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Granada Club With Background Surprises |
by Kevin Risner
A disgustingly cheap, plastic-bottle of Don Simon sangria. Add a helping of paella at the hostel. Add another for good measure. I'm ready. I'm ready after my recent gustatory celebrations. The tapas tour I had been on yesterday was a success; the food and the drink then and now are top-notch. Time to go out as one can only do in Spain!
Tune the dials to the Moroccan district of Granada. I indulge in some hookah with a mob of hostellers willing to explore the city around midnight. The air is warm and seductive, obviously better than a late October in Ohio would feel like. The balminess still vibrates, and I don't even need a coat. Inside the hookah bar, pulling on (rotten) apple tobacco, I get into an argument with one of the servers who has no idea that green tea can expand past any mint version of the drink.
The evening had begun with an air of anticipation and decency. Now, I simply sulk and watch the other newcomers smoke, try the flavors, and laugh and speak of the delights and the horrors of their travels. No churches chime the hour at this time. We depart when we deem it appropriate and return to Gran Vía longing for more. It's early in Spain. Nothing is too late.
Some of the people in our group decide that a club has to be in the offing. And there is just the place: the name such a stand-out in my mind that it has slipped away. We stroll to the club. Here most people will undoubtedly be jumping for joy, my paella-filled, sangria-heavy insides writhing with unease. A full-capacity crowd most likely on hand, it will be packed with grinding and beer sloshing in the air, and horrendous dance music zooming through the sweaty room. I suck it up. Hell, I'm in Granada; it's not too, too late. The next day involves nothing warranting the alarm to be set.
Where do we go? South of the hostel, far, far, far away from Gran Vía and the giant cathedral where I had seen billions of remedial spices and a blood-hawking seller earlier that day. Two bouncers greet us at the doors, which are high like an entrance into the Sultan's palace. The fee comes at us and splatters onto the pavement as if in blood. Bartering commences. I stay in the background, not willing to try and finagle some incredible deal a Euro or two less. I am not as enthused. I am easy to please.
Success! My surprise with the discount is nothing though; it's nothing at all when compared with what we see as we bound down the stairs.
The club winds up empty. Absolutely empty. Minus two bartenders. It is 2:00 in the morning, and not one person is standing out on the dance floor or leaning against the bar with a cheap beer in hand. A couple of us decide to change that. Two Aussies whose names I will kindly forget. As we sip our bottles of Alhambra (imagine one of the atrocious American lagers but from Spain), we wonder what to do. There is no real dancing going on. No sure-fire excitement that might flood us at any moment. We pass the coat check. There's another human present! However, this one has a furrowed brow and a sneer on her face. There are eyes that dart at us as if to say "Don't even think about coming closer to me, or I might swoop down and bite your necks!" In front of her is a foosball table. If I ever design a club in the future, there will be a foosball table on one end. A creepy coat-check lady in her own cubicle overseeing the matches. I might add a pinball machine on the other end of the room, and then make something even more memorable on the floor above, shuffleboard perhaps, or darts. Or curling.
The key thing would be bottle holders all around on the walls. You know, for dancers to deposit empty or half-drunk bottles. This is so that they won't shower people with San Miguel while on the floor. I put down my bottle in one of those holders and crowd around the foosball table. A few more people shuffle in as we fight for Barcelona FC's victory (at least some of us). The lady continues to glower as a few others deposit unneeded coats. Her hair black is bobbed up. She's an outsider, ominous in comparison to the other females. They're in flashy halter-tops and the neon lights overhead flash endless vibrations to the fair few in attendance.
One of the Australians starts getting fresh with this Finnish girl (part of the trio in our party). This one though has the flu. But this doesn't stop the Aussie. However nasally, flushed, raspy she is—his lips are locked to hers, magnetized to coughing fits. And the one major response from the peanut gallery is: "He's desperate."
The make-out session becomes lengthy, longer than the foosball game. Barcelona does not let up its assault against...some other lame, lower-league team. The coat-check lady remains standing, arms across her chest, overseer of the damned. Then she stares at us, her arms now akimbo as another pair leaves more outer layers for her to hang up.
Distance is good. We keep our distance from a few things now. Influenza. Frightening stares. Alhambra.
We create beer-label tattoos instead. We dance to Datarock and Franz Ferdinand. The amount of people grows in size. That lady—though she is farther away now—still stares at us as we dance and mingle. Worry is there, chills while breaking a sweat in a club in Granada at 3:30. I see the scenario. She breaks the barrier and upends the foosball table with Herculean strength. If that's not enough, she pounces on the necking hostellers and rips off their heads. Each one a grape crudely pulled from the vine. She then bares fangs and comes at us. She's pawing toward us with dagger fingernails.
How dare you have fun? I'm not at all! So I eat! I want you all to die! You can't dance and grind and shuffle. You can't shout "Fa fa fa, fa-fa fa-faaa faaaa!" to anyone!
This rant in my brain ends as The Killers pull me back to my hostel pals. They're begging me to sing along and tell everyone that "somebody told me you had a boyfriend that looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year." I keep on humming this as we break free from the claustrophobia of the club. It is 4:30. Two hours later. The place continues to inject more people into its bloodstream. Jam-packed. Positively writhing. Xanadu infused with Queen, Usher, and disco balls.
When do Granadans sleep? It's a weeknight, almost dawn. Surely some of the people inside have to be at work early the next morning? Maybe they are all university students? When classes at 10 AM are a laugh? The coat-check lady might have a day job as well as her nightly glare-fests (and possible binge on hostellers in public bouts flagrante delicto). But when do they sleep?
Sure, there's the siesta around two. But that's it.
I ponder this for a minute, maybe less time than that. We stumble back to the hostel. It's all a daze now. All the foosball and the bad hookah and the peppermint tea and the sangria. And then the final layer of good paella all molds together with the rest in one giant mess. There are a few more "fa fas" we shout out loud to others heading the other way. We want the other way. A tiny bit. But I like the way that heads to the bed. That bed will out-trump everything tonight. For five seconds it will. And only during those five seconds. But it has that little slice of triumph. It even triumphs over foosball. I suck at foosball.
Kevin Risner graduated from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio,
where he wrote articles for both of his college newspapers. He
recently spent a year teaching English in Istanbul, Turkey. He
currently lives in North Olmsted, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
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