Free Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield Page A

going. What is this sound? Who knows? Up! Down! Turn around! Please don’t let me hit the ground!
    At school dances back home, I’d felt awkward and conspicuous, but here the lights were out and nobody could see me except my gang. The other dudes ogled my friends. They danced up to the girls’ faces and spoke to the American girls in English, saying, “I am your boyf riend” or “I am fast, I am good.” They danced up to the Spanish girls and sang the lyrics of whatever song was playing, usually in English. The girls would hold my hand and the boys would go away. Then they would let go of my hand. Most nights I was the only boy any of them would talk to. On the floor, I was one of the girls, twirling as one of the ladies of the night.
    None of us ever drank, despite the fact that we were all of legal drinking age and there was a bar. This seems a bit remarkable in retrospect, but it was never even an issue. Why waste discoteca time? At some point during the night, Pacha always shut off the music for a half hour or so, so they could host an urban-cowboy contest on a mechanical leather bull. We stood around, stomping our shoes with impatience, watching the clientele hop on the bull and tumble off, while the sound system blasted country music. Then the techno-pop came on again.
    Some nights, we stayed home to watch Dallas . They were two seasons behind the United States, so I ruined the show for them by revealing everything that was going to happen to Pam Ewing. I promised not to tell anyone else, so Angela could ruin it for the whole school.
    Sometimes they trusted me to pick the evening’s entertainment. I took them to see The Graduate ( El graduado ), telling them it had lots of Simon & Garfunkel. But I squandered my credibility dragging them to Airplane! retitled Aterrizza como puedas , or “Land However You Can.” I assured them that in America, this was universally recognized as the funniest movie ever made. How I laughed, the lone hyena in the theater, at all the badly dubbed Spanish versions of jokes I knew by heart. The girls failed to see the humor of “ Yo hablo jive” or “No me llamas Shirley.”
    I tried explaining why it was funny. See, in ingles , the word “seguramente” is “surely,” which sounds like el nombre de una persona. Shirley! ¿Divertido, no?
    I was never allowed to pick the movie again. To punish me, they took me to Midnight Express , about an American boy who gets thrown into a foreign jail because he tries to smuggle drugs. The movie was torture to watch, although it did introduce me to the concept of bras that unhook in the front.
    These were the coolest girls I’d ever met. They called the Smurfs “Pitufos.” They argued over politics and corrected my grammar. They took me to juice bars, and whenever the radio would play Depeche Mode or Soft Cell, they’d yell “¡Ponelo mas alto!” We gave one another profanity lessons in our native tongues. They took me shopping, where I learned the joys of spending warm summer days indoors, waiting for hours outside changing rooms and repeating “that one also looks very nice” in Spanish. They were teaching me a whole new language, in more ways than one.
    Surely there were girls like this back home? Surely not. And no me llamas Shirley !
    Sometimes we listened to records. Yet even though they went out clubbing two or three nights a week, they did not own any techno-pop records. They collected the acoustic folkies like Bob Dylan and Victor Jara, who I’d heard of because the Clash liked him; he’d been killed by the fascists in Chile for singing songs about girls who were killed by the fascists in Spain. I liked listening to records with these girls so much, I even drove myself, by sheer force of will, to enjoy Simon & Garfunkel, and began relating to their sensitive little folk songs. “Hello doucheness, my old friend. I’ve come to suck with you again.”
    They talked about the Spanish Civil War like it was yesterday, and