There Goes
the
Neighborhood!
By Jason Love
Merengue!

For Thanksgiving, I sat down with my family and, same as always, wondered how much inbreeding it took to create such madness. We ate our turkey and sides of carbs while football droned on in the background.

I cared as little about the Lions as I had the year before. Talk shifted to dimpled chads, and my drunken relatives voiced their opinions on everything.

I tried to rebut, but they had God on their side and no need for logic.

This year, however, I had the foresight to bring a friend. I asked her to tie a rope around my waist and not let me get sucked into the dinner table debates. In exchange, I would visit her family afterward. She sat there politely while my uncle grew louder and turned red and spat mashed potatoes as he explained how Monica Lewinsky proved that Democrats shouldn’t even exist.

My friend’s name is Yahaira (yuh-HI-duh), but we’ll just call her Yari to save the headache. Yari was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in California, which makes her Bla-spani-casian.

Leaving my family’s house at long last, I teased Yari for celebrating Thanksgiving at all. There were no Dominicans on the Mayflower. It was the white man’s manifest destiny to pave everything in sight.

Later I found out that Yari’s family didn’t care for the whole Thanksgiving charade anyway. It was just an excuse to throw a party. And, man, could these people party.

Nearing Yari’s home, I could hear the music pulsing from within. It shook the windows and echoed in the sky. It was an incessant Latin beat that made you move––whether you liked it or not. We opened the door and everyone cheered.

Yari’s aunt ("Tia") danced over to us and, without losing the rhythm, took our coats and led me to the living room. I had never met the woman.

Tia put her arm around my waist and forced my Caucasian bones to gyrate like never before. Merengue thrives on shouting and stomping and high-pitched cat calls. I fell in love with it immediately. I must have looked foolish to the natives, but in my mind, I was living la vida loca.

Tia spun me to the backyard, where I met the rest of her family. There were enough Dominicans here to form two more major league expansion teams.

Everyone chatted in Spanish, so I just nodded stupidly. Some took advantage of the opportunity to talk about me in front of my back. They were not judging me, mind you, but reveling in the fact that a guy could be so white without disappearing.

Tia introduced me to everyone—and I mean everyone—all the way down to the fetus in her niece’s stomach. And each person offered me something to eat. I wondered if I looked gaunt or something.

It turned out that they simply enjoyed eating. There was food everywhere: rice, beans, tortillas, Coronas, even those green, banana-looking things you see in the store but don’t know where they go.

Simmering on the grill were mounds of meat that smelled delicious for blocks. I asked the cook what type of meat it was.

He laughed at the silly white boy and said, "Es meat. You like it."

On the adjoining patio, the elders played dominoes. They studied their tiles with somber expressions and slammed their tiles on the table in turn. I’m not sure what the slamming was about. Every move was some kind of statement.

Yari’s uncle asked me, "You play, Yayson?"

"Not if you don’t plug it in somewhere."

The room was silent. Four Dominican elders stared at me vacuously. That joke killed at Hornblowers.

Suddenly, I was accosted by Tia, who merengued me back to the living room. She was ready to dance again.

Before I could say "hola," I was stomping and sweating to the same, never-ending song.

I spotted Yari’s grandma sitting like an Indian elder by one of the speakers. She smiled at the novelty that was me. I couldn’t imagine the fit that my own grandmother would be throwing over the commotion.

There was no kiddy table either. The children danced in and out of our legs, risking their lives to party with the grownups. And the room continued to rumble. The neighbors definitely would have called the police had they not been dancing with us.

A circle formed, and people were called into the center to do their thing. Yari was first out, so we raised our arms chanted something in Spanish that I didn’t understand. One of the men called his mother out and spun her around until she couldn’t see straight.

The beat was so fast, so feverish, it created a high that had nothing to do with the Corona. It was like that scene in ‘‘Titanic’’ where the poor Irish folks were jigging in the galley, only everyone here was black and there was no boat and it was actually nothing like that at all.

I would be the last one to leave that night.

I was still taking merengue lessons as relatives fell asleep on the couch. Knowing that I’d have to return to my Top 40 world, I guess I was clinging.

I only hope that next year they invite me back, because this merengue thing beats the hell out of talking politics with a bunch of turkeys.

Read Jason Love’s column in the acorn twice amonth

(or whenever he remembers to write it)