Fridays are like a sigh of relief, I woke up and cleaned, tromped down the hill for fried rice supplies, sweated back up the hill and took a long shower. Sometime around ten Borja came home with a few friends, we’d met at our last party, we all crammed into the kitchen and they taught me silly phrases and peeled potatoes while I boiled rice and chopped garlic. I was chopping carrots when more friends came, we exchanged polite kisses and I started defrosted the peas. When Sydney and Michelle arrived with lentils I was just finishing up the fried rice, and Borja and Marc were frying potatoes. We made vodka and pineapple juice drinks and sat in the living room and they passed around the guitar and the girls sang, at first quiet, but sweet and soulful, and the boys sang jubilant songs in Spanish, and we all clapped along and complained about being hungry and smoked spliffs. When Borja finished the tortilla española we all cheered and dug in, piling our plates with tender tortilla, with flavorful lentils dabbed with plain yogurt, with rice slathered in Sriracha. We refilled our drinks, the boys passed around a bottle of wine, and Michelle rubbed my belly. We smoked more. The music started back up, stronger voices, boozy brave, I couldn’t stop smiling, even the little fragments of uncertain song were perfect. By three in the morning we’d switched to recorded music, played Al Green and watched videos of an a cappella choir singing a Prodigy song, and Syd, Michelle and I went to the kitchen to make cookies. They must have thought we were crazy, in fact they told us so, found us closed in the kitchen dancing to California Dreaming while nibbling on cookie dough. When the cookies were done Borja’s friends took over the kitchen, boiling marijuana and butter, to use for a cake the next day. Then we curled up on the couches, finished off the vodka and melted into the cushions.
The next day we all woke up far too early, got the cake in the oven and sipped on tea. Everyone went home to collect things and I puttered around the house and realized I’d somehow lost my phone. Mierda. A good half an hour or so late, Borja and I eventually made our way down to Plaza Nueva to meet up with more people and some pretty adorable puppies. We weren’t the latest, though, so we sat in the plaza and sipped on litros until everyone else gathered, and then we wandered our way in fluctuating clumps up past the Alhambra, past the cemetery and over into a part of town I’d never seen before, with it’s own cave community. We climbed a narrow little path up to a cave with the bare bones of mattress spring frame for a door, and sat around a little table on couch cushions and opened up the weed cake and dug in.
One of the cave’s residents gave me a tour; the cave was dark and musky and he kept telling me that it was normally cleaner, but it had a hard cement floor, lumpy rounded while walls, and shadowy little chambers where beds were set up. It had a communal space with a couch, which is also where one of the more roving members of the household slept, and a little kitchen area, where they place goals under a grate to cook stovetop and have a little brick oven. No lights, no running water, just pure scavenging self sufficiency, a good deal of neighborly good will, and a lot of dumpster diving (although I have to say, I like that in Spanish they refer to it as reciclando, or recycling.)
Back outside, everyone was figuring out money stuff, and someone went on a drug run and came back with mushrooms and acid, which was promptly divided up and eaten. The sun was getting low, and a chill set in, so someone suggested we all go get some firewood, and we tromped back down the hill, to a wooded area where the boys sawed big pieces of fallen trees and the girls gathered piles of sticks for kindling. When we got back it was just about sunset, so we dropped the wood in piles and went around the other side of the hill to watch the sun slink away beneath the city silhouette. The drugs were started to kick in and everyone was smiling until they thought their faces would fall off. I can’t laugh anymore, I just can’t, they kept saying, laughing. When we got back to the cave, they’d already started a fire.
I spent the night with a soft, mellow buzz, taking little drags off spliffs that came my way, sipping on the bottles of wine and beer. I didn’t expect to be there so long, but night fell and we huddled around the fire, ducked from the smoke and chatted. A little puppy would climb over us, let me pull her into my lap and sit like a person and doze off for a little, and then would go and bark at the bigger dogs. At some point someone pulled out a bunch of chicken and spiced and grilled it and passed it around with bread, later someone handed around pears and tangerines and we all nibbled on them. One of the girls, Eva, tried my Burts Bees chapstick and took to calling it el chicle que no es chicle, the gum that isn’t gum, made everyone try it and kept asking for more every half an hour or so. Everyone was nice in an easy natural way, no one stopped conversations abruptly to ask me if I understood, and it’s better that way. I didn’t talk much, but I never do in situations where I know so few people, but it was fine, I let the language wash over me like smoke, took in what I could and chatted to the people nearest to me. It’s funny how uncomfortable you can make someone by trying too hard to make them comfortable, but no one did that to me. Midnight came and went and it wasn’t until sometime after one thirty that we began stirring, some people headed for the bars, others for home. Borja and I walked home with one of the girls, whose name escapes me (too many new names in one night…) since we realized we were nearly neighbors. On the walk home it suddenly occurred to me how little I’d slept and how little I’d eaten—about three hours of sleep the night before and I was running on weed cake and pieces of shared fruit and bread—but the hungry exhaustion that settled in my bones was satisfying. I love Granada.
