casi completamente ficción (viii)

The bus ride from whereverthefuck Cuba back to Habana was long and crowded and made him feel unpleasant and sore. He decided his ears were tired of listening to Spanish and not understanding even half of it, so he decided to stop listening and put in some headphones just so nobody would try to talk to him. Most of the time he didn’t even play anything through them but once in a while he did. He tried to listen to some classical music which was no good since during the quiet parts, the loud bad Spanish pop-music from the bus would leak into his ears and make a mess of everything. A few times he tried to listen to an audio-book which was a comedy and it made him feel good to laugh sometimes but he wasn’t much in the mood to laugh so mostly he just tried to sleep.

When he arrived in Habana he checked into the same hotel he had stayed in 4 days earlier. The hotel had seemed shabby to him 4 days ago but now it seemed like the goddamned Plaza when you compared it to the place he had been since. He put his bottle of rum into the mini-fridge to cool off along with a bottle of water he had bought during one of the bus stops. He couldn’t wait to get back to the States to eat pizza and drink whisky instead of rum and hear some music with English words again. But tonight the closest he could get was a hamburguesa that he had sent up from room service that wasn’t quite the same as an American hamburger but the differences were mostly good ones. He ate the hamburguesa with fries and a can of Coca-Cola and a little bit of rum and he went to bed with a stomach that woke him up a few times during the night.

He woke up just before the alarm he had set for 8:00 the next morning and took a long hot shower with proper soap and shampoo. He packed his bag and walked down to the hotel restaurant and drank two cups of tea and what he figured was supposed to be a doughnut but wasn’t really. Then he returned to his room and took the bottle of rum from the minifridge and placed it on the table in his room next to 50 centavos that he didn’t want to bother to change at the airport. He had one more drink from the bottle and then put it back down on the table, figuring that half a liter of fine aged rum would make quite a tip for some cleaning woman or whoever found it there, if they were allowed to keep it. Either way it was money well spent, since he hated to think how much money it would have cost him to do that much drinking one glass at a time at the bars. So he had gotten a good buzz twice and fall-down drunk once all on $16, and that wasn’t even counting the drinking he did in the mornings. It was too bad about all the regulations about liquids and airplanes and things you can and can’t buy in Cuba or he could have brought back half the rum, but he knew that once he was back in the States where there was plenty of good whisky he wouldn’t much want rum anyway. Besides, the taste of it would probably make him think too much about Cuba, and he figured that wasn’t something he would want to think about too often unless he was trying to. Sometimes he would probably try to, though, and for those times he could buy some rum a glass at a time.