Night Report: El Regreso del Conde

My last night in Barcelona: There are only so many opportunities we get to live a life which feels never-ending.

On a whim I returned to Barcelona. I needed escape from the lonely frigid northeast, I needed to see the sea, there were miles and miles and miles between me and all the love I feel and I admit I am also in love with distraction. Exile excites me. Consider me a coward if you want: I went in glory, fully aware of my financial irresponsibility, but I had had enough of the boredom of the predictable, the reasonable, you don’t understand how it eviscerates you to look out the window and see a highway cutting through the skyline. The halo of my moon hidden by the Harlem River Drive. The steel was siphoning me away.

I emerged already exiled and in my travels I think I’ve found a place resembling my own private paradise: the east coast of Spain and all its Balearic beauty. Me and how many others, one wonders. Hubris, but how could I not — as soon as I stepped off the plane I smiled, lightly battered by the paw of Apollo, the brilliant sun changing the chemistry of me.

A week out and I still can’t quite articulate how stark the difference between my two seats of power. The green, the gold, the light, there isn’t a single thing missing in the East which I know would improve the West. Until you leave your home to step over mounds of trash, amble beneath scaffolding forgotten from years-ago-projects, avoid the gaze of the trigger-happy puffer jacket goons guarding the deli, stumble over the cracks in the sidewalk, and scowl over the D train’s estimated arrival in 11 minutes — you can’t understand why I teared up when I realized my room in Badalona boasted a balcony.

¿Why of this city out of all the cities? As I wander through its veins, I recognize that it isn’t immediately the history. And the language is just familiar enough that I’m functional but not comfortable. The public transportation works efficiently, but that isn’t special, rather it’s a unique flaw of American metropolis one could easily circumvent. What I fear I think is that I’ve both overstated and underexplained the importance of having the sea’s song under my nose. There is no water within me, only wind and blood of the earth, and like a true alchemist I seek perfection, to achieve some blessèd ratio of the elements to synthesize gold. And I believe too blindly my brand of being a man that doesn’t need the sun. The light is explicit here, it’s brilliant and it feels like an admirer's eye. I am so desperate, often such a fool, because above all else I love to be in love.

And I love to create who I am. Facts feel white. Greedy grotesque whiteness took my ancestry from me, and yours, and yours. So I take back from reality and forge new jackets with the thread of the Fates, Atropos-silk oversized in the style of vintage Armani, I drape myself in Lachesis’ jewels and name myself the new Count. Clotho witnesses me. This is how the bloodline survives, and not in the way of superiority or blue blood, namely the reversal of our genocide. Nevermind the death of the dynasty. Mythmaking is meaningmaking is metamorphozing, artistry is living which is a kind of making, and every day is a new choice to be.

I devoured my second city with my eyes during the day and I had cerveza y tapas in the afternoon and I served my role as esoteric advisor in the evenings. I couldn’t escape work nor did I want to. All through the nights I yearned. I smoked. I wandered. I did not sleep.

And of course, because I am El Conde, because every night is all there is, I spent my final night going out alone under the glow of the waxing gibbous Gemini moon.

Murky and mystical music followed me. The sounds of the mid-winter Mediterranean night: techno and drum and bass and breeze — though within me one would hear the crashing, cascading drums of the Al-Fatihah trio’s “Birth, Life, and Death”. I rode a rented bike over a bridge, through lines of lazy traffic, between paved parks and under shadows of palms. “Crazy man that listens to crazy jazz!” Everyone else is also nocturnal, I’m not alone in my madness. Stalks of palm trees stand and lean over us, swaying in the wind like our bodies in the breast of the black, accents rippling over our tongues, sazon in our pores. The streets are empty because everyone is dancing, no one asleep.

Within City Hall I found a quarter of the world. The basement of the city’s beating heart was packed with the throngs of the young, baggy pants and backwards baseball caps and sunglasses and just a few of us elders. No one wears on their face that they know the world is ending. And maybe they don’t know, it could be that no one else is running away from the empire like I am, I may be the only one covering the mouth from the haze of heavy black city smoke and faltering old imperial engine. Instead they exhale 2% tobacco on artificial mist all around me, they’re content to bounce to bass without lyrics. They’ve got their own problems I’m sure I don’t recognize or could barely pronounce. No matter how much practice I get I still stumble on my words, Spanish lags behind my enfranchised English, the bartender smirks and shakes her head and presses “USD” on the credit card machine without even asking if I’d prefer to pay in Euro.

It’s like they knew: no matter where I go, I’m never home. I love New York but I’m no longer in love with her. Feelings can change, beloved, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I can’t stand the humidity for long. I’m away from my full wardrobe, my clippers, my portrait artist, my best friends, my mother. I’m not whole. I’m seeking something in between the bodies, a sensation which no one can give me but must be hewn from the dark like salt from a stone.