The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America by Brian Kevin Page B
Authors: Brian Kevin
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young. What’s more, Sky had taken a shine to a lady friend of Ricardo’s—an absolute bombshell who had flirted with him mercilessly at Cirrosis and looked like a cross between Natalie Wood and Salma Hayek. Needless to say, she would be in attendance at the club’s opening night. So off we went.
The nightclub Las Tecas—which translates roughly and grandiosely to “The Archives”—looked like a discarded set piece from
Miami Vice
, bedecked with fake palms and so much neon that the room hummed audibly during the brief gaps between earsplitting reggaeton anthems. A sign above the backlit bar proclaimed that tonight’s party would feature BIUTIFUL STREEPERS . We settled into a nook with Ricardo’s crew, surrounding a table on which the proud newclub owner had set an unopened bottle of aguardiente and a tray full of shot glasses. When that bottle was empty, he produced another one, and another after that. And that’s pretty much how things went for the couple of hours I managed to stick out the party, mostly chatting with Ricardo about American pop music in a pidgin of his bad English and my bad Spanish.
I left the party around the same time that a topless blond woman came walking across the bar, spraying a mystery liquor into people’s mouths with a squirt gun that looked like an AK-47. I thanked Ricardo and the club owner, shared a round of cheek kisses with the women at our table, and told Sky that I’d see him the next day at Ivan’s.
Except when I woke up late the next morning, Sky wasn’t at Ivan’s.
Look at you, Don Juan, I thought admiringly, and I left him a note before heading out to find coffee and an arepa.
I spent much of that day sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking bad instant coffee and working my way through a long magazine article in Spanish about the international flak that Colombia was taking over its military-base agreement with the United States. There was still no sign of Sky when I walked back to the hotel in the midafternoon. His cell number went straight to voice mail, and Ivan said that he hadn’t come around. I laughed it off, but after a couple more hours and a few more unanswered calls, my amusement started to drift into concern. I didn’t have Ricardo’s number, I realized, but somehow I had ended up with the club owner’s from the night before.
He answered after a few rings. Our conversation was stilted, but he told me that he’d last seen Sky and Ricardo getting into a cab together sometime after dawn. Was I sure he hadn’t come back to the hotel? Positive, I said.
“Then I’ll come get you,” the club owner told me. “We can go look for him.”
A half hour later, he pulled up to Ivan’s in a silver Camry with a prominent spoiler, which I’d seen parked outside the night before. In the passenger seat was a girl who’d sat at our table. Both of them looked worried. I hopped in, and they tried to reconstruct for me what they remembered of the wee hours. They spoke quickly and talked over each other, and it was hard for me to keep track of their pronouns. Sky had danced with a girl who they both agreed was crazy. Or maybe her boyfriend was crazy, I wasn’t quite sure. At some point, somebody had been slapped—possibly Sky, possibly the girl sitting in the front seat. Everyone was drunk, they said, and things got a little tense. That much I understood.
“Dios mio,”
the girl up front kept muttering, which made me more nervous than I had been. You don’t understand, she said, fingering the beads on her necklace—some people here will take advantage of a drunken gringo. Kidnappings still happened from time to time, and it occurred to me that everyone in town knew who we were, the famed traveling American journalists.
“Dios mio,”
the girl repeated.
“Dios mio.”
The club owner drove in what seemed like arbitrary circles, stopping occasionally to ask acquaintances if they’d seen a tall gringo matching Sky’s description. No one had. The two of them
The nightclub Las Tecas—which translates roughly and grandiosely to “The Archives”—looked like a discarded set piece from
Miami Vice
, bedecked with fake palms and so much neon that the room hummed audibly during the brief gaps between earsplitting reggaeton anthems. A sign above the backlit bar proclaimed that tonight’s party would feature BIUTIFUL STREEPERS . We settled into a nook with Ricardo’s crew, surrounding a table on which the proud newclub owner had set an unopened bottle of aguardiente and a tray full of shot glasses. When that bottle was empty, he produced another one, and another after that. And that’s pretty much how things went for the couple of hours I managed to stick out the party, mostly chatting with Ricardo about American pop music in a pidgin of his bad English and my bad Spanish.
I left the party around the same time that a topless blond woman came walking across the bar, spraying a mystery liquor into people’s mouths with a squirt gun that looked like an AK-47. I thanked Ricardo and the club owner, shared a round of cheek kisses with the women at our table, and told Sky that I’d see him the next day at Ivan’s.
Except when I woke up late the next morning, Sky wasn’t at Ivan’s.
Look at you, Don Juan, I thought admiringly, and I left him a note before heading out to find coffee and an arepa.
I spent much of that day sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking bad instant coffee and working my way through a long magazine article in Spanish about the international flak that Colombia was taking over its military-base agreement with the United States. There was still no sign of Sky when I walked back to the hotel in the midafternoon. His cell number went straight to voice mail, and Ivan said that he hadn’t come around. I laughed it off, but after a couple more hours and a few more unanswered calls, my amusement started to drift into concern. I didn’t have Ricardo’s number, I realized, but somehow I had ended up with the club owner’s from the night before.
He answered after a few rings. Our conversation was stilted, but he told me that he’d last seen Sky and Ricardo getting into a cab together sometime after dawn. Was I sure he hadn’t come back to the hotel? Positive, I said.
“Then I’ll come get you,” the club owner told me. “We can go look for him.”
A half hour later, he pulled up to Ivan’s in a silver Camry with a prominent spoiler, which I’d seen parked outside the night before. In the passenger seat was a girl who’d sat at our table. Both of them looked worried. I hopped in, and they tried to reconstruct for me what they remembered of the wee hours. They spoke quickly and talked over each other, and it was hard for me to keep track of their pronouns. Sky had danced with a girl who they both agreed was crazy. Or maybe her boyfriend was crazy, I wasn’t quite sure. At some point, somebody had been slapped—possibly Sky, possibly the girl sitting in the front seat. Everyone was drunk, they said, and things got a little tense. That much I understood.
“Dios mio,”
the girl up front kept muttering, which made me more nervous than I had been. You don’t understand, she said, fingering the beads on her necklace—some people here will take advantage of a drunken gringo. Kidnappings still happened from time to time, and it occurred to me that everyone in town knew who we were, the famed traveling American journalists.
“Dios mio,”
the girl repeated.
“Dios mio.”
The club owner drove in what seemed like arbitrary circles, stopping occasionally to ask acquaintances if they’d seen a tall gringo matching Sky’s description. No one had. The two of them
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