Nothing Really Does Compare

Nothing Really Does Compare

Rain was 21 years old the night insomnia struck him. It was a cool, foggy night, the San Francisco fog so thick he could not see the apartment across the street. He had been living in San Francisco for 5 years. He had come from a troubled family in Long Beach, always arguing, never spending any time together, never enough money. All he had ever thought about growing up was escape. He wondered when he would be old enough to leave. His daydreams were full of variations on the escape theme – how he would leave the house, where he would go, how he would get the money he needed. His favorite show to watch on TV was reruns of “Bewitched.” His teenage fantasy was a girl who was secretly a witch, who could use her magic to transport them somewhere electric. His life could best be described as “banal.” He learned that word from a book he’d read, Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” when he was 13. He had picked it up in a used bookstore because he liked the title. Rain loved to read.
When he was 16 something inside him recognized that it was finally time to just do it- just go. That old aphorism kept ringing in his ears: Now or never. That day in school they were reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” and they had gotten to the part where Holden is so fed up with his circumstances that he runs away from his school and goes to Manhattan. That was the first sign. Then, after school, he was walking home in the rain and he slipped and fell right in front of a poster for Dos Equis beer that said, “You only live once, make sure it’s enough.” And Rain thought: Now or never.
So that night, full of gumption and bile and adrenaline, he packed all his belongings into his old beat up dodge dart and hastily grabbed the white envelope full of cash he had been saving from his odd jobs. In those days, he was just old enough to apply for a ‘real’ job but hadn’t yet, and Rain would do anything for money. He mowed lawns, walked dogs, babysat, delivered packages to the post office… anything anyone asked for, he would do it. The only thing he ever spent his money on was cigarettes, and when Rain was 16 it was 1997, a pack of Marlboro Reds cost $4.25, and he was a 2 pack a month kind of man. All of this allowed him, that night, to get into his car and drive away without saying goodbye. He headed North for San Francisco. It seemed like a new frontier, something new to discover, but still, coming from Southern California, he wouldn’t be a stranger there.
In San Francisco, he found a quiet, clean looking residential neighborhood and parked his car. He would sleep there, in his car, every night for the first month of his adventure. During the day, he would look for work, eventually getting a job at the Safeway supermarket as a bagger. Along with his new income came the opportunity to make new friends, and the people who worked at the store were not too friendly. But Rain was persistent and eventually worked alongside a cashier with whom he struck up a conversation, and the cashier agreed to let Rain sleep on his apartment floor rent free. They maintained this arrangement for two months until Rain had saved enough to pay his own rent.
During the five years he spent in San Francisco, Rain became the apprentice to a body piercer and eventually got his own job as a piercer in a tattoo shop. He made some local friends who were more his speed – quick witted, sarcastic, working class. He moved in with better roommates. He’d had a girlfriend for two years. His people were the kind of people who had never known what it was like to live with the wind at their back. All those priviledged kids who got cars when they were 16 and got to college anywhere they wanted, who got jobs at the mall when they were in high school just to be ironic. Rain’s people pushed and fought for everything they’d ever had. They had to beg for jobs, which they actually needed, and people cringed to look at them anyway, so they covered their bodies in tattoos to claim control of the situation. It felt good to fit in, more or less, in San Francisco, but lately Rain was missing the excitement of ditching high school and setting off into an unknown future. At 21, there was a special magic in the air, and he craved a new adventure. So that night, unable to sleep, he sat at the computer and looked up travel deals. His imagination opened wide like a lotus flower blooming in the mud. London? Prague? Buenos Aires? And then he saw it. He knew it was right as soon as he saw it. He just KNEW.
Barcelona.
He pulled out the only credit card he had, the one he never used but saved only for emergencies, and bought a roundtrip ticket that left San Francisco in one week and returned a month later. He didn’t speak Spanish. He went without any reservations.
Before he left for Spain, Rain did some asking around and was advised that there was a neighborhood called Gracia where all the alternative people lived. That would be his first destination in Barcelona. He found out that you could rent an apartment on the spot for a single month or as long as you wanted. That’s what he would do. His plans were coming together like a puzzle underwater. His mind was swimming in his future happiness.
Armed with what seemed like enough info and a deep thirst for discovery, Rain drove to the airport and bought a newspaper to read on the plane at one of the airport shops. On the front page, it said August 15th, 2001. He thought this would be a date he would never forget. Rain boarded the 747 to Madrid, transferred to another flight to Barcelona, and spent his first night in a random hotel. In the month that he would spend in Barcelona, Rain would survive on the cash that he had managed to save up over the past five years. That wasn’t much, but Rain was used to working with little. The next morning, he followed a map to Gracia and began wandering around. He saw clothing stores selling all kinds of hippy gear, colorful woven jackets and tie-dye pants. He supposed this was what people wore when they went to Ibiza. Rain wasn’t interested in that scene. He wondered if this was what people had meant when they told him Gracia was “alternative.” To him, this was embarrassing European psychedelic trash. To him, alternative was punk rock, tattoos, plug earrings, and ironic t-shirts.
Eventually he stumbled upon an apartment with a sign in the window that said “PISO EN ALQUILER” (he gathered that meant “FLAT FOR RENT”) and inquired within. In Barcelona, all the apartment buildings had lobbies with porters sitting in confined little spaces, ready to greet you. They looked like movie ticket windows. Most did not have elevators. The porter had leathery skin and wore a polo shirt with suspenders and an old cap. He sat there quietly, reading. Although Rain guessed that the porter would not understand him, he tried his luck with English.
“Hola! I want to rent the flat upstairs for one month?”
The porter shook his head. Rain repeated the word he saw on the window sign in his deep California accent: “Alquiler?”
The porter nodded. “Si, si.” He said, enthusiastically.
Rain held up his index finger. “One. Uno.”
The porter looked confused. He shrugged his shoulders. Rain did not know the word for ‘month.’ He saw a pad of paper and a pen on the porter’s side of the window. He made a writing motion then pointed to the writing instruments to signify that he wanted to use them.
“Si, si,” said the porter.
August 16 – September 16 was what Rain wrote on the pad. “Uno,” he said again.
“Quieres alquiler el piso por un mes. Si, entiendo.” The porter shook his head yes.
The porter wrote down a number in pesetas on a pad of paper. It was difficult to figure out the conversion of pesetas to dollars. Rain took out his phone calculator and figured out the numbers. Agreeing to the price, Rain handed over some pesetas he had gotten in exchange for dollars at the airport, and like that, he had a place to live.
The apartment came furnished with a single bed in the one bedroom, and a coffee table in the living room. If he wanted to have any guests over, they would have to sit on the floor around the coffee table.
A few nights later, when Rain was relaxing in bed, he wondered: why this flat, why this street? There seemed to be a greater scheme at hand, but it was unfathomable to him at that moment. About an hour later he was called by a siren song into the pub next door. It was dark inside, and all the people there seemed to be regulars. It was supposed to be and Irish pub but the bartenders were all Catalan, as were the patrons. He thought the only thing Irish about it were last March’s Happy St. Patrick’s Day stickers still up on the wall. And of course, the beer. He saw a pool table in the back and walked towards it. He would always remember that Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” was blaring over the sound system. He felt like he was high on something, but it wasn’t any drug. It was just the satisfaction and exhilaration of living exactly as he desired. That fateful night back in San Francisco when he had bought his airline ticket. Barcelona this very moment at the bar. It was all just because something told him he should. Yes, it felt good to follow his instincts.
He spotted a pretty young girl pouring shots of tequila onto the table and licking them off. She was skinny, like all the Catalan girls, and had chin length brown hair and brown eyes. She had a ‘bring it on’ attitude that drew him to her. Instantly, she became what he wanted. He knew, she was the reason he had been drawn to this spot. His young mind believed in energy, chi, life force, not to mention karma. He thought he had felt her distinctive energy calling him from his flat next door and known he had to come here to meet her. And here she was -rebellion, excitement, LIFE! He approached her, timidly, and asked, “Do you speak English?” And she was very proud to reply (in perfect English.)
“Yes. My mom is American.”
“Oh!” said Rain, caught off guard. She didn’t look American. “Where is she from?”
“She’s from Hawaii. I’m Mahina,” she said, a mysterious look on her face.
They talked for a few hours after that. She told him that her mom had come to Barcelona in the 70s and never left. Her dad was Catalan but she didn’t know him. She grew up in Barcelona speaking Catalan and Spanish, and English with her mom. She was 17. She still went to high school. And Rain could tell from her stories, the wind had not been at her back. She offered to show him around, to be his translator. They barely knew anything about each other, but they were already like two pebbles skipping along the same pond, side by side.
During that month, Mahina became Rain’s constant companion, introducing him to foreign food, nightclubs, people, and ideas. Rain ate up the paellas, the croquetas, and especially the crema Catalanas. She taught him to say “Koala!” as slang for “goodbye,” which he loved and would always remember. The Catalans he met were so nice to him. They mostly kept to themselves but if he ever reached out they did their best to be helpful. He learned to say “Perdoname” to excuse himself after his many unintentional gaffes. To that they always replied, “No pasa nada!” meaning, basically, forget about it.
And they really did speak Catalan with each other, instead of Spanish. Mahina told him that under Franco it had been illegal for the Catalans to speak, read or write in their native language. As a result, the older generation didn’t know the grammatically correct language, nor how to read or write in it, because they had only spoken it in secret behind closed doors. The people who were Rain’s age, who were born after 1975, after the death of Franco and the end of the bloody Spanish Civil War, had been educated in Catalan and were allowed to speak it freely on the street. As a result of all the turmoil, they were very proud of their heritage and preferred to use their own language over Spanish.
Mahina loved speaking English with Rain. She felt like she was claiming her American heritage and identifying as her mother’s daughter (although she barely knew what that meant.) One day Mahina took Rain into a tattoo shop right on the main street, the Passeig de Gracia. All the guys there were Catalan, but to Rain’s excitement they spoke English well enough. The main guy, Josep, had a dirty blond ponytail and skater clothes on. The second in command, Albert, had short black hair and a goatee. He wore a t-shirt with some kind of unidentifiable logo on it. Rain and Mahina chatted with them in English for a while. Rain showed off his many tattoos – the stars on his elbows and crawling up his neck, the writing on his forearms, all the work he’d had done to mark his years of freedom in San Francisco. Only then, when he felt comfortable, he asked Josep if he would hire him as a body piercer.
They shocked him by immediately saying yes. In that moment Rain was transported by a happiness he had not felt before. It was like leaving gravity and all the other rules of living, and just floating upside down anchored only by his heart. Maybe this was finally “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” He would move to Barcelona. His life would take another surprise turn. Rain had become an aspiring writer, and he felt as if someone had handed him the pen to write the magnificent story of his life. He was absolutely thrilled at how the story was turning out.
And so, before his month was up, he arranged to keep his apartment indefinitely, confirmed his new job, made promises to his new girlfriend -- and then he used up the rest of his emergency-only credit card to buy a one-way ticket that would return him to Barcelona from San Francisco in two weeks.
Rain had left himself two weeks to go back to San Francisco and sell all his stuff. It was easy. He wasn’t sentimental and his mind was already elsewhere. Breaking up with his San Francisco girlfriend was the most difficult part, but she knew him well enough to know this was something he had to do. Like the time he drove her to the Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo and proposed surrounded by the chewed-up wads of gum. Or when he brought home a mouse from the pet store because he couldn’t bear to think of it living “a meaningless life in a box.” Rain was a man who knew what needed to be done because he just got a certain feeling; once he recognized that feeling, practically nothing could stop him. Just as when he had left home at 16, he didn’t even bother saying goodbye to most people in San Francisco. He didn’t’ think they cared that much about him.
Mahina was a model. She showed Rain a few Spanish magazines she had posed in; a hair styling magazine, a department store catalogue, a teen magazine. Almost as soon as Rain had returned to Barcelona for good, Mahina told him she had to travel to Madrid to audition for a cell phone commercial. They took the 2 ½ hour train ride together, and she completed her audition. She got the part. Although she had white skin like the Catalans she had some Hawaiian features to her face which made her stand out and look especially beautiful in a country that did not have much diversity. She was also ethereal – Rain couldn’t decide if she was more like an angel or a ghost. After the audition Mahina decided to stay behind for a few days to visit friends, while Rain had to go back to Barcelona for work. The only money he had now was from selling his stuff in San Francisco.
On the train ride back, he sat reading a book of Robert Frost poems. He had dropped out of high school at 16, but he was no cliché. Once he had arrived in San Francisco and got a job bagging groceries, he got his GED and enrolled in community college. He got his Associates Degree in English Lit in 3 years. He enjoyed reading the classics, and secretly wrote Marxist poetry in old fashioned journals - kind that had the black and white fuzzy blur on the cover and the black binding - dreaming of being a real writer.
Every half hour he got up to smoke a cigarette. The third time he got up to smoke, he noticed two young women staring at him, giggling. They sat back in their seats as soon as he noticed them. But when he went back to his seat and his poetry, there they were again, spying on him and whispering. They were college girls, obviously, and American. What did they want with a tattooed working-class bum like him? He felt like they were taunting him with their whispers. Girls like that thought they could have anything they wanted. After a while he closed his book and slept for the rest of the ride, dreaming about Mahina and her cell phone.
[better transitional detail]
A few days later, during a bright Gracia afternoon, two young women sauntered into the tattoo shop. He didn’t recognize either of them at first. One of them stared at him, jaw agape.
“It’s you!” she yelled.
“I’m me,” he responded.
“You were on the train! From Madrid!”
He smiled. He knew who she was.
“I recognize your tattoos!!”
“What were you doing in Madrid?” He asked, shyly, still smiling.
“We were visiting a friend from LA. You?”
“I’m from LA too,” he said. “My girlfriend had an audition in Madrid. She’s a model.”
“You’re from LA and you’re here and I saw you on the train and I found you! I feel like some spirit lead me by the hand into this shop. Oh my God. We HAVE to be friends!” she shrieked.
They exchanged phone numbers and promised to hang out. He was excited. Girls like that would never give him the time of day in the states. They thought he was uneducated, not cultured, low class. And he was, low class at least. He knew what he was.
The girl was called Mattie and her friend wasn’t interested in hanging out with a nobody piercer who worked in a tattoo shop. But Mattie seemed to love him. When they went out together to bars, to clubs, to cafes, she told him all about her life and her friends and how she hated college, how she loved Barcelona. He told her the story of how he had wound up in Barcelona, how he met Mahina, how he thought he would probably stay for five years. Despite her middle-class upbringing and impressive education, Mattie treated him as an equal. That bothered him. He felt like he was being sleazy, or pulling one over on her. One night, when he had taken her to a secret upstairs bar in the Placa del Sol, he declared, “I’m a communist!” and showed her the hammer and sickle tattooed on his forearm. It didn’t have the effect he had hoped. She just nodded, glassy eyed. He added, exasperated, “I’m working CLASS!”
That got her.
After that Mattie acted more self-conscious about her status as a college girl, acted more ‘motherly’ towards Rain in an attempt to mitigate her higher status - but she still wanted to hang out. It was as if this was the first time she had realized that being a university student held any sort of prestige. If Rain was honest, it was charming. She really had not thought herself any better than Mahina and him until he had pointed it out.
But it was becoming apparent to Rain that Mattie was spending time with him to fill a deeper need, to heal some painful wound. The more he spoke to her the more he could see it in her expression. She believed in him. She thought he could heal her. Slowly, she began to talk about how she never wanted to go home, how this was the first time she had been happy in years. She told him that she hadn’t been able to make any friends in college, she had been going for three years and still had no major. She had gone to a therapist once and the therapist laughed when she said she was depressed. It became clear that Maddie felt hopeless; Barcelona was giving her hope. Rain understood he was a big part of what Barcelona was for her.
Mattie’s affection for Rain was growing – and Mahina was getting jealous. In an effort to create some distance between Mattie and himself, he told her that Mahina really didn’t like her, that she hated her. That she was overcome with jealousy. Mattie said that there was nothing to be jealous of, she had no romantic intentions. She suggested that the three of them hang out together to prove her point. So, the next day, Rain and Mahina met Mattie at a café in Gracia. They had nothing to talk about and it was very awkward. Mattie ended up talking about a metaphysics class she had taken at university. She knew Rain would be interested.
“We read about the dualistic theory of magic?” She gleamed. “That’s where, like, there’s magical law which governs magical properties and natural law which governs non-magical properties.”
Rain was titillated. “And that’s metaphysics?” he asked, eyes blazing.
“That’s bullshit,” hissed Mahina, getting visibly impatient.
Mattie went on. “Magical and natural law each have their own rules. Magical law can override the rules of natural law but neither one can override the rules of magical law.”
Mahina had heard enough. “You are really full of it,” she growled. “I have to go. I have an appointment.”
She pushed her way past Rain and left the table. No one said goodbye.
Mattie thought she had failed at her task, and was prepared to never see Rain again, but then he cheerfully asked her if she had ever tried absinthe. She said no.
“I’ll take you to a secret absinthe bar in the gothic quarter. It doesn’t open until 11,” he said. Rain knew about all the good places.
They met up that night at their usual spot on Las Ramblas and he led her into the gothic quarter, which was quite scary at night. The buildings were covered in gargoyles and all the people who were out seemed like rats crawling on the statues. The absinthe bar was art nuveau, completely 1920s style. Rain ordered two glasses of absinthe and they each came with a spoon and a cube of sugar.
“There’s a ritual to this,” he told her.
She watched as he balanced the spoon across the glass and put the sugar cube on it, and then lit the sugar on fire and watched it fall into the glass.
“Now you can drink,” he said, pleased with himself.
They drank two glasses each of milky, sweet, green absinthe in this manner. Afterwards they were so drunk they could barely walk, but they did not hallucinate, as was the rumor about absinthe. Mattie asked Rain what he would do about Mahina. He shrugged.
“Most people hate their lives,” he said. “They don’t really live. They’re too afraid. I’m living. I’m here. Mahina is like me. She’s only 17. She’s a kid. But she’s already a model and she had the guts to go out with a foreigner who is 4 years older than her. She is an insanely jealous person, and she may lose me because of it. She still has growing up to do. I don’t know. We’re all walking a tightrope, aren’t we? Even you?”
She nodded in agreement. “But don’t you care what happens?” asked Mattie, mesmerized. ” Do you just live by your gut all the time? Sometimes I wish I could do that.” She said, almost to herself. Rain was silent.
When they finally got up to walk home, they encountered a wind stronger than either of them had felt the entire time they had been in Barcelona, but which was familiar to them both being from Southern California. It made them recall the Santa Anas.
It was a strange feeling, being halfway around the world, drinking absinthe in an art nuveau bar surrounded by gargoyles, everybody speaking a language so foreign it was like being in a parallel universe, and meanwhile feeling that familiar feeling of the Santa Ana winds. They had to tip forward as they pushed up Las Ramblas towards home.
“This is crazy!” Mattie yelled over the howling wind.
Rain stared at her. “You have to face the wind,” he said gravely.
“It’s impossible to walk!” Mattie shouted.
Rain took a deep breath and looked straight ahead. “You have to face the wind.”