Pisco

Santiago, Chile

Chipe Libre was a fancy Peruvian restaurant in Santiago. They specialized in ceviche and pisco. Ceviche is a raw fish dish with chile and lime that I adore. Pisco is a hard liquor made from the same grapes used in wine production.

I ordered some fancy ceviche and a beer. I wasn't looking to get too drunk. I was sitting at the bar and struck up a conversation with Lynn, a 50ish blonde American woman.

Lynn was an adventurous middle-aged middle classer doing some solo vacationing. She had a nice AirBnB somewhere nearby and had come to Chipe Libre to try their pisco flights. She offered some of her pisco to me. I tried a smoky one that I liked and ended up tacking on a lowball of that to my next beer.

Lynn and I hit it off well and chatted at the bar until they closed at 11:30pm. I was staying in a hostel over by the club district of Bellavista, which was not too far away. I suggested we relocate to the Bellavista Patio, a trendy outdoor mall full of bars and restaurants.

We ended up settling on some fusion sushi bar. We stayed there drinking until they closed at 1am. I don't really remember any of that.

Back out on the street we met a couple trashy Chilean women, somehow. I think Lynn may have literally bumped into them, and then they had some miscommunication in two languages, which I translated.

I found out as part of my translating that they were headed to some bar nearby that sold cheap giant bottles of Escudo beer, which seemed like a great idea. So we went with them to a dark empty club a couple blocks off the main strip.

The bar had giant TVs playing latino pop music videos at considerable volume. The seating was VFW-style plastic chairs and plastic tables.

The beer was the cheapest I'd seen in Chile, and I bought more than was reasonable. Lynn and our two new friends made themselves into the dance party, and I aggressively went after our beer supplies.

At some point Lynn went up to bathroom and the fugglier of the Latina clubbers decided it was time to make her move. She was desperate for me to dance with her, but in lieu of that she opted for cupping her breasts and pushing them towards me. You want? Yes?

I was drunk and more amused than anything, so I just took her hand off my leg and screamed back over the loud music some broken Spanish about my 50-year-old benefactor upstairs in the bathroom. I think the clubber may have been trans, but I didn't ask.

When Lynn came back she told a horror story about a filthy bathroom which sounded funny to me as well. She was sketched out by the bar, so we paid the tab and went outside and started making out in the street.

Apparently Lynn had a boyfriend somewhere and for this reason did not invite me back to her fancy AirBnB. I called her an Uber instead and that was that.

*

The next morning I was of two minds.

One the one hand, I felt like no harm no foul. Good for the older lady that she had some younger guy flattering her and kissing on her and whatnot.

But a bigger part of me felt complete revulsion and shame. I reminded myself of Bad Santa fucking oversized ladies in the big and tall section. It just felt like self-destruction.

So in a hungover state of self-disgust, I went out and got a tattoo I'd been meaning to get. It was a David Foster Wallace-inspired drawing of a tennis player upside down with his head smashed through the screen of an old computer monitor.

The tattoo artist was gorgeous, and the tattoo was surprisingly painful. I guess that should not have surprised me, but it did. I was planning to read a book on my phone during the tattoo, but the pain was too distracting.

The tattoo turned out great, and I did not end up becoming romantically involved with any other senior citizens during my stay in Santiago.

And the moral of this story is - nevermind there isn't one. Cheers!