RFI - Part Five
My wife wasn’t answering her phone and I was dying to tell her about what had happened. I spent the next hour looking for her and when I landed on the main street I found myself in the middle of an art car parade.
The spectacle rolled down the street, each car more amazing than the last. The first one to pass me was made from a VW bus and was festooned with thousands of sequins in dozens of colors. A fiberglass sculpture of a whale was attached to the roof and dwarfed the bus. It too, was covered with blue sequins and glinted in the sun.
The VW bus was followed by a 57 Chevy, coated in chalkboard paint and covered with chalk drawings. There was an old volvo that looked like a Chuck Taylor shoe, a conversion van that looked like Teddy Roosevelt and a Smart car that had been turned into a stretch limo covered in fake leaves.
I watched 30 or so cars pass by and then, for the third time in 24 hours, I crossed the path of the strange and blue. A station wagon passed me. It was painted cobalt blue and blanketed end-to-end in small blue and gray alien figurines. On the side of the wagon, the mix of colors spelled out the words “Blue Blood.” The driver wore a blue hooded robe and dark sunglasses and looked straight at the road in front of him.
As I stared at the car, my cursory knowledge of high school Spanish came suddenly back to me and I realized “sangre azul” translated as “blue blood.” My senses were heightened and my brain was buzzing with the implications of what I had witnessed the night before. Had this strange group of people hurt someone? Was I the sole witness to a heinous crime?
In an effort to make sense of what I was seeing, I asked the local man to my right about the blue wagon and curiosity shop. In just a few minutes, I learned what I was seeing and who these odd people were.
October 16th, 2008 by rob