LOCO GRINGO
Street art - Montañita, Ecuador - March, 2022
There isn’t enough time for poetry. I had a Japanese student while teaching English online — I taught kids from dozens of countries all around the world, sometimes brief conversations like a Saudi guy in Riyadh on his way to work or a Kuwaiti who’d just graduated college and wanted to know what he should do with his life — and the young student from Osaka asked great questions constantly.
“What do you mean?”
I’d been talking about the Greeks for whatever reason. I said that they had more time to think, observe, to philosophize.
My young student asked, “What do you mean ‘they had more time’?”
Ah, a great question. I told him they didn’t have to worry about having, getting, or finding a job.
And that has nothing to do with why I brought it up to you, but I will say that I am writing now this column because most columnists across America suck.
And that’s unfortunate. But it’s closer to the truth.
I am listening to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony while drinking a large bottle of Ecuadorian beer. Now that I’m back in Manglaralto (a place I’d been two weeks ago) I have my own apartment, on the first floor of a third-story building, with neighbors above and to the side.
I’ve been seeing a girl down here. And the last time I wrote about her I didn’t expect anything of it.
Before all that, I’d been in Manta — which is about 150KM north, or a three-hour taxi ride (maybe less) or almost a four-hour bus ride. In Manta, I stayed in a second-floor apartment overlooking the sea. There were nearby cafes and restaurants and every night the streets were bustling with locals. I wrote for a bit almost every day and night, finished a full-length play…
I worked for a digital marketing company, creating blog topics and infesting them with meta-data, and also I wrote articles on online gambling in areas like South Africa, India, Russia (yikes!), and shit. Where else? My mind escapes me.
Anyway, I’d been covering that beat while in San Juan, Puerto Rico too. And the mornings were the best with the sunlight pouring into a little one-bedroom spot I had in the hipster hood — I wrote dozens of articles per week, and I made sojourns to the beach…
Just like up in Manta, going for a swim after a twenty-minute walk. Ah, that fresh vivifying enlightenment of getting lost in the gravity of bad news online, and then walking to see the most beautiful women in the world. Tan skin, fashionistas. Strutting, holding onto the arms of girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands.
That’s one thing you will always see in Latin America, in my experience, since late October across San Juan and into Ecuador — I first saw it during my initial trip abroad to the Dominican Republic — the way Latin American women touch and caress their loved ones. A warmth I had never known.
And walking back from the beach after a few beers under the hot sunshine falling down to the horizon, a young woman nearby in a bikini (all my life a beautiful woman had always been put in front of my field of vision, just to say hello) and then another girl asked me if I knew where to find any weed after I’d lit up a cigarette from two other girls. I laughed. She jostled the beads in her hair, her friend nearby — “Mota?” I asked.
And in the mall, getting new cell phone data… A few days later.
The girl that had helped me before, we sat at her desk as she pulled up whatever the hell she’d been doing … and I sat there HUNGRY and DIZZY and HOT and waiting…
I explained to her in broken English that I’d gone down to visit the coast, and like they always did anywhere in the world — they wanted to know if you were ALONE.
“Chica…”
I explained.
Then it got to the contract which I had to sign.
It was a digital contract that required a signature like a normal human being. I scribbled it repeatedly, and she said NO!
She explained that the signature had to be small. To fit in this little box. The worst kinda test in my lifetime. I signed it again and said, “LOCO GRINGO.”
She bawled over in hysterical laughter, putting her face into her hands.
“NECESITO MI MADRE!” I wagged a finger at myself. “NO! NO!”
She laughed some more.
The day I moved out of my apartment where I’d been for five weeks, I swept up my hair and threw out piles of beer bottles, water bottles, chicken bones, and hurried out at the last moment to catch a cab to the bus station.
This time, the people there helped me to get on the bus right away. And then I went down for round three.
When I arrived, it was hot.
She was going to meet me, but then she didn’t. And that hardly mattered. Overanalyzing anything was out of the question, and I was OKAY being alone when getting to my new place in Manglaralto.
I walked in and immediately took a liking to it (after a quick two-dollar cab ride) and took a short tour: two couches, a bar/kitchen table set up with four chairs, a big kitchen, two bathrooms, a bedroom with a bed and a fold-out couch, and paintings on the walls of surf sports and beachside vibes with a rainbow jutting through a blue sky, and then I did what I do best: went out to the beach, grabbed a beer and stared at the sky with a stupid smile on my face.
No more beard. I’d shaved it before coming down again. I’d spent a week feeling perturbed about ingesting too much news. And when that happened, I barely looked at myself in the mirror. I could go a whole week with only staring at my face for two minutes a day, just to get my hair combed (if I had one).
No time for poetry. I’d written a story called FORGOTTEN IN FALLUJAH and instead of sending that to a mag, I posted it here. I sent them some poems instead.
So then Ophelia met me back at my place. We were happy to see each other again. (It had been two weeks.)
She stayed over, and the tour — I covered the condoms by the bed with a towel — she’d initiated led to her staying the night and us rocking the bed like Pamela and Tommy Lee. “I missed you!” she’d said.
And in the morning too, I held onto one of her voluptuous breasts and we went for a ride. Show me a Wall Street Journal or Chicago newspaper columnist who writes a sentence like that! Shit.
It was nice to have breaks, to get back into the swing of working. And I took her out to dinner in Olon the next night, we ate at a Thai place and were served by a Brazilian waiter with tattoos on his face and neck. I got the chicken paid Thai — she had sushi — and we split camaron skewers (shrimp).
We talked about our previous “relationships,” and I told her that she was too nice. Girls always have terrible stories about … dudes.
And, yeah. Since I’m a dude, I realize that my ex could say some nasty shit about me!
So later, we rollicked the bed again, and in the morning too. I said, “Shhh!” The walls in my new spot were pretty thin.
And we saw each other again, with her picking me up just as I’d been typing some poems. I liked that — getting picked up by a beautiful woman and leaving a half-written poem on my typewriter.
We held hands in Montanita and walked to a restaurant we liked (it wasn’t serving food) — so we went elsewhere. We sat and watched the passers-by. I had a poke bowl and she had ROAST BEEF.
“Is that like the Philly… what’s it called? The sandwich you told me about?”
“PHILLY CHEESESTEAK. Sorry, I thought it said ‘pork’. That’s what happens when you get old…”
“You’re funny,” she replied.
And we enjoyed each other’s company so much that we continued talking after dinner. I got another beer, and she ordered another lemon juice. She told me about Ecuadorian politics, how previous leaders left the country after looting it only to take up teaching positions at Harvard.
And it wasn’t the first time I’d listened to a girl (woman) in a foreign country talking to me about how the USA “intervened” in her country…
In fact, I was wearing a shirt I’d got in Saigon.
“I like your shirt…”
“Yeah,” I’d looked down at it. “I bought this in Saigon, at a famous market there that’s been around since 1917, I think. Or 1912.” I looked it up, and then I showed her where I’d stayed with my ex.
“You talk about your ex a lot,” she’d said.
“She got mad about what I wrote about her.”
“What did you write?”
“No, I won’t say.”
“OH COME ON TELL ME.” She shook my arm, gently. I couldn’t resist … those … eyes … hazel … her warm smile.
“I wrote that her vagina was hairy.”
OH, LAUGHTER COMPOUNDED WITH THE JOY OF BEING FREE IN A LIBERAL AMERICAN SATELLITE STATE, YEAH.
And we waltzed out to the pier-like steps and sat on a bench and snuggled and chatted and dreamed, overlooking the ocean. I said we should get a spot nearby the sea for a weekend.
“I like that idea,” she smiled.
More rollicking at night, and she moaned: “I really like you! I like you so much!”
And unfortunately, there wasn’t much time for writing poetry.
