"The Fam" Survives the Transition to Santa Fe

Everyone asks,

How ya doin’?

Do you miss LA?

Don’t you just love Santa Fe?

How are your wife and son doing?

Wellllll… those are allllll… different questions, now aren’t they?

Here we all are, above, inside the new Santa Fe house, back in the summer of 2022, for the first “walk-through”. It’s completely empty. We’ve driven 800 miles in two days, stopping in Williams, Arizona, at the Southern rim of the Grand Canyon, and as you can see, there are streaks of sunlight on the new wood floor and behind us. Definitely a good sign. It looked then, like a good house. And three-quarters of a year later, I can still say,

“It’s a good house.”

But to answer those questions:

1- “How are you doing?”

Just fine, thanks. I was more than ready to leave Los Angeles. I was already retired for five years from my USC theater professorial job after working for thirty-one. I knew I would never miss teaching another class. I was also more than worn out initiating and self-producing my own artistic projects: one-man shows, documentary films, performing arts festivals, other people’s shows, grant writing, so on and so on. I was more than exhausted trying to be the invincible, artistic white knight on my own charging steed, hoisting my sword and shield aloft, knocking all opposition out of my way. I had already failed more than once, fallen off my steed many times, and had proven myself all too mortal.

I was also exhausted from the ten-year fight with my one-time, bleeding-heart liberal landlady in Echo Park, from whom I had happily rented for twenty years, until she married a former Republican LA District Attorney, who brainwashed her into believing that tenants were neither to be listened to, nor treated decently, but rather, to be exploited for maximum residential rent and treated rudely and meanly, in ways such as sending them regular extortionary eviction notices! Which she did - more than once - until she died in 2021 of a brain tumor - after which her daughter duly inherited the house during Covid - and cruelly continued the assault, until upon discovering that she couldn’t evict us during the pandemic because of City, State, and County protection, she, under pressure of both time and the law, bought us out, after which, we more than willingly, moved to - “The Land of Enchantment”, Santa Fe, New Mexico!

Ultimately, I always knew, that all I needed to move successfully, no matter where, was - a good internet connection. As I aged, it just became more and more apparent to me that I had the entire recorded history of mankind, and all its resources and literature, directly at the end of my fingertips. A little more surprising, I was finding that most of my friends and connections were online. Or very occasionally, on the phone. And amazingly, all over the planet. Then again, I wondered, was it true, that the older we all got, the more our circle of friends diminished? I saw it happen with my parents. And now, was I seeing it happen to me? I mean, it wasn’t just because we lost friends as we aged. Of course, that was simply true of life. But I think it also had something to do with tolerance, crankiness, and just the “march itself, toward the end” itself. Could it be that we/I was just not as open, or as I say, as “tolerant”, as we/I once was? I can see it, even now, with my own friends’ tolerance for me. Even on this very Substack. I get shoutouts and complaints from some “friends” of over forty years - because of my choice of language, or because of my oh-so-unacceptable ideas. They don’t like them. And as a result, they don’t “like me” anymore.

Be that as it may, I’m, for the most part, primarily content here in Santa Fe. Of course, I’m “old”. I have to live with a mysterious, doctor-defying, and seemingly incurable, bi-lateral knee and shin neuropathy. That is, I have, for some un-diagnosable and unknown reason, pain, every day - in both my knees and shins. I had thoracic spine surgery almost four years ago to “decompress” my T-11 and T-12 vertebrae that two neurosurgeons told me were too close together, and if I didn’t have the surgery, I “risked paralysis and incontinence”. Being a former modern dancer who still thought I knew my own body perfectly well, I didn’t believe either of them but, hell, I couldn’t take such a risk, so - I had the damn surgery - and whatayaknow - got no pain relief at all! And now, four years later, no Eastern or Western medicine or treatment, nor any epidural, nerve block, or injection has relieved my knee and shin pain, even a bit. Seemingly, “ I just have to live with it”.

C’est la vie.

Still, here I am in Santa Fe, me, Trules…. married, with a family! With an Indonesian wife, Surya, and a sixteen-year-old adopted Indonesian son, Exsel. Truly amazing.! That I do have a family at all is completely due to the miracle of my meeting this young girl, thirty-one years younger than myself, entirely by accident and incident on the island of Bali over 23 years ago. Now we “own a home”, another thing I neither wanted nor planned, but with which I ended up, following the lead of my immigrant wife, who never abandons her undying “American Dream”. I’ve traded in my lifelong playing of tennis for more “age-appropriate” pickleball, which I play 4-5 times a week at the Chavez Center, a mile away from our house. We have a newly-landscaped backyard garden with a hot tub that our friends near Taos gave us, a gorgeous black wrought iron table and chairs that we found in the alley, a new propane-burning fire pit, an orange and gray hammock swinging from a pinyon tree, and a Surya-Indonesian-designed “bale” (baLAY), a seven-foot-square wooden gazebo that Surya’s hotel-restaurant busboy-co-worker and father built for us.

All in all, I’d have to say,

“I’m a lucky man.”

2- “What about your wife?”

Surya and I met in front of an ATM in Kuta Beach, Bali in 2000.

Some of you know the story. It was the last place I wanted to be on the magical “Island of the Gods”. Kuta is the touristy, Australian surfer hub of the island, and Surya had traveled three days by bus and ferry from her native Medan, Sumatra, two years earlier after high school, to find work and to change her life. I had to fly out of nearby Denpasar the next morning, the only international airport on the island, and I was cashing US dollars for Indonesian rupiah, making me temporarily, a third-world “millionaire”. But I was lost, geographically speaking, so I asked the first two strangers in front of the ATM for directions, two young women, one of who, naturally… became my wife!

Surya arrived in LA on August 3, 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, and no doubt if we had gotten her passport and visa much later, coming from Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, I’m quite positive that you would not be reading this story today. She came with almost no ability to speak or understand English. In fact, her only knowledge came from listening to, and studying, the printed lyrics from a Shania Twain album.

Friends always ask:

How did you two communicate if you didn’t speak the same language?

I always answer,

I spent over a decade being a professional silent clown. I was pretty good at non-verbal communication.

There was a big learning curve and lots of “bumps in the road” over the last twenty-three years. But Surya studied and fought to find her way and get ahead. She survived a drive-by shooting in our LA neighborhood, Echo Park, and two bouts of Covid. But learn English she did. By going to years of ESL classes. And LA City College. She took the written California DMV driver’s test five times and tore up the failures four times! She got her first job bartending on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. She worked for Chef Wolfgang Puck, catered the Oscars, the Emmys, and worked as a server at some of the best restaurants in LA. She sent money back home to her family in Medan. And most impressive of all, she tamed the lifelong bachelor-poet, me! She got me to marry her, to brush my teeth every night before I go to bed, to adopt her eight-year-old nephew, Exsel, to become a good and loving father, and finally, to buy a house and move here to Santa Fe. My young wife, she’s a force of nature!

And now in Santa Fe?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the main reasons we chose Santa Fe was its rich and well-renowned culinary scene. We hoped it would be a good place for Surya to find a job. And to put it simply… we/she… lucked out. Even before we physically moved, she sent out resumes from LA, got immediate replies, and had interviews galore lined up when we arrived in town. It seemed that Covid wiped out the restaurant and hospitality industry here, as it had almost everywhere else, but in Santa Fe, a good deal of the workers never returned. Not only had the restaurants and hotels historically paid far under the State minimum wage (eg. $4.00/hour instead of the required $11.50/hour; outrageous how they got away with it!), but they still were doing it, post-pandemic! This had forced many servers, managers, busboys, and all front and back of the house workers to find different careers.

But Surya is a “career server”. She wasn’t an “actor”, like the majority of the “waiters” and “waitresses” in LA, “waiting” to get their big break in Hollywood. She’s a full-time professional, dedicated to her job, always showing up with a smile on her face and a positive attitude, with no auditions or excuses on her resume. So when Santa Fe restauranteurs, GMs, and managers, all in desperate need of post-pandemic reliable staff, instead of hiring local young high schoolers, saw Surya’s resume, with all her LA experience, they called, e-mailed, and texted her. Sometimes the owners themselves offered her jobs. Right on the spot. It was really something! The hardest thing for her was to “choose between offers”.

And now after eight months? As I’ve mentioned in my last post, Surya’s worked at the Rosewood Hotel’s Inn of the Anasazi, right near Santa Fe’s main Plaza, almost since she got here. It’s the same five miles from home as in LA, but it only takes fifteen minutes to get there any time of day, instead of an hour and a half in LA rush hour. It’s a full-time job with benefits, but not without its “complications” and “personalities”, like any restaurant job behind the scenes, a la Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”, or more recently, “Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D” by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina. She even went to her first employee “protest” meeting last week, to complain, along with her co-workers, about the hotel’s underpayment of minimum way, and allowing the salaried manager to participate in the “tip pool”, also clearly against the law. Go, Surya! Power to the people!

But what drives my wife, what always has… is her future. Having one, that is. A secure one, to be precise. Whereas, yours Trulesly, “Mr. Improvisation”, never planned his life at all, always “lived in the moment”. You’ve heard of that, right? Ram Dass? “Be Here Now?” In fact, I always think of my life as having “just happened to me”. I never planned to be a modern dancer, to run for Mayor of NYC as a clown, to marry an Indonesian woman 31 years younger than myself!

Well, ok, that was my life! But this is Surya’s, who watched her mother be moved from home to home by one too many landlords, always renting, never owning her own home, never being in charge of her own destiny. Surya promised that would never happen to her! Then… she believed she married a rich “bule” (bouLAY = Indonesian gringo), who could educate her in the ways of the world and keep her financially secure. But oops, dumb-ass me almost got us evicted - multiple times - just like her mother. I ended up failing my wife.

So now my wife works like a fiend. Takes responsibility for her own future. Whereas she used to always imagine herself as “being under my armpit” (= “under my wing”), I now imagine myself as “a passenger in her car”. She drives me. It seems like the normal evolution and progression. She grew up under my eyes and naturally, became more and more independent. Something she absolutely needed to do, since I won’t be here all that much longer. And now, in the latest step, she got us to move from LA - finally - to buy this house - which she works like a fiend - to pay off - not in thirty years like our mortgage says- but in five!

And I don’t put it past her. She just started a second job in a popular Santa Fe restaurant - for lunch!

3- “And howse your son, Exsel, doing?”

Ahhh, this is the hardest question of all!

The last thing Exsel wanted to do is leave LA. It’s the only place he knew in America. Exactly like his “Bou Ani” (the name he calls Surya, technically his aunt (“Bou”) in Indonesia, although she is legally his Mom in the U.S. ever since he was adopted in California in 2016).

So many of our friends who have met Exsel over the eight years he’s been here have asked or commented,

It must have been so hard for him, leaving his parents and brothers behind. He must have been soooo homesick. Did you take him to a psychologist?

Soooo Western thinking! No. And not at all. Exsel was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from the moment he arrived in LA. He seemed to never look back. Sure, ok, he watched Indonesian cartoons and dreamed of his brothers - for about a month!

Because he also spoke no English, just like his Bou. But he was curious and enthusiastic, and just two weeks after he arrived on the Cinco de Mayo, 2015, he was serendipitously enrolled in the last weeks of the term in 2nd grade at Elysian Heights Elementary School, a three-minute walk right down the wooden stairs from us in Echo Park. Sure, he had to get eight terrifying inoculations from the school nurse, four in each skinny little arm, and his 2nd-grade teacher, the kind and innovative Mr. Garcia, had to use Google Translate to translate from English to Indonesian (and back) to them to understand each other, but there was our new star student in an American school - after only two weeks!

“Me genius,” were two of the first funny words he’d say, pointing at himself, his two front teeth missing, charming his way into his new admirers’ hearts.

Within just a few years, however, the kid knew more idioms and spoke more American slang than all my native-born U.S. friends, and he could make his way around an iPhone, Chromebook, and TikTok account far more facilely than his over-educated Dad - me! He graduated Elysian Heights with a boatload of close friends, but with my urging, he had to start all over again in middle school at Eagle Rock High School, about a fifteen-minute drive away. It was tough to start seventh grade anew without friends because all the local kids knew each other from grade school. But start again he did, and with his natural gregariousness and wacky sense of humor, he worked his way to becoming one of the most popular kids in the 9th grade.

But…. after he finally was able to go back to Indonesia in the summers of 2021 and 2022 to visit his birth family, after waiting on tenterhooks for six years for the U.S. government to decide, or not, to grant him permanent residency and a green card (actually I guess it was Surya and me who were on tenterhooks, not the oblivious little man), and after he got back from Utah in August 2022, after doing a gifted
”engineering internship” at the home of one of Surya’s best friends near Salt Lake City, he was entirely deaf to the idea that,

We’re moving from LA to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“I don’t want to hear it, Pak Trules.” (the name he calls me, ‘Pak Trules’, silent “k” on the “Pak”, a name of respect for elders in Indonesia)

Sorry, Little Man, you know we’ve been in a battle to the death with the landlords. We can’t afford to live in LA anymore. I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to leave. It’ll be tough for you. I’m really sorry.”

You said we could rent near Eagle Rock until I graduated.

I looked everywhere, man. We just couldn’t find anything decent. And we found a great adobe house in Santa Fe. It’s a terrific town. Great art and culture and food. Hopefully a good job for Bou. And we’ll own our own house for the first time.

Exsel didn’t care. At all. What teenager would? To be ripped out of school between 9th and 10th grade? To lose all his friends again? To have to start all over again! The most important thing in his life was his friends. Ricky, Jaden, Kaden, Shara, about thirty more. Going to the mall. Going bowling. Eating pizza! And now, we were going to end all that?

No way, Pak Trules. I’m not moving!

But what’s the alternative? I’m going to let him stay at Eagle Rock High with one of my friends and see him only over holidays? He’s almost sixteen. I’m seventy-five. How many years do I have left with him? Of being a father? “No way! “

So move to Santa Fe we do.

After interviewing three high school principals and touring three Santa Fe high school campuses, Exsel decides he wants to go to Santa Fe High. It has a “rough reputation”, economically speaking, but it’s the closest thing to Eagle Rock, size-wise (1800 kids), with a football team, electives, and a homecoming dance. (Gotta have the homecoming dance!)

Because we don’t actually arrive until September 21, he arrives three weeks after the Fall semester has begun. He already has two strikes against him: being a newbie, and now, starting school late.

He absolutely hates the school.

Just like in a bad movie, he spends the first day eating lunch - at a table - all by himself. Kids aren’t friendly. No one introduces themselves to him. And not just on the first day. For the entire semester. They’re clickish. They’re on their phones all day long. My friendly, outgoing boy doesn’t have a single friend - all semester.

He won’t let me help. He won’t let his counselor, or his teachers, help.

Thanks for ruining my life, Pak Trules.

What am I supposed to say?

It’s painful.

As much as I love the new town, the new jazz club, the historical adobe architecture; as much as Surya likes the ease with which she’s getting hired, that’s how much Exsel hates Santa Fe.

He won’t even walk around downtown.

It’s monochromatic.

There’s no Asian food.

He spends all his time on his phone, talking to, and texting, his LA friends.

Then… one day…. out of the freezing cold Santa Fe winter blue, we/he gets a belated Christmas present.

Two days after tearing open all of Santa’s and Hanukah’s combined holiday presents, he literally wins the Santa Fe public school lottery on December 27, and he gets accepted to Monte Del Sol Charter School, a five-minute walk from our house, right across the main street, Governor Miles.

It’s both a middle and high school. With sort of an “alternative-arty-learner-friendly” reputation. Each high school class, like the 10th grade, will have only 60-80 kids. Hey, it’s gotta be better than Santa Fe High, right?

But ok now, let’s cut to the chase. Cut to the truth, that is. According to Exsel. Not my meandering way of getting there. This post has been long enough, right?

I just decided to change my attitude and behavior. I was just so angry at Santa Fe High. You guys moving me from LA when I didn’t want to leave. I hated everything and everyone. I was shut down and furious. I didn’t want to meet anyone - so I didn’t. It wasn’t the other kids’ fault, it was mine.

Wow! That’s what he says this June, having just graduated 10th grade at “Monte”. After having won “Friendliest”, “Best Dressed”, and “Best Newbie” in his class, as voted by his teachers and fellow classmates.

I figured I better change if I didn’t want the same experience in the second half of 10th grade, right? It was all based on me and my own choices. So I changed and got different results.”

Man, you coulda written the book!

They already got books on this, Pak Trules.

Did you read any of them?

Nah, what for? Only losers read books. People who have lousy lives read biographies about people who they think have better lives than they do.

Got it.

Wisdom 101, according to Exsel Manalu-Trules.

Well, there you have it. The update on my son. He’s certainly doing better this Spring than he was doing last Fall and Winter. Still, he still resents having moved from LA to Santa Fe.

“What does Santa Fe have that LA doesn’t have, Pak Trules? Nothing. When people are young, like me, like you were "back in your century” (oooh, that hurts!), they want to experiment. They want to find out who they are. They want to make choices, to grow up, to find an identity. LA has endless options. Santa Fe is a hick town. I understand why you like it. You’re retired. But me, it’s dead. Nothing is here - but the mall. A frigging mall! Do you understand?

Yes, I do, man. But it was just time for me and Bou to leave LA. I explained to you many times, we had no other choice. And… unfortunately, you’re our son. You’re not in control; not in the driver’s seat. One date you will be. But not now. Do you understand?

Yeah, but I don’t have to like it, do I?

No, but you have just two more years. Then you can move back to LA or to wherever you want. I know it seems like a really long time, but that’s how it is.

And…

That’s how it is.

…. with all three of us Trules and Manalu-Trules,

in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

…in our new home.

We’ve survived.

Where hopefully, one way or the other, we will…

Thrive.

Best,

From the Southwest,

Pak Trules

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