This was it, this was the bit all right—the one they had paid to see without even knowing what it would be—and he wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon.
“Who are you?” repeated the cop/shopper. “Nuts, I guess,” said the same dumb, shy boy through Angel Echeverria’s microphone, shyly shuffling his feet, one on top of the other. “I guess I’m nuts. I don’t know if you want to buy me.” Angel Echeverria then reclaimed his confident self again, a confidence lifted subtly but perceptibly higher than before by the knowledge coursing through his body that he now was so thoroughly destroying the audience he so loved. “You go into Whole Foods? SOY NUTS!!!” He pounded his fist proudly on an invisible podium and waited—not even for the sake of timing now, but for people to pause and literally replenish their breath so they would be physically able to laugh more. “YO SOY SAUCE! CóMPRAME!” He could now slip in and out of English and Spanish and they wouldn’t even notice the transition; it was as if he weren’t a comedian anymore but the voice in their own heads entertaining them at this point. “Sí, yo tengo una identidad, un confidence, un pride. YO SE QUIéN YO SOY! I am worth it!” He strutted around the stage, elbows high, being for the crowd a proud bottle of soy sauce with a smile headed skyward as the men and women in the audience, enveloped in the comfort of being entertained and the elation of being understood, applauded and cheered as long as they could, minutes on end, to express a gratitude that would last for months.
Everyone who saw Angel Echeverria saw him a second time, but no one saw him a third. They all wished he would find a new bit as good as the Whole Foods bit, and so did he. But he had what he had and he did what he did, and everyone remembered him fondly.
The Market Was Down
Nobody knew why the market was down that day. But it didn’t stop everyone from having a theory.
“Worries over Spain’s role in the EU brought the market down today,” said a woman on the radio. “The market had an off day today, due to uncertainty in oil futures,” announced a man on television. “Market Slightly Down as Health Care Details Come into Focus” wrote a newspaper writer.
The truth was no one knew why the market was down. It started the day, just … down. It stayed down most of the day. It had an up moment for a little bit around lunch, but was still, just, down.
Why was the market down? No reason. Well, stupid stuff. Actually, to be honest, maybe it was Spain at the beginning, but it was really only worried about Spain because it woke up looking for something to worry about. Then, before long, the market started worrying about bigger things, things that didn’t seem to have an answer.
If the market had never existed, would anyone miss it? Would anything really be different? Did anyone actually really care about the market, or did they just think they could make money from it? And then there were all those people who said they hated the market, and they always seemed so much cooler and better looking than the people who liked the market—were those people right? Were they on to something? Was the market soulless? Evil? Pointless? Harmful? Bad?
The market calmed down for a minute when it pictured Warren Buffett. What an undeniably warm, wise, lovely man Warren Buffett was! And he sure loved the market. With all his heart, without question. That made the market feel better.
But then the market thought of something so sad it made it want to kill itself: what if Warren Buffett was just wrong? This made the market feel worse than ever: the idea that an obviously wonderful old man like Warren Buffett might have wasted his heart loving something as terrible and worthless as itself, the market. Now the market felt so guilty and terrible it let itself wonder what it would be like if it let itself completely collapse. But it didn’t. Oh, that’s ridiculous, the market told itself: now you’re just down because you’re down. Come on. Look alive.
The market began to pick itself up a bit. People were happy to see the market improve—everyone was rooting for it (except for a few people who were always betting on the market to fail, but there would always be people like that; and those were people that even the people who hated the market hated). When the market realized how many people were counting on it, and how many people were hoping it got better, that made it pick itself up a little more. It felt more valued, more confident. Feeling that way made it look that way, too, and that made more people treat it that way. And that made it feel that way even more.
It was still down, though. Just kind of down.
What time was it? It felt late.
The thing was, the market could only be what it was. That’s what it was: the market. Some people would always love it; some people would always hate it. Was it good? Was it bad? It wasn’t its job to know. It was just its job to be what it was.
As the sun started to burn its way down in the sky, the market decided to just stop thinking for a while, stop working for a while, and get some rest.
The next day, the market was up!