Carlos the Charismatic

Carlos doesn't live next door, Eddy does, but Carlos is often there talking.
A lot.
Carlos likes to talk.
He hangs his phone from the light fixture in the ceiling of the porch and listens to music and talks.
To Eddy, Priscilla and some other guys who sit on the porch next door.

A few days ago Carlos comes in asking if his son, Carlos Jr, can use our microwave to warm up his sandwich.
I stand in the kitchen with Carlos Jr talking about the football world cup while Carlos stands at the front door talking to Kimberly about the spirits in this house.
'You ever hear anything?' he asks us.
'Like what?' I say.
'You know...,' he says, 'like noise, like something in the night, you know, stuffs like that,'
I tell him I have never heard anything.
He tells me that this is good.
Carlos had told me that an old evil woman had lived and died in this house and that if I ever hear anything I should tell it to go away.
Carlos then tells us that if we do hear anything it's probably just in our heads.
'Sometimes you make it true only in your head,' he says, pointing to his forehead.

Carlos comes and goes from next door.
Sometimes I won't see him for a week or two.
I'll ask Eddy or Priscilla if they have seen him and then we will all wonder where he is.
The he will show up again, full of tales, making Eddy laugh.

A few weeks after we met Carlos told me that his wife had been shot, by the police.
'Not too far from here,' he told me.
'10 times.' he said.

*****
The image above is from South Park.

I went for a walk in my neighbourhood this evening.

I went for a walk in my neighbourhood this evening.
I took my camera and this is what I saw.
Next up, I want to film people and edit it in the same way.

What was she doing in the garden?

While I was drawing this a woman approached the house, opened and went in through the gate, turning right into the garden.

I could see her behind the hedge, flashes of the colour of her clothing between the leaves, doing I did not know what.

Then, after only a couple of minutes the women came back out of the gate, looked left and right, and then walked off, tucking her shirt in her trousers and tidying herself as she walked, leaving me to wonder if she had entered the garden, which might not have been hers, to have a wee.

Someone took our vegetable box and someone else brought it back

This morning, at around 7am, someone knocked on the door and when I answered it I saw a man holding a biggish cardboard box.
There was a woman standing down on the footpath looking up at us.
The man said hello and then began to explain that he wasn't a delivery man, but that this was our box of vegetables.
'I live over on G street,' he said holding the box out toward me, 'and we found this in the street outside our house,'
'Oh,' I said, looking inside the box , 'we were wondering what happened to our vegetable box,'
Inside the box was a cauliflower, a carrot, a bunch of beet root and a small plastic bag with mushrooms in it.
'We recognised the box because we get a delivery from the same company,' said the man, who had a black moustache and was wearing a baseball cap and a blue polo shirt with a name tag of a solar installation company pinned to it.
I took the box of vegetables and stood there looking down at the few vegetables left.
'They have only taken, which would make sense if it was a homeless person, the things they didn't need to cook, like...all the fruit,' I said.

The man and the woman and I all agreed that it was probably a homeless person who had taken it and then we chatted for a bit about the box, about the the neighbourhood, about how good the Mexican take away on the corner is, about where was the best place for the vegetable delivery to be left, and then laughed and said that we hoped whoever had taken the fruit had enjoyed
it.
And then the man said, 'My name is Robert,'
'Hello, Robert' I said putting the vegetable box on the porch and holding out my hand, 'my name is Toni, and thank you for bringing back our vegetable box.'

A Conversation with Roberto Della Rosa-The condensed version

This morning, as I left the house I said hello to a man pushing a shopping trolley down the edge of the road.
He said hello back and then he called out-'I am happy today, I am so happy today. How are you today?'
This made me smile and feel happy, so I said- 'Well, seeing you so happy has made me happy.'
Then I walked over to him so I could hear him better.
'You live in that house?' he said.
I told him yes, that I did, and had just moved in.
'I'll see around a lot then,' he told me, 'I'm always up and down this road, I'm always working,'
His shopping trolley was a tower of what looked like recyclable material- a gigantic see through plastic bag of cans in the bottom, picture frames, a mop handle, a green rubbish bag on top and various things poking through the cage of the trolley.
'I'm not like those other ones down there,' he said, 'those ones waiting for handouts, I am out there getting my own thing, it's how I was brought up, it's the kind of man I am. I am that kind of man,'
Then, because he had seen the tattoos on my leg, I listened while he explained a tattoo he had on his shoulder.
'It's my name, Robert Di Rosa,' he said, showing me the tattoo-a cross with 2 small roses above it.
'My daddy was a white man with Italian and German in him, and my mother was Brazilian, Mexican and Indian,' he told me.
I spoke a little bit of Italian to him, calling him Roberto Della Rosa, and he laughed and told me that because his mother was Mexican he was given the Mexican version of his last name.

The he told me that he was not a thief.
'I always ask before I take something,' he said, referring, I supposed, to the content of his shopping trolley.
Then he told me a story about how he had learned to ask because the black people in his childhood neighbourhood would fill shotguns with rock salt and shoot intruders to their yards.
This, he said, had taught him to respect people's property.
Then, suddenly, he started to talk about spirits, about how he had good spirits around him.
'You got those good spirits too,' he told me, 'and you've even got my name on your neck,'
It was true, I have a tattoo of a rose on my neck and he told me for this I would never forget his name.
Then, when he was ready to go I tried to shake his hand, but he wouldn't.
Instead he held out his fist to me and we did that knuckle banging thing.
'I've been in the trash,' he said, 'I don't want to get you dirty, because you know, we get older, we get sick and we can't get rid of it, so I won't shake your hand,'
Then he told me to have a good day, and that he would be looking out for the house.
Then he started to push his trolley down the road and I said to him- 'You have been an inspiration to me today, Roberto Della Rosa.' and he laughed and said he would see me again soon.

I thought about the dignified Roberto Della Rosa all the way to a cafe where I was to leave some postcards for my tattooing, where I was going to drink a coffee and where I would end up seated at a table with a man called Mark, who, when I asked him what he did for a job, showed me a website for a new product he was selling-Swedish personal lubricant.

******
The tattoo above was originally an outline of an old skool rose.
Sarah, on whose arm it is, asked me if I would colour it in in my style.
I said yes, of course, I would love to, just up my alley.

While I was drawing this an ugly pug-style dog approached me from behind and made a feeble growl....

While I was drawing this an ugly pug-style dog approached me from behind and made a feeble growl.

The dog and I stared each other but then it seemed to get bored and turned and left.

Just as turned back to the house I was drawing, a large SUV pulled up in front of it.

I watched a woman get out of the driver's seat, look in my direction and walk off down the street.

I was slightly annoyed because there was more than ample place in front of and behind her car for her to have parked her modern-day swollen chariot of glass, metal and plastic.

I had my headphones on and was listening to Rebecca Ferguson singing love songs and I was in a rather good mood which I didn't want to spoil, so instead of getting pissed off I just drew around the car, so to speak, and invented what I could not see.

I really am IN the US of A.

While I was drawing this house road workers went up and down the road in front of me, driving mini steamrollers and crushing asphalt into the street and smiling at me as they passed.
The house, in Sherman Heights, San Diego, is just over the bridge that separates Golden Hill and Sherman Heights and the bridge is over one of those massive multi-lane freeways that has a massive green signs that things like LOS ANGELES. and MLK Parkway and other directions.
So after I finished the drawing I walked back across the bridge and for a moment I stood in its middle, looking down at the cars and then over to the city in the distance and then up at a plane as it flew in to land at the San Diego airport.

And as I stood there looking at these vistas that I'd only really ever seen in films and on TV, I had a revelation-
'Woah,' I thought to myself, 'I really am IN the US of A!'

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