Camino Journal Day 18

April 17

It’s freezing in the morning in the hotel and pouring down rain outside. It’s around 5am and not a soul is stirring anywhere in the small coastal town of San Vicente de la Barquera. I lay in the bed, under my three layers of blankets and sheets and watch my breath condensate before my eyes with each exhale. Managing to roll a spliff without getting out from under the covers, I quickly dress in order to hang out the window and smoke it.

No one in my family checks up on me while I’m traveling, and this trip isn’t any different. I'd been out on the road again now for three weeks, and there was a bit of an empty feeling coming over me as I realized no amount of walking or any physical feat in this world could make my parents enjoy my company any more than they do. I can’t tell any more if it’s envy or jealousy, but they are incapable of showing any interest in my life, especially something they are not involved in.

Smoking my spliff and sipping on a Coke I had brought back to the room, I wondered if I walked around the entire world if my parents would finally admire me. Or if I had a million dollars and bought them houses and paid my dad back all his child support money. Then maybe they would love me. As alone and pointless as I was, a tourist at 5am in a coastal seaside town on the edge of winter, I was even more alone in my ideas of family. More alone when it came to contact with where I came from. Even the gulls slept on my sadness.

Why did I need parents anyway? Am I not already old enough to realize I don’t need them anymore? At what point am I supposed to start caring for them? I guess it didn’t matter. The divorce was so terrible, maybe neither of them will ever be able to love their children; children who represent their greatest mistakes. I wondered what my dad was doing. I hadn’t spoken to him more than a hand full of times since I was 15 years old. It had been since 2015 that we’d said a word to each other. Need-less-to-say, he’s not reaching out or anything.

I wished I could wash my hair, but without heat and now with the cold rain, I wasn’t sure when I would see some hot water and a hot room combined so that I could take care of my hair without catching cold. I brushed it out, did some hygiene maintenance and at 7 am headed back down to The Lewer for coffee and breakfast. I planned on eating a large lunch at there later in the day and would finally order a cachopo, which is sort of like a chicken fried steak, and a tradition in the Asturian/western-Cantabrian restaurants.

After a coffee and spliff, I headed back to the Hotel Big Light to prepare my pack and gather up all my things. It was a nice room. I wondered what my past self would say about me staying in this lush property just off the promenade. He’d probably call me a capitalist, or something ignorant, and definitely would have misspelled it. But was I a capitalist? Was I a communist, as suggested yesterday on the patio with the men at The Lewer. If I don’t want a king, and I don’t want the oligarchs, then I must be a commie. I thought about Bernie Sanders. A socialist? Am I a socialist? Words from Allen Ginsberg’s America rang in my head from the countless times I’d ingested him reading his poetry in voz alta. “Save the Spanish Loyalists,” he yells in a live reading of Howl just a couple decades after Franco took power and regularly murdered by firing squad any socialist, communists or loyalist.

The church overhead on the hillside was built back in the 13th century along with the small castle and the remains of the castle wall. The bridge leading into the city, with its 28 arches, was built by the Catholics in the 16th century. Again, I wonder what it would have been like to live during those long-ago times. And what of the before times. What was it like here before the church and before the bridges, before the Catholics and before the Fascists? Before the capitalists? Did it matter? The heating bill was breaking the bank of everyone around.

In my twenties, I was sure I was an anarchist atheist. Despite being problematic, I relished in Orwell’s writing of the anarchist in Homage to Catalonia assuming positions of political power, joining the government and being voted into office. What was their overall aim? I guess it doesn’t matter now, the fascists won, and communism is all but vanished from the peninsula. And anarchism? Just a fashion statement. These days harmless.

I finished my coffee and went back to the hotel to get my things together. I’d need to be out of there by 11am. Leaving my bag with the reception, I went back out into the city. I found a quiet bench and rolled a spliff. I checked my funds. I was definitely not a capitalist. Capitalists have capital to lend to governments and banks that help society grow. I didn’t lend, but I had some funds, so what was I? I had enough money to be a consumer. That’s all I’d ever be. Nothing I do shows otherwise. Even with my modest savings, here I am spending them on consumption. The capitalists have lent their money to the banks, who have lent it to the shop owners and real estate moguls, and they use that money to create goods and services, and I buy them with the money I make from my labor.

Even now with over 10k saved, it sits in my bank and does nothing but wait to be used up on future consumptions. I have to admit to myself I will be endlessly consuming for the rest of my life. It costs me a minimum of around $20K/year to live. My savings wouldn’t cover shit if I was to unexpectedly have to live on them for any length of time, and they were too small to invest and get any kind of meaningful return.

I was so grateful to be a musician. The only thing I’ve ever enjoyed enough to hold on to. The trade has at least provided me with a way to survive the basic needs of being human here on this planet, granted I’m still 90K in debt from living off student loans for the last 6 years of my college experience. 6 years seems too long, you say? Well, I’m what is known as a non-traditional student. It’s all covered in the pamphlets.

Back then, I could live on less than 10 thousand dollars a year. How did I do it? I just didn’t consume anything other than the basic necessities. Even then, I stole most of the food I ate and relied heavily on the generosity of other consumers who didn’t have enough to invest in anything but had enough surplus to give a little to the other. I was glad at least now I was no longer the dreaded other. No longer a sub-human, subnormal, bane on my fellow man. With my voice and breath alone, I had amassed enough wealth to not ask for anything any longer.

Sitting there watching the tide come in, filling those arches, I imagined horse drawn buggies coming across to go up to the church. I tried to feel what it was like to live before the automobiles and electric light. I wondered if I had re-incarnated. Had I been around on this planet before? Or was this just Jung’s collective conscious? Were my thoughts of a past life merely just another escape from my present situation, another denial of the absence and impossibility of my social mobility?

I tried to take some mental inventory and sort through some of the thoughts I was having about myself and my psyche. I realized I had some conflicting thoughts about myself, and that embracing Carl Jung, seemed to be alleviating some of these problems. I’d realized the monsters were actually personas that I’d created to help me survive this life-after-trauma. The trauma caused me to suppress certain aspects of my being deemed inferior or unwanted by the authority during my childhood and so instead of accepting those things about me, I attempted to cut them off. By cutting out pieces of myself I formed a hardened and suppressed version of myself which Jung calls the Shadow.

A doodle from the notebook

The inner child, Joey, who’d been showing me mind movies, is a discarded half of who I am. He sits in the shadows of my being and asserts himself when he can. But this getting to know him, getting to know me, it was something more than I’d experienced before. I realize that there are layers and layers and layers of personality traits and little monsters, or personas, who take on the day-to-day realities we all must face and protect our fragile little selves from completely breaking down.

From a capitalist’s point of view, this is great. You get maximum extraction of labor at peak performance periods of the body’s shelf life. If the laborer can survive until they are no longer able to aid in production, then they can work on their psyche and sense of self as a reward for a life’s service. But while they are able to work and aid in the means of production, the creation of a shadow self, although volatile and explosive in nature, generate more productivity on a whole, even in spite of the casualties, violent outbursts, sexual perversions, and corruption brought about by the shadow self. Without a shadow self to take the beatings and harbor true desires, attending work at a factory or office place for $400/week would be impossible for anyone. The human being can acustome itself to anything. Except for me, I think. Maybe I wasn’t even human. What I am?

But for some reason, Joey wouldn’t be beaten down. He kept expressing his desires. Although I was excellent at allowing myself to suffer for the benefit of others, a behavior that helped me make it through adolescence and gave me purpose in the face of senseless lack, with a respectable job as a teacher, responsible for the livelihood of over 100 students a year, I could no longer suppress my dissatisfaction at the “way things are”. The system of public bilingual education in Texas is problematic. As a teacher, I satisfied my personas and their shadow by giving up my life for the betterment of all. I realized my salary teaching 5th grade bilingual language arts would never be enough to buy a house, a nice car, pay off my student loans and live a quality life.

At the height of my teaching career, I made $3300/month take home. I worked over 70 hours a week. My rent was $1000, my car with insurance was another $600. My student loan payment was adjusted for my income and was around $700/month. Right there, before eating, I had only $1000 left. I took out another $200/month for a 401K I’d agreed to during the new teacher orientation, which was more like an exposé of useless services. Each vendor chipping away at that monthly check until as you leave you realize, you’re not going to have any money to go to the movies, to take a woman out to dinner, to start a life. I was blessed that I didn’t have any children or a wife to worry about. After getting signed up for some decent healthcare, I would have around $200 a month left over after covering food expenses. As a public educator, working in a low-income neighborhood, teaching bilingual education, I was expected to continue to live hand to mouth, and for how long?

You might think the $700 in student loans a month could be savings later, but you’d be wrong. The $700/month payment didn’t even begin to hit the principal. I’d be paying on these loans until they are forgiven after my service in the public sector. I had signed for 6% interest. There were now 13 of them, all showing on my credit report. Instead of it being just one account, one loan for the time I went to school, each dispersement is calculated as its own line item. I missed 3 months of payments during my transition year from undergrad to grad school while I was teaching English in Toledo, Spain. I wasn’t guided to call and take the forbearance and since my salary teaching English abroad would only be 1,100 euros a month, plus a place to live, I wouldn’t be able to start paying my loans back and so ignored them all together until they went back under in-school-deferment.

In those days, student loans as well as medical bills, didn’t reflect on your credit report, but now, for me, those 13 accounts all show up as having been 90 days delinquent at some time in their life. Even with my current income approaching, and sometimes surpassing, that of my teaching salary, the now ballooning 90K I owe, is also figured into my debt-to-income-ratio. No tendras una casa en tu puta vida. I remember seeing those stickers in the metros of Barcelona during my 2006 semester in college. I was only $24k in debt back then. I couldn’t understand what the Spanish youth were saying. I just assumed I’d easily get a house when I graduated. I mean, I was attending the University of Barcelona.

All of this was my first wake up call. The first time I realized I was just an actor in this big game. I was wearing a mask, a persona of a teacher of a helper, of someone respectable, and my city used it against me. My society had me convinced, student loan debt was the only way to social mobility. I graduated college with $70k in debt. I could have bought a small property and a vehicle for that, and still had some left over to start a business. I could have been autonomous. Education was always supposed to lead to autonomy and self-reliance, but I’d been sold a bill of raw goods, financing myself into debt before I’d ever earned a real dollar.

My last year teaching was in 2013. I realized that year if I couldn’t survive and live happily off of $3300/month, then this was not the career for me. I took my teacher mask off. I quit that persona. Maybe then was when I first started realizing how fucked up I am. It was hard to take. I put all my stuff in storage and went back to Spain to try and marry Hannah. But then that was just another persona mask. The Husband. I wanted to be someone’s husband and have children, but that was so long ago.

In 2019 I realized I was still wearing a residual mask of the teacher, which I’ve been calling the Helper Monster in these writings. I’d pretty much got the helper monster under control, and I think that is what allowed Joey to resurface. The Teacher and The Helper both served the same purpose; to give me some feeling of worth. I feel worthless. Like I’m not useful. Like there isn’t much for me to do here. There aren’t many people who desire the way I do. But these are only half-truths my psyche uses to justify wearing the mask of the persona and discounting the shadow self.

“I’m here. I’m always here.” Joey hears me wondering if he’s around. “That hash smells and tastes so good. It turned out to be kind of a nice day, huh?”

I noticed the rain had let up and there was a bit of warming sunshine pouring into the city through small openings in the clouds. San Vicente is truly charming to the look. The Picos de Europa loom largely toward the West, abrazando the small town in its bust. “Is talking to you crazy?” I asked Joey, not really meaning to or wanting to. I didn’t want to admit they all may have been right all these years, “Am I some kind of psychopath?”

“Well, if you were having this conversation out loud, then I’d have to say there would be some issues but talking to yourself is getting to know yourself. The very act of loving yourself and attempting to figure all this out is proof you’re not a psychopath. Psychopaths are incapable of feeling. They are incapable of empathy, but they can learn to display empathetic tendencies toward the other. Have you ruled out sociopath, yet?”

“My stepdad used to call me that.”

“And you’ve always had an aversion to hearing words you don’t want to hear and misunderstanding things you wish to misunderstand. You’ve never learned what the word means. Like when you use to hear “the straight and narrow” as “the straightened arrow”. Subtle, but very ingenius way of controlling your reality.”

“Am I sociopathic?" I googled some definitions really quick and referenced an online etymology dictionary for the origins of the root parts of the word. Socio- means dealing with the social. Pathic coming from Latin and Greek words, means to suffer. With empathy, the ‘pathy’ part was first used as a way to say “in feeling with” something. Rudolf Lotze coined the phrase in 1858.

“Another way you can prove you’re not a psychopath, is that you don’t appear completely normal,” Joey interrupts my iPhone research.

“You think I’m not normal? Are you saying psychopaths are normal? That’s funny.”

“Well, I can recall thousands of times we’ve been told we are not normal. And a defining characteristic of the psychopath is the appearance of normal. They can create whole lives and families and no one around them ever knows they are psychopath. We can’t even hold a job. I am you, after all. We are the same.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re me. You just seem so different from who I am.”

“Don’t avoid. You know you’re not really a quote/unquote normal person, right? And I don’t mean like you’re a superhero or have special abilities or you are a unique specimen. Like you’re really not normal, and you don’t have any problems letting people know how you feel. These traits are antithetical to the make-up of a psychopath. Psychopaths are quiet. They plan, they calculate, they assimilate and go unnoticed throughout their lives.”

“What’s a psychopath, anyway?” I ask getting back on Google. It spits out, “a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior”

A person suffering. That checks out, I think. Chronic mental disorder? Was that me?

“Be honest with yourself,” Joey encourages.

Yeah. that’s me. As far back as I can remember I’ve had a mental state that was definitely “out of order” or at least “not in the right order”. So yeah. That checks too. With abnormal or violent social behavior. Damn, I think. That checks too. I have abnormal behavior.

“Are you sure I’m not a psychopath?” I ask Joey

“Do you like to kill little animals? And watch them suffer?” He asks back.

Horrified by my own mind, I respond with disgust. I could never do that.

“Do you remember back in 4th grade. Some of the boys would go Frog Stomping in the trails and creeks,” I ask Joey.

“Oh yes. That was terrible. They invited us. I’m glad you didn’t go. Frog Stomping. What a past time.”

“They came into school that morning reeking of something so foul, their boots and jeans covered in black grime. Clay and Derrick claimed they stomped 100s of frogs in the creek by their bus stop. A particularly good morning for Frog Stomping, they kept saying. “And they got blue blood! Blue fucking blood” Clay kept going on. “I can’t believe they got blue blood.” Turns out the blue is from the copper,” I say, not knowing where that fact had been stored up for so long.

“That’s psychopathic,” Joey affirms.

“And how my brothers used to torture our pets, psychotic?” I ask in agreement with Joey

“Most definitely,” Joey continues quickly, “In 1885 the term began to be used in the criminal sense to describe a person without morals. Needlessly slaughtering hundreds of frogs while waiting on the school bus and experiencing joy, is not normal. We are not normal in a different way. Anti-social all the same, but not the same kind of not normal as those psychopaths.”

“I guess not-normal is better than subnormal.” I laughed to myself. What wealth I had come into. It was unbelievable to sit with a thousand-dollar phone connected to the world, literally all the knowledge of the known universe at my fingertips. I had money. If I ran out, I could sing and get more. I would be checking into the B&B in just another hour, long enough for another spliff and a canned Shandy. I closed my notebook and put my phone up.

At the small shop on the promenade, I bought two canned Shandy’s and went back to my bench. It had a nice feel. The tide was all the way out now. All the boats sat on the damp bottom of the exposed sea floor. The 28 arched bridged seemed needless in low tide, but also explained how such a beautiful structure was erected so long ago; they had 12 hours every day to work on it with little water around. I imagined the times before the bridge with travelers arriving to the banks of a high tide sea and having to camp the night before entering the city the following day. The bridge was likely a necessity to avoid needless robbery at so close a point to the safety of the castle.

“Sociopaths suffer from trauma and they have feelings. Many of them over-communicate in order to explain away threats, perceived and real,” Joey is going on again. He looks much larger. No longer a boy, but a teen. Someone who I could be friends with. An almost equal. He must be into his later teens now. I’ve fed him well. My conversation and attention helps him grow. I grow too and understand more of this world and the disorder of my mind.

“Sociopaths are impulsive, rude and brash. When they don’t like someone or something, they say it. This causes chaos in their social relationships,”

“That’s where the social suffering comes from. The definition sort of makes sense now. To suffer socially.” I say out loud.

“Right,” Joey continues, now with the vague outline of a mustache showing above his lip. “Better said, suffering due to society. And this suffering is linked to past trauma. The past trauma produces, let us use the word bad, behaviors that, although are helpful to keep us all intact as one psyche, are not really useful beyond that. If you were psychopathic, you’d have completed grad-school. You’d easily be a millionaire by now. You’d have been able to assimilate in that final stage you always fail at.”

He was right. At every big accomplishment or achievement, there was a wall at the end. I couldn’t get around it. I’d fall apart. The newness and hope and novelty of grad-school and what it meant to my identity, was worth the assimilative attitudes toward the program, and mine were genuine. It was when thing started to be uncomfortable and a process which the professors called professionalization began that I was unable to continue to pretend. To me, getting a Master’s Degree represented, first and foremost, a higher value to my student loan debt. I’d paid 70K for a BA and now, I’d get a MA for free. In my mind it made the debt more worth it. Secondly, I thought ignorantly, the higher levels of university were where decisions were made, where research was done and where I would begin to have influence over the world around me. I guess in a way, I imagined being a part of social change, policy change, civic duty, and a number of imaginary positions and workings that made up the way I thought the world worked.

I was so very excited to be a Teaching Fellow. It hit on all my cylinders. I’d be able to help while teaching the Freshman, I could help the staff by taking the early shift - the 7am class. I could further take on more loads by keeping long office hours and being where my peers, students and professors could find me. I’d go and visit my professors at their office hours regularly and we would begin to make the big talk and they would help me make my mark on the world, after all, they’d admitted me to the program. The title teaching fellow gave me a sense of importance within my family and a sense of superiority with my fellow man. The recognition of being admitted through a rigorous process furthered my delusions of importance and when my reality didn’t meet my expectations, I became absurd. If I’d have known the wisdom of Ray Wylie Hubbard back then, I might have been able to make it through, despite all these other factors. He says, “The days I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, those are good days.”

What I came to find was that I was in the middle of a war. There were so many battles around me. There was a new President of the University of Oregon coming in from out East, some kind of profit-motivated-capitalist who was gonna turn things around and use the endowment for what it was supposed to be used for. Everyone at Friendly Hall hoped for air-conditioning on the 4th floor where the tenure-track romance language professors held their main offices.

Richard Lariviere who spent 2009-2011 in his post, advocated for privatization of the university through his New Partnership plan, claiming the connection with the state was a burden on both parties and hindered the possible growth of the school and limited its potential of becoming a university like those of Harvard and Yale. This was the beginning of the Ivy League of the West coast. I mean, those Californian kids have to go somewhere, right? When the University of Oregon originally opened in 1876 it was a tuition free university. There’s a monument stating such at one of the main entrances to the campus grounds.

“Remember,” Joey pipes back up, “You scheduled a meeting with that guy. That’s probably why you blew it. Got the heat brought down from above. Self Sabotage.”

“He asked me if they were treating us alright over there in Friendly Hall and I said, “No.” My first complaints were regurgitated logistical stuff that the entire staff complained about regularly. No elevator in the building. Lack of air conditioning, rotting walls, tight and cramped spaces and large communal offices with all 60 graduate students sharing space to hold office hours. These all seemed like valid concerns, and he nodded along sitting a couple seats away from me on a large 16 seated wood table varnished with a shine that mimicked the president’s bald head.”

“And how are you doing? Grade’s good?” he asked.

“I’m struggling a little now that I’m in grad school, but still keeping a 3.8.” I replied.

“Well, anything else on your mind?”

“Yes, I don’t think it’s fair that the Language director is allowed to sell his textbook to the Freshman and Sophomores mandatorily. I’ve heard this is known as a “University Kick-Back.” I’d love to know ways I can help find better textbooks, or to make textbooks written by faculty free of charge to students attending the university where the book was written and published.”

The air of the meeting changed. Lariviere’s head went cockeyed, and a stare of bewilderment came over him. His fixed eyes seemed to scream in rage, “Is this kid fucking with me, right now?”

“Well, Joseph, I want to let you know that we are being recorded right now. With audio and video, so anything we discuss here is captured. What you’ve just brought up is very interesting and could quite possibly be concerning. However, I have faith that the department has sought out better texts and that the one you are using now is the best choice regardless of author.”

I interrupt, “But there is a new edition every two years. This keeps the cost of the book up to $160 with no used alternative.”

“Joseph, you will learn as you move along in this world, listening is a skill that can serve you in so many ways. Not merely to learn what someone else has to say, but to show respect and portray your position in this world. As you grow older, you will find being quiet in the presence of those who hold the power will aid you much more than spouting off your ideas with such hasty deliberation.” I breathe to speak, but the president cuts me off again,

“You’re on scholarship, no? And are you a member of the student union? The teachers Union I mean.” he doesn’t let me answer, “Well, you have to be in this state, anyway. You might find some people over there to bite on your little crusade, but what I advise you to do is, close your mouth, open your eyes, take lots of notes and try to attend every minute of office hours available to you to learn what you have missed along the way, because, Mr. Savage, unbeknownst to you, you have a lot to learn. You’re dismissed.”

His cold, regularly lotioned hand slipped into mine as we departed with a displayed handshake for his secretary who now was holding the door for me to leave.

I didn’t know what to think. Had he helped me? Had I said something wrong? Had I done something out of the ordinary? Looking back, I can see so many flaws. I can see how I sealed my fate. His suggestion to spend every moment I could in the office hours was a death sentence. Those professors didn’t want to deal with me outside of class. I quickly learned most of them didn’t even show up to office hours, students of all levels had long abandoned them all together. I’d sit in the hall and tally in my notebook the times they professors never showed up. It was another layer of the veil pulled back. The system wasn’t real. Nobody cared. I was to accept I was being admitted into the upper echelons of society, but was to make no fuss about the revelatory experience of seeing for the first time behind the curtain.

I tried to back track over the course of the third trimester, but was outdone by myself and inability to assimilate, as a psycho would have. I withdrew before grades came out. I guess it feels better to know who you are a little bit. Realizing I had an anti-social disorder and that I had so much stuff to unpack felt good in a way. It was a new weight to bare, but lighter than anything I’d carried before. I grabbed my pack from the Hotel Big Light and kindly gave my regards to the receptionist, who had now warmed up to me a little. The sun was out, but it was overcast, and I used the time to get to the B&B right at check-in time.

After the 2 mile walk to the more residential part of the city, there was no one there to greet me. I sat and smoked and drank a Coke from the vending machine outside the receptionist office. Still, no one around. I sat there 30 minutes or so then called the booking customer service line. They’d already charged my card, and so would have to start the process of verifying there was no one to check me in if there was going to be a cancelation fee. That took another 30 minutes and finally when Booking.com told me I could abandon the reservation without penalty, I decided to head over to the pilgrims albergue and just get going out of town in the morning.

The albergue was back over by the old church and when I got there, there was a man so happily sweeping the floors.

“Pilgrim! Welcome! Welcome pilgrim. Come in! Come in. So glad to see you. Will you be staying here with us tonight?” he asks letting the broom lean in the corner and approaching me with open arms to take my pack from me.

“Sit! Sit. Please sit. Here is a bench. Remove your boots. I’ll set your bag here and we can get your checked in. I’ll go for the receptionist now. Wait here.” He starts to walk away but continues on, “So nice to see you. You will love this place. Where did you start your walk,” he stops going after the receptionist and waits for my reply.

“In Irun. I started April 2nd.”

“Oh wow! Irun. That’s far. And you have almost 3 weeks now on the Camino. That’s spectacular. I’ll be back in a moment.”

He disappears around the corner, and I continue to remove my boots. This isn’t so bad, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t have to pay the 30 bucks for the B&B and I would also get to meet some new pilgrims staying here. I was feeling good about the way things work out. I might even be able to pay as little as 5-euro donation if they are a donativo.

The Lewer with my video of Offspring’s Self Esteem on the TV.

When the man comes back, he’s brought a woman with him, who upon seeing me, crouches low to be eye level with me sitting, and quickly approaches me wagging her finger at my face, “You! You are no pilgrim. What are you doing here?” she asks accusingly and to my surprise. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“I’m a pilgrim,” I say calmly. “I started in Irun, 17 days ago. I’ve been walking to here. I have my credentials. Let me get them for you.” I reach for my pack.

“No. I saw you. You’re not a pilgrim.” she says before I could get my credential from my pack.

“What do you mean, you saw me. Where did you see me?” I ask, now with a higher pitched sense of frustration coming on.

“I saw you in the fucking doorway to my house,” she says vaguely, but with a death-stare that I should know what she’s talking about. By now the man who was sweeping is staring at me in disbelief and another older man has come out from the back and is watching this all go down. They are both trying to figure out what the woman is accusing me of as well and I quickly retort,

“At your door? Well, what was I doing at your door?”

“You were walking by.”

“Well, pilgrims walk,” I say condescendingly, and she flies into a rage so much so that the older man grabs her hand and pulls her back from me about 10 feet.

“You think you’re funny?” she continued, “I saw you two days ago walking around my neighborhood. You’re not a pilgrim. You’re a tourist. Let me see your credentials. Give them to me.”

Flabbergasted and completely caught off guard, with my rage machines firing and my heart racing, the blood boiling and everything in my being telling me to fight or run, I managed to move my trembling arm and hand to my pack and retrieve my credentials and hand them over to the lady-receptionist. She notices the uncontrollable shaking and scoffs looking me directly in the eye, “You’re no pilgrim.” before turning to consult my credentials with the other older man behind the desk.

After a few seconds the womans yells out, “Hah! See you. You stayed two nights at Hotel Big Light and the night before at a 4 star in Gerra. Gerra is only 3 miles from here. You’ve only walked three miles in the last three days. You’re no pilgrim. What are you doing here?”

“Jesus, lady! What is your problem,” I ask changing the expression on the older man’s face from one of curiosity to one of protector.

“Son, you will not speak to her that way,” he chimes in. “I’m looking at your pilgrim’s passport here too, and I agree. You’re no pilgrim. A hoteligrino maybe, but a pilgrim definitely not.”

Hoteligrino is a word made from the spanish words for Hotel and pilgrim. A Hotelgrim. I couldn’t deny that I been staying in a lot of hotel, but didn’t see it as being a reason to consider me not a pilgrim.

“But some of the albergues have been closed due to Covid. I had to stay in some hotels,” I say defensively.

“But three nights in a row? You’re on tourism. You’re not a pilgrim,” the woman yells at me again before the older man shoos her away telling her he’d take care of it.

“I’ve never been treated this way,” I say to her before she’s out of earshot. The old man gets more perturbed that I want the argument to continue, and the woman turns around, crouches over again and walks toward me at eye level where I’m sitting, “What’s your problem anyway? I have money. I never asked you for anything. You’re acting like I’m scamming or something.”

“You are scamming! You’re a tourist. Nothing but a tourist. You can stay here but you have to pay.” she says firmly.

“I’ll pay you whatever you want,” I say with disdain. “I never tried to stay for free.”

“You’ll pay whatever I want, huh?” she asks as if she’s gonna call my bluff and ask for some astronomical amount, “Well the price is 20 euros a night for the bunk.”

“Fine,” I say, and whip out a 20-euro bill from my already opened wallet. The man shoos the woman again,

“My child, Go. ve te. I’ll take care of the rest.”

I approach the counter where the old man is with my passport and the registry. I lay the 20-euro bill on the counter and sigh, “What was that all about,” I say laughing a little.

“You sir are a very rude individual. And definitely not a pilgrim. Pilgrims stay in albergues. You stay in hotels. There’s a difference in doing tourism and doing spiritualism, my child. You might try and learn that.”

“For fucks sake,” I say not able to hold back any longer. “I was busking all day yesterday and the last time I came here in 2019 I didn’t have a penny. I played music all day and lived on what I earned. I thought I’d contribute this time and stay in nicer places,”

“Do not raise your tone with me, and there will be no cursing allowed in this establishment.” he retorted.

That was insane, nobody cared if you cussed in Spain, and cussing in Spanish just isn’t the same as in English. I felt like I was in the twilight zone again.

“I mean, look,” the man has the ballpoint of his pen hovering over one of the squares on my pilgrim’s passport, “Hotel,” he jumps the pen to another square and goes down the line, “Hotel, Hotel, Hotel. How much have you spent already? Looks like at least 500 in hotels. You’re un rico, not a pilgrim.”

“Man, fuck you. Que te follen!” I finally say snatching my passport and credentials off the counter from under the man’s hand. “Keep the fucking money,” I yell pushing it off the counter bar top and down on the registry, “For the next pilgrim you want to fuck with.”

Since my shoes were off there was a couple minutes of awkward silence as I prepared myself to leave. The woman came back out and so did the other man who was sweeping, and they all three stared at me as I got ready.

“This is fucking unbelievable,” I say picking up my pack and heading out the door. My heart felt like it would leap out of my chest. I had mystical visions and cosmic vibrations of tearing the entire reception area to sheds. Flipping over a couple benches and destroying something. Anything. Their gazes fell on me like the weight of Atlas, beckoning me to commit violence. It was as if I could see their desires to be physically assaulted, wounded and further thrown from their courses. Their aching soulless eyes, hungry for the bills to be paid, didn’t dare allow a hand to return the bill to me. It stayed put for them on the open registry to be accounted for when I was long forgotten.

I couldn’t hardly catch my breath and I was busting at the seams so livid like an animal. Where was Joey? He’d know what to say, I thought pushing my anger down out of my throat and holding back the tears of rage mounting up in the damns of my eye lids. I passed under the threshold of the propped open door, and a relief came over me. The world seems to shift back into place and my breath becomes a little lighter.

“If you want to be a pilgrim, learn how to be kind,” the old man yelled at me sympathetically as I disappeared from their view.

I sat on a bench. It started to rain again. Jerry Jeff’s song Little Bird played in my head as I cried and smoked.

“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! What the fuck was that?” I wondered half expecting Joey to answer. He didn’t.

“I’m no fucking pilgrim,” the old man’s words echoed in my mind. “Dammit! Where am I going to stay now?”

It was already too late to walk on, so I phoned the place where I’d made the previous reservation and a woman answered.

“I’ve been here the entire time. I’m not sure how I missed you. So, you’re saying you’d like to come and stay after all?” she cheerfully asks with a hint of confusion.

“Yes. It would be great if you could come to the plaza and pick me up.”

She agreed and I explained to her what had happened at the albergue on our drive back to the B&B, “Ridiculous,” she finally says, “I can’t believe them. They aren’t even a real albergue for pilgrims. They are just as private as my place. They had no right to treat you like that. Hell, the trail didn’t even go into town and past their albergue until the government made it. It used to go around this city all together. You know the whole Camino is all made up anyway. You can walk it how you like. You don’t worry, my child. We’ll take care of you. We have a very nice room all ready and made for you.”

She was sweet but still a little pestered by the whole situation. I tried to give her my debit card, but she said she would take care of it through the app, restating she just couldn’t understand how she missed me coming there earlier in the day.

“I sat right here for over an hour. Booking.com even called you and got no answer.” I said unconvincingly.

“I don’t understand this at all,” she said shaking her head and giving me my key, “Follow me.”

She took me around the corner to my room. There was a little electric lawn mower moving about the lawn, bumping into things, turning around and going again ad infinitum. I guess the machine is light enough not to leave wheel marks in the lawn because you couldn’t tell it wasn’t cutting the grass in a uniform manner.

“I really don’t understand how I missed you. I’m here all day. I have my kitchen there and I take my coffee and watch for the arrival of my guests,” she explains again scratching her head and trying her best not to assume I was lying. “Well, I’m glad you made it. Sleep well.”

She leaves and I unpack my things, take a hot shower and wash my hair. There’s a nice heater in the room. The temperature outside is dropping quickly again as the sun disappears and the rain comes on strong. I sit on the covered patio and smoke an evening spliff while watching the electric lawn mower slowly making its way across the wet grass. The rain beats down on it as it makes its way to retire beneath its solar powered charging station after a confusing route made up of only straight lines and angles.

I got into bed with a tinge of blue twilight left on the horizon coming in through the cracked window. It was 8:30. I’d wake early and walk as far as I could. My rage machines were raring to go. Laying there, I thought about the little electric mower outside, who barely made it home and seem to almost sputter out of battery while pulling in the last inches to its docking station where it would take more power over night. Were it able to travel in circular patterns, it wouldn’t have to travel so far to get back home. I reimagined my post-apocalyptic world where the mowers lived on forever and realized that this scenario, with overcast, rain and a lot of obstacles in the yard, could very well render the robot lifeless and without the ability to return to its charging station.