Costa Brava
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do" Mark Twain
“…So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ” Mark Twain. This is the kind of quote that usually would irk me in some script-fonted motivational IG post, but comes back to me every time I need justification to jump off a cliff (metaphorically speaking).
I was making bad coffees at a Danish Bakery run by a grumpy baker and a toffee-nosed business man (who had outrageously accused me of stealing from the till) when I got a text from an ex I hadn’t seen since my 19th birthday.
“Hey Lil Rig, just got dumped by my fiancé. On my way to Barcelona. Join me?”
I had £50 in my bank account and 5 shifts scheduled for the following week, so I obviously replied with “Fuck yes! I can afford a one way ticket, I’ll be there by 2pm tomorrow”. I left without a trace. I disappeared from the shitty job without notice and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. That, my friends, is what I call LIVING! Or what a therapist might call impulsive and irresponsible. Freedom tastes so sweet when you force it’s filthy hand over your mouth to suffocate you with it’s sugary allure.
He worked at the record store when we first met, oh about -one hundred years ago. He was a DJ (*ahem* turntablist/scratchologist) who drove a pick-up truck with hydraulics and a vanity plate that said “HU5TLR”. His name meant “crown” in French (a running royalty theme with the nomenclature of lovers of mine). He had a cupboard stacked with box-fresh trainers, a gun in the bedside table (“in case of intruders”) and a shelf proudly displaying collectible Star Wars battleships. My mom referred to him as the Hip Hop Honey. His dad was Willie Nelson’s weed dealer, he had elegant hands with which he played classical piano and an MPC, cooked like a king, loved like an addict and had a killer vinyl collection we would scour on Sundays for samples. He took me on the back of his dirt bike to a place he called “Narnia” (a field of daisies) where we recreated that Virgin Suicides love scene. He showed me his fluorescent orange fluffy flares from the original rave-era and blew my mind open with 12” remix versions of songs like “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” by Baby D and NRG’s “I Need Your Love”.
More importantly, he saved me from an extremely destructive 3 year relationship I desperately needed to be dragged out of kicking, fucking and screaming. So when I got a call from a friend to tell me that my current boyfriend had just left a strip club at 10am with a couple of hookers (instead of driving home to help me unpack and set up the new one bedroom flat we just signed the lease on), I showed up on hip hop honey’s door step with a bottle of champagne and said “fuck it”. He was 10 years older than me, we watched a lot of Top Gear with Thai take-away food, spent many nights at clubs waiting for him to finish sets, and we lasted about 8 glorious months before I flipped the switch. No bad blood. He hated when I put back the passenger seat and flipped my heels on his spotless dashboard.
Big rig (let’s call him) meets me at Aeroport de Barcelona sporting a giant smile… and long braids complete with beads (I think). I can’t help but laugh and cover my eyes with my hands (like that monkey emoji -🙈). I would usually find this Crocs™ level cringeworthy, but for some reason it makes total sense on him and who am I anyway? He’s a ridiculous human; super passionate, excitable, and enthusiastic. He’s absurd to me in a way that rivets and delights me. The energy he emanates bounces off walls; he walks like there’s springs in those pumped up kicks, and he talks in way that makes me believe that somehow the speed and happy pills he did at bush-doofs never really wore off. We catch up on all that has come to pass since we split and how fucking funny it is that we end up in Barcelona together. He reveals his new found bi-curiosity (which I’m gagging to hear all the juicy details about) and the world is our oyster.
One night, we meet some local friends he’s made who run an underground weed cafe (thick with smoke, dingy couches and TVs playing cartoons on the walls). Someone from that scene guides us to a Brazilian salsa night out the back of a small bar. I know how to salsa and I’ve flung my handbag down, hand in hand with a stranger twirling me in close to him before you can say ¡vamos!. This whole scenario is my idea of heaven and an easy way for me to flirt with my ex by making him thirsty and jealous *shrug*. I especially liked the challenge now there was maybe men to compete with for his affection.
After having a stranger grind up against my ass just long enough to make me uncomfortable (my first experience of the slow and sensual Bachata), I go back to my purse to get cash out for cocktails… and hasta luego iPhone!! The little shit with a felt fedora runs out of the club with my phone into the night. Our new friends say “Estupido! we told you! Mine was stolen 3 times last month!”. I do the ‘Find my iPhone’ thing on someone else’s phone, like that episode of Broad City. We follow the little blue dot moving across the map for a minute with baited breath, pounding heart and then it’s dead. They’ve pulled out the sim. These guys are pros and it’s all over. An entire crew of sweet drunken spaniards guide us down the streets for a funny forever to the police office to report it (with a caveat that a police report was only worthwhile for the insurance forms). I didn’t have insurance -duh, but Big Rig did and thought he could fudge a stolen laptop with it and scam the system. A futile attempt the cops weren’t buying.
I guess I was supposed to be mad about being robbed, mad at the thieves (like everyone else around me throwing their hands in the air and shaking their heads in my defence), but I couldn’t help feel like if this dude was desperate enough for money or a thrill that he had to pull a stunt like that, then he could take the phone and he definitely needed it more than me (a dumb tourist). Also, quietly, we all hate having phones don’t we? I know I’m a cyborg, but goddamn I get nostalgic for showing up when you said you would, leaving a voicemail on the home phone and meeting at Town Hall Steps. The idea of having a blue dot tracking me everywhere I go is like having a monkey on my back.
After a day or so of day turning into night and night turning into day and feeling like I’m somewhere in between, I attempt to get into my social media and email accounts. Apparently with two step verification, there’s just no fucking way. Not going to happen. It’s like trying to locate and enter a secret tomb in the pyramids protected by all the curses and gods of centuries past, not knowing how to read hieroglyphics or having any tools whatsoever at my disposal. The chimes of freedom flashing! I go a week or more without contacting anyone who is not in my immediate vicinity, my present reality. My mother tells me she was about to register me a missing person. Aperol Spritz, please.
Big rig takes me to a party at the hair dressing salon and convinces them and me to cut a bob into my hair. A street party and a half later, I’m swinging with a fiiine bob and some ornate oversized gold earrings I bought (that reminded me of something you’d see in a Pedro Almodóvar film). He was right about the bob. Something transformative about it and I feel my entire personality shift.
There’s a street in the gothic quarter with antique stores where we snap up a portable record player and a couple John Lee Hooker comps (The Hot Spot soundtrack was our album when we were a couple). The record player never stops; we flip sides dutifully (unless we’re busy as such and the skipping needle continues on skipping until you know what the time is again), Boom Boom ringing across the Catalonian skies for the rest of the trip.
We roll up the coast to the Santa Maria de Monserrat abbey (built in to a surreal looking rocky mountain) then up to Figueres where they have midnight viewings of the Salvador Dali Theatre-Museum. We get very stoned and I find myself very much running around the halls of this museum at midnight with Dali’s creations popping out of the walls and reaching out to me, drinking pink champagne from the mouth of a figure carved in stone. Stoned. So stoned.
"It's obvious that other worlds exist, that's certain; but, as I've already said in many other occasions, these other worlds are inside ours, they reside on earth and are precisely at the centre of the dome of the Dalí Museum, which contains the new, unsuspected and hallucinatory world of Surrealism” Dali, 1974?
All I remember from then on are old discos, bad sheets and Pina Coladas on Lloretta del Mar. Then the serene satisfaction of every kind of woman and her dog topless on the beach cove of Platja Cala El Golfet in an act of normality not even the sleaziest-eyed scrub would flinch at. The joy of being able to join in with my giant breasts and do the same; no one even remotely interested in blinking their eyes at me or hollering. On a cloudy day in Cyprus I get cars slow rolling up to me, yelling and honking, and the absence of that lamb to the slaughter feeling is hard to overstate here.
At Cala de Sant Roc I spot an indie musician called Kindness on the beach. We’ve met in a studio briefly once before, but I’m actually too shy to say hello (knowing he definitely won’t remember me) and besides, his girlfriend is glowing so hard my insides turn to mush. There’s jocks on yachts, the water is crystal and the Patatas Bravas are hot. I’m omitting all the filthy melting moments, because I don’t want this to become Sex & The City… though I could be down for Mills & Boon.
I return to London, back to square one, googling careers like “wedding celebrant”, “coupon collector”, “professional competition winner”, “survey filler” and “transcription writer”. Tears in my eyes, huffing and puffing, woe is me. I’ve been through 16 phone numbers since then, but my my secrets to life and the predicaments they present are still one in the same. Luck, love, the kindness of strangers in a very Blanche DuBois way, and of course, winging it.