A friend-in-need invites a traveler on a spontaneous trip to Puerto Rico, where he attempts to distract her from her pain by indulging in the local sports scene, leading to a test of their moral strength at an out-of-town cockfight.
In Spanish, only one letter marks the difference between penis and penalty.
But one letter can, sometimes, be enough: just one letter, in fact, was what got me up and rarin’ to head down to Puerto Rico. It’s one letter–well, really, an email–that Liz sent me one December evening, early, probably before dinner, that got me on a plane. One letter, sometimes, makes all the difference.
She had gotten, received, acquired, was now carrying, and was totally losing her mind about both gonorrhea and herpes; at the same time, from the same man, whose last name and last known whereabouts were unknown to her. Where he’d last been and what he’d last been up to were unknown to her. What was known, though, was that he had given her something lasting.
To clarify: it was not my fault. No surer alibi in all the world was to be had than mine: I was in a different state, of both location and mind, when it happened. But we were friends; true friends, the kind that come out of nowhere, turn up for foul weather, and she emailed me to say that she was all alone, feeling terribly scared, and would I please, if I didn’t mind, if I had a moment, come down and see to her?
What, I replied almost immediately in a just-one-letter response, do the travel posters for Puerto Rico not mention the gonorrhea and the herpes?
I had already booked my ticket.
We live in a world where you can get anywhere at any time, and the next morning was soon enough for a three-hour hop to my turquoise waters and her red body sores. My amber sunlight and her white muck. But most healing is really the art of misdirection: your trick knee hurts less at the theater, your cold is more contained with someone to just gently lay a hand on yours.
I arrived in time to escort her to the doctor–a tall, slender, tanned man so handsome that it only added to her embarrassment as she explained the problem–who gave her an ample cocktail of daily medications, taken three times daily: the antibiotics, a one week course of pills so large one wondered if their normal recipient wasn’t a horse with the clap, came first. But because of the unique problem she faced, he also wrote her a slip for retrovir, an antiviral he suggested might help with the herpes outbreak, and a medication that would help with her pain, which was considerable. He chided me for doing this to her, but complimented me for seeing it through. I corrected him on neither point. And he urged her, in the most stringent terms, not to ever, ever drink while on these medications.
She took her pills with a piña colada, and then, at home, I pulled out her blender and made two more to chase it, bringing them out to the rocking chair where she’d plopped down on her inside balcony. It was, thanks to her lofty government job, an absolutely lovely home: in San Juan’s old quarter, she lived alone in an early colonial house that smelled of cedar and sandalwood, mounted over an interior courtyard with nothing above it but the clouds and one long vine that had curled up over the roof and wound its way down back towards its Mother Earth. When it rained–as in that yuletide season it did several times daily–the whole sky releasing its grip on an unreasonable, unseasonable storm of rain coming whipping swift and long as chains down into that narrow riad interior. With your eyes closed, you could imagine yourself not in a forest, but a tree yourself, such was the bodily perfume of that ancient, fragrant wood and the stillness in the sound between the rain. It was, if I’m honest, hopelessly romantic, and one could see how a person might be inspired, on such a warm, wet afternoon of lowering light, to go and risk with a stranger damn near every venereal disease known to man.
My plan was, to reiterate, one of distraction. I figured that if I could keep her attention elsewhere long enough, she’d forget that everything hurts. And so I purchased tickets to a baseball game, perhaps selfishly, as in my years of travel around America, I’d learned that if you have to be alone far from your people, it’s still better to be alone together. Even on December 12, for that, my imaginary never-reader, was in fact the date that the Puerto Ricans still round the bases. We were going to see the Carolina Gigantes play the Mayaguez Indios-Tiburons–the Giants versus the Indian-Sharks, raising questions about what precisely makes one shark more indigenous than any other–on the Gigantes’ home turf, not far from San Juan itself.
On our way to our seats, we stopped in at the hot dog stand; music was blaring, it was a still-warm winter night with the air a little thick with steam from the afternoon rains, and behind the counter stood two young men in white caps, little with a sickly greenish fluorescent light draped on them like a pall. We ordered a bunch–five or six- of the “standard,” a hot dog topped with sofrito-based chili, nacho cheese, and crinkly potato chips. To drink, they served two things: cheap beer and cheap (two dollars!) piña coladas.
We sat down in our seats, ate our hot dogs, and watched one team lose to another. The crowd was more sparse than you’d expect, but nevertheless lively; Liz washed down her second dose of pills with the illicit colada, and then I headed back to the stand to fetch even more.
I could not possibly tell you who won. I can tell you that among life’s surprises, one of the finest is that crushed potato chips are a fine, just a fine topping on a hot dog.
Leaving the stadium after the squad we’d rooted for to win and had done so–or perhaps with our heads hanging in sadness at the terrible loss of our beloved team (for who remembers? who cares?)–she recalled a little delight, a random late joy: the culprit of her unhappiness had mentioned to her that he knew of, and would one day take her to, a cockfighting stadium an hour out of town.
He, of course, never called her again. I came calling, instead.
“Do you want to… see a cockfight?” she asked me. Now, I like to think myself a moral man. I try to be a decent man, or to at the very least keep the arc of my life bending in that direction. A cockfight is something I would never, ever endorse, and I, of course, told her so. Immediately. Without any hesitation.
So, anyway, it was almost midnight as we made our way to the cockfight.
The parking lot was full–you’d think it was the Super Bowl–and not only was it full, but every car was one of luxury, on an island where wealth is few and far between. One got the sense, walking past a row of Porsches and Lamborghinis in a territory where many struggle to find food or keep lodging, that anybody who was anybody… who was bad… was there.
That sense is correct.
The stadium was set up not unlike a gladiatorial arena of ancient Rome. At the center was a small, tight circle, twenty feet wide, maybe, with concentric rings of weathered seats going up into the rafters, where we have fixed ourselves in the very highest row. A series of circles made quite an echo. And everybody there had quite a lot to say.
At the ringside, well-dressed men–shiny silver suits, almost like a uniform among them–held wads of cash, tens of thousands of dollars each, in their hands while beefy, evil-looking men loomed over them and watched for the even more immoral.
There is no other way to put it but this, no poetry in the paint of it: my god, the horrible things we think of. The roosters–rude, riled–pecked at each other, pulled out one another’s eyes, and maimed each other. Sometimes they killed quickly, sometimes a rooster was left broken and bleeding on the ground, hoping to die until some small man came and picked it up, carried it upside down by one leg, and obliged it. When a rooster struck–which they did constantly, it was a barely intelligible pigpen of dust and blood and feathers in circular-saw clouds–the whole crowd cheered, which turned into an exclamation point frenzy whenever one rooster punches his beak with finality into the other. There is no sport to it, just barfight and rage, but the money that passed back and forth between the bad men below was intoxicating to watch.
After each round, a bevy of impertinent women with implausible bodies, in bikinis so trim they are the second most illegal thing in the room, carried around signs like it was a Vegas title fight. Still more carried around concessions–more piña coladas to wash down the third round of pills (sorry doc) and also plate after plate of freshly fried chicken, wrapped up in plastic, warm and steaming. I asked one woman if what I suspect is true, and she happily confirms that yes, they were selling, portion by portion, the losers.
It’s an atrocious, horrible thing in which I obviously would never, ever engage.
So anyway, the fried chicken, fresh and peppery, tasted incredible with the illicit coladas, which we enjoyed over two more fights before deciding, after one particularly horrible encounter left both cocks down for the count, the penalty having been earned by both, that it’s time to go.
The road back to Liz’s house caressed the coast the whole way, with each and every small churl of the Caribbean lit up by moonlight, small beaches punctuating little groups of houses, resort communities, shack homes. At one point, I pulled over abruptly with no warning, overtaken by the charm of it all. We stepped out from my horrifically illegal parking job towards the remains of a couple-centuries old fortification, just as weathered by time–and timed by weather–as everything else here.
The two of us clambered up onto the old stone wall that, for all I know, some sweaty Spaniard (he too rife with disease, he too so far from home) had put down five centuries ago, long forgotten but, like his diseases, lingering ever forward unto now. All those conquerors brought their diseases, found new ones, met and mingled with the locals and the people they brought, and the people they visited back home and brought over with them, just one century after another, catching each other like colds. They still live on, here, in the loins.
We sat there on that wall, the stars constellating above us, tiny islands on a wide, long sea. For a brief moment, we almost met.
We never touched. And at some point, we lost touch, too. But she’s still there, on that fence, young and dumb and briefly happy. If she’s changed, I’d never want to know. Two decades have, since, passed on, like all the wrinkles on all those waves, one into another and another and another and another and another and, and, and.
My god. I can feel every minute of my years.
