Letter from a Johnny

(info en Spanish aqui)

I was there. I saw it, I heard it, I lived through it all. It’s funny how the most important things are the hardest to explain. Words cannot trap the sun reflecting on a friend’s smile on a May afternoon, when we decided to forget about our exams and talk about what we wanted from love and life (I miss you every day!!). Words cannot transport the reader to our (our!) concert hall where the spit of the big names wet our faces as they played the trumpet, where my neighbour’s flamenco made us dream of home when we thought that we were far away (today 500 kms sound like a joke). What makes a space a place? It’s the people, the friction, the music. The Johnny had it all – we got it all.

The Johnny … “El Johnny.” In a city where each university residence has the name of a saint, we domesticated ours to a more friendly shape. From San Juan Evangelista to “El Johnny,” our dorm concentrated the spirit of Madrid in the last years of Franco’s dictatorship when it first opened its doors. It had the smell of resistance – the strength of hope – the not always properly targeted impulse of newly liberated youth. Decades later the dorm opened (officially) to women, and I was part of the first generation of she-Johnnies: we were less than 10. What an experience in a building where everything was everyone’s – the smells, the sounds, the spaces. Many things didn’t change despite the passing of time and the entrance of women, which made it a very interesting environment. During the classical ritual of “welcoming” new students, for the first time in my life I was called “damn working class” (“maldita proletaria”). Then I found out that our dorm was the cheapest of all – it still is – thus allowing for working class students that couldn’t afford to live anywhere else in Madrid. Other “insults” were of great interest for anthropological purposes, although I will leave it up to somebody else to translate them: “tu padre mató a Paquirri!!” or “me voy a hacer un sofa con el himen de tu hermana” became the basis for the construction of my Johnny identity in September, 2001. Sharing toilets and showers with hundreds of male students in a context not properly equipped for 2 full years provided plenty of material to work with after that. And of course that was not all: remember the 2000 general elections in Spain? An internal survey predicted that, if the Johnny population was representative of the population of Spain, the communist party would win the majority of the votes. I learnt my politics in "a nest of reds" (un nido de rojos, as we say in Spanish) while a conservative government run the country for the following 4 years.

I was there, at the Johnny, and every time I approached its ugly structure of corrugated iron and tiny sausage-shaped rooms I thought it was pretty much like many of my favourite people: rough on the outside, incredibly beautiful and complex in the inside. But only the brave ones dared to go that far. The room of one of my very good friends was the spot to rent soft porn magazines that had been inherited through generations of residents since the first of this kind where published in Spain – real antiquities featuring full-on afros and crazy shoulder-pads from the 80s, although some pages were suspiciously sticky. We talked about role games and science fiction as the guys dropped by to pick up a magazine, and that is how I started my alliance with the “freakie” (nerd?) subculture that inhabited my dorm. Most of what I know about love, friendship, and music started there at the Johnny, my Johnny, our Johnny.

We won. We are (were?) together.

Esperanza Spalding.

Last March I went to see a concert at the Jonny. As I walked into the building my breath sped up, my knees felt a bit wobbly. It had been two years since the last time. Everyone was so young around me, and I didn’t know them!! I felt the weight of the privilege that I was given when I first set foot in this place. The privilege of developing as a young woman in a space of freedom and respect, music and light, of friendships that I will treasure for the rest of my life. Long live the Johnny that made us who we are, who taught us what we know, who gave us so much good music. I went on a pilgrimage to thank the gods for lending me two years within your walls without knowing it may have been my last chance to do so.

So yes, it turns out they may close the Johnny for good. Juan passed me a note a while ago, but I didn’t want to believe it, I couldn’t believe it. Now I have to. From the jazz festival at Saint Louis, Senegal, where I am because I once lived at my Johnny, our Johnny, I can’t help but wonder: why is it that the most important things are the hardest to explain …