He was right in front of me and had a head bigger than Trump’s balls. He moved around a lot, like he had a scorpion crawling up his leg, and when the song was over and we were clapping for the band, he kept dancing, and maybe he’d been doing it since swallowing that pill in he summer of ’67 in Haight-Ashbury. It was like John Belushi in the outtakes of The Blues Brothers. Like Belushi but not funny. He was incredibly annoying and clingy, and he couldn’t quite get the blonde he’d put his arm around and christened in gin several times. Because he drank gin and asked for a lot of flowers in his glass, and I’m not surprised, as we already know that the extremes of cosmic stupidity always end up touching, either because of the urns or because of the concentration of aromatic herbs in the gin and tonic.
I took the opportunity to ask the owner if he was insured; not my big head, but the floor, I added, laughing at my own witticism.
In the end, I could see it coming, he stepped on my foot. But it wasn’t just some minor thing. It was the stomp of a huge beast that had just escaped from a Lovecraft nightmare. I think my fingernails cracked and my eyeballs swelled. For a moment I considered grabbing the guy by the scruff of the neck and smashing him into the bass player, who wasn’t innocent wearing a Che T-shirt either, or throwing him over the bottles in the pub, which could have triggered an extraordinary pre-railway brawl.
But I restrained myself, thinking that nothing would make him more excited than getting a slap in the face. Because there are guys who are born with that talent. And in one of his constant invasions of my space I took the opportunity to empty half a glass down the back of his neck. Not good. A couple of ice cubes fell too. Clin, clin, clin. Come back for another, you big head, I said to myself. And then he turned around, hardly looking like he was going to hug me, and I instantly flashed him a 32-piece smile and two silver sparkles, along with eyes that were as compassionate as they were cynical. In case he wasn’t already moved by my young guinea pig look, I cocked my head to one side and muttered an “I’m sorry” that would make an Islamic State executioner wince.
Then she stepped in. The blonde girl started laughing out loud, because some women see reality in a dimension hidden from men, which is that of evil, and she immediately realized that someone was pimping her superman and found it all very funny. And she didn’t miss the chance to press the ice cubes down his back, and he was forced to respond with some rather pitiful caresses and lower the heat, and I hadn’t felt so happy in a long time.
The band kept on playing classics and the guy with the galactic head kept on annoying, which is his thing, reaching levels that are hard to take, even for someone who is reasonably in favor of animals living in freedom. And in a treacherous hip sway, to the rhythm of Hombres G -sufre, mamón-, he lost his balance with commendable clumsiness, and came at me like the fiscal policy of the European Union, and I felt a moral obligation to stop him, but it seemed wonderful poetic justice to dodge him like in Matrix, contemplate how he cracked his skull against the ground, and then put his hands to my head, saddened by the blow. I took the opportunity to ask the owner if he was insured; not my big head, but the floor, I added, laughing at my own witticism, with that stubbornness so typical of writers the night after collecting the royalties and spending them on a packet of pipes.
Still, I held out my hand, for the blonde was already rolling on the floor with laughter and he seemed more inclined to finish her off than to come to her aid. Standing up, freshly humiliated, she stomped a little on the ground, hoping to find a pothole or a puddle of oil, or some other excuse. Then she cursed a waiter, and turned her head as if looking for the referee to blame, and then I understood that he needed to be a victim, because he was in fact touching his groin with a serious expression as if he had suffered a sudden muscle tear. And then the blonde came back, trailing her circus behind her, to deal him the final blow, looking at him with inconceivable love: “I love you for the fun you are.” And I, chronicler and witness, would bet an arm and a leg that this is the same thing that hyenas say every night to their cats, after entertaining themselves by torturing him thoroughly. And for an instant, I must be getting old, I felt sorry for the big head.
READ MORE from Itxu Diaz:
