Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
minutes he was more satisfied and happier than he'd been in the two days I'd known him. We
got a big room in a cheap hotel and lay around drinking wine and smoking opium.
We left the next morning for Madrid, dropping David at the train station and heading
into the Pyrenees foothills, low-rolling scrub mostly, arid and empty but startling and beauti-
ful too, except for the Guardia Seville—the Spanish police—who were equally arid and empty,
low-rolling scrubs on their one-cylinder scooters that couldn't begin to keep up, resulting in
a bunch of gun-toting fascists even more pissed of than usual with the Yankee boys on faster
bikes. We got pulled over for a document check and explained to them, “No speaka too gooda
de Espagñol. Parlez vous humma humma?” Then we turned it over to Bruno, who nodded ob-
sequiously many times on cue and got us out of there in a few minutes, assuring us later that
we were on our way to a solid fucking without him. Then he asked if it was his turn to drive
yet.
We'd already smoked most of the opium and ditched the rest after meeting the Guardia
Seville. Those were the last years of Franco, and nobody called him Uncle Franco. The dif-
ference between him and Stalin was the political spectrum between them—they butted heads
at opposite ends, making them more similar than different. They both ruled by oppression
with a heavy hand. Madrid was all new and old, an exotic city with open markets and strange
things to eat for pennies. We enjoyed it for a day and headed out, because adventurers yearn
for the open road, where things are more likely to happen. Besides, John Levy was from LA,
where the latest, hippest, grooviest stuff broke first, and he had it on good sources that the
real happening was only a week away in Pamplona, where the bulls would run for seven days,
beginning at seven a.m. on the seventh day of the seventh month.
David had acquiesced to take the train to Madrid and join us for that tour but then an-
nounced that he would head to Florence, because he came for art, not cows, and we would
meet up bye and bye, maybe. Bruno murmured that he loved art and could show David the
best art museums and the best Italian home cooking from his mother too, if only David would
lend him the paltry few lira for a ticket to Rome, where they should surely stop on the way to
Florence. Bruno hadn't been home for a year and felt that it was time. David agreed, sensing
intuitively that Bruno was an artistic person with a big heart and a giving nature, after all.
A unique characteristic of those days, or maybe of any days for people of a certain age,
was our range of emotion. On one extreme was the overwhelming loneliness of my first night
in the world with no friends or family. I remember the crushing sensation of cold potential, of
death with nobody knowing or caring. The potential for life with no meaning, for that matter,
seemed as frightening. Those feelings seem unfounded but may have been necessary to a wild
boy raised softly in the suburbs.
On the other hand, parting ways with David and Bruno was casual as another slice of
toast. We didn't review the good times, the high miles, the horsemeat sandwiches quelling our
starvation, the big hotel room on the top floor where we smoked opium and drank another
