I spent the summer of 2019 house-sitting some friends' apartment in Malasaña, in downtown Madrid, Spain. For those of you who don't know Madrid, Malasaña is the neighborhood right next to Chueca, Madrid's so-called "gay neighborhood", so when Gay Pride got underway, we were party-adjacent. And Pride is an ENORMOUS deal in Madrid: over a million people travel to Madrid, from all over the world, to take part in the fiesta to end all fiestas, even if it is forty degrees outside at noon (which it was that weekend). Techncially, most of the party wraps up on Saturday, after the parade, but more than a few diehards (not me) manage to stretch it out for a day or two more.
So that Sunday, I was walking down the street to get to Gran Vía, the main commercial thoroughfare, when I passed a delivery truck bringing supplies to the local grocery store...
>>chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk... chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk...chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk...<<
...and I spotted a couple of teenagers slumped in the doorway of an apartment building, right in between the gay leather bar and the hardware store. (Madrid's like that.) And my writer mind started racing:
I wonder if they're okay? I wonder if their parents know or care where they are.I wonder if they met each other last night, or if they've been together for longer than that? Do kids today still not date, like before, when I lived here? Do kids still drink and do botellón (open-container partying on the street) like they did in the 2000s?
>>chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk... chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk...chuk-a-chuka-CHUK-chuk...<<
And then the line just hit me: It's not wise to rationalize when you're five. drinks. in.
I sat with it for a while, but I didn't really do anything with the idea of it until Thursday, when I realized that I probably wasn't going to get it out of my head until I wrote it down. The first version of it was pretty messy, and not a little judgemental, making it sound like I was so much smarter about romance and alcohol, when the reality is that neither one of those is my forte.
And then I returned to Canada.
Reader, I lost the lyrics. And it took me the better part of six months to rewrite them.
I have no idea what happened to those kids. I hope that the only thing they suffered was a hangover and sore feet from dancing.
I hope they're still together.
I don't have a picture of the kids, the truck or the street (and I wish I had a recording of all of the hullaballoo that had gone on at 5AM that morning!), but here's a cute picture of the neighborhood, taken that day:
