Calle San Miguel

Like many cities and towns in Europe, Torremolinos had a walking street, Calle San Miguel. No cars or any other wheeled vehicles allowed, no cell phoning drivers, no bicyclists wired into I-pods, no skateboarders or in-line skaters. You can walk in any direction you want any time you want providing no one is blocking your way. Just pedestrians. Sweet. As a maraschino cherry topping, Calle San Miguel was paved with yellow bricks.

The people on Calle San Miguel were cosmopolitan and raffish all at once. Torremolinos was no longer the Hippie Haven it was when James Michener wrote The Drifters, but many young people sported longer hair than Spanish custom dictated, and some played guitars as though they held a species of bass drum. Many of them, it seemed to me, were either passing through or not, but either way waiting for something to happen. Anything. Many wore tee-shirts with the names of American universities. UCLA’s shirt was the most popular in Europe. However, the shirt didn’t mean they attended that school. Some young people didn’t even speak English and somewhere else was a young Southern Californian wearing a Heidelberg tee-shirt who spoke no German.

People kept Spanish hours, surprise, surprise. During siesta time you could have gone bowling except Calle San Miguel had a very definite tilt downhill toward the Mediterranean. The street ended in a steep stairwell to the beach named Calle del Peligro, Street of danger. The danger was if you fell on the stairwell, you’d go a long way.

No one ever lost a bowling ball, but once a soccer ball got loose. Before it was recovered by the boy who owned it every foot on the street had touched it at least once including a nun in her habit. Caught the ball beautifully in the sweet spot on her foot. Nice shot, sister. Europeans play that game well.

In the evening the tourists came out to play. That’s when Calle San Miguel revealed itself in its true colors, a glorious tourist trap. You could buy post cards, sleazy little ash trays with “recuerdo de Torremolinos,” written on it, oil paintings of Spanish villages mass produced in Morocco. Every third door opened onto a bar. We stopped in one once to listen to some music and absent mindedly ordered a sangria. The bartender slopped in heavy dollops of vodka and gin before he even reached for fruit and wine. We stopped him in his tracks. We wanted a drink and he was mixing a prescription.

Life went on like a Old West gold mining boom town until 3:00 or so. Then the store owners aimed their guests out the door, cleaned up after them, weighed their day’s money, and got ready for the next day’s business. We didn't have to watch television. There was more entertainment on Calle San Miguel.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009