Mallorca Memories

It wasn't familiar at first, I was still half asleep. The sound rose up from the living room, the unwatched television on some random channel I'd forgotten to switch off when I went to bed last night. Then it hit me and the song registered.

And I drifted back through time and space ...

It's a warm early March in 1985. I am in some shithole Palma cantina on the island of Mallorca, Spain. Julian Lennon's Too Late for Goodbyes is playing on the jukebox, I've drained a glass or three of Sangria and am making out with one of the lovely young senoritas employed there for that purpose. Well, to be precise, they are employed so that I can buy them very expensive watered down champagne, or perhaps it is just water. Either way, I am not one to bother over the particulars of another's profession and in any case am not in the mood to talk business or to much talk at all.

I have a room in a local hotel and am in my old clothes, I'm just a traveler trekking across the globe. I am transported from the real circumstances of my presence here as a US Navy sailor stationed on an aircraft carrier anchored just off-shore for a short port visit. But that's no longer me. I am merely a tourist, like many of the others in this bar. Lots of Brits and other northern European types floating around the island. I am released from the shackles, unbound from any constraints.

In a very real way, I'm home.

I was truly in heaven that night almost 25 years ago. In fact, I think I've probably never been happier before or since.

Looking at the short synopsis above, it seems vaguely sleazy and not a little pathetic. Typical sailor adventure - acting all "ugly American" in ports the world over.

But it wasn't like that at all.

There were one or two other sailors there in this particular dive, but we blended in with the tourists pretty well (I chose an out of the way place for precisely this reason).

And the girls may have been on the payroll but they were not your typical working girls.

Hookers usually do pretty much anything that doesn't require intimacy or affection; these girls though were very much the opposite. "Buy-me-drink" girls are pretty common, certainly they were back in the day, and especially in port cities. But the ladies in this particular establishment were very different; it was their vibe. I've not come across their kind before or since and I've been to a lot of gin joints the world over, both very swank and awfully dank. If any single word captures it, the one that comes to mind is "lost innocence" (okay, that's two). Perhaps "sweet."

Whenever I hear Julian Lennon's music - and his success was fleeting, so it's not all that often - I'm transported back to Palma, that evening, that cantina. Perhaps iTunes can help. It's not that I actually much enjoyed his brand of tuneage - sense memory music for me is usually happenstance/background, the random soundtrack to moments in time.

I guess in this case, it's apropos - it is much too late for goodbyes.