Porto Sketches, iii.

then it was night and we were back in the berry liqueur flat and back at the sauce. then i got the call and my best london lad babak was in town. i sprang down to the street and walked, walking as i did all 5 days with legs flexed and foot muscles tense, grabbing at the stones beneath my shoes and propelling my body forward with determined purpose. every hill was a new joy as i shot through air like gravity was a toy. when i say this was a walker's city i bloody well mean it. so i get babs and take him to a bar for immediate post-flight relief. large, cheap, shitty portugese beer. perfect. then were back with the boys and girls and we hit a restaurant where we sat on the back patio and ate killer burgers. the best ive had outside the states. wine, meat, table, cigarettes and hash. hash is in porto like tobacco in spain. everywhere found and everywhere permitted (except inside restaurant dining rooms).

then we were in the center and tasos and his boys led us to a street, nay an aisle of bars.

but this is porto and there are no rules so the aisle was the bar and people had it filled. in the low purple orange light of nighttime city glow we spun, babak and myself around with people talking on all sides and basically fading into the hum and buzz. two funny and quite lovely looking girls turned up and started shouting at tasos in greek. babak and i, understandably alarmed, asked if there was some way to avoid calamity. ha ha silly westerners, this is a normal conversation. that is now to be resumed. nice to meet you. we shrugged and turned and found ourselves flooded with the scene and the booze in our tanks and the hash in my lungs. asked tasos the way to his flat for rest. strange directions in a strange city yet still we pulled it off – we walked home together passing clusters of ghouls, fiends, and generally salacious youths and finally laid out flat on our bellys for to snooze the night through, after a short panic on babak’s part for having left his contact solution with berry liqueur/tripe-mother man. but tasos on the phone indicated a solution he had and all were laid to rest...