Saturday night havoc
Some Sundays you wake up at noon, sweating like Patrick Ewing at the free-throw line, wondering things like, Why is my head full of snot? Why is it so hot in here? Is my camera really broken? Why is my shirt covered in wine stains? Has the 1997 Geo Tracker that broke down and nearly stranded me on the streets of greater Port-au-Prince at 4 a.m. had its headlights scooped out and tires pinched by hoodlums? What the hell happened last night?
Point-by-point sometimes is easiest. My head’s full of ecoplasmic mucous because I’m fighting off whatever microflora have crept into my system despite drinking nothing that doesn’t do a stint in a bottle first – though noshing a 2 a.m. cup of conch from a street vendor carrying a giant silver pot and brandishing some kind of gut-nuke hot sauce was probably not the most prudent course of action. It’s hot in here because it’s noon in the tropics and the jalousies let the A/C bleed out and the sunlight stream in. My camera, it turns out, is not permanently busted; rather, it decided the connectors between the body and the lens needed cleaning – that’s Error 99 on the Canon 30-D, in case it befalls you. Three people separately guessed that it succumbed to voodoo. Its fagging out on me prevented the thorough photo-documentation of a farewell shindig at the razorwire-trimmed compound of the French Red Cross here in town. There convened a cross-strata of the headiest local foreigners: NGO staffers, diplomats, consular functionaries, cell phone company sorts, entrepreneurs, journalists. For some reason there wasn’t a corkscrew to be found in this French-run manse, so someone opened a bottle of red by stab-ramming the cork into the neck of the bottle, and as he filled my cup, the wine gouting out along the blade, my white shirt soon looked like Leatherface’s apron. This is why I wake up looking like I got my nose bloodied the night before. C’est la vie.
Mentally I checked out of the party once I realized that I was hands-down the least interesting person there and that the playing of “Informer” wasn’t a mistake or foray into ironic 90s-nostalgia but an actual harbinger of the other anachronistic abortions that would be popping up on the iPod. It was time to go clubbing. Of course, clubbing turned into drinking and dancing, and dancing turned into flailing like a fawn on slick rocks compared with the locals, then led to bouncing across the street to a Haitian-mook bar called Barak where I proceeded to gulp lager with an ebullient Irishman, which convened into a near-disastrous mechanical collapse on the part of Katz’ car that involved swift bilingual mechanical fiddling, a pointless battery swap and at least 10 neighborhood dudes poking, pulling, suggesting, testing and generally swarming the vehicle on the dimly lit street while a kid of about 11 implored me, in melodious English, “Hey, chief, why don’t you just give me some money?” We wound up hitching a ride home in the SUV of a Red Cross worker who had joined us at the bar and who suggested us, prudently, to pay one of the guys 500 gourdes (about $12.50 American) for their time.
The vehicle survived the night. Mechanics swapped out some insulated tentacle from the starting system and we were back on the road Sunday morning. “What a fucked-up night,” I told Katz. “The capper on the evening is that everything broke.”
“If you like that,” he replied, “you’ll love living here.” With those words, I introduce you to a prescient video of our drive around Petionville on Saturday:
