GRATING SPACE

The feminist meeting focused on drinking — our best girl power conversations take place around the liquor table and consist of three or four agreeing people, nothing more. It’s hard to organize a drunken community — or any community, when its organizers are drunk. In college, we can drink, go to school, and have time for activism. This proves tougher when one adds a career and kids. No churches or town halls or squares serve as social meeting points — this is what taverns are for. We drink like the Irish and are overcome by an oppressive hand, likewise. If it weren’t for whiskey we would rule the world.

When ANP Quarterly asked Mark McCoy about his abstention from drugs and booze without identifying with being straight edge, he said, “I have no interest in any self-righteous scene that’s just as superficial as the one it condemns. On the other hand, if I have any ability to exercise control over my life, I will at least start by not getting fucked up. Things are already infinitely confusing enough as it is.”

I’ve never been to jail not drunk, or been involved in a sober fistfight since I was a preteen. I’ve committed heinous acts of vandalism, shot fireworks into the faces of my friends, and an arrow through the thigh of an enemy. I’ve climbed and fallen from a number of trees. I can’t go back to Panama.

Almost every tale of being raped I’ve been told by girl friends has involved them consuming unworldly amounts of alcohol first.

Since I’ve thought about it so much means I probably should quit — hang out sober with Whiskey Meg and drink Red Bulls and water. It’s a stupid waste of money that keeps me writing garbage or nothing.

But these things happen to everyone who drinks and hardly anyone quits, except for Lou Reed, who had exceptional reason.

“Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas, but Unguentine — now dead after a bloody eventless life — turned out to be a ferocious bastard who beat me within an inch of my life everywhere we sighted land, not because of me, not for land, but for drink, he with his bent for alcohol up to the very last moment when his grey lips touched the blue sea for the final time, moment of his death. Suicide. So I sailed that ship, I sailed it every nautical inch of our marriage” — from The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine

My father, rightfully concerned, appended one of our conversations about my fondness of the sauce with a quote from my dead grandmother: “The only thing worse than a drunk is someone who doesn’t drink at all.”

At my friend’s grandmother’s funeral, two of his drunken aunts emerged from the parlor’s back room laughing so much they were choking and gasping, their faces covered in greenish dust. Things turned really awkward with the family only when they realized it was all residue from a fight with grandma’s ashes. My friend quit soon after that.

I like to swig when I drive on the highway to smooth out the lane changes, and when I ride my bike through downtown traffic to calm my fear of the big, fast trucks. A beer makes me more congenial during job interviews and helps me go to the bathroom in the morning. When it’s too hot to nap, I drink to stay up. I can hardly imagine shoe shopping without a flask, my patience almost at its end as soon as I walk in the store and see the repulsive faces of the loafer vendors. My stomach is a mess of gurgling rot without a bottle on the bus, and I can forget about flying unless I’ve got a secret stash to suck from before takeoff.

The only time I love sobriety is around haughty cats. I’ve never had the patience, drunk, to coerce them into my lap for a good petting, and I can’t forgive myself for missing such a chance. I love to pet them so much, so when I’ve been drinking and in stalks a feline that scoffs at my clumsy advances and I’m forced to physically catch and grapple it into my lap, it’s all claws and blood and fur and crying owners and ends with me, the monster, in the back with a shovel and a popsicle-stick cross.

Spring break 2005, San Diego

Stop Smiling is my favorite magazine (it’s Jack Shafer’s, too). I was lucky enough to do a bitchin’ internship there in the summer of 2006 and have been writing periodically for its Web site since. Below are links to some of the stuff I’ve published there, all in a neat little list.

BOOK STUFF

–Interview: Deb Olin Unferth

–review: 145 Stories in a Small Box by Dave Eggers, Deb Olin Unferth, and Sarah Manguso (McSweeney’s)

–review: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso (FSG)

MUSIC STUFF

–Live report: Personal Fest 2007 in Buenos Aires (feat. Snoop Dogg, Chris Cornell, CocoRosie, B Real, Kid Koala, and more — see better photos here)

–CD review: The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn by CocoRosie (Touch and Go)

–Live report: Touch and Go Records 25th Anniversary Party in Chicago (feat. Shellac, !!!, The Ex, CocoRosie, Calexico, and more)

–Live report: Art Brut in Chicago

–Live report: Slim Cessna’s Auto Club in Chicago

–Live report: Liars in Chicago

IN THE WORKS…

–Book review: Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth (McSweeney’s)

–Interview: Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other works.

Africa: It’s a rough neighborhood. That’s what I say when someone brings up Kenya or Darfur or Namibia. I just don’t want to talk about it. A few years ago I took the Greyhound from Kansas City to Phoenix to visit my friend Camilla. She was new in town and didn’t know the spots, so we spent three whole days at her house, talking. It was one of the best conversations of my life, and it spanned the whole time. We covered love and art and all the good shit, and on my last night in town we went to a coffee shop with a boutique in the basement, sat down at a table, and stumbled upon Africa. We talked AIDS, famine, rape, and machete death, political unrest, child soldiers, and lions. After an hour we were both too depressed to say anything else, so we dabbed around the racks of skirts and crafts downstairs for a bit and left, silent. The next day I boarded the bus for Vegas.

Last night we all got to drinking and played a game where we had to name countries from different parts of the world. We started with African nations. Someone said Zambia, then my friend who’s going to Kenya soon to build school desks said Kenya, Lauren said Côte d’Ivoire, which was mine, only in English, so I said Sierra Leone, and so on. If you couldn’t think of a country when it was your turn you had to drink. In the end I forgot about Zimbabwe, even though I’d been talking about it earlier, but I was drinking to begin with.

I had been telling everyone about Mugabe and the only uplifting thing I have heard out of Africa in a long time.

It happened a couple months after the Kenya election bloodbath. I remember the day before that vote in the Herald newsroom lucidly. I read a Reuters factbox about how Kenya was a bastion of peace and affluence in a continent of chaos. Even the guy who wrote our eds, Michael Soltys, penned a positive note on Kenya’s behalf. The next day, after both sides had accused the other of rigging the ballots and Nairobi’s slums were alight with riots and murder, I asked Michael about it and he just trailed off…

Now it’s Zimbabwe’s turn to make Africa ashamed. Tsvangirai is in exile and as the Queen of England strips Mugabe of his knighthood without eliciting as much as a shrug, the runoff vote looks to go on tomorrow, as illegitimate and violent as any. But I remember one bright spot in the days following the general election in April that sits in my head as an example of exactly what Africa needs.

Tsvangirai had won first-round victory by a slight margin while a shipment of arms was on its way through the ocean to Zimbabwe from China. Mugabe, who has not made his reputation by refraining from the use of force for political gain, licked his lips. His minions had been keeping track of which communities had voted for the opposition and had been frequenting them, delivering beatings — just the type of mix that doesn’t improve with guns.

Zimbabwe is landlocked, thus has no harbors in which a ship can dock. The Chinese boat was charted for Durban, but the South African port authority saw it on the register, and word got to the dockworkers’ union. The union bosses convened, elbowed around their wooden union table, chomped their requisite union cigars, and decided that aiding the delivery of arms to Mugabe was colluding to commit murder of their fellow Africans, if not as good as killing them themselves. The Chinese boat sat in the harbor for several days, then the union held its own poll — the ship could dock at port, but no guns would come ashore.

The captain got on his Chinese radio and called his boss, who said, Well, if not South Africa, then Mozambique. Off the boat went, but the news had spread.

The solidarity the workers of Africa showed over the next week makes me want to sob with glee. The ship arrived in Mozambique, where the dockworkers turned it away. Back it sailed, west, around the Cape of Good Hope up the coast to Angola. The government said it was not welcome. A little further south, past the next political border: the same result. The Chinese ship headed home, heavy under its unspent arsenal. Mugabe never got his guns.

No amount of Western school desk builders will fix Africa. No number of UN peacekeepers, Mormon missionaries, Red Cross agents, or charitable donations can mend what hundreds of years of colonialism, unimaginable poverty, and antique ethnic* hatred have torn apart. By all means should the wealthy world spend what it can to finance a continental recuperation, but all efforts must accord with the reality that outside aid alone equates to a bandage, and only Africans can repair Africa.

Zimbabwe will go to the polls tomorrow, its ballots stamped with serial numbers so Mugabe’s goons can know if someone fails to vote right. He has other means, and does not need a Chinese ship, the tale of which will become a blip — not even a note in his Wikipedia post. I’m sure there are other stories of Africa that inspire hope in other people who are tempted to think the continent is lost — a backwards, AIDS-wasted anachronism in the worst way — but the South African dockworkers turning back the gun boat is mine.

What a beautiful act of refusal, a blind gesture of peace. A collective decision to turn one’s back and take a box from a different ship.

*This sentence originally read: “…colonialism, unimaginable poverty, and antique tribal hatred…”
Read why I changed it.

SLUG Magazine whipped up a critical-mass-style float for Salt Lake City’s 2008 Gay Pride Parade. Here is the evidence:

This review originally appeared on Stop Smiling Online.

The Two Kinds of Decay
By Sarah Manguso
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A writer does not need to have experienced great suffering at an early age in order to write a good memoir while still young, but it doesn’t hurt. In 1995, then-21-year-old Harvard undergrad Sarah Manguso contracted a rare, devastating disease — her immune system began to produce antibodies that attacked her nervous system, which induced paralysis that began at her extremities and encroached toward her vital organs. The Two Kinds of Decay documents the nine years of illness that followed the disease’s inception. It is an impressive display of inquisitive memory, a treatise on being young and sick and a testament to the importance of truly paying attention.

Decay focuses on two lives: the one Manguso actually lived and the one she assumed she would live before she contracted the disease. Slavoj Zizek says the opposite of “existence” is, in fact, not nonexistence, but insistence — a thing we know could have existed, but does not, nags at us, insists we not forget its absence. The appearance of Manguso’s disease was the point of departure at which her real life broke from the path she assumed it would take and spiraled out into spacetime. While she describes her painful and degrading hospital stays, the crushing effect of the disease on her psyche, and its repeated impediments to her development into a successful young woman, she returns continually to the other, absent life — the one she lives through her friends and imagination, in which she has great college sex, graduates on time and has the physical capacity to feel powerful and fast.

Manguso, a Rome Prize-winning poet, structured Decay into short chapters, most two or three pages long. Her straight-faced prose swells within each short space, creating a series of pressurized, succinctly sealed units. Most end with observations or descriptions that range from humorous to heartbreaking to horrifying:

“[The doctor] tried again and again to jam the tube into my vein. Every now and then he had to stop and apply pressure, as I was bleeding. At one point I thought I felt a jet of blood spurt into my chest cavity, and that’s when I lost my composure. Months later, after his hair had gone from steel gray to white, my father told me it had looked like a horror movie.”

At points in the book, Manguso radiates with the knowledge of how fortunate she is to have been covered by private health insurance throughout her illness. At one, a hospital accidentally sends the bill for one of her dozens of infusions to her parents’ house, and she sees the single treatment cost $35,000. At another, Manguso meets a young Irish woman online who has the same disease, and who receives crucial blood plasma transfusions only once a month because that is the best her country’s health care system can offer. Finally, years after her disease’s most recent remission, Manguso writes, “I’ve always had health insurance — if I relapsed without insurance, my parents would be homeless within a year.”

At 186 pages heavy with white-space, The Two Kinds of Decay is readable in two or three days. It’s Manguso’s second prose publication, after last year’s Hard to Admit, Harder to Escape. Both books’ sharp, terse tones are adaptations of the style Manguso honed as a poet. She has already emerged as an “exciting literary talent.” Decay simply further affirms she deserves such a title.

A man named Pete arrived at our hostel soon after Tom and I got to Buenos Aires. This was in November. Pete had run a pizza shop in Mar del Plata that served up New York style and had just been ditched by his Argentine wife. He is the fourth American man I know who had married an Argentine who had grown tired of him after two years. He had, as had the others, a reason or three to explain why it hadn’t worked out, but all four had the same resigned shuffle of feet that accompanied their excuses that betrayed they all were suffering from the same shock of having become boring to the one they loved.

Pete was from Queens, a wiry 35-year-old with shock-blonde hair and a stiff jaw. He asked us our plans, and after we told him, he said, “Guys, go out and fucking rule this city.”

On more than one occasion, months later, stumbling home in the bleary pre-dawn from a party or DJ gig, Tom and I would turn to each other and say, “Hey, remember Pete? We fucking rule this city!” I found Pete’s email address the other day in a pile of paper scraps. Under his information he had inscribed the same imperative. I thought of emailing him to let him know that I have at least occasionally accomplished his mandate, but then I felt sad for him.

The night before we moved out of the hostel into our apartment some of the hostel habitants had a dance party in the lobby — Tom, Pete, I, the ever-sleazy Pepe, and five or six Brazilian girls of varying levels of physical attractiveness. The dim yellow lights did little to detract from the room’s overwhelming redness, given it by the bright-blood color painted over all the walls. Pete and I sat at a small table, drinking beer, watching the girls dance. Tom and I had been out looking for a permanent residence all week, and this was to be our last night without a true home. Pete and I were sizing up the Brazilians, noting their positive features and detriments. Pete pointed to the skinniest one, who wore a broad belt and long, straight hair. Her lips curled back a bit too much to expose her overly square teeth.

“She’s the best one,” said Pete. He swallowed a mouthful of beer. “I’m gonna fucking rape that girl.”

Pete and I didn’t talk much after that. I was glad to be moving the next day.

**

I knew it was where I wanted to live when the door to my (future) apartment opened and in the portal stood a short old man with perfectly slicked silver and black hair, wearing a pinstriped suit and a gold Virgin Mary medallion on a chain over his necktie. The place was gorgeous, but not nearly as amazing as Ale, el dueño, who shook a firm hand and walked with a stiff limp, called me “my friend” and wrinkled up his already deeply creased face to tell sly jokes in stilted English. He glossed over nothing in his tour of the dwelling, flipping switches up and down to show each light worked, on and off, opening and closing each kitchen drawer, taking the knives from their magnetic strip and putting them back to showcase its effectiveness. Each demonstration was accompanied by an enthusiastic, “You see? You see?”

Sadly, I apparently missed a portion of the more thorough tour Ale gave Tom when he came over to see the place a few days later. This included a segment about the nozzle apparatus on the terraza, about which Ale explained, “It’s a nice day, and you want to take shower outside, you take shower outside,” while simulating the soaping of his armpits.

Ale turned 80 this year, and actually oversees the apartment for his daughter, who owns it but lives in Virginia. His prior occupations in life have been at least, but are not limited to:

Pastry chef
Tango instructor
Gynecologist assistant

He has five daughters by who knows how many mothers, is a veritable nutrition encyclopedia, and an expert on Argentine political affairs. Problems with bathroom appliances that my roommates deem unmanageable and I don’t have time to handle are no match for Ale’s expert deep-plumbing jabs with the toilet brush or precision snags with a hook-ended wire hanger. His good humor regarding his ailing health transform unbearable moments of sadness and embarrassment when I am struck speechless — once, speaking Spanish, I misunderstood his telling me he might have to have surgery on his knee, and thought he said he would probably have to have his leg amputated — into jovial bouts of camaraderie.

Ale and I have the same cell phones, and occasionally he takes mine from the apartment on accident to the great confusion of he and my friends who call before he realizes the mishap. I also have two entries in my phone for people named Ale — one for him and another for Alejandra, a brief Bolivian affair who hates me for telling her the truth.

I met Alejandra on a Tuesday, she went home with me on Saturday, and on the next Tuesday I went to a club, called and invited her to come out, and ended up going home with another girl. Even after this, Ale(jandra) would text me to try to hang out, but I was still with the other girl, so I would inevitably make up an excuse not to go. Finally I decided to end the charade and explain it all to her in an email, to which I never received a reply. She ran into my friend soon after at a club, and expressed to him her feelings about me.

She hates me because I told her the truth.

One afternoon on the terraza in the fall, Ale, el dueño, was watering the plants and he was distressed that they were dying. I said this was natural in the fall, and that the leaves always fell off the trees eventually, but I couldn’t remember the Spanish word for “leaf.” I asked him what it was, but as soon as I did I remembered that I had looked it up a couple weeks before, when my friend came back to Buenos Aires from Bolivia with a sack of coca leaves. She was getting on a plane for New York City the next day and, although we were not sure of what the Argentine laws were regarding coca leaves, we decided it would probably not be a good idea to take them to the airport, and that she should leave them with us.

The next three days were a mess. Tom and I didn’t eat at all. We got up, brewed coca tea, crammed the leaves from the bottom of the cups into our cheeks, and went about our days, refilling our mouth pouches whenever we felt the sensation spent. I imagined myself an Incan porter, scrambling over rugged Andean miles with hundreds of pounds of supplies for the next village on my back.

On a cab ride to a DJ gig I asked the driver about the law regarding coca leaves, and he didn’t know either, so he got on the radio and called dispatch to see if they knew. Their reply made me somewhat nervous, especially since it was the end of a three day spree strung out on the stuff, I had a whole bunch squashed up against my gums, and my nerves were somewhat shot. Yes, the dispatch announced to who knows how many drivers, coca leaves are indeed illegal, at least in Buenos Aires.

But when I asked Ale on the terraza what the word for “leaf” was, he did not simply reply “hoja,” but recited from memory the first two stanzas of this poem:

Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño.
Eras la boina gris y el corazón en calma.
En tus ojos peleaban las llamas del crepúsculo.
Y las hojas caían en el agua de tu alma.

Apegada a mis brazos como una enredadera,
las hojas recoían tu voz lenta y en calma.
Hoguera de estupor en que mi sed ardía.
Dulce jacinto azul torcido sobre mi alma.

“Borges,” he said afterward, and walked inside with a smile. This was only a few minutes after he had extracted from our clogged drain a hairball the size of a weasel, colored like the Russian blonde who had moved out a few weeks before.

Unfortunately, Ale refuses to let me take his picture, and I respect his wishes. He was undoubtedly a strapping young macho, and from his preset appearance is still plenty vain. Regardless, he’s still the most handsome 80 year old I know, and does plenty well with the ladies. Ale always insists on coming to the apartment and cooking pizza for us from scratch, and in an effort to arrange the first such occasion, another roommate, a German who Ale was never fond of, called him around 9pm on a Saturday to confirm the date the next day. I was not present for the conversation, but heard from Ale the next day, irate that the German had called him at such an hour, as that hour was an obvious time when Ale would be hanging out with his lady friend, which he was.

“I know, Ale. I’m sorry. I have no idea why he called you then.”

For whatever reason, Ale and I have a deep understanding of each other. I like to think we’re kindred spirits, and it makes me immensely happy to be kindred spirits with an aging Argentine Renaissance man. I can only hope that when I am 80 years old, some bright young lad will write a blog post about me with similar sentiments.

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The smoke left the city, so we forgot about the fire. For five days Buenos Aires lathered in a grey plume sent by southward winds in from the campo, where towers of flames ripped through the brushland in Zárate and transformed whatever they touched into a billion ashen particles that we in BsAs sucked into our lungs, blinked off our eyes, and washed off our skin for a week.

On Monday the winds shifted and the smoke disappeared from the city. Thursday, in Zárate, the fires burned the furthest from control of the firefighters they had been since they started.

International news picked up the story of smoke in the capital. Nothing like this had happened before to Buenos Aires, but it somehow seemed fitting. While every news story about the smoke included tidbits about people with headaches, breathing problems, and highways and airports shut down, the best single line in any coverage I read came from Martín Gambarotta, the wild-haired porteño poet who sits hunched a few days a week in the corner of the Buenos Aires Herald newsroom punching out editorials with a concerted look in his face:

“Each waft of smoke is a reminder to Buenos Aires, which likes to think of itself as a sophisticated metropolis, that it is part of a farming nation.”

Oh, how Buenos Aires wants to be European. Oh, how porteños say they’re not sure why other people consider them “Latin Americans,” when they’re actually Italian. Oh, how beauty standards are set according lightness of skin, slimness of build, and any other attribute that delineates a person’s heritage from the indigenous people who populated this continent before the colonizers moved in.

A reporter friend of mine, who took me out to dinner on one of my first nights in town to give me the low-down on the city, said, “People in Buenos Aires will tell you so often that it is such a European city, and will point out to you all these different aspects of it to support their claim, all the while ignoring the tenfold number of characteristics that make it completely unlike any city in Europe. Buenos Aires might be the most European city in South America, but at the end of the day, it’s a South American city.”

**

“Is the movie we’re going to go see part of the film festival?” she asked.

“No. All the people who are going to the festival have already seen the movie we’re going to go see,” I said.

We were cutting through the grey air down Defensa street out of San Telmo from a tango class towards Ave. Corrientes to see There Will Be Blood. She, a heavy smoker, seemed immune to the ailments the non-smoking sector of the city had succumbed to after having their breaths’ ratios of oxygen-to-not cut significantly over the past week. She had no headaches, no more coughing than normal. This week it paid to have already trained your lungs to accept impurities.

We bought our tickets early and waited at an outside café table, sipping coffee and musing about marrying. I could use a Swedish passport, if nothing else for Cuban stamps. Sure, we had only known each other three weeks, but imagine the fun of having a young European wife!

The theater in which we watched the movie had crackly sound that made the Spanish subtitles helpful. Its seats were made of wood and sat on an almost-flat floor, so the first row was spaced back fifteen meters from the screen and made the room seem half-full or minimalistic. The movie was one that induced a long period of silence and contemplation after its finish, and when the last credit rolled off the screen and the lights went on we arose and stepped out into the most surreal street scene I’ve ever seen.

The smoke over the neon lights of the narrow, pedestrian-only stretch of Corrientes, the choke of bad air and the citywide smell of campfire mixed with popcorn and trash, the gabbing debutants filing out of the Buenos Aires Film Festival across the street, and the waves of impervious eyes of nightgoers that stared through the haze as they would into any other Saturday filled us with horror and awe. We wrapped our arms around each other and walked in a daze through the masses of couples and families, marveling to each other in hushed tones that the most bizarre thing was that we seemed to be the only ones who could tell we were in some sort of Twilight Zone.

“No one else knows,” she said. “Look at them, all wandering around like there’s nothing going on. How can they not see this?”

On autopilot, each of us unknowingly steering the other’s body, we navigated the crowd, the hooker handbill hander-outers, the prowling threesomes of young men, the throngs of spectators gathered around amateur comics doing sketch skits, performance artists with painted faces, and tango dancers in red velour heels and black brimmed hats. Casinos and fluorescent-lit restaurants glared out at us beneath towering, blank residential facades. No moon, no stars — just upwards and upwards of wafting grey clouds against the sky’s black.

We emerged along the waterfront, with its yachts and floating nightclubs. We figured out why everyone looked unimpressed but us: Misfortunes bind the people of a city. A porteño is a porteño because he lives in a city on a port. But things like the smoke make Porteños a plural because they all have to live in the same shit. During good times, community festivals can encourage the populous to celebrate the city, but it’s things that make celebration an impossibility that really solidify its citizens, especially when they celebrate anyway. Mauricio Macri and every single cartonero breathed the same smoke in Buenos Aires, just like every person in New York City felt the crush of 9/11. Argentina has seen much worse than smoke, and its people have prevailed to become, despite class or political division, a singular entity.

We, bleary-eyed tourists stumbling about in Neverland, could only imagine what it feels like to be an unconscious part of something like that.

The absence of new posts on Grating Space can be explained by two things: the fact that I have been working seven days a week at the BA Herald because everyone else in my department quit (more on this later) and because my brother, Drew, has been in town and I’ve been busy entertaining him. I’ve got more coming soon, but until then here’s an excerpt from a mass email he sent out from my computer that I stole without his knowing it. Ha!

“Something I imagine goes through a lot of people’s heads their second or so night in Buenos Aires”
(Title by Nate)

It’s hot in my room at the hostel, right on the edge of stifling. The first thing I notice when I open my eyes is that I’ve acquired a new roommate at some point. Bright sunlight slants through the glass door next to my bed and casts shadows on a backpack, a pair of hiking boots, a sports bra and towel hanging on a bedpost. I’m lying flat on my back and I’m still wearing my clothes from the night before. Now the pain — a horrible pressure right behind my eyes that seems to expand and compress my skull at the same time. My throat is raw and my chest feels squeezed. I roll over on my stomach and crush an empty pack of cigarettes — oh yeah, right. It’s 3:57 in the afternoon.

Roll out of bed and put my feet on the floor. Ooh, wait, too fast. Lie back down. Try again — there, that’s better. Stain on my shirt: vodka con Speed, South America’s energy drink. Speed is sickly green, syrupy, and could whip a whole four-pack of Red Bull in a fight. It comes in a steel can with metal walls too strong to crush with one hand, like the liquid inside might eat through normal aluminum.

Sit for a second and stare at the floor. Dig through my suitcase for ibuprofen caplets bought in a pharmacy yesterday. Ten days in Buenos Aires, ten ibuprofen in a pack, for ten pesos. Stash the pills back in my suitcase under my Buenos Aires map. North is never up on maps of Buenos Aires, I remember Andrew telling me last night — they always put the river at the bottom so north points down at the corner. Irish Andrew, who works at the newspaper with my brother. Andrew and my brother have been at work for two hours by now, hopefully they feel better than I do.

(ed. note: Drew neglects to mention, because it hadn’t happened yet, that a few days later he found his same female roommate spread-eagled, totally passed out on top of her covers without pants or underwear on. He just averted his eyes and snuck out of the room, hoping she would wake up or at least unconsciously pull some sheets over herself before the maid or anyone else came in. I told him he had neglected his hostelmate duty, and that he should have sucked it up and woken her up to let her know she was exposed, so as to allow her to fix the problem. This, of course, is kind of dangerous: She would have probably either been super grateful or she would have screamed. It’s these kinds of uncertainties that make life worth living.)

(ed. note 2: My friend said two people in a hostel room in which she was staying in Uruguay kept her awake all night having sex. In the morning they were lying naked, completely exposed and asleep on one of their beds. She took the liberty, since they had stopped her from resting, of taking a number of photographs of them in their compromised position. It was good fun until she tried the flash and woke them both up with the first burst. Tough one to explain yourself out of.)

**

I’m sitting with my brother outside of Kim y Novak. Nate’s roommate, Lucian, told him before we left that some woman had called and left him a message but he couldn’t understand what it was — Lucian’s Spanish is pretty poor. Apparently, “some woman” was Nate’s boss, telling him not to come in until two, and it’s eleven thirty now. So we’re sitting outside watching two stray dogs weave around tables on the sidewalk outside. Nate slurps from a can of Speed. I take a blurry digital picture. The night is humid, but not oppressive. Caroline arrives.

Caroline is 27, Korean, small, and pretty. Following her are a young-looking Colombian in baggy clothes and an unhappy-looking girl with black hair. The Colombian is Tino, whom Caroline wouldn’t shut up about the night before. Tino this, Tino that, Tino’s really into hip-hop and I NEVER meet Latin guys who are into hip-hop. Tino. I’m at the corner of Peru y Tino. I’ll have a vodka con Tino. We’re going to this really cool club called Club Tino. Tino.

Caroline’s from New York, a food columnist and part-time cocktail waitress at Kim y Novak. She met my brother at the bar. Unhappy-Black-Hair is Flo, an Aussie who’s wandered the world for the last four years. I can’t tell what she’s upset about — she tells me that she’s underdressed because Caroline is wearing heels and she’s wearing sandals. Everyone tells her she looks fine, Tino tells her in Spanish.

Drinks downstairs. My brother’s setting up his DJ equipment, the four of us are sitting in white leather captain’s chairs around a low table. It’s dark and there are creepy-looking drippy eyeball things painted on the walls. The whole club is white and red. The music is loud. My brother’s boss yells at me for lighting a cigarette.

Staring off into space, not really listening to Caroline tell Flo a story about riding the subway with rich people. Tino stares into space politely from the other side of the table. Tino has a beard — a chinstrap-and-moustache combination that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to grow. His looks much better than mine. I’m not irritated, just a trifle jealous. I tell Caroline this. She giggles, then immediately leans over and tells Tino. I wish I hadn’t spoken. Flo still looks unhappy.

Apparently it’s Caroline’s friend Sam’s birthday tonight and they’re celebrating across town and she invites me to come along. I look at my brother, drag-and-dropping away on his laptop, quickly contemplate a night sitting here, and eagerly accept. My brother is more than happy to get me out of his hair, which at the moment is getting tousled by Bosco, the flamboyantly gay and drunk bar owner.

Cab ride across town, and I have no idea where I am. Tino asks me what I do for a living and I try to explain to him that I am an Army officer, a combat engineer, a “Sapper.” Tino is impressed, but unfortunately I misspoke and instead of saying “Zapador,” or Sapper, I said “Zapatero,” who is the Prime Minister of Spain, or the Spanish word for shoemaker. Tino’s still impressed. Lights blur outside my window. A quick exchange in Spanish, a turn signal, a squeak of brakes, and we’re here.

Sucre is a restaurant/bar that looks like the kind of place Christian Troy would hang out in. We meet Sam, the birthday girl — 28, Chinese, slim, also pretty. With her are Irish Andrew, his friend Seamus, Sam’s boyfriend, and another guy, whom I’m told is “the coke dealer.” Andrew and I go to the bar, which is thirty feet high of backlit liquor bottles. Above us is the catwalk to the upstairs restroom. I make a note to take a picture from the catwalk looking down on my next piss break. Andrew tells me the bit about the Buenos Aires map. I tell Andrew a story my brother told me, about an Argentine trying to convince an increasingly frustrated Irishman at the Herald that “thirty cattle heads” means the same thing as “thirty head of cattle.” I take a piss. I take a picture.

We walk down the street to Rumi, a club that Sam likes. Somewhere we’ve picked up three more guys and I’m mentally preparing for a long stand in line, but we’re whisked right in. The velvet rope clinks down and strands four girls in short skirts behind us. The doorman hands me a coupon good for a discount on the cover charge, which is still thirty pesos. Inside is dark and deafening. The bass from the music is so strong that the loose fabric on my clothes is vibrating. I realize I’m leaning on a speaker disguised as a table. A drink for everyone — vodka and tonic for me, Andrew drinks beer, the girls split a bottle of crappy champagne. Time flies. Tino has decided to coach me on the finer points of picking up Argentine women. I try to convince two girls that I’m a doctor. We drink some more. Argentine women slink around the floor. Argentine men circle like sharks in dress shirts. I dance badly. Caroline and Sam disappear then reappear. Five in the morning — I’m so drunk I can’t understand English, much less Spanish. The lights come on.

Tumble out into the street, and mercifully it’s still dark. I can feel myself starting to shut down. There’s a discussion of where to go next but I don’t contribute. Sam and Caroline are flushed, Tino’s got his arm around me, Flo is finally smiling. We cram into a cab, and I still have no idea where I am. My head is heavy. Days later we’re piling out on to the sidewalk in front of someone’s apartment building. I’ve had enough. I double-cheek everybody then flag down a cab of my own. Piedras y Humberto Primo, I slur. We drive for days and I am awoken by the sound of my head bonking on the window. That will be fourteen pesos. Upstairs. Blackness. It’s 6:32 in the morning.

Oh, brother.