At this point I had flown from St. Louis to Berlin and gone to Amsterdam and back to Berlin, to Bremen in the West of Germany, and flown from there to Girona, an hour north of Barcelona, taken a bus to Barcelona, a bus to Andorra to visit a friend teaching English there living in an apartment on top of a waterfall, and taken a bus with her back to Barcelona where we rented a car which we were in the process of driving to Granada. In Tarragona I first noticed the scratches on the car. It was after our first night there when we saw a band play inside what appeared to be an archeological excavation of the Roman ruins into which the club was built. I was already anxious because, when we hired the car at Barcelona Sans, as we were completing the transaction, the lady informed me that it was illegal for me to drive in Spain without a Spanish driver’s license, or at least a European one. This was something she was required to say, apparently, but we should be fine, she assured us. Also, I learned, in the next moment, the rate we had booked, which we happily could afford, included no form of insurance at all. That would cost more a day than the rental itself. I don’t remember the spanish word for liability, but I understood it in context. We were very liable, but we should be fine, she assured us. And from there we followed the directions up the stairs, outside, into the hotel and its elevator, up and out the hotel to the rooftop parking lot, assured that if we understood all that then maybe we weren’t doomed in some tragic parable about cross-cultural hubris. I was against the idea to begin with, I should say, as car rental strikes me as a kind of tax on the bourgeoisie that segregates them from the true traveler and fills the coffers of the owners of all the world’s most scenic parking lots. But then I thought about the open road, the window down, the radio on, and all that other bullshit. I would hear “Call Me Maybe” for the first time on that radio, driving through the andalusian countryside. Perhaps “Call Me Maybe” is its own kind of tax on the bourgeoisie. This is not intended to explicate “Call Me Maybe.” Moving on.
I had never driven in another country, in another language—so to speak—and I had never rented a car before, and I hadn’t even driven a car in months, much less a stick shift, much less in the middle of one of the biggest cities in a world. Much less in the five lane roundabout that one immediately finds traveling southwest from Barcelona Sans, but there I was, and there we were, off to the South of Spain, our destiny with the steering wheel, in my hands. Ten and two.
If I had rented a car before, especially without insurance, I would have checked the car for blemishes, scratches, dents, because, when I first noticed scratches on the backseat passenger door, a small dent on the driver’s door and another in the passenger door, I would have known that we had acquired them, they were our burden to carry, or if they were there to begin with, we had inherited the scars of a previous traveler’s burden. But I did not know when these signifiers of imperfection became a truth of this reality. There were windstorms both nights we were in Tarragona. There were, as there were in any town, idealistic youths who resented the visits of wealthy outsiders—another such tax on the bourgeoisie, a sort of psychological one on the owners of capitol. Graffiti. A voice for those can’t assert themselves through property. You may own this building, this car, this wall, but you don’t own this city.
Scratches, graffiti means in Italian. The language of the disenfranchised artist, using the physical world that does not support an artist class as the canvas. We will not be silenced, it says, even if all the world perceives is a dull scratching. We will be heard.
But no—this was a cruel joke on us: we were piecing our lives together with monies as threadbare as our worldwide reputations. We had funded our own brief rental car residency and it was to pay off with inspiration and creativity. We were to scratch in marks on to the rental car of the world and a decade of quasi-adulthood artistic toil would finally yield something other than the profitless schmaltz of personal satisfaction. But this was not intended. The thousand dollars I had left waiting in California for the third and final bocce tour, it was for the production of my work, it couldn’t go to these mystery graffiti produced by someone I had never met.
We googled “sleeping in your car” our last night in Tarragona and found the enthusiastic camel-riding avatar of The Perpetual Traveler who began the post, “If you can sleep in a car, you’ve gained an enormously valuable life skill.” We could thus have two productive travel days bookended by the comforts of a hostel and forgo paying one night’s lodging. The seeming discomfort of sleeping in a car, The Perpetual Traveler explained, “is mostly a problem of perception and adaptation.” This first post was mostly about the consciousness shift needed to pull off automotive shut eye, a second detailed where to put the car before attempting to sleep in—an integral first step. The idea of a “sleeping hat” is mentioned, and that “free sleeping is no excuse to avoid dental hygiene.” Also, “when you wake up you probably want to get in the driver’s seat and drive away as soon as possible.” Like most tips this last one was somehow both reassuring and really unsettling.
She had been reading Eileen Myles’ Inferno, a self-described Poet’s Novel detailing the poet and performance artist’s years of obscurity, her development of self, craft, confidence, the very novel we were reading, a chronicle of the ability to create feelings and stories with words, the absurd decision to devote yourself to that. She read it out loud to me as I drove. Like all road trips the fact that everything happens as you’re driving creates the illusion that everything happens in the car means more because it literally rides over a greater trajectory—it was not two hours before dawn, one before we’d arrive in Granada, and she was still asleep in the backseat as I listened to the history of an angel with whom I was unfamiliar. A simple narrative—we drove from here to there—carries a more complex and emotive one—this was it, I was traveling with my book inside me and I was sharing it with the world, I had quit the life I lived and placed all my stake in this, with the friend who quit the country and chose to be an artist ten years before in the moments and conversations in which I chose to be a writer. The car gives it literal momentum, meaning, even if it is standardized, the same for everyone, for safety reasons. We may not have discovered the Alhambra, but we found it eventually.
We improvised songs. We had conceived of a series of songs about the trip, a couple of which were recorded. After passing through Sax at dusk, its castle illuminated, and seeing several more lit up on top of a hill we wrote “Light Up My Castle,” before moving on to one of the same r & b-meets-folk genre: “Milk the Car.” The premise was that, when one had a car, everything else became extraneous, redundant: a watch, a music-playing device, temperature-controlling clothing, and, the piece de resistance of the number, a place to sleep. “We’re gonna milk the car tonight / ‘cause it’s all ours tonigh-ight.” It was the old bohemian dream that transfixed us a decade earlier, drugged us into choosing a variety of truth-flavored ephemera over money, comfort, etc: you can do everything with less money and it is precisely this means that will make experience real. How far this logic goes, of course, is uncertain. I definitely got by on less when I was twenty, but I don’t think I approached situations with the same mindfulness, or perhaps I have been brainwashed into thinking so by my comparative comfort. Discomfort does not equal truth, and a car seat is pretty fucking comfortable by design.
We arrived in Lorca around eight o’clock. We had a trunk full of bread, cheese, chocolate and a bottle of 5 euro cava. We found a pleasant parking lot and walked to an adjacent pleasantly-lit park. We ate like royalty with the 40-odd euro we saved and spent elsewhere, we strolled the Versailles-inspired paths like they were ours and then we walked back to the car, brushing our teeth at a drinking fountain on the way, peeing in well-trimmed verge, and tried to sleep in the car. It is possible to convince yourself of a false truth, but the sleight of hand can be so beautiful. You’re simply being read a story while you’re driving on a highway, distracted by the possibility that you are liable for someone else’s scratches.
I have a collection of important documents. Not diplomas or w2s or anything: drawings, receipts, scraps of various sizes. The Avis document I signed that October afternoon in Barcelona is one of them, as a reminder of sorts—of what?—not to worry so damn much? that I’m not fit for car rental? That everything was always already OK. It listed the name of the part of the car, the descripción of the blemish, and the cantidad. Aleta delantera izquierda / Rasguño / 1 ... Puerta delantera izquierda / Abollado / 1 ... Poetry to my ears scratch, dent, scratch, dent, scratch, scratch, ones that I hadn’t even noticed, right passenger door, back left door, they seemed to appear out of nowhere, a hallucination of one who suddenly possesses, convinced of his downfall before any noted evidence.
This piece of paper was always in the car, we needed it to remind us where and when to return it, to ask for gasoline sin plomo. It told us thanks for choosing Avis. Gracias por elegir Avis, but I failed to note the carefully detailed “Estado del vehículo,” choosing instead to hear her read Eileen Myles’ Inferno as we drove back from Granada descending from the Sierra Nevada, When I left Queens College and was just in New York I felt like I was in some tremendous vat and kept falling and falling, but that was life, wasn’t it. I wrote a poem called when you quit and it was about this dive into nothingness, to stop trying to be good not even bothering to go to graduate school and instead trying to do something. Not an outside thing. I couldn’t even explain this to myself. I just kept falling.
You should think about this
when you quit.
At least for now I feel I have stopped falling. But I still can’t quite explain it.
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