Ryan

I spent my childhood as a Gaucho - a freeriding horseman, orphaned to la pampa. By day we herded cattle and scalped Mapuche rustlers, dropping carcasses in herbaceous folds or stacked at the base of Calden trees. Eyes for the condors; scavengers will pick the corpses clean, warning signs to others. My poncho, my home under ... a hemisphere of stars. Ah, and nights around the fire … tobacco, rum, mate … comtemplating the grassland’s unclaimed abundance. Drink would flow and, inevitably, blood would spill. I’ll never forget the shuffling rhythm of Pampean grass. Its sharp edge, fibrous strands, whispering like native hips. I left the grasslands in 1912 on an ocean liner bound for Paris. Looking for fortune; fate brought only sorrow. In the ship's galley I played the zero hour, lunar demise, the comedy of whorehouses – Tango. My bandoneon was the Capitan’s pleasure during the voyage that saw the Lusitania sunk in the North Atlantic. A thousand souls lockered in the sea's cold fathoms. But a grand ship she was; a floating palace. And Capitan? An old salt that loved bawdy tango damn near as much as he liked the ladies, pinching and slapping, seizing liberties they would never willingly surrender. When lightning strikes I still take fright, fearing the German torpedoes have struck again, a million-ton hammer's merciless crack to Lusi’s wrought boiler. Though my days in the Quartier Latin - mingling with the knife-grinders, the umbrella menders, the milk goats, and serenading the saturnine bordellos of Rue de la Huchette - are long past, I miss them not. I am now the proud owner/operator of a Helado de Coco cart in Logan Square. Surely you’d like to submerge yourself in a bath of my delicious and refreshing coconut crystals?