At first I couldn’t get anybody to come to the bullfight with me.
There was my roommate, an overweight asthmatic lesbian without a father, who was as certain of her afflictions as she was that the darkened circle outside the hospital we passed each morning on the way to the Facultad was really a blood stain left untended since two weeks ago.
And there was my buddy from school, who had arrived at her third year of liberal arts education with as poised and artful a stance on said matters as her hair pinned back and let drape taut and flat to her shoulders.
As a person proud of an ability to not only distinguish between belief and desire, but then choose desire, all the more rare because so natural—get it, like a steak that’s just been chucked—I followed the vision of a man, cognac, and a hidden fist, muffled by the indeterminable grunt, pant, and stammer of hooves in my brain.
Here there were many things that I didn’t understand. Of course there were doors to be haggled with, streets that wound one way and then unwound another in my head. You bet, I would have gotten all tied up in string just trying to find the minotaur in the maze. But then there were pencils with stubby heads where there ought to have been erasers, as though no one had ever had reason to equivocate; there were only either small or large bottles of water, as though no one had ever before had a medium thirst. Snacking while walking was as foolish as leaving the hall light on after everyone had already passed through to rooms on either end. Afternoon was a reserved indulgence, temperate and sure as the day’s left-overs in covered pans.
The question mark comes before the question, as though you’re supposed to already be certain of your own uncertainty; so does the exclamation point, flashing like a neon sign showcasing your excitement—COMING SOON—to the world (I would demonstrate but this is an American keyboard); and they even invented a whole grammatical system of personal ambiguity, like institutionalizing doubt. There was one certainty I knew of, and its name was Extra Virgin Olive Oil, who like the Beatles that one time, had superseded Jesus Christ—but that’s a joke.
If it weren’t for Sloane, I’d be fucked. But I knew to ask her, because she was both a slut and a lush, and you can always count on that kind. Besides, I’ve always gotten along with such girls. This is not to say that I am one or the other, much less the two at once, but merely that I have a certain fondness for them stemming back to my New Orleans days. They always happen to be around when you can’t find anybody else, and then they’re no where to be found when you really need them. So once you become conditioned to having no expectations, you’ll reap many happy returns from their sporadic company. Waiting for her, I stood outside the ring, watched the old men pacing in, who looked so much like old southern men, in their khaki pants and pastel-collared shirts, and with their cigarettes. But they had this brisk aura about them, invigorated to be mobile and to live in spite of the toxins. There were no dead-beat dads lurching about, and there wasn’t even any fighting at the weekly botellon. I saw them almost everyday with kids and dogs, ice-cream and footballs in the park, leaving the wife at home with the domestic matters, but not the caring? It was a strange reverse. My only working definition of machismo was that men will give each other kisses and hugs.
My incomplete understandings, my secret asides…I was daydreaming about an article I could write called “Going Abroad is a Hoax,” really just to be filed away for accountability purposes in the recording studio of my brain, where my voice is dubbed more times than Elliot Smith’s and it’s well understood I’ve cut through to some ironic and comic truth all those assholes and their cousins out there in the world wouldn’t understand. I was away from my Midwest intellectual safe-haven, where the boys have Johnny Cash staring contests after drinking whisky, get high and go to monster truck rallies on the weekends. For sure, there was some change-the-world banter, routine jams for Sudan and display pictures of mangled pigs, but a lot of the time we lived for nostalgia and allusion….But that could just be the way I wanted it to be, wanted to remember it. In any case, I’d say those proximal cornfields really did influence us; we started out like any Band song—a vision of country people not good not bad not confederate not yankee, just working on the railroad—but then Phineas Gage starts in along side ‘em, strikes wrong and sends Sherman marching right through his fucking skull.
The boys of my school, my time….They with grizzly bearded faces that don’t belong to this generation, fists around some sleek neck sitting up in unmade bed, twisted face toasts to his tormented bookcase. Drunk always to a soundtrack of last-chance moments played out forever to endless beckoning looks, if answered, surely by aimless refrains. Dylan with stand-up hair and absurdist prance, playing dumb—the gloating goat, the silly ass, coy and crass—twinkly eyes dodging expectation, at any moment he swings his glasses back on and ducks down the alley. Danko wears a cowboy hat with a pink feather but won’t break face. Never have to leave the couch, in such close reach of the controls. Sure there’ll be a woman who’ll indulge. Whether they’d seen the footage or not—young boys longing not to get somewhere, but to find somewhere and stick around there, like daddy in his favorite chair. Either faking knowledge or genius—always feigning distance. Dream of all the different existences, travel just to realize you ought to have stayed where you were, so long’s you can find a hero to idolize. You can echo a million personas, ‘f you can fit ‘em in and still make stride. All of it role-play, paint-by-number, smock-wearing mock-up of our cultural American hotbed, stuffed down like dollars collected for the theme-keg. You never had to settle for falling in love with just a person, but with a whole kaleidoscope barrel of misfired intentions, roulette game of aimed reverence.
I wanted to stay in one spot without having to be still, move at my will and have somebody admire my angles.
Sloane arrived. The girl was almost theatrical, with those big black sun-glasses and helter-skelter scarf, slinking up, shaking and wiggling her belly—as she had taught me, what you do when you’re full to make more room. Today maybe she resembled Janis dressed up like Jackie O, whereas on other days she was—but what’s the use, the more I try to list the names of these women the more my mind goes blank. No, you couldn’t really place her. But you couldn’t place this, either—two American girls and “a day at the killings.”
For what it’s worth, she often didn’t comb her hair. Her eyes were never the same shade. She went from loud and obnoxious to silent and shifty in a matter of minutes. She reminded me of a friend from home except that she was not a stupid whore. With Sloane you never got caught confusing insincerity for charm. (For a while I thought the two were interchangeable, but that was just the way I excused myself for lacking the more appealing one.) She had a face that was both aggressive but promised to let up as soon as it muscled its way into yours. She was neither beautiful nor scheming enough to play the femme fatale. Neither was she one of those girls like in the novels dating before 1960.
When we made eye contact she threw her arms in the air and flung her mouth open, then swung them both down together, saying hello in a lever of surprise.
We offered one cheek for the other.
“You were the only one who would come!” I exclaimed.
“I know, I know!” she said.
We headed in. Her purse like a giant satchel was stuffed with canned beers, San Miguel.
“But we’ll need more, soon,” she winked at me.
We looked around. We were the only women—except for a couple randomly dispersed grandma figures. “They dress so well here,” muttered Sloane.
“You like the tight jeans?” I asked.
“I like the tight jeans.”
After a few suspenseful moments the gate rattled open and the first bull charged out, swinging his horns, eyes darting blindly. Vulnerable confusion. He looked like somebody just out of a stupor, and it seemed he hadn’t quite regained his sight, if he’d even seen well before.
“Ok, see?” Sloane said. She’d been to Spain three times before. And then, “Hold on,” as she pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and reached into the bottom of her purse for her Lucky Strikes with her right hand while de-velcroing her left-gloved hand with her mouth. (I forgot to mention, she always wears these white stitched gloves, and never takes the right one off because it’s good luck.) Pulling the deflated glove-fingers out of her mouth, she ejected a cigarette and failed to light a match, spoke to me with it bobbing between her lips: “So what happens first is these men on feet test the bull with their capes. Trying to see, you know, which horn the bull prefers, which direction the bull is leaning towards.” Scratch, scratch—flame, smoke. “If they can pinpoint a general direction the bull’s heading towards then that means it’s a dangerous bull because he’s trying to mark out his territory.”
We scanned the ring for said behavior.
“What are you going to do if for some reason you have to switch hands?” I gestured to the gloved right, cigarette nearby blazing.
“Not going to happen,” she said.
“This bull knows what he wants!” I said proudly. We watched him feel out his space.
“I know, huh! Come on, bully.” She handed me a beer.
”Get it, bully?” I said.
“Take the beer.”
“So, this is the beginning of his life,” I mused.
“And the end.”
“Don’t say that!”
I watched him thrash around in his finite dimension of freedom. “Bull 126! What a nice-looking bull. They oughta spare this bull.”
“Probably won’t. That’s a rarity.” Sloane spit, then looked confused and spit something more elaborate, cursing under her breath something about salchicha.
“Spare the bull and spoil the…bull?”
“Something like that.”
“Have you ever seen Raging Bull?”
“Quit that shit I’m going to ream you out!” She grabbed my head and started giving me a noogie, like my big brothers used to do when I was little. Her cheeks packed with laughter.
“That was the last one I got!” I pleaded. “That was weak anyway—a noogie with a gloved hand.”
“It stays on,” she said. “It’s my right-hand man,” she grinned.
Her routine would have bored or even addled me, had she been somebody else; but Sloane was so good at her part that you were inclined to believe her. Like well-crafted surrealism, I never doubted her story.
We drank clear through the preliminary rounds of torture. Bull 126 was oozing blood out the back and panting, flapping his thick rubber tongue. Out stepped the matador.
He was thin but robust, tiny waist but protruding rib-cage, like a greyhound dog. You could almost measure him with your eyes, as though his existence were a calculation of space occupied in the world. His pants were so tight you could make out the bursting roundness of his balls. His vest was glimmering and beaded like a Mardi Gras costume.
“All right, Manolo,” muttered Sloane.
“You know, I really wouldn’t marry him,” I said.
“Yeah, right? I don’t see the attraction.”
“Shit, I’d rather marry the bull.”
Sloane turned to me and hit me in the shoulder. “Get the fuck out of here!”
“Beauty and the Beast?”
“But in all seriousness my favorite Madonna song is ‘Take a Bow.’ “
“I know, soo good, right? But the video? When she’s rolling around in a corset on the bed?”
“It’s Madonna; what are you going to do?”
Manolo began to dance and strut around the bull, getting as close as he could to show off—the bull’s horns almost grazing him. Like there was a tiny ruler between them. The crowd roared with his every turn of wrist and altered stance, while Bull 126 shook his horns until he started to look silly. Manolo was taunting the bull! Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey gone wrong. Blind Bull missing the Ass.
I smiled. “Remember that kid’s book Ferdinand the Bull? It was about the lazy bull who didn’t want to fight he just liked to daydream under a tree all day.”
“Yeah, I do! What happened at the end, though? Did he grow up?”
“I can’t remember that part.”
It seemed Bull 126 had had enough.
“Where’s he going?”
He had turned his back to the matador and staggered to the other end of the ring like a sloppy drunk trying to leave the bar.
”He doesn’t want to fight anymore.”
Then he turned back again. He stamped his hooves in the dirt, ducking his head down and wielding that thick rubber tongue like a gun.
“I kinda hope he kills him,” I said.
“Manolo?”
“Yeah.”
“Venga! Toro…Cien veinte seis!” Sloane spattered. Numbers were always a challenge.
“I hate Manolo,” I said.
“Maybe he’ll break free. Just take off down the streets of Cordoba. Running of the bulls solo act.”
Then 126 sauntered back over like he’d changed his mind, decided to submit. It was so sad. You could see the defeat in those droopy eyes.
His movements became heavy and delayed, like in those dreams when you’re trying to escape but your legs won’t work. Then he lowered himself to his knees and tucked his head down, baring the spot between his shoulder blades, the path to his heart. The matador wisened up and then stuck him.
“The fuck was that!” we cried.
The crowd waved their white handkerchiefs. The men behind us told us to take our shirts off, which were white, and wave them. Bull 126 lay totally still, a mass of matter.
We looked until we couldn’t look anymore. Out pranced the mules to drag the body away.
Sloane emitted a private shriek for the both of us.
“You know how they call ‘still life’ in Spanish?”
“What?” she barked.
”‘Natura muerte—dead nature,’” I said.
The other bulls were not as valiant as Bull 126 but we still wanted them to win. There were two bulls each matador, and we’d seen four die. We were demoralized but we couldn’t stop watching. That must be the way these things work. We were also really drunk in a desperate sort of way. We went to order more beers.
“This shit is long,” said Sloane. She looked tuckered out. Her right glove was slipping off.
“Took Hemingway fifty pages on one fight,” I remembered.
Sloane insisted on doing the talking. I was more skilled in speaking, but she was more advanced in the body language and finesse. She was like one of those little kids who can’t make any words and just goes “ladidadoodoo” but nails the inflection. She started gesturing and clicking her teeth, stalling with the “pueeees” “venga, vale” all the bullshit words and the “gracias” with the lisp and without the s. I guess some people are just better fakers.
“Which are the real emotions?” I said. “What are you supposed to feel? It’s like when you go see a sad movie. How do you know what you’re feeling is natural or—”
“Or you’re just drunk?”
“We should’ve stayed sober, in honor of the bulls.”
“Yeah…next time?” She pouted like a sad drunk clown.
“Hey, but they’re all dead,” I said. “That was it for them. That was life and now it’s over.”
“There’ll always be more bulls.”
“Thank God for that.”
In the dusk air, we opened more beers and looked around. In a moment I saw Sloane’s eyes turn from green to hazel, then fall back to tired green. The ring was so small, so old, so…we were searching for something, but there was nothing but the sound of other people’s thrills. What was charm? Whimsical elegance. ‘I don’t give a fuck’ catches a lucky breeze. I would feel what I wanted to feel. I looked upon the men, rows of slanted foreheads and dusky eyes upon the matador—their king, as men will always have a king. And I will watch the watchers until one day I can see past their gaze into a space where there is no longer seeing or seen, no one to watch or be watched, just the rattle of a film reel turning in a place where there is no screen.
2 years ago - read more...
The kind of natural sprawl that’s so appealing they sell it to suburbanites who wish to recreate it in their backyards, just like Abercrombie sells holy blue jeans to rebellious teens.
