It took six minutes, or maybe thirty, with my head between my legs, eyes closed so I couldn’t see the tainted rim of the hostel toilet. Then I had a quick wash of my knees and my face before I clung desperately to a manically orange sink-top with the dried blue spills of mysterious toiletries waiting for another fainting spell to pass. I grabbed my beach towel and a long strand of paper towels before heading to the kitchen where I wrapped the brittle paper around two muffins, some sausages, bacon, an orange juice, crescents and something that looked like a twinkie, but much more brown, rigid and lamely foreign. With my beach towel folded over my breakfast bindle and held conspicuously to my side I approached the lobby with full intent on getting the better of this hostel’s bureaucratic no-bringing-café-food-out-into-the-great-big-blue-world-policy.
As I strolled towards the lobby the sterile-white tile of the kitchen became even more of a yogurt shop looking blue and orange; orange like the men’s restroom and blue like a divorced mom’s new car. Did that mean the women’s room was painted blue? But, no, this was no yogurt shop, this lobby, this was like the common area in an overpriced dorm, filled with advertisements headlined with positive statements or vague musings completely void of meaning imposed over a sampler’s flight of all the major racial groups, but with only the whitest looking representative of each to halfheartedly throw on emotionally sedated smiles, like an ad for toothpaste or another fucking Clinton. It was a youth trap, a way to sell the romanticism of cots to people with credit cards who believed in things like vibes.
In the lobby loitered a mix of Canadians, Brazilians, French and one incredibly tall, broad shouldered Bavarian, a real ubermensch-type. They were full-grown adults waiting patiently for their line-leader to march them out for the organized beach activity of the day: volleyball. One of the clerks was signing out volleyballs while another took the phone out of his mouth to point at the other’s ringing phone and speak with the sharp bark that could only be interpreted as cursing.
The hot air came rushing through again and the air pulled the scent of sausage grease out from under my arm and straight into my fragile gut. Like my gut, the whole lobby seemed to turn on its side. The communal erection, a shared, hearty vibe that once stood tall in the anticipation of organized-sports-fun-time deflated as the whole group stepped lightly aside in a fermenting mixture of curiosity and disbelief, like they were stepping aside for a ghost weeping over its smelly dead cat. Two brown girls, looking only at their feet and the orange and blue tile, brought the salty air through the lobby and all eyes followed them. I kept my eyes low too and caught a glance at the young girls’ feet. Skin was missing, bold red lines had been torn over metatarsals as if they’d tried to slow down their long boards by dragging the tops of their feet over unforgiving pavement. I slipped through the crowd like a true ghost, unnoticed and unsuspected of smuggling food.
On the Barcelona beach, cooking in the sun like a flat pile of shit on black asphalt, I was desperate to spot one of those little Mexican bike boys, the kind that wasn’t Mexican, but, close enough: dark brown skin, black hair, probably had a name like Juan or Miguel, and, most importantly, they peddled around on a fixed gear with plastic grocery bags yelling “Cervesa! Agua!” during the day and “Marijuania, coca! Marijuania edible!” during the nights. I needed to track one of those little fuckers down before I lost consciousness in any of the many ways that could happen.
A joint was all I wanted. One joint and I could chug my orange juice, eat all my breakfast slowly and then I could swim out passed the sandbar where I could purge my asshole in a slightly more sterile environment in like one of those monkeys in the hot springs or a crawdad dropped in saltwater. Today, I was the only shit-smearing miracle boy that I had to worry about. Not even my dutiful brother could convince me otherwise. Where did all his future family paranoia nonsense come from? It couldn’t just be mom. There had to be something in his environment pushing him. He must still be seeing that Catholic Filipino from Chicago with her dad, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company or some shit.
“Agua, Cervesa?”
The little Mexican was wearing the sun like a headdress. “SI! Un cervesa, dos aguas y, ugh, pot, weed, oh no, I mean, marijuana.” I mimed a smoke. “Si!” The young man pulled out an Altoids tin. “Uno, dos?”
“Dos por favor.”
“Si.”
Other Posts:
The Best Fuck You Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Invest in Rain Part1Part 2Part 3
Where does your father do his barnacles? Part 1 Part 2Part 3
Van-life series Part 1
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Your posts arw golden.. yeah... i thik writing migth have its advantages as well as ..... thanks for sharing...