"What are you doing?" she asks. "With your hair?"
My fingers have found their way to my head yet again. What fuck this is! I fear I'll never quite get away from the habit, no matter how far I run from it. Not even here in the south, Buenos Aires, not even here does my hair find solace. No rest for the wicked, they say. THere's pure treachery in my head then. Where am I?
I'm in an old theater that's not an old theater anymore, but there was a time. Maybe splendor, maybe magical performances graced this place years ago, but now it's a bookstore with a cafe on the stage and rows and rows of books where the audience used to be, and up on the high levels that I can see from here too. The curtains are still red and the trim still gold and the angels and gods and cherubs are still dancing on the great domed ceiling above the orchestra pit, the kid's section. Libros para niños.
But the magic's gone I think. Only a residue of what was is left now, they way the cold damp night clings to tree leaves in the mornings. That's if it's damp, and here in Buenos Aires there's always moisture in the air.
It rained blankets of water yesterday so that the cold soaked through my clothes on the way to the mystical flat on Ceretti for the Argentina v. Belgium game, and today's not much better. There's not much rain, but the wind's kicking and a fine mist is whipping around and I can feel moisture between my toes. This feels like Paris today.
"The weed loves this weather," Solange's friend had said yesterday. Between the two quarterfinal games that day we managed to smoke even more. From the vaporizer that I thought Solange had called a vibrator because it hums to life loudly every three minutes or so. from the blunt, from the joint, always smoking in that house. And mate with coca leaves. After a hamburger, they took me upstairs under the greenhouse roof to show me the plants. His plants, the farmer's the drummer's.
He grows OG Kush and Blue Dream and some pineapple hybrid from Hawaii. And he plays death metal drums like a man possessed. He's amazing. "Ready for a relapse?" he'd say and pass me a joint of heavy indica. It's strange to think that whatever I need here is provided for me. I fall into place without even trying to, like the heavens want me to write some more.
