Chavez and a Shot

"Oye, Gringo!" It was a woman's voice, harsh and angry in the darkness. I ignored it and kept walking. Let the locals yell all they want, if that's what makes them happy. Never anger the natives.

The sidewalk lurched left, then right. "Earthquake country," I muttered, grasping for a street sign and catching it on the third swing. The taste of rum and mint on my lips made me curse Hemingway for making Mojitos popular amongst literary types. "Damn you pappy! Damn you and your six toed cats!"

It was late, past two in the morning, and the flow of cars had ebbed almost entirely; only a shiny new Volvo kept pace with me. College kids maybe, although they looked shady. The driver was still yelling angrily in some crazy voice. "Tongues maybe? these kids nowadays and their crazy religious cults."

"Gringo! What the fuck are you doing here?" I spun and lurched toward the passenger side of the car. The girl in the passenger seat looked uncomfortable. Did they just now realize that they had been harassing someone from the most violent culture on the face of the planet?

"What are you doing in Venezuela?"

"Walking home from the bar." It was a perfectly sane answer, but the driver cursed again and then, after an angry spit out the window, she spoke rapidly in Spanish. A long haired boy in the back grinned, and I tried a glare, but only succeeded in leaning my head all the way into the window, right up close to the girl in the passenger seat. I had been in Venezuela for just under 10 hours, and already I was making new friends. I had flown in at the invitation of another journalist to "hang out and get my feet wet in South America." The story was simple: Daily life in the New Venezuela. President Hugo Chavez had just solidified his socialist intent, and an ever-escalating war of words with the Bush administration in the North was getting nasty.

"What's this all about anyway? Can't you see I'm working?" The driver continued to glare angrily, but the passenger was now interested.

"Oh, you're from the North?" What was wrong with these people? Drugs I figured. The rum hadn't worn off yet, and I was now leaning all the way into the car, my legs slumped worthlessly against the door.

"Fucking Gringos. You come down here and think you can write about Caracas. You don't know anything. Fuck it?Get in, we'll show you the real Venezuela." I crawled into the backseat beside the filthy boy. His hair was greasy and long, tied back in a ponytail. His teen angst smelled a lot like marijuana and body odor. He didn't like gringos. We had that in common.

"Step on it!" I blurted drunkenly as we sped off into the darkness towards the mountain and the surrounding barrios.

Douglas didn't speak English, though the girls in the front seat did. Irene, the passenger wore thick black-rimmed glasses over stupefied eyes. Rosa was the angry driver whose English was more like Spanglish, though with more fucks and shits than feel good movie moments. The Volvo sped through narrow alleys up the mountain as Douglas rolled a joint full of skunk weed.

"The shit grows everywhere here." Irene pointed out. "Its not that good, but it doesn't cost anything." It looked like yard clippings, and smelled about the same, but that didn't deter Douglas, who took deep drags. His dry lips barely dampened the papers, and his face was gray from countless years of abuse.

"Most kids in the barrio start smoking crack around ten," a policeman in one of the nastier parts of town would later tell me. "Before that they sniff glue." As there was a lack of good glue in the car, we passed around a cheap bottle of whiskey instead. We ended up going to Douglas' apartment in Los Acias, a rundown side of town inhabited mostly by dilapidated buildings and feral cats. Irene and Rosa didn't actually know Douglas; they'd just picked him up a few moments before they saw me. Irene looked upper middle class while Rosa was part of the rich elite. It was an odd trio that I had fallen in with, and it was clear what held them all together.

"He's got cocaine," Irene pointed out. I didn't know about cocaine, but I did figure he probably had hepatitis and a knife, both of which should have worried me much more than they did. Rosa parked behind a shoddy wall lined with barred windows and broken glass. We ventured up black staircases winding up and up into urine soaked apartments.

Inside, the walls were the color of limes and great chunks were eroding off onto the brown tile floor. There was no furniture aside from a purple sleeping bag spread out in the back room. A lonely lightbulb swung from exposed wires in the cracked ceiling, and all I saw in the kitchen was a jug of filthy water sitting in an even filthier sink. We walked back towards the bedroom and its sleeping bag.

They took turns cutting lines of coke and snorting them off the dirty floor. They bitched about politics and life in general. Irene hated the opposition. Rosa hated Chavez. Douglas hated just about everyone.

As a matter of fact, Douglas was looking more and more pissed every second. I caught him eyeing me. These girls had gone to his place because he had cocaine. I was sure he had the barter system in mind, and as he eased closer to Irene, his eyes were a little less glazed over with drugs than they were with lust. Rosa didn't notice. She kept snorting line after line.

"Jesus, your head is going to explode." I'd never seen anyone ingest such an inordinate amount of drugs, but she kept going, talking faster and louder about politics and literature. If she mentioned a book I had read before, she would immediately change the subject to something I was unfamiliar with. Rosa couldn't handle rebuttal. Irene on the other hand was looking nervous. Douglas' grey faced advances were far from welcome, and I thought his chances of closing the deal on the purple sleeping bag while Rosa and I debated on the literary styles of Gabriel Garcia Marquez mere inches away were only a bit more than slim. Irene nudged Rosa. "I want to leave." She whispered, but the cocaine was in charge of this party, and come hell, high water, or heart failure, Rosa was in it for the long haul.

Irene got up and went to the bathroom. Douglas followed. A few minutes later when she came back, her face was red.

"Rosa." She shook her by the arm, but that didn't even break Rosa's train of thought. The light staining the floor with shadows of barred windows was brighter now. "He flashed me in the bathroom. I want to go home. Please." Douglas sauntered in and leaned up against the door, his pants unzipped and lowered over thin hips. Long curly hairs poured out from behind the crevice of his zipper. He eased over next to her on the purple sleeping bag, his legs open and his hips turned so as to expose his genitals to both girls, in the hopes that the mere sight would drive them instantly mad with lust. Rosa kept talking and Douglas eyeballed me as if to say.

"Gringo, you better run some kind of interference." The rules for wingmen are the same even in Spanish, but Rosa wasn't used to being interrupted, and besides, it wasn't like I could've taken her into a different room to talk.

Irene pleaded for help, first from Rosa, then from me, and I relented. "You know, I've got to get going. I've got a meeting in a few hours." Irene jumped. "Yeah, we better take him home now." Douglas' eyes narrowed into slits and I thought the time for battle had come, but he relented and showed us the door. He said something in Spanish as we exited into the piss stained hallway.

"What did he say?" I asked, assuming it amounted to "fuck you gringo." "Venezuelan women are like microwaves. They heat you up, but won't cook you." Rosa answered, finally done with her ranting. I laughed as we headed towards the Volvo, shining in the pre-dawn light. I stopped smiling though when I reached my hotel, and found the doors locked.

Two employees hung back from the door, looking tired. "Come on you lazy bastards." I thought as I rapped on the glass, making eye contact first with one, then the other. With a great show of effort, and a heaving groan, one of the men made his way to the lock and unhinged it.

"Thanks." I offered, without really meaning it. The man turned his back to me and grunted. There were two other gringos in my hotel; a journalist from New York writing for Harpers and a photographer who lived in Paris. They tried to wake me up in the morning. "Too much research last night," I mumbled, and they left, unconvinced. It wasn't until the leak in my ceiling went from a slow drip, to a pour, that I roused myself and splashed through the soaked carpet into the bathroom. I didn't have hot water, and the horrific sounds I made under the icy grip of the shower echoed in the corridor.

My head clearing, I thought about what Rosa had said the night before. "Chavistas are all the same. They just beg, always wanting something. They stand there on the street corners and expect us to give them everything."

"I read that 80 percent of Venezuela is in poverty. It can't be all their fault. Can it?" I had asked, wary of her angry fits.

"Oh? you read. Yankees always read. You come down here and make judgments. Help the poor you say. Why can't they help themselves? I work hard. I go to school. They don't do anything. You don't understand anything."

She was near screaming, helping herself to even more cocaine from a plastic baggy she kept in her bra; not bothering to cut lines anymore, just snorting large clumps off her fingers.

"Ok, so you don't like socialism or Chavez. I can dig that, but you have to admit there are problems here. I mean, 20 percent of the population holds like half the wealth, right? Most of the people can't read or write. Besides, Chavez won 3 elections didn't he?" "He fucking cheated. They used these new machines and everyone knows he cheated. And what's wrong with some people having money? So long as we work for it, we should be able to keep it." I hadn't felt like telling her that the Organization of American States had overseen the elections and said they were clean. I asked her what her father did and she didn't answer. I didn't have to ask what she did; I could see it all over the tip of her nose and in her reddened eyes.

I had grown tired of arguing with Rosa. She was one of those people that can be angry about any topic. She was young and privileged, and would always be. According to the Chavistas, she was the embodiment of the opposition. Escualidos; weaklings, Chavez had called them; the social elite in one of the South America's most dichotomous nations. This called for more research.

Suka is the oldest and most popular bar on the strip of Altamira. Thick rope hammocks hang from the corners and are constantly filled with throngs of lusty youngsters, exhausted from long days of spending daddy's money. This was not your run of the mill South American discotheque. The styles were European and everyone had a lofty look about them that only served to alienate the jeans-wearing American journalist who was busy eagerly downing shots of Cuervo at the behest of the owner.

Cushions lined the walls and corners where flocks of 20-something girls giggle and laugh. The men stood apart, smiling, their ties pulled loose around their necks and their shirt sleeves rolled up, eager to put the white collar work day behind them. The whole place is a façade; behind the joyous carelessness on their faces lurk worrisome, distrustful eyes. Altamira is a deserted island of wealth in a sea of poverty, and its sole palm tree might as well be Suka bar. Here flourish the last remnants of the glory days before the economy began to fail in 83. Just beneath the surface, opposition talk abounds. The people here are pissed, and if you get them started, they'll talk you right through your drink, and the next one, and then interrupt you while you try to stagger off to the bar. German and British businessmen, filling spaces that have emptied as US companies are forced out, drink Heineken and look stodgy. "Chavez is ruining this country?

"Can you believe we have to pay taxes, we never had to before? "He's stealing our oil money.

"One more round over here please, a shot and a mojito.

"Communist. That's all he is. He wants to turn us into Cuba. Now there are Cuban doctors and advisors everywhere. We are democratic! Not communist! He says he's the people. Can you believe that? We're the people."

"My dad is a banker, now Chavez is taking all his money; he's going to go out of business and can't pay his bills. It's fucked up. What? You live in Florida? Hey, we should hang out sometime. I'm going to Spain for two weeks, but after that I'll be back at The University of Miami for classes. What's that? No, not on scholarship, my dad pays it." One more drink and my head began to swim. Suka bar has no direct light, only a hazy red ambience that penetrates the gloom like candlelight. My legs were weak and I staggered out the door, bumping into the bouncer on the way out.

"Don't worry, not from around here," I blustered as I took a sharp left and weaved through the maze of bars and nightclubs; four blocks of them. Sexy women in provocative, low cut blouses bounced around on the street looking too young to be out so late. "We love you gringo!" I heard yells and screams from a passing car and turned in time to see five women blowing kisses out the window towards me. The hotel staff didn't feel the same way. They locked me out, again.

A day later, I found myself in Ciudad Ojeda, a skanky oil town on the shore of Lake Maracaibo with two other journalists. The once crystal blue water was covered with a green scum of duckweed. The steam rising from the warm water in the early morning sunlight mixed with smog for a hazy prehistoric feel.

"Look out for pirates." Someone cried through the roar and smoke of a cheap outboard motor. With a few hundred bolivars, we had bribed a local fisherman to take us out on the lake close to the hulking oil machinery that dominated the horizon. The threat of pirates was real, and none of the other fishermen, clad in only shorts and bronzed skin, dared to allow us near their boats. Content to simply harvest their nets for the meager oil poisoned fish that might be in them, they wanted nothing to do with three gringos stupid enough to brave pirate waters.

Looking around at the overloaded dingy, water pouring over the bow as we slammed into each wave, I began to have some doubts about our ability to outrun or outmaneuver any would be buccaneers. Even our captain, Amerigo, no doubt from the same proud maritime heritage as the namesake of the western hemisphere, seemed a bit nonplussed.

Upon hitting the shore, I went directly to the hotel bar and ordered una cerveza to wash away the filth and erase the images of rampant oil gluttony that threaten to raze my nation from within. There was no escaping the immorality however, as all around me pudgy white hands caressed pert bottomed teenage hookers with mouths full of fever blisters. Just across from the decadence was a shop full of last minute souvenirs for wives back home that had been overlooked during the orgy of skin and cheap rum.

The hookers smiled at me, revealing large gaps in their teeth to match the ones in their eyes. They supported Chavez wholly, but his expulsion of American oil companies had cut into their client base. They had moved here from Maracaibo in the hopes of finding work. They were uneducated, young, and ashamed, with families who thought they were students or waitresses. They were just like the girls back in Suka bar, save their lack of dreams; those had expired amidst countless nights of back alley blowjobs and $30 threesomes with overweight middle-aged southern gentlemen on assignment for Halliburton.

Later, back in Caracas, the streets were full of a different kind of revelry. The Iglesia Santa Teresa, the Holy Church of Teresa, was surrounded by thousands of people. Barefoot worshipers clad in purple robes and toting wooden crosses filled the streets, waiting to be allowed a moment inside the monumental cathedral in the hopes of touching the famed crucifix there. Teenaged mothers crawled pitifully on their knees across the rugged concrete, their legs cracked and bleeding, the soles of their feet blackened. Medics rushed back and forth providing IVs for those who succumbed to the overwhelming heat. In the back alleys, teenaged boys took donations for erecting, and then burning in effigy, straw Judas Iscariots.

I left the throngs behind and walked high up on the Avila Mountain, the smell of Judas pyres still mingling with exhaust from overworked cars.

"Chavez doesn't really do anything for us. He gives us food, or free money, but that's all. That's what you give a dog. That doesn't solve the problem," Vilma De Arias tells me with the shit covered streets of La Vega barrio as the backdrop.

"There has been no change under Chavez, things are just as bad."

Arias plans to run for local office of the barrio, and her neighbors will vote for her, regardless of whether they support the president or the opposition. In the barrios, they look out for one another. They help with each other's homes, establish community outreach programs; there's even a drug rehabilitation house that's run solely by local donations. Arias planned to show me opposition supporters in the barrio, but for every one, 20 passersby yelled pro-Chavez slogans at us. It's clear where the loyalties of these people lie, but when I asked any of them why they supported either side, the responses rang from anger, to a vague sense of nationalism. One gets the feeling that the answers to their problems are much more complicated than either political party would like to admit. The rock steps climb directly into the heart of mountain, and ramshackle walls close in around like a vise. Occasionally these shanties go crashing down the mountain after a rainstorm. Isabel, a camera-shy 16-year-old hooker at the base of the Avila lost her younger sister in one such landslide a few weeks before.

Around the corner, people stand in a half-mile line to get their mission payment. The government is paying them to become literate. At school, children are eating two more meals than they would receive on the streets in another such incentive toward education. Change is in the air, and banners reading "Venezuela Si! Bush No!" hang from buildings. None of this mattered to Isabel as she idly stood in the shade, looking up at the clutter of mud and rubble that took her sister's life. Shielding the sun from her eyes, she turned away from the Avila and its barrios, and back toward her next customer.