Out-Of-Tune Madrid Ragtime

I haven't been home for the holidays in a while. Since about 18 I've gone out of my way to duck them as much as possible. Mainly to duck my family. If there aren't any jokes because the truth is always the best joke: I can't really handle the misguided expectation of warmth and it's more awkward than any motivation a white guy finds while he's on a dance floor trying to impress a black girl. Yeah, so borrow, max a credit card, wash and rinse some dinky-ass script in LA for a guy more interested in getting into your pants than making a movie, get on a vineyard for a few months---do whatever---and make enough dough to fuck off where nobody knows you... where after fifty tries they still can't pronounce your name right and wonder why you're so happy about it.

Don't tell anybody and get over to Madrid and stay out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper street light haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for cheap. Chance being stuck over a toilet for 10 hours and go sight-seeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3am and the Romanian prostitutes lining the outside fence at the big parks with ponds you can take a girl to and rent a row-boat with. Walk until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and get off the Gran Via and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the North Africans are waiting for you peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that Policia are approaching are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting 80 different directions weaved into all the other squeaky Windex scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting hectic glances at their fake designer watches.

Stick with that until a handful of kids break dancing in a troupe grabs your attention doing Michael back when Mike was single-handedly sinking the war on drugs with a moonwalk.

Nurse your hangover or buy something else and get down near that statue of a bear reaching up into the tree who looks just like you going for a first kiss, just as shy and deliberate and off-key pilfering some girl's museum gift shop while she's a little amused that you offered to read her palm because obviously you can't read palms and just wanted an excuse to touch her and give her the cracked-windshield-Brando-brow-action that only worked because its failure was kinda sweet. Spend Christmas morning on bench with a coffee and paper bagged cheap cognac and a few of those faintly sweet tasting Fortuna cigarettes and give Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish until a tourist bus rolls in and the Gypsies move in like a kicked over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes. Discern which nationality and why affords the most pleasure in being robbed?

Continue this practice after having been rolled your first week over there by a smooth Arab pair. You shoulda seen the girl with him. I couldn't take my eyes off her while he's going on about my jeans. "Where in the fuck do you FIND a pair of jeans like that, man? You're Italian?" I just kept nodding to his girlfriend while the guy reached over and admired my belt, followed by my pockets. Was this how all Arabs demonstrated their admiration for the craftsmanship of Italian tailored jeans?

Possibly.

So you head over to the little casinos surrounded by the upper crust Romanian prostitutes, not so done-up but noticeably more blond because a lot of the older Middle Eastern businessmen like them that way. You've figured out a trick at the casinos with this standard machine they offer---a frightening one when you apply it's message to anybody who emotionally fits the bill---where a rake is pushing coins off a cliff and you have to throw in more coins hoping it knocks some off. That brings in about 20-25 Euros first thing in the morning since drunks don't play attention to odds at night and they don't recalibrate the machines.

And then Christmas night or New Years get back to Sol, ground zero of the city, and watch the drunken maniacs try to climb up onto Alphonso and grab the king's huge shnoz while everybody cheers.

I guess the main trouble with being at home around Christmas is that one of the saddest Christmas stories I know is about a couple little kids living in the projects in a thimble-sized apartment with their on-welfare-single-mom, who woke up Christmas morning only to find their apartment had been burglarized and all the presents under the tree stolen and their mom had to account for it. These little kids were my big brothers before I was born, before my dad met my mom and her kids and stepped in.

So whatever grievances one might have directed toward *this* particular holiday go well beyond small potatoes given the participants involved.

This was the first Christmas I didn't have that nagging itch to take off. Somebody swiped it from me and I'm inclined to believe the culprit left on a plane for Manhattan but is rumored to be returning in the near future. But even with the snow around, it wasn't a good idea to bring it up and engage in some sorta pissing contest with that Norman Rockwell from Hell scene.