The Wrong Direction

The day ends or begins walking, aimlessly, from a club in some far off neighborhood, finding a pedestrian bridge over the highway to a train station. I pay for a ticket and stumble onto the train and take my seat until the conductor and two security personnel approach and try to tell me it’s the wrong one. I deboard, cross the tracks in the chilly dawn and make my exhausted way on the next train to Retiro. There I grab a strawberry topped pastry and take the circuitous subte route back to the very rough proximity of my neighborhood. I pass people engaged in the early morning ritual of hosing the dog crap off the sidewalk and go twenty or so blocks and make it home four hours after I started, 9am starting at 5.

The night starts when I grab a beer with the hostel set. I am quickly introduced and almost as quickly dispatched as the clan abandon the hostel pub to get something to eat, and never return. I fall in with a Brazilian girl and her friends and we set off on a misguided quest to find the club Suzuki. We got the name wrong. We are directed to a motorbike shop. When she asks me what I do for a living, I tell her about the forensics toxicology lab. When she still doesn’t get it, I give her some examples. "Marijuana?," she says " I love marijuana!"

She’s a self described Communist who embraces me when I tell her I hate George Bush. Abandoning our search for Suzuki, we duck into Ugi’s, a pizza chain, share a pie and a liter of Quilmes lager. My new friends chat about soccer with the pizza man until he crouches down and pumps up his fist shouting "Boca!" the name of the immensely popular blue collar soccer club in Buenos Aires.

The Brazilians are too tired and drunk to go out, so I join an Aussie and an American who have dibs on another group of Brazilian girls in a different hostel. We take a taxi to Puerto Madero to a club modeled, roughly, on the Sydney Opera House. Nearing 2AM on a Wednesday night, the action is breaking up preternaturally early. So that’s when we get on another taxi to the hinterlands of Buenos Aires to a club that was a melange of cigarette smoke and bad techno music. Inside is a token transvestite and a token whore dancing sinuously while balancing a cerveza on her head.

I wake up that afternoon and subte my way to Recoleta and grab lunch and espresso. Recoleta Cemetery is enormous and baffling. The coffins are in full view inside the mausoleums, housing a crucifix, candelabras, and small flower arrangements. The departed are often cast as a bust or included as part of a religious scene. A certain percentage may have ended up here after finding themselves hopelessly lost in the labyrinth and finally succumbing and eaten alive by packs of the feral cats residing within.

Literally out of nowhere a downpour lets loose and I duck into the free art museum. I tour the galleries with as much deliberation as I can muster, but its no use, the rain continues. I make a mad dash to the modern art museum where a puddle is forming on the marble floor from the dripping dome above.

On my way back, the downpour restarts in earnest and I try to sweeten the way with a side trip to Freddo, who mix up a mean, gelato like, ice cream. I’m soaked, but it ends, finally, and I dry in the howling, chilly air that follows.