Sebastian Hoyle – Stories

            I’ve always been deeply effected by the movies I’ve seen.  I don’t know if that is a testament to the movie makers ability or my weak-mindedness?  I’d like to think the movie makers ability.  Just give me that one, it’s good for my self esteem.  At any rate, when Star Wars came out I was convinced I could move things with my mind if I just tried hard enough.  Naturally, I never moved anything with my mind. I just accumulated about a million action figures.  You know you’re a Star Wars junky when you have to have both the regular, and the “Snow Gear” Storm Troopers.

            After I saw my first Rocky movie, I wanted to be a boxer.  I even trained for a few days. Then I got beat up by the neighborhood bully and that ended my hopes of being a famous boxer.  Actually, he wasn’t even bigger than me, but that’s what I told myself afterwards.  Hey, what can I say, my self esteem needs all the help it can get.  After the beating I took you’d think I’d have learned my lesson about letting movies influence me, and I did, for about 10 years.

One night while I was in college with nothing to do I watched “The Piano” with my friends Justin and Pat.  Not a great movie, but a good movie.  Harvey Keitel was in it.   Anyway, in the movie there’s a girl who doesn’t talk.  Actually, she can talk, she just chooses not to talk.  Like I said, movies were very influential on me, so, after the movie, I got to thinking.  What would it be like to not talk?  Before common sense kicked in and said what stupid idea the whole thing was, I had already told my friends about the plan.

            “Dude, after this movie is over,” I said, “I’m not going to talk for like a few days”.  Justin and Pat stopped watching the rolling credits of the movie and slowly looked back at me in the back of the room.  Yup, they thought I was an idiot.

“You’re what?”, Justin asked.

“I’m not going to talk for, say, three days from the time this movie ends.”

“You are a fucking genius Sebastian,” Justin said sarcastically.  “What could possibly be the point of not talking?”

“Do you mean three days, or three sets of 24 hours?” Pat interrupted.

“Um, I don’t know,” I replied, grabbing another handful of stale popcorn, “I guess three sets of 24 hours.  So, I won’t talk for 72 hours.”

“Sounds pretty dumb to me.”  Justin said while getting up to rewind the movie.  Actually, it had only been 30 seconds and it was already sounding kind of dumb to me too, but I figured it was worth a try.

After the movie, the 72 hours of quiet started.  It’s actually much easier than you would think, once you get over the initial need to talk and respond.  Talking is a habit, like smoking, but much easier to break.  Before I could get home, the teasing from Justin and Pat started.

“Dude, if you’ve got a small penis, just don’t say anything.  It’s ok, we all knew it,” Justin said with a smile while poking at my crotch with the video we’d rented.  After walking for a few minutes, another brain storm of a joke came to him.  “Hey, if you spank the chimp more than five times a day, just don’t say anything,” he said with laugh while patting me to hard on the shoulder.  Aren’t friends great…  Finally, I was able to ditch Pat and Justin, get home, and go to bed.

It’s 3 a.m. and the phone rings, I’m still half asleep.  It was Pat.  “Sebastian, is that you?”  I looked at the phone.  “Dude, say something?  Are you ok?”  Hm, I hadn’t thought of this problem.  If I wasn’t going to talk, how was I going to use the phone?  “If this is you, tap the phone on the table”  I tapped the phone on the table.  “Cool man, I just wanted to test you.  I think it’s cool what you’re doing, keep it up”.  And then he hung up the phone.  Now it wasn’t a joke, now it was a test.  I had to go the distance.

Day #1

            Singing.  It didn’t take me long at all to figure out that I missed singing.  Within just an hour or two, the talking I could learn live without.  The singing was a problem.  Like anyone, anywhere in the world can hear Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, or John Lennon’s “Imagine” and not sing along.  It’s a damn physiological impossibility and both of them were on the radio on the way to school.  So, I turned off the radio to listen to the quiet.  Which, it turns out, sounded a lot like honking cars and road work.  Now I know why I started listening to the radio in the car in the first place.

            School, however, turned out to be no problem all.  I think teachers actually prefer it if you don’t talk in class.  Like in someway that allows them to think they’re teaching the material so well that the lecture they’ve been giving for 29 years off the same piece of paper is, in fact, flawless.  Well I’m glad that little fib helped someone’s self esteem.  While I was daydreaming in class I realized I definitely picked the right time to do this experiment.  I don’t think a boss at a job would have been so willing to listen to my pet “personal growth projects”.  My daydream during my “Religions of the World” class went something like this…

Extra Mean Boss:  Hoyle, get into my extra plush, decked out, you know you can’t even afford this carpet, office of mine.  (Sebastian Hoyle enters office from stage right.  Boss looks up from his oak desk to say)  Hoyle, I’ve got a problem with you.  I was told by your boss, the guy 18 spaces down from me on that organizational chart I had my secretary’s secretary make for me, that you haven’t been talking all day.  Is that true?

Umpa Lumpa Hoyle:  (Hoyle writes on a piece of paper his answer and then hands the boss the paper.  The paper says)  I’m sorry extra mean boss sir, I’m not talking for the next 72 hours in an effort to see what I can learn about humanity that can help me grow as a human being.

Extra Mean Boss:  (Boss reads paper and then tears it up and throws it in the trash) Well, here’s your first lesson Hoyle.  You can’t work for the firm of “Myers, Connors, Welling, and Baker” without talking.  You’re fired!  Not only that, but while we’ve been talking, someone has been cleaning out your desk for you.  You’ll find your things on the curb out front.  Have a nice day”.

Day #2

By the second day every friend I ever had came out of the woodworks to chatter away at me.  Having realized that I couldn’t respond I naturally seemed the perfect candidate to talk to.  The reason being it would seem, nobody else would sit and listen to them talk.  I’d swear I was the most popular guy on campus to talk to that day. Not that any of the questions were good ones.  They were questions like, “Do you think she likes me?”.  I couldn’t speak, naturally, so I just had to keep listening and walking along.  “Does this make me look fat?”  Wow, this would try my patience in a hurry.  “Is it ok if we could to the record store before we go to Burger King”  What the hell do I care, if we go to the record store or Burger Kind first, they are right next to each other.  Why are you talking so much to me?  “I’m so nervous, what if I don’t do good on my test?”  I don’t care if you don’t do good on your test, and talking about it isn’t going to make you do better.  So, for gods sake, say something interesting or shut the hell up!  What I quickly learned was this.  When you stop talking and start listening to people, you’d be amazed all the things they say that don’t really need a reply.

Day #3

On day three I was sitting with Pat Nintendo in silence when he turned to me and said, “Dude, this girl who has a crush on me left me her car for the weekend, do you want to go to Mexico?”  God yes.  Finally, something to break the endless chattering of others and the boredom. Let’s go to Mexico!

            However, before hopping into our “borrowed” car to go to Mexico.  I’d made two miscalculations.  First, I was going with Pat.  The person who might actually be able to hold out longer than me in a quiet car on a long stretch of road.  Second, between Phoenix and Mexico, there are no radio stations.  By the time I realized these two critical errors though, we were already on the road to Mexico and the last of the AM radio stations had given out.  Nothing but silence.

Have you ever listened to the sounds of the desert and nothing else for 6 hours?  It’s a lot different than the “silence” of a city.  The desert is actually quiet.  A kind of spooky quiet at first. One that lets you hear your heartbeat create a rhythm with the tires going over the evenly spaced cracks in the road.  Once the initial shock of it wears off though, you’ll find yourself beginning to enjoy it.  At least I did.

I used to wonder what idiot it was that made deserts national parks.  It’s nothing but cactus right?  Well I don’t wonder anymore. It took me just 6 hours and now I’m a  convert.  Make all the national parks from deserts you want to, that’s what I say.  You’ve got my support.

            Towards the middle of the afternoon we arrived in Mexico.  Mexico, it turns out, was a time for truly inspired practical jokes for Pat to play on the locals and me.  In case you’ve never been to a Mexican boarder town, it’s easy to imagine.  Just think of the worst neighborhood in your own city, then add stray dogs, uneven sidewalks, and pushy shopkeepers.  They hang out in front of their stores pulling on your shirt and saying,  “Hey, American, I got something for you.  Special price for you today only”.  That’s when Pat would jump in and do the talking for me.

“I’m sorry sir, my friend can’t talk to you, he had his throat taken out by a tiger.”  What could I say?  Nothing at all.  Just smile and agree.  As the day went on though, I even began to find Pat’s comments funny.  Some of my personal favorites were, “He doesn’t speak, not since the time he saw his parents killed by a badger” and “Sorry, he doesn’t have any money, he spent it all on medication for the clap!”  When you’re the butt of a really good joke, you can’t help but laugh.

The fun can’t last forever though.  So, after 6 hours of walking around, eating strange tacos, drinking beer, and listening to Pat tell lies, it was time to head home.  First, however, we had to get though the border patrol gate.  “What nationality are you?” the policemen at the gate asked me.  I pointed to the American side.  “Don’t play games with me,” he continued, “now what nationality are you?”.

Forget that I was white as white can be.  Forget that I was showing him an American drivers license.  For that matter, forget the four guys behind him that were climbing the fence with a pound of marijuana strapped to each of their backs.  He wanted to know what nationality I was!  I had visions of having a full body cavity search only to be tossed into a Mexican jail for 40 years.  Only to finally get out of jail and find all my friends would have forgotten me, a Republican was back in office, and social security was bankrupt.

“American”, I said in a haste of panic, “I’m American.”  The man waived me through the gate and I went back home.

            When I was born my mother had me baptized Roman Catholic.  Growing up she always took me to Protestant churches though.  She said she was trying to “cover her bets”.  Personally, I never played cards much, but man did I hate church.  Not that I hated the church itself.  A building’s just a building, not to be hated or loved really.  I just hated that church was always on Sunday mornings;  like somebody couldn’t have made Monday the day of salvation.  As an eight year old you’re under the delusion that you only get two days a week off from school and life, Saturday and Sunday, and God was seriously cutting into my play time.  I guess I resented it a little.  Well, that, and the preacher always went long.  Here’s a word of advice.  If you’re ever a preacher, make an eight year old boy happy, end on time.

            Even before I had reached my ninth birthday, my Mom and I had already come to  an understanding.  I would sacrifice the morning of one of my two days of freedom and go to church.  In return, we would sit in the back row of the highest balcony of the church and I could do as I pleased;  so long as I did it quietly of course.  So, every Sunday, from 9am until our uncaring preacher finally ran out of words, I would daydream.  I’d daydream about being outside playing with my friends, watching TV, or actually being Han Solo flying the “Millenium Falcon”.  From time to time I would get bored of killing Imperial Storm Troopers and try to pay attention to what was going on.  Mostly people seemed to just mumble a lot.  The preacher would mumble something from a book; a really long word, which may actually have been a sentence, something like, “Brahfraanalhafara”.  Then everyone in the audience would mumble back, “Andalsowithyou”.

            During one of the “non-mumbling” times that correlated with a brief period of me paying attention, I watched two boys my age come out from behind a curtain.  They were dressed all in white and were carrying these big “candle lighting things” in their hands. For a good five minutes or so, they just walked around and lit all the candles in the church.   Man do churches have a lot of candles.  Instinctively, I knew that’s what would make my Mom proud.  Every eight year old boy knows that.  For some reason we all know how proud our mothers would be if we were the “candle lighting boy” who carried the “candle lighting thing”.  But forget that, something else had my attention now; the candlesticks that were holding up the candles.  I’d never really looked at them before, but now that I had, I was fairly sure they were made of silver.

            With this small bit of information, my still forming eight year old mind went to work.  “Why would God want silver candlesticks?”  I couldn’t think of a particularly good reason.  “What if the candlesticks were made of wood?  Would God be angry?”  That one was easy, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t much mind.  “And what if their were no candlesticks in the church at all?”  Heck, God didn’t need candles to see by, he was God, and we had perfectly good electrical lights hanging from the ceiling anyway.  “Maybe,” I thought, “the candles were in case someone forgot to pay the electric bill?”  I couldn’t be sure.

            Sometime after the two boys lit the candles, but before they made it back behind the curtain, the whole Church thing had more or less sorted itself out in my mind.  “If God doesn’t care if we have candlesticks at all, than does he care if we have this building?”  Not that I’d ever met God or seen a burning bush or anything, but I was more or less sure he didn’t care.  The building didn’t seem all that useful to an eight year old boy anyway.  It didn’t have an arcade room or basketball court or anything cool to speak of.  Just lots of candlesticks.  “Well than, if God doesn’t care if we come to this building and light silver candle sticks, what does he care about?”  That one had me stumped.  Luckily I was in church and could sleep on it for a bit.  Which I did.

            By the time the following Sunday had rolled around, I was relatively sure God didn’t much care whether I went to church or not.  I would like to think this had nothing to do with my friends wanting to play football at the open lot down the street, but I can’t testify to it.  So, at 8:00am, I made a run for the field near our house and laid down in the tall grass.  Around 8:30am I could hearing my Mom calling.  So far, so good.  Then around 8:45am, I could hear my Dad calling.  Whoah, I wasn’t expecting Mom to bring out the big guns so early in the game.  I was scared to death my Dad would find me,  laying flat on the ground, with bugs and critters starting to crawl on me like I was a Thanksgiving Feast, I could hear my heart beating.  Thump, thump.  Thump, thump.  Man was I nervous.  Thump, thump.  Thump, thump.  So I did what I’d always done when I was scared and nervous; I prayed.  I prayed that my Dad wouldn’t find me and drag me to church.  I guess God has a sense of humor after all, because after 15 minutes, my Dad went back inside to watch TV.  He never went to church with us anyway.  Eventually my Mom went to church and I went to go find my friends.

The football game went well, at least as well as the hundreds of other football games I’d played with my friends on Saturday’s for the months before.  This time I just happened to be playing on a Sunday.  I can’t say I played all that well though.  I was a bit distracted because I really couldn’t stop thinking about the ass beating I was going to get when I got home.  Around 3pm, more out of hunger than courage, I finally went home.

I crept through the door as quiet as I could, more or less with the expectant fear you always see in that one animal on the public television “Wild Life” shows that strays to far from the herd.  It knows it’s just seconds away from getting thumped on by the lion in the tall grass, because it can see the cameraman waiting to film its death.  It just can’t find the lion.  Well, this time I was the animal and the “Wild Life”  camera in this scenario was my sister saying, “Man, are you gonna get it.”  I had the exact same problem though, I couldn’t find the lion.

I went into the kitchen to check the fridge and there was my Mom.  Did you know it’s the female lion’s who do all the hunting for the pride?  It must be true, I saw it in “The Lion King”.  However, for some reason she was letting me go without a single word.  Quick, grab the Coco Puffs and milk and make a run for the bedroom.

It was obvious what she was doing.  She was leaving me for the big lion.  She would pick up the scraps.  On my way to my bedroom I got spotted by the big lion, my Dad.  Right behind me to film the whole great “Wild Life” documentary entitled, “Death of A Calf”, was my sister.  Now is when it was going to happen, I was sure.  But it didn’t happen, it never did.  My sister never got her “Death of a Calf” highlights shot, and I never got yelled at.  I never even got a stern talking to.  Nothing ever happened. 

After that I just kind of quit going to church and nobody really ever talked about it again.  There was just this quiet disappointment in my Mom that I was never going to be one of those kids who lit the candles at the beginning of church.  I was the kid who laid down in the grass and prayed.

            “The World’s Fastest Program”, that’s what the flyer said for the dorm program I was putting on.  The flyer said it was an “educational game” where the prizes had “cash value”.  What a great flyer.  What poor college student could possibly say no to a 2 minute program where you win money, right?  Needless to say, the flyer worked.

Now it was 2pm on Saturday and that flyer had attracted twenty people to play my newly dreamed up “educational game”.  I looked out into the waiting room, picked out two people who looked like they didn’t know each other, and brought them into the isolated “gaming room”.  A small room with white walls and two doors.  One door in and one door out.

            Walking into the room the first two students saw a beat-up, 1970’s style card table with two chairs.  One chair on each side of the table.  In the middle of the table was a checker board with just one piece placed in the middle of it.  Next to the table was a bag of laundry tokens, which is, by the way, the closest thing to a formal, internationally recognized, “dorm room currency” there is.  So, technically, the flyer didn’t exactly lie.

“Welcome,” I said, “the rules of the game are this.  First, you can not communicate with each other in any verbal or non-verbal way.  No stares, no winks, no smiles, no talking.  Nothing that could possibly be interpreted as communication.  If you do communicate in any way, shape or form, you will both give up your winnings and the game will be over.”  They nodded in understanding.

            “The object of the game is simple.  You earn laundry tokens by moving the piece to the other end of the checker board, one space at a time.  So, if the piece goes to the side of the table opposite you, you get one laundry token from the ‘Laundry Token Bag of Love’n’.  The bag you see here.  If the checker piece ends up on the side of the table nearest to you, the person you are playing will get one laundry token from that very same ‘Token Bag of Love’n’.  You can move the piece on the board any direction you want.  Forward, backward, or sideways.  It doesn’t matter to me a bit.  Player one will go, then player two, and so on and so forth.  The game will last for two minutes.  Neither player can ever get more then five laundry tokens in a single game, and you only get to play one game.  If there are no questions, than the game starts now.”

            The first player was a younger girl, about 19 years old.  Kind of made you think she had enough money she didn’t need the laundry tokens anyway.  Like she paid someone to do her laundry and just bought new socks any time her old ones got sweaty.  After my shotgun directions, she looked a bit confused, or maybe that was just her natural look.  Either way, she was first up and it was her turn to move.  She moved the piece forward.  Then it was player two’s turn.  Player two was also a girl.  White dress and a pewter cross on her necklace.  She lived on the “Health and Fitness Floor”.  Floor eleven.  Instead of a TV room, they had a weight room.  She moved the piece forward as well, which put it right where it started.  Player one moved the piece forward again and player two moved it right back to where it started again.

This back and forth motion on just two squares in the center of the checker board went on for two straight minutes.  At the end of the two minutes, I called “time”.  Both the rich girl and the Snow White look alike contest winner had earned no laundry tokens.  For them, the game was over.  They exited through the second door in the game room to go to a separate “debriefing room”.  Basically, just a separate room so they wouldn’t talk to the other players who hadn’t played the game.

            The next two players came in.  This time, player one was a boy.  I think from L.A. or at least San Diego.  He looked very hip with the baggy clothes and retro strips down the side of his shirt.  Player two was a boy as well, but not as well dressed.  Instead, he came off as the kind of guy you would want to go out and party with, really talkative and joking.

They heard the instructions, and they did the same exact thing for two full minutes.  They moved the piece back and forth on just two squares in the center of the board, I called “time”, and they left with no laundry tokens.  The same program went on for group three, four, five and six.  Seemed like I had nearly every type of person walk into the room; tall and short, fat and thin, young and old.  The angst ridden kid, the pot smoking drop out, even one musician.  All had two things in common, stinky clothes and they wanted my laundry tokens.  For each group I always gave the same instructions and, for two minutes, the same thing would happen.  The checker piece would move back and forth at the center of the board, I’d say “time”, and they’d leave the room empty handed.

            After six groups consisting of twelve students, I was beginning to wonder if anyone was ever going to win a laundry token.  I felt a Scooby Doo dream sequence coming on, complete with wavy lines.  Would I just have to live with all these stinky people?  What if they trapped me in the elevator on my way back up to my room?  I wasn’t sure I could take that.  Trapped in a elevator with twenty angst ridden, stinky people.  Don Knott’s! Don Knott’s is the bad guy!  Go get the Mystery Machine and run him over before he traps me in the elevator again!  I was starting to have a panic.  End dream sequence, time to rejoin reality.  Hm, I’d better take the stairs in the future just to be on the safe side though.  Then, with group number seven, it happened.  Blah, blah, blah, here’s how you move the piece.  Blah, blah, blah, here’s out you get the tokens.  No communication in any form…blah, blah, blah, blah…“go”.

            Player one looked at the checker piece and waited.  “What are you waiting for?” I thought.  Ten seconds went by.  You could just see her working it all out in her head.  She knew something wasn’t right, kind of like the mouse sniffing the cheese just before it walks into the trap.  She was willing to wait a bit to figure this one out.  Fifteen seconds.  She looked at me, then back at the checker piece, then back at me again.  Twenty seconds had passed.  That’s when I think I cheated.  I didn’t make any movement.  I didn’t give her a hint.  I just kept looking at her with the same cold, expressionless face of a Greek statue, but I thought it.  I know I did.  For that brief moment before I could stash it away in the back of my brain, buried between the cynicism the OJ trail and yet another high school shooting spree. I thought “restore my faith in humanity”.  I thought it, and she saw me think it, and maybe, just maybe, I gave the smallest hint of a smile because in my heart I knew she would.

            Then she moved the piece towards herself.  A look of confusion from the other player.  The guy sitting across the table from her had some serious thinking to do now.  Why would she move the piece towards herself?  This one had him stumped.  You could almost hear him thinking.  “Who cares why the girl is stupid.  Let’s take advantage of her.”  So, he moved the piece towards her.  Quick as can be she moved it towards herself again.

“What a freaking stroke of luck,” the other player probably thought, “Maybe she didn’t understand the directions, or maybe I got lucky and got put with the only person here dumb enough to move the piece towards herself.”  So, he moved the piece towards her again to get a laundry token.  Thank goodness, finally one person in this building wasn’t going to stink.  Even if he didn’t appreciate this great gift of human charity I was witnessing, I knew that I sure would on my stink free elevator rides of the future with him.

So, with just over a minute to go, I put the checker piece back in the middle of the table.  It was the guys turn to go start.  Now he was stumped.  Why would a seemly rational person move the piece towards themselves?  He made a little sniff of the air while trying to work it all out in his head.  “Didn’t she know I was going to get the laundry piece?  What was she thinking?”  A long pause.  A minute and twenty seconds had passed into the game.  Forty seconds left.  Then he moved the piece towards himself.

One minute and fifty seconds into the game and they were all done.  Both players had reached the five token limit.  They were out the door to the waiting room.  The only players to get a single token all day.  The only players who were going to get clean clothes.  The only ones who were willing to move the piece towards themselves.

               “Sebastian” my mother said on the phone just before I left to go to Europe.  “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid”.

“I promise Mom”.

“And Sebastian, don’t do that Running of the Bulls thing.  Promise me you won’t do the Running of the Bulls.  People get hurt all the time doing that”.

“I promise Mom”.

So there I am, waiting in the street.  I’d learned as much as I thought I could, but I was still nervous.  Mostly because I’d been up all night drinking until I passed out on a park bench and was suffering from a hangover. But also because I was standing in the middle of the street, in Spain, waiting to do the Running of the Bulls.

“Are you American?” a Spanish man next to me asked while he was reading the paper and casually smoking a cigarette on the crowded street.

“Yeah”, I answered.

“You know these Bulls can kill you?” he said just as calm as can be in a Spanish accent, still looking at his newspaper.  Yeah, I know Einstein, thanks for the insight.  Gosh, I thought I was doing the “Running of the Musk Rats” for a minute, but now that you mention it, I do kind of remember somebody saying something about bulls.  Of course I know bulls can kill you!  What are you some kind of idiot!  They’re not going to just run around humping people’s legs!

            “Yesterday” he continued, “somebody got stepped on and broke his back.  It happened in the street right over there”.  See, I know what you’re up to there Pedro, you’re just trying to play a good game of “scare the foreigner”.   I’m on to you and your ways.  Oh wait, it’s working.  Oops, I really am scared.  Doooh!  “And the day before,” he added, “a matador got a horn though his stomach.  Died right on the field.”  Ok, ok, it’s working, you scared the foreigner.  Thank you very much.  You can stop now.

He did have a good point though.  What exactly was I doing here again?  Let’s weigh the facts.

            Fact #1:  I’m an American in Spain and the friend I came to Europe with is currently somewhere in Ireland making car bombs.

            Fact #2:  I haven’t called home in two weeks.  My family still thinks I’m in Berlin stealing pieces of the Berlin Wall to take home to them.

            Fact #3:  I don’t know a single person in Spain but this guy Pedro standing next to me and he seems less than helpful.

That’s about the time something really clicked in me.  A minor oversight in the zest of my travel ambitions.  I could die on the street here and nobody would know who I was, or where to send the body.  For that matter, no one back home would even know where I was, or where to look for the body.  Hmm, maybe this was a bad.  What exactly was I doing here again?  The crowd became anxious.  Two minutes until the start.  Now what was I thinking about again?  Oh yeah, what the hell am I doing here?!?!

Why do those people bungee jump?  Why do people jump out of perfectly good airplanes?  Actually, those are pretty stupid things to do, come to think of it.  Did I have to cheat life in some foolish Spanish tourism death event to prove that I was something to myself?  Hell no.  I wanted to be a history teacher and all that requires is a college degree.  Balls of steel are an optional accessory and does not get you a pay raise.  It’s not too late to make a break for the gates before the first whistle blows.  I could still make a very good high school history teacher.

“Did you know that I heard today they were releasing eight bulls, more than they did the last two days.  It’s going to get pretty dangerous.”  Oh shut up Pedro.  I’m having a life crisis here and you’re distracting me from it.  Don’t I want to live to become a history teacher, get a house payment, a car payment, and plan for my two weeks vacation in Hawaii?  Isn’t that the point of life?  To get car payments?  The first whistle blew.  They opened the gate in front of the crowd.  The bulls were still locked up, but we could start running.  In two more minutes they would open the back gate and release the bulls.

“Hey American,” said Pedro, “Don’t run with the tourists, run with the men.  Run with the Spanish”.  I stood there watching thousands of tourist run by and not a single Spaniard move a step.  Soon, the crowd of people in the street was clear.  The tourist’s had all run ahead.  Now it was a few hundred Spanish men, and me.

“Very good American, watch the coward tourists run” my Spanish friend said.  He was still smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper.

“So, when do we run?” I asked.

“Not, yet” he replied.  He stopped reading his newspaper and began to roll it up.  So, we waited.  While we waited I started to do the math.  When the second whistle blew they would release the bulls 100 yards behind where I was standing.  Then I would have to run down 500 yards of narrow streets to the stadium.  That’s shouldn’t be to hard.  I can cover 500 yards, I think, in the time a bull covers 600 yards.  Bulls are big and slow, right?  More time passed and I got nervous.

“Hey, when are we going to run?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Pedro, “but soon”.  I waited.  Then the second whistle blew.  That meant they’d released the bulls 100 yards back.

“Now we run!?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he replied smooth as could be, “but soon”.  He put down his cigarette.  Well, as least he put down his cigarette, that means we should be running soon, right?  Hm, how long does it take for a bull to cover 100 yards?  Ten seconds passed, then fifteen seconds.

“When are we going to run?”  I asked, a bit more concerned than before.  Pedro pointed to a trash can 15 yards away.

“When the bulls get to there.  Then we run”.  No, I thought, that’s when you run. Now is when I run.  So, with a guilty conscience for forsaking the credo of the adrenaline junkies of the world, I started a light jog.  10,000 foreigners ahead of me, and 1000 Spanish behind me.

            The Spanish guys behind me started to jog, so I started to run.  We went like that for a hundred yards or so.  Then the Spanish guys started to run, so I started to sprint.  The Spanish guys started tearing ass down the street and I followed suit running my hardest as well.  With only one hundred more yards to the stadium the Spanish guys started passing me at somewhere between Mach 5 and Warp Speed.  (Made this white boy look like he was standing still.)  So I poured it on as hard as my legs could carry me.  We finally got to the last stretch before the stadium.

I don’t know who the genius was that invented the Running of the Bulls, but I’m sure they were looking for people to die.  The street you run on is a two lane road and the entrance to the stadium you run through is a one lane “Spanish size” road.  Which in human terms equates to about ten feet across.  Serious traffic jam.  At that particular moment I would have been very happy for one of those Walt Disney “people mover” mono-rails things to swing by, stop and pick me up, and whisk me off to Space Mountain, but none were in sight.  Just lots of crazy Spanish men pushing me.  I ran with the crazed crowd chanting my mantra,  “Please don’t let me fall down, please don’t let me fall down.”

            Freedom.  Freedom as I made it into the stadium and took a sharp right turn so as to hide behind the side of the open doors away from the crowd of people.  Just as I turned back to think, “Man, I ran too early” I watched the crowd clear and four big fat bulls come running past.  I watched people fall and get horned.  I also watched people stepping on people in an effort not to get horned.  In case you’re wondering, bulls are much bigger than you think and much faster than you think.  They will kill you if you’re in the way.

            Three weeks later, back in America, I’m on the phone with my Mom.  “Mom, I did the Running of the Bulls”.

“You did what!” she yelled.

“Mom,” I repeated, “I’m ok.  I’m home safe.  Nothing happened.  I did the Running of the Bulls and I’m ok”.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you’re home safe.  Was it fun?”.  Gosh I hadn’t thought about that before.  Let’s see;  I waited, I ran fast, I could have died, bulls ran past me, I watched some Spanish guy get stepped on, and I nearly wet myself.

“Yeah Mom, it was kind of fun”.

“Ooooh”, she said, “ I wish I could have been there to watch.  It sounds so exciting.”