Let’s All Move to Spain

I’ve been back from Spain for three days and I still want to move to Spain. Let’s move to Spain. I’m thinking Valencia, but Malaga is a strong contender. Being back in Spain felt like a homecoming, and in a way it was. In Rota I found the house I lived in when I was a kid and it looks almost exactly the same except the Mulberry tree that stood in the front courtyard is gone and they installed a new iron gate, presumably for parking a moped because there’s not much street parking left anymore. Rota underwent a massive renovation in the 90s transforming it from the sleepy fishing village on the outskirts of the Rota Naval Base to a summer beach destination replete with sleek beachfront condos and upscale boutiques, which I’m not going to lie, made me a little sad because even though I knew about these changes I was still picturing it as it was 40 years ago, and “progress” in the form of gentrification makes me sad even though I know that’s a limited and flawed way of thinking. Nothing is black and white. Still, there were glimmers of the Spain I knew as a kid. The phone booth where we trapped a lady because we were hurling eggs at her from my roof until she called the La Guardia and the entire village assembled, not for the first time, to witness the drama was gone but my neighbor’s house was still there, in almost the same condition, though the family who lived there and was such a huge part of my life is gone. I went by several times and no one appeared to be home, and when I knocked on the door on our final day in Rota and explained who I was and what I was doing there the person inside said the family I was looking for was gone and that was that. I spoke to a man who was about my age who had lived in Rota all his life and he remembered my house, and the little fruit market that used to be on the corner, and I told him I was looking for my old neighbor Pepa, and her children Josie, Rosa, Juan Carlos, Angela, Tommy, Susanna and Kiki, and while he personally did not know them he said if I had a few more days he was pretty sure we could track them down, but sadly, we did not have a few more days as we were on our way to our next Spanish town. 

The house I lived in when I was a kid. We trapped a woman in a phone booth because we were throwing eggs at her from my rooftop and when she called the La Guardia we escaped by running over all the rooftops until we got several blocks away and thought we’d made a clean getaway until we heard my dad bellowing my name and we knew we had to return to the scene of the crime and face the consequences. I had to scrub the eggs off the phone booth with a pair of my dad’s old enormous tighty-whitey underwear (we used them for cleaning rags for reasons known only to my parents) while everyone from the village stood around me and pointed to the spots I’d missed.

Even though our trip was ambitious and filled with complicated logistics, it all went incredibly smoothly, and the ease contributed to my overall feeling of belonging and well-being that Spain affords me. My Spanish was better than I expected, particularly in Andalucia where the dialect felt natural to my ears and shockingly, people seemed to understand everything I was saying, unlike here in Amsterdam where I try to order four chicken thighs, mixed vegetables and potatoes from the butcher on the corner and apparently my Dutch is so bad they have absolutely no idea what I am saying, ever, even though I am pointing to the items I want and it’s the same order I’ve been asking for every week for five years. 

She protects the sailors of Rota. We used to play in those tide pools and we had to be careful not to get trapped when the tide came in. It was ridiculously dangerous.

Spain is also incredibly witchy. The first night we were there we went to a street festival in Toledo and I met a woman who sold me bracelets in what I thought was going to be a straightforward transaction but before she handed them to me she performed an incantation on them and pressed them into my hand while looking deep into my eyes with such warmth and affection I felt it in my entire body. The next morning James, who has never once in twenty years of our marriage told me one of his dreams, woke up with his hair standing on end and told me he’d had a long vivid dream that lasted all night that involved me drinking some kind of hallucinogenic potion from a goblet and disappearing into a tent and coming out, naked, painted in gold and green and the lady inside told him that she liked me and wanted us to have a threesome and “then a weird black horse showed up” and I told him it all sounded about right to me.

I’ve often said that sometimes I think I’d like to eat a baby, so imagine my delight when I found this hand-painted guide to the different types of witches and was able to identify myself.

Later in Granada as we were leaving the Alhambra another lady stopped us on the street and pressed rosemary into my palm and stroked my face and proceeded to give me, James, and JW the most accurate palm readings I could ever imagine and afterwards she bestowed us with what I’m pretty sure was a blessing of protection and good luck and when she hugged me I felt it through my entire body. I am telling you, this shit is real and it is calling to me like a goddamn Grimm fairytale.  

Years ago, I wrote some stories about my time living in Spain. I wrote about the lady in the phone booth, rescuing newborn kittens after my friend Danny witnessed a man throw a wriggling plastic bag into a dumpster, the time my baby sister disappeared and the entire village turned out to search for her, the time a man flashed me and my friends on the beach then later showed up to re-brick our fireplace, and many other strange and unsettling stories about my time in Spain. The stories are dark and disturbing, at times, and so surreal you might not believe them. For a long time I never told anyone about my stories because they were so weird I didn’t believe them myself and one time when I was in my late 20s I was at the Dublin House on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with my best friend Dorothy and I started telling her some of these stories and after each one I asked “Do you think that’s weird?” and after each one, she’d nod sagely and say, “Yes, that is in fact very weird.”

Weird is where I feel most at home. Let’s move to Spain and be weird. 

P.S.
As soon as I figure out how to do it, I’m going to create a new Substack called “Extra Sauce” where I can post some of the stories I allude to in all my blog posts. I know you will be delighted to read them as they are highly entertaining. If any of you Substack experts know how I should do this please tell me because I’m not very good at Substack yet. Or if you are an agent or acquiring editor who would like to help me in my endeavor to publish a book of my dark and funny stories that are weird and true but have no overarching connective arc I would be thrilled to make your acquaintance. I’m like David Sedaris meets Mary Karr if I do say so myself. I do not have an agent, although I have spoken with many lovely agents over the years who seem eager to work with me if I can ever get my arms around what my book will be. Perhaps your crystal ball will show us the way…