Take It Off

by J. Minter

  Arno grabbed his bag and put it over his shoulder. He walked down the plank without looking back. But he heard Mickey, sure enough, coming along behind. When he got to the dock, he saw the black car waiting.

  He looked at Mickey and said, “You can have it. I wouldn’t ride with you anyway—you’d probably just fuck everything up.” Then he turned and walked quickly down the dock and into the city.

  “See ya!” he heard Mickey yell after him. Arno made a bitter waving gesture over his shoulder, but didn’t bother taking one last look at his friend.

  Barcelona ♥ Mickey

  Mickey watched his friend walk off the dock and into the city. He looked like he knew where he was going. Which Mickey was pretty sure he didn’t. Mickey flipped him off to his back, and the Ariadne, too, for good measure, and then he started kicking the black car that was waiting to take him to the airport. He kept kicking it until the driver got out and started yelling at him. Mickey yelled back, and that made him feel better. Then the driver got back in the car and took off without him.

  “Yeah, well, you suck, too!” Mickey yelled, and then he added some stuff in Spanish so that everyone knew he wasn’t some spoiled American brat. He picked up his bag and walked into the city without looking back.

  For a long time, Mickey walked as though he was in a trance. Getting kicked out of places was pretty familiar to him, but getting kicked out and being abandoned by his friends was new. He walked up Las Ramblas, the big, two-lane boulevard that ran through the center of the old town. There were lots of tourists strolling in the afternoon sun, and they were seriously bumming Mickey out. Too much laughing and kissing. He got on a bus and rode up through the city. He just kept picturing Arno sneering at him during survival test, or Arno not even looking back as he left him on the docks. Mickey got mad all over again, and then he got melancholy.

  He must have been lost in his own head for a while, when he felt someone shaking him awake. It was the bus driver, telling him in Spanish that it was the end of the line. Mickey got out and walked through the streets without thinking about a destination or what he should do next. It was a seedy, hilly neighborhood, and Mickey climbed up through the winding alleys of temporary-looking little structures. Eventually he found himself in a park with wide walking paths shrouded in trees. He walked for a long time, and he started feeling calm, and thinking about things, like the way sometimes nature could tame even his wildest instincts. Of course, that hadn’t been true on Barker Island, and that reminded Mickey of Arno, and of Greta. And then he realized that in all this time, he hadn’t thought about Greta at all. And now that he had, he didn’t miss her particularly. Strangely, suddenly, this made him feel better about everything.

  Eventually he came out on a wide plaza that had a view of the whole city. There were tourists there from all over, taking pictures of the view. He went over to the edge and looked out. He looked at all the wide boulevards leading down to the sea, and the vision cleared his head somewhat.

  Mickey’s first thought was that he hated Barcelona. It was the kind of place all his Venezuelan cousins on his mother’s side talked about constantly. They all had bodyguards and wanted to be models and never ate and pouted when they didn’t get what they wanted, and they all talked about how “Barthelohna” was their favorite city in Europe, except Paris, and that was only because of the clothes.

  His second thought was that he was starving.

  He dragged his bag out of what must have been the front entrance of the park, and hailed one of the taxis. Once the car was racing through the streets, back toward the old town, Mickey instructed the driver to take him to a good restaurant. On the way, he told him all about how Arno and he had gotten kicked off the boat, in Spanish. The driver dropped Mickey on an empty little street, and Mickey tipped him absurdly.

  “Buena suerte!” the driver called as he pulled away.

  The restaurant was small and grottolike, and it had sheets of brown paper for tablecloths. It was a little early for dinner, and there were only a few well-dressed Spanish people sitting around and enjoying an after-work bottle of wine. A dark-eyed, lank-limbed waitress appeared.

  “Uno?” she asked him. He nodded, and she led him over to a table. There was piano music in the background. Mickey looked at the menu and decided he was really, really starving. When the waitress came back, he ordered a bottle of wine and paella for two.

  The waitress laughed and pushed her long shiny hair over her shoulder. She told him that the paella for two was “para doth perthonas.” Mickey had never heard anyone pronounce Spanish S’s like Th’s without sounding pretentious, and he was smitten.

  “Estoy esperando alguien,” Mickey told her.

  “Dijiste una perthona.”

  “Lo siento,” Mickey said, clasping his hands and pretending to beg for her mercy.

  “Okay-ay.” She laughed, then disappeared.

  The paella for two took a long time, and he had practically finished the bottle of wine before it arrived. More people were coming into the restaurant by then, and the lovely waitress was moving around the tables in a hurry. He grasped at her apron when she passed, and put his hands around his neck like he was dying of thirst. “Mas … vino… por favor.”

  She laughed and slapped him away. A busboy appeared a few minutes later and uncorked a very superior bottle of wine. Not that Mickey was discriminating about taste right then. A few minutes later, the busboy brought his food. He refilled his glass and tore into the paella.

  He watched the waitress work, becoming ever more drunk and smitten. When she came near him again, he called out, “Cómo te llames?”

  She walked over, looking bemused, and began to pick up the ravages of the paella. “Donde está tu compañero?” she asked.

  “Se fue,” he replied despondently, forgetting his ruse about the paella for two entirely. “Tu nombre, por favor.”

  “Angelina,” she said sweetly, and then leaned in and kissed his cheek. Then she went back to work.

  Mickey stayed all night drinking and watching Angelina flicker between tables. He watched the dinner crowd come and go. Later, when he was in no shape to check himself into a hotel, Angelina gave him a cup of black coffee and took him back to her place.

  Nobody in Barcelona recognizes Arno

  “Does anybody speak English in this godforsaken town?” Arno called out. A few backpackers who were begging on the street looked at him briefly before looking away.

  He was dehydrated and mad, and to make matters worse, he was definitely lost. He knew some Portuguese and German, because he was half Brazilian and half German, and he could handle himself in French because of all the art and fashion world functions he’d gone to over the years. But Spanish he couldn’t understand at all. He’d spent a few hours trying to get to the airport, and he even managed to get into the subway. But he could never figure out which way he was going, and he couldn’t figure out how to ask which was the right way, and eventually he got frustrated and gave up.

  Now he was in the city again, wandering down the big main drag. There were vendors selling cheap souvenirs, and everybody was walking really slowly, like they had all the time in the world. He called out for English speakers again, but everyone continued to ignore him. He decided to take a different tack.

  “I need a translator. Anyone? Ten euro for an hour as my trans-la-tor.”

  He crossed his arms and waited. It took about five seconds for a scrawny kid to emerge from one of the vendor tables and run up to him.

  “Good day, sir! Pablo at your service,” he said with a little bow. He looked about eleven, and he spoke English with an accent that was both Spanish and British, which Arno had to admit was cool.

  “Hey. So I need some help checking into a hotel, and that’s it, okay?”

  “You need help finding hotel?”

  “Yeah, and getting into a room. Does ten euros sound fair?”

  “For twenty I will find you the best hotel room in Barcelona.”

  “Whatever, fi
ne. Pablo, I’m Arno.” Arno gave the kid a twenty, and then followed him as he hurried through the busy street. Every hotel they passed, the kid would look up, consider it and shake his head. Finally they came to a big old-fashioned hotel with wroughtiron work across the façade.

  “The Hotel Imperial is very good,” Pablo said with a grin.

  “Looks great. Let’s go.”

  “Wait, Señor Arno. They are very picky at the Imperial. I go first, and get you a room.”

  “Why would they give you better service than me?” Arno asked incredulously. He had four major credit cards, and he was cleaner than anyone else in this city his age. He couldn’t imagine why any hotel in the world wouldn’t want to take his money. He didn’t want to say that to the kid, though.

  Pablo cleared his throat and leaned in to Arno. “I did not want to tell you, but there is much anti-American sentiment in Spain right now.”

  “Fine. I’ll wait here.”

  The kid nodded deferentially and ran into the hotel. He appeared several minutes later, looking very pleased with himself.

  “They have a very good room waiting for you. I will need fifty euros to get the key.”

  “Oh, come on. They’re going to know it’s me anyway once I go into my room.”

  “Señor Arno, I think it is very bad to upset them before we have the key. All the hotel rooms in town are full, it is very lucky that this one is still open.”

  “Fine, whatever. But come right back.” Arno handed over fifty euros, and watched the kid scamper back into the hotel.

  While he waited, he wondered if fifty euros could be right. The hotel actually looked sort of high end, and the guests who went in and out looked older and like they had good taste. He watched the hotel door carefully to make sure the kid didn’t go in or out. After fifteen minutes, he got totally furious and stormed into the Imperial.

  He went right up to the reception desk, but before he could say anything, the girl sitting behind it put her hand up and said, “El hotel esta lleno.”

  “What? Look, have you seen a little kid?”

  “A … kid?” The girl looked confused, although she clearly understood English.

  “Yeah, Pablo, short, scrawny. He was supposed to get me a room.”

  The girl shook her head.

  Arno cursed under his breath, pushed his hair away from his face, and said, “You haven’t seen him? Fine. Can I just get a room, then?”

  “Sir,” the girl said firmly, “the hotel is full.”

  “Fuck!” As Arno cursed, loudly this time, he kicked the desk. The huge vase of flowers sitting on top of it shook, and then fell forward, smashing on the ground. It made a big shattering noise, and pieces of glass sprayed everywhere. Arno jumped back from it, a little stunned, and saw that the girl was in shock, too. She looked like she was going to begin tearing up.

  Then he felt the big hands of a security guard on his shoulders, and he was thrown out onto the street. The guy was yelling in Spanish, but when it became clear that Arno didn’t understand a word he was saying, he gave up and went inside.

  Arno stood alone in the bright sunlight. He put his cop shades back on and walked quickly away from the Hotel Imperial. He was pissed and embarrassed, and pretty much the only thing he could think to do was to find Pablo and make Pablo feel as bad as he felt now.

  Suki reminds me of our many differences

  Suki hadn’t said anything for a while. She was sitting across from me, wearing her big, cheap, Jackie O knockoff sunglasses, and smoking Gitanes. We were sitting at one of the outdoor cafés along Barcelona’s main strip that ran up from the dock, and we were both nursing the tiny coffees that our waiter had served us. I hadn’t said anything for a long time, either.

  Our ferry had come into the port of Barcelona a few hours ago. As it sailed into dock, we watched the Ariadne move back out to sea.

  We came down the plank way and stared at it for a while. I guess I must have really believed we were going to get back on the Ariadne, because I’d spent all our money on gin and tonics and now we were penniless again. Or, technically, just without money, because I did have a lot of change in my pocket. When I told Suki that, she got sort of excited and pointed out that the coins were actually like dollars here. We counted out a few one- and two-euro pieces, and then she asked if I would buy her some cigarettes, and then we got into sort of an altercation because I felt like in this sort of dire situation, smoking was not a necessity. Then some sleazy Spanish dude who reminded me a lot of Rob, except taller and possibly better looking, interrupted us to make some grandiose speech about how Americans don’t appreciate the beauty of life, and by extension, smoking, and then he gave Suki the rest of his cigarettes. Thus the Gitanes.

  Suki seemed very pleased with herself after that, and suggested we have coffee and think about our situation. Which pretty much brings us up to speed. We were trying to be very spare with our money, which was hard because coffee in Europe comes in very petite portions and because we had had gin and tonics for dinner last night and both of us probably would have liked to eat something.

  The tables were packed close together, and there seemed to be a lot of people out at five on a Wednesday afternoon. I felt like a lot of them were staring at me, but I’m used to that because everyone always stares at me and my friends. Suki lit another Gitane, and then her eyes got all lightbulblike.

  “Hey, you know what? We never got the rest of the money out of my checking account.”

  I tried not to look at her cross-eyed. “Are you kidding?”

  “No … I don’t really know how much is in there, though. Maybe sixty dollars? And, with the exchange rate, who knows. I mean, it’s not going to get us back on the boat. But it might get us a hotel room for the night.”

  “Hey, Suki? I don’t think we’re getting back on the boat.” I had been thinking about this all morning, and now, since I was feeling pretty brutal, I decided to be brutally honest. There was no way we were going to get ourselves through a foreign country and find a boat that was actually moving fast. Additionally, I didn’t want to anymore. My one thought was getting back to New York, and Flan.

  “I guess you’re right,” Suki said, even though she knew nothing of my Flan urgency.

  “I think the best thing for us to do is try to make it to my dad’s house in London,” I said very levelly. “If he’s there, he’ll get us back to the States.”

  “How are we going to get to London?”

  “Can we think about that tomorrow?”

  “Okay.”

  We paid our bill in coins—which felt really strange—and went off to find a hotel room.

  Suki had been to Barcelona on a family vacation, and she seemed to remember it pretty well. We were in the old town, and the street we were on, which was wide and had a big promenade in the center with lots of cafés and tall trees, was called Las Ramblas. Supposedly there were lots of cheap hotels in the little streets that ran off of it. In addition to all the Spanish people who seemed to be lazing about in the late afternoon, there were lots of backpackers, with dreadlocks and mangy-looking dogs, sitting on the sidewalks or walking around. It was sort of like the kids on Saint Marks in the East Village, except these kids really looked like they hadn’t been home in years.

  We got lost again, of course. Barcelona looked a lot like Palma on Mallorca had, with ancient stone streets that twisted and turned illogically, and nineteenth-century apartment buildings built close together. It was more dirty and urban, though. The shutters all looked bolted down, and when we took a wrong turn, which was pretty much all we were doing, the corner we turned into more than likely smelled like piss.

  There were hotels everywhere, but every time we walked into one the clerk looked at us and made an ominous hand gesture and said, “Lleno! Lleno.”

  Eventually, when I was near the point of despair and convinced that my loafers were close to shoe death, Suki clapped her hands and shouted, “Yes!” I looked up at a thin, crumbling building with a really ol
d sign that read HOSTEL LA CUCARACHA. I stared in disbelief, but Suki obviously felt good about it, so I followed her in and up to the second floor.

  A tired-looking woman, who looked suspiciously like the clerk at the Mallorca Cucaracha, looked up at us as we came in. Suki smiled broadly.

  Suki conferred with the clerk, and then told me that there was good news and bad news. Miraculously they had one room left and they did take cards. The room was fifty-five euros, though, and Suki was worried that her bank would reject the charge.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” I asked.

  “I’d just be surprised if I have enough with the exchange rate, that’s all.”

  She handed over her debit card, and after a few tense moments it cleared. The woman gave us the key, and we climbed up the rickety old stairs to our room. I don’t need to tell you what the room looked like—it was the same icky kind of room we stayed at in Mallorca. We lay down in the sandpaper blankets, and pretty soon we were sleeping.

  I slept for a long time, and I dreamt of an endless succession of holiday parties in a snow white New York with Flan on my arm. She was wearing her clingy red sweater, and her white wool circle skirt, and her cheeks were all pink from eggnog and she smelled like sugar and spice and …

  Arno at the edge

  Arno had been sitting at the outdoor café for at least an hour, and none of the busy waiters had noticed him. They all wore black pants and long white aprons, and they looked perfectly efficient. But still, none of them had noticed Arno sitting there by himself. It was the exact opposite of New York, where everybody paid attention to him and were usually so stunned by his beauty that they also bought him things.

  Nobody had bought him anything here. The cathedrals were all ringing seven o’clock, and he wanted food more than anything, and a cold beer to wash it down, and he was ready to pay for it. But he couldn’t get the waiters to look at him. After an afternoon of wandering the filthy, foreign streets of Barcelona looking for that little thief Pablo, Arno had told himself that things couldn’t get much worse than they already were. But, of course, he had been proven wrong.