In 1974, Spanish men had to serve in the army for a period of three years. In Spain, the joke was: Why does a Spanish policeman’s hat have three corners? So he can lean against a wall easier. The next year, the dictator Francisco Franco died, which was a huge relief. Everyone understood that the draft law would not survive the new socialist government. Nobody knew when the draft would be abolished. Just as the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald were driven to France by Prohibition, an entire generation of the most intelligent and creative Spaniards came to New York, about 60,000 people determined not to spend their youth leaning against a wall carrying a submachine gun. In art, this explosion of activity was called the movida madrileña or the Madrid Movement.

One day in 1980, I woke up surrounded by a brilliant crowd of artists. My roommate Juan Muñoz would return to Spain by 1983 to become a world-famous sculptor. Our friend Juan Giralt was more than ten years older than we were, and very established, with his work hanging in Spain’s top museums. Javier Romero would go on to found his own advertising agency and become known for Volkswagen’s Fahrvergnügen campaign. Pepe Morera “el Hortelano” and Barbara Allende “Ouka Leele” continued their art career on Spanish television and in museums as well.

The farther away I travel, the closer to home I feel, and a notable facet of la movida for me was the tense attention of a stupendous Jersey girl. I had been hungry for affection all during my move from San Francisco back to New York and I took to her hoping that I could regain the youthful passion I had known in my early twenties. The confused old married guy that I am now wonders if this was where my life veered into alienation and if I can discover this by mere recollection. In my blue-collar years between university and real estate, I had understood that I didn’t ever want children and had a vasectomy two years before at age 25. So there. I can’t say if this helped or hurt my sex life but my girlfriends were not in their thirties in those days and consequently were far from the unwinding of their biological clocks.

Sylvie helped me polish my high-school Spanish. Of French descent with straight brown hair and a beautiful oval face, Sylvie was one of my closest female friends. Despite her beauty, I felt no desire for her, which was fortunate, as I didn’t want to complicate my relationship with her boyfriend, much less with her. In those days, I used to trade her guitar lessons on my cheap Spanish guitar for Spanish slang lessons. I think it’s essential to use an acoustic guitar for writing tunes—I can’t really hear pitch on an electric—so I always kept a cheap Spanish or two around for home jams and lessons. For “House of the Rising Sun” she taught me the term hortera, literally a grocer’s assistant but generally signifying gaudy and in bad taste. Some things were hortera but others were horterisima. For “Stand By Me” I learned pasota, meaning someone who misses all meaning because he’s either stoned or stupid.

By 1980, my apartment at 311 East 12th Street just off Second Avenue became like the annex of the Casa España. Juan Muñoz and I threw huge parties. Juan Giralt would make tortillas españolas, delicious potato omelets that we divided into small squares with toothpicks stuck in for easy munching.

The Spaniards brought their own choice of drink. I was first introduced to manzanilla sherry at Juan Giralt’s loft across from CBGB’s. Manzanilla is a fermented sherry and not a fortified wine like port. At about 18% alcohol, it is as strong as sake or vermouth and gets you drunk much faster than wine. My roommate Juan Muñoz and I used to buy it by the case. Juan was a sculptor and I helped him set up his studio in P.S.1, which was then just getting started as an invitational artist space.

My apartment was up two flights and a stoop to my entire modest floor, which was 22’ x 80’ including the staircase and probably had housed entire families of Ukrainians. A wretched Italian restaurant across the street lent a secure ambience until 11 p.m. but late one night I was awakened by a pimp screaming at a crack-infused whore, “Evvy time I look at you, bitch, it’s fifteen minutes offa my life!” I was astonished at his wit and woke Juan to tell him. We rushed about in the dark looking for a pencil with which to write this down.

Raised in a well-off family, Juan thought Puerto Rican was the baddest Spanish, with ll pronounced like j rather than y, jo for yo, and so on. For example, one afternoon as we were just starting our manzanilla evening, he told me about a strange custom he had with Ellen, his half-Italian half-Jewish girlfriend. They would go down to the Second Avenue Deli on 10^th Street, and have this strange concoction. “Jou know, they put some soup in a bowl and then put in a jellowish doughy thing…”

“Juan, it’s called a matzo ball.”

“Jeah, a matzow ball. Why didn’t you tell me about this thing? Helena really likes them. Let’s have one and then jou can come with us later if jou like.” I considered telling him not to pronounce “you” like “Jew” but figured he would be fine without this footnote.

After dinner, we went to a SoHo bar, the Spring Lounge. Ellen was drinking with a stupendous blonde, uh, not large, just terrific—lovely curls, cute turned-up nose, spacy pale complexion which I now recognize was just anemic, very poetic looking. I sidled up casually and ordered. She was wearing a light blue denim dress with a few large buttons down the front that showed me her modest breasts from time to time and set my starved heart to pounding. We both threw some greenbacks on the bar between us and as we drank, the bartender just took some money each time. We both had been to some of the same art shows at White Columns and other galleries of the day.

“Did you see Juan Giralt’s show?” I asked her.

“The colorist?” she replied. “He reminds me of Barnett Newman. ‘Art history is for artists…’ ”

“ ‘…as ornithology is for the birds,’ ” we finished together.

“Or like Morris Louis in rectangles,” I suggested. “But I find Giralt’s pastel purples as calming as a field of grass. Have you met him?”

“Only at the gallery,” she answered.

“I’d be happy to introduce him. He’s a riot. Someone taught him to say ‘Ho my goodness!’ and he has no idea how prissy it sounds.”

She had a space a few blocks east of Katz’ Deli on Norfolk near Rivington, which at the time was really not safe for white girls. She seemed interested that I played guitar in a band. At the end of the night, there was a $5 bill left on the bar after a nice tip. We offered it to each other and then I tore it and gave her half. I didn’t bother to get her phone number. Juan marveled at me and called her “la Estupenda” thereafter. Ellen got me her number.

I talked to Sylvie about her but she thought most painters were hortera and not worth my time. Thinking back on it now, it is obvious that we didn’t belong together. She was coldly calculating, looking for a match advantageous to her art career, and she hoped I was that, the better to spite her sisters. Which sadly, I was not. I was an intrepid poet, who wanted to burn my real estate career just to spite my parents, and I hoped that she would ignite my creativity. Which actually, she did. Together we drove to her family home in her Volkswagen bug, which she shifted expertly much to my admiration. Her mother had been an opera singer and she liked when I read to her from books off her shelf.

Over Veselka’s cold borscht at lunch one day, Estupenda told me she was moving to a big loft on Pitt Street, which being at Avenue C, was at the time inconceivably dangerous for her. Whereas I had hope on Norfolk, I couldn’t imagine how I could defend her on Pitt.

Juan Giralt showed us his studio and his works in progress as well as some finished pieces. She showed him some snapshots of her recent work and he asked where her studio was.

“I’m moving to a second story loft on Pitt Street just south of Houston.”

“Ho my goodness!” Juan exclaimed. “Won’t that be a danger?”

“I have a dog.”

Juan looked at her dubiously, “I hope that helps.”

“I’ll be fine.”

I didn’t know whether to feel proud of such bravery or as if I were watching the Titanic set sail.

One night after dinner, I invited her up to my apartment for the first time. Juan was out at Elena’s. We listened to Henry Cow and David Byrne while hanging in my bedroom and smoking a bit of weed. I sat on my big wooden desk and played her a tune or two, maybe Buddy Holly’s “Learning the Game” because she liked retro.

“So…Juan invited me to visit him in Madrid over Easter,” I said. “They call it semana santa, a “holy” week of eating, drinking and partying. He says that they drank so much Freixenet cava last year that rather than call it Champagne, they called it champu (shampoo). It bubbled and it was cheap.”

“That’s pretty funny.”

“Would you like to go with me?”

She seemed to consider it but answered far too quickly, “I don’t think I could travel with you.”

“Oh? Uh, why not?”

“It would just take too long,” she said. “I have a show coming up.”

I nodded, “OK. I’ll miss you.” I leaned in and kissed her, as if goodbye, but the kiss turned into something else altogether. My heart was pounding as I begged her and she finally consented to make love to me but whether deliberately or not, she finished me too quickly. I was grateful but a bit guilty about my speedy end and I realized I was unlikely to get another chance that night, if ever.

Her loft had been a commercial linens laundry, and was very deep, maybe 120’, spray-painted entirely white like a gallery, with a steel front door and leftover pipes and conduits all over the walls. It looked out on desolate fields of bricks that were lots where buildings had been abandoned for tax liens and torn down to deter squatters. In those days, Estupenda painted standing screens that depicted landscapes and seascapes. They were simple and decorative fields of color about 6’ high by 3’ wide panels, hinged together in threes and sixes.

The living area was relatively small, with screens defending a double bed from the cold, an electric heater, and a bathroom with heating wires wound on the pipes to prevent them from freezing. An open flame gas heater could throw heat around the loft but she left it mostly off to save money unless she was working.

We used to eat lunch around the Lower East Side at Latin breakfast joints that served Café Bustelo and made wonderful flan. We discovered that if you stood diagonally down the street from the essex street/ retail market, its sign read sex street/ tail market, and we knew that the W.P.A. artists had done that on purpose.

One freezing night there was nothing to do but huddle in bed and her passion got the best of her. About 3 a.m., perhaps repulsed by how close we had become, she threw me out and I walked home down the center of a deserted Houston Street singing Ruben Blades’ “Pedro Navaja”, his fantastic version of “Mack the Knife”, at the top of my voice. I would have been more discouraged but I noticed that she had thrown me out after sex, and not before. She was the first person I met who really didn’t care for sex, or at least not with me. I found this mystifying and incomprehensible.

I went to Spain with Juan and returned. At one point when Estupenda and I were on the outs, Juan told me that in his opinion, there was no other fate for me but her. He absolutely screamed at me, “¡Pero que pasota eres! Jou have to decide, man, if jou’re going to be world class or if jou’re always going to be from New Yersey!” This was hard to unpack. Yes, I was from New Jersey but then again, so was la Estupenda. So? And then, if I were going to try to be world class, would that mean a lifetime of loving a woman who didn’t like sex?

After a while, I realized that another guitar player was tuning Estupenda’s axe. We kept up our lunches and dinners until I told her that I really had loved her. “Loved?” she said.

“Yeah, you know, past tense.”

She considered this quietly and then looked at me almost vulnerably, “Is there someone else?”

I was astonished and wanted to say, “You mean you think you were a someone?” but the moment passed while I goggled at her stupidly.

My band played a loft party attended by over a hundred Spaniards and Estupenda gave me a nice diamond after the gig—actually, a walnut with the corporate logo <diamond> inked on its shell. I didn’t see her again until years later, in her Paris loft, which was also sprayed all white.