The Wine Festival

Mexico City, Mexico

I had extended my stay in Mexico City by a day so I could spend the whole weekend with Amistad. We had been hanging out every day for the past week. On Sunday we had been planning to visit some ruins, but we were worried about rain and decided on a wine festival instead.

It was the second day of the festival, and we arrived just a couple hours before it closed. Amistad was chronically late for everything. Seemed to be a common character flaw in Mexico.

A couple days earlier she had been late for El Hombre de la Mancha. I was freaking out because in the USA sometimes they won't even allow you to enter if you arrive after a play has started. But in Mexico City they equipped the ushers with flashlights to help late patrons find their seats. The play also had no intermission - I'm guessing because they knew people would be late returning to their seats.

The way the wine festival worked was they gave you a glass and a card with 12 boxes on it. You had your choice of 30 or 40 wine vendors and every time they poured you a sample they were supposed to put a check mark on one of your boxes. Initially the inconvenience of this system proved to be long lines for small samples. The line for the meat and cheese plates was even longer, and to combat this I bought a bottle of wine that we could pour at our leisure while waiting in line for different wines.

Since it was the end of the festival, many people were leaving, and they were eager to hand us their unfinished wine cards. On top of that, some of the vendors weren't exactly diligent about marking cards. And since Amistad and I were both capable drinkers, we managed to collect quite a bit of wine.

A couple hours in the festival was supposedly over but they weren't kicking anybody out. Amistad and I were hammered. We made friends with a trio of young punk rockers who claimed to be 21 but looked more like 18. The girl of the trio was cute and flirty and claimed to prefer drugs to drinking.

The punk rock girl left for a bathroom to do I think ecstasy at some point, and when she came back she started making out with an older woman seated at a picnic table. Amistad suggested to me that this was funny, because she wasn't even a lesbian. Her theory was born out later when the punk rock girl started making out with the straighter of the two punk rock guys.

Eventually all the wine ran out and we had to leave. The five of us were planning to go to some biker bar Amistad liked, but it was impossible getting everybody together. I felt like the only sober person of the bunch (I was far from it - just a more functional drunk). Amistad insisted on stealing a flower pot and then wanted me to carry it, which I flatly refused. Finally everybody came outside, but the punk rock girl was crying because she had lost her wallet and cell phone.

So the young punk rockers went back inside to look for her stuff, and Amistad went back inside to use the bathroom. I waited on the street with the stolen flowerpot, becoming increasingly agitated. What were we doing hanging out with these young kids anyway? I had just started to walk away and ditch everyone when Amistad and the punk rockers returned.

Punk rock girl was a wreck. She had lost all her possessions and in my opinion been physically used by anyone who wanted a taste. Plus now she was probably coming down from some drug and alcohol cocktail. Her two friends wanted to keep partying, but I convinced the gayer of the two to take her home.

Amistad however was adamant that this girl come with us to the biker bar. She grabbed both of her arms to force eye contact and told this girl she had to come with us. At which point I completely lost my shit.

I was standing in the middle of the street cursing out Amistad, mostly in English, because my foul Spanish wasn't all that good. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why can you not let this girl go home? You're 33 fucking years old! Fucking listen to me! And on and on.

Eventually I told Amistad to fuck off and walked off on my own. The straighter of the punk rock dudes stopped me to swap contact information. We had been discussing literature or something. Amistad gave me a puzzled, "You're not coming to the bar?" I had a head fogged with fury and the most damaging retort I could manage was "Fuck no!"

I stomped off towards my hostel and stopped in at a hip mezcal bar with fancy mezcal cocktails. There I texted the story of my self-righteous anger to my Minneapolis friend Becky. I referred to myself in the third person as "our hero" - this is how poker stories are told, and the main event of the World Series of poker had just begun in Las Vegas.

Our hero hadn't helped anyone. All our hero had done was yelled and made someone feel bad and then stomped off after having a bro moment with one of the kids who had taken advantage of that fucked up girl. I was sure that yelling and cursing and telling people they're shit and then peacing out couldn't be the best way to deal with ugly scenarios, but that was my modus operandi. At least I would never go along to get along.

I somehow managed to rack up a $50 tab at that mezcali, which is tough to do in Mexico. When I arrived back at my hostel I found another hostel guest, Sonya, outside and in a state of consternation.

Sonya was a young Russian with long red hair shaved on one side who worked in Chicago for a tech company as a corporate trainer (sounded project managementish to me - somewhere in that world of not a manager but not a coder either).

Sonya was stuck in Mexico due to confusion in the American immigration services over one or the other of Trump's executive orders. While in Mexico she had decided to get LASIK eye surgery, because it was about half the price there as in the states. Apparently she had gotten the surgery that morning, and then in the evening she had been jumped outside the 7-11 a block away. Now she was blind in one eye.

I had recently had LASIK surgery at a top notch clinic in Minnesota, so I called their 24-hour assistance line and had Sonya talk to the people at the Whiting Clinic.

I only heard one side of the conversation, and I was blackout drunk, so I can't really report on how that conversation went. I'm also not sure what happened afterward. I know we got more touchy. I think we embraced. I don't think we made out, but I'm not sure. It does in retrospect though seem entirely possible that I at least entertained the notion of taking advantage of a fucked up girl - the exact same thing I had been so self-righteously pissed off about all night.

I do know that we went to bed in separate rooms, because after whatever we did outside, I spent some indeterminate amount of time at the front desk of the hostel telling the women there all about my night. She was bored anyway. Turns out it's pretty easy to speak Spanish when you're blackout drunk. Probably I was misconjugating and using incorrect prepositions, but when you're that drunk I guess you don't care.

The hostel was a "capsule" hostel, meaning your bed was in a little cubby with a curtain. It provided a phenomenal level of privacy for a shared room at a hostel. When I finally retired to my room I lay down in bed with my laptop and started blasting metal music into my headphones.

I was too fired up to fall asleep, and at some point my racing mind landed on the idea that I wanted to fly to Las Vegas and play in the World Series of Poker main event. Fuck it, let's go. The problem was I had to buy in the next day by the dinner break, and in order to come up with $10,000 in cash I would have to fly to Minnesota first and visit my bank.

I spent 2 hours in bed researching flight plans and the best I could come up with was a flight plan that left a 1-hour layover in Minneapolis. My bank had a branch at the airport, but I had no way of knowing if they would have $10,000 cash on hand. Finally I decided I wasn't going to risk it, and I passed out.

Three hours later I was bleary-eyed on a bus to Oaxaca. I had apparently texted more with Amistad the previous night. In the misty light of morning we made some sort or reconciliation. I told her I was going to miss her. She wished me happy travels. I slipped off into a troubled sleep and hoped to wake up somewhere prettier.