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

everybody at school had very complex political opinions. The little brother of my Spanish host family spray-painted an A in a circle on the wall of the garage, which (as he explained) meant he was an anarchist. If you wore a Spanish flag on the wristband of your watch, it meant you were a fascist. I had never met real-life fascists or anarchists or socialists. I was used to calling someone “fascist” when they borrowed my pencil without resharpening it, so I was shocked to hear people call themselves fascists. There had been an attempted military coup three months earlier, and everybody had fierce ideas about that. The school had a mural of Guernica up in the lobby, but it was covered with a glass panel to keep right-wing students from defacing it with graffiti.
    There were fascist discos and socialist discos. One of our Spanish classmates invited us to a party at a place called Aguacates. Kate, Ligia and I never refused a chance to go clubbing, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go, because they said it was the right-wing disco. I was like, who cares, it’s just disco, right? At midnight the DJ played “Arriba España,” the perky theme song of the Fuerza Nueva Party, and everybody rushed to the floor to sing along and gave fascist salutes, even the very drunk girl in the fuchsia tube top whose cleavage I had spent the evening admiring. I remember you, Amanda, and even though I appreciated how the salute made your right breast stretch a little farther out of your top, I didn’t care anymore. I even stopped wondering if your bra was the kind that unhooked in the front.
    We left Aguacates a little rattled. I understood why my friends wouldn’t go there. It was like “The National Front Disco,” one of my favorite Morrissey songs, about how there’s a group of friends and one of them starts going to the fascist disco and everybody grieves because they’ve lost their boy. In general, political enemies did not party together.
    All summer long, the songs were the only souvenir from the night I could hold on to the next day—remembering all those sensations was overwhelming in sunlight, so I would hum the tunes to myself. I had to learn them by heart, because I had no way of finding out who sang them or how to get a copy. I knew I’d never hear them again back home. Most of them didn’t exist in the United States yet, and many wouldn’t get any airplay until the 1990s, when they became staples of ’80s-at-eight radio shows. Mecano were easily the most popular group in the discotecas —they were local heroes, a Madrid trio with two smoldering synth boys and a pretty girl in a pouffy dress. The boys played keyboards, or as they were called on the album cover, “ teclados ,” which meant “touched things” and therefore seemed sexual by definition. The boys always frowned and looked mean in pictures; the girl singer, Ana Torroja, looked like she despised the boys. Hot!
    Whenever I looked at the picture, I imagined how great it would be to join this group. What was Ana Torroja really like? Was one of the boys in the group her boyfriend? Or were the boys a couple? All their songs were either about putting on makeup or going to parties. Their big hit, “ Me Colé en una Fiesta ,” was about both—Ana crashes a party where she isn’t invited, sees her boyfriend dance with another girl, and cries all the way home. I had already heard plenty of songs with this story, but this one I was actually dancing to, which made it all completely different.
    The boy in my Spanish host family, Jorge Luis, was into metal and punk. The only male friends I made in Spain were his friends, so we sat in their rooms listening to Iron Maiden. They made me translate “The Number of the Beast” for them. (“¡Seis! ¡Seis! ¡Seis!”) They thought guys who went to discotecas were not so cool. The kids at school brought more records for me to translate—nobody in the United States even remembered Meat Loaf, but these kids loved all the