TRANKIMAZIN; or, HOW TO GET RIDDEN HARD...AND JUST PUT UP

before the beginning of our divorce week festivities, it seemed to me that the leaving of my second wife should have been less difficult. we had, after all, both been around a block or a few, and, what's more, there had been no contention or uncomfortableness over either of us acknowledging out loud to the other that all of the shopping and the dinners and the parties were to be in celebration of our demise. (things didn't go nearly as smoothly during my divorce weekend in newport, which i spent arguing with my first wife over my having unilaterally decided to call it that before suggesting that she might take the bus back to the city so that i could try to fit that ridiculously underpriced mid-century danish chair in the rental.) but that's love (modern, and maybe just differently so in both cases). there might be a few more scuffs now on the patent leather, but for the most part the cameras just got laughter and the funny faces that were made for the cameras. then, however, the contract was over, and as much as the picture of that week might have convinced us that the two of us might have been able to pull off a good picture, we pushed through it laughing for the very reason that we knew that the contract was ending and that we both needed another trip around another block. it was mostly for her, anyway, i tell myself -- and i told myself as she told our mutual friends (which is to say the friends of hers who had met me) to call me from time to time after she was gone. and i think that i had something to tell her, too, something that seemed like it could wait through the shopping and the dinners and the parties, but that left me when she left me her keys. her taxi came to collect her at that very special hour just before the golden one of the evening in the light of which the tablecloth that had been covered almost completely for almost the entire week with dishes, bottles and glasses coming and going from the corridor and the kitchen seemed not just unmagical but disgustingly soiled, all of the walls looked stained, and the dull reflections off the floor showed it to be embarrassingly in need of a mop.

dramatics and hysteria. i hadn't realized that there was so much dust for my second wife to bite. but instead of clearing the traces and taking advantage of my solitude (which had also been forced to wait through the week of shopping and dinners and parties), i escape it. or, rather -- and rather dramatically and hysterically -- i welcome the rest of the world to join me there. (the legacy of my second wife.) there are cakes and dinners and laughter and dancing. the disgustingly soiled tablecloth is covered again with dishes and bottles and glasses. that we should all live every day as if it were our divorce weekend! and it's the last of the last bottle of sherry that our mutual friends brought us to toast our end, but i've just learned that pfizer markets xanax here under the most darling (and very practically straightforward) trade name -- and that they push it over the counter. it's certainly cheaper to get with a prescription, but that (haha!) might require another marriage. you might be living every day like it's your divorce week, but one way or another you're going to pay the price of intellectual property (or just make do with what your friends bring you).

it's funny (and not only the picture of a country popping trankimazin to forget the anxiety of the possibility of developing an anxiety disorder). she left, and, i swear, all of a sudden it's springtime. and the last place in the city that i thought i'd ever be is the one that makes me happy. it's full of foreigners -- and cheese (that special kind that foreigners like) -- and we all know that the authentic core of the city lies in its foreign pretenders' ostentatious denunciations of their other countrypeople's inauthenticity (and especially in the flamenco ring). most blocks, in other words, and wherever you find yourselves walking them, are disappointingly the same. but strangely, that older anybody who played his guitar for the seven or so of us who stuck around la carboneria after the main event was finished on friday night made me wonder if there wasn't something left for me in seville in the wake of my second wife's leaving me. he seemed refreshingly without aspirations to local authenticity. and even unabashed: "ne me quitte pas. ne me quitte pas." and sure he was probably singing it for the two french girls, but i let it work for me nonetheless. you've got to do what you can with where you've got it. if there was a pharmacy on the block, it wouldn't have been open for hours anyway.