My theory is that the mystery of Daniel's unusual mind relied on the fact that he was a dog.
He wasn't, of course, a proper dog, with a happy tail and furry skin. He was, in fact, the hairless person I ever met, male or female. Daniel was technically a human being, with two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a belly button. But I know he was canine.
Myself, I am a four-eyed monster with tentacles instead of legs, one anxious right hand and a horrendously-drawn left hand, covered in glitter, with honey earrings hanging from my carrot ears and a titi monkey as a tie.
Daniel was a dog. He actually liked to bark, specially to police officers.
One day he told me about the occasions in which he got arrested. He's not my only friend who got arrested. In a beautiful summer night in Cordoba city around a fire, my friend Cortés told me and the rest of the travellers of that time he spent a night in jail being a nerdy seventeen-years-old, for hacking public telephones with an even nerdier friend, in order to make free phone calls. Police made the two of them spend the night inside a shit-hole where they barely had place to stand, surrounded by old dirty drunk dudes that were in for robbing or murder. Next to them there was a cell were some guys were threatening them with raping their asses and killing them, just for the laughs.
Another friend of mine, El Don, was also one night in jail with three other friends. They were driving to a David Guetta show, outside Buenos Aires. Of course, they were carrying drugs. The police knew how it was going to be, so they were waiting in the road and stopped my friends, and two other cars. The car in front of them -blond tall botox-filled woman and rich guy- had LSD, ketamine, pills, weed and cocaine. My friends had only five joints... a normal healthy breakfast. Obviously, they had only five joint because they couldn't get any more drugs. Otherwise, they would have had more than that. But they didn't. Not only they had five pitiful joints for the four of them, but also they got arrested for that. They spent the night in jails and -again- sharing the room with people that was in for murder. One of my friends got actually robbed inside the cell (a brand new jacket specially bought for the show). The funniest part is that, in all those hours when they were waiting alone in the cell, they actually managed to smoke some weed some other guys had on them.
For Daniel it was different. Every time he was in jail, it was because he was "walking shirtless in the street" or something like that... and if you are a non-white young guy with dirty clothes and no shirt, you are definitely a danger to society. And if you try to ask the police why they are taking you to jail, they will beat the shit out of you.
"What do you do when they start beating you?," I ask.
"Well... there's not a lot to do, really," he says calmly. "Just shouting them to fuck off and biting them until they get tired of kicking the shit out of me".
When I met Daniel he was convinced he was an angel.
Before starting to write about him, this morning, I thought of using a different name, but I couldn't think of one that would fit his personality appropriately, so I googled "Daniel" to find the meaning and maybe get some ideas from that.
"God is my judge". No way to change that.
During all the years I knew him, during his cocaine addiction, his homeless period, his weed-smoking in public, his psychopath laughing for no reason, his barking... In all that time, other human's judgement never affected him. Not a little bit. Not in the outside or the inside. He knew human judgement existed, he could try to analyse that. He knew the basic stuff to be allowed to walk in the street (like wearing trousers) and to be -kind of- accepted in society, but there's no way he cared about other people's judgement other than that.
He wasn't like that because he was "oh, so independent and careless and free!", but because he was a dog, a winged dog. And he believed in God. At first, at least.
