“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

Palace Players V: And What Got Made Was Broken Too

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

Palace Players V: And What Got Made Was Broken Too

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