I was "Sardine" (now RIP?)

Micro Introduction to a flash-memoir in progress. I call it "flash-memoir" not because the length of the text, but because it focuses on a fragment on my recent past that spans from the autumn of 2018 and ends in the winter of 2019.

When I moved to downtown Denver to begin a short-living career at the University of Denver as a tenure track professor of Cultural Studies, little did I know that my occasional sleepless nights (which began to multiply as my exposure to Denver's poverty that glimmered so brightly during the nights) were going to turn into a constant invitation to leave my loft at damned Premier Lofts to wander in the streets until the early morning. Soon, due to my lack of interest in the smalltalk interactions that I established with those, who like me, enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, I began to create organic conversations with African Americans who during the nights, I noticed, served as the liaison between the homeless and the few shelters of the metropolitan Denver area. I also befriended other African American youngsters that in a secret fashion, and through the deployment of a set of organized maneuvers, controlled the social dynamics of the streets of downtown Denver. I was doing fieldwork, without noticing that I was also slowly becoming a player of the field, as they had noticed as well my presence in the areas where they used to hang out. 

Amidst that hellish urban scenario and human stage, and due to my increasing animosity against spending too much time locked in my damned loft as if something inside myself was warning me already 'bout the imposed lockdowns that were going to take over my life in the coming years, and also 'cause I was goin' through a long, painful, expensive, and punitive set of processes aimed at signing the divorce papers of the second love of my life (the autumn and winter of 2018-2019 were the longest of my life: I was constantly navigating through quite different tides and oceanic temperatures, some encouraging, others clearly attempting to made me surrender to depths that I hadn't explored previously). Due to that constant inner conflict that felt like a never-ending boxing battle against myself, with my abdominals just getting stronger as I made crunches in the darkness of my damned loft, but nonetheless feeling a constant painful punch in my guts due to the imminence of my divorce, I chose the cold streets,  against the last words/thoughts of Renton from Trainspotting, instead of spending hours performing HIIT and Cross Fit at the gym of damned Premier Lofts before putting myself to sleep under the contract that I had signed with the various presentations of sativa that I found at boutique dispensaries.    

It was also among the homeless musicians of downtown Denver that I began singing a cappella as an act to fight against the "present tense" and the freezing urbanite sonic realities that the transit and zombies delivered straight into my/our ears. Singing a cappella was also a maneuver to challenge non-Afro American street musicians, who were armed with mics, instruments, sound amplifiers, and etcetera, 'cause due to my constant socialization with my Afro street peers they had accepted me as one of them, a member of their family, and often they used to tell me, looking straight into my eyes, “You are black, you just didn’t know it...” That Socratic statement ("You do know it, you just had forgotten it, remember...") made me precipitate into a process of embodiment that I had not experienced before, which I manifested through various forms of resistance in the privileged spaces where I had to interact on daily basis due to my PhD, MFA, two MAs, my double BA, my guest speaker talks at Emory University, among a long list of other top universities and international congresses, and the damned place where I picked to "live" when I arrived to Denver thinking that at some point I was going to invite my crazy-baseball-fan dad to spend a few weeks with me, so we, or he, could go to the games while I tried to convince my now ex second love to come to Denver for a reunion. Something that never really happened, neither my dad coming for the games at Coors Field nor Tesla answering my phone calls...  

Besides singing a cappella in the cold Denver nightly streets, warned by a déjà vu that happened the summer prior to my arrival to Denver, while teaching travel writing in Sicily to a group of High Point University undergrads (perhaps, also as an Italian déjà vu, as if my message resonated in that country which is the ones that I know best, including most of its islands, from Isola Elba to Vulcano and Favignana and Olbia, between between the winter of 2019 and the spring of 2020 the Sardines political movement erupted as a series of peaceful demonstrations against the right-wing resurge in the country), one sleepless night that I didn't find in the street the faces of my Afro family/tribe, I walked back to my damned loft and left the building armed with a bottle of black spray paint and a couple of caps that I had gotten online (not really knowing why, but as if my inner self was sending me a message from the future to tell me, "you'll use this black paint..." I also painted with acrylics, oils, and watercolors as a hobby to stop thinking about Tesla) and walked outside the limits of downtown Denver, while listening on my headphones some of my favorite songs of that time of my life, songs that now belong to my "Denver Soundtrack." Once I found on an empty alley, off Colfax Avenue, a clean wall, many memories and images began to shuffle inside my head as a roulette until something inside of me triggered the choice of my first graffiti, which became my signature and the only graffiti that I tried to master over the course of the time that I performed graffiti in Denver. 

I didn't want to start scratching the walls of Denver with my most known heteronyms in the area (Dr. Crank or The Professor), so as if a hand that wasn't mine was guiding my pulse and first spraying endeavors, what appeared in front of my eyes was "Sardine." Since that night, each time that I didn't find my Afro American street fellows, my urban tribe, during the early nights that Tesla's voice whispered invisible neglecting words inside my ear, I went out to imprint "Sardine" on as many sidewalks, transit signs, on-going construction sites, abandoned spaces where dilapidated walls still remained erected, and even the frontispiece of various businesses of the Rhino district (for a while there were certain sites on the web asking if anyone knew what the "Sardine" graffiti was about, for instance, this site: Reddit.) (Also, Dreamstime.com featured a graffiti I didn't make declaring that I was R.I.P. and that I was going to be missed.) 

Even though it wasn't my intention at all, but nonetheless knowingly that among graffiti "anonymous" artists, as if we were a species of superheroes dealing epistemological powers hidden behind color, shape, and camouflaged messages, I entered a battle-space against other local graffiti artists. Their most common way of counterattacking my "Sardine" coded graffiti, as it commonly happens in the graffiti urban cultural cosmos, was by vandalizing, distorting the simplicity of my message, or replicating it with open messages that attempted to warn me that I was going on my way to Hell, R.I.P., or that my offsprings were gonna be mutants with one ear (there was even a short-living proliferation of graffiti signed by "Sardine Boys"). 

The "Sardine," from my public intellectual and artistic standpoint, was the simple refusal of accepting certain unhealthy eating habits and encouraging people to follow the "Sardine" path through long sessions of walking outdoors to burn unnecessary calories stored in our bodies regardless of the time of the day. My realm was the night and the early morning, but "Sardine" was also there under the midday sunlight of Denver and other surrounding areas, particularly those that lead towards the University of Denver and its golden domed main buildings. I was indeed driving "Sardine" towards a highway that I hadn't anticipated or expected that became a kind of new hell in my life, for there were so many graffiti throughout Denver and beyond that remained untouched for months, while some of mine, particularly around Rhino and near the University of Denver were often erased quite quickly.  

It didn't take long for some to find out who was the persona behind the "Sardine," who had mostly enraged the owners of the Rhino district businesses that I had marked (most of them restaurants that sold dishes that relied on pork, beef, and highly caloric dairy products). Mine was a health-related, yet simple message without any affiliation to any specific movement, but as soon as the rumor that I was becoming a kind of intellectual graffiti maker radical who was inflicting damages to businesses in wealthy downtown Denver reached the ears of the administrators of the University of Denver, including the heads of my home division, their reaction, while passive, soon became a close-monitoring of my activities while at the university. 

One early morning, after unsuccessfully looking for a place near the university to place a new "Sardine," I went straight into my office on a day that I wasn't expected to be there. I was astonished to find inside my office the Dean of my division with an adjunct instructor (I was a tenure track faculty research professor) who didn't stop talking about some kind of gibberish about how I was some kind of community radical that was pitching homeless African Americans against the "good people" of Denver without noticing that I was listening their conversation 'cause they had left the door ajar. I slowly entered into my office through the slice of empty door: the Dean was attentively looking at the titles of my books that occupied an entire wall of my office, while the adjunct was looking at my African masks that were hanging on the walls. Their first reaction was of total stillness, as if by the fact of remaining still their presence became invisible to my sight. The Dean said that he'd stopped by my office just to say hello and talk about my adaptation process regarding the university's culture, while he heard a weird sound inside that made him call security to ask them to open the door, encouraged also by how early it was. Then he looked at the adjunct, shuffling his thoughts in order to find a good reason for him to be there, and finally said, "Oriol was just walking by and greeted me." I knew that Oriol's office was in the story below mine, but I limited myself to a smiling silence while drawing on their foreheads a virtual "Sardine" in crimson, which was also one of the colors of the flag's university besides gold. That night, after sending a kind text message to Tesla without getting back any reply, but the check mark that it had been read, I imprinted a "Sardine" on the displaying window of a specialty butchery that proudly presented to the passerby chunks of meat that resembled the thights of professional bodybuilders of the kinds of Kevine Levrone and Dorian Yates. 

A week later, while I was opening the door of my office, with the newly acquired habit of placing my ear against the door, a student wearing headphones walked behind me with such a speed that I wasn't even able to distinguish his silhouette, I could only hear a fainted message: "Stop Sardine & Dr. Crank, the University is pissed-off..." It was clear in that moment that the persona's identity behind "Sardine" not only had been discovered, but also had a specific address and a known working office, whose door displayed a sign that I'd made myself with crayons: "Don't Disturb, the Poet is Working." Exactly what Paul Eluard had displayed on the door of his apartment during the surrealist Parisian explosive counter-cultural revolution during the aftermath of the Big War. 

The question, I wondered while going mentally through as many walls and flat surfaces where I had imprinted my graffiti signature was, "how could I stop 'Sardine'?" My message and the conviction contained in that simple composition of s-e-v-e-n words was incorruptible, even more while the "Lodo Kulture" of the drinking clubs that surroundedc the Coors Field Stadium were beginning to spread like a virus with sticky tentacles with the ability to erode any form of civilized urbanism. More than ever before, youngsters were puking beer and pizza in the streets, girls wearing miniskirts were uttering sounds that resembled the cry of hogs under the blade of a terrible butcher that resembled the one featured in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974 movie; multitudes of aging single men were wandering high up to the ceiling of their brains while seeking either random fights with strangers or pulling down their pants to show their underwear while laughing like idiots. The nights of Denver had become in a few weeks into the worst fragment of Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights," painted during the turn of the century period of the fifteenth century, an oil and varnish painting that I had seen at El Prado museum of Madrid a couple of times, always observing it while thinking that Bosch should've painted that triptych twice of trice as big as it really was.  

One fateful night, as if Bosch's "Garden" had also absorbed me as a figure that resisted by all means to become still, while I was standing out in total darkness in the middle of my damned loft, a few knuckles knocked on my door with a sort of urgency. I opened the door without looking through the peephole. I saw a group of at least five cops, all looking down, until the only female asked me to stepped out of the apartment. At first I thought they were going to ask me questions regarding the neighbor two doors away from mine, whose loft exuded on daily basis an incisive marijuana odor that not even the sturdy wood of the door was able to contain the waves of smoke emanating from inside, as if his apartment was an engine burning down. As soon as I stepped out, the female cop asked me to turn around and swiftly handcuffed me. I was indeed confused, but the confusion rapidly turned into an inner anger that made me clenched my fists with such strength that all the cops listened to the cracking of my knuckles and phalanges. They didn't explain anything to me and I wasn't capable to argue against their actions. Surprisingly, and without ever "reading" me my rights as I had seen in so many movies, they guarded me to the street to make me get into an ambulance, where I was asked to lie down while a female nurse, glaring at me with mix feelings, that I interpreted as a light expression of hate and repulsion, inserted a syringe in my left arm. 

The ambulance drove around for a long time, while I began feeling an irremediable numbness inside my body and mind. I knew the city well because I had walked and biked it over and over, so I knew that they didn't know exactly where they were supposed to take me, for the ambulance wandered from west to east, and north to south. When the liquid that the woman injected in my veins finally reached its full effect, I collapsed and lose my senses completely. 

I woke up in a bed inside an individual room with crystal clear walls of a very modern hospital unit. A young nurse, whose sounds of her name were accepted by my audition pleasantly, told me with an evident worried expression that I'd had a mental collapse and had been admitted into the psychiatric unit of the UC-Boulder University Hospital. She told me that it was for my own good, and handled me the new iPhone X and wireless headphones that I'd recently bought at one of the local Apple stores, and with a smile asked me if I needed a pen and something to write or make drawings. I was, as you can imagine, totally confused, but thanks to the constant care that my young nurse provided me, my time in that individual unit was pleasant as it allowed me to rest, get some sleeping pills, and a few doses of intravenous plasma transfusions. 

After three days at the UC-Boulder University Hospital, I was transferred to the Denver Health Hospital, near Speer Boulevard, where I was placed in a psychiatric unit among other "patients." After checking in at the "front desk" of the unit, where a male nurse asked me to spell my name, height, and weight, I remember he saying "136 pounds" is perfect for you, I was guided by another male nurse, whose demeanor was that of someone giving a quick tour in a resort, for he was pointing out the activities that we, "patients," could carry on or endeavor in certain spaces and desks, such as, "you can use those crayons to make drawings," "if you wanna read over there you'll find books," stuff like that, he showed me my room and left me by the door without any attempt to getting inside. I had been transferred during the night: inside the room darkness spread through a wide window that in the distance allowed me to disguise a huge brick building of a public High School. I wasn't alone, in the room there were two beds; the one next to the window was free, the other was taken by a very tall African American guy a little older than me who didn't put his eyes away from the thick bilingual dictionary in Hebrew and English that he was reading. He replied with a quick "Hello, my name is Carl," his voice deep and strong, then he told me, as if I couldn't realize it on my own, "that bed is free." I repressed the sudden smiling that I wanted to utter because he had an intimidating facial gesture, plus he was at least six inches taller than me. "Thanks," I replied, practicing the most professional and kind voice I could, to avoid sounding intimidated or foolish. I lay down, folding the soft pillow in half to make it harder, and after I placed it under my nape I fell asleep. 

The next days, weeks, months, and even couple of years witnessed a radical transformation of myself in all aspects of my life, from walking back to damned Premier Lofts when I was discharged from the Psychiatric Unit of the Denver Health Hospital after two weeks in different Psychiatric Units (with a small container of lithium pills and a prescription to follow up the lithium treatment) to find my damned loft vandalized, the doors of the balcony wide-open and the neighbor's window crashed and a few minutes later taken by two huge white cops straight into downtown's Denver jail without any explanation or having my "rights" read, as if I was suddenly the main character of Kafka's The Process, charged with a "criminal mischief," a charge that made me travelled through three different detention facilities, including Chicago's Cook County Department of Corrections and North Carolina's Forsyth Correctional Center, right in the city where Tesla had moved, a process that also made me appear, under the "case" made on my behalf by the public defenders that were assigned to deffend me, as the character from Joel Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There. After weeks of being locked, even in solitary reclusion after a winning bout (good luck of mine...) in self-defense against my enraged hillbillie inmate that sleep in the bed above mine, I went back to Denver to quit my job and arrange my settlement agreement, arguing mental illness, and moved to Sardinia, abandoned the new black hybrid Toyota RAV4 that I'd bought at the Denver International airport, all my belongings, books in my office and plans for my future in Denver, but what I could pack in a black military backpack, and what I was wearing: my Tommy Hilfiger navy blue joggers and favorite navy blue Express suit jacket, and a new pair of New Balance hicking shoes that I got before departing at the local Foot Locker, and left the United States to never come back...     

to be continued...