From The People’s Almanac of Modern Regret, 2005 – 2013 by Vince Palladino
DATE: 20 May 2006
LOCATION: 45.0408° N, 93.2628° W
WEATHER: 74°
AUTHOR: Palladino, Vince
The two emails came within hours of one another: the first from my wife, a link to a Washington Post article announcing the winner of a citywide student essay contest about gentrification we’d seen advertised on library pamphlets (“It was right before my eyes; I just didn’t know what it’s called,” said the winner). The second email was an invitation to a showing of This Is Spinal Tap, broadcast with a newly-bought, portable LCD video projector in the fenced-in backyard of a of a friend’s new basement apartment in the very neighborhood discussed in the prizewinning essay.
“BYOwhatever if you seek extreme inebriation,” said his invite, so we did.
The movie scenes blasted on a white sheet that hung lazy off the backyard fence. First a short film of stick figures exploding, then the featured presentation, which we all had great fun quoting in real time. “What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap, and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?” we yelled out, and: “D minor is the saddest key,” until we heard something Spanish hurled over at us from a voice on the other side of the fence. We hushed up, almost ashamed to talk. Then an outline appeared, a man, hovering ghostly and indecipherable above the screen.
SOMETHING SPANISH, he said.
We didn’t speak Spanish, only movie quotes.
Some of us screamed back words we remembered from high school. VERDAD. COMO ESTAS. FELIZ NAVIDAD. CERVEZA.
The man yelled back CERVEZA, and the party’s host—someone I’d never met, who I’d only seen in one photo, posing with a keytar—convinced him to jump the fence, so he did.
He stood in front of the screen, swaying, blanketed in the broadcast, staring straight into the beam of the projector like it was a window or a mirror. He had a loose collar on his shirt, nametag on his breast, the puddled legs of his gray slacks painted on by a scene of actors parodying British arena rock stars. The man’s face was sweaty and overlapped by the face of an actor onscreen, who stuck his tongue out obtusely and smacked at his guitar strings.
SOMETHING SPANISH, he said again.
Someone I didn’t know yelled GET HIM A BEER.
CERVEZA, said someone else I didn’t know.
CERVEZA, he replied.
Then another someone yelled GET HIM A CORONA, so another someone handed the man one, and he drank it. Scenes of a cheering stadium crowd projected on the man’s chest. Someone took out their camera phone and triggered a picture.
Someone yelled TURN ON SPANISH SUBTITLES, so the host of the party did.
Then the man fell on his rear in the grass, out of the light, like my wife and I, and we all watched the movie together until it became boring, and then, like everyone else we quietly filed out through his basement apartment, past the cupboards, watching the host of the party as he held the man by the arm then carefully walked him out to the streetfront, to where the man’s own door was, one reminding the other of where they both now lived.
About the Author
Vince Palladino’s work has appeared in Agni, Post Road, Ninth Letter, The Wall Street Journal, HTMLGiant, The Rumpus and a number of other magazines and websites. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Corporation of Yaddo, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University.