I didn’t stay still for long back then. I moved with the seasons and followed the work. I was living in Spain. Catalunya. Near Callella de Palafrugell on the Costa Brava, in a village so small it didn’t have a name. It was a just a cluster of old stone farmhouses Catalans call masias. Ours had walls three feet thick and tiny windows to keep out the blistering sun.

We had no running water or electricity but we had a sun-torched garden with a well in it and an ancient woodburning stove that was also home to a family of mice. We cooked huge paellas and potato casseroles and mushroom stews. And once in a while an unlucky mouse. We hunted frogs by the light of the moon, stole chickens from a nearby farm and lived off the crops we plundered on our drunken way home from town. We spent what little money we sometimes earned on the bare necessities of our Utopian lifestyle: weed, whites and wine.

The masia belonged to a French guy called Eric no one had ever met. He existed like a shapeshifter on the periphery of our imagination. He was Don Juan’s ghost. Maybe we had met him but he was a raven at the time and only talked to us in our dreams.

In those days I only had two posessions I valued, a typewriter and a guitar. I was reading The Naked Lunch. I didn't understand any of it. But I loved its chaotic freeform style. It meant I could write endless drug-fueled meanderings through the structural wastelands of my hormonally impulsive imagination, unconstrained by form and the outrageous demands of punctuation.

We lived with a pack of wild dogs who thought they owned us. Mwoof was the Alpha Male and Rark was his Alpha Bitch. True anarchists that we were, we had our own unspoken hierarchy. Carlos was our Alpha Male. He was older than the rest of us, a carpenter. He had a wife and a son and three mistresses, only one of whom was my girlfriend. Then there was Manilo, an artist from El Salvador who taught me how to lose graciously at chess. And Marilu, a rich heiress from Peru, who’d flunked out of uni in Barcelona and was now hiding incognito while her millionaire parents tried to track her down through the Guardia Civil and an army of private investigators. We were truly desperados.

Of course Franco had only been dead a few years and the Guardia Civil were having a hard time making the transition from complete bastards to merely civil bastards. Any time they wanted reminded of the old days they came out to the masia to kick us around, bust up our furniture and piss in our stove. They were stationed in a fortress just off the Placa Catalunya, in Palafrugell. I would get to stay there one long and scary weekend, but that, as they say, is another story.