A Different Story

I have found them: the perroflautas, the hippies, the artists, the ones that don’t fit in in our chrome and shiny capitalist world, the ones that bear the darkness of their tormented souls with an inviting smile. I have found them! 

To do so, I had to travel back in time and go through a portal. The portal of a bar, unlike any I’d ever seen before: no sign on the door, no ‘se puede fumar’, nothing but a door hidden behind gates with a buzzer to ring and the wait that comes with it. Will it be open? Will they let me in? 

Once a former clown opens the doors ajar to make sure it’s not the police, he ushers you in. you are now, somewhere else. In a land where mobile phones don’t ring, where there are no plasma TVs broadcasting Lady Gaga’s latest video – I know I have it in for her – where no two chairs are alike, where there isn’t a bar but your nan’s kitchenette in the corner, where everything that you see has been picked up off of the street and has somehow all come together peacefully, where most people sit on the floor or on the steps leading to the mezzanine, where people gather to recite poetry, either their own or not. That’s right, people gather to read poetry. And not a sound is to be heard but the words themselves float in the air and grab your imagination. 

A sugar that belongs to the seventies, as if the years had not gone by, as if the eighties and the nineties and the noughties had never happened. A heaven forgotten by time. A haven of literature to sit in and feed your soul. A temple, an underground temple, an illegal temple. 

No gays were to be found there and so what. In 2010, I found a place that shook me to my core and that was everything I’d always dreamed of finding. 

Shame my Spanish wasn’t up to the part.

Shame I cannot tell you where it’s at.

Like Alice, before you follow the white rabbit,

this one is a clown and looks like a bit-nick.