New Year’s Eve compliment
It was the early 2000s, in my early twenties. We were returning from New Year’s Eve celebrations.
On New Year’s Eve, it was always impossible to find a taxi, and that night we walked for more than two hours to reach the neighbourhood where my friends lived and I had parked my car.
Halfway there, for reasons I still haven’t figured out, I drew the attention of another group of twenty-year-olds, who were standing drunken quite a distance away. (I don’t remember if I was the only one in my group wearing a suit; either way, I wasn’t the only lad in the city, or anywhere in the world, who wears a dark and sober suit on New Year’s Eve.) One of those guys started shouting at me:
‘¡Guapo!… ¡Que vas más guapo…’
[Handsome!… (That) you look better…!]
His friends, mine, and the entire crowd on Paseo del Prado by the station of Atocha stopped to look at him with great anticipation.
He began to show regret, overwhelmed by the pressure he himself had put on the — delayed — outcome of his ingenuity.
So the man looks better…?
‘… than Bruce Springsteen’. You look better than Bruce Springsteen. That’s what he said. And a silent mixture of disappointment, blush and bemused reflection about the minstrel, Bruce Springsteen and me took over the audience.
Needless to say, from then on, whenever any of us showed up dressed in his finest array, we would tell him he looked better than Bruce Springsteen.