danceislove

The next evening, after bachata class, I had a date with Raj.  Raj was the guy I’d met at CATS, who one night called me pretending to be a Spanish prospective lindy hop student.

I met him in Lavapies and we went to the Economico, which Robert had always said was supposed to be good.  Surprisingly we got a table right off, at 11pm.

My stir-fry tasted like salt and oil, and the white wine was nothing to write home about.  Raj just had pineapple juice.  He gave me a DVD he’d made of world-music videos, for my birthday.  I thanked him and squeezed the plastic sleeve into my purse.  We paid the check and I led him up to La Latina and Artebar.  The waitress told us we had just missed the flamenco show.  “Maybe we could come earlier next Friday and watch it,” Raj suggested.

“Yes, maybe, right after my dance class,” I said.

He was really quite smart and sweet and interesting, not to mention cute, perhaps a little skinny, but with a gorgeous dark skin tone and a beautiful smile.  He knew how to dress, too.  The beige button-down and black jeans looked just right, not overdone.

But he had a certain mildness of personality that just didn’t work for me.  I made all the decisions about our evening, what time we would meet, where we would go, how we would get there.  Maybe he was too scared to choose something I wouldn’t like - maybe a lot of men have been bullied by women in this way.

Also, though he seemed fond of his work, and his home country, both of which I asked him about extensively, I didn’t sense any of the passion I like to witness in a conversation partner.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with Raj, and he had a lot to recommend him, in fact.

It was all moot, though, anyway, because by that time I had already let my heart slip away from me.

let’s dance.
Maybe in order for me to fall in love with you, you have to want to dance with me.  Maybe just wanting to is enough.  Maybe that and not letting other things get in the way.  Maybe that and loving blues music, and being quiet while I describe the nature of leading and following.  Maybe that and

We were sitting in La Negra Tomasa, because it was open.  A lot of the bars were closing at 3AM on a Thursday.  The live music was very loud, so we had to bend close and yell in each other’s ears.  “What do you want?”  he exclaimed.  I wanted a Rueda (white wine).  He got a big glass of beer and we sat down.

“You want to dance, don’t you?”

“Well - it’s okay,” I said.  While Taj was getting our drinks I had avoided eye contact with the mostly South-American-looking, mostly-male crowd.  Now we were sitting and I snapped my gaze to Taj’s face, the hazel eyes, the lovely mouth.  I hadn’t noticed that about him until the other night, the blues lesson at his place.  His mouth had a curvy shape and looked soft, like the brown curly hair, like the brown corduroy jacket he was wearing again; that was more than fine; I was wearing Claire’s black leather again.

“Salsa is so easy,” I announced. “I could teach it to you in like, five minutes.”

For a few moments we watched some couples do their twirls on the red and white checked floor.  Then Taj said, “It looks like it involves a lot of hip movement.”

“Yup.  It does.”

“I can do that.”

“You have told me.”

“I just don’t get the music, though.  it’s like there’s too much going on for me.  I can’t identify with the structure.”

“That’s pretty common,” I said.  As I looked into his eyes again it occurred to me that salsa does not match his personality. It’s too frenetic for his laid-back style.  Laid-back but strong, and clear in the way he’d said, earlier in the little blues club, “I’ll buy your drink,” and when I’d asked him what kind of bar he wanted to go to after the show let out: “Take me somewhere.”

Now he asked, “Salsa is easier than blues?”

“Much.  But I think you like blues better.”

“The thing is I don’t have anyone to dance it with me.”

“What do you mean?” I squeaked.

“Well, you’re a professional!  I can’t ask you to -”

“Taj, there is no blues dancing here.  It’s a big zero.  And I want to dance blues.  You’re stuck with me.”

He grabbed me and kissed me.  Put his hand on my shoulder, pulled me to him and pressed his gorgeous lips to mine.  The vocalists kept hollering and chanting, the timbales kept clanging, and the couples spun on the floor before us.  Taj proceeded to demonstrate some seriously good kissing skills.  He touched my cheek, which I love.  I sank my fingers into his curly hair.

Then he said, smiling, “I feel very Spanish.”

It was pretty hilarious.

They made us leave the bar at 3:45. “Maybe you could teach me some more dancing, at your place?” Taj suggested.

I sighed.  “Not tonight.  I have to take things slow.  It’s just the way I’m built.”

“I’m OK with that.”

“Can we walk around for a while?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“You’re a really good kisser,” I said.  “Really good.”

“Yeah?”  He smiled and took my hand.  Jesus, for god sakes Jesus fucking Christ.  When was the last time something like this had happened to me?  I felt like a high school girl again and it was awesome.

He said, “I wanted to kiss you the day I met you.”

“What?”

He said it again.

“I’m stunned,” I said.

“You think it was an accident that I sat down next to you in the computer room at TtMadrid?”

“That was what I figured.”

“I saw you and I thought, that girl is hot.  I have to find out who she is.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but resisted making a big deal out of it.  I didn’t want to give the impression I was fishing.  “You got my attention,” I said.

“And then you disappeared for four months.”

“Oh man.  That’s complicated.  I’ll tell you about it, someday.”

“I’m in no rush.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

Eventually Taj walked me home and we kissed for a little while at the door to my building.  He had a gentleness and sincerity to him that kind of blew me away.  He wasn’t all over me.  Instead he was all about me.  This, I am pretty sure, is what women want.  Is it true, girls?  What do you say?

I laugh.  “We’ve barely scratched the surface!  The possibilities are endless.  For example, in some ways, in blues, the girl is a part of you.”  I stand up and pretend to have my right arm around a follower.  “You can change your tempo, according to the music.  You can turn -”

“Can we turn together?”

“Sure.”

“I want to try it.”

“OK.”  I stretch my arm to put the water glass back on the table.

He gets this big grin on his face.  “Let’s dance.”

I smile too.  All those boys, all those months, babbling about being uncoordinated and rhythm-less, none of them with any more or less dance experience than Taj - which is to say, basically zero - saying they were scared of me, or apologizing that our date would not be about dancing, or asking me please not to make an outing “all about dancing” - all of that, well, crap, and now I begin to realize that all I really wanted was someone to look at me and say those two little words and mean them.

I cue up “Ramblin.”  At the horn blast I say, “Is this OK? Or do you want to dance to some of your stuff?”

“This is fine.”

“So, class is over.  We are just goofing off.  It doesn’t matter if we mess up.”

Taj brings me into closed position.  My left elbow drapes over his arm.  My right wrist slings across his left shoulder.  The piano chords plink, the bass walks.  Aretha lets us know, “I’ve got the bluuuues on the highway -”

Before I realize it I’ve closed my eyes, absorbing myself in the music, in the sensation of being led, and my right arm wraps around my partner’s neck, all of which happens in real social blues dancing.

We are just goofing off now.  Let’s dance.  There is trust here, already.

He says, “If you close your eyes, how do you know what I am doing?”  He’s moved me back, released me into open position.

“I can feel it.”  Going back into teacher-mode, I say slowly, “Following - is different - from copying.”

He tries the dip but I continue to walk around and past him.

“Hey!  How come you’re going over there?”

“Because you stretched your arm out.  See, you established a connection by putting your right hand on my back so my job is to maintain that connection.  If you want me closer to you, you have to keep that right arm closer to your body.  Try it again.”

When he brings me in it’s a little abrupt.  He understands the how to make the girl come to him but he doesn’t have the finesse yet.

“Rambling” ends and I hi-five him, but when the next song on my playlist begins he starts dancing with me again.

“I have this,” he says.  “Susan Tedeschi.”

“It’s a good album,” I agree.

After that song, we sit down again and I start talking. “Some people believe in God, or something like that,” I begin.  “I believe in leading and following.  In communication through movement.  Training oneself in lead/ follow is just like learning a language, and I think it’s about as complicated.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve spent a lot of hours on it.  And I still have so much more to learn, but it’s immensely fulfilling.”  I begin to go into more detail, about the important skills involved in both leading and following: being in shape, being able to balance, transferring momentum from the body and letting it flow unimpeded through the body.  “For me, leading and following is a metaphor for life in a lot of different ways.  It’s what my book is about.  Probably the most common misconception about dancing is that you’re supposed to have rhythm in order to do it.  Actually you can dance without rhythm, and you can learn rhythm - although you have rhythm, I’m not talking about you.  Anyway, in my experience dancing is more about training than anything else, any prior natural ability or anything.  I find that most people -”

“Hey hey!”  Manny is coming down the hall now.  I look at my iPod and notice it’s about 11 o’clock, and I wonder, has he just finished work, or something else?

Manny’s also has a nice black coat, like Brad’s except double-breasted.  He crosses through the living room and slides open a heavy metal door; I guess that’s to his bedroom.

“You missed it, I was dancing,” jeers Taj.

Manny calls out, “You’re gonna have to show me.”

“Maybe later.  Hey, I made some spaghetti if you want some.”

Brad gets up from his Facebook activities on the couch.  “Oh yeah, Taj, can I get some of that?”

The three of them troop into the kitchen and I follow cautiously at a distance.  “So what’s in it?” Brad asks, in something of a challenging tone.

“Ground beef, tomate frito, onions, garlic, artichoke hearts -”

“Artichoke hearts!” Brad shouts.  “What the fuck did you put artichoke hearts in it for?”

“Because they taste fucking awesome.  Yeah, I know you would put goat cheese and blueberry jam in it -”

“Let’s let our palates decide,” Manny intervenes.

“I love artichoke hearts,” I pipe up.  “Can I have some?”

The four of us adjourn to the living room, with our microwaved bowls of spaghetti. Brad and Taj continue their debate about appropriate ingredients for the sauce.  I have to interrupt them for a moment.  “This is really good,” I say truthfully.  “I’m impressed.”

A short time later Manny and Brad settle onto the couches and one of them puts on a downloaded episode of “Dexter.”  I hate TV so I figure it’s time for me to go.

“Now comes the goofy part,” I continue.  “This is what I ask people to do in class before we start the partnering, because, you know, it’s a close dance.  You watched the clips, right?”

“I watched that first one you sent me.”

“So you know what I mean.  First we’re going to do the one where… remember when you were a little kid, and you were at school, and some girl you liked was trying to get by you but you didn’t want to let her?  You know, you just got in her way, wouldn’t let her pass.  Right?  Or whomever.  Not necessarily a girl.  Anyway, we are going to do that.  I’m going to try to pass you…”

“You mean like football?”

“No,” I laugh.  “It’s non-contact.  OK?”

I make for the far wall, the one with the calendar on it.  He dutifully participates in the exercise, moving quickly and consistently to block my path. I let it go on for about two seconds, which is really all that’s necessary.  Then I say, “Notice what you did with your body, how you got kind of low?  That’s how we blues dance too.  Now we’re going to do this.  Here.”  I put my hands out in front of me.  “We’re going to push each other.”

“This is kind of a losing battle for you,” Taj observes, grinning again, as we push into each other’s hands.

“I know,” I admit.  “You’ll see in a minute why it’s useful.”

Kendall and I usually made our students do these exercises in blues classes we taught.  Before that we had used them ourselves at the beginning of air steps practice, to get more comfortable with each other physically and emotionally.

“There are three different basic connections in blues dancing,” I tell Taj.  “We’re gonna start with in-connection, chest-to-chest.  When you dance you put your arm around the girl, but to get the feel for this right now we’re not going to use our arms.  We shouldn’t have to.”  I’m parroting Kendall’s patter.  “The first thing you’re going to do is shift your weight so she can feel which foot you’re on.”

Contrary to how it may seem, I am not exactly referring to myself in the third person here.  When I teach boys - and mostly I teach boys - I say “the girl” to denote any and all dance partners they will have, for my goal is to teach them to make girls happy by leading well.  I take on a double role in the lesson: the practice “girl,” and the teacher who evaluates the boy’s performance in terms of girls’ most likely preferences.

In-connection established, Taj leads the weight changes.  He does this surprisingly well too.  No rocking, no huge step, just a simple, complete transfer.  If only all my students did this so readily.

“OK,” I say.  “Now you can walk.  Anywhere you want.”

“OK -”  He laughs a little and seems to hesitate.

“You think you’re going to step on my feet, right?  Don’t worry about that.  It’s an occupational hazard for me.  See if you can move through me.  Not around but through.”

It takes Taj a couple of tries to lead me in something other than side-to-side movement.  “You’re in my way,” he says.

“I’m gonna go with you.  I’m not a brick.  Try it, you’ll see.”

Finally he pushes off the floor, moves forward.  I let the momentum carry my feet backward one by one.  Then he reverses direction.

He’s got it now.  He’s even remembering to keep his knees loose.  I show him how to put his arm on my back, how to hold my right hand; I explain that he can move in any direction.  We try open position.  He does so admirably that I teach him how to stretch away and give momentum.  I show him a dip, which he also learns quickly, not leaning over, which practically every student does at first.  Instead, Taj keeps his body upright and solid.

When we practice to music he makes the common mistake of reaching for me in order to reinstate in-connection.  I stop him, putting a hand on the front of his right arm.  “Don’t go to the girl.  The girl always comes to you.  Right?”

“I like this,” he says.

“You go -”  Pretending to be him, I look into the distance and give a small toss of my head, then catch the imaginary girl sailing into my arms.

“I have to go, ‘You are dancing with me now.’”

“Exactly,”  I exclaim.

He hooks his right arm around my back and brings me in.

Syncing up with the rhythm takes a song or two, but I can see he’s going to get it.  “This is a lot of information,” he observes.

“You’re right.  But you’re doing great.”  It’s been about an hour since we’ve started so I high-ten him and say, “Good work.”  I grab my water glass and chug, perching on the arm of the couch.

Taj falls into one of the plastic chairs beside the wooden table.  “Before we did this I really didn’t know what to expect,” he says.  “But I like it.  A lot.”

“You’re good at it.  You learn really fast.”

“But, obviously,” he rejoins, “there is tons more stuff to learn.”

Unlike most elevators in Madrid, this one doesn’t have a mirror, which is a bit of a shame.  I would have had plenty of time to pat my frizzy hair down while oozing upward.  Riding this elevator feels like being gradually sucked through a giant straw.

“I’ve got the blues,” I begin to sing out loud, but have to stop after this initial line of Aretha Frankin’s “Ramblin” in order to call, “Knock knock,” as I push open the door.

“Hey,” I hear from somewhere within.

I proceed cautiously down the narrow passageway, whose electric light just catches the downward arc of a bare white foot in the darkened bedroom on the left.

“Were you sleeping?  Oh, sorry.”  I pause just shy of the doorframe.

Taj emerges, fully clothed, to my relief.  Despite my sexual orientation I dislike random male nudity.  This caused a problem for me while I was Kendall Beckett’s dance partner; to this day the number one Kendall-related question I hear is, “Still taking his shirt off?”

Taj is saying, “I just lay down for a minute.”

“Well, nap’s over.  It’s time for dance class.”

He laughs and we do a brief Spanish greeting, two kisses.  He follows me down the long hallway, which turns sharply right at Taj’s room and continues past two bathrooms in a row, the kitchen, and finally the living room.

“Sorry,” Taj says, “I already ate.”  I follow his gaze to a bowl mostly empty of spaghetti and other stuff.  Earlier he had texted me to ask whether I wanted some when I came over.

“I’m glad you ate.  I know how it is.  You finish class and you need to eat.  There’s no reason to wait.  Anyway, I’m not hungry.  Should we move stuff?”

“Yeah.  We have to pick up the table together, because one of the legs is busted.”

“OK.  Hold on.”  I scoot around it and try to get a grip, as it’s heavier than it looks.  Also, its round blond wood surface holds a cacophony of items, one of them a small tumbler part-full of the wine I drank last night.  There are several other glasses, probably with an even older arrival date, plus two full ashtrays, and a crescent-shaped smear of dried chocolate ice cream.

When I return from the bathroom Taj has also moved the coffee table from its spot in the center of the room in front of the futon couch.  He calls from his bedroom, “What shoes should I wear?”

“Socks.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Your floor is sticky, so any shoes you wear will stick too much.”  My eyes rove the pockmarked, smeared, coated wood.  I should have brought extra socks, but nothing to do about that now.  They wouldn’t have fit in my little purse.

My iPod, however, slid in nicely, and now I unhook the earbuds and connect it to the speakers on top of the wood table.  I cue up “Fine and Mellow,” the first track on the new list.

“So blues is an improvisational dance,” I tell Taj when he returns wearing socks.  “You can totally do whatever you want, as long as you lead the girl.  What I’m going to do first is give you some kind of structure, because you have to start somewhere.  Most importantly, I’m going to teach you how to lead.”

First I show him the pulse, to the music.  We do doubles, two pulses on each foot.

He asks, “Do I pick up one foot at a time, or just sort of shift my weight?”

“You pick up one foot at a time.  The dance works much better when you’re definitively on one foot or the other.  It’s the same for the girl.”

“OK.”

“Yeah, that’s really good,” I say happily.  He’s not goose-stepping or rocking or doing any of the other very common superfluous things.  He’s pretty relaxed.  “Now see if you can release your knees, instead of pushing from the top,” I add, indicating my upper chest and trying to push my body down from that point.

“Is that what I’m doing?” he says, watching me and grinning a bit.

“Only a little.  Try to just let your weight down from the knees.  At the same time we’re going to try to keep the body active - not stiff, but active.  Engaging our abs, for example.  You know how when you take a pair of jeans out of the dryer and they’re a little tight?  Oh, we’re in Spain, there are no dryers.  But you remember.  Anyway, you try to zip them up, what do you do with your belly?  Yeah, you get it.”

I only have to help Taj with rhythm once, when we’re switching from two beats on each foot to one.  I should have had him do one beat on each foot first. My mistake represents no great loss, however.  To entrain him to the beat, I hold his hand and lead his weight changes around the room.  He feels the tempo, and then he’s fine.

Someone is coming down the hall.  Brad.  He emerges into the living room, blond hair in as high a spike as ever.  He’s also wearing a pink collared shirt and gray sweater under a black pea coat, jeans and nice shoes.  I notice all of this as he unloads his backpack onto the floor next to the table.  Somehow when boys dress up a bit I find it very disarming.  “Long day,” he is sighing.  “I had a four hour class with this one guy.  Fortunately we drank beers the whole time and he wanted to finish an hour early.”

“We’re doing a blues dance lesson,” Taj explains.

“OK, well, don’t let me get in your way,” Brad says as he makes his way around us to sit on the couch and turns on the TV.  His Facebook screen pops up.

Having begun to feel embarrassed - I didn’t mean to expose Taj to his roommates’ possible ridicule - I was now surprised.  Don’t guys usually give each other a hard time about dancing?  Maybe this would occur later, in my absence?

“So, OK,” I ask Taj, “how do we get from point A to point B?  Let’s say I want to go over there.”  I point to a calendar hanging on the far wall.

“Um, you walk there?”

“OK, but what’s the mechanism?  I’ll give you a hint:  it’s why we can’t walk on ice.”

“‘Cause our feet slip out from under us.”

“Right.  We can’t push off of the ice.  But we can push off the floor.  So if I want to go forward on my left foot, I have to push the floor backward with my right.  All the movement comes from pushing off the floor with one foot at a time and keeping the energy flow in the body.  It’s not stiffness but a dynamic energy.  I think of it like a firehose - ” and here I make a silly gushing sound, and with my hands I indicate an imaginary flow of water from the floor, through my torso and out through my limbs.

He laughs, as if entertained.

I ask him to try pushing off the floor and taking a step to the side.  While at this point most white men would have begun the movement with their shoulders or taken a really big step or used almost no energy, Taj executes a good sideways motion. Though I haven’t planned to start the partnering at this point, I take his right forearm and position his hand on my back. “OK,” I say, “now do that same exact step and see what happens.”

He moves again and I follow.  Then I step back and say, “You just led me.  Nice job.”  I hold up my hand and he high-fives it.

The next day, I wrote this:

If I put my feet on automatic pilot, I end up walking to Sol.  Fewer than 100 paces from my house there is a metro station, a smaller one, but at Sol I have my choice of three lines.  Anyway, Sol’s got action.

None of this crosses my mind until I am several blocks up Calle Atocha, my feet happily motoring under me.  Where am I off to again?  Oh yeah, Quevedo.  I’ll get the Linea 2.

I could have taken the metro next to my house, alighted at Bilbao or Iglesia and walked 7 or so mins to Quevedo. But this is more fun.  I probably pass 56 bars and 13 cafes on my way to Sol.  I wait briefly on the fronts of my feet as large trucks and impatient taxis maneuver slowly down the narrow lane cutting diagonally across calle Espoz y Mina, next to the terraza of Tia Cebolla and its frenetic, ornery waiter. (See Quince Minutos.) I get to see how efficiently I can slalom among tourists and grannies on the single-file wide sidewalk, glancing over my right shoulder as I jump into the street to run past the latest clutch of slow-pokes that has stopped just outside a shop.

Once I reach the main plaza of Sol, with the neon Tio Pepe sign to my right and far above my head, people old and young and fast and slow zigzag across my path while looking in different directions. They talk on mobiles, lead groups of dogs, adjust headphones, wobble on stilettos over the uneven cobblestones.

I realize that my own feet have been running.  For how long, I am not sure.  They don’t stop until I heave open the heavy glass door to the station.  Then I resume, rushing down the stairs. I pop my ticket into the entrance slot.  The little plexiglass doors slide open and I retrieve it out the top of the machine and I’m still running.  About a million people are surging off a train, my train.

Standing in the crowded metro, I lean my back against a post and brace myself with my feet against the floor.  I open my little black purse, drop into it my keys and metro pass, fish out my iPod and ear buds.  I start making a playlist, in descending order of tempo.  Fine and Mellow.  Squeeze Me.  Night and Day (Ray Charles, not Frank Sinatra!). It Hurt So Bad. Ramblin.

My iPod says it’s 9:26.  I’ve got about 4 minutes to finish the list.  As I’m adding Jimmy Witherspoon’s “How Long,” my phone goes off.  Just as well:  San Bernardo already.  One more stop.

“Hello?”  I should say “Si” or “Hola” or “Di me.”  I’m in Spain for god’s sakes.  I’ve given in to laziness.

“Is this Liz?” says a man in English, with an accent.  Hopefully he’s a potential English student.  I could do with one or two more private classes per week.

“This is Antonio,” the guy continues.  “I got your number from a friend who said you are a good dancer.  Could you give me some information about your dance lessons?”

I describe to Antonio my available hours and the location where I currently teach my lindy hop students, all two of them.  Meanwhile the train stops at Quevedo.  To get out, I push one of the big green buttons where the doors meet.  That makes them slide open.

“Were you at CATS last night?” Antonio asks next.

“Yes!  I mean, no, actually I wasn’t there this week.  But wait a minute, what kind of dance do you want to learn?  Salsa?”

“No, I want to learn the lindy hop.”

“Well, great!  That’s my favorite.”

Suddenly the tone of voice on the other end of the phone call drops a shade darker and softer as I hear, “Liz, this is Raj.”

“Oh, haha, Raj!  How funny!  What a good joke!  Listen, I can’t really talk right now.  I’m on my way to teach a dance class, believe it or not.”  I met Raj at CATS once. He’s a high-powered software guy from a small African country, speaks French and Spanish and English. But at this moment, the pharmacy clock next to Taj’s building is telling me that it’s 9:32.  “I gotta go, but let’s chat later, OK?”

I push the button to 7 IZQDA a second before remembering that the door is often unlatched.  So, heaving open the heavy iron grille, I enter the broad marble foyer and hit the light switch to my left.  Up half a flight is where the crackerbox elevator will take me the rest of the way.

After the show ended Taj said, “Do you want to go get a beer?”

“Sure,” I answered.  I have always loved going out after going out.  Anyway, we had been discussing beer earlier, the Belgian variety, and Taj had said he knew a good place nearby.  In fact it was on the corner, a stone’s throw from the club.

I pulled on the dull bronze knob set in a wooden door frame of peeling black paint.  Inside, strings of soft red lights lent a pleasing visual counterpoint to the hushed old-school piano blues on the speakers.  “I like this place; it’s so different from the typical Spanish bars,” Taj said as we claimed our stools.  The bar was pretty much empty.  Candlelight glowed on nearby little round black tables stuck in the corners.  “It’s not all metal and brightly lit,” he continued.

“No noisy flashing lottery machines either,” I added.  “I hate those.”

Taj’s favorite beer was the Rochefort 8 (not 6 or 10, and I have no idea why there are no odd numbers).  I tried to remember what I’d had with Alexander and Robert recently; I’d liked Leffe Rouge best but this place didn’t have it so I chose Chimay Azul.  The usual dish of peanuts, cornnuts and pork rinds appeared with our drinks.

“I kind of can’t believe that show,” I said.  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better blues show and that’s saying a lot.”

“It was pretty amazing,” Taj agreed.  “My student who told me about it, he’s pretty cool.  He’s the only student I have that likes good music, not Iron Maiden.”

“Isn’t that hilarious how there’s a cult of Iron Maiden here in Spain?”

“I figured the show would be good but it went way beyond my expectations.  What were you telling me before, about the meter?”

“Oh,” I said, “the six-eight.  It’s a common meter in blues, especially slow blues.  Some of my favorite songs have it, like Ray Charles’s ‘Drown in My Own Tears’ and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Dr. Feelgood.’ Every measure has six beats.  The first and fourth are emphasized, so it goes one two three four five six.”

“You know a lot about music.  I wish I did.”

“Well, stick with me and I’ll tell you lots of stuff about music.”  I took a sip of my Chimay and put it down.

“OK.”

I would be friends with Taj.  By now it was clear I liked hanging out with him.  Also I was reasonably confident he felt the same, hence the “Stick with me” comment.  Before he’d made me kind of nervous with his intense yet nonchalant charm but now things were relaxed.  We both appreciated blues and other kinds of good music.  He never once asked me a stupid question or interrupted me, always seemed to listen to what I had to say.  I also had the feeling that if I felt like sitting quietly for a while he wouldn’t mind.  A good quality in a friend.  Probably he would never give me a hard time if I did something he hadn’t expected. I seem constantly to be surprising people.  They want to know why I am leaving a party so early, or on a different occasion why I am showing up so late, or how I could possibly be so crazy to go running every day, what I am eating, what type of food is that exactly, am I vegetarian, why do I live in Madrid, doesn’t Paris have a better lindy hop scene, why haven’t I started one here yet, why do I like to hear people talk about math if I’m a dancer, that’s really weird, and what you don’t like musical theater, but musical theater has dancing in it!  Oh, thank you for telling me, I didn’t realize that.  Oh yeah, I forgot, I like musical theater. (Shoot me.)

“Want to try it?” Taj asked me, about his beer.

“It’s better than mine,” I pronounced, after a sip.  “Here, tell me what you think.”

“Yup.  Mine’s better.  That’s still good though.”

“I love the music they play in here.  I think this is Oscar Peterson.”

“Yeah?”

“You can tell by the really ripply chords.  When I lived in Boston, sometimes I used to go to this fancy restaurant on Sunday nights just to hear this guy.  His name is Paul Broadnax. He’s 80 years old and awesome.  Plays piano like Oscar Peterson, sings like Joe Williams.  Joe Williams is my favorite male singer of all time.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“I’ll have to give you some of the more old-school blues music.  You’d like it.  I have to admit, I don’t miss too much about the US but one thing I do miss is being able to dance to music like this.”

“I still want to learn how to dance to blues.  I think it would be awesome.”

That was the second time he’d said it unprompted so I took a leap and believed him.  “OK, I’ll teach you.  Tomorrow, if you want.”

“OK.”

“Is there anything you miss about the US?”

“I miss going fishing.”

“Really.”

“It’s the one thing I could do, all day, every day, and never get tired of it.  I could fish in Spain, but -” he sighed.  “Well, not in Madrid.  And it’s not the same as it is in Florida.”

“What do you like so much about it?”

“Being outside, in nature.  Seeing what nature is doing, how it affects everything.  A lot of things affect fishing:  the weather, the wind, the phase of the moon -”

“I never thought of that; none of that ever occurred to me.”

“Well, I think most people don’t think about it.  When you’re just out there, on the boat, some beers….” he smiled.  “I’ve had to learn how to think like a fish.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Where they’re going to be, what’s going to make them bite.  You can’t rush them. Sometimes,” he shrugged, “you just don’t get anything, but sometimes it’s like they’re biting every second.  I don’t always keep them.  Usually I throw them back.”

“Oh,” I said.  “You mean you don’t eat them?”

“Sometimes.  It depends.  Some people think it’s cruel, killing animals.  People think that about hunting.”

“You mean eating what you kill, or not?”

“Yeah, eating it.”

“Well, people who think that’s cruel, they eat meat, right?  Usually.  They just can’t kill they’re own meat so the factory farms do it for them.  How is that somehow better than hunting?  I don’t get it.”

“I don’t know.”  He smiled and shrugged.

The bar gal caught my attention.  “Chicos,” she was saying, as she wiped down the bar.  “Estamos cerrados.”

“What time is it?” I said.

“Two,” said Taj.

“Oh yeah, it’s Sunday, so they are closing early.”

The gal brought our check and Taj said to me, “I’ll buy your beer.  It’s your birthday.”

I slid off my stool and Taj stood aside to let me get to the door first.  It took me a long moment to figure out which way the knob turned and whether to pull or push the door.  Charitably, and to my great relief,  Taj said nothing at all.

We got out onto the main road, having resumed chatting.  It was dark and misty and quiet, even the cinema neon shut off. I hadn’t been paying attention to where we were exactly. “Um, I think my place is over there.”  I pointed down the hill.

“Mine’s that way.”  He indicated the opposite direction, coming to a dead stop.  “Well.  I had a really good time tonight.”

“Me too.  It was awesome.  Thanks.”

When he kissed me on the cheeks I noticed how warm he was.  Not fair, why are boys always so warm?

OK, where was I exactly?  I wobbled toward San Bernardo Glorieta.  A glorieta is like a rotary, except usually much more beautiful, with a fountain and plants.  I had to cross it and to make sure I didn’t get run over.  Not getting run over would be a plus.  Apparently I was still drunk.  So, let’s see, San Bernardo all the way to where it ends at Callao metro, then cross Gran Via and put El Corte Inglés on my left, that department store to end all department stores.  Then Sol and then.  Easy.

Bass drum and rim shots alone chanted the opening to a sultry blues, the sounds falling in two distinct groups of three.  Think Ray charles or B.B. King at their slowest and heaviest, the kind of stuff that pins you hard into your chair and makes you close your eyes as you lean back and go, “Mm.”  Then you become all liquid, and you want to dance with someone if you know how to dance a slow blues, or you pretend you are the singer if you don’t know how to sing, for the vocals are beginning in a deceptively quiet tone over a single rhythm chord, a lazy bent-note guitar melody.  The bassist caresses those thick strings at just the right time, and deep vibrations undergird a sudden saxophone flourish, rhythm chord, and gilded electric motif.  Nothing is extra.  Minimalist sound conjures a whole heavy emotion - the blues - and all the while the drums tick quietly under everything, two groups of three eighth notes.

I wanted to text Kendall:  ONE two three FOUR five six.  Could I message an American number?

But then Taj was leaning toward me:  I really like this.  I can feel it.”

So instead of texting Kendall I asked Taj if he could hear the meter.  He nodded slightly.

The frontman was singing about dirty dishes, how there were too many of them in the sink for just one girl.

Neither the drummer nor the bassist soloed on this tune - their spare solidity necessary throughout - but the instruments up front went to town.  Lou Marini slowly spun a glorious solo, plaintive notes building to impassioned wails.

The notes tripped along almost unpredictably, sometimes stretching out and other times cutting off, weaving in and out of the rhythm section’s structure to create that energized, relaxed feeling we call in the pocket.

Then it was the electric guitarist’s turn.  He began by hitting pedals with his feet and working the whammy bar to create sounds that alternately whooshed and screamed.  Cheap tricks, I thought.  This tall, shaggy-bald demon-eyed dude was a nut case.  His tricky guitar work greatly embellished the simple blues structure.  But phrase after phrase his solo became louder, faster, more and more ridiculously complicated.  Now when he threw in distortion it only heightened the powerful effect.  Another phrase began.  I stared momentarily at Taj, open-mouthed: was this guy really still soloing, at such an intense pitch?  Was he on coke?

Now he regaled us one-handed, using the neck of the guitar only.  The other hand was free to play with the whammy bar.  Clear, crisp, obnoxious melodies sounded, followed by loud bar chords.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” remarked Taj.

“Me neither,” I shouted back.

The nutty guitarist’s antics were far from finished.  Before our eyes, he jumped off the stage and began to slowly move among the tables, dragging wire, playing all the while.  He opened his eyes wide at a female audience member and made that Eddie Van Halen sound on the guitar that’s like whistling at a pretty girl.  Then as he waded farther into the audience, we saw Lou follow suit, coming down from the stage, playing sensible saxophone fills to complement the whacky guitar.  By now, though, our friendly neighborhood crazy musician had calmed his playing to a few well-placed notes per measure because he had sat down with a group of six just beyond Taj’s and my table.  After scraping and fidgeting his chair to free the cord to which his guitar was attached, the dude began talking and joking with his newfound tablemates.

The entire audience was eating this up.  Lou sat down too, with some other people across the club, and the two players traded measures as people screamed and cheered.

At length the errant instrumentalists regained the stage, traveling slowly back, smiling and flirting and responding to the mad adulation provided by the spectators, never stopping the music.  The frontman of course asked us to applaud for their special guest Lou Marini, and for the one and only, the unequalled in all of Spain, “Franciso Simon!”

(Here is a You Tube link to Red House playing at Cafe Central, the place I went with “Giovanni” on the Wednesday before the show I have just described.  This video shows a good example of Francisco Simon’s shenanigans, plus some great music.  Click here for the clip.)

“Happy birthday,” Taj said, coming down the narrow hall.  “I didn’t know.  I saw it on Facebook.”  He probably had opened the apartment door after I’d buzzed in the street.  It takes a good bit of time for the rickety elevator to rise seven floors.

“Oh yeah, well.  Thanks.  For some reason I didn’t feel like making a big deal out of it this year.”  We Spanish-style greeted each other.

The apartment was quieter than I expected.  When we entered the living room Brad was there in front of a TV screen showing Facebook.  Manny was not around.  Brad explained the TV display: “My computer monitor broke.”  The Facebook bubble-pop chat sound emerged and Brad leaned forward to type something.  Needless to say he did not seem ready to go out to a blues club.

Taj stood next to the round table next to the sliding glass doors, across the room from Brad and the TV.  “Should we go?” he asked me.  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

“Yes,” I smiled.  When he returned from the kitchen I added, “Oh, the ticket is twelve Euros, right?  Here.”

“Thanks.”

He was wearing glasses because apparently last week when he’d been out hiking some pollen or plant had gotten to him and irritated his eyes so he couldn’t wear contacts.  But the gold rims went nice with the brown curly hair and the brown corduroy jacket.  Had I dressed up enough, my fitted olive shirt and jeans, leather jacket?  Well, he was wearing jeans too, OK.

It began to dawn on me that no one else was coming to this show with me and Taj, just before it began to dawn on me that I didn’t really want anyone else along, just before it began to dawn on me that I didn’t want to not really want anyone else along.

Anyway, we left the apartment and walked the few blocks to Clamores.  We were bang on time (too early, in Spain) and so had to wait a bit for the doors to open.  To reach the club you walk down a flight of white stone steps once you come in the front door, and we waited on the steps behind a few other early people before getting our tickets from the door gal.

“I reserved us a table too,” Taj said.

“Nice.”

We handed our tickets to the guy at the threshold to the area with tables and chairs and then it wasn’t clear what we were supposed to do next, so we began to drift inwards, curious as to how we would find our table.  Other clubgoers followed suit.

“No no no no no!” cried the door guy, running after us and waving his arms.  Then we hadn’t gone back more than halfway when he looked at the tickets in Taj’s hand, changed direction again and asked us to follow him.

Our table was in the third row, in the middle.  Both chairs were behind the table and faced the stage. “What do you want to drink?” Taj asked me.

“Um, Johnnie Walker and Coca Cola Light.”

While he went to the bar I settled back in my chair and let the pink neon above the stage, CLAMORES, mesmerize me.  Something comfortable and old-fashioned about the whole place, red velvet but not too much, simple small wooden tables.  The main section of the club - behind us - was marked off with slender brown pillars.  At the moment the stage was completely lit and a guy was still setting up the drums.

But shortly after Taj brought our drinks - he’d gotten the same as me except with regular Coke - the band began to gear up.  They were kind of goofy-looking guys, especially the guitarist with his open shirt, and his head mostly bald except for some shaggy hair in the back.  It seemed we would have, in addition to the guitarist and drummer, a bassist, saxophonist, and frontman with rhythm guitar.  The lights went down as the frontman, a swarthy guy with a salt-and-pepper beard stepped to the mic and began a rapid stream of Spanish (which of course is not actually rapid, it just seems that way to me), part of which made the audience laugh.  The only thing I really got from the opening speech was that their band was called Red House and that tonight they had a very special guest, from Manhattan, Lou Marini.  He waved, a slight, gray-haired guy, downstage right.  Saxophones of different sizes sat at his feet.

“Oh, he’s gonna play alto and baritone sax too, cool,” I remarked.

“What’s the regular kind?” Taj asked.

“Tenor.  That’s the most common kind, I think.”

The band launched into an accessible, shuffle-beat tune to open.  I couldn’t help but miss West-Coast Swing.  But I leaned back again, sipped my drink and kept my movement to an acceptable level: toe tapping, head nodding, occasional release of my upper body forward, on the phrase.  “These guys are tight,” I said approvingly to Taj.

“Yeah.  The singer is really good,” he added.

“I’m glad your student told you about this.”

“Me too.”

The member of the band who impressed me first was the crazy-looking guitarist.  He was wildly tall for a Spanish guy and seemed to have a demonic look on his face as he busted into a fast solo early in the first set.  After he executed a particularly stunning display of fingering pyrotechnics I exclaimed, “Holy crap, did you see that?” I had to lean in and kind of shout in Taj’s ear because the music was loud.  The side of my face brushed his curls a little bit and I tried not to notice and thought I should probably try not to let it happen again.

“Yeah.”  He was grinning and nodding his head too and looked really happy with the music.  He didn’t talk about it a lot but seemed to get what I was hearing.  It reminded me of going to hear music with Kendall, except that Taj was a nice person and was not getting silly drunk.

Robert walked with me to Sol and we both got on the red line.  He was going to meet Raina somewhere.  The fact that he had already left Madrid yet was back for a weekend made everyone want a piece of him even more, and god knows I had been hogging him.  During the summer we had formed the impromptu nucleus for gatherings, though perhaps I was his partner in this by default, as Lionel and Raina and the others always called him, never me.  As August gave way to September and eventually October Robert increasingly expressed frustration at his friends’ dependence:  “Where are you?  Where is that?  Who else is there?  How long will you be there?”

One day as we strolled down Calle Argumosa in Lavapies, home to self-consciously hippie-styled bars and neat little terrazas under groups of trees, the latter of which are rare in central Madrid, Robert held a particularly long telephone discussion, in French of course.  Then he snapped his little low-rent phone shut.  “I mean it, I’m going to throw this thing away,” he announced, having achieved his customary state of mild rage.

“Robert, of course everyone wants to be where you are,” I said.

“I don’t really care.  I’d rather just talk with you.”

“Yes, you and I are good at making a plan without complicating things.”

“You won’t guess who that was.”

“Lionel,” I guessed.

“Of course.  Lionel.”  Robert jabbed his fingers into the sweet summer air in front of him, palms facing each other.  “Do you know what he asked me?”  Robert’s voice rose into a giggle, tense with disbelief and irony.

“Hmm, who you were with and how long you would be somewhere?”

“He wanted to know what kind of shoes he should wear.”

“That’s what you were talking about for so long?”  I peeked over Robert’s shoulder at the bar we were passing; it looked bigger than the rest, sky blue walls, gleaming white floor, stainless steel stools with butter-yellow cushions.  Tempting.

We wound up on a terraza on a corner, the end of Argumosa, where I got a mixto (ham and cheese) and a tinto de verano.  (”Why,” an American friend asked me recently, “would you mix red wine with lemon soda?” to which I responded, “Because it tastes awesome!”)

The waiter brought fried potatoes with my grilled ham and cheese, both of which I shared with Robert.  Afterwards he rolled and smoked a cigarette in as the brightly lit, city summer night continued around us and we drank more wine, chatting freely all the while.  No more calls about shoes or geographical locations disturbed us that night.  I don’t know if Robert turned off his phone or maybe he really had thrown it away.

Now we stood on a crowded train not sure what to say because he was going to meet a friend and i was going to meet a boy and who knew when I would see Robert again?  next day he would return to northern Europe to do theoretical physics at another famous university and to live with his girlfriend; who knew if they loved each other any more; Robert and I certainly loved each other, in a way it was love at first sight when I arrived at Willow’s place so many months ago and he was playing guitar and I was wearing my black dress.  At the same time I knew it could never be because as he played he rushed the beat.  And although from that moment the debt between us began to rise steadily in his favor I didn’t want him.  I never did, never would; should it have been otherwise?

I kissed him on each cheek and hugged him hard before he got off at San Bernardo because he was changing for the brown line, the Linea 4.

For me there was one more stop, Quevedo.

I arrived just shy of the appointed time, 9:15.  Disgusting.  I can’t show up this punctually.  What will people think?  I ducked into the nearby VIPS to kill five minutes at least and bought a pack of gum.