I'll write tonight because I need to take my mother to the doc early in the morning. I am out of my mind, and I want to tell tales, but life is just too fucking much for me right now. My mother just came into the room where I am tying to chill and asked me, "Are you mad at me?"
"No, mom, I'm not mad at you. My life is just shit and I think about hanging myself from the rafters in my house all the time. I have no support, and I can't handle all the shit I have to deal with all the time anymore."
It went on from there. I've lost my mind, truly.
But I'm not sure that is of any interest to you. And so. . .
There is so much to tell about. . . then. Sombre y sol. You can see that here. Bullfighters were rock stars. You saw there images in every bodega in Spain. Not so much now, I think. Times change and so do attitudes. If you are young, expect it.
But you won't.
1989. A terrible mullet, a travel vest, a flipped collar, a sports watch, a braided string bracelet, and white frame sunglasses. But I looked kinda buff.
I can't post most of the pics of me on that trip. I looked like Joe Dirt (link).
I'll tell you about the festival sometime. It was. . . memorable. As was the rest of my month in Spain, France, and Italy.
But today. . . was horrible. I sat in my house waiting for the HVAC guy to come. He did, and he made some adjustments to the system that seemed "hillbilly" to me. Then he left, and an hour later the house was getting hot. I looked at the thermostat. It was dead. So I called the company.
"Oh, no," the woman on the phone said. "I'll get someone there as quickly as I can."
An hour later, the same guy showed up. He said my drain lines were clogged and charged me $200 to clean them. When he finished, I said the house was not cooling down.
"It will," he grinned, took my $$ signature and left.
An hour later, the temperature had not changed.
It still hasn't. I have an app on my phone with which I can check it.
Nothing is working. I can't get a break.
But back to the narrative. When we got to Pamplona, we were supposed to have rooms in the central square. Brando, however, was a fuck, and that didn't happen.
Right above here. So sweaty Brando told us to chill and have drinks and he'd be back. And when he did come, he had us two rooms. . . in a college dorm on the very outskirts of town.
It was horrible, and people revolted. I was exhausted and fell asleep on a mattress on the floor that had been alloted to me. Others had the bed springs. I fell asleep when we got there, and a fellow, a prominent drug attorney, woke me and asked me for the keys to the car saying he needed to get something out of the trunk.
We never saw him, his wife, or the car again. They bolted. They were not the only ones.
The entire Pamplona affair became a shit-show of Brando's making. No rooms, no bullfight tickets. . . but walking into town, the parks and squares were filled with people sleeping in tents and bags and sometimes just blankets on the ground. The party was 24 hours a day, the discos cranking through the night until the dawn.
There was much madness. In the day, a serious religious festival took place with icons and rau-rau dancers. I'll get to that. But there were also kids who would climb the monument in the center of town and dive into the excited, drunken crowd expecting to be caught. This fellow did, and they tried, but they were able only to grab his feet and legs and belly, and when his head hit the cobblestone, it cracked like a melon. An ambulance arrived in a bit and carried him away.
It may not have been this fellow, but it could have been. I mean. . . I didn't spend the entire day there.
I spent much time in the Museo del Jamons. Chorizos and Serranos and much local wine. You could fill your bota there, too, and it was all "affordable." Meaning, we needn't spend much money. Spain was just coming out of the Liberation from the fascist Franco regime, and it was just coming to market. Much of Spain was good.
Thats's an incredible lookback for now. While I spent the day in my warming house with the "repairman," I scanned and cooked up old images. I'll tell you more later, in the morning if I have time. There are stories. . . if I can get past the problems that plague me now.
* * *
It is morning now and there is no time. I have to get my mother up and out the door in the next half hour. And then onward to other troubles and horrors. I need to catch a break.
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