A guy in his fifties, gray and balding, sits on a stool on the sidewalk. In front of him are hundreds of CDs he has burned. Two-disc sets of salsa, meringue, ranchero, etc. Musica Latina.
He shakes my hand as I approach. I get the feeling he's a gentleman. He's got a discman wired to a powerful, South American Boombox, running off a car battery. He only chooses grooving salsa. Trumpets, etc.
I want to find Mexican Opera that I heard in the street the other night. A quechua mini-taxi driver named Victor played it. I listened in the road to it and he called me in with his friends and we passed around shots of rum and coke and now I'm invited to play soccer with them.
The opera is not to be found. I've heard many CDs. Finally I found Nicola Di Bari, an Italian guy singing in Spanish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjmW2aKMkA4&feature=related
El Corazon es un Gitano (The Heart is a Gypsy)
I dug it but 10 meters down the sidewalk another CD man was blasting Latin Dance Salsa. I could not focus. I was mad at him for "pushing" the cd on me. I was hard sold and paid the guy a 5 sole coin for the CD.
I was walking down the street with my new CD and he whistled. "Hey! Hey!" What did he want me for? Maybe I gave him 2 soles instead of 5.
"Hey, look this." He flipped the coin, 5 soles, in his rough hands and pointed to it. Then he gave it to me.
"This not real."
"What?"
"This. No Real."
A counterfeit? Looks very real.
I gave him back the coin. Twenty steps later I thought, what a dolt. He could have pawned this coin over on somebody else easily as change.
He knows I'm not in love with the music and he wants me to come back so we can listen to the goods together. That coin's as real as day. I made a friend.
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