Those early years made good by the Kaleidoscope of characters!

AFTER I had bumped about here for a few years I noticed a definite sociological stigma attached to our environment. The Spaniards skirted all the foreigners as if we were a crazed and condemned lot. Dark veiled women peered at us from the shadows as if having crept into a circus without paying for the tickets, a circus that never slowed down or stopped.
If you stepped back and counted you could calculate more homosexuals, gigolos, theatrical types, artists, witches (both good and bad) reformed prostitutes, women trying to become prostitutes, drunks, druggies, thieves, and criminals hiding out and gaggles of what were everyday normal folk trying their best to fit into the above hierarchy with poor feigned attempts.
I was but a sort of ‘sputnik,’ spinning about this array of captured and condemned humanity seemingly all trapped in this place at one singular moment in time, and space.
I was treated worse than a naked alien as I was the mercenary in the mixture; trying to earn a living and survive. The rest, all had money, or pretended running up massive credit-loans. Something the Spaniards were never reluctant to give as they simply couldn’t tell who were the real players and who wasn’t. They all dressed the same, knew no apparent social graces and were exuberantly proud of being drunk while emphasising to one and all how boisterous they could be.
To this self ingratiated society I strolled directly up to and plumped myself down at their tables and listened. Knowing as dysfunctional as they were between themselves they would hardly question me. And they didn’t. Yet, I was viewed with disdain and discomfort. Also, remember, I didn’t live amongst the village folk but was a sporadic visitor that was greeted instantaneously as suspicious.
Sometime during that day I would return home and recount to my wife my encounters in the village. She would shake her head in wonderment and disbelief. We lived in two different worlds, the beach and the village, vastly separated by a sea of difference with but the common denominator: that flowery British language of arrogance, superiority and smugness.
It was as if they were all talking FOR each other, creating walled personal barriers to achieve maximum evasiveness from any listeners. That didn’t bother me. For no description I could give would paint the wonderful chameleon colours they each tried to portray. We hadn’t anybody like that back home in Iowa so it well took me ‘donkey years’ before I exposed them for being each what they were; the same exact personage I had met in the beginning.
Has one learned anything if he’s gone full circle? And of course the severity and strangeness of those antiquated times I have grown to love and cherish.