The Zebra & The Eggplant Man

Man, sometimes I'm really alone, I mean really, really alone. Like being one lone zebra standing in the middle of a dozen lions licking their lips, sharpening their claws and winking at each other. Bring it on myself mostly. Go and do things that are not smart. Stupid actually. Me, that is. Walking in to the sleazy bar and standing there, the soul-crushing hostile silence louder than the jingle-jangle music coming from the beat-up jukebox. Should’ve walked right out but asked for a beer instead. Dim lights getting dimmer and me here in a real scary part of downtown Cartagena, Colombia. All the good folks in the bar staring at me, especially the militia guy with the gun. He was grinning, dazzling me with his mouth full of rotting teeth and one gold incisor and worse, his greasy shades-of-eggplant uniform. He walked over to me and lifted the weapon, pointing it at my head. Still no sound from the others in the bar, all waiting to see what I might do. What I might do. Hah. Die was a big possibility. Cry like a baby, maybe. What do people who are not James Bond do in these circumstances? The gun in my face was blocking any exit plans I might have had. So the thing was there was nothing to do but wait. Stand still and say a little prayer quietly in my head and not let the man with the big gun see I was trying to do anything to undermine his self esteem. As well as that silent prayer I silently damned this reckless curiosity and driving need to experience the colorful and deadly dangerous idea of coming to this infamous place. I was the proverbial stranger in town, young, naïve, traveling light and alone and right now smoking a fat cigar like I knew how. A real Havana, top quality La Gloria Cubana, handmade. I’d got it from a taxi driver when I’d promised to call on his younger brother back in New York. If I ever got back to New York again, I decided, I’d take the prayer thing further and find a nice church. But I do these crazy things all the time, things I couldn’t tell your mother about let alone my own. There was that time in South Africa where I was almost sold…but, let’s deal with this adventure first. So here we are, me standing up to the man in the greasy eggplant uniform with a gun in my face.

    He grinned some more and stuck the end of his gun in my mouth. Now I had the gun in one end and the cigar in the other. I would have liked to reason this out but he didn’t seem like the type. He raked the end of his gun along my teeth looking for gold maybe, leaving my cigar undisturbed, respect for quality implicit in his action, and laughed and said something I didn’t understand. He said it again louder but it was difficult to reply with a mouth full of gun barrel and Havana. I think I was looking really scared at that point, because I was, and he yanked the gun out of my mouth splitting my lip. Blood dripped on to my kaki jacket but I stayed still. The cigar might die on me if I didn’t get to suck on it soon, but I just didn’t have any suck in me right then. I wanted the eggplant gunman to go away so I could get my life back. A wiser me might have figured this was part of the risk factor – if I took chances, if I went where I shouldn’t, if I would go on walking near the edge.

    He looked at me for a moment more and then a zinging crack whipped passed my face, also missing the cigar. I blinked and managed to suck air through the split side of my mouth. He laughed like he’d done the funniest thing in his life and waved the smoking gun in my face. Then he walked out of the bar. The jukebox was still scratching out some elevator tune, the men were talking again and where as before they had been hostile, now they ignored me. The working women, who before might have looked for business, also ignored me. I was a nearly dead man walking. The zebra was now in the company of over-fed lions. It should have been a lesson. Like that time in South Africa. But that's a story for another time.