It’s only a single xeroxed page containing a few poems, a photo, and a biographical sketch. Before he hands it to me, he signs it: “To Florence Levinsohn, with love, Alfonso Segovia.”
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Segovia’s poems, about 2,000 of them, which he’s collected in a spiral-bound book he calls “Rainbow for Life,” and also his short stories were all written in Spanish and are mostly unpublished, although he says that a couple of poems appeared in a 1989 anthology and that he was named poet of merit in 1989 at a San Francisco public reading.
When Segovia bounced forward to receive me at Chicago Hair Design salon at Lincoln and Fullerton, I knew at once that he was no ordinary manicurist. Displayed in the shop’s front window beside his manicure table are plaster hands that show off his “fantasy” nails–five-inch-long fake nails rising eight or nine inches high and telling elaborate stories in paint, feathers, gems, glitter, and hair. When they’re on display in competitions, he told me, the model’s hands are also painted.
“But I didn’t want to work for Lucy because then my family would say I was an American gigolo.” He tried to find a job in Spanish-language broadcasting. “It is all cliques,” he says.
“I want to see my stories on Broadway,” says Segovia. He will write a play based on one of his nine short stories, “The Ghost of the Night of the Party,” he says, and then he will write a screenplay based on another story, “Red,” about “a boy who is so impressive that he never has to fight.” Has he ever written a play or a film script? No, but he can do it, he insists. Has he any idea how rough it is to get a play or a movie produced? No, but he will do it, he’s sure.
