You’ve got to get back up yourself.

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III: Turn Out the Lights as We Planned

Palace Players IV:

“This may be the most splendid Shiraz I have ever enjoyed.”

Earlier she said we needed to not draw attention to ourselves.  She then proceeded to park the Pagani convertible in a handicap spot facing everyone on the beach.  We hide behind large sunglasses, ordering foolishly expensive beverages in the daytime.

I shake my head at her drink selection. “We are in France. You ordered wine from Australia?”

“But you don’t know that it’s from Australia! Maybe it’s French? The French invented Shiraz, but we call it something different.”

“Do you call it Chianti?”

She gags on her food dramatically, causing everyone to look over at us. “No. Chianti is totally different, we call Shiraz ‘Syrah’ here. Chianti is more dry, but Americans just drink beer so I don’t fault you for this.”

“Ha! Wow how gracious of you.”

She kicks me under the table. “I have a good-developed taste,” she says.

“Yes but your English could use some work, you say ‘well-developed taste’ instead of ‘good-developed’. Just a little grammar thing. Those words aren’t necessarily interchangeable.”

“Sorry, I only speak FOUR languages. You speak how many?”

“One and a half.”

“No.” She reaches over the table and adjusts the collar on my shirt.

“If I was European I’d know more languages. I blame it on the American school system for how much ‘Spanish’ they taught me.”

She laughs and nods in agreement, pulling a pack of Parliaments from her enormous purse.

I lean over the table to light her cigarette, lighting mine next. “We should smoke less of these” I say, words muffled by the one between my lips.  She shrugs at my suggestion.

In her company I’ve become accustomed to the lingering smell of smoke on my clothing, although of course her clothes always smell brand new. Resting my cigarette on the edge of the table, I poke at the penne pasta in front of me, pondering the disappointingly small “lunch-size” portion. Whenever we’ve eaten together, no matter where, she consumes roughly half of the food she ordered and takes the rest home in a to-go box. I eat everything on my plate in a matter of twenty minutes and finish whatever is in her to-go box when we get home.

Sitting across from me, she sips her completely full glass of wine and clears her throat, “If you smoke less than a pack a day it can be good for you actually.”

“No, no way in hell.”

“Don’t swear! No really, I asked my doctor.”

“Your doctor told you that smoking was healthy so long as you smoked less than twenty a day?”

She nods, exhaling. “Reduces blood pressure.”

I shake my head.  He would probably tell her anything to have her remember him.

We’re down the beach from a luxury hotel and every four minutes or so American tourists walk by, speaking English to each other. Some sound Southern, others are from the midwest. She asks, “Are Americans born with cameras in their hands? I have never seen an American without a camera.”

“You have never seen me with a camera! I am an American.”

“That’s true! Do you even own one? How, then, are you an American?”

“I think I had one once but I left it in Las Vegas when I was in college. Hey are we safe in the open?” I ask, changing the subject, “Two days ago we were actually dodging bullets.”

She shrugs again, practically ignoring the question. “They don’t know we’re here.”

“They won’t see your car?”

“There are a lot of cars like mine in France. They are French I think.”

“Okay let’s pretend your car isn’t Italian, or, like one of 10 like it in the whole world. Wouldn’t these people know your license plate number?”

With a quick laugh she puts the cigarette to her lips. Holding the smoke in her lungs for a couple seconds, she soon exhales in a white column. It dissipates into the canopy of our table’s umbrella as the cigarette gets put out on the edge of the table cloth. “Why would I have a registered car, admirador? I cannot afford the taxes.”

I finish my drink; wiping disbelief on my face. “ Never mind.”

This short story is the fourth in a series.   The sister series, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.

“I don’t long to be adored: I wish to be heard.”

My dear friend Lydia has finally started blogging and I’m so happy about it!  She’s fantastic and a fantastic writer.  She did a lot of editing on my last Palace Players piece and really helped pull everything together.

More importantly, Lydia posted a blog yesterday and since then I’ve read it many times.  I recommend you do the same.

I don’t want to ruin anything with too much of a synopsis, but it’s a blog about the struggles of being heard as matador, as a fighter, yet as a woman in a still-patriarcal communication culture.  Freaking good writing.  It’s moving, yeah, but it’s sincere and applicable and significant.

You can read her piece here: Given chocolate when I asked for brandy.

Turn out the lights as we planned.

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III:

When everything exploded we heard it from upstairs.  There was smoke outside on the street and people were shouting and screaming.  It was early morning just before sunup when our sleep was perfectly perforated by the blast, shaking us awake when flying debris cracked the window by the bed.  Bullets reflected off the house next-door in irregular triplets.  They must have gotten the wrong address.

We grabbed a few things we couldn’t leave there.  For me, a backpack with my computer in it and the guitar I brought over to her house.  For her, her purse and an old box of jewelry.  Everything went in the back of the car.  She shouted at me to hurry as I ran back into the kitchen from the garage to get food.  I grabbed bread, apples, and the American beer I had paid far too much for at the liquor store near her house.  She was already sitting in the passenger seat and tossed the keys at me gracefully as I exited the kitchen, slapping the garage door button on my way.  No more than a minute’s time had passed since the explosion, but we were already on the road.

Her car was fast, some absurd Pagani roadster.  Strangely enough she usually took taxis or called for her driver when she had to be somewhere.  I had never seen her drive, although I was sure she could.  Today though, for whatever reason, she deferred the escape driving to me.  In a normal situation, I would have been nervous about my capacity to drive a car with such an inane amount of rear-wheel horsepower.  Right now there was only the fight-0r-flight response in which we had chosen the later.

Although she was never very specific, she had warned me that something like this might happen and that she would have to leave if it did.  I told her again and again from my heart that I was in it for the long haul, whatever that meant.  Here we were a month later, roaring down Avinguda Diagonal toward the sea.

She watched for followers through the tiny back window of the the closed roadster top while I kept my eyes on the road.  She shouted directions and I would use every bit of driving knowledge I ever gained from playing video games to take her prescribed turns correctly.  Finally connecting to Autopista del Maresme, we accelerated hard and headed North and East up the coast.  In the pink light of the morning a thin column of smoke rose from the residential heart of Barcelona.  The living heart of Barcelona, however, was in her incredibly loud convertible and already making a bee-line for France.

“It’s about 500km to Marseilles.  I have people there.  If you want to drive faster you can, I don’t care.”  She cared.  I accelerated.

“Can you explain a bit?” I said.  She wouldn’t say anything, but the purr of her motorcar overwhelmed a few minutes of silence that may have otherwise been awkward.

The engine in this car was mounted behind the driver over the rear axle for extra traction and better weight distribution, but the result was a feeling of being shoved in the back every time you accelerated instead of feeling “pulled along” like in a more traditional vehicle.  She apparently didn’t care, lying with her head against the softly vibrating glass of the closed window, eyes shut tight, sweater pulled around her narrow shoulders.

I wondered if she felt like she was acting.  This whole “escape” felt like something from a movie and she was a movie star.  As surreal as it was, I could still smell the smoke on the shirt I was wearing. Who were they?  I guess they got the wrong house.  My whole story with this woman made no sense at all but every new experience became the new most exhilarating  moment of my life.

In a little while we crossed the border into France.  She woke up as we slowed down and groaned dramatically; groggy from her nap.

They didn’t recognize me at the crossing, but they sure as hell recognized her.  I was worried they would figure out that we were escaping Spain and try to stop us or something but they just wanted her autograph, leaning far out the window to reach way down to our low-profile car with paper and pen.  The men in the booth were so overwhelmed with her that they didn’t even ask to see my passport.  I slid it back into the front pocket of my backpack and pulled out the cigarettes.  She saw them and reached out her hand, only half-listening as the men in the booth told her, in Spanish, how much they enjoyed her most recent film.  She thanked them in French and they smiled enormously.

We waved and drove off, engine reverberating arrogantly through the concrete border complex.  She lit her cigarette and leaned over to light mine as I drove.

“Do you speak Français, American?” She asked.

I shook my head, “Only kind of.  I’m a lot better at speaking Spanish.”

“You are terrible at Spanish.”

I smiled, “Oh yeah?”

“Si, admirador. You are also terrible at swimming.”

“Is there anything I’m good at?”

She snickered and bit her lip, reclining into her seat.  ”Ummmm, How are we on gas?”

Our smoke curled off the instrument panel where the gas gauge was still dead-set on “F.” That was impossible; this car could not possibly be gas efficient and we had driven all morning. “It says we’re still full but that doesn’t make sense.  Is there anything wrong with your gas gauge?”

She laughed, “Nope, it works great.  Can I drive soon?”

“Yes. This is your car after all.”

 

Palace Players IV: You’ve Got to Get Back Up Yourself

 

The sister series to this one, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.

Who told you you were naked?

A short story.

A small house next to a busy street had been converted into an office for an auto insurance broker and at some point they had planted a sign in the front yard.  The letters on top always stayed the same but the letters beneath were interchangeable.  They came as individual letters on square glass slides and they slid into slots, one after another.  You could spell out whatever you wanted for the passers by.

Like a lot of businesses who employed these interchangeable-letter signs, this little insurance agency usually displayed jokes.  The idea was that the question was on one side and the answer was on the other so that, driving by, you had a split second to think it over before you saw the answer.  This posed three problems though:

1.  You could easily read one side of the sign as you approached it, but you had to either crane your neck and read it quick as you drove away or you had to read it backwards in your rearview.

2.  This posed a bit of a safety risk, requiring the driver not only to divert his or her attention away from the road to read the sign as they approached it but also to do all kinds of unsafe driving acrobatics (described above) to see the sign as they drove away.

The biggest issue, however, was number 3: the joke only worked if you approached the sign on the Westbound side of the street.  If you were going Eastbound you would see the answer before the question, which really compromised the potency of the joke.

There was a time when we were walking Eastbound on that street.  At some point during the week the person in charge of deciding what joke to put up had decided to go with a motivational saying instead of a joke.  As we approached it from behind we read:

IF WE DON’T LEARN FROM IT!!

I looked at Eve and she looked at me.  We walked around to the East-facing side of the sign to read the first part.

IT IS ONLY A MISTAKE…

I shook my head and she squeezed my hand and we continued to walk.  We had learned from our mistake.  We had learned through toiling for food and pain in childbirth and domestic violence and addiction and eating disorders and arrogant pride and car crashes and divorce and and date rape and suicide.  We had learned.  We still think it was a mistake.

Some peculiar fix, the two of us.

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II:

If my eyes were open I would realize that the steam from my morning coffee had completely fogged up the lenses of my glasses.  Figuring out how everything happened would have been a much easier puzzle if we were both sitting at the same table this morning.  We could compare pieces.

I remembered at first the sight of her in the back of that crowded room and I remember hearing a friend of mine shout “Where are you going?” as I disappeared into the overwhelming mass of people.  I think I turned around and waved as I left them there.  They would be fine.

I remember next a chair, maybe next to the door?  It was made for one, but only I was sitting.  She laid between the leather arms and supported herself with an arm around my neck.  I remember the first words she said,  ”You found me!”  I probably thought this was strange at first, her assuming that I had been looking for her since we swam in the sea, but after a moment I realized that she was absolutely right.  I had been looking around every corner.

We found a quiet spot somewhere outside the noisy room and we sat and finally spoke like two real people would.  I told her I had never been so consumed by a person in my whole life.  She smiled as if on camera and turned her head to meet the martini glass she had raised to her lips.  This opaque yellow drink had been with her all night, but still it was so full she had to be careful sipping it.  She sighed and said, “Who have I but you, admirador?”

I laughed, “Anyone in this entire city, this entire country, would do anything to just be seen with you, to stand next to you.  I’m some American you don’t even know.  Why are you here with me?”

She reached into her purse, “Why are you not lighting my cigarette?”  She smiled and buried her head between my shoulder and my chest, holding out a Parliament in her left hand.  I pulled a lighter from my pocket and lit the cigarette, but it never met her lips.  We sat there together, her head unmoving as the smoke curled around us.  You could still hear the party from down the hall but all the music and the talking and the people yelling drink orders at bartenders had meshed into one throbbing sound that bounced off the marble walls and found our ears, all four of which were perfectly inattentive.

Now I don’t remember now how we got back to her place but I do remember sitting on the front steps and laughing and rambling on about nothing.  She asked, ”Do you miss your city when you’re here?”  I told her my city was too big.  She said her city was not big enough.  At first I thought this was funny because I felt like her city was enormous, maybe even bigger than mine.  Regardless I told her its small size was the sea’s fault, constricting expansion on one side.  She disagreed and said people wouldn’t have ever lived here at all if it weren’t for the sea.  ”Why did people ever move to Las Vegas then?” I asked.  She told me they must not have known she was in Barcelona.

I wiped the coffee fog from my glasses with the corner of my shirt and thought about her saying “Barr-te-lona.”  At some point last night she had written her number on the back of my hand and I had transcribed it to my journal and put it in my telephone as soon as I realized it wasn’t permanent.  In a funny hotel coffee shop I sat like a teenager in helpless infatuation, looking at her name on the screen of my phone and wondering if it was too soon to call.

 

 Palace Players III: Turn Out the Lights as We Planned

Palace Players IV: You’ve Got to Get Back Up Yourself

 

The sister Palace Players series, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.

Introducing Palace Players:

Palace Players I:

From where we were sitting you could only see a sliver of the sea between the steep downhill road and the old building that stood at the bottom.  It went from there to the horizon.

“You are amazing.  You swam all that way and you didn’t even get your hair wet.”

“Thank you,” She replied, “Weren’t we racing though?”

“We were. You only won because I had to battle those sharks.”

“No.” She said, poofing up her hair with her fingers. “This is Spain.”

Later, upstairs around some bar we couldn’t really afford, a query was raised by one of my friends as to who the most beautiful person in the world was.  We had somehow spent last evening around outrageous celebrity.  Maybe that made us feel like we had credibility to decide who the most beautiful person in the world was.  After twenty minutes of discussion everyone had mostly agreed that she, the girl from the strange party, the popular actress, was hands-down the most beautiful person in the world.  I sipped my Hofbräu and contemplated this for a moment.  My pride wanted to jump me like a recess bully to puff me up and elevate my perception of my “game.”  I quelled that pride by reminding it that, actually, I had only been with the woman once and we had just been swimming.

There was no long evening of wining and dining in the costal city.  We hadn’t slow danced the last song as the bars were shutting down.  We didn’t split a cab and go home together, wherever her home actually was.  I didn’t even know where she went after the beach.  In fact, save for the conversation about swimming most of the night was fuzzy in my memory.

“I can’t believe you talked to her man,” a friend of mine said.  “Please tell me you got some kind of number.”  I smiled.  From my right front jeans pocket I produced the note she gave me and placed it on the bar, sliding it over so my friends could verify its authenticity.

She had said goodbye and got up to leave when I impulsively grabbed her arm.  Like something practiced in a movie of hers, she stopped and whipped her head around to look me in the eye.  Her smile was calm and almost crafty, like she was hoping I would stop her.  ”Yes?” she said, her accent making the “s” sound like a “z.” I asked her to wait while I tore a page from my journal and scribbled my name and number on it; smeary ball-point honesty.  Folding it twice I set it in her hand, begging her with my eyes to look it over even just once.  The note she gave me in return was written in pink on a receipt from her purse.  It only said “-rematch-” and had her first name with a heart after it.  I pitied my friends who could only see the note.  To me it was evidence of where I had been and that, even for a moment, I was there with the most beautiful creature in the whole world.

“Well that sucks,” Said a friend.  “It doesn’t have a number on it.”

Immediately someone told him to shut the hell up.

 

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III: Turn Out the Lights as We Planned

Palace Players IV: You’ve Got to Get Back Up Yourself

 

The sister series to this one, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.

A brief theory of identity constitutive consumerism.

Wow that sounds exciting to read.  This might bore you to death.  You’re going to do it though, aren’t you?  It will only take a few minutes.  You should read this.

I saw a man on a motorcycle the other day when I was working at my noodles restaurant.  His bike was some sort of Harley or a a Harleyesque Yamaha or something like that and it had yellow flames along the side over the top of sparkly metallic purple paint.  The man’s beard was Moses-long and it was almost blowing into his girlfriend(wife?)’s face as she held on to him on the back of his bike.  He had the leather and he had the boots and he had an enormous smile on his face.

Bored at work and indoctrinated to forever think like a communications major after 4 years of classes, I thought, “Does he ride that bike because it fits/affirms his perception of himself or does the bike work to make him feel/appear tougher than he he perceives himself to be?”  In other words, in the mind of the motorcycle owner, does his possession “fit with” his idea of himself or is it working to “improve” his idea of himself?  How does this question apply to consumerism in general?  With so many options for the expenditure of our respective discretionary incomes, what makes us choose the things we do?

I asked my brilliant friend Abby about this and she said the motorcycle owner probably just really enjoys riding a motorcycle and that there may not be this huge identity thing for him over the bike.  Brought back suddenly to reality, I agreed that he probably bought it because it sounded fun.  However, that man didn’t select a Kawasaki Ninja or a Honda Goldwing.  He went with the purple Harley with yellow flames.  Perhaps someone gave him the bike or something, but let’s pretend for the sake of conversation that he had all the bikes in the world to choose from.

What we choose to consume, even if it isn’t something as statement-making as a Harley Davidson, says something about us.  As members of a consumeristic culture we have the choice to consume in different ways.  My argument is that our perceptions of ourselves are a key influencer in that decision making process and that we purchase and consume certain things to either affirm our self-perceptions or to “modify” them. 

Days away from entering kindergarten, my mother took my sister and I to shop for school uniforms.  The options were limited and uninspiring, and I can remember thinking that even as a 5 year-old.  I rejected yellow shirts because I liked the dark green ones and the dark blue ones more.  My sister decided on some plaid jumpers and long skirts even though she certainly had the option of long pants or shorts.  Was my selection of green and blue over yellow a matter of functionality or something?  Not at all.  I didn’t want to wear a yellow shirt to school.  My sister probably thought the jumpers and skirts were more feminine than the pants and shorts.  As a 22 year-old about to graduate from college, I found myself with that same sister at an Urban Outfitters in Cherry Creek a few months ago shopping for clothes.  I had received some clothes from Urban for my birthday and there was nothing wrong with the clothes at all.  They were completely functional.  There were no rips or tears except for the one I caused by jumping to intercept a bean bag during a backyard game of cornhole.   There was no reason (besides the tear) to exchange them, but I knew I didn’t want to keep any of them.  I shopped around for a while to find some things I liked more and then took those things home.

What does it mean?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps I’m asking you to consider why you buy the things you do.  I like Wayfarers because I like to feel young and Beatnicky, it affirmed that perception of myself.  I bought a fixed-gear bike because I wanted to feel wilder (Cue A Fine Frenzy) and I wanted to be part of what I thought was an awesome trend, maybe that was more identity modification than the sunglasses.  Why do you have the car you have?  Why did you purchase the clothes that adorn you today?  Where did the motivation come from to study at the specific coffee shop you attended this afternoon?  Etc.  I don’t know if there’s like a right or wrong way to consume with this mindset.  Knowing the identity motivator that lead to whatever consumerist action I took may not change anything about that action for me, but isn’t it a worthy thought process to track this stuff?  Maybe I’m a nerd.

Maybe I’ll get a purple Harley with yellow flames.