Fiesta de Primavera

 

The weekend begins with little boats of vegan curry, sweet grape juice and a couple of cold forties, hoards of young Spaniards armed with plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic bottles, the pervasive stench of piss and piles of trash. We down our first forties and then meander through the masses, looking for familiar faces, or new faces. I climb up on Leon’s shoulders and call out for his friend, who we never find. Down below, people applaud or raise their drinks up at me. Someone hurls a chunk of ice against my back. I keep drinking up there.

Eventually we have to pee. There’s a high cement wall, and on the other side are bushes, full of women, mostly, as the guys are resigned to just lean against any old wall and let loose. We climb up a skate ramp and a group of girls protest, yelling that we can’t pee up there, go fuck ourselves. They are delighted when I attempt to lower myself over the edge and eat shit. Sydney makes the leap much more gracefully. We wait outside a particularly promising bush that a cute girl in a floral skirt tells us is “occupied.” She quickly gathers that we are not from here, and gives us her contact info, hoping to meet up for tapas some day and practice her English.

 Once we’ve peed, we eye the wall suspiciously. Climbing back over does not seem to be an option, but further down, it’s much lower, so we run over and hop on. But we’re a long way, a tin rooftop, and a group of people away from our friends. Fuck it. We take off, hopping precariously along the wall, and people start to take notice. Three boys are blocking our way and protest, not wanting to hop down, but I just ask them to scoot over from each other, and then step behind each one. A few people cheer. When we reach the rooftop, Syd climbs up first. Now people are really watching. We must look crazy, maybe we are. We dash along the rooftop, not wanting to break it, and people really begin to cheer. Someone throws a chunk of ice, again—sonofabitch. But finally we reach Leon and he lowers us down.

He’s acquired people, and I run into Carlos, serious as ever, but drunk as fuck, complaining that he can’t pee. Andrew, a British kid, has a backpack full of warmish tinto de verano, and I chug some of it, and then Matteo calls, saying to come home, so I take off dashing through the crowd and up, up, up the hill. Later, of course, he texts me saying he’ll actually be a while, so I stop and buy vodka and potato chips.