Open for Opportunity

The soothing swoosh of the low tide was his only tranquilizer as his pudgy body awakened from the requisite slumber after a night fueled by Fanta Limón and bottom-shelf vodka. It was 9:12 a.m. according to his analog wristwatch and the cloudless blue sky and the brilliant yellow fireball that had risen over the Mediterranean would no longer allow him to sleep. He rubbed his right hand through his unkempt, curly brown hair, understanding that no matter how much grooming he might do, complete sand removal would be impossible.

           The longer hand flinched to 9:13 and he asked himself how much his worn-out Seiko would bring him if his high school Spanish would allow him to find a pawn shop near the beach. An expiring rail pass and an American passport constituted his most precious possessions once he had placed his backpack with what was left of his clothes and his dignity in a filthy, dented metal locker at the Alicante train station.

           The few bills and assortment of coins with the regal profile of King Juan Carlos would not afford him decent lodging. Luckily, the weather had held out and the beach had served him well as a provisional measure. The awakening tide had crept in a bit further and the beachgoers trickled in despite the early hour. The orange towel that had accompanied him throughout the previous 27 days in Europe served adequately as a means to keep the sand from smoothing away the features of his skin. Back home at the highway department, his favorite task had been sandblasting snowplows. Each summer he reveled in the freedom of hiding out at the garage while his colleagues patched potholes in broad daylight under the surveilling eyes of the head honchos. Alone with his blasting machine, he had discovered the exact pace at which he’d have to work to remove the rusty yellow paint, only leaving a pristine steel surface ready to be repainted with a fresh coat of that unmistakable highway department hue.

           The fine white sand on the beach reminded him of the power of those minuscule grains. A single speck posed little threat but if they were to join forces in a ragtag sand militia, they possessed the power to remove the outer layer of his soul—a soul that seemed to be wandering around a purgatory of his own doing. When he first saw Alicante on the map, he had planned to enjoy the sandy beach but the circumstances would not permit it.

           “Come spend a month with me,” she begged him last November, “We’ll travel around Europe by train.”

           Oh, how he wished he’d listened to his initial intuition. It would be impossible. By May, he’d be earning $6.66 per hour renovating snow removal equipment, whipping weeds into a merciless submission, or working his highway magic with a florescent orange flag.

           “We’re done here May 1,” she told him, spelling out her plan despite his repeated rejections, “We can travel the whole month of May.”

           The appeal of the plan began to grow as the months went by, alone at college, longing to hold her in his arms again. In his room, he had tacked a series of four photos of the happy couple taken in a photo booth during the previous fall semester. The drunken smiles emphasized the beginnings of their love story and they kept him going through difficult moments. Despite the many temptations while partying with his friends, he remained faithful and missed his girl more and more over time. When the aerograms arrived, usually three weeks after she had written them, he devoured every chance to hear her voice, albeit through paper and pen. On those rare occasions when she could spare a few hundred pesetas to give him a call, he relished the sounds of her authentic voice. Spain was incredible and she was having the time of her life. “The only thing missing is you.”

           In a lonely funk due to her absence over Christmas break while back home with his high school pals, he convinced himself that he could juggle a month in Europe and resume his summer job in June. As the months raced towards his departure and glorious reunion with his girlfriend, the aerograms began to tail off and the lack of even a collect call converted her voice into an odd, distorted, and distant memory.

           “I got my ticket,” he informed her as his mom allowed him to make a quick overseas call on New Year’s Day. The lack of enthusiasm on the European end of the call did not go unperceived but he brushed it off as one of his many paranoid thoughts that habitually inhabited his insecure mind. Of course, she couldn’t wait to see him and get the know Europe together.

           Together. That’s all he longed for as he moved his towel to allow the waves to advance up the beach. He had stopped missing her officially a week earlier in Perpignan, twenty minutes after she boarded the slow train back to Madrid. Unofficially, he doubted he’d ever be over her.

           “I’m sorry,” she found a standard apology to suffice, “I’m not the person you used to know.”

           Indeed, she had become a different person. The girl he had sent off on that flight eight months earlier loved him, needed him, and even believed that perhaps they were destined to be together forever. She was his better half, but equally as insecure and needy as he was. The woman who abandoned him in France no longer needed him. She was self-assured, confident, and madly in love with another man. A Spanish man. An Iberian macho. For the love of God, he hated that man!

           As he rearranged his towel for the fourth time, removed a handful of broken shells from the sand, and placed himself facedown, he tried to erase her from his memory. How could she be in love with Marcos? How could she cheat on him? Most of all, how could she leave him in the south of France to run back into the arms of the son of her host family in Madrid?

           Set adrift in a continent that he no longer cared to explore, he made his lonely way to Barcelona. Feeling sorry for his situation, he overspent, staying in a three-star hotel near the Ramblas and enjoying himself as much as possible as a foreigner with negligible language skills and a desire to return to the good old USA. Then, he ventured down the coast to Valencia for a couple of days before winding down his adventures in Alicante. He planned his return to Madrid the next day. The steady weather pattern was nearing an end as ominous gray clouds began to hide the bright sunshine. He would need to make some cash fast, spend the night in a cheap hostel, and then, head to Madrid.

           “Pipas, avellanas, patatas, agua, Fanta Naranja, cerveza,” a sun-grizzled creature shouted out the names of his beachside merchandise. The sun had leathered the taut skin that stretched over the lanky man’s face. Despite his thin contexture, the muscles of his toasted arms had been working out for years, lugging a basket of salty goodies in one arm and a cooler full of refreshment in the other. The severe hoarseness of his voice as he broadcasted his menu had been caused by his long-term tobacco habit that had already shortened his lifespan by some fifteen years.

           Sitting up on the orange towel he observed the raisin-like vendor with undue curiosity. Selling snacks and beverages to willing customers clutching fists full of pesetas on a sunny beach couldn’t be more difficult than sandblasting snowplows on 90-degree Midwestern days. All he would need was a pack of beers, a cooler, and some ice. The opportunity was there in front of him. The old man couldn’t cover the entire beach by himself. He would be doing the guy a favor, he thought, “And I’m going to focus just on beer.”

           It was a short walk to Simago and he filled his head with the lyrics of a Dire Straits song as he thought about how easy hocking cold beers to thirsty beachgoers would be. He left the grocery store with twelve beers, a Styrofoam cooler, enough ice to chill his hot commodity, and a 100-peseta coin left in his pocket. He would gamble everything on this venture. He could sell each brown bottle for 100 pesetas each and subsequently, reinvest the 1,200 on more beer. If he worked quickly, he could re-use the ice he had purchased. He had learned something in three years as a business major. The buy-sell-buy cycle would continue until he found himself with enough cash to find a decent hostel in Alicante for one night, a bite to eat in the morning, and enough to subsist in Madrid for one day before heading to the airport. Sound business sense.

           “Cerveza,” he called out with his lousy accent, buzzing the Z way too much to even fake a close facsimile to the authentic pronunciation. Once the weather took a turn for the worse, his business model would crumble under its own weight. Without customers on the beach, he’d be just a sad sack without any money and a twelve-pack of beer. He swung the cooler rhythmically as he merrily marched through the warm sand and he repeated his poorly executed sales pitch in increasingly louder tones. Within minutes, he had found his first paying customer.

           “Dos, por favor.”

           He retrieved the two semi-chilled bottles from the cooler and proudly presented them to his initial client.

           “200,” he successfully communicated the price despite his mangling of the number in Spanish.

           Instead of two precious coins, all he received was an incomprehensible tongue lashing. Once the thirsty Spaniard realized he had not been understood, he created the universal pantomime for bottle opener. The bottles were not the twist top type and the absence of a bottle opener rendered them completely useless. The frustrated client returned the beers to the foolish ambulant vendor.

           “Do you have one?” he asked in his native tongue but the tan Spaniard had already receded into the thinning crowd of sunbathers and swimmers. The seventy/thirty mix of clouds to sun failed to produce as much as a faint shadow of the down-on-his-luck American. The weight of the full cooler began to tire him as his bare feet sank into the sand with each excruciating moment. As his feet buried themselves deeper and deeper into the beach, he realized he was shrinking—physically in stature and emotionally as a human being. The dry sand of the beach imprisoned his consciousness with the realization that he had made the last of a series of fatal mistakes.

           “Cerveza,” he cried feebly once more, attracting the attention of a stocky young man with a cleanly-shaven bald head.

           “Una,” was the only word the pink-headed man uttered, accompanied by the raising of his left index finger.

           Hope spurted from his eyes in a last desperate chance to make a sale, get the ball rolling, and avoid his eternal self-destruction. When he informed the sunburned man of the price, the latter chuckled at his accent. The twosome looked at each other sympathetically. They were both Americans.

           “Holy shit, you’re American, aren’t you.”

           The porcine American customer paused slightly, initially unwilling to blow his cover.

           “Yeah, I am.”

           Glee. Joy. Happiness. There was someone who could help him, who understood his language, who might have a bottle opener.

           “I bought all this beer,” he paused to catch his breath after the excitement, “and I didn’t buy a fucking opener.”

           “Oh,” the disappointed American scratched the curly hair on his chest, “well, that sucks, doesn’t it?” As the rhetorical interrogative hovered in the thick beach air, the potential savior turned his back on his countryman to search elsewhere for an ice-cold beer. Then, he pivoted abruptly and delivered his parting shot, “Dude, why didn’t you just buy cans?”

           Nearly three decades have passed. If you shade your eyes from the sun, on the northeastern end of the beach, you can witness the sun-weathered skin of the latest generation of refreshment sellers crying out the names of their ware for all to hear. On the other end of the beach, if you hold your eyes tightly shut and listen closely on a sunny beach day, you can still hear the faint cries of “Cerveza!” in a strong American accent. Legend recounts that shortly after the bottle opener blunder occurred, the Levant began to blow and the rain whipped the Alicante shoreline. When the storm had settled down, the remnants of a Styrofoam cooler had washed ashore near the Esplanade. Twelve never-to-be-opened beers remained intact, sheltered from the storm. When opportunity knocks, they tell you in Alicante, you’d better have an opener.