MAYhemMadrid: Opening Weekend cont'd...

BACK up on the street at Metro Alonso Martinez, where barrios Malasaña, Chueca, and Salamanca muddle together and dress the land with disparate notes of high heels, jazz/funk bars, and stonebench perching 40oz clutching leather jackets. Suits breeze by scuffling chinos (this is not derogatory, but the Spanish word for chinese, which they are) and loud preoccupied girls while your three musketeers tap their phones and internalized maps to obtain the evening's provisions and participants.

Cross and cover calles and it's Tribunal, ground zero on any other weekend night that doesn't anticipate the city-only festivo for the uprising of Dos de Mayo. On this night, you head to the eponymous plaza, deeper in the heart of Malasaña. Here the twin Madrid commanders Velarde and Daoíz lead the insurrection against French occupiers from inside the armory. Armory is gone but the brick portal remains, arched above a statue of the heroes that takes up the center of the commemorative plaza. In 1976, Madrid's liberal La Movida reaction to the death of Franco began with a public striptease in the center. Now the plaza houses weekend nocturn botellons and hash circles and terrace meals all around the edges. And once a year people gather to celebrate the rebelliousness of this otherwise centralist capital. And the police come out to meet them.

Present our heroes, living presently among the stages of the past, looking past the crowds at the police presence, with hightened anxiety. Though many weeks of anticipation for the date had slowly passed, twas only in the last few days that we began to hear murmurs of the darker side of this particular festivo. Be careful, they said. Watch out for fights, they said. Watch out for police. Watch out for fights with police. Two years back the conflicts got out of hand and people were battered. Police have responded accordingly, tacking 2 bodies on every corner of every street. Our excitement for cheap collective revelry wheezed out of us like a circus balloon while we shuffled past dozens of navy blue neon yellow sentinels toward the amazing pizza place that occupies the NE corner of plaza dos de mayo. Rendezvouzed with many we did not know and marched through the one-lane cobbled calles of hardrock Malasaña filling with bodies bustling and streetlights buzzing. Through heavy Spanish doors and up creaky madrid stairs through darkened passage and file into remarkably well-furnished flat on planta uno (floor two for americans - our 1st is their baja or zero) where the party began (we had wine beer and blackberries looking up margarita recipes).

Good people and bottles later, we had developed the international test for relative urban importance (the ETT, otherwise known as the ID4 Test: would aliens come to your city in the first round of earth visits?), found out all about Korean ginseng remedies, and made some healthy new connections. Cocktails got sloppier and funny smells filled the air and it was time for our heroes to move on to bigger things. But amid the confusion one man fell behind and we had to bid Erok sweet dreams as another, Jose, took his place in the quest. A few detours and we found ourselves buzzing apartment 4c on c/ Dos Hermanos in Lavapies, itching to get up to American friend mike's springtime blowout.


Hosting with hospitality, Mike directs attention to the beverage buffet in the kitchen and then to bodies in the immediate vicinty before leaving one to ones own devices and tending stereo. Quite the multinational affair, Mike and his Italian flatmates have people all over the map and Your Humble finds himself unable to decide whether to speak English, Spanish, or the 5 things he knows in French to a friendly Parisienette. Give each a shot and decide things aren't sustainable in this place, and begin antics with sunglasses and introductions before having a smoke and shuffling out the door to sway in the cool breeze of the early AM air blowing through the narrow streets Lavapies.

Here some vestige of sense takes what hold it can and tells Your Humble to seek refuge from the Friday night demons of serpentine Spanish streets that hide in the shadows behind grinning faces. Au Revoir amigos, 'sta logo mes amis; must rest these bones before the sun breaks loose and sees you still out from the previous eve...