It is considered inappropriate for men to wear shorts out at night. This is a silly and antiquated rule that I have started to violate. I don’t care if I stick out; I can’t do it anymore. If it’s this hot people should be able to wear shorts and that is that, so there, Spain. Inside the clubs that thump with music that reminds you that you are in Barcelona the city is at its hottest, even in shorts. The girls dance and move and glisten but I do not think I glisten. I just sweat and the back of my shirt glues itself to my shoulders. Drops fall off my nose and when I try to talk to the glistening girls I look like a leaky faucet.
I could go on but I am sure that you are cool and comfortable as you read this and thus it must bore you like a war story with too much detail and blood and repetition—I am sorry for that. To make up for it I will tell you about the guy in the wheelchair. I call him wheelchair-man. He was severely debilitated and rather than seem smart and look up what was wrong with him I will say what I would say if I was talking to you and not writing for you: he had that Stephen Hawking thing going on. His head was pressed down and towards his shoulder and his arms jutted up against his body awkwardly. His right hand controlled a small joystick on the armrest.
I saw him near the beach where I was watching a fun Brazilian band playing on the street. They made a lot of noise and yelled a lot and jumped around and smiled while they sang. I was sitting on a curb watching them and smiling too when wheelchair-man started to pass by behind them. He had a large bottle of water attached to the back of his wheelchair and I remember wondering how he got to it. Could he get out of the chair alone? He went a little ways past and then he stopped. He slowly turned around towards the band, making a half circle with a four or five foot radius. He stopped and stayed like that for a while, watching with his head stuck to his shoulder, and then he pushed the joystick forward and came a little closer. He listened a little more, and then came a little closer again.
This went on until he was near the rest of us watching. People in the audience were stamping their feet and some were up and swaying but a lot were just sitting down and watching too. The Brazilian guitarist, every now and then, would jump up and run through the crowd. Wheelchair-man started to fidget with his joystick and shake the chair back and forth a little and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Then he did it a bit more, and he started to rock his body back and forth in the chair too. Another song came on and he kept going and then he wasn’t shaking the chair back and forth but driving it around, turning it, spinning it, and doing figure-eights: he was dancing, as best he could at least.
He kept rocking more and more and it wasn’t graceful or pretty because he couldn’t move his body and I was a little afraid he would fall out of the chair but the people in the crowd started to notice him. It seemed to me he was the most earnest man I had ever seen and that all he truly wanted to do, or ever wanted to do, was dance. He was very concentrated. He was smiling too, or making what seemed to me like a smile. The guitarist went over to him and jumped around him and wheelchair-man spun around in circles and now it was clear that he really was smiling and the music was playing louder and another man in the band was yelling into the microphone and it was a moment that made me smile too and I was happy to have been there and for him to have been there and I was happy that he was happy, for whatever that is worth.
I don’t know if there is anything deeper than that in the story, I don’t offer it as a parable or a positive example. It is only something that I saw just off the beach in Barcelona which is a place strange enough for it to have been real. After a couple more songs I got up and left, but he was still there, spinning and dancing, sweaty and thirsty looking.
