Grimy Neverland (4th)

The heat was oppressive as we stepped out of the Granada bus station, far too hot for a zealously bearded Irish ginger.  Arnie’s friend from the golden state met us at the entrance.  Nacho had been studying there with his girlfriend for the past year and would act as our introduction to the city.  That first night we got pished and stayed in Nacho’s apartment.  At one point, blurry eyed unsteady, we got to the topic of Sacromonte.  The man made caves dug into the mountain above the city facing the Alhambra once housed the slave population used to build that very palace.  How the caves became the refuge for drunks, junkies, gypsies and destitutes that it was then, I have no idea.  To us it sounded like paradise; a ragtag bunch of misfits living on the edge of civilisation and forging a path of their own design.  And, of course, a place to rest our backpacks free of charge.

A few days later we climbed up through the maze-like Albaicin (Granada’s old town) in search of this new exciting promised land.  Soon we found a small dirt path by a fountain that led up and out of the city.  Sweaty and scorched we followed the winding way backdropped by the terracotta sprawl of the Alhambra on the far mountainside; an oasis of green flora and red brick isolated from the urban jungle and arid steeps, and glittering white through sun-baked haze the distant peaks of Sierra Nevada.  A beautiful view, that when I recall, conjures mythic flamenco refrains, ethereal castanets and every morning-piss I‘d have for the next half a year.

Sacromonte, or so I’ve been told, consists of three valleys, I would never make it beyond the first.  The initial barranco came to view, a quaint rambling coalition of mountain paths and doorways dug into the valley walls.  On a glance maybe fifteen domiciles.  It was nothing new for a couple of backpackers or even tourists to make it this far.  The former viewed as possible allies but both seen as potential prey.  We walked aimlessly from cave to cave peering in those that had no door wondering just how to make an introduction, the place seemed all but deserted.

“Hey,” called a man from the direction we’d come.  We turned to see a tall figure with a face shrouded in black fuzz.  “Over here,” he waved his arm.  Arnie and I questioned each other with a glance then started backtracking.  

I remember that first sight of what would become my original travel family.  They sat on worn, tattered and mismatched sofas around a table supported by cinder blocks.  Beer bottles, joint butts and all manner of recreational filth littered the terrace I would know later as the kitchen.  A bunch of grubby, self-neglected outcasts regarded us with drunken glee; were we cats to join in the fun or mice for fresh amusement?  Their dogs, three mongrels that seemed to cover the whole range of canine shape, size and colour, lounged in the shadow of a crumbling exterior wall.

A bald man with a red cap and a smile like a bombed out graveyard grinned a grin that swallowed his eyes and repulsed the skies, asked, “Espanol?  Deutsch?  English?”

“Irish,” said I.

“Oh I like this one,” said a man with a familiar southern twang to his accent.  Black haired, bearded, small of stature; a rodent face crowned with a battered fedora.  The man who’d beckoned us over.

“Ah fuck it’s another one,” declared the original questioner with a southern English slur.

“Oh shut up Neil!”

“Fuck you Franky!”

“So, what brings you two all the way up here then?”  Asked Irish Franky.

“Yeah we just got into town the other day and herd of this place, thought we’d check it out.”  Said Arnie.

“Do you drink then?”  Queried a stocky Belgian with a scar that crazy-paved his skinhead.  That was Derk, who’s powder blue and perpetually bloodshot eyes punctuated a face some how akin to Homer Simpson’s.  The man looked like he’d been born stoned.

“What do you think?”  Asked Arnie.  

“Hmm, I go to the city.  Shiva hop!” a man stated, standing up and leaving with his small black mut in tow.  He was an absolute mountain of a man with the only tidy beard (mine included) out of the lot of us.  From the Czech republic he had an iron persona and a dictators baring that radiated havoc.

“Aw don’t mind ole droopy drawers,” Franky reassured, “sit down.”

“Yeah Patrick’s jus’ a big kitty cat really,” squeezed Neil through his Satanic smile.  He looked as though he’d just eaten a spoonful of malic acid, how the man could see through the creases was a mystery.

So sit down we did.  Beer, wine and bullshit flowed like a river of, well, beer, wine and bullshit.  These men were cut from the same fuck-you-flag as the Irish party demons I counted as brothers and sisters back home.  At one point Arnie and I ventured into the city to refill the reservoir.  On the way we decided to ask if we could get a cave to call home.  I mean fuck it, it wasn’t like I had a plan or a time limit to keep to and who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be a troglodyte?  What nineteen year old didn’t dream of this exact adventure?  Breaking away from a home that demanded your freedom as recompense for the stagnant safe servitude sold as the only path through life.  Falling in with a ragged crew of rejects, rebels and renegades.  The complete flouting of oppression in the ultimate Peter Pan story.  I’d found my grimy Neverland.

When we returned we took to the sarcy sludge like we were born to it, the aggressive humour of high people in low places.  Eventually Patrick returned with a crate of beer and another trog whom he’d met in the city.  This man was a hand taller than he but spindly of limb.  Where Patrick’s beard was trim, the new comer looked like a wind-beaten shrub.  He walked with the grace of a daddy long legs (the crane fly variety) and suppressed what could only be described as a shock of black hair under a grubby bandanna.

“Hey Bin!  What the fuck are you doing back here?”  Playfully Franky greeted the new arrival.  Bin scowled, approaching like a crane with spastic paraplegia.  He comically peacocked his chest and planted his fists on his hips casting a long shadow over the Irish man.  Before Bin said a word though, his gaze fell on me and Arnie.  He bent over, somehow the movement implied the screech of a rusty hinge, and met my blue eyes with his brown.

“Hola.  Hallo.  Hello.  Bonjour.  Caio.  Konnichiwa.”  His voice sounded like that of Barry White’s and Mr Bean’s spliced abominable clone.  He extended a hand and I took it.

“Hi,” said I with a nod and a handshake.  He issued an approving hrmph while his answering nod gave his hair framed face the appearance of a threatened hedgehog.  Bin swivelled to Arnie and repeated his multilingual hello barrage.

“Ni hao,” answered Arnie taking the man’s hand, “I’m Arnie.”

“Bin Laden,” boomed the response.

“No fuckin way,” laughed Arnie.

“Si claro, mi llamo Bin Laden,” beard shaking affront lazered from his eyes as he again creaked back to his full height.

I turned to Franky.  “So.  You live in the caves.  With Bin Laden?”

“Yep.”

“Christ on a bike.”

“Na, he lives on a different mountain.”

Patrick and Bin took a seat and opened drinks.  Patrick silently took a moment to pour some beer on the parched earth.  A gesture that was repeated by all the cave dwellers and then by Arnie and I in respect for the mood of the moment.  In retrospect, at the time I, and possibly Arnie, had no cause to echo the veneration and of its true poignancy I’d be blissfully ignorant for years to come.

Again the banter flowed jagged and loud.  It wasn’t until the evening bore down on us that Arnie and I asked if there was a cave we could stay in for a while.  The question was met with just a drip of consternation until Derk pointed to a cave close to the valley’s cleft saying we could stay there as long as we wanted.  No one objected though we were warned that the cave wasn’t exactly on the safe side.  But who gave a fuck right?  It’s not like having a ton or two of earth and boulders dropped on you in your sleep ever hurt anyone.

We learned that the first barranco was more on less divided into three areas or factions.  The side where we drank was the international alcho section; the middle, right beside where Arnie and I’d be sleeping was the gitanos, the Spanish gypsies; and on the far side lived the Italian junkies.  The advice given was: watch your wallet with the latter and do, not, fuck, with the former.

All these men were beggars, buskers and bin raiders.  Scarred and battered veterans of the road each with a story of woe and wonder to tell.  I listened to, joked along with and cringed to tales of every emotional shade and hue.  Patrick told of a time when he and Robo, a Czech who lived in a squat in the city, got stranded in some white walled higher end tourist trap on the costa del sol.  They needed money fast and begging from the squeaky clean, rose perfumed shit pile that constitutes the British, German and god knows where else’s holier than thou herd of camera clickers would take too long.  Patrick had taken his knife and liberated a pay phone from its hand set, found a box in a bin and a straw from a finished drink on a cafe terrace.  He taped them all together, then slammed this Blue-Peter-botch-up down on restaurant table after restaurant table asking for cash to fix his broken mobile.  Whether people paid out of humour, pity, disgust or terror didn’t matter.  In no time they had enough for a few cartons of wine and two over night bus tickets to the festival they’d been heading to.

Franky, with clasped hands and gritted teeth recounted a time when he’d been busking down in the city.  He’d went for a piss and a gitano youth had helped himself to the change in his guitar bag.  Franky had caught a glimpse of who it’d been and later that night, in a drunken rage, had slung insults at the boy’s family who also lived in Sacromote, just across from where we then talked.  He barely remembered it.  Next day when he’d went on the morning booze run the youth and two of his friends followed him into the Albaicin.  He soon found the way blocked by the thief and one of his accomplices.  He tried to apologies.  No good.  Before he could turn and leg it the third of their number grabbed him from behind pinning his arms.  There was no escape, the streets too narrow his detainer too strong.  He pleaded.  No good.  The thief produced a scalpel.  He opened Franky up.  Cut him five times across his chest, once down his face and to finish him off sliced his throat.  His voice quivered and his tear rimmed eyes trembled with remembered pain and anger as he traced the scar on his neck.  They’d left him there on the cobbles thinking the last thing he’d see was the growing pool of his own blood.  “I’m fuckin lucky to be alive.  Fuckers the lot of them.”

Derk wove a drug smuggler’s parable.  He’d been begging outside a supermarket in the city when a couple of gypsies had propositioned him.  No matter what rung on the social ladder you find yourself, greed is great motivation.  It was, is, common for dealers looking mules to ask the naive and down trodden alike, to throw a few hundred quid at an expendable either to get the product through or toss them under the bus to keep the pigs nice and greasy.  Into the Sahara Derk had went.  Moroccan hash comes shaped as an egg; lots of not too small shitable shillings just the right size to gulp down and crap out.  After a few unsure days getting bombed out of his mind on a Saharan hash farm, Derk made the return leg of the journey.  Not a hitch.  Easy money.  It wasn’t until some months had past and Derk was practically rolling in caramello, money and excrement that the hash hit the fan.  On something like his fifth trip, the laxatives had just kicked in and there he squatted in a cheap hotel bath tub awaiting the pitter patter of Peseta signs.  Hunkered down, panting and up to his ankles in brown gold it took a time to realise that some of the hash had managed to make a home in his gut.  Some eggs were still lodged in there at the time of the telling, or so he assumed.  He couldn’t exactly go to a hospital and having fucked up digestion was, to his mind, better than a Spanish jail cell.

Neil half told, half enacted his slice of history.  He’d been living in London at the time, walking down the street to god knows where when a suit stepped out in front of him.  Expensively dressed and lugging a black suit case, he’d emerged from a jewellers not five feet in front of Neil.  “Fuck it,” the limy with the shattered smile had thought.  Zippo at the ready Neil grabbed the man from behind jamming the lighter into his back and with a voice dark as sin had threatened to kill the man.  “Drop the fucking case!”  The man had, of course, obliged.  Neil, having pushed the man to the footpath, grabbed the case and ran.  More than two hundred thousand quid’s worth in stones and metals.  But being a man of practical paranoia Neil had known there was no easy way to cash in, he needed a plan, time to make like a squirrel.  He’d dug a hole by a tree beyond the limits of Heathrow, a place only he knew.  A few years later he’d returned for his treasure only to find that the limits of Heathrow had changed.  Where had once stood the tree of his golden goose now sprawled runway.  Ain’t life just a bitch.  Even after all these years when I think back to his telling of the tale I still believe the man.  That there is, to this day, a fortune buried under the tarmac at Heathrow fills the eight year old treasure hunter in me with glee, be it true or not.

This place was to be one of my greatest educations.  When I think of a university (not that I went) I see it as more a specialisation than a real education; a narrow view down but one path.  Trigger culture triggers me.  Snow flakes who think they can reshape the cruel world from their semi-well-read shelters sicken me.  The slightest whiff of the real world would send them scurrying for their safe places.  They would see my first travel family as a social issue bereft of any human factor, hell, ninety nine percent of people would see us that way, if not as an unpleasant addition to their shoe and probably you too.  That idea, and its repulsive simplicity reeks of ignorance.  Be it with an ivory tower’s view or a smothering self indulgent compassion, any eye that fails to meet another person’s square on, regardless of station, is askew.

Being there felt like putting on an old pair of shoes.  The things we talked about were real and by that I mean Real.  No banal blathering of the latest status symbols gathered to make one’s amygdala sing serotonin serenades.  No talk of super salaried sports heroes scratching your balls and fist clenching competition centres.  No verbal worship of skinny, oh so talented industry sluts selling you your own appearance.  No protective strength stunting pronouncements to stoke childish indignation and coddle the offended into an externally vindicated victim status.  This was Real life.  This was nature.  Brutal, beautiful and mine.  I herd somewhere that if you really want to know a society you need to ask those at it’s bottom and honestly, homeless life for me at that time was a liberation from what I considered to be a sick and cannibalistic system.  I felt more at home in the gutter than I ever had in school, or working a factory floor, or collecting a dole check.  Of course it is not the same for everyone, I was there voluntarily, not after my world falling to pieces, but I was far from the only one.  I had indeed found my grimy Neverland.