Spotlight on Tongue and Groove’s Conrad Romo

In the holiday spirit, LAR’s nonfictionista Ann Beman spotlights a writer with work set in the holiday season, albeit the Lenten season. Conrad Romo’s essay (pp. 26-29 of LAR’s fall 2009 issue) describes an annual pilgrimage he and his taciturn father make for a Lenten meal featuring diced nopalitos, or “little cactus.” Through the course of the dinner, “Nopalitos” reveals Romo’s sometimes prickly relationship with his dad:

 “There was a time that I felt an urgent need for us to really talk. I wanted to know if it was as hard for him to talk to his father as it was for us. I wanted to know if there was anything he wanted to know about me. Anything he wanted me to know about himself. … Was he still mad at me for walking away from the employment line at the Southern Pacific Railroad, or for wrecking his car that time? And before I went to Alaska, when we had that fight and I had my hands around his throat, what did he see in my eyes?”

 Romo is published in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, spanning sixty years of fiction writing, bringing to life the Latino denizens of Southern California. A native Angelino, he writes a mix of short stories, poetry, and personal essays, often about family and relationships. He has also begun writing about his past history in a cult, as he was a member of the Church of Scientology for 14 years. “I didn’t want to talk about it for a long time.” He says, even now, many years later, he doesn’t want to explain it. “I can’t.” In any case, he’s written a dozen or so pieces touching on Scientology, and has read several aloud at Tongue and Groove.

Romo started Tongue and Groove about six years ago. Combining readings of poetry, short stories, personal essays, spoken-word performances, and music, the event initially took place at the Zen Center of Los Angeles in Koreatown, where Romo is an active member. The event now happens one Sunday a month, usually toward the end of the month, at The Hotel Café on N. Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood. In fact, he’s in the process of lining up the next Tongue and Groove reading. “I like to invite a variety of writers,” he says. “I like a variety, a tonal dynamic. I want not to just have my head tickled. I like to get hit in the gut, too.”

But, he insists, it’s not about him. He’s merely the facilitator. “Tongue and Groove has been a community I have been of service to. It encourages others, and myself, to write. I’ve found truth in the saying, ‘If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.’ By being around writers and having read from a few of my pieces, it started to change my mindset. I too am a writer.”

There’s something about readings that transports him. “There’s something about a really good reader. They command the room.” He says some non-Tongue-and-Groove gigs feature actors reading writers’ works. “But,” he says, “I’d rather have the writer read their own work, hem and haw and stumble, and hear their own voice.”

There’s a need for this, he adds. “In these times of heightened communications – blogs, Twitter, cell phones, instant messages, texting – it seems like there’s a greater need for connection, to see each other, to rub elbows.”

I ask Romo if he can identify recurring themes in his work. “Communication,” he says. “I notice people have difficulty in saying what they should say, and in hearing.” He writes about misunderstanding, too, and variations on all the above. “Nopalitos,” of course, touches on this theme.

“If not for the nopalitos, all we would do together is watch the occasional boxing match or ballgame. Part of the problem is that he mumbles and has an accent so I can’t understand him. He swallows his words and I have to ask him to repeat himself to the point that he gets annoyed. I usually just make general acknowledgments that might fit anything he’s saying.”

Since finishing the essay about a year ago, Romo and his father have returned to their preferred restaurant for tortas de camarón with diced cactus. “We both love that meal, so we go back once a week for that four- to six-week season.” He has not shown the essay to his father, and doesn’t know what his dad would think about it. He saw his father recently for Thanksgiving. They exchanged their customary hellos, but that was it.