For my sobrina, Samantha, the most innocent person I know.

– Todd Gilbert

Foreword

In the Spring of 1996, in an effort to forge a path of adventure and cultivate stories from life experience, I returned to Spain – specifically the Basque Country in the Pyrenees Mountains – to rid my life of conveniences and force myself to clear my head and find the peace to make a life-altering decision concerning my future. What I found was far from peaceful, but the result was clarity in many areas of life that I hadn’t considered. My mind was pushed to its limit as I struggled to communicate and express feelings to keep my sanity in an unfamiliar place.

Communicating, I found, is a human necessity. Without it you perish in mind and even body. A wet blanket of depression is the gun in your hand opposing a will to reach the light that shines faintly in the distance. The pilgrimage to that light was arduous, but I’m sure that I haven’t experienced anything more rewarding in my life since reaching it.

This isn’t a victory story, but a journey narrative that ends without full closure. To this day I struggle with what it all meant to me. My eyes are more open now, and even though it’s hard to put into words, I left Spain with a better understanding of life as it is, as I wish it was, and how I planned to make it my own.

Some months before I left the States to live in Ordizia my niece Samantha was born. She was the youngest person in my life at the time, and when I started writing my journal it occurred to me that a letter to her made the most sense. She was the best example of someone who could understand what I was going through. Her eyes were new, her heart was open, and she couldn’t effectively tell anyone how she felt about anything. Not only how she felt, but also what that feeling meant to her. We struggled through expressing ourselves together, even though she didn’t have the capacity to realize it at the time.

I kept a picture of a newborn Samantha taped next to my bed in the frigid, empty, echo-filled flat at the base of Txindoki, where I pushed through for six months hoping to demonstrate who I was and what I felt to those that surrounded me and coped with my disposition during the struggle.

I used my “letter to Samantha” along with memories I collected through pictures, notes, and other accounts to write this short story that provides a clearer picture of that time in my life. This is my humble version of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” – an account summarized later in life, as I was too immature when it happened to fully understand the weight of its meaning. 

PART ONE: A Blind Leap

How can you know what you’re capable of if you don’t embrace the unknown?

– Esmerelda Santiago

1

The train rumbled north out of Madrid toward Basque Country. There weren’t many people on board, but I kept myself from looking at any of them directly for fear that they might engage me in conversation. For the past few weeks I had been living on the couch of an old friend in Salamanca who was nice enough to take care of me while I did my job search. From the moment she met me at the train station it was evident that my language skills diminished during the previous few years in Auburn as I finished my American degree. A little less than two years removed from Spain and my semester abroad program in Salamanca was all it took for me to forget everything I learned.

The scenery started to shift as rolling foothills took the place of the capital city industry. I’d been to the Basque region only one time previously, in the summer of 1994 when I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, but other than the San Fermínes Festival I hadn’t had any real experience there.

The day before I jumped on the train I received a phone call from a man named Alberto Pérez in response to my flooding the country with letters requesting employment. Sr. Pérez worked as head of purchasing for Orkli, a manufacturing plant in the heart of the province of Gibuzkoa, and his phone call to Estrella’s apartment couldn’t have come at a better time. One more night in Salamanca trying to teach English in the streets to university students and bussing glasses in the bar nestled against the Plaza Mayor for money wouldn’t be enough to solve my financial woes; I was broke and would have to return home. But then came Sr. Pérez to the rescue.

My days in Pamplona during San Fermínes were an education in fear, endurance, and a touch of debauchery, but certainly didn’t leave me with any lingering cultural enlightenment about the Basques and their homeland. That was heading toward me on the rail just as fast as I bound for it – and I had no idea.

Sr. Pérez met me on the rail deck in Beasain, a neighboring town I learned was a touch larger than Ordizia. A short walk through one to get to the other, someone unfamiliar with the area might assume they’re one place.

The sun had set when the train grunted to a stop in Beasain. Through my window I studied a lone man dressed simply for the cold. Adorned with a jacket meant for weather fifteen degrees warmer than it was, a thin woven scarf wrapped twice around a neck that held a purposeful face with short, wavy, light brown hair – maybe a little red. Sr. Pérez was the only one on the deck, and after I collected my limited items and stepped off the train in front of him I realized that I was the only soul destined for Beasain that night.

I was extremely nervous. I’ve always been comfortable in my own skin and confident in my ability to perform up to par in situations I belonged, but I wasn’t 100% sure this was one of them. I was scared that I had misrepresented myself and that the no-nonsense man standing before me would see through it immediately. For this precise reason I had crafted a statement and practiced saying it over and over with Estrella’s guidance in perfect Castilian Spanish explaining that it had been some time since I’d been in Spain and to forgive me the time it may take to get used to using the language again. At that moment I couldn’t remember a word of it. There was no question that Sr. Pérez intimidated me from the beginning.

2

I sat silent at the dinner table surrounded by his small family, afraid to say much and trying to be as courteous within the confines of a foreign language as I could be without making a catastrophic and inexcusable blunder. The flat was small, which I was used to having lived with the García family in Salamanca, but you never get used to the feeling that you’re going to make too quick a move and knock something over. We were halfway through dinner and I still wasn’t sure where I would be spending the night or what his intentions were with me at all from a business standpoint. His son stared at me across the table with a puzzled face that I was likely mirroring right back at him.

Sr. Pérez’s wife stood and asked if anyone would like wine. Being polite, I offered up my desire to make things less awkward by agreeing to a glass. At the same moment I agreed to a glass Sr. Pérez waved his wife off and calmly dismissed the idea with the shortest Spanish statement I could think of that meant, “we don’t need wine”. His wife sat back down and I cowered a bit in my chair assuming I had crossed a line by accepting the offer. He had me upended with only a few words. I was in over my head.

After dinner, we said goodbye to his wife and son and I followed him back into the common hallway of the apartment complex and toward the elevators sheepishly, no more informed than I was when I was on the train by myself. In retrospect, I came to know that the business at hand was not the thing to discuss at the dinner table. The table was for family, and his was a family I would never see again after that night.

His home was on floor six, but he pressed the button for two once we were in the elevator. The door opened and he led me to an apartment door. He produced a key, unlocked the door, and handed the key to me.

“I’ll be here to get you at 7:30 am”, he said in flawless Spanish. He went on to give me a rundown of the apartment, which evidently was mine, and was gone in thirty seconds. I found myself on the inside of a closed door; the only thing more daunting than the silence was the darkness. I fumbled around blindly until I found the light switch.

3

Home sweet home…

The apartment that Sr. Pérez and the management at Orkli gifted me was larger than the apartment in Salamanca I lived in with a family of three and a second American roommate. And I was alone here, with only cold floors and echoes to trigger my senses.

There was no entry to speak of – only an oddly long hallway that ended with a right turn down another long hallway. This second hallway had options. The first left led to a furnished living area. There was a couch, a small table with one chair, and a lonely bookshelf whose only tenant was the world’s smallest television.

From the living area you could access the kitchen, which was also fully equipped – not “American” equipped, but “everywhere else in the world” equipped. There was a refrigerator that was small for a family but large for a college dorm room. There was a stove with four gas-fed eyes and a small nook table, again with one chair. There were two plates, two bowls, two coffee cups, two drinking glasses, and two of every piece of silverware. There was no dishwasher, no microwave, and no garbage disposal.

From the kitchen you could exit back into the hallway and continue down. The next option to the right was a small bathroom – the only one in the apartment. A sink, a toilet, and a shower.

The hallway ended with another right turn, but first, straight at the end was a furnished bedroom. If you took the short right, there was a second unfurnished room to the left.

My bedroom had a small desk with a lone chair to the left along the wall as you entered. On the right was a single bed with the traditional Spanish space-saving drawers below it. One pillow, a single sheet, and a thin wool blanket completed the ensemble. Built with the bed was a small bookshelf to the right as you lie down. At the foot of the bed, also along the right wall, was a small closet, which was more than enough to house the few things I was able to carry on my back from Salamanca.

I had no idea what to expect with the morning. I had a long day of travel, an awkward meal, and now I was alone in an apartment, which seemed impossibly empty, cold, and solemn. I put on the warmest thing I had and crawled into my new bed. Before I turned the light off to sleep, I wedged a picture of my newborn niece Samantha between the creases of my bed’s bookshelf. On the opposite side of that shelf I wedged a picture I had cut from the USA Today newspaper I was reading before I left the Atlanta airport a few weeks before. It was a picture of a newly discovered country singer that I found quite attractive. In my mind, she had the quintessential American “girl next door” look. She’d been with me, along with Samantha, the past few weeks. I didn’t want to forget what an American girl looked like during this break from my norm. Her name was Faith Hill.

~

That first night was a lonely one, and the frigid apartment became unbearable at some point during my attempted slumber. I hustled down the hallway and squatted down in front of the radiator to assess the situation. I was more familiar with the typical European heating system having lived in Salamanca so long, but it was still such an inexact method. I cursed the stupid thing under my breath and cranked the regulator up. I could feel the heat start to fill the coils. Satisfied, I shuffled back down the hallway to my bed.

4

The knock on my door came around 8:00 am. I had showered, dressed in clothes matching the dress code Sr. Pérez had given me, and sat for about an hour waiting nervously for him to come get me. He was wearing a thin, worn, light mustard sweater, a heavy coat, dark corduroy pants and held a dripping umbrella. I looked at the umbrella, one more thing I didn’t have, and in my best Spanish gave him a short acknowledgement that I understood it was raining, then made a gesture with my empty hand indicating my lack of one. He looked at me like I was crazy and we headed down the elevator.

The walk to Orkli, where I would be working for the next several months, was as awkward a voyage as I’ve ever experienced. I understood about half of what he was saying as he attempted to hold the umbrella over both of us. One thing I definitely caught was the moment he stated that he would bring me an umbrella. It was evident that he assumed I wasn’t capable of procuring one myself.

That morning was spent meeting everyone around my station, which was situated just next to Sr. Pérez’s desk. Facing me across a walkway was Anún, a middle-aged attractive lady with light blonde hair, red lipstick, and an unstoppable smile that put me at ease immediately. To her left (my right) was Mesonero, a short, balding, homunculus of a man that seemed to be perpetually on the phone, his brow forever huddled in a look of concern and confusion with whomever he was talking to. Next to Anún to my left was Vicente, a terrifying man who spent most of his day yelling, whether it was on the phone or in someone’s face. He had a salt and pepper beard that probably would have been solid black if it weren’t for hypertension. He would stare at me often with a distasteful “what are you doing here” look. Vicente scared me.

During a tour of the factory, Alberto, which he now insisted I call him, explained to me how he saw things working with me at Orkli. I would assist him with his duties as Director of Purchasing by communicating with the English-speaking suppliers. This ended up being all the European countries other than Spain, Italy, and France. Orkli manufactures components used in space heating, water heating, and plumbing systems, and parts are purchased from all over the world to complement the manufacturing process.

The apartment was owned by the company and would be part of my deal. This was quite a relief, because I was penniless. On top of that, Orkli would automatically deposit 90,000 pesetas every two weeks in an account they had already set up for me. This was roughly $600 in US currency. He handed me an ATM card and told me the pin number. I was shocked at this but tried to mask my surprise. I assumed this would be a volunteer job where my general expenses were covered, but after some quick calculations it came to me that I might actually be able to have a life here in Ordizia.

My first day was full of nervous energy, but I think I did pretty well. The degeneration of my language skills didn’t seem to be as noticeable as I thought it might. For this I was thankful, but certainly not out of the woods by any stretch.

5

My first day at Orkli initiated a relationship with Vicente’s administrative assistant, Aitor. Aitor and I, it seemed, were set up by Alberto to become friends. I think Alberto was looking out for me, trying to get me plugged into the local young adult scene the best he could.

Aitor and I hit it off right away, mainly because we were around the same age and he was as interested in American culture as I was in the Basque way of life. We met after work for a drink and some of his friends joined us. This was the beginning of a complicated web of social experiences the likes of which I haven’t experienced since. Aitor and his friends introduced me to the “Cuadrilla” – a group of lifelong friends in the Spanish culture.

As Americans, we are familiar with the concept of “goodbye”; small town Spanish youth for the most part isn’t. As small town Americans, we live our young lives with a group of friends for several years. If we never move, this could be a stretch of eighteen years or even more. College usually brings on an entirely different collection of people as our personalities are sculpted, and once we enter the general workforce and our single professional lives another group shows up. By the end of our lives there are so many changes that it’s hard to keep track of all the characters.

Spanish small town youths form “cuadrillas” and they stay together for life. Most Spanish towns will have a “Cuadrilla Day” where the small groups of friends make themed shirts and hit the town together. I’ve experienced this a few times and it’s pretty unreal. There will be collections of cuadrillas of all ages roaming the streets partying. Senior groups standing next to 20-something groups, all drinking, singing and dancing together.

After my first day at Orkli, Aitor walked me to Beasain, which was not only the larger of the two towns, but also the more active community. In a small bar in the town center, Aitor’s cuadrilla started to assemble as I met one after the other. In all, there were about five members.

Aitor collected a “bote” because it was his turn. A bote, in this case, is a pot of money. Each time they gather, one of them takes point to handle the bote. A denomination is decided on – $5 to $10 normally – and the person in charge collects it from each of the others. The point person then does all the ordering and paying. There’s no discussion as to whose drink might cost more. It’s simple and efficient. If they run out of money, another collection takes place.

Aitor’s friends were soft-spoken, sweet people. I felt comfortable with them and they went out of their way to make sure of it. No one in the group could speak English, but they enjoyed trying. And they enjoyed helping me with my Spanish. I also got a crash course in Basque, which they would drift into randomly in the middle of any of their conversations with each other. It was easy to tell when that happened because the two languages are vastly different. In fact, there’s no relationship between them at all. Another easy way to tell was the mere fact that I suddenly couldn’t understand a word. It was frustrating at times, but I got used to it.

~

I returned to my flat that night feeling accomplished. I survived my first day at Orkli without showing my hand too bad, I’d met a group of friends that welcomed my company, and I’d settled in to a now very warm and cozy apartment thanks to my middle of the night radiator adjustment. The foundation was set.     During my first few weeks in Ordizia I fell into a routine of sorts. I would go to work in the morning, spend a full day completing odd jobs for Alberto, either meet Aitor and his friends after work or go for a run through town, read, write, and go to bed. My language skills were slowly coming along, but there were still a lot of gaps that needed to be filled with knowledge and fluency. I hadn’t spoken a word of English, which was starting to wear on me. But all in all, things were going well. Then, one Saturday morning, there was a knock at my door.

6

I opened the door earlier than I needed to, after a long night out with the cuadrilla, to find Alberto standing there. He said something that I didn’t catch and walked past me into the foyer hall. I was uneasy about him just coming in without me inviting him, but technically it was his apartment more than mine. He continued to talk and walk as I followed him down the hallway. I tried to translate his words in my head, but having missed the beginning, I was lost. His destination was the radiator.

He squatted in front of my heat source, felt the heat in the coils, and turned the knob down. Now that I realized what his intentions were, it was easier to translate his ramblings. In a condescending way, he was explaining how a radiator works and the general concept of utilities and their costs like I was ten years old.

I experienced this type of talking down to when I lived with the family in Salamanca. In their culture, the men are taken care of by their parents until they marry, and the new wife takes over from there. He assumed that I was too immature to know anything about how life worked, and that I was being wasteful because of that ignorance. But something about this instance bothered me more than any one prior.

The flat got pretty cold that night, but the heater was still on, just fixed at a lower setting. It wasn’t as cold as that first night, but cold all the same.

On Monday morning I entered the office with my tail between my legs. I had reached a point with Alberto that I wanted to please him, and I felt that I blew that in a way. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since he left the flat.

My fears were confirmed. My frivolous ways were the talk of the plant. Not just the people in front of me day to day – Anún (whose motherly manner prompted me to start calling her Tia Anún), Vicente, Mesonero, and Alberto – but the random guys I would casually run into on the factory floor as well. Alberto was so interested in my day-to-day thoughts and actions that I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the radiator incident to himself. I absorbed continued ribbing throughout the day, but the real trouble came when I was unable to truly defend myself due to my lack of fluency with Spanish. Once their attitudes toward me, and Americans in general, mixed with the mental frustration I was enduring with my language skills, I started to get angry.

When I returned to the flat I marched straight down the hall and stood in front of the radiator. The apartment felt pretty cold at that moment, but my inability to defend myself with words meant I had to defend myself with actions. Another millimeter of force and the knob would have snapped and fallen to the floor as I turned the radiator off completely. That was the last time I touched that regulator. It was off and it stayed off.

I looked out my window as the sun set on the other side of Txindoki. The majestic mountain was covered in snow and the wind whipped around the tip, blurring the summit against the sky. It was quiet, and I was spooked by the prospect of facing another night like my first one. I walked down the hallway to my bedroom and assessed the situation.

I had warm clothes, which I separated from the others. I put on the thickest socks I had, a hooded “California Track and Field” sweatshirt I owned for some reason, and a pair of flannel pajama pants. That would be my bedtime attire for the foreseeable future.

Faced with this new stand I was taking, I knew the most important thing in my possession was my zero-degree sleeping bag. When I came to Spain on this journey I had no idea what would happen. I certainly never could have predicted that I would have my own apartment in the Basque Region. I could have just as easily ended up backpacking around until I ran out of money. I’d done it before and it was where I was headed had I not landed the gig with Orkli. For that reason I had my bag, my backpack, and even a tent. Two years prior I spent five nights making my way from the north end to the south end of Portugal, sleeping on beaches the whole trek. That trip’s accommodation plans were budget-related, but I did it without any gear. This time I was prepared.

I unraveled my bag and laid it across the bed. It was certainly up to the task of keeping me warm through the night. It was built for exposure. Outside of that bed, however, I knew things were about to get challenging.

I made dinner and watched some TV. All the channels were in Spanish except for two: a cartoon network and Turner Classic Movies. I watched a Humphrey Bogart movie and then the Flintstones. Sometime during an argument between Fred and Thelma was when I started to see my own breath.

The next morning was the first of many challenging mornings to come. My bag was zipped over my head with only my mouth visible to anyone that might walk in, and my back ached from having a limited range of motion through the night. When I unzipped the bag a rush of cold air consumed me and I quickly zipped it back in place over my face. Inside the bag it was toasty, almost sweaty. But outside was a different story. I’d never felt an interior space that cold before. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to waste. I had to be at work and I don’t think that me calling in and claiming sickness was really going to help me make any headway with the respect quotient I craved from my coworkers. I sucked it up and unzipped the bag.

Once I was in the bathroom and had the shower running I thought it might get better, but the water took too long to get hot. I stood there as long as I could take it and then ran back down the icy tile hallway to the bedroom and climbed back into the bag. I heard the water running and thought, “Now I’m wasting water”. That’s when it occurred to me that I could be more efficient. Why get out of the bag until it was necessary? I stood up with the bag sucked tight around me and hopped down the hallway back to the bathroom. Once inside, I shut the door and waited until the mirror started fogging with steam. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.

I showered, dried off in the steam filled room, returned to the security of my bag, and hopped back down the hallway to the bedroom. I actually got dressed inside the bag, stepped out, put on my shoes and jacket and headed out the door. It was early, but I didn’t care. I could add ‘arrives early’ to my list of things proven.

~

And so it went on. My nights were active with Aitor’s cuadrilla, my days were spent proving myself to a building filled with people that had a pre-conceived negative notion of Americans, and the hours in my flat were an exercise in frozen efficiency.

One afternoon as I walked through Beasain by myself, a guy walked toward me without averting his eyes. His face displayed an expression of recognition, which made me nervous – I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. He stopped me in my tracks.

“You’re the American,” he said with an air of assurance as if I wasn’t aware of that fact. I was used to that by now. Most people in the streets knew who I was just because I seemed so different. I was like an alien.

“I’m the American,” I concurred in Spanish.

“I love the U.S.,” he continued. “I’m planning to move there soon. To Miami Beach. Do you know Miami Beach?”

“I do,” I said with a smile. The guy was aggressively energetic, but I found it amusing in a way.

“My name is Jesús,” he said.

“I’m Todd, but you can call me Teo,” I answered. “I know it’s easier.” No one in Spain could say my name with any success because of the hard ending, and it was simple for me to revert to the Spanish nickname I’d acquired over the years.

“You and I are going to be great friends,” he went on.

Jesús was right, and it caused more turmoil than anything of a similar nature would have in his favorite country of America. For that reason, I never saw it coming.

PART TWO: A Cold Winter

Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb,

I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from,

Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer,

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

– Bob Dylan

7

The bloody bull gingerly stepped to the edge of the platform, its weight all the plank could handle as it bowed to a haunting creak that silenced the crowd. I treaded the crimson water just below the beast as it took its last steps in this world, its final shadow surrounding me. Its breath projected a rhythmic finality as the cadence slowed like a fading heartbeat. His eyes made one last look deep into my own, and he fell his final fall.

I woke up with a start. The violence of the nightmares was progressing. Even someone with no formal psychological training could diagnose what was happening to me: I was wrestling mental demons that were summoned by my inability to express myself. Not just to communicate, but to communicate deep thoughts and feelings. Opinions. These things, I began to realize, were necessities in the human experience. I was mentally frustrated, and it had reached a breaking point. The violent nightmares were only the beginning.

It was mid-February and I’d been a guest of the Basques for over a month. I’d perfected my morning frozen ballet, which included the innovation of never leaving my bag until I was inside the steam-filled bathroom. I could see my breath leave my body each night, but I would crawl into the bag and read before it became a problem. The bag really was my saving grace, but only in the physical realm. My mental state was another thing altogether.

I had plenty of social activity; Aitor’s cuadrilla kept me busy after work on most days and my new friend Jesús and his friends started to fill my late night schedule. I connected with Team Jesús quicker than I did Aitor’s group. We were from different worlds but our personalities gelled. It was an unprecedented admission to a second cuadrilla. There was still plenty of frustration though. Add alcohol to anything and things can get interesting. My language skills got exponentially better by injecting street experience, but I still struggled to truly connect emotionally. I continued to be a novelty to everyone around me.

Loneliness was the problem stated simply, but I had plenty of companionship. I just didn’t have any emotion. It was all work, partying, and laughter. No one really knew who I was; I was just “the American”, and I was there for everyone’s amusement.

The empty room next to mine now contained a fully pitched tent, which took up a lot of the floor space. On random nights, I opened the floor to ceiling doors in that room and slept in the tent bathing in the outside sounds. My apartment was situated next to the train route, and the noise soothed me. It was a way to escape the stillness. It was freezing outside, but with the heat off the open doors made little difference. The silence of the flat was deafening so the dark hour sounds of my barrio were welcomed and comforting.

Headaches came as often as the nightmares. They were different than any I’d ever experienced. Not migraine level, but somewhere in between. Often times I was nauseated with the pain and had to lie down. My mind was trying to break my body and vice versa, and my well-being was caught in the middle of the struggle.

The newest addition to my insanity was the conversations I had with myself in the mornings. During the time between the frigid bathroom environments and the steam-filled ones, I stared at myself in the mirror, fully donned in a hooded full-length sleeping bag, and started having conversations. I asked questions in English and answered them in Spanish. It became part of my daily routine. It was a teaching tool that I used unconsciously, and was really effective in helping me with my tenses and vocabulary. Every night we went out I would learn a new word or phrase and I started working these into my conversations using the mirror to practice before I showcased them in common interactions. It wasn’t premeditated though, and I never thought back on it until long after I left Spain. At the time, it was another trick to battle the loneliness.

8

Maite Ibáñez was her name. She was a member of my second cuadrilla and I was fond of her immediately. It wasn’t as much a physical attraction as a feeling of comfort. She made me laugh and had a way about her that lifted me from the depths I started to find myself in. When I started to suffer mentally, I became quiet and sunk into myself. I wasn’t quite there. Maite always picked up on this. She had a hard time navigating my accent – more than most anyway. For this reason she understood less of my spoken words than anyone else, but in a way she absorbed more. I could look at her, she would read my feelings, and would calmly manipulate the others to adjust their levels to accommodate my moods. It was remarkable really, and watching her do this became one of my pastimes.

Along with Maite, Jesús had four other people in his cuadrilla: Isa, Yoseba, Cristina, and Isa’s boyfriend whose name escapes me. Cristina, a cute, petite blonde, was Jesús’s girlfriend. I found it amusing that Jesús was fascinated by American culture and his girlfriend was one of the only blonde haired, blue-eyed girls in Spain. Isa had short, light brown hair that stylishly framed her face. She had big, bright eyes and smoked a cigarette like it was a sixth finger on her hand. Her boyfriend was a competitive cyclist and somewhat known in the area. Cycling was very popular across the Pyrenees region and many young Basque boys dreamed of burning through the Tour de France and its related circuits throughout their childhood. He had a small, toned frame with a buzzed haircut and glasses. Yoseba went cigarette for cigarette with Isa and was built for the bars. His head was shaved and his frame was effortlessly powerful. Redneck strong is what we would call it back home. But he liked his booze and his cigarettes, so anyone that he had a problem with could get away pretty easily. Jesús was tall, tan, and in good shape. His features were dark, with thick black eyebrows and a flattop black hairdo. His daily attire was as if America had thrown up all over him.

Maite had tanned skin and impossibly blue eyes. Her hair was dark, shoulder length and wavy. Her clothes were stylish but simple and she had a purpose to everything she said and did. She was like a big sister to me in a way, looking out to make sure that all comments remained fair and that my experience was a good one any minute we were together.

9

Basques were settled separately from the rest of the Spanish people, and their heritage is evident in both their lighter skin tone and the fact that having blue eyes isn’t uncommon. Many Basques think of themselves as superior to the Spanish populous and long for independence.

There is a radical sect of their people, like there is in most cultures (Ku Klux Klan, etc.), which uses violence to work toward this end. It seemed there were always kidnappings of public officials, car bombs, and aggressive demonstrations, but threats outnumbered actual injuries or deaths. They made a lot of noise but were focused in their demands and not really interested in hurting anyone. One afternoon I was walking in Donostia (San Sebastian to those other than Basques), a small town along the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain, when a car bomb detonated no more than twenty yards from me. It was loud and frightening, but there was no one in the car and seemed to be timed perfectly so that no one would get hurt. It was more smoke and fire than a Hollywood explosion, but scary all the same.

My only other ETA experience came one Saturday morning when I looked out the windows of my flat to see police cars and the La Guardia (Civil Guard) surrounding the building. There was a knock on my door and I opened it to see one of the guards asking to enter for a search. I didn’t really understand, but I had nothing to hide so I allowed him entry. It was obvious that he was looking for a person because he didn’t touch a thing. He just combed through the rooms and the closets. The next Monday at work, Alberto explained that a known ETA supporter, a woman, lived in the building with us. She was suspected as the getaway driver in the most recent kidnapping and they were hunting her. That was the last I heard of it.

The Basque culture afforded me one convenience, but my language skills weren’t good enough yet to take advantage of it. I looked Basque with my blue eyes. As long as I didn’t speak and I wasn’t in my new small town where everyone knew me, I could avoid the detection of being American – a quality with a negative connotation in a lot of European locales.

10

The explosion was deafening, intense, and threw me from my bed like I was a pebble. The heat sucked my bag around me as the air was drawn away before I could react. I writhed around desperately on the floor in a mass of melted material trying to free myself like a cocooned butterfly, but it wasn’t a miracle of nature. I was burning alive in a sea of flames and intense heat.

 I kicked free of the burning bag and quickly forced myself to a standing position. My room was engulfed in smoke and flames, however something about it wasn’t right. I assumed that gaining higher ground would hurt me temporarily as the smoke started to fill the room, but it actually became easier to breathe. It was then I noticed that the flames were coming from the ceiling reaching for the floor, and the smoke was gathering about my feet instead of the ceiling.

“ETA! They found the girl the Guardia was looking for and they killed her! She lives right above me,” I thought to myself.

There was no time to ponder this. I needed to get out of my flat to safety. But the flames were like nothing I’d seen.

Everything was backwards, which posed a unique conundrum. If I gained high ground I would run myself into the flames, but if I dropped to the floor my lungs would be consumed with toxins I wouldn’t walk away from. It was burn or suffocate. Why was the smoke falling and not rising?

I made a break for the door, ducking down as far as I could without ridding myself of available oxygen. It was consumed in fire but I had no choice. I gathered force, lowered my shoulder, and barreled through it like a bull.

The door exploded in a furious starburst of light with the weight of my volition, but the other side wasn’t the egress I’d imagined. Instead, I found myself freefalling into an abyss. My apartment was gone and my stomach pushed upward as I fell endlessly through a black blizzard. Cold, black darkness. Silence.

I woke with a shudder and a small scream. The nightmares were commonplace. I lived with them.    

~

March was approaching but the biting cold evenings refused to retreat, so I stayed true to my daily routine. Every day that I stood in my bag waiting for the shower’s steam to rush over me I would either stumble through my questions and answers with myself in the mirror or stand in silence thinking, in Spanish, what my day’s duties would involve. The want to please Alberto never receded as I refused to let him think of me as anything but worthy of what I was given – freezing or not.

Another thing I started to notice as the temperature in the bathroom reached a level of tolerance and I dropped the bag to the floor around my ankles was that I was starting to diminish physically. I had been running a lot, which kept me in shape, but combined with the amount of walking I did on a daily basis it was hard to take in as many calories as I was burning.

One morning at work I made my way across the factory floor to the receiving dock. The guys had a large scale they used to weigh freight – the only scale I was aware of in the country. The folks on the floor knew me well enough at that point that I stopped to joke with a few of them on my way, never lingering long enough for them to engage me to a point that I would get lost in the conversation. I kept it simple and continued moving.

Rafa, short for Rafael, was in charge of the loading dock during the normal day shift and he started yelling at me before I was within twenty yards of him. He was just one more that was fascinated that I was from the States and for some reason chose to be right here with him. One more that liked me, but didn’t understand me.

I asked him if I could use the scale and he stared me down with a confused look.

“For what?” he asked in Spanish.

“I’ve lost some weight since I got here and I want to know how much,” I replied, noticing that I thought a little less about the Spanish answer I spit out than normal. In fact, at that moment I couldn’t remember thinking about my answer at all. I hadn’t translated it to Spanish from English in my head before stating it. A bewildered smile graced my face as I stepped onto the scale.

“Setenta y séis,” reported Rafa.

“Seventy-six?” I shouted with a confused look that Rafa had no answer for. “What the hell?”

“Setenta y séis,” repeated Rafa not knowing what else to say.

I panicked for a second lost in thought.

“Kilos, Kilos,” Rafa explained pointing at the numbers on the scale. “No Libros.”

“Kilos,” I said under my breath with a hint of laughter – Americans have yet to grasp the metric system. It was still startling once I did the conversion in my head. I’d lost close to fifteen pounds.

I laughed with Rafa discussing my conversion mishap as well as general topics of the day. The conversation went on longer than it should have and I started worrying that Alberto was looking for me. I bid Rafa farewell and headed back to Purchasing.

As I walked, it occurred to me that my cracking up with Rafa was the longest conversation I’d had without using evasive tactics. We were simply talking and I wasn’t translating anything in my head. There wasn’t one thing he said that I didn’t understand. Maybe it was finally happening. Maybe I was finally making a breakthrough.

11

I wasn’t making a breakthrough – at least not a full breakthrough. Gaining comfort within a real conversation was certainly a positive change, but it only led to more frequent strife. My friends and coworkers sensed my language progression and engaged me more often. It seemed I was part of a non-stop series of conversations meant to test my skills. Every time one interaction ended another would begin. Multiple topics, different people, names, places, times, dates; it never ended. It was like juggling chainsaws on a unicycle, never having the luxury of averting you gaze or relaxing. It was the beginning of a brutal series of headaches.

The first one hit me during a weekend trip to the mountains with Aitor and Cuadrilla #1. We climbed a snowcapped Txindoki and then spent the night in a rustic cabin that belonged to one of their families.

The climb was actually a lot of fun. It’s not a technical climb, meaning the use of climbing gear and know-how, but more of a long hike. It’s 10,000 feet to the summit, and the snow makes for a labor-intensive day, but I won’t be writing any “scaling the North Face” adventure stories any time soon.

We took some great pictures that day, and all seemed right with the world until we reached the cabin. I was used to the group switching from Castellano to Basque midsentence, but now that I understood a lot more it was frustrating. Basque was beyond my reach – many scholars contend that it’s the most complex language in history. It’s taught only in the Basque country in an effort to keep it from extinction. Many of the purists in the area took pride in only speaking Basque. I appreciated their culture, but the language switch was like nails on a chalkboard to someone struggling to hang in on every conversation.

That afternoon we had a purist with us, so there was a lot more Basque spoken than anything else. He taught me how to play an ancient Basque instrument that had me hitting blocks of wood against other blocks of wood sending different tones through the hills and valleys that surrounded us. His instruction was in Basque, so basically a bunch of noise. The cryptic conversations around me wore me down mentally until I had to retire into a bunkroom in the cabin and lay down. It was the worst headache I’ve ever had. I laid there trying to relax and was overcome with the desire to leave, but I had grown accustom to relying on my cuadrillas for everything. I had no car, no sense of where I was geographically, and therefore no control. I nursed the headache and tried to maneuver my way through constant inquiries regarding my condition. Another ailment became clear as I missed Cuadrilla #2 and wanted to be in the streets with them moving from bar to bar as they most surely were. It was a smaller, less significant version of torture.

I was bad company that weekend. Even worse, from that instance I started to make excuses with Cuadrilla #1, opting for Cuadrilla #2 when given a choice. I never meant to hurt anyone, but feelings are fragile among these groups and there seemed to be no way around it. I often lied to save face, and was even caught a few times out with Maite and Isa after declining an invite from Aitor to go here or there. It made for a few awkward situations, but I built it up in my head to an unrealistic level. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was just more comfortable with one group than the other. In a normal life, this could be dealt with seamlessly, but in the microcosm that was my Spanish life it felt more significant.

~

It was indeed a cold winter. But all winters end, and the sun did shine on my face again. The sun brought more than a change in temperature; it brought a bit of hope to my lonely, frigid home, and something about the presence of hope brought a change in me.

The nightmares got worse before they ended, but they did end. The headaches intensified before they subsided, but they did subside. And there finally came a morning when I couldn’t see my breath. I climbed out of my bag and opened the storm blinds letting a bright new sun cast its light across my tiny room. Txindoki was brilliant in the distance as I turned and walked barefoot down the hallway, leaving the bag in a crumbled pile on my bedroom floor.

PART THREE: A Spring Awakening

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

~

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.

― Cynthia Occelli

12

A more brilliant sunlight finds its way through your windows on days when your mind is at peace. The world around you sheds a layer of worn skin and colors are bright and new like a spring bloom. For the first time the floors of my flat radiated warmth I hadn’t felt on any prior day I’d spent in Spain, including my days as a student in Salamanca when I was blinded by tender ignorance. In Salamanca, every day was blanketed with wine and song – an advantage you inevitably lose as the weight of responsibility slowly tips the scales in a direction unfamiliar to youthful eyes.

And so it happened to me on a day in April of 1996. The murky waters that flooded my everyday life in Ordizia cleared in what seemed to be an instant. An awakening of sorts I still don’t fully understand. The human brain is complex beyond our ability to grasp it, which seems contradictory; our brain isn’t evolved enough to fully understand itself.

I’ve never had a moment of clarity or visibility that matched what I felt on that day. It seemed to come from nowhere even though I knew it came from months and possibly years of a labored mental state. Your brain will finally break if you force it to. I sacrificed my mental stability in order to grow, but I wish I could say that I knew what I was doing. I certainly didn’t.

Everything that happened that day was doused with the fairy dust of my new superpower: the ability to communicate not just my thoughts, but also my feelings. It was with a more intense step that I walked across the factory floor and through the purchasing pit to my desk that morning. I was speaking to everyone who would listen and even caught myself understanding the humor of my foreign colleagues, a challenge that any bilingual person will tell you is one of the most difficult to overcome.

That day at work was my best by far, but it wasn’t until the sun set on the horizon and the sounds of the night rose and spread through the streets that my revelations fully blossomed.

Maite and Isa met me for an unforgettable night of roaming the Beasain streets, the liquid lubrication all that I needed to speak faster and understand all the night’s happenings without thinking. Not spending every moment translating all the words in my head left room for simple expression. I was able to look at Maite and Isa and tell them everything that I couldn’t get off my tongue in the months prior. I was ecstatic. Maite cradled my face in her hands at one point in the night and in a Spanish sentence unadjusted in vocabulary or speed of delivery to appease a less gifted speaker, said simply, “I love seeing you happy”. It was an elementary expression, but the weight of my understanding not just the words, but also the strength of her sentiment, seemed significant.

That night found its way to a blurry end, but not before my life in Spain was changed forever. The next few days continued with a similar flow, and it was that same week that I received the best news I’d gotten since I arrived. A letter from one of my best friends from home indicated that he and a friend wanted to stop through for a visit as they were making their way across Europe. It had been over three months since I’d seen an American or even spoken English to another human being other than a phone call to my parents every two weeks and the occasional phone call to suppliers in Germany that I had befriended over the phone at Orkli. I couldn’t wait to share my struggle and now my success with someone who actually knew me.

13

Waiting for the train to arrive that carried my friend and his traveling companion was excruciating. I was like a gossip-spitting teenager entrusted with a secret that was about to burst out of my mouth in an avalanche of words, phrases and nonsense. The last few days had been a new and enlightening experience for me. The culture, the environment, and the people no longer had a stranglehold on my psyche pushing me farther into darkness with every passing day. I was the transformed Grinch of Basque Country after meeting Cindy Lou Who. It was candy canes and sleigh bells at this point, and I was ready to show off my new town, my new friends, and my new talent.

As they stepped off the passenger car, I was taken back to my days riding the rails from country to country without a peseta to my name or a razor in my bag. They looked like I felt a week before. We hugged and it was the happiest I’d been in months.

They were well equipped for the journey they were on and appeared as seasoned travelers trying their best not to look American. My first thumbs up went to their luggage: backpacks ripe and ready for any bunking situation. I was impressed. It was only a few years before that I met two friends from college during a short stay in Amsterdam where they greeted me with rolling garment bags and collared shirts. They stared blankly in my direction as they took in the full scope of my unshaven, disheveled appearance. I was a man that had spent the last few nights sleeping on a cot above a live music bar in the Red Light District, worn down and beaten from weeks on the trail.

This meeting of friends was altogether different. They actually appeared to know what they were doing. They didn’t speak Spanish though, so I was as indispensible as I hoped I’d be. Plus, I had a kitchen.

We dropped their bags at the flat, they showered and cleaned up within twenty minutes, and we hit the streets. A huge meal was followed by the first bar of the afternoon. One by one, Cuadrilla #2 started trickling into the social scene. I led the two Americans from bar to bar picking up my Spanish brethren as we went. First Yoseba joined the wave, always early to darken the door of any drinking establishment. Next came Isa, then Maite. Jesús and Cristina followed suit somewhere in the haze of the night and I was in full translation mode.

It was a hyperactive assault on both languages. I was on fire. There wasn’t one thing said by either contingent that I couldn’t put through the autocorrect in my head and spit out in the object’s native tongue without hesitation. I never stopped talking in either language. Drinks flowed and smiles went from ear to ear as two cultures gelled.

I’m certain that to this day no accomplishment in my life has been more blatantly demonstrated than my Spanish was that night. I’m also certain that reaching every milestone since pales in comparison to what it took out of me to reach that moment. By the time my friends rolled away on a northbound train a few days later, I was a different person entirely – no longer The American, but The American Local.

I lost every battle in a war of words throughout those months except the final one. Staying out there to fight when I was so clearly beaten made all the difference. It was around this time that I found myself focused again on my initial objective, lost in the muck to this point: finding my life’s path.

As fitting an end as my overcoming of the language barrier seemed, the reality I came to face was that it only served as an opening to a world full of choices that had to be made. My experiences living abroad were simply a prelude to the opportunities that came with ambition and youth. Still having no clue as to how I wanted to move along with my life, the wind of my breakthrough stymied and my sails fell dormant. My departure was imminent and I really had nothing to return to. Depression cloaked me once again, but this time I could express my feelings to those I had let in. In the end, this made all the difference.

14

Looking back now at my final days in the Txindoki villages, I envy the younger me. I lived like a rock star once my personality wasn’t lost on the locals. I was still an exotic from a faraway land, but they finally saw me for who I was as a person and not as a crude microcosm of American culture.

I made the most of the few weeks I had remaining. My first move was to accept an invitation from my co-worker, Tia Anún, to join her and a few others in a Basque cooking class. It was such an odd feeling showing up without nerves and fully confident in my communication skills – basically it was a cooking class, but taught in a different language. I was relieved to find that even with unfamiliar cooking term usage I was able to follow along without a hitch. It was taught in Basque, but they translated everything to Castellano for my benefit. This was fine with me. I knew that I could study the rest of my life and never fully understand Basque.

The class reminded me of a sailing course I took instead of following the rest of my Salamanca friends around Europe during our Spring Break two years prior. They had their fun, but I chose to travel to Barcelona by train and join five Spanish strangers making their way along the Costa Brava in a small sailboat. My Spanish was decent at that point, but the added sailing vocabulary made for a rough few days. Other than nearly perishing in a brutal storm that had me curled up below deck with four inches of water sloshing our gear along the galley floor, it was a great experience.

The cooking class brought nothing but joy in my final days. It was there that I finally felt camaraderie with people I worked with.

On the social front, other than my long nights in the bars, satisfaction came on Tuesday nights in the local movie theater. Once spring started, Tuesday nights became movie night for all young people in town, which included both my cuadrillas. They played a reasonably recent American movie dubbed in Spanish, and I was there every Tuesday.

The strangest thing happened once the reels faded the screen black and the lights came on: people I didn’t know personally started to talk to me. There was something about the magic of Hollywood that drew them in, or perhaps it was a different confidence I had in my eyes that lowered the wall, but I was suddenly in play. For four weeks I held court in the center section of the Beasain Cinema answering questions about the United States, Americans and their customs, and why it was that it seemed everyone was shooting at each other at all times. What struck me was that they had no real context to know fantasy from reality. “Are there really rogue cops running around New York City dodging explosions and killing 5-6 people a day?” “Do you personally know Bruce Willis?”

I’ve never felt more like a celebrity than I did those four nights. I think I could probably handle it given the opportunity.

15

For my last weekend in Spain I traveled to Donostia, a picturesque water town on the Bay of Biscay that I visited a few times during my stint in Salamanca. Jesús and a few of his friends outside the cuadrilla were passing through there that weekend and I made plans to meet them one of the nights. Other than that, I planned a solo excursion. Maite, Isa, and anyone else I would have liked to spend that time with were unavailable, so I chose Donostia to say goodbye to Spain. Alone.

Traveling alone is a worthwhile measuring stick for a lot of things, but especially when it comes to knowledge of language. Buying train tickets, navigating stations, finding hostels, speaking to cab drivers, and just carrying a general “I know what I’m doing” awareness keeps you moving efficiently and safe. I wanted solitude that weekend, which seemed unlikely after so many weeks of fighting the longing for companionship and understanding. I knew I would find solace overlooking La Concha and the shores of Donostia.

I slept in a small, 2^nd floor room in the city center that overlooked a small alleyway filled with craftsmen peddling their wares. After a full night’s sleep I strolled down the alley on Saturday morning chatting with the people and examining their crafted products. I was looking for something to give my niece, Samantha, when the time was right that might commemorate the endurance I mustered in Spain and help pull focus to a unique, well-spent age of trial. I found a charm unique to the city, and bought it seeing that it was perfect. I then moved along through the corridor and out to La Concha, one of the most beautiful beaches in Europe.

I think that for everyone, in some way, the ocean inspires deep thinking. I assume its vastness pulls you inward and sheds light on the weight of the world around you. It makes you small. As I leaned against the wrought iron barrier with La Barandilla at my knees and peered out at the Bay of Biscay, that’s exactly how I felt.

The day before, during my final shift at Orkli, I was approached by one of the executives and proffered a six-month job doing marketing research for their possible expansion into the U.S. marketplace. It seemed to be a logical next step that would lead me into a career in international trade and possibly secure me a post with one of Orkli’s trade partners in New York City. It was logical, yes. But logical seemed boring to me, and I couldn’t shake that feeling. However, it was the only road marked at that point, and I’d reached an end to my wandering. I was in need of a direction.

I know it was in that moment, although subconsciously, that I decided to accept it. The only other thing on my calendar in the coming weeks was an appointment with a friend in Auburn who had been diligently taping every episode of Friends in anticipation of my return. Other than my picture of Faith Hill, now securely tucked in my journal, I harbored a love for Jennifer Aniston’s hair that would take precedence over any job post once I touched American soil.

16

That evening, I met Jesús and his friends in a loud club along the shore for a few drinks. Before saying goodbye and heading back to my rented room, a funny thing happened. Donostia is frequented by American students making their way to or from Spain – a way stop to destinations unknown. Loud bars on the water are like magnets to Americans, so when we encountered some I wasn’t surprised. Other than my friends from home sliding through Ordizia and Beasain, these were the first Americans I’d seen in several months, and of course, they were rude.

Not all Americans are rude in Europe, but a lot of them are. I certainly don’t condone it, but I do understand it. We live in an isolated state where many of the world’s standards call home. We expect everyone to speak English because most people do. That’s just one example.

These guys were about my age and behaving in a more raucous manner than the situation called for. They were being belligerent with the bartender and getting frustrated because he couldn’t understand what they were ordering. Their attempt at a solution was to order the same thing only louder. They were cursing loudly and being general idiots, I imagine because they assumed no one could understand them anyway.

Jesús decided to talk to them in his limited English and he did pretty well, although they snickered at his accent. Jesús, being so enamored with the American culture, didn’t notice anything derogatory about their attitudes. He kept laughing with them as they laughed at him. I kept silent, only speaking enough to introduce myself in a Spanish accent and pretending I was one of the many light-skinned, blue-eyed Basques.

Once I reached a level of intolerance, I followed them into the restroom. Standing shoulder to shoulder along the line of urinals doing the business we all are a slave to no matter what your country of origin, I allowed them to continue their drunken tirades of worthless rambling. Once in front of the sink, I stared deep into their reflected eyes and stated in perfect English, “You guys are behaving like imbeciles and the only reason I’m playing the part of a local out there is because I’m embarrassed to be tethered to you idiots.” I dried my hands and left without waiting for a reply. When they made their way back to the bar, they avoided our area all together. They never said another word to me.

17

It was at some point during the following week that I left Spain. I did my best to spend as much time with my friends as possible, but I found their attitudes toward my departure strange. It didn’t seem to resonate with them that my time there was over and that there would come an evening soon where I wouldn’t appear in the bars. Even with my newfound expressive abilities, I was unable to secure the sentiment I needed from them. I needed to feel missed before I was gone because deep down I knew that I would likely never see them again. If I couldn’t feel missed in their presence, I wouldn’t feel missed in their absence. I struggled mightily with this through the rest of my days in Spain.

The night before my departure I went out expecting a big final night with a mixture of both cuadrillas. After a few hours of barhopping alone, it was evident that my departure was an afterthought to everyone but me. It was a sad evening, and the alcohol didn’t help my depression. I didn’t understand why I was so ignored in those final hours and I was truly hurt. I walked home through the evening not wanting to be seen any longer.

Once I arrived at my flat, I sat down and wrote a letter in Spanish twice. One I would leave under Alberto’s door in the morning for Aitor to communicate to Cuadrilla #1 and the other I would leave for Maite to communicate to Cuadrilla #2.

As I wrote the letter, it occurred to me that the reason I wasn’t getting the somber reaction I needed from my friends could have been the fact that they had never in their lives had to say goodbye to anyone before. Not like this anyway. This was, by all predictions, a permanent goodbye. Emails, text messages, Facebook, cell phones…these were all futuristic concepts unavailable at that point for real communication. I would write letters of course, but how long would that last? This was a pure goodbye, an experience they had never endured. This cultural realization seemed significant to me, so I copied the same letter in both English and Spanish for the young eyes of my niece, who I hoped might one day follow in my footsteps.

The following morning I battened down the hatches of my flat and stuffed my worldly possessions into may frame pack. I broke down my tent and bid goodbye to the indoor campsite I created. I stood there looking at the empty room that had been a vacation home within my apartment and reminisced of the hours spent fighting a lonely madness. I seemed so far removed from that time that I had to laugh a little. It did help me in some way, so I allowed it a moment of reflection.

I rolled my sleeping bag and tightly secured it to my pack. I wasn’t denied heat, but I stubbornly denied it myself and that bag was the only thing that kept me alive as a result.

I tucked my handwritten calculation of “days endured” into my journal along with my Faith Hill picture and zipped it away with the rest of my belongings. Before shutting the door for the last time, I stood in the quiet hallway and reflected. I fought back tears as the months ran through my mind. The finality of it all was a hard thing to accept. I knew that at no point in my future would I be standing again in this moment – this stage of life that was filled with the excitement of the unknown. This apartment was the final weigh station from which my future began. Once you’re in that moment, there’s no going back. Decisions from there lead to others. There will always be choices, but your motion is perpetual. It wasn’t down the hallway of my Ordizia flat I was looking, but across a mid-life purgatory meant to force my next unavoidable step, and I knew that once the door closed, I would never be welcome on the other side of it again.

As it clicked shut, I heard the echo of the lock permeate through the empty rooms on the other side of the door.

18

The gate was latched and Maite’s family’s ice cream/pastry shop closed that morning when I stopped on my way to the train station. I had an hour to catch my train to Madrid and had left time in anticipation of seeing Maite, saying a proper goodbye, and giving her the letter I had written the night before. It was fitting, and comical in a way, that a misunderstanding of hours in my communication with Maite would be the cause of me never seeing her again.

I ripped the letter to Maite and the rest of Cuadrilla #2 from my journal, rolled it neatly, and wedged it in the latched gate for her to find. I gave the facade of Ibáñez one last look, then spun toward the train station and began my final walk through Beasain.

~

The train station was quiet and sparsely populated. I found a dark area along the Madrid-bound rail that matched my melancholy mood and dismounted my life’s belongings from my shoulders. I leaned on a support beam and settled with my back against the pack on the dirty station platform.

Over the two years I spent in and out of Europe, I gained a grand affection for train stations. They are the hearts of a traveler’s circulatory system placing every conceivable destination at your fingertips. I drank bottles of wine and broke bread with strangers on those platforms, changed the course of my direction with a coin flip, and even slept on their benches more than once. To this day I’ve never been to Copenhagen due to the last minute convincing of three Cuban girls in Salzburg, Austria for me to follow them to the beer gardens of Munich. We had quite a time in Germany, but I think I would have loved Copenhagen.

These thoughts clouded my mind as the southbound train clanged to a slow halt on the rail. I stood, stretched, and gathered my things to climb on board.

As I turned and lumbered forward, I was startled by the sudden panting presence of Maite and Isa blocking my path to the train. Between labored breaths, Isa struggled to light a cigarette before saying a word. Maite began by expressing her apology for missing me at Ibáñez and held up the letter I had left. She said a few simple words and hugged me. Isa followed suit between drags. I was lost in the emotions that had built up over the hours before and had yet to muster a response when Maite cradled my face in her hands as had become custom when she felt me hurting. She smiled, and in her eyes I saw recognition of hardship. Her hands were soft against my face as her head nodded slightly forward. After months of struggling to express myself audibly, a wordless understanding passed between us as she allowed me to go silently with closure.

I kissed them both on the cheek and lifted myself onto the train. As the car rumbled south, I stared out across the Pyrenees foothills for the last time, and in a culmination of mixed emotions, a tear fell into a solaced smile.

My job has dropped me innocently around celebrities in a lot of odd situations, but perhaps the most interesting story comes from my encounter with Lenny Kravitz, one of my first, and also the only one that warrants mention without the subject ever having spoken a word to me.

In the Spring of 1992, it occurred to me that following a green bird casually around backstage bordered on obsessive behavior, especially in this case, because it was important to me that I meet Lenny Kravitz; and who else would be walking around backstage wearing what looked like a lace curtain with a parakeet on her shoulder other than someone that was with him.

This was the puzzle piece I was looking for. It had to be. I’d only been living in Auburn about nine months, but I was an enthusiastic freshman from Indiana certain of one thing: this girl wasn’t a local. She could only be linked to one person, and that was the equally individualistic Lenny Kravitz, my white whale. That bird was my road map, and I wasn’t letting it out of my sight. She headed down one of the darkened side tunnels leading into the office areas under the bleachers, and I pursued – at a safe distance – straight down the rabbit hole.

I kept back as she rounded the corner in front of me and disappeared. Once I had a clear view of the corridor she continued down, she was gone. There were a plethora of doors on either side of the hallway and she could have open and closed any one of them. My once buoyed spirits sunk just as fast as they had risen. I chose a door and went inside.

It seemed to be some kind of utility room. A boiler room perhaps. Do those still exist? I was being lazy, which I normally despised, but I was a little down about my failure and needed to start coming up with an excuse story that would keep me in the good graces and acceptance of my latest crush: a girl that was older, and certainly established on campus and more popular than me. The entire week prior I had inflated my responsibilities with Auburn’s Major Entertainment Committee in conversations with her, exaggerating my access at these events. It was all going smoothly until I promised that getting her backstage to meet Lenny Kravitz wouldn’t be a problem. I swung for the fence on that one, and it seemed in that moment that I would crash and burn. And so goes the tale of the green parakeet…

I sat solemnly on a metal folding chair staring at the dull, eggshell white cinderblock walls around me. Suddenly, the opposite door opened and a colorfully dressed black man wearing shades and a Kangol hat stopped immediately and looked me over.

“I’m sorry,” I said, jumping out of my seat, still startled from the interruption. He was wearing bright red pants and a loosely fit silk shirt with a flyaway collar pointing to the tips of both his shoulders. He wasn’t Lenny Kravitz, but standing in a dilapidated arena in the middle of Alabama, he was obviously someone that knew him. I walked toward the opposite door and he stopped me.

“It’s cool man, hang out.”

I thanked him and sat back down. My new friend was carrying an odd array of objects. There was a guitar case, which he placed just in front of the only other chair in the room. It faced my direction a few feet to my right. There was a curious, water-stained cardboard box about the right size to house a bowling ball, which he placed on the seat of the chair. An electrical cord hung from his shoulder and he meticulously unwound it, as he seemed to study me through his shades. It was an odd, uncomfortable moment. He dragged the lead behind one of the furnace vents and disappeared for a few seconds, presumably to plug it in. He returned with an end of the cord in one hand and flipped the lid off the box with the other. He lifted out a small amplifier that looked like something you see in a neighborhood yard sale listed with five decreasing prices progressively marked out to prod a buyer. He set it on top of the furnace and plugged its power cord into the extension in his hand. He then maneuvered around the chair and opened the guitar case on the floor with one hand as he scooped the box with the other. It was like some kind of soundless, poetic ritual.

Just then, there was a shuffling noise that seemed to come from behind a furnace to my right.  I ignored it at first, assuming it came from outside and just seemed closer than it was. But then I felt a presence. The room suddenly became more crowded in my mind, like the feeling you get when you know someone is looking at you. Then there was another noise. I twisted to look in time to see one of the oddest three second visuals I’ve ever experienced.

The top of the furnace was eye-level from a standing position, so I only caught an upward-angled viewpoint of what looked like a deflated beach ball slowly bouncing across the surface toward its end and the now vacant chair to my right. My new friend, who had only at this point said a few words to me, stepped to the side clearing a path. My eyes switched back to the approaching object just in time to see it break away from the shelter of the furnace into the open, and at that moment I found that the ball was actually a wide, all-consuming hat, which corralled a wild bunch of dreadlocked hair belonging to a shaded and striking Lenny Kravitz. I didn’t move.

At the same moment Lenny reached the chair and sat down, my friend started adjusting the knobs on the amplifier, grabbed a cord from the guitar case, and plugged one end into the amp. Crack, crack, rattle, hum. Lenny lifted the guitar from the case and placed it in his lap as he settled himself and his hair into position, seemingly never taking his eyes off the stranger in front of him sitting open-mouthed in a metal chair. His audience.

“Are you a Led Zeppelin fan,” my old friend asked, snapping my mind back to reality and his attention.

“I am,” I answered, not exactly sure where that response would lead.

“Did you know that Lenny’s an avid collector of vintage music equipment?”

“I didn’t,” I replied, not forgetting how strange it was that Lenny was being referenced as if he weren’t present. He just stared in my direction, his eyes hidden behind blindfold-like sunglasses.

“We just purchased this amplifier last week and it arrived this morning,” he continued, noticing my interest as it peaked. “It’s the studio amp that Jimmy Page used during the early Led Zeppelin album work. It cost us twenty-five grand.”

I’m not sure what my face did at that point, but almost on cue as those last words fell from my friend’s mouth, Lenny smirked with an all-knowing understanding of what that would mean to a music lover. At the same moment, he glided his right hand down the strings of his axe letting loose a profound, nostalgic strum that echoed through the boiler room – the first sound from his new treasure. I sat back and watched as his head bowed down and started gliding back and forth, his dreads slapping either side of his face with a rhythm that accompanied the fresh amplified sound still reverberating through the room.

“Yeah…,” the sidekick whispered, lost in the moment as Lenny dove in without hesitation to the opening guitar riff of “Freedom Train”. I sat back in wonderment as his hands manipulated the instrument and his head and hair danced wildly in accompaniment. It was truly a magic moment.

He never did sing while I sat in that room. I never once heard his voice. But it was better that way, and served to focus all the energy on Jimmy Page’s amp, an iconic piece of nostalgia that seemed to be in pretty good hands as far as I could see.

There has been a lot of mystery surrounding the equipment Page used in the early years. That said, I have no idea if any of their amp story was true. I also don’t really care.

I never saw the green bird, the girl, the sidekick, Lenny, or Page’s amp again after I left that room mere minutes after I entered. I still failed my love interest, but the story, in my mind, was worth more.

Maybe that’s why I’m still single.

Monday, January 29, 2007

(6 Days to Kickoff)

I’m sitting in the first class cabin of a Delta 767 that I’ve probably been in before, which is an odd feeling. My stomach is filled with an uncomfortable mix of anticipation and stress. Super Bowl, after all, is the king of corporate events. There isn’t enough time to do it all, and nobody ever has. Even the most interesting and incomparable story on an average day seems almost trivial during Super Bowl week. You can almost hear two people’s voices from Detroit 12 months ago,

“I can’t believe that we just had a beer with Elton John!”

“That was Elton John? I agreed to go horseback riding later with him, and he told me his name was Eleanor. Forget about that, is that Dennis Hopper steering that riverboat?”

Not that I actually overheard that conversation, but I think you get my point. Anything can happen and usually does.

I look up from my book as the plane is loading and I’m shot back 8 years to the Hyatt Kauai and my first experience with the NFL on a personal level. I was having drinks at Sullivan’s Library, the world’s greatest hotel bar, when the NFL Player’s Association checked in to the hotel for the week. It was obvious something was going on; I think I felt the room list a little to the left when these guys walked through the door. After each drink I got a little closer trying to hear conversations and maybe work my way into the billiard rotation. That night I ended up playing chess with Robert Smith, who played for the Vikings for awhile, but more importantly for the Ohio State Buckeyes in the 80’s. He spent most of the night whipping my ass across the chess board and talking down about Auburn and the SEC. I wonder how he felt about that National Championship game (Ohio State losing to Florida in 2007).

I’d like to say that I’m taken back because I see Robert Smith coming through the jet way.  But I also met Shannon Sharpe during that trip to Kauai, and he’s staring right back at me now, 8 years later. I’m not going to bother him even though he’s right across the aisle from me. Shannon Sharpe doesn’t hold the celebrity that my readers are looking for. My nephew Chase is going to hate this decision.

Touchdown in Ft. Lauderdale, and I am following Shannon and his driver down the escalator and there she is…my driver. A girl from Samsung with a cowboy hat on and a sign that reads…wait a minute…not close enough yet. Perfect!

T. Gilbert~Hot Dog King 

Paparazzi is minimal. 

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

(5 Days to Kickoff)

Traffic couldn’t be worse. I’m running a golf tournament at Doral Resort and Spa on Friday and am on my way to the hotel to do a walkthrough. Upon my arrival I’m informed that the resort is a little crazy today because Jim Brown is hosting a celebrity golf tournament. Again, there couldn’t be more going on. Jim Brown…nothing irregular about that.

I get a call on my way out.  My new assignment is to go to South Beach and pick up “some” Super Bowl tickets. The next thing I know, I’m driving in bumper to bumper traffic with 80 Super Bowl tickets in the passenger seat.

My phone is ringing again and it’s a call I’ve been expecting. It’s my assignment for Friday Night’s “Player of the Year” dinner. Earlier, I received the final list of attendees for the dinner. The event is the biggest thing our team does during the week. Various sports and entertainment celebrities attend and the NFL Alumni Organization presents their “Player of the Year” awards. This year the hostess of the event is Samantha Harris from E! Entertainment and the co-host of “Dancing with the Stars”. This worries me a little because I’m confident that I’ll be enamored with her. Anyway, Todd Heap is the Tight End of the Year and I’m being told that I will be his handler. Basically this means that I will have to go up to his room and escort him down the red carpet to his seat in the dinner. I chuckle a little because he was my fantasy football tight end and I have a bone to pick with him: I finished in 5^th place. That reminds me, I owe several people a lot of money. If they only knew exactly where I was on I-95 rolling along at 2 miles an hour with my doors unlocked and $250,000 worth of Super Bowl tickets on the seat beside me.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

(4 Days to Kickoff)

It has started already. The no-sleep thing. Last night I was in bed at 3:30 AM and up this morning at 7. I decided to stay until Tuesday morning after the game to take advantage of Monday and the beach. I will probably sleep all day.

I plan to spend the entire day in our makeshift office inside the Hard Rock preparing for my golf tournament on Friday. I’m unbelievably stressed and need sleep. There are so many names, times, phone numbers, schedules, etc. racing through my head. I hate this part of the job.

I decide to walk around a little and settle for a few minutes at the hospitality desk in the Conference-Center foyer. I’m looking at my computer screen when I hear a faint voice announcing her name and that she needs to check in. The name sounds familiar but it isn’t until after I tell her she is in the wrong place that I really focus. I’m staring straight at Mrs. Cunningham from “Happy Days”. How strange is this? Marion Ross, alive and well. She actually looks really good. Maybe there’s been a little work done.

~

It’s late in the night now and we’re all still working. I get up to take another little walk and decide to go to the bathroom. Stefanie, a girl I work with, stops me in the hallway and we chat a little. She turns to walk away and as I turn the opposite way and start walking with my head down I run right into Prince. Now, Prince is about four-feet tall, so I’m surprised he didn’t hit the deck after even this small blow. I know that he is known for requesting that no one look at him, which is more than odd needless to say.  I wonder how he feels about being physically knocked down? He’s performing at Hard Rock Live tonight and in another example of random things happening at the Super Bowl, I was handed three tickets to his show. The face value of the tickets is $300 and they are on the front row on one side of the stage upper deck. The venue is small, so we’re talking close.

A few hours go by and we’re still working. The show has started and I’m starting to get nervous. I saw Prince at Atlanta’s Fox Theater about seven years ago and he was amazing. Such an unbelievable entertainer. It has come to a choice. If I am going to see any of this show, I have to go now. I lie and say that I am running to my room for something and I dash through the casino and to Hard Rock Live instead. Just as I cross the threshold, I hear those unforgettable words from the 80’s: “Dearly Beloved…we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” Perfect timing.  I stay for two songs and think about the days when a four-foot black man changed the face of music in “Purple Rain”. Two unused tickets are burning a hole in my pocket as I make my way back to the office. After a few more hours of work, I head up the elevator and prepare for another solid three hours of sleep.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

(3 Days to Kickoff)

Today’s a pretty important day for me. My main function at this event is serving as the tournament manager for the NFL Alumni Golf Tournament at Doral. Basically, current and ex-NFL players litter themselves across the Super Bowl Host City each year to get paid for appearances at parties, events, autograph sessions, and the like. This tournament is for a second client I have on site that has decided to entertain their customers with a golf tournament in which they have the opportunity to play with some NFL greats. All week I have been getting calls from various players and organizers either signing up or dropping out of this event. It’s a tumultuous carnival of changes and has been the source of my stress for the last few months.

Today I have packed a bag to last me two full days and nights and have bid a farewell to my room at the Hard Rock for at least the next 36 hours.

On my way down to Doral with Stefanie, who is assisting me with the set-up for tomorrow, I get the call that I had been hoping for. Actually, Stef gets the call. It seems that once the game tickets were sorted out and divided up among the attendees, there were a few left. They were given to her for the work she had put in throughout the year (much more than me seeing as her office is just down the road in Palm Beach), and she could give the 2^nd one to whomever she wanted. She just couldn’t sell it. Tempting, seeing as it could bring in several thousand dollars.

She hangs up the phone, looks at me, smiles and says “we’re going to the game…and this year we have seats.”

She was referring to last year’s frigid fiasco in Detroit…my first Super Bowl experience. We were working together there as well and although we were given credentials to be in the stadium to assist with a lot of what was going on internally, we were only able to access certain areas. We weren’t assigned to an actual seat which meant that we wouldn’t be seeing any of the game or ever find ourselves comfortable.

I refused that fate and climbed onto a railing to peer over various Seahawk and Steeler fans to see anything I could. That ended up vaulting me involuntarily into one of the most elaborate lies ever crafted. The architect was supermodel Niki Taylor.

20 minutes prior to climbing up that railing, Niki was standing in the concession line behind me getting a beer of all things. I recognized her and we started talking about how it seemed we were the only Seahawk fans in the entire area around our level (I was wearing a small Seattle pin on my shirt). We talked a little while longer about trivial things, she got her beer, saluted me with a “Cheers” gesture and moved on to her seat.

Now, I was a few rows behind her, balancing on a railing and trying to see over her 6-foot head.

The events that ultimately led to me having one of the best seats at Super Bowl XL in Detroit started with a jackass Steeler fan that had snuck into the box where Niki, her father, and a friend were sitting. He had situated himself in the seat right next to Mr. Taylor who was being very patient with the unruly fan. The guy was being obnoxious and on top of that didn’t belong there. People were getting annoyed by his barrage of shouted obscenities and his refusal to go back to his actual seat. When the guy said something rude in the direction of her dad, Niki lost it.

The first thing that was distracting was that she stood up, and she’s got a pretty intimidating stature. She gently pushed her father to the back of his seat and yelled something to this effect…

“Listen you little bastard. Nobody wants you here; you’re not supposed to be here and I’m getting the usher to haul you out of here.”

The guy looked up at her and said, “Lady, no one is sitting here. What does it matter if I’m here?”

Just then I noticed her catch a faint glimpse of me out of the corner of her eye. A chill ran down my back because, let’s face it, I wasn’t supposed to be here either. And then she pointed in my direction as she continued to stare him down. I froze…and she yelled.

“This is my best friend from high school, and because of your fat ass in this seat, he has nowhere to sit! He’s standing back here on this railing and the rest of us have to sit here listening to you. I haven’t seen him in years, and you’re in his seat! Now move!”

Then, she extended her hand and took mine ushering me over the rail. The guy tucked his tail between his legs, left, and the section started to applaud. Nervous that the oncoming usher was going to realize that I didn’t even have a ticket, I pleaded with her to let it go because I wasn’t supposed to be there either. She ignored me, moved her dad a seat down, slapped the seat next to her and said,

“I don’t care, you’re supposed to be here now.”

The rest of the game we all drank beers, rooted for the Hawks, and danced to the Rolling Stones at the half. I spent what seemed like an eternity talking to the guys around us about what Niki was like back in high school and recounting old stories that I simply made up on the fly. What did I care? I was sitting next to a supermodel at the Super Bowl, listening to the Rolling Stones with a beer in hand. Not a bad day.

I haven’t seen her since, but a few emails have gone back and forth. She is an avid motorcyclist and I have tried a few times to join her and Robin, her friend at the game, on a charity ride they do each year. Unfortunately it hasn’t worked out.

Friday, February 2, 2007

(2 Days to Kickoff)

Yesterday is sort of a blur. After a meeting at Doral, the site of my NFL Alumni Golf Tournament, Michele Skolnick comp’d me a room for the night and Stefanie and I got about an hour of sleep – she on a down feather bed and me on a five-foot sofa. Michele is an old friend in the hotel business that is currently stationed at Doral, lucky for me.

It’s 4:45 AM on Friday morning and my alarm is ringing incessantly.  Breakfast for the group starts at 6:00 AM and registration at 7:00 AM. The shotgun goes off at 8:00 AM. Lunch is at 12:30 PM, the NFL Parade of Legends and the awards show begins at 1:15 PM. I have a car waiting to take me back to the Hard Rock at 2:30 PM. In the back of the car is my suit for tonight. I’ll change in the car and be dumped off to work the red carpet. My Todd Heap assignment has changed about twenty times and now I am the floating celebrity escort. That always leads to random situations.

~

Errict Rhett is on the player list today and I’m looking forward to talking to him. He was Emmitt Smith’s back up at the University of Florida and he gave me a few fits while I was in school. I see him open the lunch room door just off the course and he comes right up to me.

“Thanks for everything,” he says, “I had a really good time.”

I ask him what years he played at UF to confirm and after the confirmation exclaim, “You bastard!” I feared him for a few years while I was at Auburn. “Yeah, but you got us,” he replied. Auburn beat #1 ranked Florida 2 years in a row during the 1993 and 1994 seasons. Errict Rhett was the running back in both of those games. He reminds me that the guys that played for Auburn at the time including Calvin Jackson and Frank Sanders, all went to Dillard High School. He informs me that those same guys did the “same damn thing” to him during the Florida State High School Football Championship Game. He couldn’t be a nicer guy. He takes my cell number, we take a picture, and I move on to the sedan that’s waiting for me.

~

I’m asleep in the back of a sedan and my suit is riding up all over my body. Golf went well, and I was given tons of compliments on the fluid registration, play and program. That always relieves you.

A faint noise outside the car becomes louder and louder until it demands a reaction. I slowly sit up, look out the window and witness a frenzy of lights, sounds and attitude. It seems that Henry, the driver, has pulled me up to the red carpet instead of the hotel’s front entrance. The door is opened by the valet just in time for me to scramble upright and throw my legs out without looking too foolish. It was insanity in its purest form. Cameras, screams, and it all ended abruptly when my face was focused on. You can hear the inner minds asking, “Who the hell is this guy?” I had a very brief moment of celebrity until I saw one of the girls we hired to help with escorting on the side of the stanchion ropes near the VIP make-up and staging area. We rented one of the bars in the outside mall to set up hair and make-up so everyone looks in tiptop shape on their way down the red wave of chaos.

Various sports and entertainment celebrities have already made their way into Hard Rock Live for the dinner so the paparazzi and fans are well primed. I’m in the staging area long enough to catch a quick glimpse of Lesley Visser getting freshened up. She’s one of my favorite regular attendees at these events. She was a pioneer for women in sports broadcasting and continues to be a force in the world of overall media. I believe I’m correct to say that she is the only woman ever to be inducted into the NFL Football Hall of Fame.

I met her last June in New York at the Four Seasons of Hope charity dinner at Tavern on the Green. She had a few too many margaritas and came weaving out of the show. I hustled over to her and she grabbed my arm to take advantage of an escort to the bathroom. She told me a great story about covering the Auburn-Alabama game in Birmingham back in the 80’s. She said that in the frenzy of an Auburn victory, she drove back to Auburn with David Housel, the Athletic Director at the time. They were so wrapped up in the moment that she packed up her camera crew and drove the 2 hours to join the fans in rolling Toomer’s Corner. I loved that story. She shouted a “War Eagle” in my direction as she got into her limo that evening in New York.

I walk back to the reception and catch my first glimpse of Samantha Harris, who is quite striking and cute at the same time. She looks like a million bucks. She will be m.c.’ing the event tonight. Her husband played college basketball at Ithaca in Upstate New York, which I know because I read it somewhere. They make a great couple.

I say a brief hello and prepare for what has become my first job of the evening: escorting Troy Aikman through the “back of the house” and into the pre-dinner reception. I’m excited because Jordan Bazant, Troy’s agent, will be with him. I met Jordan and his partners a few years ago now and we always have an opportunity to hang out a little when their clients are doing appearances. I can hear Troy speaking in the reception room so I sneak in and get myself ready. I shake a few hands and wait for my signal from Jordan.

~

The door forcefully opens wide and the light from a Fox TV camera blinds us as we exit. I’m on Troy’s right and Jordan’s on his left. We are whisked into the back of the house through 2 swinging catering doors and our parade to the dinner begins. To our surprise, the hotel staff has lined the back hallway to give Troy a quick ovation as he walks by. The scene is rather remarkable and if I stay a few inches ahead I find I can pretend that this circus is for me. The camera light is still lingering like a supernova over my shoulder and now Jordan starts handing him footballs. A pen appears in his hand as if it sprouted from beneath his tailored sleeve. I guess he’s done this enough to know never to be without a pen.  As we walk, Troy signs a ball and tosses a perfect spiral toward the hotel’s head chef who brings it down with a Franco Harris-like immaculate reception. What takes only about 30 seconds seems to go on forever as we rush along the camera-filled hallway with Troy hurling signed balls to and fro. At the end of the tunnel, a door opens and leads us directly onto the end of the Red Carpet and the gathered crowd I witnessed a little earlier goes crazy. It’s hard to feel sorry for the guy; a lot of people would give anything to live like this just once. I find a way to though. I’ve seen him step away from a crowd and just stand for a few seconds by himself staring at the ground. I always wonder what he’s thinking.

We make our way into the reception and I need a few minutes to rest. I feel like I’m going to pass out in the middle of this event. I make my way through the crowd, past security and toward the Green Room. Just outside the door I run into Samantha and her husband, Michael. This is the first chance I have gotten to meet him. We talk a little while she leaves us to go to the bathroom. He is an interesting guy but also very normal. Normal in a good way. When she returns, we make our way to the Green Room.

Inside the room there are several NFL Alumnus including Don Shula and Mike Singletary. Mike has been with us all week attending dinners and receptions. He looks like he could still play on Sunday and help the Bears out a bit. I briefly met Shula last year but didn’t strike up a conversation with him again fearing that my Auburn roots would become exposed. His son was recently fired from the University of Alabama and I’m not sure how he feels about my state as a result.

It’s quite humbling to see all these great players huddled together giggling and punching each other playfully as if they just left the schoolyard. I just stand next to Terry the bartender and keep quiet.

The room pretty much clears out just before the dinner starts and I’m left to chat with Terry. I have him pour me a drink and tell him to keep it hidden behind the bar. I’ll be back, and I feel like I may need it.

I make my way behind the main stage, through a black curtain and onto the fiasco of the dinner floor. A sea of people have gathered around the tables talking and mingling with players and celebrities. Just before dinner is served I catch a few pictures. One with an old friend from Happier Days and one with the Incredible Hulk.

I decide that I would rather watch the show from behind the stage and see the back of the house action rather than sit at one of the tables behind the production team. After taking another sip from my drink that Terry is hiding for me, I make my way from the Green Room and to the side of the stage. Presenters and award winners are being guided up the stairs in front of me. Samantha sits on a folding chair being briefed by the production crew. These shows really are interesting from this point of view. I watch a few presentations and then settle back into the Green Room.

Suddenly a frenzy of activity comes through the backstage door. Lights, cameras and an entourage come through followed by Nicolette Sheridan of “Desperate Housewives”. This is a little random. I never saw her name on any of our lists. Samantha comes through the door with quite a determined look on her face. I hear her explain to the B-Roll camera crew that they need to send all the Nicolette footage to “E!” by 8:00 AM on Monday morning to have it included in their Super Bowl summary.  This B-Roll camera crew belongs to the Hard Rock and they evidently will be taping an actual interview with Nicolette Sheridan for “E!”.  Samantha asks me if I would try to keep everyone out and quiet. Suddenly I’m standing behind the camera directing the very small crowd. The interview concludes without incident. As the room clears, Samantha hangs back for a quick drink before going back out on the stage. She makes a few jokes with Terry and me and then strikes a quick conversation about my role and where I’m from. She tells me that she would like to leave her agent’s number with me in the event I would ever like to bring her in for an appearance or another hosting gig. She doesn’t give it to me right there because, as she explains, “The last thing I need is for a B-Roll crew to capture me writing my phone number on a napkin at a bar and giving it to some unknown man in a suit”. That’s kind of funny I think.

She leaves and following a security guard, I make my way to Hank Williams Jr.’s tour bus just parked outside to ask them if we could have about 10 minutes of meet and greet for some of the Samsung executives. As I enter the bus, the first person I see is Kid Rock. Another unexpected encounter. He approaches me and introduces himself as Bobby. 2 girls emerge from the rear of the bus and a few things become crystal clear: 1) These girls are strippers, and 2) These girls are “Bobby’s” girlfriends. There are brief introductions and Hank appears. His manager is close behind. I get confirmation and I’m off as fast as I was on. I’m thinking to myself, “How do I end up on this bus after the show?”

Later, as the show starts, I slip out from behind the backstage curtain and make my way to the front of the stage. Hank wails away, Kid Rock joins him on stage and the show is actually quite entertaining. Marian Ross is actually still here. She is right beside me and we make a visual acknowledgement just before we start dancing a little. My surreal alarm goes off in my head once again as I bump hips with Mrs. Cunningham during “Family Tradition”. How many original hips does this lady have, and am I about to crack one of them?

I walk through the crowd and nod recognition here and there. I shake hands with Doug Flutie who is standing just next to…it can’t be. It is. Vanilla Ice.  Vanilla and I “rap” a little and I learn that he actually lives just down the road. He’s friends with Hank and Kid Rock and so we go backstage together to get a different look. He’s actually a really nice guy. I felt a little weird admitting to him that one of my high school girlfriends was in love with him and I split with her in a rage of jealousy. “Let me buy you a drink for that,” he concedes. I think he also asked me if she was here tonight. She would have liked to be.

Saturday, February 4

(1 Day to Super Bowl)

Last night was unbelievable and quite the pressure releaser. My official duties here in Miami are over and it’s time for me to enjoy and embrace the event that is the Super Bowl. After all, the Colts are playing and I’m from Indiana. Doesn’t it only make sense that I’m a fan because of geography? The only problem with that is that I’m not sure they were actually in Indianapolis when I was born. That’s something I’ll have to look up.

As I walk through the corridor leading to the lobby and my cup of Starbucks life, one of the doors to the elaborate pool area opens and the wind ushers in the smell of an open charbroil flame and cooking hamburgers. I make a fairly quick and abrupt right and let the sun and heat slowly drape over me.

Lying too close to the grill for it not to be intentional, I find Samantha and her husband Michael relaxing in a few of the deck chairs. She was truly an excellent hostess at the event last night and was intensely charming to boot. Michael was a little quieter but I was able to loosen him up a bit as the night wore on. I decide to sit next to them while I wait for my fix off the grill. Like me, her commitments are over. She admittedly is waiting for the Prince halftime show and nothing else. Prince…it’s entertaining to think about what he might be doing right now. We decide that will be our conversational topic for the next 10 minutes or so. Little does anyone know that his concert the other night came close to being cancelled as a result of my near full body take down outside the spa. We laugh.

~

It’s later in the day now and once again I’m handed tickets to an evening event that I have no business attending. This one reads “Ocean Drive Beach Party” and has a face value on the ticket of $1,500. Where do people get this kind of money? I am truly out of my league here. I spring to life a little as my head rests on the bus window heading into South Beach and fireworks start exploding to the right over the water. The traffic is unbearable, but I’m finished and I’m going to relax. I open the bottle of wine I snuck onto the bus and share a little with Stefanie.

Once the bus stops, we fight the rest of the way down Ocean Drive on foot. It looks like a snapshot of my 1995 Mardi Gras trip to New Orleans. I still think I might be the only person in history asked to leave a bar’s terrace because they were afraid I might actually fall off, but that’s a story for another time.

The crowd thins as we reach the beach and the security station. Once again I’m whisked through untouched and without question or waiting. These credentials I seem to find dangling from my neck on a daily basis sure do make these things seem a lot less impenetrable than they always have been in the past.

I hit the bar and then glance toward the stage which has been constructed on the beach. The entire area is fenced and no one from the outside can even catch a glimpse of what’s going on inside this VIP fortress. Only the pounding music and electricity make their way over the walls. The bars are giant ice blocks. And fireworks begin exploding over the water. To my left is the VVIP Island that has a separate security entrance, is railed off and lifted maybe 3 feet higher than the sand I’m balancing on. Along the perimeter of the fence are a few unmistakable characters. Hulk Hogan and his daughter Brooke are in a conversation with Scotty Pippen who looks pretty cozy with Nelly Furtado. I hadn’t heard they were an item, and maybe they’re not, but there she is and I’m having a hard time looking anywhere else. I just heard the other day that he was planning an NBA comeback. Carl Lewis passes across my line of sight and breaks my Furtado stare down. He’s moving a little slower than he was in the 92 Olympics, but I decide not to challenge him to a quick 100 across the beach. He says a quick hello to A-Rod on his way up the stairs and into the depth of celebrity central. My eyes are averted back toward the stage where Fergie is belting out a tune and gyrating as only she can do. Wait a minute…look at this girl with A-Rod. A-Rod and A-Bod.

A tap on my shoulder and suddenly I’m looking at Jon, one of the sports agents in a friend’s agency I have worked with a few times in the last couple of years. He introduces me to Nick Mangold, his client for the night. Nick is a mammoth offensive lineman for the Jets and is incessantly bugging Jon about leaving so they can get to the Penthouse Magazine party over at the Mansion on Collins. He asks me if I want to come along, and it’s tempting, but I just arrived here so I politely decline.

As they walk away there is some commotion around the stage. As my eyes adjust to the rising smoke and electric lightshow I am able to catch a glimpse of the new act on stage…J-Lo. The crowd goes nuts as she is joined by her husband, Marc Anthony. This shift in celebrity gears has brought some of the VVIPs down into the peon area. Tara Reid stumbles through the sand trying to convince the world she isn’t loser drunk and Tom Cruise graces the front left of the stage dancing with his latest contract wife trying to convince the world he’s heterosexual. This makes me laugh a little and I need another drink.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day so I decide after a few hours of partying on South Beach sand that it’s time for me to head back. My phone rings. Dallas Roberts, a family friend who finds himself in these circles more often than I do, is hanging on the other end.

“Am I getting correct information that you are in Miami?” he asks.

“That’s right, where are you?” I reply a little puzzled. I even give my perimeter a glance feeling I’m being watched.

“I’m in Miami on my way to the Playboy party in Ft. Lauderdale. Come meet me,” he offers.

I can’t do it. I’m exhausted, so I let that opportunity slip through my fingers like a lock of platinum blond hair slips through the hand of Hef himself.

Goodnight.

Super Bowl Sunday

~ 2007 ~

Miami, FL

An epic day…

The sun rises and I’m wide awake. If you’re a sports fan, this is the day. Super Bowl Sunday is the ultimate crescendo of the sports hurricane. There’s a buzz this morning that you can feel but not yet hear. I spring to life, shower, get dressed and into the chaos.

Although my job is officially over, my client is taking three buses into the mess and I have volunteered to help with that transfer. It’s the least I can do to pay them back for my end zone ticket.

I’m mesmerized by the activity along the entrance road to the stadium zone and my forehead is glued to the bus window like a child on his first day of school. The bus comes to a stop in front of a police barricade and our driver cracks his window. A flood of sounds avalanche through the opening and amp up everyone’s anticipation about 5 levels. As our driver argues with one of the police guards outside of the NFL Experience my phone vibrates in my hands. I look down to find a message from Dallas. He is on his way toward the stadium in a police escorted motorcade. I laugh to myself as I look around the crowded bus I’m on. Our driver wins the argument with the barricade guard, however, and the door to the football kingdom is slid open long enough for our chariot to pass. Dallas seems to be in another world right now, but I decide we’ll be able to find each other and make a plan.

My client has access to a tailgate party in a large circus tent that features a rotation of musical acts, a never ending buffet line, and a ton of NFL players you may or may not have ever heard of signing autographs and taking pictures. As I walk in only one thing floods my mind…beer. I have been so stressed the last few months getting ready for this trip that a beer might just set me free.

I look at Stef as I take my first drink and all we can do is smile. It’s a mixture of exhaustion, delirium and wonder as we take a look around on a daily basis at this unbelievable world that seems to exist on a different plane than the one most of us usually inhabit. It’s all pretty surreal and now I can finally enjoy it. My phone rings…it’s Dallas.

“Where are you?” he inquires, his voice somewhat muffled by sounds of furious activity.

“I’m under a giant white tent in the Coke Pavilion,” I explain. “That’s about as much as I know.”

“I think you’re right beside us. We’re in the Cadillac tent,” he returns.

I walk outside and through the security gate in the front of our tent. Dallas is right; the Cadillac tent is right beside me. This entire time we have been about 20 yards apart. I decide to test my “All Access Working Pass” even further and walk right through the security gate at Cadillac. I’m amazed as no one even bats an eye. I’m in.

The scene inside the Cadillac tent rivals that of the Coke Pavilion. I don’t see Dallas, but I do see a bar in every corner. That’s my cue. As I wiggle through the crowd toward the back of the tent, I notice an entourage of about 6 guys heading in my direction. The crowd seems to part in their wake which I envy a bit. As they pass me by I catch a brief glimpse of Nick Lachey in the middle of the pack. I could stand here and try to figure out exactly why he’s famous, but I don’t have the time. I need to find Dallas and make friends with the bartender now in my sights.

Just as I reach the bar I notice Paul Rudd standing to the right of it. We make eye contact and I see recognition in his face. Paul and I met briefly at Dallas’s 40th birthday surprise for his girlfriend Christine in New York City. Before I met him, I liked him. After learning that he is a down to earth guy, I love him. As I know that they’re friends, I assume that Paul and Dallas are together. I walk over to him and we reminisce a while about the surprise in New York. He explains that Dallas is around somewhere and then introduces me to 2 more of their friends. 1 beer down and thanks to Paul, 1 more on deck in my hand. This is starting to get good.

Once Dallas arrives, the five of us start talking at an alarming rate. I think that we’re all equally excited about the fact that we’re going to the Super Bowl and things couldn’t be more lined up in our favor. We’re drinking free booze, eating free food, littered with credentials and now, as I glance in front of us, 2 girls are gushing and on their way toward us. This is where hanging out with Paul Rudd is going to pay off.

Surprisingly, the girls don’t go right up to Paul. He’s been in several movies and let’s face it, he married Phoebe on “Friends”. Who’s been alive in the 90’s that wouldn’t recognize him for that alone? They don’t go right up to Dallas either, which could have also been a possibility. He gets recognized every once in awhile for parts he’s played in movies and TV shows. They address all of us together which threw me off a bit.

“Who are you guys? You guys are famous aren’t you? We recognize you,” they ramble in an embarrassing tone.

Without getting a straight answer from any of us, they just continue their line of questioning slowly starting to focus on Paul. Once the “Friends” association comes out, the floodgates open. They treat us all like we had been friends for years. We all take pictures and beer number three is popped. Dallas looks at me and says he wants to go outside for a cigarette. We tell the girls goodbye and move to the courtyard.

People must have noticed the pictures being taken just minutes ago on the inside because now people are coming at us left and right. Most of them recognize Paul specifically and a few people are talking to Dallas with some interest. The odd thing at this point is that people are also asking to have their picture taken with me. By association I assume, they think I am somebody worth showing their friends as well. It briefly enters my mind to set them straight but then that moronic idea shoots out of my head like a cannonball. I think the summit of the scene has to be the moment that a girl asks Paul to take a picture of her with me. “Say Superbowl!”

The time comes for us to make our way to the stadium so we grab some road beers and start the long walk into the mess. We’re running a little late so our pace quickens through various barricades and security lines. Our credentials seem to be the golden ticket as we hustle on without anyone questioning us. I start to notice people looking at us as we walk by and even hear some comments, mostly about Paul. It starts to get a little comedic as I take in the situation as a whole. We’re almost running now and people are noticing us in every direction. We all laugh at the various comments and Paul starts exclaiming, “I was in Anchorman people, we need to get through.” All of us are giggling uncontrollably now.

When we finally reach the security line for entrance to the stadium, our bags are checked and Dallas is stopped because he has a video camera in his bag. The security guard is refusing his entry with the camera and we all look at each other questioning what to do. Something comes over me and I decide once again to test my magic all access pass. I step forward and explain to the guard that we were unaware of the no video rule and that the car was too far to go back. I continue to explain that this is a VIP group as I point at Paul and that I have been assigned to escort them to their box in the stadium. I assure him that the camera will never be used. Put delicately, bs is rolling off my tongue like a waterfall. He takes another look at my credentials and at our group and then let’s us pass. Once we’re clear of the security area, I say goodbye to the guys and head toward my seat.

I’m in awe of my seat. Last year I had to sneak into a club level box and get pulled into a giant lie crafted by Niki Taylor which resulted in a very nice position flanked by a supermodel and her dad (this is another story completely). However, the seat was in the upper level. Right now, I’m looking over a railing right into the Colts’ entrance tunnel. Helmets are gathering beneath me like shining marbles of war. Beers are flowing freely now and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt happier or more at peace. The Air Force sends a fly over causing temporary deafness as I look over my right shoulder to give Samantha Harris and her husband Michael a quick acknowledgment. They are sitting directly behind me. We are all wearing trash bags as it has begun to sprinkle and we have prepared for the worst.

The last few days I’ve been working with Samantha, the current host of Dancing with the Stars, who hosted an award show on Friday night that I helped put on. I’ve never watched Dancing with the Stars, but know what it is, and I took to her immediately.

I quickly learn that it hardly matters who you are rooting for at the Super Bowl. About 1% of the attendees are there because they are actually fans of either team. Corporate fat cats have taken over the event much like The Masters at Augusta. Because of this, most everyone seems to be cheering for a good game no matter the result. As halftime approaches, people are getting excited to see Prince. Samantha has grabbed me more than once to make sure that I’m ready to dance during the Prince show. “My own personal Dancing with the Stars” is what I’m thinking.

It’s raining pretty hard at this point as I run up to get a few beers before the halftime show. I run into Michael on my way back down to the seats and he leans in to warn me that we’re going to lose Samantha after halftime because of the rain unless we think of something. I pause for a second letting that turn over in my head and then tell him that I’ll handle it. I retreat up to the concession level and grab another beer. Samantha doesn’t drink beer, but I figure I’ll give it a shot.

As I get back to our section, I notice that Michael is gone. Samantha’s standing there looking like a wet rat staring intently at the field which has become a circus of activity since the halftime buzzer rang a few minutes ago.

“This is for you and you don’t have a choice,” I tell her as I hand her the beer. “You and I are going to make a little wager.”

I continue to explain to her that at the end of the game we are going to add up the total score of both teams and that one of us is going to bet on that number being odd and the other even.

“What are the terms?” she asked.

I thought for a second and came up with a definitive answer. I was feeling the beers at this point and it never occurred to me that there was any chance in the world that I was going to lose this bet. In my mind, it was just a matter of coming up with something I could make her do that would make a good story. It wasn’t going to be money, that’s boring. It had to be something memorable.

“The winner gets to choose the song that the loser then has to sing to the entire casino bar back at the Hard Rock,” I stated without a hesitation.

“Done,” she returns.

~ Indianapolis 29 – Chicago 17 ~

As you have probably guessed, I took odd. I think I was caught up in the Prince show and jumping up and down singing with Samantha. I did keep her entertained. I did keep her there. I did do my job. But I lost the bet.

I think to myself, “She’ll be asleep before we get anywhere near that bar, so I’ll escape with a little dignity on this one.” There’s a feather in my cap.

Stef, Michael, Samantha and I all make our way through the exiting crowd when we pass a beer garden.

“Todd!” I hear Samantha exclaim. “I’m not going to make you sing back at the hotel.” I think my relief could be heard over the over served crowd in the garden. “Here’s as good a place as any.” Damn.

She lasers through the crowd to the front of the bar area and pulls up a bunch of chairs. Unfortunately for me, this looks like it’s really going to happen. She makes us all sit down as Stefanie goes up to the bar for beers. It’s almost as if this has been planned for days. Am I the only one who was convinced that I was going to win this bet?

With the star quality she possesses, she summons everyone in the immediate area to gather for a special performance.

“My friend Todd here has lost a bet with me tonight and to settle that debt he will be performing a song of my choosing for you this evening.”

She looks around at the crowd and then at me. The song hits her suddenly and like an evil genius she gives me one last devilish smirk.

“Tonight, Todd will be giving us his rendition of Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’.”

Monday, February 6 (The Day After)

I’m sitting at a bar next to the Hard Rock Hotel’s pool drinking a beer and thinking about yesterday’s activities when my phone rings. Looking at the number on the screen I know by the area code that it’s from L.A. but I didn’t recognize it. When I answer, a familiar voice speaks back to me. It’s Samantha Harris.

“Todd, how’s it going?” she asks.

Quickly dismissing the possibility that this is a call to inform me that she has decided that it’s over between her and Michael and it’s me that she wants, I go on with the conversation in a normal fashion.

“I’m doing alright I guess, kind of a long night.”

She asks me to do her a favor by following up with the camera crew from Friday night regarding the interview she conducted with Nicolette Sheridan. Evidently it never made it to the cutting room floor at E! Television. I promise her I will, we say a few parting words and we say goodbye.

I have my bags packed for my flight home and they are at my feet. I stare into my beer glass one last time and continue thinking of not only the events of yesterday, but the entire week. I pay my bill, collect my bags, and walk around the pool and into lobby area to check out. As the pool door slams behind me I see one last entourage heading for the elevators to my left. In the middle of the pack I see a beaming head of blonde hair. I heard through the hotel grapevine that Anna Nicole was checking in today. It must be her heading to her room. “It’s an odd time to check in,” I think to myself as her elevator opens and they all get in. The day after the Super Bowl? She was going to be in a suite just down the hall from the room I am checking out of. She seems to have really turned herself around, thin and seemingly clean for a change. Good for her.

Afterword

Several things have happened since this Super Bowl trip. My friend and fellow staff member, Stefanie, quit working for the firm that hired me to help with Super Bowl programs in both 2006 and 2007. Stefanie is currently working for the Breeder’s Cup planning and executing programs surrounding the Derby, The Preakness, and the Belmont. We have kept in touch and talk often.

I haven’t heard from Samantha in a while. She texted me last year to tell me that I would be hearing the news that she was pregnant. She also wanted to bet on the sex of the baby, which I now know I have also lost. She sent me a text around Christmas in 2007 to say happy holidays. I haven’t heard from her or seen her since. Her career has taken off as co-host of Dancing With The Stars and she’s doing fantastic I understand.

As I was leaving the Hard Rock, I passed close enough to Anna Nicole and her entourage to smell her perfume. She went in as I went out. That night she proceeded up to her room and never came out. An overdose of prescription drugs ended her tumultuous life that very night just 6 rooms down from the room I had been living in the past 7 nights.