Jack Kerouac Style

On Friday of last week I dispensed with the usual slew of pre-outing text messages, opting to take a night solo in the general spirit of adventure and meeting new people and what have you. I headed to a bar called Flux, a small basement place I'd met some Americans at a couple years ago, and in spite of it being midnight on a Friday the place was quiet, tranquilo. I sit myself down at the bar and after a minute start up a conversation with an Argentine to my left. His name is Luigi, and he quickly falls in love with me, as is the Latino courtship style, and though he leaves the bar after just a few minutes, he spends the rest of his weekend texting me. I'm ambivalent. I'm a friendly bar-goer, at best.

After Luigi rolls out I turn to my other side, where two mid-30s British guys are standing, and I strike up a conversation there as well. These guys, Matthew and Austin, are from London, honeymooning (apparently the gays are getting married in Britain, these days) and are wandering around South America for about three weeks. They make occasional sardonic references to Bush or Obama, to which whoever didn't make the potentially offending comment always says, "Oh, you had to take it there!" as though Americans are embarrassed by both of their major political parties (aren't we?). We get into the basics, what I'm doing here, what they're doing here, what we're doing back home, what music we listen to. Turns out that while in Rio the week before, on their way up to the Big Jesus, they happened to be riding (in a car? one of those trolley things? I don't know how you get up there) with a guy who runs the lights at Radiohead shows. Like me, one of them is a huge Radiohead fan, and it just so happens that the band is coming to Buenos Aires in the coming week (this past Tuesday, now). Tickets -- if not sold out -- are running at US$100 (far too much for my meager wages) but these guys manage to score a pair of free VIP passes from this trolley-traveling Jesus-seeking fellow. We run through the albums -- Kid A at the top of my list, The Bends (an older-school choice) at the top of Matthew's -- and then through Brit rock that's made it across the Atlantic generally. "From the floor of my room sophomore year," I tell them, "through those big Bose-style headphones, Champaign Supernova turned me into a stoner." It was a lame comment, but I couldn't help myself: it was the closest I'll get to personally thanking Oasis. And now I have to listen to a band called Pulp, because it's going to change my life.

The Brits know one of the bartenders here -- an English expat -- who recommends to them "an indie bar" about 15 blocks away. They ask if I want to come along and take care of translation needs, so we jump in a cab (15 blocks in this area isn't bad, but a distance like that at night is always wiser by car) and in 10 minutes we take to a sparsely populated dancefloor. They pick up a round of Budweisers (because I'm an American?) and we shift and sway and pass little messages from person to person like a game of international telephone. We scope and chat and Austin humorously waves his ring finger whenever the topic of marriage comes up. I cannot ascertain whether the gesture indicates ecstasy, exhaustion, or terror. My gut says ecstasy is the intention, but every time I see it I still think: terror.

I later catch the eye of a skinny, lightly-bearded Argentine, who smiles at me and laughs to himself when I smile back. Who laughs when you're flirting from across the room? Is this something people laugh at? I'm a pretty good audience, so the absurdity of this makes me chuckle, too. But I'm lost in a mob of people, on my way to get a round of drinks, so the laughter ends there, until I end up back at the Brits a few minutes later and the porteno (a porteno is a someone from BsAs) is there. The four of us talk for a bit -- the Brits share my love of Arrested Development, saying that when people say that Americans have no sense of humor (fuck, do people say that?) that's the show they point them to -- until the Argentine -- Andres -- and I end up talking off to the side. He speaks perfect English, studied law (for a semester) at Columbia (until the U.S. government kicked him out over a visa snaffu, though he was a legitimate student at the time) and has a norteamericano boyfriend from Seattle that lives in BsAs. He knows what Fulbright is. Argentines who know Fulbright are of a certain intellectual class, usually, and this speaks well of Andres. I tell him I'm tired of being hit on by transparent Argentines like Luigi, and that he should keep the boyfriend. We re-join with the Brits -- and the bartender from Flux who has now shown up -- and now, at 4:30, unable to last any longer, I head home solo to crash and burn asleep.

On Saturday night, I meet back up with Andres at a street corner in Palermo, and we catch a bus south towards Parque Centenario to check out a party his friend is throwing. It's 1:45 in the morning. To start any sooner, for the Argentines, would be incomprehensibly lame.

The party is in this slightly run-down, unoccupied little townhouse/apartment building thing. It's only a two- or three-floor set-up. Andres's friend's aunt owns the place and is looking to get rid of it, but as she apparently can't find a buyer, the home sits hollow as a cave, save for 100 inebriated Argentines who move and shake and light things on the rooftop. We all meander into little pockets where there's space to stand, shifting to the music, feeling a cool breeze under a surprising abundance of stars in the geographical center of a huge metropolis. As the night wears on, the air fills with the scent of sweat and harsh tobacco, and when the marijuana washes over us I am elsewhere, I am back in North America, I'm at RFK stadium and I'm 17 at a sunny HFStival, and I'm in Baltimore exhaling out over I-83 from a slanted rooftop on St. Paul Street. I am a million places and it's new and old and fresh and stale all at once. I am where I wanna be, like always.

Andres and I talk to a gay Aussie he knows who has been traveling South America for five months and leaves for London on Monday, to meander yet another continent. When we introduce ourselves, and he mentions going to London, he has to clarify that he's Australian -- I realize that Americans are probably in the habit of assuming he's British (as I had, at first). But I play it cool and don't make an ass out of myself. The guy is funny, kind of a ditz, and he spends five or ten minutes trying to relate the beat of an Argentine song he recently heard. He's looking for the song's title. The performance is pretty amusing but he doesn't get an answer out of anyone.

I drink a little red wine I found in the next room over (also open-air rooftop). I take it slow and enjoy another friend of Andres's who relates to us a number of humorous and self-deprecating stories about sociology professors she's slept with. Apparently sociologists are sexy. I plan to keep this in mind.

Hours pass and new people come and go through the crowd, and sometime after 5:00AM we begin to plot our exit. I leave with Andres, the Australian, and another Argentine. We wish the Aussie luck and he hops in a cab. Andres and I split our own taxi back to our neighborhood, I jump out at my block as he continues on, saying we'll meet up in a week. I crash at 6:00 in the morning.

I spend the following weekdays buried in research lit relating to my project, reading and reading and reading as much as I can. I feel lost, I feel heavy . . . occasionally there are minor breakthroughs, points where I not only highlight a passage but really highlight the shit out of this motherfucker . . . I'm throwin' an asterisk down on this guy! I do this all week long, absorbing as much of the dense Spanish writing as I can, and at the end of it I just hope that some point of synthesis is on the horizon. I don't know if I have too much background info, not enough . . . I might not have any idea what I'm doing. In fact . . . . I'm fairly certain that I have little idea what I'm doing. But I push through, trusting that all those asterisks will add up to enlightenment in the coming weeks.

I find a copy of Jurrasic Park in Spanish. Parque Jurasico. Sweet.

"But it's not a lizard," said Ellie.
"No. This is not a lizard: in 200 million years, not a single lizard with three toes has walked on this planet," said Grant.

But then what could it be, Dr. Grant?!