The Paseo

The Paseo
Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Torremolinos opened my eyes to an entirely new lifestyle. Nothing in our past lives had prepared us for this raffish and entertaining tourist town. It reminded me of Venice Beach in California. When the sun went down, people just turned on the lights and partied on. Amazing. Remember, though, that we were staying at a beach front apartment. It was a lot like renting digs on a carnival midway.

A word on why Joanne and I could be in our early 40s and still have a “Golly Gee” reaction to the nightlife we saw. We were and are basically country people. Up until we moved to Guam, we had always kept horses, chickens, cows, and other livestock. The horses didn’t care if we had partied until 3:00 a.m.. They wanted their breakfast on time and were not above being vocal about it. This makes for an unpleasant dawn on New Year’s Day. Trust me on this one.

And Guam was not a frenetic experience, even though we lived in the heart of the capital city. We lived near the cathedral. Cathedral areas the world over are never noted for their swinging night life.
So if you could have seen us on our first night, you would have thought we had just come into town by burro cart and were trying to figure out how to work the light switches.

Torremolinos was a swinging town. Somehow in the 1960s it had become a Hippie Haven for disaffected youth on their Grand Tour, so much so that James Michener wrote a book about the place, The Drifters. Other Americans and Europeans of any age looking for vacations with most fun and least expenditure found their way to Torremolinos.

We had recovered from our previous day’s flight to where we could go walking in the evening and observe the paseo. The paseo is a justifiably world famous custom where in the evenings girls dress up in their finest and walk up and down the streets with their friends, never alone, while the boys, also dress in their finery which consisted of skin tight trousers and shirts with the top four buttons undone, scope each other out. The girls pass in review while the boys review them, audibly and appreciatively.

Besides the paseo, we also observed the singularly civilized habit of tapa hopping. This activity was for men and women, not boys and girls. A tapa is a small snack one has with his glass of wine, for it is not civilized to drink on an empty stomach. As I understand the matter, the abundance of flies in Spain made it undesirable to leave your glass of wine untended for very long, so some inspired bartender put a small dish on top of the wine glass, a tapón. But the empty dish looked inhospitable just sitting there, and so the custom developed of putting something in the dish, an olive perhaps, or minced garlic and olive oil into which one could dip a slice of bread.

Some bars began to develop their own tapa specialties and now, well, maybe not now but thirty years ago, Madrid was famous for their tapas. Some bars specialized in lobster, others in shrimp, and it became quite the thing to go tapa hopping, going from bar to bar for a glass of wine and a chat with friends. Sometime a tapa hopping expedition might take three hours and was done instead of supper.

Torremolinos bars did not aspire to Madrid standards, and some of the beach front bars just offered commercial pretzels. My favorite tapa was calamari a la romana, deep fat fried squid rings. I can hear some of you in my imagination saying, “E-e-e-w-w-w-w!” But with a squeeze of lemon, calamari was delicious. Fried in lard really helps the taste of sea food. Lard helps the taste of everything but ice cream.

But enough thoughts of cuisine. Joanne, Pat and I were still very tired and so we returned to our apartment while Eric went off with John Pettis and other newfound 13-year-old live wires. But he soon came running into our apartment, took off his clothes and began to put on mine. He got on the pants and suit coat, although they were a little big for him. Give him a cane, a mustache and a derby and he could have been Charlie Chaplin. Eric was half way through tying my necktie when it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to do that. That’s when he sought my advice.

I, in turn, was curious about what could have wrought such galvanic activity in my son, the one who didn’t want to come to Spain at all. It seems he had met two Canadian girls, probably in their early twenties and of a mind to toy with a puppy, who told him that if he would dress up he could go tapa hopping with them. I depressed his ambitions first by denying him any money for the expedition and second by demanding my clothes back.

I knew that this was going to be an interesting time in my life.