and realized that I’d just been a victim of Fashion Police brutality.
I pleaded with the other doormen to let me back in to find my friend, but they’d have none of it. The doormen were curious, however, about what I had done to get expelled. I told them I hadn’t bothered anyone. Heck, I hadn’t had a drink all night. “Well, there’s your problem,” joked one of the doormen. “You were probably the only sober guy in there.”
The doormen continued chatting. At one point, a confused young British girl came out of the club and asked the doormen for help, and I stepped in to translate. From there, the conversation started to flow.
Before, I had needed Patrick to meet new people, but now I felt strangely liberated.
I started chatting with some of the other outcasts, people who had been thrown out because they were too drunk, or who were not allowed in because they weren’t cool enough. There was a drunken Australian girl who was ejected but had to wait for her friend, because she didn’t know how to get back to their hotel. There were two local guys who weren’t allowed in even though their girlfriends were already in the club. They openly worried about all the guys in there hitting on their girlfriends, and I tried to comfort them by saying that the only guy approaching their girls was likely a burly Australian asking them for Ecstasy.
We club rejects spent the rest of the night telling stories, asking questions about each other and talking about where we were from. It was fun and interesting and, as a bonus, no one hassled me about my V-neck sweater from The Gap. Before I knew it, an hour or two had passed. I was enjoying myself more outside the club than I had inside it.
The sun was rising, and the club was closing up for the night. I finally reconnected with Patrick, who never managed to find any Ecstasy—or those local girls he had met the night before. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“I got thrown out.”
“You?” he asked in a way that was almost insulting.
“How is that possible?”
I told him about my altercation with the doorman. Patrick went into a rage. “Let’s get ’em,” he said, heading back into the club to look for the doorman. I had known Patrick all of five days, and here he was willing to beat the hell out of a total stranger on my behalf. I grabbed him and told him it wasn’t worth it.
“But he ruined your last night in Barcelona,” he said.
“No, he didn’t,” I replied. We were standing on a nondescript corner outside the club, and I was thinking of the outcast friends I had met that night. “Look at where we are!”
JON AZPIRI is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. Being of Basque heritage, his favorite part of Spain, by far, is the Basque Country, where no one judges him on his penchant for V-neck sweaters.
Madrid
Madrid
Close Quarters
lauren guza
two months into my study-abroad program in England, I was convinced of my own invincibility. After all, I’d ridden the London subway without getting caught in the automatic doors more than twice. I’d trained myself to look to the right first when crossing the street. And I’d learned to speak British with admirable fluency.
When the university announced we would be given a week free from classes to focus on preparing for exams, I promptly booked a train ticket to Spain. I set out for Waterloo Station muttering flimsy justifications about the value of life experience. Dawn hadn’t yet seeped through the gray stillness, and the coming day was deep and wide and inviting. I scoffed at the airplanes taking off from Heathrow, cutting the sky with their hard upward angles. How blind those people are, I thought. Think of what they miss from 30,000 feet.
The first leg of the trip, from London to Paris, involved an anticlimactic passage under the English Channel. The conductor warned us that soon we would all be descending into the darkest depths of oceanic transportation, and anybody who suffered from claustrophobia, back pain, pregnancy or a really painful paper cut should please alert an attendant if requiring assistance. After this deliciously ominous introduction to the Chunnel, it was a bit disappointing when the 20-minute ride revealed itself to be not unlike a Los Angeles freeway tunnel at midnight.
I’d been ridiculously conservative in allowing myself most of the day to get to my connecting train, so I ended up spending six hours huddled beside my suitcase in the alarmingly cold Paris station, forced to keep warm by eating gooey chocolate pastries. I had christened the suitcase “Croque” (pronounced “Craaaawk,” with an obnoxious American accent), in honor of the perfectly melted croque-monsieur sandwich I’d eaten at a sidewalk café—and because I had to call him something when I spoke to him.
Despite its allure, Paris was merely a word printed on my itinerary, a logistical connection necessary for reaching my ultimate destination: Madrid. A red-gold name that made me think of spiced afternoons and Hemingway stories and orange peels. When the electronic board finally informed me that my train would leave in five minutes from Platform 7, I dragged lazy Croque toward the tracks, and within seconds was spectacularly lost, trying to communicate my situation to a nearby employee. My knowledge of French is derived almost entirely from Pepé Le Pew cartoons, and this particular fellow seemed to think my frantic inarticulateness was quite comedic. When I finally wrestled directions out of him, sprinted to my platform and leaped wildly through the train doors, I had only a moment to revel in oxygen-depleted glory before the engine began to nudge us out of the station.
Staggering down the narrow hallway, I located the door of the cabin that would be mine for the overnight trip to Madrid. I threw it open, peered inside and realized quite suddenly that when I’d called to book a bedroom, they’d thought I said closet. I, though perfectly accustomed to college dorm rooms and childhood games of sardine, could not believe that a space so small was meant to contain human life. It was about eight feet wide, and two pairs of chairs, metal with cracked polyester cushions, faced each other in such a way that any two people sitting in them would rub knees. The walls were plastic painted to look like wood, and trimmed with grooves that suggested four fold-out beds might actually emerge into this mouse hole. A single sink, sterile and separate, seemed to smirk at me from the corner. The windows were shrouded in stiff, institutional curtains. The closet’s purple shadows were barely dissipated by its one naked light bulb.
And suffocating the cabin with her wide, full body and expressionless face was The Woman—and her smell. It was a thick, fleshy odor, a scent of sweat petrified in crevices of skin. My breath caught in me, and I resisted the urge to run, thinking that might be rude. She’d nodded in my direction when I first opened the door, but now seemed barely to notice me as I wedged Croque into a corner. We were sharing space, sharing air, sharing lives, and yet her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. It occurred to me that perhaps she didn’t speak English, but even my nervous Spanish and barely existent French seemed only to confuse her, so we resorted to a vague vocabulary of grunts and shy smiles. She busied herself with her baby, whom I hadn’t noticed at first, but who now gurgled and bubbled at me through rolls of skin and saliva.
Though it was still early, I dove onto the top bunk the moment the attendant flipped it
