Chapter 21: Hate, Hate, Hate

Wherein our protagonist meets Antonio Banderas, Jim Morrison, Z.Z. Top, and Oliver Stone.

Even before I see the auberge, I hear loud rock and roll carrying towards me. Old school rock and roll. L.A. Woman is blasting out from behind its closed iron gates. When I walk up to the gate, I see a girl dancing by herself in the courtyard. She’s doing one of those sea amoebae, Grateful Dead dances. This is not Camino normal, by the way. Not the music. Not the astral plane gyrations. But I am so tired I don’t want to walk even thirty more feet to see if there is another choice. I’m done. Cooked.

I try to let myself in, but the gate is locked. Okay, that’s not normal either. Nothing anywhere is locked in Spain. It’s too damn hot to get up and secure anything, and it is too hot to run off with anything you’ve stolen even if you wanted to. A young, bare-chested guy wearing a groovy leather necklace and a jade bracelet comes up to the gate. We have an immediate, eye-contact, reptilian back and forth. Well, what do you know? We don’t like each other one tiny bit.

I move forward to clear r…