Carnival
“Quito, Ecuador is a painting by Micah Mullen” — FineArtAmerica.com
I am drinking an Ecuadorian Pale Ale (Alc. 6.2%) in Manta, Ecuador while listening to Mozart. There’s salsa music or a radio station playing downstairs at one of the establishments … I live in the Barbasquillo section … an area being built up supposedly. There’s a cafe downstairs along with the two places to get ice cream at night. It’s 10:34. Carnival is over.
I’d first arrived in Quito (the capital city) back on December 2nd, coming from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I’d spent about five weeks there, mostly working on a project affiliated with a digital marketing company I’d been employed by since last June (when I was nearing the end of my 20-month stay in Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic).
The bastards had me writing articles on sports betting for BetMGM. One of the largest gambling companies on the planet had contracted their blog writing work to a third party for ghostwriters. This is the “Brave New World” you’ll hear old-timers talking about in bars or maybe on Facebook posts, who knows. I stopped scrolling Facebook in 2017 and the rest of social media as well. (Except Twitter because I fart noise am better than you, expletive. Fuck face.)
Let me just say that I have zero interest in being or seeming like a nice guy on the internet. I’m happy to be hated, despised, ridiculed, bombasted. Forgotten. I like walking down the street in a foreign country with a mangly beard and cutoff jean shorts as women walk across the street to get away from me and people stare at my face like I’m an alien creature. That’s fine. It means they’ll stay the fuck outta my way!!
I went to the southern area along the coast of Ecuador for the second time because I’d met a girl down there. I’d spent about a month or more in Quito. There, I had an expensive apartment in the financial district with two bathrooms and a largesse view of the back park. Many days I’d go to open the windows whenever it got hotter in the middle of the day to see the people on the corners, some of them poor or broken or mentally ill, and I’d think: hmm. This is good. I know what that feels like, and now I have a big flat-screen TV for a monitor where I work from the dining room table in a place I call my own.
I had a door man, and the elevator played classical music. The bed was big, and the apartment was filled with glass windows. I kept to myself, wrote, worked.
Then I thought, to hell with it. I’d been making plenty of money, and the bastards wanted more out of me for the same rate of pay. I spat on it all, then I decided to head for the coast.
Luckily, when I sabotaged my working on the project, the company didn’t boot me out entirely. I kept writing topics for various clients and that was good, yes. Make money, money make money. Have some, here’s some. Go fuck it in a bucket.
I was in Manta, along the coast. For one week. It felt strange. I’d been working so much for months after escaping Vietnam that I forgot what it meant to do nothing at all. One day, I drank by noon out at the beach. Later, by 5 PM, I was drunk, felt useless. It was the first day off (but not really) I’d had in months.
Still, I’d been teaching English online in the mornings. Aw, shit. Let’s get to the point.
Man, I went to Santa Marianita, had a Russian landlord, a place on the beach, went to Puerto Lopez, had an English woman for a host, then I went to Montanita, the most popular beach town in Ecuador, and for two weeks I stayed back in the woods, almost, in an apartment with two bedrooms and a whole shitload of insects.
I met her on the last night, a date, on the beach, she had these gorgeous eyes and I told her she looked Brazilian.
“Thank you! I take that as a compliment.”
There was a waitress there who was younger, and much more beautiful, but she didn’t speak any English. And she grinned, grinned at me whenever I talked to her or approached her. She wore one of those nineties hats and had this smile that melted my insides and made my knees weak. I wondered about her as my date talked on and on.
When it was finished, I suggested we go back to my place. She agreed.
Back there, we sat on a couch and talked and drank some more and she slid into me like a Dave Mathews Band concert in June when school’s out. Yeah! Hippies!
And when I mentioned weed or she did, suddenly our lips were locked and then I realized SHE WASN’T WEARING A BRA. So I dug a paper clip out of her shirt. And she said, “Oh, thanks.” And we went to bed and ruffled and rustled and she spoke in Spanish and put my hand on her ass.
She left. I went to bed, arms akimbo, beer dangling, in orange underwear.
I returned to Manta the next day on a three-hour taxi ride that cost $80 after drinking four tall cans of beer in the early morning into the afternoon, dancing in my kitchen with the sunlight pouring into the windows and the cleaning lady huffing and puffing, asking when I’d be LEAVING.
For the next two weeks, I got a place, paid for it for the rest of the month, worked, wrote, got rejections. And thought, hmm. Maybe I should go back down there and pin the tail on the donkey. Blindfolded. At the end of the world, everybody digging their own grave.
I went back down and stayed at a one-bedroom place right near HER’S … in Manglaralto, a town south of Montanita … after writing a play at night for a Dartmouth contest. In fact, after the three-hour bus ride, I scrambled into my new place, plugged in my laptop, finalized my submission (65 pages), and submitted everything about 10 minutes before the 5 PM deadline.
Then I went out to get something to eat on a dirt road a block from the beach. After the rice and shrimp and fried plantains, the owner who was covered in tattoos came to talk to me. He said he had a husband or boyfriend in Texas. Yeah, Texas is big. Ecuador is small. Oh, half Venezuelan. Fantastic.
He said he had Italian ancestry, and I said I did too. And then I rigamarole-d outta there and went to meet up with HER, what should her name be? Alice? No. Henrietta. Nah.
Something with an O. Ophelia. Yeah.
Ophelia was on the beach with her brother-in-law, her sister, her two-year-old nephew, and her cousin, a judge or lawyer. The rest of them worked for a media company or a production company except for the kid. He was shy, but not, a spark, blonde hair, full of fury, fire, curiosity, and intelligence.
The BIL was facedown on a towel, covered in tattoos, burnt to shit. Ophelia pulled out some dope as her sister Ariel’s earrings dangled in the sunlight. I wasn’t shy. But I didn’t smoke. So then it was done when the sun went down, but we were not.
We went out dancing (I changed my shirt) and after taking a cab we turned a corner and somebody dumped water on my head! YOU BASTARD, I’LL FIND YOU. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU JUST DID? I HAVE EONS OF GRIEF AND I’LL MAKE YOU DRINK WATER FROM A SPITTOON AND FLUSH YOUR JOY OUT WITH A FORK RIGHT THROUGH YOUR SPLEEN.
“Whoa,” Ophelia said, “calm down. It’s Carnival.”
We began on the tequila, which ushered in the … I believe the word is … fling.
The magic happened on the dance floor as her strapless dress barely covered her shoulders and her braless boobs flip-flopped into the night. She made me grab her ass, and smiled, laughing, grinning, we had more tequila, and as we danced she kept telling me over and over, “YOU’RE SO CUTE!” We kissed and bothered our neighbors, and I thought yes, at the end of the world, I want to be salsa dancing with a braless girl in a foreign country if not explaining to her how to order a cheesesteak in South Philly.
As she got drunk, I ordered her water and myself another beer. The place erupted, and we’d danced for hours.
I guided her out with my hand on her back and then we got into a cab and back at my place we made out and stripped and got into the shower to illustrate a Malecon maelstrom of sex. My dick stood at attention like saluting a flag. An eruption, a volcano. We were drenched, wet, drunk, tired. Ready for
Sleep.
In the morning, we laughed and rolled and tossed and farted and pissed and moaned and got up at 11 AM. The front lights were brutal and there were people out there making noises and that made me realize OH I AM HUNGOVER AND PEOPLE MAKE SOUNDS, GO AWAY FROM MY DOOR. COME BACK TOMORROW.
She joked about the Walk of Shame as I guided her out the door and to her car, offering her a pair of sunglasses.
“Thank you,” she smiled.
She took me out to an intersection after I realized I had nothing to eat at my new place. And I barely could stand up, grabbing a six-pack, some instant coffee, accidentally knocking over a glass bottle as girls giggled at me.
And the best night of all was the next night when her brother-in-law cooked this delicious meal at their little house elevated into the air with windows and chairs and a kitchen and a bedroom, bathroom, their hippie abode, her sister and brother-in-law and their two year old who smiled at the table eating bread and talking in Spanish, it was just him and I as the rest of them prepared the meal. He stared into my soul, grinning, silent, wondrous.
There were tomatoes with cheese and fresh-smelling basil, clams, and octopus drenched in garlic and salt and pepper, plus a local fish cooked to perfection, melted in butter with carrots and onions, so, you’re a writer — her sister said at the end of the night.
Yeh. Sometimes I write.
The rest of the week came as a whirlwind. And when I returned to Manta on Sunday after another three-hour bus ride, I thought about how fast life goes and Ophelia’s little cabin up on a hill in the middle of nowhere, rocky in her manual jeep, her bright eyes, her little Spanish asshole cat, the mosquitoes, the silence, the shoreline, the green, green trees, her cooking breakfast and dinner, and the net that surrounded her bed at night when she whispered to me, “GUAPO.”
We made it in the shower there too and in bed and in the morning when the sun elicited this human feeling, her arms around me and mine around her.
I got back to my place 150km north, and worked, made my rounds for beer and two smokes, and in the morning I awakened at 6 or 7 AM to finish an article for a client on the metaverse before working my other gig, and I thought, yeh … back to Reality.
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