Back To School Part II

Guadalajara, Mexico

I'm sitting in a comfy chair at my hostel, watching a Twins game on my laptop and struggling through El Mysterio Del Barco Fantasmo. Laptop on the table, notebook of vocabulary words on my lap, cell phone with the SpanishDict app on the arm of the chair. This a pretty normal evening in Guadalajara for me.

Conditions at the hostel are excellent. I have my own room with air conditioning. Other long-term guests include:

• Kayla - An adventurous Coloradian medical student in Guadalajara for reasons unclear to myself, herself, or any of her family and friends

• Anna - A gorgeous young Mexican medical student interning at a hospital in Guadalajara for the summer

• Raul - The super-friendly manager of the hostel who spends most of his day chatting up the lovely medical student guests

The thing is, this mysterious boat has appeared in El Triángulo de Poseidón right while Zeke and Jen are preparing for the big sailing race. Also the Twins are flirting with relevance in the MLB wildcard race. I'm mostly focused on these two races.

*

Tinder has led me to a "whiskey" bar. It's decent-sized club with door guys in black suits and a big-screen TV that's playing the summer's top hits (Despacito ad infinitum). Of whiskey they sell only expensive shots of Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Wild Turkey. There's a currently-empty dance floor and behind that a bunch of tables filled with locals in club getup. It's not exactly a dive bar.

My date assures me that this is a rock club. She's a 30-year-old middle manager and writer of erotic poetry. Her English is decent, which is convenient because my Spanish is still un trabajo en progresso.

Around 11 the pop hits go away and a grungy-looking rock band takes the stage. They open with a soft rock song I don't know. I love the Cure! Don't you? I guess it's a Cure song. Between Cure covers, my date screams into my ear above the music that she is very sensual. Well, only one way to know for sure. We call an Uber.

*

I'm in my room at the hostel building a pyramid of empty beer cans. I feel crappy. My Spanish sucks. I haven't started on a new website or started writing anything creative. There's all this shit going on in Minneapolis like another cop getting off after killing an unarmed black man and here I am doing fuckall in Mexico. So I'm drinking.

Loud music's good when you're drinking. So I have headphones on and I'm blasting Dillinger Four and the soundtrack to La La Land and Dion and the Belmonts and whatever random shit pops into my head.

The next morning I discover a pyramid of 10 beer cans and a blog replete with fairly graphic sexual depictions. I'm too hungover for school, so I go to my favorite café, eat a big breakfast, and update my blog with tasteful edits.

*

I'm sitting on the floor in the common area of our hostel with a bunch of friends from school and from our hostel. Ryan has brought a post-medical-student friend into the fray. She's interning insane hours at a hospital for next to no money. Her English is spectacular - she knows words like "jocular" and "frenetic". She says her family has money, and that's the only reason she can afford to intern at the hospital. The hostel party migrates to a pizza place nearby and we find seats next to each other.

We're at Gallo Negro, a bar near my hostel. Everybody else went home or dancing. Neither of us are dancers. She humors me and plays a game of pool against me. Afterwards she says she's too tired for anything except sex or home.

*

I'm upstairs watching a very lo-fi drag show at a dive bar. A skinny young and very drunk guy is hanging all over me. He wants to take selfies with his basically screenless cell phone, and I indulge him. The drag queen was speaking sans music in what I assume was a standup routine when I entered, but I think my presence threw her off a bit. I'm the only gringo here.

I'm super-drunk. Ryan had a birthday dinner earlier at a cool restaurant with a bigass parrot and creepy religious paintings by the bar bathrooms. I stopped in at this bar on my way home. Drunk gayboy starts getting a little too touchy, so I say goodbye and head back down to the tiny bar. The bartenders are scantily-clad ladies, the patrons are 20-something guys with hints of facial hair. I find a decent conversation with a couple of them.

*

I'm the middle man on a 3-man motorcycle journey through the heart of Guadalajara. I suspect we've exceeded the max occupancy of the bike but my amigos are unfazed, so I am too. Jorge in the back is an amateur but aspiring-to-be-professional magician. Don Juan-Juan or something in front looks about 18 and prefers to ride between cars or through stuck intersections.

I'm drinking beers outside a 7-11 with Jorge, Don Juan, a college couple, and a few others. We play a game where you throw coins against a wall to see who gets the last beer. I provide a couple coins to people who don't have any.

I'm on the patio of a crowded bar demonstrating my best card trick to the college couple in my broken Spanish. Don Juan is passed out on a bench nearby. Inside there's a dancy party going on - I'm not sure why all the punks like this place. According to Jorge it's because there are women here. He wants me to dance, but hell no.

I'm in Jorge's other friend's car getting a ride to another bar, listening to Joy Division. Reggaeton (esp. Despacito) is universal here, but apparently all the cool kids are into 1980s British post-punk. Go fuckin figure.

*

I'm up on the roof of the hostel near sunset. I have a baseball game on my laptop and all my Spanish study stuff set out. Kayla comes up to check on her laundry and we start to chat. I put the game on pause.

Kayla spent a year in Israel and her analysis of the country seems really innocent to me. She talks about working in a hospital there and being surprised that her coworkers couldn't hang out with her after work because they weren't allowed in the Jewish part of the city at that time. She says she would cross the street when she passed Hasidic Jewish men so that they didn't have to. But if it was a regular Jewish guy it was cool, he might ask her on a date.

We have a discussion about casual sex. She's pretty opposed to it. I encourage her to sleep with this guy at the school she thinks is cute. My theory is that sex is healthy and that people who haven't been laid in a while are often assholes. But I concede to her that sex absent love is less than fulfilling.

Tomorrow is my last day in Guadalajara. After four weeks of Spanish classes I expected I'd be more fluent. Oh well. I learned a lot, I met some rad people, and I had some fun along the way. Tomorrow I start traveling for real.