PRINCESS PANCAKES PARTY; or, ALL ABOUT THE BUTT; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 4

cicus (centro de iniciativas culturales de la universidad de sevilla) screens international films for free. who knew? that finnish girl that everyone seems to know. she tells everyone that she knows that cicus is screening a series of finnish films throughout the month of january. they are a date! and then there is a party, because the finnish girl goes home after the movie about the woman who refuses to go on strike with the other cleaning women but then loses her scab position anyway and makes pancakes (the finnish girl, not the finnish woman in the movie). communism had its "golden age" in finland during the hottest years of the cold war, but even though the party participated in a number of cabinets, it never made president or prime minister. it didn't seem to be of any help to the cleaning women fight their case after coincidence and necessity convinced the ex-scab to give her lawyer acquaintance a chance to litigate helsinki city hall. the finnish girl would need to make a party of her own. and something about pancakes. that she made them after the film. and that she realized their curative power in the depressing wake of it. or something. but everyone goes to the party because everyone seems to know her, not because she knows about pancakes. they say, however, (as they say) that the pancakes are good. the idea for the pancake party was good. the finnish girl (who also makes a swedish pancake) knows everything about pancakes, they say. she smiles when they say this, but this is mostly because she is mostly smiling. once people showed up to the party the finnish girl was thinking about going dancing -- but not about going to class, although she had learned some fun things at a contact workshop in málaga. it was funny that it's all about the butt. she wants to make jackets. what a smile. then, on the heels of the arrival to the buffet table of the swedish pancake arrives the swede. she lives downstairs. downstairs she had made a chicken curry and a thick chocolate sauce with nuts. they're for the pancakes, so she puts them on the table with her countryfood. her smile is smaller. at breakfast in the morning the tube of caviar she brought the last time doesn't leave the fridge. both she and the finnish girl need to get to dance. but it would be nice to have a walk and a sit. as naturally as a prop cigarette can be smoked over a cup of coffee the swedish girl naturally holds her prop cigarette next to her cup of coffee. after the studio she's going to go home and eat the nutella she didn't use in the chocolate sauce with a spoon, "like the italians." something passes. "it's all about the butt." big smile.

I DIDN'T THINK SO; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 3

i think that i had meant to go. the posters were up in the streets of the macarena at least two weeks before the event, but the sixteenth of december came and went, not without fanfare, because it was probably for too much of it that passing a friday evening at wherever it was that the event was being held seemed insufficiently attractive. the cause could have used some bedazzling of its advertisement. with everything else assumed to be happening in december, that poster really should have tried for something more than the tired old faces of lenin, stalin and chairman mao. "qué ha pasado con el comunismo?" the sixteenth of december is well behind us: it's a thing of the past. but its reminders still decorate the macarena, and watching a scrap collector push by under a ragged array of those posters that covers almost the entire street level wall of a building off of san luis, i wonder how anyone here manages to secure themselves a shopping cart. maybe the ones in circulation have just been passed down or over since before security was increased to its current levels at the grocery stores. (and that is, at the groceries stores that still have them.) the cart at her apartment on twelfth avenue ultimately went back to the streets without her finding a friend who wanted to inherit it. so it was left, filled with skeins of her less expensive yarn and piloted by two cabbage patch dolls (and filled still with the skeins of the expensive yarn that she couldn't take). it was left for someone to push, as a friend held the door, still piloted by the two cabbage patch dolls through the deliveries door of the design firm that had opened on the other corner of that block of twelfth avenue. but before it was the depository for those shoes of hers that she couldn't throw out but wouldn't wear except around the building and across twelfth avenue to the grocery store owned by the femmalien (she called her) -- which was before she threw out those shoes to store her yarn -- the cart had once (at least that once) seen its purpose fulfilled for shopping. the shopping had actually been done, but with two bags each on both arms each, she said she wouldn't be able to walk the ten blocks back to the apartment on twelfth avenue. but look, a shopping cart. it's probably someone's, because shopping carts that have made their way out of somewhere anywhere have, anymore, had intentional help. but she's already putting her bags inside. the bikini she knit herself didn't work out for her so well at the beach, but she looks not so surprisingly appropriate test piloting the cart for the cabbage patch dolls in her miniskirt and the leg gauntlets she sewed for herself out of a purple vinyl coat. and she looks now not surprisingly inappropriate struggling for the cart with the man who's trying to wrest her hands off of the push bar. she shakes his hands off of her instead. then it's him her hands are pushing as he's screaming that the shopping cart is his. "is your name walgreens pharmacy?" she says and then he slides down the tree that's planted in the sidewalk somewhere along tenth avenue. and i look at the scrap collector and wonder if i shouldn't reevaluate missing events like the one that passed on the sixteenth of december instead of chasing the tails of phantom banalities through streets of a city they'll probably shouldn't see. but she's still talking to that man on the ground. "i didn't think so."

LOVE ME OR KILL ME; or, AS COOL AS BERLIN; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 2

but we have so many friends, she says. sure they may not be as reflective as we would like them to be, but what do we do to make them so supportive? what do we do? reflect, probably. and that does make you interesting, but it also makes you wonder why sometimes people aren't very reflective. "i wanna be future with a history, out of tune but in my melody; je m'en fous...but very trendy." not necessarily the last one, but those are the words. and berlin is really cool. really, really cool. except for its capitalizing on its communist past, although that past has undeniably played a part in making the city an interesting place to live, even if a handful of years was enough for her to know that maybe she didn't want to live its capitalist future. for now. actually, she says, it sounds like portland is a lot like berlin. or that berlin is a lot of little portlands with different architecture. that's why you leave after the first decade of the twenty-first century. hardcore vintage is over, so why put up with the rain? you're probably getting priced out of the architecture you liked anyway. (the communist portland is probably super easy to spot, and the authenticity of the industrial design probably makes the coffee even better.) but he doesn't follow. he doesn't even make a show of pretending to try. but it isn't like you leave for somewhere else just to roll over and die. that's not even intimated, and any intimation would just be a matter of reflection. she can be urban poetry, young and wild and free, a friendly kind of freak somewhere else. love me or kill me, she might say, but that would just be to impress, um, maybe the irony of feeling it so hard that you want to go on living to figure it out. or to find someone more worthy of killing you. and in the end it isn't the death that kills you but that the audience doesn't get it. they might get it somewhere else (but not back in bavaria). of course there's flamenco in berlin, but it's not like she's dancing here in hopes of going back to start a school in berlin. and she explains that in her andalucian spanish, which only ever echoes the standard idiom of the central iberian plateau when her mother german makes it too easy for her to distinctly voice the hardness of her soft j's and g's. she doesn't hear it. but she will reflect. "y de algún modo de algún modo de algún modo comunicar algo del abrumador inmortal irrefrenable incondicional omniabarcador enriquecealma abreconsciencia constante inagotable amor que tengo." para ti. "i wanna be, i wanna be."

HIJA DE PIJO; or, GAS WHORE; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO?

in the best way. in the best way. you're assured. but there hadn't been gas for days. days! (two.) and then there was the gas man. the gas man. she might have done anything for him after all those days -- and he brought the gas. the line between reasoned sophistication and intolerance might not be so fine as the one between genius and insanity, but we shouldn't deny it its reasoned sophistication. and as she explained to her audience in the kitchen (which included the man who would later be designated sex god on the kitchen chalkboard), if those nineteen year old moroccan girls were trying to throw a benefit then they were pijas. they go to the university? pijas. the division of wealth in morocco is so extreme it's incomparable. if someone has enough money to send their kids to university in spain they're fucking pijos. you're a pijo or you have nothing. nothing. there are maybe a few middle class families, including my family, in morocco. oka-y. so maybe i'm a little bit pija too, but c'mon, not really, i mean my father was a communist. both sides of the line between reasoned sophistication and intolerance are egalitarian. hija de pijo! the sex god tried (tried!) to get it out, but it doesn't really roll off the back of the throat. and whatever about the sex god. we are sex goats. MEAAHHH. the sex god had been incredulous about the flying goats, but all doubts had been put to rest by the pictures of the goats in the trees. and although the trees exist at the same latitude in mexico, the goats only fly into them in morocco. then they shit (or spit, if it eases your stomach) the stuff you need to make the delicious oil that you mix with the honey that the diabetic refused until he realized that the orange juice was all gone. sex goats. MEAAHHH. we're all sex goats here. and by then the sex god's infamy had been chalked up on the board. that didn't, however, resolve the question of whether sex gods or sex goats had the appropriate prowess to seduce a merman or maid (fucking pijos all of them). but a mermaid, that's just like a woman with one leg, right? the sex god's prowess wasn't at all promising. luckily, the gas whore was saved that ignominy. but the knocking at the door wasn't going to be the gas man at this hour. somehow those fucking goats flew their way all the way across the mediterranean.

this character sketch (and others), copyright 2012 looking good in pants, is for sale. contact our agent for expansion possibilities. and please, oh my god, don't go into too much detail about the gas whore thing because she might already be really pissed off that we wrote about it.

STOP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW; or, ONE MORE THING, part 2

they came. late, but anyway. i thought i’d already been given the gift of the magi that night that i lost the key to my spanish boyfriend’s heart on the floor of that gay disco in chueca, that night that I went to that disco to show him that i was available to unlock it, and the same night that my spanish boyfriend stayed home to show that he could sit and read quietly despite the party. and the plot lines would diverge if i were to suggest that the key might have been stolen (although maybe that’s just the modern twist), or maybe not, because my sad, ironic gift would have been offered up nonetheless. but that mamma bear and her family standing on the corner near the star café in the small hours of the thirty-first were a measure of hope. (that is, they hoped: “and my what big balls you have, my dear.”) and, besides: whatever, i didn’t really believe in those silly clowns with their cakes and their candies. but, as the footballers’ agent i ran into again by chance so appropriately noted, we’re all catholic around here, believe it or not (because your mother and your uncle and your grandfather do). and when in spain, do like the romans. i probably also got some credit for the international publicity i gave them, and so it is that they brought me michel houellebecq, flannery o’connor and roberto bolaño (in the elegant shadow of lorin stein) to keep me company for the month of austerity. (resolution: frugality, or stop doing the books).

and all of a sudden mamma started to dance. she said it had something to do with the moon.

ENDING START

and so i found myself running again to el faro de triana. i had heard the cabalgata pass along resolana and then turn the corner of the block next to mine onto feria, where, had i actually caught it -- or, rather, had it stopped me down the block from my building -- i likely wouldn’t (couldn’t) have continued my progress; but as it was i seemed to have timed my departure perfectly to make my scheduled dash to catch the three kings and their cavalcade as they crossed the isabel ii bridge, on schedule, at seven-thirty. i knew my way.

the previous saturday, the thirty-first, i’d made my last of the same dash of the old year. the portuguese delegation (from faro) was scheduled to meet us there in the early afternoon, and i’d had just enough time to make the end of the beginning of the meeting having woken late from a five hour nap necessitated by too much not enough sleep on my overnight bus from madrid. luckily, when i arrived i’d only been preceded by one member of the foreign delegation and -- a double stroke of luck -- she appeared to have been thoroughly engaged by an englishman named trevor. (lucky for us or not, el faro de triana is full of those, and the local delegation seems to attract them.) in short order, which is to say two (more orders, that is), the rest of her contingent had joined us and we were on our way.

and our way stopped us at quite a few places more, doubled back, doubled back again, stopped, tried to dance before doubling back once more to try to dance again, lost a credit card, finally danced, and sang a festive (but totally unironic) choral rendition of “summertime” before putting us in the path of that family of amantes on a corner near the star café -- where the one of the portuguese still in conference invited the thirteen year couple and their three shared lovers to visit her apartment near the beach (as she had done with most of the people we’d encountered in the previous three hours. and had we not dallied for forty-five minutes on that corner, we might have made it into vintage before it closed instead of having to take refuge from the cold in the bar next door where the progeny of better heeled seville were still carousing (and the bouncers politely resetting the overturned tables as they fell). at that point, however, we were really just headed for home, or for triana, that is, where that first and last portuguese was staying with one of our own, and vintage just happened to be near one side of the isabel ii bridge. el faro de triana is at the other, and on that other side it was cold, so i stayed.

the next day, i was firmly resolved to…something. but as i couldn’t quite pin that something down -- and as christmas still had five days left in it anyway -- i thought it might be wise to give the resolution some time. what’s more, if it got dark again, people might not notice that my cuffs were soiled and my patent leather scuffed, so after the portuguese had agreed to terms and left (we’re to meet once a month for the duration of 2012), we camped out at our faro on this side of the border until, well, a few hours after dark and i was sure it was safe to make the return trip.

when i passed el faro de triana yesterday evening, still well ahead of the kings, the crowds had already gathered along the bridge and along the wider part of san jacinto, so i was confused as to why my friend was still at home. making dinner. apparently enough time had passed since our last conversation about the parade that she thought i wasn’t coming, she said over the phone. but i was there, so i decided to join her in her apartment for a cup of tea.

and it was over that cup of tea that i heard the cabalgata pass, and neither i nor my friend made any move away from the kitchen. so the three kings passed, throwing candy to the crowds, and their entourage trampled the candies not foraged by the trampling crowd, and the quickest way home after i’d decided that i was finally over the holiday took me right through the sticky upshot of christmas. maybe because i missed their big moment, or maybe because i swore at them with every gummy step i took up the staircase of my building, but i woke up this morning to find that the kings hadn’t left me a thing in the night. but on the beach in conil this afternoon, it was hard to remember what exactly had been so interesting about their coming in the first place, and if i hadn’t had the shocking reminder of soaking my head in the salt water in an attempt to clear up the congestion of my lingering cold, i might have forgotten the mad dash to the parade all together. but there’s always tomorrow. and by then the decorations should be down.

merry christmas.

DONDE ESTAN LOS TODOS CHICOS AT, part 3

we stood in front of las meninas for, let’s say, an hour (let’s say), because our attendant late renaissance art history phd-in-progress had something to say about it. a few things, even, about why it might be the most important painting in the place. and we were proud, because you can understand the garden of earthly delights without understanding it (or so we fancied ourselves led to believe), but to be a successful voyeur in the chamber of the infanta margarita is something that requires a more, well, delicate sensibility -- as they say.

the surrender of breda was a similar story, but velazquez had played different tricks than with the attendants of the infanta. it might have just been the lingering effects of the night and the morning, but the museum guests with their ears pressed to the black sound clubs giving them their recorder tours seemed not to hide their jealousy over our access to javier’s private lectures. that i was looking around was definitely a result of those lingering effects. in other words, it’s possible that halfway through our several hours long private tour of the prado, it’s possible that i was still, well, drunk -- as they say. (although they don’t say that it might have been on attention.)

they say that you can’t do better cruising in spain than on gran vía, that gran vía smack dab (wink) in the middle of Madrid, and it would seem to be true: there’s a decision over whether or whom to follow at every crossing where two (or four or a dozen) pairs of eyes have had that extra moment to linger. but i say that if you want to know what delicious piece of eye candy is going to be wondering if you have any drugs at five-thirty the next morning in chueca, get yourself man to the prado on a friday afternoon.

this is the thought that i have on a friday afternoon at the prado as i catch my second second wind of giddiness. my bus back to seville leaves in seven hours, which won’t be enough time to collect on my investment at the museum (still drunk, as they say, i’ve probably invested sloppily anyway), but it’s still long enough that i might die at dinner. we’re meeting other friends.

i try to revive myself again with the same bit of whimsy (which is a phrase i think is fucking ridiculous now that i am no longer drunk but being encouraged again to drink) as we’re snacking at the market, but it doesn’t have the same effect as at the museum. our guide is still with us, but the fare at the market doesn’t look so great.

i’m not at all able to hide my jealousy as we cross gran vía toward the comic book store owned by one of our other friends. i could have died, but i’m saving that for dinner. dinner, however, turns out to be more than pleasant, because i like our other friends. i can die at the tiki bar we’re going to afterwards if it sucks. but the tiki bar doesn’t suck. the interiors of tiki bars in madrid are decorated in hipster rockabilly nostalgia, and the drinks they serve in their huge tiki mugs come with a free third second wind of giddiness.

i am taking my time getting my bag from the hotel, but i don't yet know that the metro route i’ve mapped to the bus station requires me to change trains at a stop that has just closed for the night because of a special holiday weekend schedule. when i come up from the metro wherever it is that i come up from the metro, i’m able to quickly catch a cab, but i regret catching the one that i do because it’s the one driven by the guy who can’t stop telling me that the last buses leave from that bus station at one and it’s already twelve-fifty. we arrive at the bus station some time after twelve-fifty, and i die at one o’clock, precisely as my bus is pulling out of the station in madrid to take the living passengers back to the madness in seville.

the resurrection doesn’t normally figure much into the christmas story, but what can i say, it was a christmas miracle. and in seville, tonight, the penultimate (but isn’t it always here), the eve of the last day of christmas, the magi are on parade. they’ll be in the neighborhood around seven. but what of it? we didn’t spend any time at all at the museum on the adoration of the magi or the triumph of bacchus. to be honest, i don’t even remember seeing them. apparently, as they say, they really aren’t that important.

STRANGE DAYS; or, SICK, SICK S**T

on the hundred and first day of christmas, you are not surprised to wake up sick. in fact, you have already woken up sick so many times since falling asleep that the story is old, and it doesn’t at all inspire you to get out of bed when you wake up for good, so you lay there, sick, until just after that one moment, the moment after which, if you get out of bed any later, you will no longer be able to make your appointment on time. but you hadn’t yet seen your hair, so you take an extra moment to somehow make it look even shittier than it did when you first saw it. you decide on a hat, which you know will just let everyone know that you somehow managed to make your hair look even shittier than how it looked when you woke up sick. but you are sick, so that should be expected. what you hadn’t expected when you woke up sick and gave yourself just a little bit less than enough time to make your appointment was that the utility company had left you a notification of suspension of service in the foyer on the ground floor, which, when you find it, insists that you contact the company by the impossible hour of one hour from now to avoid having your water cut. you think that maybe you should have gotten out of bed to answer the bell when it kept ringing, but then decide that the problem is the landlord’s to deal with within the hour and that you couldn’t have possibly dealt with the utility company with your hair looking like it did, especially before you would have known it looked that way, and, besides, it’s bad enough that you have to make your appointment in this hat. you send a text and make your appointment. afterwards, despite having been told that you look sick and should go back to bed, you meet friends for coffee. but you should do something other than just be sick today, even if that something is just having coffee. a new acquaintance introduces you to the footballers’ agent who shows up to the table after about an hour of your trying to convince yourself to go home as someone who writes, but writes something strange. you wonder if you haven’t been given too much credit (you had told the new acquaintance that what you do is what he sees you doing), but then are distracted by the thought that the sun is probably making you look worse than just the sickness had been doing and decide on getting home. you are sick and might as well sit at home trying to write something worthy of your reputation.

but you already knew that the trip to madrid would be a strange one when your first interaction after coming up from the metro at six-thirty in the morning on the twenty-eighth of december is with a prostitute to whom you try to explain politely (where politeness probably isn’t due) that you’re not interested in the ladies. she is asking you (in a shouty voice) if you are some kind of fag or something as you walk away, and it makes you feel a little better to be able to give thirty cents to the man struggling with the cigarette machine. it is six-thirty in the morning on a wednesday, and the streets of the capital of spain are strangely deserted. you make it from the gran vía metro stop all the way to the royal palace and back in a meandering figure eight without seeing even one hundred people. the plaza in front of the palace is empty except for two guardsmen. it is satisfying to walk the entire north-south stretch of the palace alone (except for the guardsmen, who think that you are suspicious). you decide not to take the guardsmen’s picture because you don’t feel like running, but you regret not having to run from the guardsmen because you would like to be able to tell that story. you actually feel like sitting, so you find a convenience store that has postcards, buy a million of them and then go to the first place with coffee that looks decent. you happen to have found your way to chueca, but this place could be anywhere in the city (or in yours, even). they do not have what you ask for (and you kick yourself for asking for something so obviously southern), but you drink two coffees while writing half a million postcards and watching snow white’s funeral procession on the morning television news. some kind of fags or something have since come in too. you leave. the light is nice (you think it’s nice), so you walk the opposite direction down gran vía taking pictures. you had made sure to buy only postcards with pictures of places that you had already visited (gran vía, the plaza de españa, the royal palace), but now that you have ostensibly been to chueca and the retiro, you buy a few hundred thousand postcards representing those two places and go to the café that you’d passed on your way away from the first one, the café that didn’t open until eleven. it is now eleven, and you can get into your hotel room at twelve. your third coffee almost helps you forget that you didn’t sleep on the overnight bus from seville, but not really because the fact of your having already had three coffees reminds you that you didn’t sleep on the overnight bus from seville. it does, however, help you quickly finish another half a million or so postcards. several tens of thousands of people have now already been written twice. you are in good shape.

you are in good shape, but not in the shape of any of the grey coats available in any of the stores in central madrid. you give up looking for a grey coat after the second millionth time that you are told that the clothes in the display window are no longer available anywhere in the city. you have since checked into your hotel, to which you return after your last straw letdown only to ask for directions to the nearest post office. at the post office, you are impressed with yourself, but the man on the other side of the counter is only put out by having to sort your postcards into so many different piles of so many dozens of different countries. you are put out to pay, but you put out anyway. then you take more pictures. it’s true. the cathedral in madrid is ugly. whatever, you think (and you think yourself abandoned, wildly and recklessly), now it’s too dark for taking too many good pictures.

as you are falling asleep in the bathtub, you think that you should really go out. you’re going to be hanging out with your friend and her boyfriend the next evening (and the next), and you’re not sure if you’ll have the chance to have it your way in madrid any night but this one. and oh. dios. mio. you fall asleep for a moment on the bed in your room while letting your hair dry to a spanish dubbed episode from the first season of “gossip girl.” you are going out. who goes on vacation and pays for a hotel just to sleep there all night? not you, anyway. and anyway, you need to eat. you put on clothes and leave your key at reception.

you wander your way north of chueca and find a restaurant. you hate that restaurants “seem nice” to you because they look like they might be trying to do something that a restaurant that you tried to like what they were trying to do had done in the past. but once you’re inside, you like that you’ve found a restaurant that serves spanish craft beer. you didn’t think that existed. (where there’s a cruzcampo tap handle in seville, there’s one from mahou in madrid.) you’d say something about the beer (or simply name it) or say something about the food, but you’re sick today and don’t feel like finding the yellow napkin that you used to write down whatever pretentious things you wrote while at that restaurant that night. mostly you think that you are happy to be sitting somewhere safe after having earlier realized that you had wandered into the parking lot of the palace of justice with your beer and that the guardsmen were only waiting to approach you out of dumb surprise.

the next afternoon when your friend calls you as you’re trying to find your way to a metro stop, you think that you’re probably going to get sick in a few days. how clean are the assholes in the civil guard? you don’t know how far you are from your hotel, you say, but you’re sure that in three hours you’ll be able to get there, shower and meet your friend and her boyfriend wherever they’d like you to meet them. when you get back to your hotel, it has somehow been possible that the woman who was at the desk when you left at dinnertime the night before is still sitting there. you imagine that she thinks you’re a spy. at best, she thinks you’re a prostitute. but maybe she’s bored, has imagination, and wonders if you’re not a spy forced to work undercover as a prostitute. you take your key and take a shower. you still have time for a coffee at that second café.

you are very happy to see your friend when she and her boyfriend arrive up the stairs from the gran vía metro stop. you didn’t even have too look for them on the other side of the street. they came up the right exit on the first try. unfortunately, you see that your friend is not carrying a bag. your friend is a friend who would carry a bag, and if you hadn’t thought so, you wouldn’t have brought these sweets that you bought for her boyfriend’s mother in seville, because the sweets are in a wooden box. now you are the guy who meets your friend’s boyfriend for the first time and makes him carry a wooden box in an ugly plastic bag all around central madrid (you thought she’d have a bag!). maybe he gives you the benefit of the doubt and assumes that you are just tired from being a prostitute-spy. but the boyfriend carries the wooden box in the ugly plastic bag to where you have dinner and later to the bar where his friend is “spinning” where the three of you have drinks. you make fun with your friend, and before she and her boyfriend head to the train that will take them home, her boyfriend tells you to follow the street you’re on until you get to the next major intersection, at which point you should go right to your hotel or left to fun. and who, given that invitation, wouldn’t choose fun? you do, anyway. and anyway, you’ll see your friend and her boyfriend tomorrow. this is your last chance not to sleep at your hotel in madrid, and you’re probably going to be sick in a few days so you should have your fun while you can. those enterprisers selling singles from convenience store bought six packs on all of the street corners are tonight a blessing, tomorrow a curse.

you ask the group standing outside the electro video bar if they’re from the city and if they can recommend a place to go after this one, and you’re only a little surprised that you follow them to a club from the night before. you go inside and decide not to ask any of the bartenders if they found any of the things that were on the chain you found broken and dangling from your collar the last time you left. you are satisfied with the poesy of having lost your half of the promise rings that a jeweler friend made for you and your last wife and the key to your spanish boyfriend’s heart on the floor of a gay disco in madrid. you do, however, think to ask after the scarf you also lost because it was a gift, and expensive, reclaimed by a friend from the lost and found at the bar where she worked in the old country. but you don’t, and you dance, and later, the day before you wake up sick, you regret that you’ve forgotten the name of the portuguese man who was only interested in talking and invited you to visit him in lisbon.

detour. there are thousands of jon kortajarenas in madrid, but when you meet them all you understand that they won’t have careers as models because they’re short and that the young ones probably won’t get any taller because they’re all on coke. this thought is tickling you as the first wave of giddiness hits at eight-thirty. you’ve decided it’s probably not a good idea to try to sleep before your checkout at eleven, so you’re taking another walk in the (general) direction of the retiro. you pass the prado, which is on the itinerary for your day with your friend and her boyfriend, and you think that you should probably shower and change clothes before you have to meet them to go there. you have an awful sandwich at the first place you find open and probably should have acceded to the server’s offer of an orange juice. you’re too tired to care what the man at the reception desk thinks about your career choices when you pick up your key, and oh. dios. mio, you’re asleep again, and it’s a quarter past eleven but you decide that a shower is worth the possible penalty. you pack your things and leave them at the reception desk, where you also return your key. you’ll be back to collect them later, and it’s really the least the hotel can do after the prostitute-spy who only slept three odd hours there sings the credit card receipt for a two night stay (although when they made your bed on morning two they did refrain from stealing any of the things you refrained from putting in the safe).

your friend calls and tells you that she’s going to need an extra hour before meeting you, so you have time for another coffee at that second café, which is where you decide that the day will be fine because you really only have two options: make it onto the bus that will take you back to seville in thirteen hours or die; so your only responsibility is to end up at one of those conclusions. you meet your friend and her boyfriend in front of city hall after your coffee and three liters of water, wondering how quickly the line at the prado will allow you into the bathroom.

on the hundred and first day of christmas, you are not surprised to wake up sick, but you had managed to pretend that you somehow might avoid it. but had you avoided it, you might not have had your mandate to sit at home making strange stories, to pass the time at least, until the water came back on and you could have a shower and drink some tea.

ON THE HUNDREDTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

maybe it’s possible (let’s imagine by the graces of inculpable hindsight) that, back on the inmaculada, i actually considered what i said about the nonstop christmas march that would carry the country -- partying – through the arrival of the magi on the sixth of january to be a joke. (it couldn’t possible rage an entire month.) in any case, however, i considered the possibility to be a sensational one, at least until i found myself participating in the efforts for its realization, which might well have failed at any point, but none of the participants ever seemed to let that daunt them, probably because, well, whenever any one of us went belly up, that one of us had the out of insisting that it was all only a joke. but now, with just four days to go until victory, who isn’t completely over christmas? in all honesty, had the portuguese not invaded seville to celebrate the new year, the party might not have even lasted that long -- and we might have even stayed on in madrid, where, although christmas followed, there was a short respite from the demands of the season at home (although, admittedly, not from the parties).

so it was that seville was introduced to the walk of shame (or that term in english anyway) by the sight of mine on the first of january, which truly shamed me for the fact that the person with whom i had slept was a friend and that our activities in her bed were severely limited by my acceptance of her terms for sharing it, namely that i stay on my side and not shift the covers too much. and all the shame of christmas would have been gratefully forgotten by the time i’d finally made it almost home around eleven that night but then ran into two friends on the alameda -- two friends whom i joined for a tea in an outfit that might even have regained some of its elegance of the night before for its brazen shabbiness (it helped me to think). and christmas could have been forgotten by the early afternoon of the next day, and it might have been, if only i hadn’t run into my friend on her own walk through the streets of my neighborhood and sat down with her for a coffee. she’d been away since the twentieth or so, and, although we’d weathered the portuguese invasion together, we hadn’t yet had an opportunity to catch up. so we talked. and i told her what i’d been told to expect myself before leaving the city for the capital the previous week. it’s true. the cathedral in madrid is ugly.

it isn’t, at any rate, the cathedral of seville, which is where i went with two friends to see the midnight vigil mass on christmas eve. maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity. but sitting there, drowning the shame of christmas in my burned coffe across the table from my friend (who admitted that she’d been a bit envious to hear that those were my plans for the night of the twenty-fourth), the grace of inculpable hindsight intervened again, and i admitted that i shouldn’t have expected anything but the drudging formality that the mass was (and that i had felt bad for having had subjected friends to it), but that i really had thought there would be more singing. i thought there would have been more singing of songs that we could have sung anyway, but apart from the adeste fideles that i belted out (in latin of course) while the better catholics went up to the altar for communion, there wasn’t a thing in which the cantor could get all but a few in the cavernous cathedral to join him while the organ thundered out the opening salvos of the dirge to the crucifixion.

i certainly make no pretensions to poetry -- and all that any of us can hope for youth is that it remain generously relative -- but i was obliged to read those letters of rilke’s to that young poet on the night of the twenty-fifth, and in the second, my hesitation over describing that mass:

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.

again, granted, i didn’t consider myself rilke’s intended demographic and so neither did i consider myself compelled to follow his injunctions to the letter. as it were, maybe i was well beyond help. but still, in thinking about treating that mass given by the bishop (or the archbishop maybe) in that biggest of the world’s gothic cathedrals i felt grateful for rilke’s caution as i found myself confronted with the possibility of a very great irony, and one that might even have allowed an ironic reading of that second letter. there were at least fifteen clergy and servers sitting and standing around the bishop (or archbishop) where he sat behind the altar (the ornate resplendence of the decorations around the altar and of the towering altarpiece i couldn’t hope to describe). apart from the cantor and one very talented young clergyman who chanted the intentions, the rest of the ordained appeared disinterested or ailing, biding their time on the fast track to heaven or, better, a promotion. most of the latin part of the mass seemed to center around the removal and replacement of the bishop’s (or archbishop’s) sparkly hat, one of which the proceeds from the collection couldn’t hoped to have purchased. the ironic interpretation of the bishop’s (or archbishop’s) standard issue homily: spread the word.

our spirits were slightly lifted by our singing of the communion carol, and we might have made our peace with our misexpecations for midnight mass at the cathedral in seville had we not been stayed after the bishop (you get it) officially dismissed us by the recessional, which stopped the crowd from its retreat when it paused at the entrance to the huge ironwork cage that surrounds the platforms that surround the altar. baby jesus, who had been biding his time in front of the altar embarrassedly (though probably not for his nakedness), was taken up into the arms of one of the clergymen, and one by one after the bishop the other clergymen proceeded to put their lips to the statue’s feet as a server wiped them clean between kisses. the clergy recedes, and the crowd follows. not out, however, but up to the cage to leave kisses of its own.

and yes, we stayed, but let that be out of deference to the faithful (who, granted, had us kind of trapped), but let that sentiment have aspersions fall where they’re due. i’m sorry sir, but irony fails to fall away, to become either small or helpless. in all its great seriousness, the church is neither serious nor great. it didn’t even give a good show. and maybe that’s just here in spain, or even just here in seville. i don’t know what midnight mass was like at the ugly cathedral in madrid, but the people pouring out onto the square from the doors of st. mary’s in krakow those years ago had some spirit. seville is, however, undeniably poetic at night, even tonight after more than a week of the children and the idiots setting off those blasted fireworks that could hardly be said to make much fire but certainly make themselves heard. and it was probably because we were out of there, or because we were on our way to recuperate (from which we’d need to recuperate the next day), but as the exploding of the fireworks in the early morning of the twenty-fifth scared the doves away from their perches in the nooks of the cathedral roof and those doves flitted up into the artificial orange light that lit it, there did seem to be, if not sacred, then something romantically marvelous in the air.

it’s too bad those same fireworks didn’t provoke a similar effect in that plaza on san luis as dusk was falling yesterday. they surely couldn’t have unburned the coffee. eyes rolled, eyes narrowed, and another story.