Karma is real, and I was married to it. Yes, “married,” as in “went to a Colombian courthouse thing and tied the knot with my girlfriend of 5 and 1/2 months in front of her lesbian moms” kind of married. But that’s no less normal than what you weirdos do at your weddings—oh look, we’re cutting a cake! TOGETHER. (We had McFlurries as our post-wedding desert, for the record).
I’ve mentioned my ex-wife on Explicit Exploits before, under the auspicious title of “The Queen.” Me and The Queen decided to amicably part ways one year ago, but thanks to California state law, it took a full year of waiting for the divorce to finalize. I was in Spain this past February and I got an email like “yo you’re divorced” and I was like “holy shit I forgot I was still married.”
Me and The Queen spent five strange years together, and it could be called anything but dull. In fact, there was almost too much action—which is a big deal, me saying that, seeing as I am more action-packed than a Mexican quinceañera for twins. And you know, that when they have twins over there, and they have two signs that say “15” right next to each other, and it spells “1515,” that’s a measurement of how loco the Mexicans go. (I read that one in an issue of National Geographic.)
Aside from the high amount of action, there was another very prominent theme in our time together; and that is the theme of KARMA always befalling those who dare tresspass against us.
Perhaps this is best illustrated by one night in Bogota—two, actually. The first night, The Queen and I were partying on Calle 85, the hub for a good amount of Bogota’s nightlife. We took a taxi home, pay the driver, get our change—somewhere around 8000 pesos (3 USD)—and go in the house. I empty my pockets on the kitchen counter and go into the bathroom, and from around the corner I hear The Queen shout, “Hijue puta!” I don’t think much of it because she’s always saying swear words. But when I go back to the kitchen, she is holding the bills I got from the taxi driver and claiming they are fake. Well, that sucks, but what could we do about it now? The driver is long gone. He got us.
The next day we get invited to a Japanese child’s birthday party, get utterly bombed off sake at the behest of the host (a Japanese detective I knew from the embassy), leave and go to a co-teacher’s “Leaving this Ratty Country Forever” party, keep drinking absurd amounts of booze, and decide only after we are blind-drunk that it’s time to go home and bone.
So we decide to walk a little bit, to get our taxi in an area with a little less “permanent-standby-mode” type of traffic that Bogota is known for. And we’re just walking aimlessly in the middle of the road, enjoying the breeze, when suddenly The Queen claps her hands startlingly and announces, “Oye, we got our taxi near here last night.” It was true, we had happened to have wandered into the same neighborhood. And then The Queen says, “That’s the spot. Where all those fucking drivers are.” I looked where she pointed and there were about five or so taxi drivers, all older guys with wrinkled faces, standing around having coffee.
And before I could realize what’s going on, The Queen starts speedwalking right up to that circle of taxi drivers, like RIGHT into them. She gets to the center of the circle and she fucking shoves one of them and the guy goes flying backwards, launching his coffee into the air, and shocking the hell out of all of the other drivers. As the shoved driver puts his hands up out of fear, I get a look at his face that even at this distance, I can discern quite clearly was our taxi driver from last night.
The Queen: My first reaction is to push him … to push this old fart (blame the sake) and I start going on on him telling him he is a piece of shit that he is a thief and every other thing that crossed my mind in that moment.
Darby: What follows is theatre of the highest order. The Queen is belittling the shit out of this guy and shoving him all around the street, occasionally hitting him with kicks and poking her finger in his face. I’m reminded that this may not be possible if I weren’t dating a “Santandereana“—girls from that region DO NOT PLAY.
The Queen: Because we are well known in Colombia for being “mad, stubborn, and we talk harshly, but most because of our strong character/temper.”
Darby: Wow, if there were an “Understatement of the Year” award, that would be the reigning champion six years in a row. But… yeah, The Queen did not tire of handing this guy a fucking reaming. To the point that I didn’t give a single thought about having to defend her from this guy at all. Yet there were all those other taxi drivers, and at some point they try to get involved but—
The Queen: Darby with his super cute Spanish accent tries to sound tough and actually stops them.
Darby: And then I go into the guy’s car and steal his car keys right out of the ignition, while The Queen is developing a new art form out of “creative Spanish insults.” But then I see the guy reaching into his pocket, and I’m like, “Fuck he’s got a sword or something!” but no, he’s got money, and…
The Queen: So I make him give us the money from the ride he charged us from the night before as well as some money for our troubles—
Darby: And now all of the other taxi drivers in the park are just laughing at how unbearably humiliating this is for the driver. The Queen landed a few more shots and smacks to the head before he ran into his car and locked the door. I smirked as I thought, “Got your key-sies!” but he must’ve had an emergency set or something because he ended up driving off, into the night, leaving the stink of shame all over the street. But we had gotten our money back, and even made some money as well. Fittingly, The Queen wanted to get a drink to celebrate. I was like, “Uh, you just beat up a taxi driver…
“Hell YEAH you need another drink!”
And that’s the kinda shit that was always going down when The Queen was in town. I say “in town” because after our spontaneous wedding, which only her family attended, I still needed to introduce her to mine. And I was like, “Hmm… I should bring her to America.” And to do that you have to go through US Immigration, who ONLY deals with you by standard courier mail, which was meaningless attempting to do from our home in Lima, hot on the tails of a FOUR MONTH MAIL STRIKE in the entire country of Peru.
And then I had to leave my new wife behind and move back to Chicago to be able to recieve mail like a normal person, although by this point I was sick to death of paperwork and decided to get a lawyer to deal with it, and he tells me that the EARLIEST he can get here here is one year later?? Under which US Immigration STILL fucks up and “loses documents” to set her arrival back another few months because they are incompotent asswipes and loathe foreigners and do everything hey can to discourage them from immigrating to the US?
(*exhales*) Sorry, still shooken up by it. My advice to anyone from the US who is thinking about marrying a foreigner? DON’T.
Back to these kind of karma-centric incidents though—I don’t know if it was a skill, or just dumb luck, but they were always happening around The Queen. One of our first times hanging out, a guy on a bike was talking shit to me and tried to headbutt me while riding by. I sidestepped the headbutt, swung my fist at his chin, and the guy dropped off the bike and did a heavy THUD on the sidewalk, knocked out cold. There was the incident in the movie theatre (story here: http://explicitexploits.com/movie-theatre-meltdown/) in Peru, where the lady hit me over the head with a shoe, incited a war amongst everybody as the movie rolled on, and then we ended up getting THEM, two-old, local Peruvian ladies, tossed out of the theatre to a rousing applause. Karma strikes again.
Upon reflection, most of this karma that working in our favor involved some degree of conflict, namely, “a shitload of conflict.” And that can be dangerous. I had a bottle of Grey Goose thrown at my head by a huge burly bouncer after The Queen quit working a NYE party in dramatic, curse-ladden fashion; the bottle missed my head by a hair’s width apart. But although the conflict could get violent, we scantly were on the recieving end. Most of this conflict could best be described as “hilarious.”
Like the one time in Equador where we missed our bus back to Colombia, and The Queen got a little too unruly with the bus company, and they didn’t wanna talk to her because she was drunk and swearing at everybody, so I had to use MY wack Spanish negotiation skills to try and get a free change of tickets, and then they actually gave it to me and I told them, “Sorry about her, she not taking her meds today day, but she definitely isn’t drunk, because she doesn’t do that,” and then I go out just out front of the bus company office and she’s drinking a huge bottle of beer on the other side of the street sitting spread-eagle and wearing shards of potato chips all over her shirt.
Yes, there were many good times to be had with The Karma Queen. I understand now that a relationship built on things perpetually being unstable can be a highly enjoyable romp, but it’s also not going to last forever. But let’s be honest: five years is a pretty good run, right? To be in a ticking-time bomb of a relationship and stick through trying times like being forced apart for a year, and to be drifting all around South America without jobs, homes, or common sense. Although The Queen and I go our separate paths now, I don’t have a single regret for any of it. Things learned from this relationship carried me on to a higher existence. I learned Spanish just so I could date The Queen. And that Spanish, years later, is what got me a job with the public broadcaster of Japan. Directly and indirectly, The Queen’s influence on my life still rings true.
And that’s the point: relationships and the people behind them come and go, but the insight gained will always be there. And in the case of this one, love may have not had our back—but karma certainly did.
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