The Diamond Rams Club
by Patrick Timony
illustration by Dave Coscia
The three 7th graders had a club called “The Diamond Rams.” They were all born in April and all shared the same strong Aries personalities. They played sports, got good grades, and had pretty girlfriends. One would grow up to attend Harvard on a full hockey scholarship and eventually become a successful lawyer. Another would grow up to win fame and fortune as a semi-professional lacrosse player and TV sportscaster. The third would take a road less-travelled and end up in a Spanish prison trying to arrange his Converse All-Stars and baseball cap beneath his butt and head so he could sleep on the concrete floor.
The third Diamond Ram’s fellow cell- mates would be hanging on the bars of the cell yelling for the guard to let them out so they could go use the bathroom or get some stinky Spanish cigarettes. They would yell, “Jeffe! Por favor! Servicios!” over and over for fifteen minutes until a guard came to the cell. The third Diamond Ram would try in vain to drift off and escape the troubling doubts that were starting to boil in his mind about the probability that he would end up like either of the other
There would be seventeen of them, all stuffed in a twenty by twenty foot windowless concrete dungeon in the basement of the Barcelona police station. Most of the prisoners would be Moroccan drug dealers on their way to deportation or to the long-term prison outside town. Two of the prisoners would be the third Diamond Ram and his guitar-playing partner, Paul. They would have been arrested for playing on the street and having too big a crowd.
Later, the third Diamond Ram would be trying to balance the remains of a tortilla bocquidillo on his stomach so that it didn’t fall on the floor and become smeared with the black grunge that lurked there. The guards would have brought bland, flaky egg sandwiches to the third Diamond Ram. Most of the prisoners would have eaten jamon bocquidillos. But the third Diamond Ram, having an obsession with eggs, would have asked the guard who brought the food, “Tienes Huevos?” which, in Spanish, means alternatively, “Do you have eggs?” and “Do you have the balls to fight me, you woman?” After finding out with what brutal seriousness Spanish men take themselves, and improving his knowledge of Spanish slang, the third Diamond Ram would end up having his wish granted and receiving two happy little tortilla bocquidillos a day. The incident would have spawned an egg of thought in the third Diamond Ram’s head that would later hatch a theory about why Spain was a third world country even though it was in the middle of Europe.
The other prisoners would chatter and burble amongst themselves, mostly in Arabic, while the third Diamond Ram and Paul would sit in the corner, sporadically trying to interject friendly phrases into the conversation. The happy Islamic chatterings would stop dead at these interjections and fifteen pairs of dark, distrustful eyes would turn slowly on the two guitar criminals. The criminals would think nice thoughts about Hammas and the Islamic Jihad until the eyes turned back toward each other and resumed haggling.
With the echo in the small concrete cell, the two criminals would sometimes hear strangely accented English phrases bubble to the surface of the chattering Arabic stew. “The echoes of reality,” in an upper-class English woman’s voice, and “Give me a smoke, bro,” in a black American accent would be two snatches of Arabic that, when combined with dungeon echo and a little imagination, would sound like good old innocent-until-proven-guilty English to the two criminals. But when the expatriate Englishman Paul would try to interject an imitation of one of the phrases into the conversation, the fifteen pairs of eyes would again turn slowly and distrustfully on the two Westerners and silence would descend.
This would go on day and night, the two English speakers alternately being spurned by their Arabic cell mates and being woken from their Converse and baseball cap supported dozes by Arabic accented calls for the bathroom and cigarettes.
After three days, one of the guards would come to the door of the cell with a passport in his hand. He would look carefully at the picture on the inside and then proceed to ask each and every one of the Moroccan drug dealers in the cell if it belonged to him. When they had all shaken their heads, he would finally ask the third Diamond Ram incredulously if it was his. The third Diamond Ram would say “yes” and try to explain to the guard in broken Spanish that when he was getting his passport photo taken, the photographer had asked him a question right before taking the picture and this was the reason that he looked like a Moroccan terrorist in the picture. The guard would not understand but would take the third Diamond Ram out of the dungeon anyway. They would ascend a long and foreboding flight of stairs, past machine gun-toting guards, into an office with lots of fluorescent lights. The guard would leave the third Diamond Ram sitting there stunned by the bright lights.
After three days in the murk of an unlit cell, these bright lights would be quite a shock, especially to a pampered and sheltered Aries such as the third Diamond Ram. The shock would have been even more violent if the lawyer who was assigned to translate for the third Diamond Ram had been someone the third Diamond Ram knew, like, for instance, the first Diamond Ram doing a year abroad after law school, using his bilingual abilities and trying to learn foreign law. And since that was the case, the shock was proportionally more violent than it would have been otherwise. So violent, in fact, that the third Diamond Ram threw up happy little tortilla bocquidillos in the middle of the fluorescent light-lit office floor.
The first Diamond Ram said things like, “Jesus, Third Diamond Ram, I can’t believe it’s you!” and “Here, let me help you clean that up,” and “How the hell did you get in here?” and “We’re going to get you out of here right away.” The third Diamond Ram felt a vague sense of shock and a sad longing for his lost bocquidillos, but after those wore off, a sense of unreality at the impossibility of the situation.
The first Diamond Ram helped get the third Diamond Ram and his guitar-playing cohort, Paul, out of prison by bickering with some Spanish bureaucrats and signing a few documents. The guards took the handcuffs off the two criminals at the door of the police station, and the first Diamond Ram said to the third Diamond Ram, “Hey, I still can’t believe it’s you. Here’s my number, give me a call and we’ll go out to lunch. You have to tell me where you’ve been for the last three years.”
The third Diamond Ram and Paul walked down Barcelona’s main walking street, Las Ramblas, to their electricitiless, telephoneless flat in the Bario Gotic. They were both thinking that, after three days in a dungeon, all the colors on the Ramblas seemed that much more real. A telephone box amazed and startled them with its colorful intricacies. The swirling crowds of people looked like herds of clowns come to try out for freedom’s circus.
The third Diamond Ram stopped in front of a street musician and dropped the first Diamond Ram’s number in his hat. “If you’re ever in trouble, call that number,” the third Diamond Ram said, except that, with his Spanish it came out like, “If you turn left at the chicken babies then I wanted to dance.”
The third Diamond Ram sits in his ramshackle apartment counting the coins the police had confiscated and then returned. He thinks of his youth and the Diamond Rams. He thinks of what might have been if he hadn’t learned to play the guitar upside-down and travelled the world making his living on the street. He probably would have been a lawyer. “Can lawyers save the day?” he asks himself. “I thought only firemen and superheroes could do that.”
He finishes counting the coins and puts the lid back on the cooking pot he keeps all his money in. Paul is smoking hashish in the corner, basking in his newfound freedom. A sliver of sunlight steals its way into the dark apartment from a crack in a board over the window. “Looks like a nice day,” the third Diamond Ram thinks. “A good day for playing guitar on the street in Barcelona.”
