Epic Epochs

“where are you taking me?” i asked, pretty sure i knew the answer.

“it’s a surprise,” replied my counterpart, a swede by the name of alex, who had picked me up from the bogota airport just twenty minutes prior.  the two of us had conquered bangkok 2 years ago.  and hopefully, starting today, we could begin trouncing south america.

we stood waiting outside a large and intimidating iron gate.  a little peephole slid open and a man sized us up before he allowed us in.  he did a quick check of my bags, which contained all of my life belongings, and then he pointed us down a ominous looking path.

i was sure we were in a brothel, but i was happy to be wrong.  although completely indiscernible from the outside, we were in a tv studio.  one of the biggest in the country, in fact; fox colombia.  and apparently, my first stop inside this new and strange land would be to act as an extra in a tv commercial.  “i pulled some strings,” alex said, grinning.  i was jetlagged and smelled like shit, but if they didn’t mind, neither did i.  as we waited to be called to set, we drifted around the lot meeting directors, actors, stagehands, and the like.  there was this one extra, a czech guy with a chipped front tooth, who had overstayed his visa by a whole year and a half and was running his own escort service called “the pink panther.”  alex suggested the three of us do some drugs to kill some time, and within minutes we were behind a movie trailer smoking a big-ass joint.  when we returned to the set, we received word that they had enough gringos (foreigners) for the day and wouldn’t need our services.  alex convinced them to give us a free lunch, at the least, but we were able to cash in our meal ticket only after everyone else had eaten.  the extras were at the bottom of the totem-pole, although their pay, being three times higher than the local’s, doesn’t reflect that.

i noticed a bunch of the tv people wearing soccer uniforms and asked whether this was a regular thing.  it turned out, in less than a couple hours, there was a match taking place between colombia and their arch-rivals, the dastardly chileans.  a win, or even a mere tie game would result in colombia qualifying for their first world cup… in 16 years.  we needed to see this game.

we caught a cab back to alex’s, deposited my bags into the corner of his room, and headed over to a local watering hole where a single 20-inch TV displayed the game to dozens of eager, fervorous eyes.  the game was nearing half time, and to our horror, colombia was down 3-0.  “can’t win ’em all,” i figured.  the colombian crowd felt the same way and started trickling out at the half, allowing us to squeeze into a tiny table into the corner.  i met a few other gringos, including a welsh guy named merlin, who… well, is named merlin, which automatically makes him a legend.  when the second half started, it became apparent that team colombia had no chance.  they couldn’t even pass the ball.  but it was at the most inopportune time when they managed to put the ball in the net.  i stood up and cheered evocatively, knowing this would be my only chance to be loud and obnoxious.  but it wasn’t; colombia was able to get a penalty kick just minutes after the second goal, with their star player radamel falcao taking the kick.  he put the ball in the net to make it a one point game.  the place we were at shrewdly cropped the edges of the tv screen so you couldn’t see how much time was left, which i guess was an attempt to get people ordering beers right til the very end.  so although nobody knew how much time remained, it certainly FELT like the game was over.  when chile fouled falcao for the second time, setting him up with another penalty kick and the chance of becoming the biggest pussy magnet in the whole country, the place flew off the seams.  falcao stared at the ball, sweat beads slithering down his forehead.  after what felt like an eternity, he started to trot towards the ball, wound up, threw his leg at the ball and the next thing you know people are jumping up on tables, showering us with beer, high-fives and tears.  it was a fucking brilliant comeback.  one for the ages.

as we were leaving, i saw a old man sitting near the exit, motionless, staring blankly ahead of him.  nothing out of the ordinary, had he not have been completely plastered in a thick coating of chunky white powder.  before it could fully register, i felt a giant smattering of the same stuff hitting me on the back of the neck.  and then the face.  and in the eyes.  and then it was too late.  raucous teens pranced around the street pelting us with flour, making a wardrobe change completely necessary.

back in alex’s tiny room i stripped and decided what to wear on my first night in colombia.  i was half naked when somebody put a drink in my hand. “aguardiente,” it was called.  literal translation: hot water.  a nationally revered/despised alcoholic drink.  this shit is terrible.  it tastes like black licorice and makes you gag as it goes down your throat.  at least it’s strong as hell.  the sun went down, the stars and characteristically unpleasant colombian weather emerged, and we had a party happening in full force.  alex’s room could fit three, maybe four people comfortably, but we had a good fifteen lodged in there, standing shoulder to shoulder and laying down on each other.  and it was right about then when somebody decided to bring out the cocaine.

i knew it was coming at some point, and there it was… and there it went, straight into my nostrils.  a gram of coke goes for 5 bucks in colombia, and although i’ve never bought coke before, i knew that that is a ridiculously small amount to pay for a bag.  seven people had at least their own personal bag, shortly after the inside of the room looked like one of those little christmas snow globes, what with coke flying around everywhere.

after we sufficiently poisoned our brains, we were out and moving through the streets.  we arrived at a dance club called the disco jaguar.  five dollars and one intense pat down/gropefest were the price to admission.  i decided to practice my first bit of spanish on the door lady.  “buenas noches,” i squeezed out between my teeth.  “wlajdlakjfrioejlfkrhg” was her response, and i quickly ran inside, reminding myself never to use spanish again, unless i was able to handle a counter-response.  the club was sweet, operating within all of the typical parameters of a good dance club.  you had your smoking balcony, two dance floors, a girls bathroom… which shamefully i frequently visited, with other dudes, as we continued our cocaine rally, taking “key bumps” to each nostril, and then trying to slip out of the ladies bathroom inconspicuously without any powder on our face or shirt.  maybe we weren’t the only gringos there, but we were the tallest, the blondest, and the blue-eyediest, which earned us some very welcomed attention.  you’d catch a girl staring at you, smile, and engage conversation.  why can’t it always be this way?

we got up on the dance stage, threw our leather jackets in a pile and highjacked one girl’s birthday party to make a big gyrating dance circle.  the crowd started sizzling out around three and we headed outside to find a french guy from our crew and merlin, screaming with his shirt off, about to fuck some fools up.  i sure as fuck wasn’t getting involved, not on my first day in the country.  everything worked itself out though, and we walked down a street to find a parade of local youngsters drinking in the middle of the street.  i was talking with the lead singer of a colombian punk rock band when, over his shoulder, i caught the eye of a girl that was talking to me inside the club.  and by “talking”, i mean “feeding me drugs.”  she came up to me and kept asking me to buy her a beer, but then there was a lot of speculation on whether she was a hooker, or a golddigger, and alex said i couldn’t bring her home since she’d probably steal everything from his room.  when she went home with some shoeless homeless guy, i realized turning her down was the right move.

we walked around the corner and picked up four girls from the street and escorted them to the only place we could hear playing music at this hour.  when we got inside, we realized it was a gay bar, but everyone was too far gone to notice or care.  everybody beelined it to the dance floor and locked arms, and then started doing leg lifts like they do in river dance, spilling our beer and dignity all over the floor.  someone handed me a bag of coke and i took it and locked myself in the stall of the bathroom.  realizing i didn’t have a set of keys on me, i wondered what the best means of ingesting it would be.  and that was for me to rip the bag open and pour all of it in my mouth, and then polish the interior of the bag with my tongue before flushing the bag down the toilet.

the next memory i have is being back in alex’s room with an english guy named freddy, where we began smoking weed in addition to railing more lines.  it was 6 AM when alex proposed this: “i think… we should take some acid right now.”  freddy immediately ran out of the room, and i looked at alex incredulously, waiting for him to announce it was a big joke and then fall over snoring.  but he wasn’t fucking around.  i had never done acid.  i was in colombia.  neither of us had shit to do the next day.  and so i took the harmless looking little piece of paper and placed it on my tongue.  and then came the wait.  the calm before the storm…

somehow we ended up on skype with my old thai teacher back in bangkok, and had a decent conversation until alex announced that he was tripping.  i hung up the call and waited for the wave to overtake me.  but it didn’t.  i started to lose hope that i would become like the man sitting to my left, uttering strange space ramblings.  and then i realized, it was never coming.  i sighed and accepted my fate, staring at the walls disappointed.  alex’s professional photos covered the walls, but this was the first time that i really looked at them.  i admired their beauty…  and that’s when they became ALIVE.

the photos exploded into the third dimension.  a fat guy’s belly popped out and seemed to drip over the border of the photo; a guy in a priest robe was getting spanked by the man next to him; joyous faces began laughing at me.  and then the wall started to fucking MELT right in front of my eyes.  i got closer to the wall and saw cellular division and metamorphosis, as intense, vibrant colors began flashing sporadically on what would otherwise be a dirty white wall.  and then came the body high.  i felt like i was being squeezed in the palm of an big angry giant, and could feel pressure extending to all of my major papillary.

it was easy to be amused and bewildered by all of the minutia in the tiny room, but i knew what had to come next.  i looked out the window at the deserted early-morning streets and saw a whole world to explore.

“alex, get your shoes.” i commanded.  he couldn’t.  he couldn’t function at all.  he tried to speak but couldn’t string together anything cohesive.  repeatedly, i stressed the importance of shoes, but he couldn’t find them.  and when he finally did, he sat down to put them on but slank back into his bed helplessly.  but we finally did it.  finally.  and then i realized we needed his keys to get out the front door and the whole process happened again.  i needed nothing except my hoodie, which would act as a shield to block out the judgemental stares of the haters we were sure to encounter.

once we got outside, alex leaned on the wall with his face.  a discarded jacket sat there on the ground and was the first clue to the kind of environment we would be dealing with.  i asked alex if there were any parks around but all he could do was grunt at me.  i seemed to recall some sort of ourdoor-sy area at the end of the block, so i carried alex in that direction.  when we got there though, all i could see was trash flying everywhere and hobos laying on broken park benches with their mouths gaping wide open.  i took alex to the only unoccupied park bench to sit down, but an entire circus of flies and maggots went flying everywhere.  this was a nightmare scenario.  we couldn’t even find a place to sit down!  but then, alex broke his silence.  “there’s a park… a few blocks from here.”  if there really was a park, i could navigate us over there.  but in his state, who knew if there even was a park?  still, i had no other leads so i decided to go with it.  and so we set forth.

the walk was about as dangerous as walking through the african serengeti armed with a squirt gun.  the neighborhood he lives in is BAD.  graffiti stained the walls of every single building we passed.  buildings were crumbling all over the place.  and had the sun not have begun to rise, we would’ve been mugged multiple times.  when we tried to cross the busiest street in the city, we failed to make sense of the crosswalk and were inches away from getting splattered by a taxi, right in front of a horrified group of pedestrians.  now the pedestrians… oh GOD, the pedestrians.

every single person we passed–EVERY SINGLE PERSON–looked like a comic book character.  they were caricatures of human beings, and their bodies were completely disproportional.  there were children’s heads on adult bodies; men with crumpled faces; women with skin that sagged off their bones.  i was terrified.  we could not get to the park fast enough.  but we did it.  we did it!

all i wanted to do was lay down.  we found a small foothill just big enough for us to lay out on and gaze up at the clouds.  i became acclimated to the soft woosh of vehicles whipping around the corner uncomfortably close to our heads, and for the first time since leaving the house we were in a neutral, non-hostile territory.  finally was i able to do my favorite thing on drugs and “observe” all of the weird shit occurring all around me.  power-walkers passing us with silly strides.  a teenage youth brigade holding a puppet show on the basketball court.  random visits from stray dogs running up to us to shower us in drool.  when i fixated my eyes on the grass and the leaves on the tops of trees, they started to sway in slow motion, like i was looking at some underwater phytoplankton.

we moved to a bench and alex made a very important announcement: “i feel like i could be a functioning member of society now.”  so i asked him to compare this trip against the other times i did it.  he had done acid a crowning 120 times, and this?  this was the strongest, by far.  i declared that i would never need to do acid again.  you don’t do this shit for fun.  you do this and undergo a change in your entire identity.  before we could get too deep in our discussion about “existence”, and our connection in our past lives, a lady came up to us with a clipboard speaking spanish.  i asked alex to translate what she said.  “i am a perfect carrier for your child.”  i’m pretty sure that isn’t what she said.

the park was amazing and we were finally in a good place mentally, but it was time to head on out.  but what next?  sleep was out.  so was food.  cigarettes.  all we could really do was start walking back to alex’s.  we took the same route back, but it looked completely different.  somehow there was more graffiti now, and bricks were dripping out of walls, making us feel like we were in the middle of a warzone.  cops frequently circled the area, and at one point they pulled over and started staring at us.  we stared back, and for about 10 seconds nobody moved or acted.  alex broke the silence with a confused, “hola?” and they drove off, realizing we were foreigners.  we discussed later and realized that it looked exactly like we were mid-transaction of a drug deal, with me wearing my hood, standing on a corner in front of a crack house, handing him my voice recorder.  when we crossed the busiest street, caracas, for the second time, we nearly avoided being run over by our second vehicle of the day, the transmilenio bus.  we scampered back home and amazingly there were people in the household up and active and doing the opposite of what we were doing.  we attempted to engage them in conversation, and i’d say we fared slightly above average in communicating with people who were not fucked out of their minds.  alex was talking with merlin, who was inexplicably dressed as a geisha, and i turned to gaze out the front window.

the street was a bit more lively than before, so it was likely around midday.  apparently a good time for the police to roll up to the jewelery store across the street and shamelessly take a bribe.  while this was going on, i look over about a dozen feet to the right and spot a coed couple cornering a girl up against a wall, holding her there by her hair.  the victim was crying hysterically, and every time she would try to step around the other two, the guy would quickly block her exit.  this was happening in the middle of broad daylight, with people walking right on by.  somehow another guy got tangled in the affair, one of those roughneck “cool-guy” types, smoking a cig and waving around a bottle of beer.  the chick threatening the girl in the corner stopped going nuts for a second to go over to the cool-guy and start getting in his face.  and when i looked back at the other two, they’re fucking making out!  this was drama at it’s absolute finest.  but it wasn’t over!  suddenly, the police come around the corner with a middle-aged balding guy in their hands.  the cops start violently frisking him, as a crowd of 20+ people gather just feet away.  they end up cuffing him and throwing him in the wagon.  this entire scene happened in 15 minutes.  i shit you not.

seeing this on acid, as you might imagine, kind of fucks with your ease of mind.  not the first shit you want to be seeing a country you moved to, you know, TODAY.  i could sense my chances at survival plummeting.  i had to peel myself away from that window.  alex was underway in trying to describe to a colombian housemate everything we had been through, but she just had a look on her face of absolute horror.  it was best that we leave and maybe attempt to eat something, so we went to a little spot on the corner and had a three course meal of soup, rice, and french fries.  as good as it was, eating felt kinda weird, and i could only put down like a quarter of it.  once we left, we realized that we were still too fucked up for sleep, so we did the next best thing and went shopping.  we drifted aimlessly around the supermarket and somehow the only thing we ended up buying were two strawberry yogurts, and a bottle of axe body spray.  the cashier at the supermarket thought we were lovers.  pink yogurt in hand, we left, looking for other options, but we were nearly out of ideas.  alex took cash out of the atm merely for the hell of it, then realized five minutes later he left his card in the machine.  that’s when we agreed that we were still a hazard to the environment and that it was time to conclude our journey.  it was now very bright out, but we still had no idea what time it was.  when we got home we learned that it was 3 in the afternoon.  there was no proper way to conclude everything we had just experienced.  you can’t go out with a bang, when the past eight hours were just one colossal explosion.  we lit up a joint and smoked until our bodies overtook our minds.  it was one hell of a welcome party.  and now, for better or for worse, i can never look at the world the same way again.