Non-Fiction: La Paz Collective

I have 14 tattoos now. Sorry, mum. The last one I did last night with my brother and skilled artist Aaron Walsh. This was the third piece of art I’ve been fortunate enough to receive from this true friend after we did two earlier beautiful pieces at the Sai Baba Hotel in Pushkar when we were both staying there in December.

Just two days before working with Aaron last night, I’d spent the best part of the last two weeks working with another friend on a purely organic and unique 25 hour arm piece. I laid out on the porch of my room at Kudle Beach beside the ocean and Oliver poked every single piece of ink individually onto my arm forever.

With Aaron the work was spontaneous and simple but incredibly important for me in terms of the significance of the symbols and the word they represent.

It was something I had wanted to do for years and now all of that is infinitely more special because he was the one who inked it in. In spite of the importance of what was being set into my skin, we couldn’t help but laugh our way through most of the whole session because that’s what happens when two really good friends just hang out. In his small hot room, with me lying under the pink mosquito net, my hand stretched out to be held by his, Aaron rocking the head light, and us both wearing very little clothing, there was definitely a strong Village People vibe being given off; at least until a pair of angels turned up with a couple of cold beers. It was fun and later we all went out together and got pissed.

With Oliver it was an almost mythical experience.

Oliver doesn’t have a single tattoo on his body, but he is a pure artist and was trained by some serious tattoo masters at the time we both met in the Himalayas six summers ago. When our paths finally crossed again here, we talked a little about what we wanted to get out of the experience then I let him draw free hand onto my skin in white paint the design that we would later turn into the tattoo. I told him nothing about what I needed in terms of philosophy or style and just let him get on with it. I put pure trust in his ability to create and to connect with me as a friend.

The result is an incredible monument to the effort he put into it and the time we spent together just going with the flow while under the shade of the coconut trees we worked away as the waves crashed against the rock less than ten metres away. Friends came and went at various points of the day to drink and smoke with us. People we didn’t even know properly would offer to bring us cushions, or food and drink from the restaurant. It was an incredible experience and on at least four almost other worldly occasions time literally stopped for us both. It was amazing and before he headed off up the road again, on a 36 hour train journey to Orissa, we hugged it all out.

Every one of my tattoos tells its own tale.

For my first piece I blacked out onto the floor mid-session after smoking a joint in the car before we went up to the studio. The magnificent cover job over that same piece was done by the hand of the best and most beautiful of all Barcelona tattoo artists, Soledad Aznar. The Goa pieces. My Sisyphus. Buddha facing down one of the Hungry Ghosts. My ripped off heart from Andy Warhol to mark the most intense and insane relationship I ever had in Rio de Janeiro one summer. They warned us to stay far apart but I flew to her anyway and It was worth every second. The same eternal seconds that tell my grandmother who brought me up, and who I could not get back in time to touch and talk to one last time before she passed, that the words written in her native Irish tongue on my wrist lift me up and carry me on her strength and love every single day.

My tattoos are a road map that remind where I came from, where i’ve been, who I was with, what I did, and where I need to keep heading towards. These feelings are heavy for me right now because I wear coconut oil as I write this and the ink on my arms is still to dry out, but it is also equally true that I believe tattoos can be random, fun, and sometimes just plain silly.

A crazy French friend of mine here told me about how one night he had to sleep in a car. He was bored, had a tattoo gun, some ink, and decided to randomly hook up the machine to the cigarette lighter and drunkenly etch Made In France to the bottom of his foot, just because he felt like it. A beautiful Israeli angel I know has a weird little space ship tattooed onto the base of her spine. She did it in El Borne in Barcelona and doesn’t even remember where exactly she went to get it done, or even why she did it.

And that is the thing about tattoos.

You get them impulsively on the road when travelling and realising that you are in the midst of an incredibly special moment that needs etching onto your skin forever. Or it can be a piece painstakingly designed and doubted over for years by your own hand until on the exact right moment when the stars align it is finally and uniquely delivered to your body. Or they are words or symbols, irrelevant to others, that you know need to resonate on your outside because you feel the same thing a hundred times as strong in the depth of your soul. And then there is simply happenstance. The heart-stopping beauty of an image you see in a temple or a gallery. Or the flower blossom you watched fall from a tree and land at your feet in Japan. Six simple words from a song you hear sung in a language not your own on a beach in Paradise. The best, magical moments, thoughts, or ideals of your life you know you must be reminded of daily for the rest of it.

It’s no coincidence that 13 of my 14 tattoos have been made on the road. There is something about the transient nature of travelling or living in a place not of your birth that reminds us that our days are forever passing too quickly and that one way or another we should always be looking to leave our mark. A tattoo announces that sentiment to the world for the rest of your life, but the journey never ends. 

Non-Fiction Feature Piece for BCN Week

G4 SUMMIT

Graffiti, Guns, Globalization and Ganas

If you ask somebody to define exactly what "subculture" means, they will probably look at you askance for proffering such a banal question, then promptly fail to give you anything like a substantial and well-defined answer. If you look it up online, you will come across a lot of waffle that ties itself up in knots by relying excessively on the word "culture". You will find words like subversion, Punks, ambivalent, non-domestic, Goths, negative, and tribes; and you will be a much better man than I if, from it all, you can derive any real meaning or significance.

When it's too difficult to decipher the meanings of words, it is often easier to take solace in images. As I walk through the streets of the city, I notice colours jumping out at me and dragging my attention away from the grey. The walls of the city are screaming out, looking for answers that I'm not sure I have. The walls are talking, and I think we ought to listen.

The images on the page opposite are all brought to you by Los Martinez, a group that lives and breathes on the same streets you traverse. But the identity of the group is less important than engaging with its discourse. If you look closely, you will see that their work has real content, something you won't find in "subcultures" defined largely by fads and pouty posturing. Interacting with Los Martinez, you are moved uncomfortably from your previous position of impassive alienation. The sharp nip of recognition you feel when you look at their work, particularly their hearts, makes you an active part of a systematic and structured opposition to the dominant culture you were ineffectually loving to hate. You have become a true outsider. You have moved away from subculture and joined the ranks of a counterculture.

One hundred years ago, the city of Barcelona and its people passed through a period of great poverty. A poor population struggled to live and, in extreme cases, starved to death. The ratio of food spending against housing spending was around 5:1. People lived in times of economic hardship and misery, but for the most part they could afford to pay for the roofs over their heads. In modern day Barcelona, the situation has been completely reversed. A normal person, earning 1000€ a month, could survive spending only 200€ a month on food, but would be very hard pushed to cover the cost of owning an apartment in the city with the remaining 800€. Most people won't starve in La Millor Botiga del Mon, but if you're not rich, you had better look for another place to rest your head at night. It is in the reality of this environment that Los Martinez are attempting to offer an alternative message to the people of the city.

Los Martinez are a group of like-minded individuals who found each other by chance as they worked individually on the streets, and who then joined together to produce work in which we find a seamless fusion of art and social commentary. They are social warriors, committed to reclaiming public space as our own by turning it into a free gallery. But the artistic beauty of their message should not fool you into taking their work lightly. This collective group of creative friends is not only fighting to reclaim the city's public spaces. In the barrios where speculation and big business are displacing residents, tearing down buildings, and trying to negate the rich history of the places they wish to reinvent in their own selfish image, Los Martinez are also out on the front lines alongside real people.

In Bon Pastor, Los Martinez painted walls alongside niños gitanos del barrio, in protest of the forceful eviction of families from the "casas baratas". In Barceloneta, they worked with the vecinos del barrio in their fight against the Ayuntamiento's Plan de Ascensores, a scheme that would see elderly people and families evicted from their homes. But it is perhaps in Los Martinez's old home of Poblenou where their fight has been the most intense, and it is this place that best highlights the unrelenting determination of their struggle and their continued belief in it. Nevertheless, it is here, too, where the odds against the success of their movement can seem largest.

In Can Ricart and Poblenou, Los Martinez were part of the group of 3,500 vecinos and friends of the neighbourhood that protested against the monster that is 22@. This privately-funded, local-government-supported venture has displaced the majority of Poblenou's artistic community, as well as many families who had lived for generations in what was tradit ional ly one of Barcelona's few authentic working-class neighbourhoods. It's an ugly thing in itself, and a pattern that's becoming all too familiar, but 22@ is made even uglier because many of the companies that operate out of this new state-of-the-art business park are ones that deal directly in, or have links to, the manufacture of arms. Indra, whose president heads the committee of 22@, is the world's biggest non-US supplier of military equipment to the world's largest military machine, the Army of the United States of America.

The protests in Poblenou, like so many others, were to no avail, and the pain felt in this particular defeat has been worsened recently by the attempted validation of 22@ and its presence in the neighbourhood through the three-day Inside22@ festival, run under the artistic direction of Niu and in direct collaboration with the 22@ committee. How is it possible that Niu, one of the groups that originally fought alongside residents and other artists against 22@, are now actively encouraging the presence of their conquerors in a celebration that is such an incredibly frivolous and insensitive rewriting of history?

But wait. It is too easy to point fingers at the speculators, propagators of war, and those who are completely consumed by the capitalist ethos of "More". If we look closely at the hands we point with, we might note, uncomfortably, that they too have a red tinge. As literate people living in a powerful Western democracy, we are all complicit in the ills of the world, and in one way or another there is undoubtedly blood spilled in our name every day. Maybe Niu, in the wake of 22@'s successful establishment, decided, as so many of us do, that this is the way things work in the world and there's nothing they can do about it.

Perhaps this elephant in the corner has allowed an overriding sense of apathy to fester within all of us; an apathy and a complacency that seem to have become the most prominent and bitter cultural capital of the day. We have been tricked into thinking that we are redundant and unable to offer any resistance to the forces of the world that shape and control our shadow lives. We have accepted our defeat and fallen out of love with the unfamiliar faces that stare back at us blankly from the other side of the mirror. Politicians don't listen to us. Wars are fought despite our Saturday afternoon marches against them. Nothing we do makes a difference, so why should we care? In discussions with members of Los Martinez, I saw that even they feel the weight of capitalism's demand for conformity. Though they fight for others selflessly, seeking no personal promotion through their acts, their lifestyle choice comes with the cost of being reminded every day that they don't own a house, or have 2.5 children, or a job that they can put on a resume. That they have chosen an "unconventional" life.

From what I see, Los Martinez keep doing what they do because they care, not only about making a stand against the violation of the city in which we live, but also about us. They could just as easily be called Los Rodriguez, or Los Smith. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet as we walk forward into what may be new times of hope, it was a member of Los Martinez who told me that, "We can't do everything". It is true: the wars won't stop overnight. The mobile phones in our pockets will still signal violence in Africa. The speculators and the greedy politicians won't desist from trying to fuck us over at every turn just because we ask them not to. In spite of this knowledge, or maybe because of it, the core message of Los Martinez is to look a little longer at ourselves in the mirror each day.

The feeling we are meant to experience when we look at the bright colours of their art, standing out against the backdrop of grey and greed that surrounds it, is that those colours are inside us. If we want to pay anything other than lip service to change, then it must start here: at home, in ourselves. The hearts on the wall are our own. It is up to us to rediscover them. And it is then our responsibility to let them sing, write, paint, shout or cry out in any way that affirms our collective struggle to remain part of the original and only truly abiding culture: humanity.

Que seamos más despiertos. Que seamos más conscientes.
Que seamos más vivos.
Más Amor.

Non-fiction: 3-AM Magazine

embracing the bull: an interview with lydia lunch

Interview by Simon Friel.

Lydia Lunch is a name you should know. Lydia moved to New York at 16 and, with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the founders of the still influential, but short-lived, No Wave movement. She has collaborated with artists and performers such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Henry Rollins, Omar Rodriquez-Lopez, Asia Argento, Richard Kern and Hubert Selby Junior, and today from her base in Barcelona continues to produce a vast and diverse range of work.

Her memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary chronicles her life from its conception up on through to a self-defining reawakening in her mid-thirties. It has been translated into 8 languages. Paradoxia bulldozes through emotions and sensibilities in much the same way that men’s cocks tear into Lydia throughout her numerous, anonymous encounters; ruthlessly and without remorse. Incest, satanism, rape, bestiality, cannibalism paedophilia, insanity and destitution are just some of the many themes explored, devoured and left for dead as the reader is pulled along a road of broken glass under the influence of acid while Lydia rips through the cities of New York, L.A., Amsterdam, London and New Orleans.

The writing is the most honest that I have ever read and for the same reason some of the most beautiful, shocking and poetic too. Lydia never seeks to justify and explain the things that happen or proffer empty apologies. In spite of all the blood, violence, destruction and waste that are left in her wake, it is, for me, Thurston Moore’s final line in the book’s afterword that rings most true: She can love you.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Lydia. This is a little bit like how it went;

3:AM: What is Paradoxia?

LL: Paradoxia fills a void that really exists in literature, which is an aggressive, honest, non-glamorous psychosexual voice. And I think we can find traces of that hyperreality in a lot of different male writers especially from the 50s, 60s and 70s but for female writers there’s still a vacancy. It’s just not their language, and I have a much more blunt way of expressing what I think needs to be expressed. I’m not the only one who behaves, acts, feels or has this kind of void that they look to fill with whatever means necessary until eventually they realise that only the self will suffice and goodbye garbage.

3:AM: I was just reading the first part which says none of the names have been changed, everybody is equally fucking guilty.

LL: Even though I’m not even really naming their names.

3:AM: Exactly, that was the question, because I read a couple of reviews, and every review was positive but there was a frustration that they want to hear more about the real Lydia Lunch story and the real people in it.

LL: Well, the thing is that most of these experiences are with anonymous people, so what good does it do to name their names? I mean, look, people may be waiting and they can wait until the day that I fucking die to hear of the — for me — minutia and the boring details of the rock aspect.

SF: Will we really have to wait all that time?

LL: For me that’s not the most interesting detail. What’s important is what the search was about and what it was for. I mean, believe me, anyone asks and I’ll give them the run down and the score card. Maybe I have a different take on it because from the time I was 12 years old I would always say to my parents when I had to be at rock concerts until 3 in the morning that it was for “my career”. What career would that be, young lady? Yes, Gene Simmons probably has a photo of me at 12 in his Kiss collection. So if it starts there, it’s like, you know, names, names, names… Who cares? Who cares? And for the most part, in spite of it, it’s not like there’s that many names that people would really recognise. They weren’t the most interesting sexual partners. Sorry, they’re not — boring! Just to be a gossipy groupie, the most interesting rock and roll sexual experience was Julian Cope. I didn’t even know who he was, but I have to say that dropping acid with Julian Cope was a beautiful experience.

3:AM: I suppose this leads to a much larger question, one that draws comparisons with the epilogue where it compares your work with that of Brett Easton Ellis, which is the fact that you are very anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, so doing that would I suppose be trading on yourself as a commodity.

LL: Exactly.

3:AM: But is that not a big fucking temptation?

LL: It isn’t a big temptation. Maybe because I think, in my own mind’s eye, I’m a bigger rock star than any of those motherfuckers. I don’t even mean rock star, I don’t give a shit about rock stardom. I don’t think of myself as a star, I think of myself as a fucking planet, honey. I’m sorry, they’re just stars, I’m a planet — fuck off!

3:AM: Ok, I mean, that’s another thing, we’ve got Nick Cave doing a big concert tonight here.

LL: Yeah, at the fucking basketball arena!

3:AM: These are all people from your history, and that’s what I mean by temptation. It must sometimes be frustrating to think they are doing that and I could be doing that.

LL: But I couldn’t be doing what they do, the same way they can’t do I what I do, because I think what separates me from a lot of the people I came up with, which would be like Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and Henry Rollins, is all three of them, in so much as all three have diversified, they have the ability to take one thing, whether it was The Bad Seeds, or Sonic Youth as a four piece, whether it was The Rollins Band, and do it and do it and do it, and I would fucking die of brain damage.

3:AM: So you don’t have the patience to do this?

LL: I’m a conceptual artist; I’m not a rock band. My concept from the beginning was you find the collaborators, you do a few shows, you document it, you fucking go on. So I don’t understand how anyone has the patience, the capacity for this kind of boredom, to play the same songs over and over. My message is always the same, it is always sexual insanity and political hysteria, or sexual hysteria and political insanity, however I have to find new ways to express this.

3:AM: So it’s not so much you not having the patience, but rather other people not having the patience with you because you’re always doing different things?

LL: How can they even keep up when I don’t work inside the machinery that lets them know?

3:AM: The world can’t keep up.

LL: I don’t fucking care. I can’t care. At 17 one of the first songs I wrote was “Popularity Is So Boring”; fuck off, I still feel the same way.

3:AM: You obviously still have a lot of energy and you have been running it for 31 years, so why Barcelona? I don’t really see that same energy out here in the street.

LL: I don’t need that same energy. I left New York because it was like plugging my finger into a light socket. It was enough. I don’t need to plug into a city for energy. Here, I can just breathe, I can relax and the pace is different. As America went into fascism, I came to a place that is 30 years out of it, although there are a still a couple of danglers here and there. It’s a different energy, and part of Spain’s amnesia sees to that. If I’m focusing so much on what drives me insane, on how politically fucked things are, I need a place that doesn’t further aggravate that. I need a place that doesn’t give me more fucking cancer.

3:AM: So Barcelona is a safe haven?

LL: Curative, because most of the damage that has been done here is in the past. The architecture impacts me. I get very emotional in certain places at certain times, the history infects me. I love the hospital San Pau at the top of Avenue Gaudi: this is one of my stomping grounds. I use the architecture more for stimulation than I do the bars or the club scene.

3:AM: Ok, so what would your advice be to any young images of you who might be out there trying to make their mark today?

LL: Look, people have to be comfortable with being alone, and if you’re strong in yourself, any communication, any experiences you have are going to be far better anyway. If you understand that you may be permanently an isolated individual in a world of six billion people, be comfortable in that, then you — like I — will be able to be an endlessly wandering nomad seeking other like-minded individuals to collaborate with. So, I think you have to make whatever the time is, work for you. You have to figure out a way because there will be so many things always against you, against the individual, against someone who wants to radically create. So you have to find historical references — as I did with Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade — that can at least inspire you to create or do whatever it is that you have to do. It’s going to be the few who make a career out of complaining about everything that pisses them off, and there is only room for maybe one or two of us. I’d encourage everyone to do it, but to make a career out of it, good fucking luck! So, in other words, do as I have done: create without a budget and find a way to get it out. You’ve just got to be stubborn. I don’t care what your age is, you’ve got to be a fucking bull. Embrace the bull.

3:AM: Embrace the bull?

LL: Take the bull by the horns, cut its balls off, sew them on to the fucking base of your spine and get going. It’s that easy. What’s so hard?

3:AM: You know, I won’t have enough space in the piece for all that we’ve talked about, but that’ll definitely be going in there!

LL: That’s right, grab the bull by the horns and cut its fucking balls off. I mean, there is no other choice. I can’t find a better way of putting it.

Fiction: Full of Crow

Kali

by Simon Friel

Joan buried cigarette after cigarette into an old, now certainly cancer ridden coffee cup, and tormented my mind at least two times an hour with the grinding and tearing of the old espresso machine as he got his fix. He moved between the high intensity spot lamp lit disaster of his scorched desk and the kitchen as though bound to an irregular conveyer belt of dissatisfaction. If he fucked up his university project again, the money flowing across from the island was going to be cut off. He had been taunted with the promise of one final payment to cover the cost of the suit that he would need to wear to the job interviews that would follow his final defeat.

I lay on the sofa in the middle world between his fight for a future and the ugly, bubbling stench of the world outside the open balcony door that I now did my utmost to avoid. I bathed in the after burn of Joan’s interrogative bulb and the primary bursts of colour from the almost inaudible murmur of the TV. My eyes followed the fuzzy images on the screen as they bled imperceptibly from one abortion of a program to another. My legs and arms itched constantly from the bug infested, torn brown sofa we had found on the street.

Everything was decomposing.

“Let’s go and drink a beer,” Joan said.

Our street was bathed in the ghoulish pink half-light that signaled the coming of Autumn. With each turning of the earth the day was swallowed more ravenously by the night and dusk settled earlier over the city. But the heat wouldn’t budge and the air was so heavy that you could taste it. Summer had lasted too long. People were tired and moved slowly like drooping, dying flowers. With some steps it felt like you hadn’t moved forward at all and that the world had instead dropped down an inch further into a pit whose face we were losing sight of.

The drunks milling about on the street in front of the bar on the corner. The bald Venezuelan guy who struggled to hire out bicycles. The Pakistanis from the kebab shop. None of the faces of the people in the neighbourhood that I had come to know over the months we had lived here offered smiles or nods of acknowledgment as I passed. They scowled or simply looked away. The exchanges of words amongst these people, which I understood little or nothing of but had once taken delight in guessing at, were now only sharp, threatening sounds of accusation and recrimination.

“Dos,” Joan said to the beer seller who appeared beside us before our backsides had even hit the floor of the MACBA square. The cans he procured were warm and froth erupted over our hands when we opened them. We said “Salud” anyway, locked eyes for a moment so as to avoid the curse of seven years of bad sex, and slumped back against the large black, rock like sculpture that Joan had once told me belonged to an ancient swindler named Sisyphus.

In front of us the smooth granite surface of the square clicked, scratched, and hummed under the pulsing beat of the wheels of the skateboards as they rolled and jumped to and fro through the night. Behind us the long white curves and precise lines of the glass fronted museum were possessed of a weird luminosity borne of the conflict between the high-intensity lights on the inside and the stifling auburn air that enveloped everything on the outside. The sickly sweet smell of Dutch green mingled with the harsher one of tangy Moroccan black. The call of the beer sellers rang out in incessant nonsensical prayer: “Serveisabeer, amigo. Serveisabeer, amigo.” And in the reflection of the museum’s huge glass panes a flamboyant Filipino kid counted his troupe of earnest dancers through their steps. “1,2,3,4. 1,2,3,4.”

“So, she’s lost her voice?” Joan asked.

“I already told you. The Norwegian answered her phone and said Kali couldn’t speak because she’s lost her voice.”

“Fucking bullshit. Stop looking your phone. That’s over.”

I put my phone back in my pocket and smirked at his switch of tactic to tough love as a means to rouse me from what I knew must be for him a weary fight against my listless stupor. I knew very well that the Kali story was over. I wasn’t expecting a message from her, but I was too embarrassed to admit to Joan that after all that had happened, it was Maya who I still hoped for some word from every time I unlocked the screen of my phone.

#####

Kali I’d met a few days earlier. She was the instigator of the meeting. She had taken my number from Josep after I had walked out on her the night we met. At her suggestion we reconvened in the same place of our first encounter for a drink.

I felt uncomfortable in the bar. The circular black leather stool was at the wrong height to lean back against naturally and left my legs dangling in an awkward space of nothingness when I tried to perch myself on top of it. Kali furthered my discomfort with enquiries in the direct Teutonic style about how I was feeling and what it was that had happened to make me so angry. I was in no mood to share with a stranger and returned her enquiries with oblique replies and meditative stares into my beer glass. My refusal to engage didn’t faze her. A look of pitied concern remained a constant on her face.

I hung around only because she looked cuter than the memory I had retrieved of her through the hangover. She was the definition of zest; a very pretty face with dancing blue eyes and flawless pale skin warmed delicately by the sun. I saw her as my antitheses and I wanted to rub some of my muck onto her. I had no great desire for sex or anything else but I knew contact with and the defilement of something as clean and pure as this would bring me back up for air, at least for a while.

She took a call on her mobile while I pondered her debasement in the stagnant white and gold pool at the bottom of my glass. The words she spoke were ugly, fast and foreign. The explanation in English was simple: her friend would be joining us; she had played her get out of jail card and the cavalry was on the way to save her.

My masochistic pride insisted I stay until the friend arrived. When she did, she whispered a hoarse “Hello” in my general direction and then launched into a muted tirade in their speak.
The friend left for the bathroom and I made to make my own move. Kali reached out for my hand as I did. She smiled at me with something different to pity. There was a tenderness in her face that forced me to look away and at the floor.

“It’s not what you might think,” she said. “She’s my flat mate. We live fifty metres from here. She asked to come because her boyfriend has just broken up with her.”

“Whatever,” I forced myself to reply, and walked out without paying for my drink.

I played football later that evening. Bill had invited me to join his team. He was too fat to play, but he fancied himself as an inspirational coach. I scored three goals in the game and kung-fu kicked one of the opposition in the back in an extreme response to a bad tackle. A full-scale brawl ensued. Once things calmed down I was given a red card to go with the smack on the side of my head that one of the other team had got in on me during the melee. Bill was beside himself in the changing room after the match. He thumped me hard on the back and said it had been the most fun he’d had in years.

The game had kicked off late. I missed the last metro and walked five miles to get home.

In the MACBA square a smiling tramp swayed in front of Joan and I. He had very yellow teeth and incredible, turquoise eyes that floundered like misplaced jewels on distant seas of red. He pointed at the cigarette box by Joan’s side.

Joan took two cigarettes from the pack and placed them in the beggar’s shaking hand.
The man’s smile grew bigger and he waved his arms out and up from his sides like a windmill. “Yo soy de la Republica Checa,” he stammered with great pride. He took out the pigeon feather he wore in his hair and offered it lavishly to me.

“Why him?” Joan complained. “I gave you the cigarettes.”

The man screwed up his face and brought one hand up to his mouth like a small child fighting to contain his amusement at what he considers to be a rude joke. He closed his eyes and shook his head quickly.

“No. For him,” the man said. “For him.”

I took the feather from him. It was ugly grey and speckled white. The drone of the skaters continued. “Serveisabeer. Serveisabeer”, chorused in persistent wave. I rested my head back against the black rock. The dancing children jumped in unison to their right. “And… 1,2,3,4. 1,2,3,4.”

“Fuck it,” said Joan, breaking the flow of it all as something deep inside of me reconnected with a feeling that wasn’t all bitter and painful. “Let’s go home and get wasted.”

Joan went to the shop to buy some drink. He paid for things now. Playing Daniel Barry paid my rent and little else.

I had my bed. Joan. The itchy sofa. And the TV. If Joan had become my keeper, TV was my new best friend. If I wasn’t sleeping or pretending to be somebody else, I was watching TV. I didn’t care what was on and I rarely changed the channel from Tele Cinco. The channel that through hours of study I had discovered to be even more commercial and of slightly worse quality than its main rival, Antena 3.

Tele Cinco was a Berlusconi channel. That I would always remember from DC’s rant when he flipped out on the last night that I ever saw him.

My favourite programmes were the news and the Saturday night gossip marathons that I understood one in ten words of. I loved those for the screaming and abject ugliness of everybody involved. At the outset, the array of complete nobodies who had been assembled to talk seriously about gossip and scandal did so earnestly and with some kind of gravitas. A couple of hours into the programme, the vacuous and vicious truth of their beings began to filter through the heavy lights of the studio and they showed themselves to be nothing more than dumb animals fighting desperately to crawl over and above one another to get to the top of the pile they didn’t understand, nor care, was nothing but a mound of human shit.

The news on the other hand was a bright blue world of necessary information. The presenter had salacious lips and splendid cleavage. I don’t know what she felt on the inside, but she had two outward expressions: happy and sad. She used this rich palate in synchronisation with the mood of the story she presented. She sometimes lost track of this complex system and once opened with her most brilliant glossy smile and extended cleavage in close-up on a fast cut from flooding in Central America and the home-video footage of half a village of people being flushed away to certain death.
Tonight she looked sad. The image that followed her desolate face was CCTV footage of a man and woman entering a convenience store. A jump to another camera showed the man and woman on fire on the pavement in front of the store. A passerby and the store owner put them out quickly. The camera cut back to the studio and the correct pretty face of sadness.

“The man died,” she said.

She maintained the same face for the next story. Her cleavage was swollen and magnificent.
We jump to the grainy images from a motorway service camera on a ring road at the edge of the city. A car had broken down at the mouth of a tunnel on a wide bend. The car was stationary on the inside lane with its yellow hazard lights flashing. There was no hard-shoulder and the two people walked on the road in the direction of the camera that filmed them. The mouth of the tunnel lit up with the arrival of a new car. It slammed on its brakes in seeing the empty vehicle blocking its lane. The speed of the collision sent both cars sliding locked together across the two lanes. The men on foot registered their surprise at the noise of the crash but had no time to do anything else before the onrushing blast of metal flicked them like skittles through the air.

“Both men died,” my sad friend confirmed.

I hit the green power button and curled up into a ball on the sofa. A faint sound like that of a cat crying began to impose itself over the white noise that rang in my ears. The sound grew louder and was accompanied by a brittle tapping that seemed to be coming from the front door. I rolled over onto my back and stared up towards the ceiling. I never answered the door.

The tapping persisted and it was clear that the crying wasn’t a cat’s.

I walked to the flat’s entrance and put my eye to the spy-hole. An old woman dressed all in black stood in the stairwell on the other side of the door. She looked slowly to the left and right as though sniffing the change in the air around her. Her hair was pure white and rolled into two tight weaves on each side of her head. She had milky green eyes, grey lips, and taut skin the colour of polished bone.

I stood frozen to the door. She looked directly at the spy-hole and brought her thin white fingers towards it.

“Vecino, vecino,” she cried. Neighbour, neighbour.

I moved back slowly down the hallway. She rapped her nails again against the wood.

“Vecino. Vecino.”

I closed the living room door, lay back down on the sofa, and switched on the TV. My old friend smiled enthusiastically as she introduced the sport.

“Grow lemons,” Joan told me as I poured the last of the DYC whisky into my coffee mug and knocked it back in one. I fought off the urge to vomit and fell sideways onto the sofa. I kept one eye open to focus on Joan who stared back at me from his seat on the floor.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked him

“Grow. Lemons,” he repeated.

“Okay,” I agreed, just wanting him to stop. Being on my side hadn’t stemmed the increasing urge to throw up onto the floor.

“Listen to me, Sam, I’m serious. I saw a program last week about a guy who gave up everything and became a lemon farmer in Andalusia. I think he was English because it was dubbed. Anyway, the point is just to grow lemons.”

“How the fuck can that be the point of anything, Joan?”

“It just is, man. It just is. You’ll understand when you think about it.”

The empty bottle of DYC stood undeservedly proud and empty on the table besides a now cold, full pan of spaghetti that had congealed into an uninviting mass of oil filmed waste. I’d lost more weight feeling sorry for myself in the flat with Joan than I had during my sojourn into heroin with Maya. “When you start smoking less, you’ll understand that it isn’t,” I told him. “And we’re out of alcohol.” I didn’t need more alcohol, but it was either that or the unrelenting horror of the TV.

“Sure,” said Joan. “Smoke this instead.” The joint that he threw across the room landed upright in my ear.

I smoked slowly and deliberately, concentrating on the intense crackling bud of fire as it systematically ate away at the white paper and the plant inside. I smiled. The sweet, redemptive wave of oblivion was coming to knock me out.

My phone shivered against my leg as my eyes softly closed. I took it out and unlocked the screen. I clicked to open the message and through bleary eyes read: Kali: We r outside

“What the fuck?”

I threw the phone at Joan and dragged myself up and off the sofa. I dropped down to my hands and knees and crawled through the open door to the edge of the balcony. On the other side of the bars, Kali and another blonde girl stood on the pavement looking up at our building. Kali took out her phone from her bag and their faces lit up in a spooky green hue.

My phone rang in Joan’s confused hands. He looked at me, at the phone, and back at me.

I bounced off the walls in the hallway to get to the bathroom, threw lots of cold water over my face, and looked expectantly into the broken mirror above the sink. An under-nourished, half a bottle of DYC whisky drinking, completely fucking stoned mess looked back at me.

“Fuck’s sake,” I screamed out in desperation, and threw more water at my face.

“Sam,” Joan shouted from the living room. “Grow lemons.”

Joan went down to the street to let in the girls. Experience had taught us that buzzing people in didn’t always mean that they would be brave enough to enter.

As the voices in the stairwell drifted in through the open door I stationed myself in front of the HI-FI on the bookcase in the side-section of the living room. I grabbed a selection of CDs from the shelves, deciding that this was going to be the most evasive and least conspicuous way of having to greet the new arrivals.

The front door slammed shut.

I opened the first CD of my pile.

Primal Scream, empty.

I shuffled to the next one as Joan began to say something into the space he expected to find me, but stopped when he saw I wasn’t there.

Daydream Nation, empty.

“Sam, your friends are here,” he said with a pleasant voice that I had never heard him use before. “Hey,” I mumbled back from my refuge.

Loaded, empty.

I sneaked a look at the crowd of three who had moved through into the centre of the living room and now stood watching me, their inadequate host, in uncomfortable silence. Kali was wearing baggy, black trousers, a loose open necked green shirt, and a thin, sand coloured scarf around her neck.

Doolittle, empty.

“Sam, are you okay?” Joan asked with his normal voice.

“Music,” I said, without looking at them.

The Velvet Underground & Nico, mother-fucking empty.

My legs ached from the crouched position I had taken up. Out of the corner of my left eye I noticed something black and solid looking behind me. I rested my hand against the bookcase for balance and shuffled crab-like in the direction of my much needed seat. I let go of the support of the bookcase and relaxed back to the relief of the chair.

The base of my spine thudded against the wooden floor. The solid thump of my head followed close behind. I lay stunned and hurt with my eyes fixed on the far away ceiling.

I turned my head back slowly towards Joan and the girls. A black bin liner that I thought to be my seat clung to the moisture on the left hand side of my face. Joan and the pretty stranger looked at the floor. After a couple of tense seconds they both burst into laughter.

Kali remained silent and sad.

Calle Viva

I miss Barcelona

My old street; Bailen with Valencia

Barcelona Love Letter

Always leaving you, but i'll never truly go away

Barcelona Port

Ravalejando

Beautiful little square at Institut d'Estudis Catalans

Mirò Tribute

Windows on Roger de Lluria