Hitchhiking To Guatamala Part 12

Windy and Loyal get drunk with kids and philosophize with a pro ball player in Merida

We prepared to make our way back toward Cancun. We found a grocery store and loaded up on avocados which were 5 for a dollar. We also bought a spicy peanut mix, oranges, and bottled water. Pre-teen kids raced from register to register offering to bag groceries. We didn’t need it but we let them bag up our groceries and we tipped two of them each with one American dollar. They were very excited about this. They asked if they could carry our groceries out of the store for us. We told them we were good with carrying our own groceries. In front of the store were more kids, selling baggies with Jicama sliced up and marinated with orange juice and red pepper. We each bought a baggie and it was refreshing, the perfect food for the hot humid day.

After the hard time we’d had communicating and considering that we had to cross a border, we decided to take a bus back into Mexico. We headed toward the Mexico/Guatemala border, missing Belize. The bus was another “deluxe” type with reclining seats, TVs, and air conditioning, and again none of these worked. We were seated in the back and I was getting car sick as the bus bounced its way down the pockmarked highway. “Funny, I was more comfortable riding on top of the bus.” I told Windy and he agreed.

Looking out the window of the bus I saw a man on a bicycle in the distance. “Hey wouldn’t it be funny if that was the German?” I said to Windy. 

Windy looked, squinted, and then said, “That is the German.” He’d gotten closer now and I could see Windy was right. I slid window open the little bit that it would open and when he was close enough I yelled. “Hola, German!”

He smiled big and waved, “Hello, American boys! Hello!”

We waved back until the bus shot past him. The bus stopped back in the Yucatan at another ruin. Windy loved ruins. I really enjoyed the first ruins we saw near Cancun, and I loved Tikal, and now I was satisfied. I didn’t feel the need to explore any more ruins. I munched on spicy peanuts and cut myself slices of avocado with my buck knife and let Windy get his ruin fix. We were trying very hard not to spend money, and living mostly off of this spicy peanut and avocado diet.

As the afternoon grew late we set up on the edge of the highway and put our thumbs out. Being back in a touristy area meant we’d once again be passed by most of the cars. We kept our thumbs out for the better part of an hour before a semi truck pulled over. 

“Where you are going?” the driver asked, as we climbed in.

“We’re heading toward Merida.” Windy hollered back over the noisy engine and loud music crackling from old speakers.

“Merida! I will take you all the way. I am going all the way to Merida!” the driver announced. “I am called Frank!”

“I’m Windy. This is Loyal.” 

“Hello Windy. Hello Loyal. It is good to know you.”

The truck was the loudest, bounciest vehicle we’d ridden in yet. Windy tried to fall asleep on the cot that sat slightly behind the space between the driver and passenger seats. Frank hit me up for an English lesson.

“How do you call Police.” he asked.

“You got it. Police.” I answered.

“No, no, I know this, police, I mean… what do you call them?” he asked, emphasizing “you”. “We call them pero. You know perro?”

“No. I’m sorry, I don’t know this word, perro.”

“Perro, perro. Grrrrrr.” Frank pulled out his wallet and bit it, while continuing to growl. “Grrrrr.” I was laughing, at least partially out of nervousness as I barrelled down the highway in a stranger’s semi while he growled and bit his wallet.

“Oh, oh, DOG! You call them dogs?”

“Yes! Perro! Dog! This is the word. They are dogs because they take a bite out of our wallets. Grrrrrr.” he said, excitedly, continuing to bite his wallet.

“That’s great. We call them pigs.” I told him.

“Pigs.” he repeated back. “I don’t know pigs.”

“Um, pigs, big animals, ‘oink oink’”

“Oh, with the nose? Pigs?” He said and pushed his nose up to imitate a pig’s nose.

“Oink oink. Pig.”

“Yes. That’s it pigs. We call them pigs.”

“Ha ha! Great, very good. Pigs!” It was a long drive but the time passed quickly. Windy and I took turns laughing with our very loud, funny host, and trying to sleep while being thrown about the cab, trying to stay on the cot. Eventually we reached Merida after the sun had gone down. “Merida!” Frank announced. You get out here. I have to make a delivery there.” He pointed down a narrow alley.

“Will you fit?”

“Yes, I fit! But you will not be able to get out.” he laughed. 

We said our goodbyes to Frank with enthusiastic handshakes and shoulder patting and more growling and oinking. “Watch me fit!” I said. We stood aside and watched him roll his semi down the alley with no room to spare on either side. It was impressive.

“And he’s gonna back out of there?” Windy asked.

“I don’t see a path forward.” I answered. We headed down the sidewalk into Merida. Frank had dropped us in a seedy part of town with a strip club and several low rent looking bars. A few blocks further things looked a little nicer and we found a very cool hotel built around a courtyard in the style of a Spanish mission, which it may have been at one time. A room for the night was sufficiently cheap. Our room had one bed, but there were wall hooks for hanging hammocks so we prepared to sleep above the beds. I took some insecticide chalk that I’d brought from Sacramento and drew circles around the hooks to keep any insects from following the ropes onto our hammocks and our bodies.

“Oh, isn’t that stuff illegal?” Windy asked.

“Not in Little Korea” I answered.

We set our bags down and went out to explore Merida, an industrial town in the northwestern end of the Yucatan Peninsula. We found a crowded festive bar with an outdoor patio and ordered a couple of beers. I’d grown used to the scratched bottles, washed and reused. 100% recycling. It seemed like a good idea. As we settled in we began to notice something odd about the other people in the bar.

“Hey Windy, is everyone else here about 15 years old?” I whispered.

“I was just noticing that. What gives?”

Just then a pair of young boys sat down across from us at the long wooden table. “Hey, are you guys American?” a red haired boy with freckles and a Slayer t-shirt asked us. He had the slightest hint of a southern state accent.

“Yeah, we are. My turn to ask a question, how old are you guys? Suddenly I feel like an old man in this bar, and I’m not. I’m just a couple years past old enough to drink myself.”

“Yeah, in the US maybe? We ain’t been carded once down here, bro.” 

His friend, a tall lanky kid with dark skin and well coiffed dreads added, “We’re on a field trip. We’re band kids. There are kids from six different bands from six different schools here.”

“Are you guys performing?” Windy asked.

“Bro,” The redhead sighed, “we don’t even have our instruments. This is a celebration man. Senior trip.” Punching the last word of each sentence hard.

“And the grown ups with you aren’t stoppin’ you from drinkin’ in bars?” I asked.

“I think they’re in over the heads, man. There are just too many of us.” the kid with dreads answered and they both laughed hard and took big pulls off their beers.

“Well, you guys have fun, be safe, be careful. Don’t find out what jail in Mexico is like.” I said as Windy and I stood and made our way to the front of the bar and onto the street.

“You guys leaving?” a kid who was pretending to be drunker than he was asked us. “You should go around the corner to Ray’s. Ray’s is the place, man. Hell yeah.” He leaned toward me to whisper “Bro, you can get anything you want there, and I mean anything!”

“Anything?” I snapped back, feigning excitement. “Anything? Like crack, Special K, Heroin, Addrenochrome, soylent green, penguin porn? Anything?”

Suddenly a hand was clutching my arm around the bicep. I felt fingernails digging in. I hadn’t felt this particular grip on my arm since elementary school and I was certain that when I turned to look at my assailant it would be a school teacher.

“Go!” a woman with medium length auburn hair pulled into a tight bun, and fashionably oversized glasses snapped at me.

“Let go of me!”

“Go!” she snapped again, releasing my arm. 

“Where exactly do you think you are to be bossing me around? I’m not your kid or your student and we’re not in your school.”

“You just go.” she said again.

“You got a lot of nerve.” I shot back. “Why don’t you go tend to the minors you’ve got getting sloppy drunk in Mexico and telling strangers where they can go to get ‘anything’ and leave me alone?”

“You were offering a child drugs. Would you like me to call the police?”

“I was making fun of a child, and I’m so glad we both agree it’s a child here drinking at a bar, when he was telling me where I could…” I thought better of getting the dumb kid in any more trouble. “Go tend to your kids.”

Windy and I left. We did not plan on going to Ray’s, but when we walked by, it did look like a cool local bar, and best of all, it wasn’t full of drunk American band kids on a rampage. We went in and I ordered Rum. Just a straight shot of rum. It seemed like a tropical drink and I did not know bar drinks as I’d always been more of a wine, beer, or vodka drinker and preferred run down apartments or beaches to bars for drinking. I was served a shot of rum and a glass of milk. “Oh, just the rum. I don’t need the milk.” I told the bartender.

“You must have milk with rum, or you get sick.” he informed me, pushing both glasses forward on the bar.

“Well, I don’t drink milk, ever.”

“Then no rum.” he said, and he took both glasses from the bar.

“Okay, okay, I’ll take the milk.” 

I brought my drinks to a table in the corner and told Windy, “I need you to drink this milk.” 

I drank my rum, and we had a few beers and we were starting to feel drunk. “Why does it take so much to get drunk down here?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m definitely starting to feel a little tipsy.”

A loud song started playing and the six or seven other people in the bar let up a cheer. The bartender came out from behind the bar carrying limes and a bottle of tequila. “It’s shots time!” he announced. “Open your mouth Mr. Baseball!” A fit handsome black man in his thirties opened his mouth and leaned his head back. The bartender poured a generous shot directly in his mouth while the other patrons cheered. When everyone else had been served, the bartender turned to me and Windy in our corner. “Americans! Open up! It’s time to join the party!”

“Okay, I’m in.” Windy said.

“Yep, me too.” We joined the crowd of revelers, opened our mouths and swallowed a mouthful of tequila each.

Mr. Baseball was Stephan, from Georgia who lived in Mexico playing baseball professionally. “I was called up to the Majors in the US. I played a few years, was out with injuries more than I’d have liked, and aged out before really making a mark. Nobody’s excited to get my Topps card, but I played in Major League Baseball. Down here in Mexico, I’m one of the better players. I figure I got a few years here, and then maybe I can coach.” This sounded rehearsed but sincere

“You’re on a fuckin’ Topps card! Salud! We’ve been tempted several times to stay down here.” I told our new friend.

“People keep offering us jobs as tour guides, which seems like it would be amazing.” Windy added.

“You should stay. It’s gorgeous down here, and on this side of Mexico at least, they love Americans.” Stephan told us. 

“It’s tempting man. It really is.” I said, as the bartender refreshed our beers. “I’m realizing this maniac pouring that bit of free tequila was a brilliant marketing strategy. I planned to be back at our room long before now.”

“Ha ha, yes, yes, he knows what he’s doing. What do you do back in the states?”

“I’m bussing tables right now. I used to work at a pet store, and before that a record store. I tend to burn through jobs pretty quick.” I said, always hating this question.

“I’m still in school.” Windy added. “Studying design.”

“No, no, what do you do, not what is your job. I play baseball, I guess that’s my job also, and I hang out here and drink too much. Ha.”

“Oh, okay, that’s a much better question. I write poetry and stories and I had a band but we just split up. I’ll probably try to get another band together, or maybe try stand up comedy.” I often avoided mentioning comedy as I knew this risked being asked to tell a joke, but I was feeling loose. “Windy is a really great DJ.”

“A DJ!” the bartender boomed, as he picked up the empty bottles from our table. “An American DJ. Will you DJ for us?”

“Oh, um, you have a sound system?” Windy asked.

“We have a sound system!” he answered proudly. The bar had grown more crowded while we’d been there and there was now a good two dozen people drinking and talking. “Come on American DJ. Come see.”

We followed him to a back room housing a couple of kegs and shelves full of bottles of beer and liquor. There was a desk in one corner and next to it a stereo system that was probably the envy of all the other bars in the neighborhood when it was new, in 1976. “Mira, mira, look, look. I have many cassettes.” On the wall were shelves going up all the way to the ceiling full of cassettes, half of them boasting handwritten labels, all in Spanish.

“Let’s rock it, Mr. American DJ.” I said, putting my hands on Windy’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry, I usually use turntables and records.” Windy said.

“Oh this works just as good. I bought the best system they had and my tapes are the best.”

Windy reached out and picked a few cassette tapes based on nothing, just whatever caught his eye or wherever his hand landed. He looked through them not recognizing any names but he stacked whichever tapes made our host say, “Yes!” or “Very nice”. If a tape didn’t get a reaction, he put it back on the shelf. He put a tape in the first cassette deck and hit play. What came out of the speakers amazed and thrilled us. Loud techno bass under traditional Mexican sounds.

“Holy shit, is that tuba? That tuba is going nuts!” I laughed as Windy tried to read as much as he could from the hand lettered cassette. The music was all over the place, bringing in banda, norteno, mariachi and even ska, all with heavy danceable beats thumping underneath it.

“Oh my God, this is great.” Windy said. 

“Yeah, man, you’re a good DJ!” I laughed.

“Ha. I guess I just let this play. I don’t want to hang out back here all night.”

“I think you just have to go back every 30 to 45 minutes to switch or flip tapes.”

“Yeah, this is the easiest DJing gig ever.”

“You might have just gotten lucky. The next tape may be a dud.” 

We walked back into the front of the bar to find everyone up dancing. “American DJ!” the bartender yelled as Windy entered the room, and rousing cheer went up.

“Oh my god, dude. You’re a hit!” I said, clapping Windy on the back. We sat back with Stephan and were given another round of drinks on the house. “Gentlemen.” I announced to Windy and Stephan, “I am very drunk. Too many more of these and I’m not gonna be able to walk back to our room.”

“We’ll get you home, man.”

We continued to marvel at the sounds coming out of the speakers. “I need to find this music back home.” Windy said.

“Yeah, but I have a feeling nothing is going to taste as good, or sound as good, when we get back home as it does here.” I replied.

“I think you’re still just upset at finding out you love instant coffee.”

“No, no.” Stephan cut in. “You’re absolutely right. That’s the tropics, man. Everything is better down here. That’s for reals.”

“Hey Stephan, tell me something; is it possible to get a hangover down here?” I asked. “I mean, I feel like tonight is the night we’ll find out, but no matter how much we drink we wake up every morning feelin’ great and rarin’ to go.”

“Yeah, man. This place is magic.” he put emphasis on each word as he repeated “This Place Is Magic.” We nursed our beers as Windy switched tapes a few more times and we got around to trading life stories. Stephan had managed to travel all over the world playing baseball. He had a great go with the flow attitude and it seemed to be serving him well.

“I’ve got no focus man.” I reached the introspective level of drunkenness. “You had baseball. You’ve done so much cool shit, but it all centered around this great love and talent. Windy has design. I don’t know what I’m doing. This, this is what I want to do. I want to travel around and trade stories. Is that a job? Can I do that for a job?”

“Or just do it and do whatever for a job. We put too much focus on a job.” Stephan mused. “You’re an adventurer. That’s not a bad thing to be, man.”

“Well, a job bought these plane tickets and paid for these beers.” I returned.

“I believe I paid for these beers.” Windy said. I gave him a dirty look.

“So work a job, but do what you love and the job is just there to support that. It doesn’t have to be central to who you are.”

“I don’t know, man. I feel like that’s easier to say when you’re the guy who has always made his living playing baseball.” I snapped back more sharply than intended.

“Always? No, no, not always. I started working with my dad when I was 13 years old, man. He had a business cleaning windows. He was Ray the Window Guy. He was the hardest working man I knew and I worked my ass off with him for years. But yes, baseball made things easier. I went to school on scholarship, and baseball introduced me to world travel.”

“You are talented, hardworking, and you’ve had some luck. That’s awesome. There are other people who are just good at money. I think people who grew up with money have these subtle cues to other people who grew up with money, things they don’t even realize, the cut of their pants, their vocabulary, their sense of social etiquette, and they find each other and make deals. They’ll meet a guy like me, and they might like me, they like hearing my stories, but I’m not who their gonna invest in. What makes someone like Cary Grant so unusual is that he studied the rich and he was able to imitate them. He snuck in. But that’s the exception. Mostly, if you didn’t grow up with money you’ll never be in their club. You can still get money, but you gotta get lucky, or work hella hard, or be hella talented, probably a combination of at least two of those. Now, I’m not interested in working that hard, so I’m hoping a talent shows up, and some luck comes my way. And even if I managed to make a lot of money, if I had kids, they’d be slobs like me for the most part, just like I had a New York accent from my parents even though I was a Californian. But they’d have a good chance of losing the accent eventually, and their kids, they’d be in.”

“I don’t think that’s true.” Windy said.

“Like I said, sometimes the people with money don’t even realize they’re recognizing each other. You just think this guy and you hit it off, have a lot in common, but it’s because you both grew up not drinking powdered milk.”

“You were talking about me?”

“What? No, I mean the universal you, the royal you.” my head was spinning and I was desperate to change the topic. “What about love, Stephan? Your life sounds amazing, but you also seem like a solo flyer. Don’t you get lonely.” I asked.

“I’ve had love. I’ve had lots of love and I hope to find someone I can share my life with. I know I will one day.”

“How do you know that?” Windy asked. 

“Windy’s not sure he believes in love.” I slurred.

“Ah, did you get your heart broken, Windy?”

“No. It's not like that at all. If anything I broke someone else’s heart. I don’t know. Love the way it’s talked about and written about and sung about, it just seems like something we’re trying to talk ourselves into. We put so much effort into giving it the hard sell. I mean, I love my friends. I love my family. But this “in love” thing, I just don’t know that I buy it. It’s like a vestigial organ from a time when that kind of connection served a bigger purpose, you know?”

“Oh wow, man. You’re both getting heavy. I think I need a few more beers.” Stephan said.

“Loyal is in love with Chocolate and porn.” Windy blurted out, eager to stop having all the attention.

“That’s not what I said. I believe in love.” I countered.

“Yeah, but you believe it's what you feel when you eat chocolate or look at porn.”

“No, no, I’m being grossly misrepresented. Ha! First off, good chocolate, good porn; secondly it’s not what I believe. It’s a fact. Chocolate triggers the same chemicals that your brain releases when you’re in love. That’s why we like it. That’s why we  have associated it with romance, with Valentine's day and such. It sounds so bad to say I feel the same about chocolate and porn as I feel about my girlfriend, but flip it around, and suddenly it’s poetic. Darling, being in your presence delights my senses like fine chocolate melting on my tongue. That’s nice, right? You could put that in a Hallmark card.”  

“I don’t know. I think it’s still a bit insulting. I wouldn’t want to know my partner loved her Snickers bar the same as she loved me.”

“Well I pity you.”

“Oh, why, because I don’t know love?” Windy said sarcastically.

“No, because you’ve obviously never had really good chocolate.” I said with a laugh. “Or seen really top notch porn. I can hook you up with some of each when we get home.” I turned back to Stephan. “Would you settle down and get a boring job for a relationship?”

“If someone loves me, they probably wouldn’t love that boring guy. They fell in love with Mr. Baseball, not Mr. Tax Accountant.”

“But don’t most people eventually wake up next to their spouse, the tax accountant?” Windy asked.

“Or the school teacher.” I added.

Windy started laughing. “This guy hates school teachers.”

I told Stephan the story of the teacher who grabbed my arm at the last bar. Stephan laughed, but Windy was laughing harder, a different flavor of laughter. “Dude, dude, no. That is NOT how it happened.” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh my God, man. I was there. It just happened. You were not that calm or that polite.”

“Well, maybe I was angrier than I’m expressing now.”

“You didn’t say those words.”

“I didn’t?”

“You absolutely didn’t. She grabbed your arm and you were like, ‘Get the fuck off of me, bitch. Don’t you fucking touch me. I ain’t your fucking kid.’ You called her a bitch like three times. You cursed a blue streak.”

This was not the way I remembered it, but as Windy described what I said, it sounded right. “Well, what I said I said is what I was thinking when I said what I really said. What I meant to say.” 

“You sound so calm and cool in your version of the story. You were not calm or cool.”

“Next rounds on me!” I said, waving the bartender back over and fixing Windy with a look that said I was aware that we had already spent way more money than we’d agreed to for the evening. “And some chips and salsa too, please.”

“To Generation X” Stephan said, raising his bottle in a toast, desperate to change the subject and relieve the tension.

“What even is generation X?” I wondered, as I took a long pull off the fresh bottle the bartender had brought.

“I think we’re a generation who is going to do some good things. We have the hippies’ idealism, but we’ve watched them become yuppies so we know the risk. We’re more realistic.” 

“Realistic, or defeated?” Windy added.

“We’re a generation without a war.” I mused. “Every generation of this century has been defined by their war. The Lost Generation were damaged by World War I. The Greatest Generation fought and won World War II. The silent generation grew up in their shadow, but also had Korea and then the beginning of Vietnam, and the Baby Boomers had ‘Nam.” 

“We had the Gulf War.” Stephan offered.

“Yeah, but no draft. When that war started I thought ‘Here we go’. I was 18 and it just seemed to fit the pattern. But it was always weirdly distant. There was no draft for one. There was no rationing. Nobody I knew died and nobody I knew even knew anyone who died. In the whole war a few hundred Americans died. Not a few hundred thousand, a few hundred. That’s not a generation-defining event. It was a very one sided war as far as dying goes.”

“But we’re defined by what didn’t happen?” Windy asked.

“Yes. We’re unique in the lesser degree of that specific trauma that we’ve had to endure. We get called soft, and aimless. They call us slackers, but we’re having to figure out what the fuck you do with yourself when you don’t have Nazis or Commies to fight, and we’re maybe a little soft, which is a good thing. It’s a privilege to not be hardened by war. How weird that this should be used as an insult. They talk about our extended adolescence. Maybe this is how long it takes to become an adult when you’re allowed the time, when you don’t have to grow up on your 18th birthday so you can go fight Hitler and Tojo. I hope the next generation gets to be softer still. If we’re the first generation not to suffer that trauma, let’s see what they're like as the first generation to be raised by people who weren’t scarred by generational trauma. We’ll call ‘em soft, and spoiled and they’ll see us as damaged and they’ll be right. And I’ll be right.”

“I’d say not as scarred. I mean, we had the cold war, the constant specter of nuclear war isn’t nothing. I think I have a good five years on you two, but let me tell you, that shit was for real.” Stephan added.

“Oh yeah. I remember duck and cover.” Windy said. “The joke around the school yard was, if the bombs fly the best thing to do would be to sit down, put your head between your knees.” all three of us finished together “And kiss your ass goodbye.”

We all took a pull of our beers in an unofficial toast. “Where are you boys on religion?” Stephan asked. “I mean as long as we’re covering the big subjects. I’m a Catholic.”

“Uh oh. You brought up religion. Loyal has some strong feelings on religion.”

“My only feeling is that once someone mentions God it’s a good queue to go to bed.” I was self conscious that I had been drunk pontificating already. One of my least favorite side effects of drinking was that I talked too much. I was often complimented for it, called the life of the party and all that, but I’d always feel embarrassed after. For this reason I preferred to drink with close friends in small groups.

“Ah, not a happy topic? Sorry I brought it up.” Stephan said.

“No, no, man, it’s fine. I’m a lapsed Catholic atheist, but mostly I just think religions become irrelevant and I’m drunk and I believe we have a market to get to in the morning.”

“Ah, the Merida market is fantastic. Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll pray for your eternal souls.” 

We laughed, and shook hands, and said goodbye several more times the way drunk young men do as a show of affection until finally Windy and I stumbled off into the night.

“Can you find the hotel?” I asked Windy.

“I think so… maybe, yes, yes, I know this street. Definitely, no, wait…. Ah here we are, I think.” 

We made it back to our room. Getting into the hammocks was challenging in our drunken state. Windy gave up and fell asleep on the bed. I stubbornly kept at it until I succeeded in getting into and staying in the hammock. I had the spins and this combined with the swaying of the hammock made it feel quite likely I would vomit before the night was done. I considered getting up and trying to vomit as this would usually serve to get me on the path to recovery more quickly, cutting to the chase, embracing the inevitable, but I didn’t want to deal with the challenge of getting back into the hammock.

‘Windy is an asshole’, I thought to myself. ‘Why did he have to correct my story. Jesus, did I really call that teacher a bitch? I think I did. But I’m telling a fucking story, in a bar. It's not journalism. I told it the way I remember it, which is the way of every story ever told. Was he still bent about the money? He was awfully gracious about it, but maybe he felt like he had to be. He’s stuck traveling with me. Me not having money was going to ruin the trip. Fighting with me about it would ruin the trip. Fuck, I hope he’s not gonna rip into me once we get home. He doesn’t get it. He comes from money. Does he? Why do I think that? He grew up in the foothills and he’s going to school. His parents must have money. Your dad has a nice house’, I argued with myself. ‘You’re not going to school has nothing to do with money. Your dad would give you school money. He just won’t give you fuck around and do nothing money. Fuck. Maybe I am an asshole. He's going to school and he knows what he wants to do and he’s smart and capable. If he has to go to his dad to borrow money his dad will think, ‘No problem. I can loan you money, my son who is doing great things.’ My dad will be like, ‘What are you doing? You have to manage your money better. Are you going to work at a restaurant the rest of your life?’ So it’s fair that Windy should pay my way because he planned better and has his shit together and is disciplined? God damn I wish I was sleeping. I wish my brain could stop. I’d rather be puking than this. I think tomorrow we will finally have tropical hangovers.’

Eventually I fell asleep.