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 room so he can open the gate outwards, but then he doesn’t open it. He just looks at me through the bars, slouching sideways on one hip and stares lazily at me. It is almost a pout. He is taking Jim Morrison very seriously. Or Val Kilmer. He thinks he is on an album cover. Then I wonder for a second if maybe this isn’t an auberge. Maybe this is somebody’s home. He says he wants to know what I want.
What do I want?
¿What do I want?
Okay, this is definitely not normal. I’m wearing a giant backpack. I have an eighteen-inch scallop shell on my forehead. I have a wooden stick with forty-seven notches I’ve carved into it, one for every hot, miserable day I’ve been out here in the middle-of-nowhere. I’ve got empty water bottles you could strap onto the side of a German tank.
¿What do you think I want?
A cama, I say without the Spanish accent that’s deserted me. “A bed,” I add in English for clarification and then esta noche. I get a por favor in there, too, but belatedly and without any expression so that it sounds ruder than if I hadn’t stuck it in there at all.
The hippy hospitalario stares at me. He’s openly studying me now. The door bouncer is deciding what will happen to the party if he lets me in. I say, stupidly, currying favor through the iron bars that I like the music. I heard it coming into town. I volunteer, even more stupidly, that I didn’t bring my iPod on the pilgrimage and music always sounds great now. Just the volume of it. Any music, I say. I mean when you haven’t heard music in so long, I trail off. Jesus, how did I get started on this? I am so tired. Too tired to explain the thing I want to explain, and I don’t know why I’m telling Jim Morrison. I’m dying to sit down and be done with the day.
This guy does not want to hear that I like his music. He will have to go and find new music now.
He starts to teach me in his Antonio Banderas accent that the Camino is music. Music is the most important thing. He rolls the R in important. Despite myself, I find this impressive, but this is no time to be giving him points for anything. “Why wouldn’t you bring music?” he asks. This makes no sense he wonders out loud, as if to himself. I think, to myself, but not out loud, that I have just watched somebody do a theatrical aside in an actual, live conversation.
He returns to me. You have to have music on the Camino, he instructs me. Life is music. By music, he clearly means rock and roll and not the Concierto de Aranjuez. I take exception to all of this, because I can say things, for example, like “break on through to the other side” without the slightest hint of an accent.
“If it is that important, I should probably go back two countries and start all over again,” I tell him. The idea was to say it with a light touch of easy, friendly humor.
He has to ask me a question first to see if he can let me in.
Oh, my God. I am in fourth grade. The bully is blocking my gym locker with his fat arm. He’s going to ask me his favorite color.
Wrong!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
In the background, L.A. Woman is making bendy plane arms and flying in circles. This auberge looks more and more like something out of Natural Born Killers, some fear and loathing shithole, way the fuck out in the mobile home desert, with a dirty kidney pool, and neglected palm trees growing beards like ZZ Top. Somewhere inside, Oliver Stone is standing on the diving board in his underwear. He’s tripping his brains out. He’s pouring a jug of Clorox into the pool. No matter what I tell this hospitalerio, he will never, ever, ever let me in. It is a fool’s errand getting into this place. Great waves of negativity are crashing over me.
Some outlaws lived by the side of the lake
The minister's daughter's in love with the snake...
Oh, God, not another Doors song. I was hoping it was a genre we were listening to and not a band. I hate the Doors. Creepy, evil band. Irritating, stupid lyrics for irritating, stupid people, and that intolerable singsong, light my fire organ. Light my organ on fire. I totally hate them. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
I am so tired, that I am almost to the point of leaning forward with my hands on my knees to support my weight while he finishes up with me.
*
Do I – he asks me this very, very slowly with his Puss-in-Boots Shrek accent – want to cook my own meal OR eat in a restaurant? I focus on him with my twelfth-round face. I cannot believe how much Banderas he squeezes into the “OR.” With one fluffy spiked DreamWorks paw, he tickles his scruffy goatee chin philosophically. With the other he holds my tail down. For a futile second, I try to think of an answer that will outsmart him. God, I am so, so, so, so thirsty. My feet hurt. I want to scurry over the fence and dart behind him. I want to hide like a reptile behind the vending machine with the green lime sodas and the San Miguels.
But it really doesn’t matter what I tell him. This is going to go on and on, and then I’m going to lose, and then he is going to smile at me with his thin lizard lips.
Because he is the lizard king. He can do anything.
He lets me in.
Fuck.
It’s not him. It’s me.
