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.