It must have been late on a Saturday afternoon and we all got together at Fontanella for beers and nibbles. Monica did a great job of pulling gastronomic rabbits out of hats all evening, one after another, and Valen made sure the music was good and up to scratch. The conversation flowed and beers were consumed at a calm and steady pace, needing us to go down to the corner shop for replenishment a couple of times. Valen had some vitamins and we each had a few dabs. More music! More volume! More beers! Up we’d get for a little dance, then back down to roll a joint or to smoke a fag. We were all laughter and smiles and loud conversations in Dominican slang. It must have been close to midnight when Marina remembered that someone she knew was having a house party down in the Gothic quarter. Frothing with excitement, it sounded to us like a terrific idea. We quickly gathered our things and went down onto the street to be rushed away and down the hill by the torrent of people. As we spilled onto the street we found ourselves falling over a group of skinheads who just smiled, rather disarmingly. All the lights were out of focus. I seem to remember we had a pit stop or two on the way – stopping a friendly Asian for a bag of beers – before we found the address and were buzzed into the building.

Once inside we were quickly relieved of our beers as we meandered our way through the crowd in the living room. The place was heaving with sweaty people and sexy, dirty tracks were thumping loudly from a very able sound system. I knew some of the faces there but most of them not and our group split up into ones and twos as we worked the room. Everyone I spoke to seemed to be either an architect or a designer, many of them being from Argentina or Chile or Colombia. At one point I was left talking to a chubby Catalan prick, wearing Bono style glasses, who said he was a photographer. Boring me for Barcelona, the longer he yapped on about himself the more I fantasized about taking him gently by the back of the head and pushing his face into the bowl of guacamole bouncing on top of a speaker just to his right;… ” trust me. I promise you this won’t hurt… all that much.” I disentangled myself from him with a “nice talking to you” and looked for the bathroom. I meandered through the flat and found the long queue down the hall that betrayed its location. On either side of the hall were the bedrooms; all cups and drinks and legs and crushed cans brimming over with fag ends. As expected, people waited in line to go into the bog in twos and threes and once I’d managed to have a slash I went off to look for my friends and maybe find a tepid can of beer. We coincided on the landing and thought we might try a bit of fresh air.

Upstairs on the terrace the mood was slightly more sober. Young groomed executives and other fashionistas stood around chatting, looking self assured and cooling their hands as they swirled long drinks, to the sound of some unbearably bland canned chill-out-sounds-of-Ibiza being played at a moderate level. The terrace was on two levels. The upper deck was about a meter or so higher than the lower deck. Ambient lighting was provided by dozens of tea-lights in paper bags and the ensemble was decorated with cacti of varying sizes and a number of over sized beanbags. It offered a good view of the surrounding roof-scapes. We nodded our hellos to the Smart Set and made a beeline for the bar that seemed pretty well stocked. I guess that the other scroungers from downstairs hadn’t yet cottoned on to this. We giggled stupidly as we helped ourselves to drinks and mixers and in the jostle someone knocked over the ice bucket which sent ice cubes flying all over the place to land under everyone’s feet. The Smart Set were starting to glare at us so, thinking it best to leave them to it, we finished helping ourselves to large drinks and went back downstairs.

We wandered into the kitchen and the place was occupied by a large group of stoned Italians. They pulled a novel device out of the freezer; their version of a Camberwell Carrot. It was a large frozen carrot that seemed to have been drilled through – end-to-end – on a turn and blocked up, at the narrow end, with an equally frozen pentacle of carrot. They then proceeded to stuff it, chillum style, with copious amounts of grass, lit it up and sent it around the room. We each had a toke and it was Good Night Vienna. We mumbled our Ciaos and Gracies, headed for the door and tumbled down the stairs after one another like a torn sack of potatoes, to burst through the front door and out onto the street, squinting stupidly at the street lights.

Glaring at us outside, on the opposite side of the road, were three scrawny teens looking lean and hungry. They must have heard the commotion, had tried to get in and had been told to bugger-off. One of them snarled to the other two, “I bet they’ve been taking loads of drugs and spent the night having sex with one and other.” Valen winked at me, turned to them and growled “Yeah…but we’ve cleaned the place out of drugs and had all the sex they can handle. Now we’re off for some beers.”