Finally; I was there, bro. On the racetrack—or whatever in the fucking shit you would call that goddamned uphill run on HARD ASS ROCKS while being chased by a pack of Miura toros. And the ones from the Miura ranch, or fighting factory, or wherever those beasts TRAIN—the Miura ones are the buckwildest bulls they unleash during the whole nine-day festival. The most aggressive. The most likely to RIP MY ARM from its socket.
It was now within minutes, if not seconds from starting. Who knew? There were no clocks anywhere, and phones were banned from the area. That’s when I saw the newspapers. It was early enough—why WOULDN’T people be reading newspapers right now? As one white-shirted, red bandana’d Spaniard was reading today’s paper, the first thing that grabbed my eye was a photo, on the front page, of a BULL’S HORN coming from out of a slit in the skin of a man’s hand. The slit started at his elbow—the horn had fucking ripped this guy’s skin open, and you could see all the muscle and tendons and spaghetti-looking shit under there, and this was on the FRONT PAGE of the Pamplona newspaper.
“I won’t be like him—I won’t be some sort of HEADLINE!” I determined.
That was going to be complicated by my three goals for the fest. They were simple, really: The first one was “don’t die.” The second and third ones were: “touch a bull,” and “don’t get touched by the bull.”
I succeeded in two of those goals.
When did I start running? I started running when I saw other people running. I couldn’t see shit happening behind them. I was NEAR the start of the race, but I started doubting my being there about one minute before the gate opened. Originally, my thoughts were, “Let me be the first one to SEE the bulls, and then I can run behind them”—okay, okay no, that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking, “Let me be the first one in front of them so I DEFINTELY get on one of these TV cameras up on the ziplines overhead.” I wanted that FAME, SON.
And then I realized that this was a very bad idea, seeing that I have no experience running from bulls, and so I retreated a bit forward down the track, which is where I was standing when I heard a loud CLACK noise, and people all around me got loose (started running). I sprinted my fastest for about one minute; and then I stopped running.
I was being passed up by a wave of frantic and fear-infected people—yet I saw no bulls. I was on a street that was very long, and I stood at the top of it looking down, sure that this was where I would catch glimpse of the bulls. My feet were hurting. My heart raced. And still I held my ground. No bulls. Then I tried to climb a thin, slippery pipe on the wall to see over everyone. Before I could hoist myself high enough to see shit, an implosion of about three hundred people turned the far corner and came barreling down the narrow street. I couldn’t see the bulls, but I knew from everyone’s facial expressions that the big brutes were hot on their asses.
I jumped off the pipe, and as soon as my feet hit the ground I resumed sprinting. The challenge now was navigating myself through the thick swarm of mostly drunk runners, while simultaneously glancing behind me every few seconds to make sure the bulls were not at my immediate rear. Each time I would swivel my head around, it would cause me to decrease in speed and temporarily bump into whoever was in front of me. Each time I checked behind me, there were still no bulls; just more runners with faces contorted in pure pulverization of fear. On the fourth time I spun around to look behind me, I was finally confronted with the sight of charging bulls. They were NOT behind me—it was too late for that—they were RIGHT NEXT TO ME.
I jumped in the opposite direction and bounced off someone to my left. I found myself on the left half of the track, while the bulls maintained complete control of the right half. As I watched them pass me by, a massive wipeout spills in front of me. Bodies go down, and it sets off a chain reaction, and multiple people at all sides of me fall to the cobblestone street. I get pulled into the stumbling shit show, although I distinctly remember surviving this fall without hitting the ground.
Video replay says otherwise.
When I watched the replay of the official Spanish transmission (because of COURSE people wanna watch it live), I could see the entanglement happening in the bottom left corner at the 1:54 mark, with a bunch of people tripping… and then there’s me, in my cut-off sleeves, bigger than everyone else—and I’m DEFINITELY EATING SHIT. SHIT got ATE! (What’s a catchy way to say that… SHIT-ATE? SH-ATE? I SHAT on the ground. Yeah, that feels right.)
Editor’s note: Said video has since been taking down for abusing some stupid Youtube rules (cruelty to animals?), but alas, I have since found another video which, while doesn’t show the pile up, does offer a glimpse of me in the moment: https://www.abc.es/san-fermin/abci-san-fermin-2019-video-encierro-sanfermines-domingo-14-julio-201907140851_video.html … look for a rogue, sleevless Darby at the 2:08 mark, and top left corner at 2:36 mark. Additional footage will be provided shortly.
After falling, I got back to my feet relatively quickly, because I saw about five bulls passing me by, and ever since I arrived in Pamplona at 4:30 in the morning, I had recalled seeing the number 7 in quite a few places. So just in case there were two more bulls out there, somewhere…
Oh, there were. They were hugging the right wall, and I was still picking myself up on the left side. Two brown bulls, running right alongside me, and this time: I hit the TURBO mode on that ass. I started sprinting AFTER those fuckers, keeping pace with them, until I made it just an extended arm’s reach away. Enact mission #2.
I reached my hand out. There it was. My moment. I just had to put my hand on the bull. My hand hung there over its galloping meaty hind legs. Me and the bull ran at the same speed. “Just… put your fucking hand on the thing!” The bull was faster than me. It was starting to pull away. It was now or never.
I pulled my hand back. Fuck. That; this thing might spin around and rape me on a wall.
And so, the bull and its bull-bud ran ahead. I was left disappointed. There went my opportunity.
I would need not wait long for my next chance.
So focused on the gait of the bulls, I failed to notice where they were running to: an arena. They entered through the gates of the arena, ignoring the bold and ballsy runners who took refuge in thing, convex holes in wall, and disappeared into the dense crowd of people congregating at the center of the arena. When I entered the arena myself, I realized this was it: the finish line.
800 meters of running. The race lasted just two and a half minutes long. But it was all over. The arena was filled with people in the stands, thousands of them, there, cheering, basking us in our success. We had did it, damnit. WE HAD FUCKING DID IT!!
Or DID we fucking did it?
As I was throwing my hands in the air, like I just didn’t… uh, concern myself,a fucking bull comes running back in my direction. I shrieked and hit the wall as the rogue bull ran around not eager to give up its right to terrorize shit. Eventually the grounds crew wrangled the bull inside a little trap door on the opposite side of the entrance arena and managed to slam the door shut. Now it was REALLY time to celebrate; the bulls from the race, all seven of them, had been locked away. The audience gave us a standing O and everyone on the ground breathed a collective sigh of relief.
THEN, some smart-ass announcer gets on the PA system and he’s like, “Okay chicos, here’s bull number one!” and the trap door opens back up and one bull shoots out of there like he’s got car pistons hooked up to his nuts and just starts going fucking MENTAL on the hundreds of us trapped on the sandy floor of the arena.
I thought I had reached the apex of exhilaration during the race—but now? I was locked in here with a bull who is sparing NO ONE and NO THANG in its way. This felt like a trick; like a ruse. Did anyone know that this was going to happen? Keeping one eye on the bull, with my other eye I looked for someone to talk to. A counselor, an ally, a psychologist; at this point I spotted a guy in a Chicago Cubs jersey.
“You from Chicago?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay safe out here.”
This was the gist of our conversation. As I started running away from this utterly useless pep-talk, the Chicago guy was literally the next person to get fucking smothered by the bull. Maybe I was bad luck? Maybe I was responsible? At that moment, none of this mattered. I needed to maintain and avoid sharing the same fate. Every time the bull would launch someone, the crowd sitting around us, reveling in the carnage, would go “AY!” like “AY LEMME SMAG DAT SHIT!” (Or whatever a bull from the hood would say.)
All seven bulls saw action, each of them released one at a time. And it was during bull number three’s reign of terror where it dawned upon me: I couldstill touch one of these big fucks. My running away from the bull shifted into a run towards the bull—not head on of course. I employed a type of angular running pattern as it was sweeping around and scattering hundreds of people, and without overthinking it as I had during the run, I reached out with my left hand and touched the bull on its back thigh.
I would touch one more bull before it was all over.
What really blew my proverbial nuts off, was that whenever they would release the bull into the arena, there was a group of fifty or so people who would LAY DOWN in front of the bull’s exit, which the bull would come flying out of, full speed. Without fail, the bull would always jump over the pile of bodies, which exhibited the speed that it traveled at AND its capacity for jumping high.
The Highest High-Man Award (yes, it’s a poorly named award) goes to the one guy who got thrown up into the air, hung up there for half a second, then the bull caught as he was coming down, and popped him back up. The guy got fucking juggled. And the crowd responded appropriately: with an “AH!” as in “AH THAT’S HOT PAPITO!” I swear, Spanish fans chant the opposite of what common sense tells you to cheer like. The whistles during the bull fight—oh wait, I’ll get to that.
Bull #4 is when my luck ran out. This bull did NOT wanna go in his cage. He was running around like a goddamn car with the accelerator pedal held down by a brick, when the mafia tries to make a death look “accidental.” From just under 40 feet away, the bull set his internal compass precisely on my location. And then he started running directly at me. Every other bull up to this point would dart in a different direction whenever they were headed towards me; this one did not. It kept coming. And coming. And OH GOD IT’S COMING ON MY ASS!!
And that, friends, was when the bull hit me.
With its horn.
Full speed.
Me.
Me running full speed.
Me running full speed into the bull.
Me running full speed into the bull in FRONT of me’s horn.
Yes. They had a second bull out there. And this bull was TWICE THE SIZE as the one pursuing me. It was a white bull. And let me tell you bout them white bulls: The white bulls get brought out when the main bull isn’t listening, when it won’t go back into the hole. The white ones have some sort of magic powers, and if they get it close enough to the crazy one, it casts some sort of magnetic spell on them, and it leads el toro loco back into the hole in the wall.
So that was Goal #3 being failed: “Don’t get touched by the bull.” Even though technically, it was I who touched the bull. With myself. I ran into it. The Running of the Bulls became the Running into the Bulls. My entire head vibrated with wooziness. It hurt, but luckily I didn’t run into the TOP of his horn and get impaled.
There was one more moment of death being cheated out there: It was me and a Spanish guy. The bull was five feet away from the both of us. The Spaniard fell in one direction, and he fell there because I pulled him in that direction. It was meant to be a diversion. But then the bull TOTALLY ignored him. And it turned to face me.
I simply started falling. It was all I could do. As I fell, the bull ran exactly to where I had been standing. It passed by me, its horn low, its dash quicker than my fall. As I hit the ground, I realized that had I not fallen, I would have felt the brunt of a bull’s head on the entirety of my torso. It was a close call.
And it was fucking AMAZING bitch. What a rush!
Oh, did I mention the music? As bulls were running around raping everything around them, the PA guy would play songs like “I Will Survive,” and “YMCA”—I was literally dodging bulls while spelling those four letters with my arms.
When the seventh bull had been expelled back into its cage, everyone hopped out of the stands, came down to the battlefield, and took pics. I was alone on my journey, so I spent most of this time ruining selfies.
Outside the arena, I went into a corner store and asked a Chinese store worker, “Qué hora es?” She turned her watch and it said 9:19. It was only 9 fucking 19. So much action had unraveled in such little time, that my first reaction was “this chick’s watch is broken.”
There was no moment devoid of action the rest of that day. The closing ceremony was at midnight. By that time, I had seen Basque bands starting moshpits, shamelessly downed dozens of kalimotxis (red wine mixed with Coke), and watched a mother fucking BULL FIGHT.
OH!
The bull fight.
Was the fucking craziest thing I’ve seen. In ALL of my travels. (AND I’VE SEEN COCK FIGHTS IN THAILAND BROTHER!) It is, simply put, the systematic and methodical murder of an animal. There is a line of matadors that do their duty in the murder, little by little. For example, there are guys that sit on top of a blindfolded horse and attack the back of the bulls neck with a fucking HARPOON, shredding the bull’s neck tendons so it can’t lower its head. Then there are guys who try and get two sort-of bouncy sticky swords in the back of the bull’s neck. And it goes down the line until the star matador comes out, and he tries to finish the bull in one move. (This is after he’s done flamboyantly cutting its sides open for about ten mins, of course.)
The matador working that day was TERRIBLE; he kept botching the finishing move. On one bull it took him SEVEN ATTEMPTS at a “final showdown” type standoff until he got his straight sword into the area that everyone is trying to stab the bull at, behind the back of the neck. And THEN you know what happens?
If the bull isn’t dead THEN, he approaches it, now on its knees, and he fucking impales it with a tiny dagger in the head, SCRAMBLES ITS BRAINS, and then the bull stops moving. And a fucking gigantic animal is once so aggressive and full of vitality is suddenly dead.
If it sounds horrific, that’s because it is; and that’s why you should DEFINITELY see it once.
Hell, you should do the whole run, the whole day, once in your life. Never do you see such a blasé attitude to something so bathed in blood. Never do you see a bull ripping a guy’s arm open referred to as a “tattoo” by a fat, bad-toothed, cigarette-sucking local, who’s done the run more times than years you’ve spent on this planet. Never do you feel awash with so many conflicting emotions in a two-minute period. It really is one of the last remaining relics of an ancient time. A time when man was mighty and barbaric, and proved itself in this way by conquering a beast.
A beast which is every bit capable of killing you, as you are them.
Oh, and for the Americans that failed San Fermin (making up 2/3rds of those gored this year), I have but one simple message for you: TRY HARDER. Numbers are down. Come on boys! Let’s get 10 of you gored next year. 20 the next. A clean-sweep the following. More selfies, less paying attention to your surroundings. That’s the American way! Go get em!
Be First to Comment