FOLIO A+E : LET THERE BE LIT Fluid narrative knits subtle connections with THREADS of water, underprivilege and the city
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28 | FOLIOWEEKLY.com | OCTOBER 19-25, 2016
ou might say the central character in Jim Alabiso’s narrative All the Angels Come is the water. Not the St. Johns River, nor the Atlantic Ocean, nor Pottsburg Creek. The water itself. There’s William: “Ankle deep in the surf. That’s his place.” There’s Jay, who constantly speaks of watermelon, the “food of the gods,” but the most earthly (and watery) fruit. There’s Ricardo “the Rock,” longing for his love Veronica, who disappeared at Cerro de la Popa, from whose cliffs “you can see the water from both sides.” You could also argue the central character is Jacksonville, but if so, the backbone of the city is its waterways. Or maybe the central character is the connection among all the characters, but if so, water works as that connection’s central metaphor. The centrality of water in Alabiso’s writing is not surprising because swimming saved his life. As I sit across from him at Vagabond Coffee in Murray Hill, it’s hard to believe he was overweight, smoked heavily, and had “a lesion in [his] prostate as wide as [his] prostate.” He was laid up in bed for a year, depressed. Then Jay came to him, brought All the Angels Come with her, and changed everything. A friend had been advising him on prostate nutrition — don’t eat charred meat, do drink green tea, eat lycopene-rich red fruits and vegetables like watermelon and tomato. Alabiso responded cynically. His depression had made him fatalistic. “I told her, ‘You know what? I don’t think eating a bowl of spaghetti is going to fix all my problems.’ A couple weeks later, she and I are at Bold Bean on Stockton Street, and we’re getting ready to go. I walk out the corner door and this strange woman across the street looks at me and yells, ‘Watermelon!’” he says. The stranger wasn’t done. “She wanted to make sure I got the message.” So she pointed directly at him, repeatedly forcefully, “Watermelon,” then trundled away into Riverside with her shopping cart. She wasn’t Jay just then, but she came back to Alabiso in his storytelling. After changing his diet and starting All the Angels Come, Alabiso went in for a biopsy that came back negative. His father had died from prostate cancer. After Jay resuscitated him, Alabiso kept thinking about different characters he’d met across the city. They all said something to him about who he was, but also about each other. The connections were surprising. When he began to exercise, he did so in water. It defied gravity, kept him afloat. Now he attains a certain peace, a particular “zone” in water that he doesn’t find elsewhere. He sees water as “the great connector” and human lives
as waves that rise from and fall back to a great sea of humanity. Soon enough, he wrote of the connections, but kept the real people who’d inspired him private by fictionalizing them as characters. As #OscarsSoWhite caught fire, Alabiso decided All the Angels Come should be an Avengersstyle story, about people born without privilege who look nothing like him and the subtle connections linking all of us. The impetus was totally opposite to Trump’s “Make America [White] Again” bombast. So details that seem random or insignificant early on re-emerge in the stories of other characters. William tucks a walkie-talkie into his coat as he stands in the ocean shallows, while later in the novel, his voice comes through the radio to the lesbian police lieutenant Sharon Holmquist. Form follows function as well. All the Angels Come is not only a novel. It’s as protean in form as its central character. For one thing, each chapter appears as a story in Alabiso’s serialization at jimalabiso.com. He experiments with a method most exploited by Victorian novelists like Dickens, George Sand, and Wilkie Collins, which re-emerged in a new form in NPR’s Serial podcasts. With the help of Jax stage maven Barbara Colaciello, the story was presented on stage recently at Players by the Sea. Perfectly fitting the flow of form, Chip Southworth’s bridge motifs appeared in the background, while Bold City Contemporary Ensemble accompanied the acting with improvisational and ambient jazz. Alabiso is careful not to call the dramatization a play, referring to it instead as “a gestured performance.” Alabiso was a student of Colaciello’s in her Improv to the Rescue classes, which she’s recently moved to CoRK Arts District. Studying improvisation, he says, beaming, “makes me really, really scared.” It’s central to Alabiso’s way of seeing the world that any project on which he embarks is collaborative. Even his swimming projects are artistic collaborations. Alabiso appeared on the cover of Folio Weekly in 2011 after swimming across the St. Johns River. He’s also swum across Monterey Bay and Lake Tahoe and 12 miles from County Dock in Mandarin to the Fuller Warren Bridge in Downtown. Because of his nonprofit Jumping Fish, which is dedicated to “advocacy of our waterways through athletics,” he frequently meets with as many as 65 people at the ocean to swim. “Just because you create something,” Alabiso says, “doesn’t mean you own it. You give it to the world and see what beauty becomes of it.” Tim Gilmore mail@folioweekly.com
Art by Marcus Williams
SEA OF CHANGE