Harpo

There you can kill your pup if she barks too loud, and your wife if you catch her in bed with someone. There, no water exists to flush away the urine smell in bus stations, churches, or schools .There you can order a hot dog/white rice/mayonnaise platter and your companions won’t flinch. Harpo might be greeted with smiles and strokes, but she would really be just another digestive system hogging the troughs.

“The dog shit is different here.”

My buddy Ty from California was commenting on the aging piles that hurdle the Quito sidewalks on your way to work.

“It looks anguished. No healthy American coil. Maybe it’s the altitude.”

We chalked up another reason to feel superior.

#855: American dog shit is happier.

We had already listed America’s obvious advantages—food, healthcare, clothing, housing, education, fitness, contraception, human rights, law and order, transportation, clean-air technology, and absolute reign over the entire universe—so we were excited to get witty with dog shit. We relied on our sardonic smarts for escapism because we were too scared to look around for marijuana.

Ty was leaving Quito the following morning to work at a Catholic orphanage somewheres about the coast. He adored the hell out of kids, but he knew the kids would have trouble adoring him back. Ty is gay. The weekend prior he was forcefully dragged to mocking crotches in the discoteca because he danced like he talked, and Ty and I made out to save him from some miserable beatings that night, and to save myself from the horny jaws of machismo.

We got all subsequent rants out of our systems the following day and it was back to joking as usual.

“Ah, nothing like a lungful of exhaust in the morning!”

But a harrowing feeling remained that Quito had more power over our sarcastic souls than we realized. A lot of the people we called shrimpy would rob, rape, and hit us with their tiny speeding Fiats in a minute. And anyway, it was us who looked like asses for being so pale, so light haired, and for speaking oh so functional Spanish all the time.

“What do you study?”

“Anthropology,” I respond, “But I enjoy the journalism.”

I’m not a fan of kids so I interned at a newspaper during the day, following reporters and occasionally understanding what was going on. At night I moved from host families to $6 hostals to kind people who pitied me. It was easy to find safe accommodations because everyone always thought I was in grave danger. They wondered why I wasn’t staying at the Hilton in the Amazonas district with the rest of the gringos.

I couldn’t possibly explain that I’m a masochist. I couldn’t even explain being vegetarian.