it’s a mitzvah!

So, this one time in Mexico, I thought I might get raped by this guy with whom I had to share a tiny, soiled mattress. And not just because he wore leather pants to bed. Let me explain.

In early 2005, I moved to La Paz, Mexico, for almost a year to write for BMEzine.com. This was a huge deal at the time; I’d never written professionally before, and prior to the move, I’d never been on a plane. When I got there, my bosses were on a trip in South Africa, but we’d discussed beforehand that if I was feeling up to it, I should go to Mexico City the following weekend to cover an event there called “BodyFest.” Hey, why not. I like free trips.

My first mistake was neglecting to lock down a surefire place to stay in Mexico City. (In hindsight, a hotel would have done just fine.) I had been put in touch with a local named Beto, and from a brief phone conversation I seemed to gather that I could either stay with him or, worst case, he would find me a friendly couch/floor/donkey to sleep on.

I arrived in the city with little fanfare, attempted to not get robbed by a gang of toddlers in the airport’s atrium, and took the most terrifying cab ride of my life to the club where BodyFest was taking place. The event itself was essentially a two day festival of body rituals, as well as a venue for a body modification practitioner named Lukas Zpira to do some procedures. Zpira being from France, I was the only person who spoke English as a first language in at least ten city blocks.

The day wore on, evening approached, and all I’d eaten were a few chalky orange cookies from the plane. La Paz was clean enough, but the prospect of putting anything from this city in my mouth was mortifying. But, sensing the onset of delirium, I drank bottle after bottle of funny tasting water, smoked about nine million cigarettes, and made the questionable decision to pound dirt-cheap beer that was being served in oversized novelty cups. Also, I was afraid to use the bathroom. My day was going from “not so bad” to “comically pathetic” at a record pace. But I digress.

The BodyFest performances were pretty spectacular. In my coverage of the event, I wrote about one in particular:

[…] two men were suspended vertically from their chests in the center of the stage. As well, a semi-circle had formed around another member of the group who had stationed himself on the floor of the club rather than on the stage. Wearing various pieces of armor and a grotesque hog of hell mask, he unleashed guttural death-metal throes that would not have been out of place in front of a crowd of 30,000 screaming Norwegians, all the while stomping around the perimeter of his area and clanging his sword and shield together.

In my notes, I referred to this character as “the Pig-Man,” for obvious reasons. He was a large Mexican fellow who had dressed himself as a sort of gothic Flintstone – tattered rags and whatnot – and wore this bizarre demonic warthog half-mask. As well, he was fairly adept with the fire-slinging and the sword-handling, and his singing voice led me to believe that he may or may not have spent a brief period burning down churches in Scandinavia.

The performances ended just before midnight, and by this point I was a carcass. In desperate need of sleep, I tracked Beto down, only to be told that there was not, in fact, any room where he was staying. However, he told me, he’d find me somewhere to stay for the night. Anxiety was very much setting in as he made the rounds, asking various guests and performers if they could help me out, but he emerged victorious and introduced me to my ward for the evening, George White.

I did a double-take – why did this guy look so familiar? Then I noticed his large frame. His large, Mexican frame.

Oh fuck. The Pig-Man.

Okay, I told myself, this wasn’t a big deal – without his swinish accoutrements, he seemed fairly pleasant. He spoke little English though, and I spoke even less Spanish. As a result, we ended up having the same conversation about four times over a 20 minute span – mostly him trying to teach me rudimentary Spanish phrases for asking for food and alcohol. Shockingly, my retention capabilities were at an all-time low. I needed to get out of there, and George was feeding me beer out of a big novelty cup.

See, George was aggressively friendly. Not in the way that 17-year-old boys get drunk off a mickey of peach schnapps and wrestle with each other in those fantastic displays of latent homosexuality, but more in that, due to the language barrier, he struggled with an appropriate way to convey how non-threatening he was. He would get right in my face while talking to me, put his hand on my shoulder, rub my leg, and occasionally, give me a long, hard kiss on the mouth.

(Okay, maybe not that last thing.)

But he did it all with a smile on his face! Intimidating as he was, on some level, I knew that he didn’t wish me any particular harm. I was not confident that he would not inflict said harm on me, mind you, but I was fairly sure that it would not be intentional. At the very least, it wouldn’t be culturally unacceptable.

He eventually introduced me to his merry band of travelers – fellow performers and an alleged girlfriend – and we were on our way. Walking out to the parking lot, I noticed that George had decided to take his enormous beer along for the ride. Good for him. I started to nod off during the drive, and subsequently because absolutely terrified that I was reaching my breaking point as far as staying awake was concerned. If it came down to it, I was convinced that I could literally have been swallowed alive by Mexico City and never heard from again. I regained my composure, and after making a few stops to drop people off we arrived at George’s building, which was accessible only by navigating the narrowest, labyrinthine alleys on earth. Terrific.

George, his scrawny friend and I made it upstairs, and I was shocked to discover that it was actually an immaculate, huge apartment. Expecting some level of squalor, I couldn’t believe my fortune; there were literally about ten large, clean rooms. Early-on creepiness on George’s part aside, it seemed as if I’d lucked out in terms of accommodations.

The universe has a dark, sadistic sense of humor.

Knowing how tired I was, George and his friend showed me to the room I would be sleeping in. It was substantially smaller, but he rolled out a mattress for me, and that was really all that mattered at that point. He insisted that I take my shoes off - not because it was rude, but simply because he wanted me to get comfortable. He then insisted that I replace my jeans with a pair of worn-in sweatpants to wear to bed. Puzzled and mildly disturbed, I declined his generous offer as politely as possible. Having had more than enough for one day, I gave a wave goodnight, and went to shut the light off and pass out. The boys shot me an odd look.

“No,” said George, “we sleep here too.”

I’ll be honest – I laughed. There had been some innocuous gay humor in the car ride over, and while I didn’t agree with the sentiment, I also was not prepared to deliver an international morality lesson to a car full of drunken screaming Mexicans. So again, I laughed. He wasn’t serious. This was, at best, a twin-sized roll-out mattress. There were about seven other perfectly viable rooms in the apartment, many of which had beds or some sort of sleeping surface. He couldn’t have been serious.

He was serious.

Apparently, a look of abject terror crossed my face, because George worriedly began asking me if I was okay with the plan. Not wanting to know what my other options were, I said it was fine. Evidently, the three of us were to lie horizontally on the mattress, our heads and feet protruding from either end. Sure. I got in first and threw myself ass-first against the wall.

Paranoid? Maybe, but I wasn’t in a risk-taking mood. I replayed far-out scenarios of impending doom over and over in my head. In my mind, it seemed highly unlikely that the Canadian Embassy would want to bring too much attention to an international sex scandal involving a pig-man, his diminutive concubine and a dim-witted boy from Toronto.

George asked if I liked Radiohead, to which I replied with a dejected whimper and an involuntary piddling of urine. He popped a CD into his stereo, which was clearly not Radiohead, but instead some asshole with an acoustic guitar terrorizing the band’s songs. Perfect. George took off his shirt and boots, left on his leather pants, and hopped into bed between his buddy and me.

I got about 12 seconds of sleep that night. Apparently, it’s tough to get any shut-eye with the imminent threat of being stripped and sold for parts to a taco vendor hanging over your head. By morning, I was a complete zombie. George offered to take me out for coffee, but the idea of putting unfiltered local water into my body gave me the dry heaves. He insisted that I take a shower, but again, I declined. Before long, we were on a bus and off to the second day of BodyFest.

Of course, I was safe in the end. I stayed elsewhere the second night, and the following morning, I returned to La Paz (which seemed like a womb by the time I got back). These trials-by-fire certainly have their benefits, though. The next time I traveled to mainland Mexico, it was to Guadalajara, and I had the good sense to get myself a goddamn hotel room. Old habits die hard though, and if you don’t think I made the crank-addled hustler I picked up my last night there wear a pig-mask while we played “hide the chorizo,” then frankly, you don’t know me at all.