My delinquent Spanish summer

How do any of us make it to adulthood?

I first went to Spain on a family holiday in the mid-seventies, when I was eleven. We stayed in a little old house at the edge of a village, near a seaside town called Gandia, and it was then that I met Paco for the first time.

I was casually exploring the village when I came across Paco in the shade of some trees, sitting on a low, stone wall. He was one of a group of boys, all around twelve- or thirteen-years-old, but Paco was clearly the leader: a young Danny Zuko and his T-Birds. Nearby, their bikes were laying in the dirt where they’d skidded to a stop and thrown them down.

Paco was inexpertly smoking a cigarette and seemed to enjoy watching me approach, anticipating the distraction I would provide. He was half-smiling; the kind of smile I’d only before seen on school bullies. The other boys immediately mimicked and mocked my tentative “buenas dias”, before Paco corrected it to “buenOs días.” I noticed that when he spoke, the others listened. I gave “buenOs días” a try, and Paco snorted. I should have walked away at that moment but, for some reason, I didn’t. Instead, I stood my ground while they joked in Spanish at my expense. The whole time, Paco held me in his gaze, rhythmically snapping open and closed a Zippo lighter, occasionally thumbing it into life. I remember being both wary and compelled. I saw him cycling around the village a few more times during our stay, but our paths didn’t cross again properly until five years later when, aged sixteen, I returned to Gandia on a summer-long exchange, staying with a Spanish family.

The parents of my Spanish family were charming and welcoming, and the four kids a good mix and a good match: two much younger (a whiney girl and a nerdy boy); one much older (a very gorgeous, self-possessed, eighteen-year-old girl); and Manolo, who was the same age as me, with a similar outlook, and who was studying English as I was studying Spanish. For one wild summer, we became good friends and partners in crime.

The family house was on an urbanización – a fancy housing estate – just outside the town; a big, comfortable house that shared a tennis court and swimming pool with a dozen neighbours. Assuming I’d know how to ride one, the family lent me one of their two motor scooters and, after a crash course (I use the phrase advisedly), Manolo and I were let loose for the summer.

On my very first evening, Manolo introduced me to the ‘gang’ who were hanging around in a parking lot, milling around between their scooters, all of them smoking: Carlos (everyone called him Charlie), Huesca (that’s where he was from), Javi, Toni, and... Paco.

Even though he was wearing mirrored aviators (at a time when no one wore sunglasses), I recognised Paco right away, and smiled at him, and was about to blurt something, but stopped myself in time. I knew he’d recognised me, too, and had seen that I was about to say something but, in what I was to learn was typical Paco style, he decided not to acknowledge me beyond a cursory glance. Instead, he greeted Manolo extravagantly, clapped him on the shoulder and drew him into the group, leaving me at the edge.

Along with his aviators, he was also wearing a leather jacket (this before it was a cliché), and sporting a small, gold earring - again, ahead of its time. He now had long hair, pushed back and tousled, had become broad-shouldered and, for a Spaniard, tall. All in all, he’d grown into a good-looking, impressive, seventeen-year-old.

Ten minutes later, Paco peeled away from the rest and offered me a cigarette. Still no acknowledgment that we’d met before. His voice had broken since we’d first met (so had mine), and he’d kind of thrown his to the back of his throat, like my friends and I did back in London when we were trying to get into an AA (over-14) film. It made him sound like he’d been smoking Ducados (black tobacco) for even longer, and inhaling deeper, than he actually had. Even though I’d tried smoking and didn’t like it, for some reason I accepted the cigarette. Finally, at the same time as giving me a light with his Zippo, he looked me in the eyes, grinned wryly, and winked. It was as if I’d passed some test or other. Smoking? Doing his bidding? Not saying that we’d met before? I learned that this kind of thing was part of his mystique; he kept you off balance and you never knew exactly how or why. He was like the group’s older brother: you always wanted his approval, and he dictated the pace and set the tone. He was daring, and loud, and funny and fun. And in charge. In a word, Paco was cool. I learned that the grin and raised eyebrow combo was a Paco signature.

Manolo and I soon settled into our summer routine. After breakfast, before the crushing heat of the afternoon, we’d go for a swim in the pool at his house (essential part of a hangover cure) or just sunbathe and chat; he trying out his English, and I my Spanish. Manolo was dark-skinned, but I was pale and blond, so sunbathing really meant managing my sunburn. This was a time before suncream was a ‘must-pack’. Draped over sun-loungers, we’d unpack the antics of the previous night: who’d made a fool of themselves; who’d done something funny; who’d got off with whom. Mostly we talked about girls: which ones we fancied, which ones allowed you to do what with them. Then, to put an edge on our appetite for lunch, we might share a joint. Manolo had a hidden corner of the garden, well away from the house, where he was growing two, waist-high, marijuana plants. After a hefty, home-cooked lunch, often rice-based, and with the afternoon temperature now rising, we’d retire to our rooms to lie on our beds and read, or nap. Mostly, the whole day, up until around six, we were re-charging so we could launch ourselves at the next evening with as much gusto as the last.

At six, we’d sneak around the back of the garage for another joint, then go back inside the house to listen to music, tell more stories, and swap slang and swear words (English and Spanish and also some in the local Valenciano dialect), until we ended up sobbing with laughter. Then, primed for the evening, we’d head off on our scooters into Gandia town. Manolo always, somehow, had an inkling of where everyone would be. We’d have to try no more than one or two places before coming across the row of familiar scooters lined up at the curb like an adolescent biker gang. It was usually outside a salón de juegos, a games arcade. These arcades were our staging posts.

Greetings were a lengthy ritual: handshakes and back slaps for everyone. Part of the glue was that everyone had at least one nickname: handsome Charlie was ‘Hollywood’ (with a strong Spanish ‘H’); Manolo was orejotas (big ears); I was turista (the tourist), or inglés. Everyone except Paco. While we were wating for everyone to arrive, we’d play a couple of games of pinball and table air hockey, maybe with a café bonbón (a shot of espresso with equal part sweet condensed milk) to gee us up, before moving on. It was always Paco who started his scooter first, never with any announcement, and we’d all just fall in behind, heading for the bright lights of the beach; Gandia playa.

There were loads of bars to choose from at the beach, and deciding which one, then which one after that, was part of the evening: that one played great music; Huesca’s cousin worked in that one; in that one they didn’t mind you smoking dope. In fact, in most they didn’t mind you smoking dope. Spain was coming out of a repressive, forty-year dictatorship and it was more an exploding firework than an emerging butterfly: sex, drugs and rock and roll were the new order, known as la Movida (the movement). Tiny strips of cannabis resin, enough for four or five joints, were practically currency within our group and beyond. The little blocks (called talegos), were about the size and shape of a small French fry, were worth a thousand pesetas (£4-odd) and, curiously, were always neatly sheathed in cellophane. Soon, from Paco, I was to learn why. And, indeed, how.

I guess I might be sounding like a bit of a druggie, but I’m really not, and I really wasn’t; I was just sixteen and trying stuff. Bear with me.

Anyway, the first part of the evening was a bar crawl; a Cubata (rum and coke) or a beer at every stop. Occasionally, Paco would call for a drinking game. The simplest was to nominate someone to have a shot of one of the obscure spirits from the top shelf: something distilled from artichokes or with an exotic animal on its label. More involved was the flag game: the challenger named a country, and if the victim couldn’t name the colours in the national flag, he had to drink a mixture of those colours; blue curaçao and yellow Galliano featured heavily. I noticed that while we were all involved in these distracting shenanigans, Paco would occasionally reach behind the bar and nick drinks, or cigarettes, or, even, small change. Once, when he saw that I’d spotted him lifting a hundred peseta note, he gave me his signature grin and wink: half amused, half challenging. Certainly, no shame.

Then we’d head to one of our two favourite discos: Rompeolas or Flash Flash. Paco would always enter first, which meant we looked less like a group and more like his entourage. The crowd in both discos was the same, as was the music. The late seventies was an interesting time for music: a nexus of disco, punk, new wave, and reggae. There were also rock songs from the seventies that Spain had missed out on during the stifling Franco era. English tourists were still a novelty, so I stuck out, especially being tall, and blond, and speaking some Spanish. I was constantly approached by strangers (blokes, mostly, unfortunately) wanting me to explain lyrics:

“What is say the song?”

I did my best. I also gently corrected them when they thought it was, say, “Doughnuts make your brown eyes blue”, or “Come on, baby, light my fag.”

Generally, once inside the disco, we broke up into smaller groups: prowling in pairs. But, as ever, when Paco decided it was time to leave, by some strange osmosis we all knew and, unless we were making progress with a girl, we’d all leave with him. One time, we congregated outside by our bikes, but instead of calling it a night, Paco dared us to break into one of the chiringuitos (beach bars on the sand itself). Paco kept watch while Manolo and I clambered through the unsecured window (so, I guess, maybe not technically illegal?), then we handed him out a wooden crate of beers (definitely illegal). We drank a couple each, before Paco decreed that we should bury the rest. When we returned at lunchtime the next day and, following our mental pirate map – four steps along, five back - we found a German family had set up almost on top of them. We planted ourselves uncomfortably close to them, and were loud and obnoxious, but they didn’t take the hint. Instead, we had to reach under towels and surreptitiously scoop out sand, virtually from underneath them. We eventually reached our buried treasure and hauled the bottles out one by one. I can report that beer buried overnight under three feet of wet sand emerges surprisingly nice and cool.

When August arrived, we went less to discos and more to local fiestas and verbenas where entire villages, one after another throughout the area, turn themselves over to a brutal, full week of non-stop carousing. We took full advantage. From our games arcades rendezvous, we’d head off into the countryside, a convoy of scooters, some riders with helmets, some without, some with passengers, some without, kicking out at each other and swerving out of the way as we jockeyed for position on the back roads. As a consequence of our disco-going in July, there were now girls with us; not core members of the gang, but seasonal adjuncts. And some actual girlfriends, too. Including Sofia, a beautiful, if frosty, queen for King Paco.

We’d usually arrive at the village while it was still light, in time to catch the procession of the village’s brass band, or to bet on the donkey bingo (the town hall carpark chalked off into a grid, each square metre with its own number, before a donkey, recently fed on wet grass, was released to decide the winner with a splat of dung). Much alcohol was consumed while the players hey-ed and shoo-ed and whooped from the sidelines. The evening proper would continue with a local band playing Spanish rock and pop on a temporary stage, encouraged by an exuberant crowd. There was often pressure on me to share some ‘up to date’ London dance styles. Unfortunately, the only thing I had to offer was a clumsy version of the dance to Tiger Feet by Mud. I like to think that, to this day, come fiesta time, with people of a certain age, those moves still make the odd legacy appearance.

Every village fiesta concluded with a fireworks display. In fact, the whole evening was punctuated with random rockets and handheld flares (a cross between a sparkler fountain and a flamethrower). Paco was particularly fascinated by fireworks. Not only would he terrorise everyone and anyone by randomly lobbing bangers at them, lit with his trusty Zippo, he also made a point of befriending and quizzing the man in charge – usually the local fireman – and asking if he could help ignite the final display.

One Saturday afternoon, when Manolo’s parents were away for the weekend, Paco turned up unannounced at the house. He seemed hyped, ushered Manolo and me straight into the kitchen, and closed the door. From his satchel, he produced a rock of ‘Lebanese gold’ chocolate (cannabis resin) the size of a lemon, wrapped in cling film. Unwrapped, it looked like a piece of dry, crumbly sandstone, but smelled rich and heady.

“Fifty thousand pesetas,” he confided, in Spanish.

We ooh-ed.

“Now I’ll show you how to turn it into a hundred thousand.”

Like a chef with two assistants, Paco took command. He called for four packets of cigarettes, a coffee grinder, an iron, and a razor. We collected them, then marvelled as he went about his business. First, he gently removed the cellophane wrappers from the cigarette packets, opened them out, and laid them flat on the table. Next, he crumbled the rock into manageable pieces and fed them into the coffee grinder, neatly tipping batch after batch of the resulting dope powder onto the layer of cellophane. It did seem like an impossibly large spread from that single rock. He then topped the mulch with another layer of cellophane. Next, using the iron (not plugged in!) he tamped it all down, so it was flat, and even. Finally, each with our own craft knife, we helped him cut it into a hundred, one thousand-peseta talego strips. Now I understood the cellophane on the talegos that we were used to buying. Not only had the grinding process doubled the volume of the original rock, but each talego was soft and smelled strong, so seemed extra fresh and potent. And easy to sell. Starting with Manolo and me; we bought twenty each.

Selling them within our group, didn’t feel like dealing, it felt like helping out our friends (despite the fact we were also ripping them off!). And the thousand pesetas here and there didn’t feel like the proceeds of crime, it felt like pocket money. As so often with Paco, you knew you shouldn’t be doing whatever it was, but there was something irresistible about him. As I’d noted at that very first meeting, as much as he repelled you, Paco also managed to draw you in.

In early September, just a week before I was due to go home, Manolo and I happened to drive past a bar that we never usually frequented, and spotted Paco. Even more unusually, he was sitting with an old man. We get off our scooters to say hi and both of us immediately recognised that this was a Paco with whom we weren’t familiar: shifty and awkward; no trace of his usual swagger. And the old man turned out to be his father.

Paco Senior was weather-beaten and unkempt, with a farmer’s hands and a dirty t-shirt, but he was warm and welcoming, with a big laugh, and he was delighted that I spoke some Spanish. He immediately instructed a reluctant Paco to get beers for us all. He asked after Manolo’s family, and mine, and about my summer, and if I understood any Valenciano, and what was my favourite Spanish food. As we sipped our cold beers and chatted, Paco seemed to draw further and further into himself. Only when Paco Senior invited us to a paella lunch on Sunday did his son become animated.

“Papá! No! They don’t want to eat paella!”

We did.

“It’s not possible. El inglés is flying home the next day!”

But we overruled him.

The following Sunday, Manolo and I found our way to Paco’s family home which was at the end of one of the tracks that criss-crossed an area of orange groves and small holdings called Marxuquera. Theirs was a tumbledown house surrounded by a patchwork of various vegetable gardens – I could see tomatoes, aubergines, and peppers, as well as olive and orange trees. We were welcomed by Paco Senior and his wife Marisa (Paco’s mum) as if we were old friends, and introduced to ten-year-old Leo, Paco’s goofy younger brother. Last to greet us was Paco himself; as withdrawn as he had been outside the bar, mumbling hello, and making only minimal eye contact. It was as if he’d simply dialled his charisma down to zero. I thought maybe he was embarrassed but, as the afternoon wore on, I began to realise that it was that he was exposed. It wasn’t that he came from a modest background, it was that he came from an ordinary background. Nothing special. Just nice. Not cool.

Paco Senior cooked the paella on a single gas ring and everything came from the garden except the rice. It was quite a ritual, accompanied by a shot of cazalla, a vile anise spirit, (definitely from the top shelf - and with a monkey on its label) whose principal use, I suspect, is to provide entertainment by making unwary first-timers splutter and choke.

“You like snails?” Asked Paco Senior once I’d recovered.

“Sure.”

“Leo!” And, with that, the youngest was dispatched to harvest the underside of leaves around the garden until he’d collected a bowlful.

When it came time to eat, we sat at a trestle table behind the house, under a wooden lean-to, with a canopy of vine leaves for shade. The paella was set down in the middle of the table and, after Paco Senior had lifted out a single grain of rice and halved it with his spoon to check it was perfectly cooked, we served ourselves. We drank from a porrón, a ceramic pitcher with a spout, so you tipped the beer straight into your mouth (or, in my case, into your mouth and down your chin and onto your t-shirt), that meant not having to wash up glasses. Chickens clucked around our ankles, rancorously eyed up by a mutt that looked like he’d been snapped at more than once by his owners.

Paco remained subdued throughout the meal, but not surly. In fact, he was strangely formal and respectful. He didn’t smoke or tinker with his talismanic Zippo. There was no sign of the drug-dealing, banger-throwing, drunk-driving, petty criminal until the very end of the meal, when, to go with the melon from their garden, Paco Senior asked him to cut a bunch of grapes from the vine above our heads. Paco made sure that both Manolo and I saw him pull a lockable penknife from his pocket and click it open; showy for our benefit – as was the edgy grin and wink.

That might still be the best meal of my life: tasty, simple, garden-fresh, al fresco, sunny, family-style. But soon, like so much of that summer, it was just a dreamy memory. Looking back, those eight or ten weeks might have been the wildest, free-est, and happiest of my whole life: no responsibilities, smoking and drinking like they were good for me, chasing girls. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much or so hard. And there were lots of first times. And quite a few last times, too.

*

My family reciprocated the exchange with Manolo in London the following Easter, but I didn’t go back to Gandia until I was in my late twenties, twelve years later. There I met up with Manolo again, who was now married and his wife pregnant. He updated me on Paco, who, it turned out, already had an eight-year-old boy, although he was no longer with the mother (not Sofia, the ice queen), and had some sort of business breeding and training Dobermanns as guard dogs. It sounded like his life was still chaotic, and that even fatherhood hadn’t brought any kind of calm or moment of inflection. His path was still, as it always had been, ever onward to the next thing.

A few years later, I learned in an email from Manolo that Paco was now destitute. His son (then the age at which I had first met Paco) had been messing around with fireworks and had accidentally started a forest fire. According to Spanish law, arsonists, even accidental arsonists, or their families, had to pay for the resulting fire-fighting effort, which included the planes and helicopters that bombed the fire with water: tens of thousands of Euros.

The next thing I heard, out of the blue, was maybe five years after that, when I received an email from Paco himself, offering me the opportunity to invest in a scheme to sell scrapped Spanish ambulances to the Sierra Leonese government. I told him it was good to hear from him and asked him to keep in touch and let me know how it went, but that, at that moment, I had no spare funds. I never heard from him again.

Finally, in my fifties, I bought a little holiday house in a village in the mountains behind Gandia, one of those whose fiestas we’d terrorised during that long-ago summer. Inevitably, one day, running errands in the big smoke of Gandia, I ran into Manolo (now an optometrist and local councillor) and I heard the very latest about Paco. He had, apparently, gone to Chile where he and some fellow speculators had been buying up swathes of land to turn into a solar farm – the largest solar farm in South America, according to Manolo. However, something had gone wrong, and he was currently under investigation by the Chilean tax authorities who had confiscated his passport and who, it sounded like, were just a couple of steps away from incarcerating him.

Although I made a lasting friendship with Manolo, without the Paco element, that summer wouldn’t have been as pivotal. It’s not that I was at a fork in the road of my life or anything, but, nevertheless, being around him definitely proved salutary. Maybe everyone needs to be around a Paco at some point in their lives, a bad boy, to help exorcise any of their own darker tendencies. And maybe sixteen is the perfect age. And then you move on.

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