Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Nightbus

I have learned that life if you split it open has as many possibilities as a fig has seeds. I have learned that you can dance all night only if you sleepall day. I have learned that the moon is not just the moon but "La Barca""The Ship", also the word for cone as in ice cream. I have learned that a beautiful woman is even more beautiful if she lies brown and naked and oiled in the sun as if she is being roasted for a feast. And above all I have learned that I have been smoking way too much hash.

I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while Tunte and I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.

They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way.

I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters.
"Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"
That was how I met Alithia and Marta.

They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.

I found Tunte passed out under a table. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around for an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.

In our tiny room with my bed one foot from the door I fled this world in a haze of hash dreams until Shatzie stumbled in. I screamed when I saw him.

We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. It was time to get out of town. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Tunte had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.

It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and black outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with his elderly blind dog in his
arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton
"where are we"?
"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.

The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping on the pavement
next to them. One felt as if they had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.

And finally, Barcelona

No comments: