Travels of a Playwright

It all went down on the N-630 highway in Spain; a long bit of road that is the main connection between the copper colored buildings in Salamanca and the sunlit shades of off-white tint Leon. It was several minutes to midnight as our two busses stood motionless waiting for some sort of solution to present itself. Middling around us were about forty well-privileged aged Spanish kids from junior high to early high school, six of their residence counselors in their mid-twenties, and four early-twenties American “professors” who were just there to teach some English for the summer. Oh, and one priest who couldn’t believe how ugly the predicament that he now found himself in the middle of. He had been running this program for El Colegio de St. Augistinos for almost a decade and never anything like this.

What I remember most about that night, is looking out to the darkened countryside of Spain and feeling for the first time that I was surrounded by foreign on all sides. There was no familiar number to call, in fact there was not one person on this side of the Atlantic Ocean that I could reach out to, to pick me up and drive me somewhere safe or familiar. But if I could have, I would have taken Tom with me, both of us away from the side of that road, regardless what had fallen between us on this trip. But I couldn’t. Instead, I could only wait and see what Padre Pajares, the priest, wanted to do next; how he wanted to get the kids back to quiet of their rooms back at St. Augustinos dorms. And how he wanted to deal with the rest of us, how he wanted to approach what had happened that regrettable evening.

This was also the last night Tom and I would ever speak. We’d been traveling buddies ever since our intoxicated days at university in California. From our 1st trip to see my DJ cousin in London, to Slovakia and Austria, to the sleeplessness of Ibiza and crossing the Mediterranean to Barcelona on that ferry where come midnight all of the passengers become bodies strewn across every floor for sleep; looking like some apocalyptic scene out of a Hollywood movie. Even after the shared fear that comes from running alongside the bulls in the wild and wine-drenched Pamplona, and driving across the whole of Spain with nothing but the music and laughter of our conversation to pass the time; even after all our adventures, what separated us now was clear and definitely cut. Tom had broken the law. And there was nothing I could do to help him; nor help him help himself.