"And what about me?"
"You... You my friend, es peligroso! Haha!" Fre turns to the Columbian girls and talks in Spanish to them, gesturing towards me, making a flatline with his hand.
I look at Guada. "Peligroso?"
"Dangerous," she smiles.
Fre screams back in, "You're dangerous, my man. I was telling them. You're so cool. Nothing effects you. Very in control. It's intimidating, man. You're swagger. No matter what happens." Flatline.
"Oh, stop it. I'm not dangerous." But the Columbians are looking at me now. So is Guauda, and so are the two Angolans. "I just don't get very emotional that's all. Control of one's emotions is a sign of maturity," I say very matter-of-factly. Maybe it's because I listen to so much fucking sad music all the time. Or the jazz. What I like to call good music.
Fre nods, "No doubt." Already he's more muted. Just slightly. He's a smart man, Fre, maybe the most articulate one I've ever met, being fluent in six languages. English, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, Italian, and of course Bantu, a tongue native to Angola. He likes to read books and cook good food and enjoys good music and quite obviously loves fucking futbol to death. A fanatic, he calls himself, but he's an intelligent fanatic. He likes poetry and sometimes he talks to Guada about Jorges Luis Borges, the Argentine writer. According to him, poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. Poetry remembers that it was first song. It was music.
*****
Winter's a good time for music. It's a hard season, and something like music can carry you through if it needs to. In Santa Cruz, we still had the festival bug from Europe, from the show in Nice and the Berlin forests. We wanted it still. We wanted the music. In the middle of October there was a festival on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was very appropriately named Treasure Island, this festival. Matty had gone the year before and convinced us to go. It didn't take much. Just the promise of grand music and haywire molly. The whole house was on board, and Max and Chase were driving up from Orange County for it, and Taylor and Dylan and Matt Swartz and Nikse were all going to because they lived in the city now. Tay and Dylan lived together in a nice quiet building out in the Richmond. Close to Ocean Beach so we stayed with them.
The usual mischief. Miss Molly as always. For Max Mike and I, the last outdoor concert we'd been to was in the summer in Southern France, and before that Berlin in the summer too, and LA and in the spring Indio. They were hot affairs, the lot of them, so we dressed according to that. But the seasons were turning, had turned already even to fall. To fall in San Francisco. It's not freezing, by any means. It's still California. But let's just say it wasn't fucking tank top weather in 2010. But that had been my wise decision. Max's too. Mike went with a t-shirt, just didn't bring a jacket, and he was chilly. It wasn't bad though. What we lacked in layers we more than made up for in drug use and dance sweat.
Through the day wasn't bad, but into the night we'd snake our ways to the center in the front. For the warmth. And we danced close on girls with the same ideas. Through Miike Snow, through Kruder, through Deadmau5 and LCD. And in the in between times, walking between stages, put a chill in the bone.
And then it started raining. Right through the middle of LCD Soundsystem, it started drizzling. Lighter than that, maybe misting. Whatever it was would melt, burn off before it touched the ground, or even our skin sometimes, if the drops were light enough.
