It was Stan’s cousin Joan’s going away party, and as such we found ourselves drinking on a crowded mid-evening commuter bus headed to her house on the opposite end of the city. It was the first time she’d been able to head home in two years. My visa had been expired for months and any travel outside of the country would at best end in hefty fines. Returning to California seemed a particularly distant and final desination, and we were determined to send her off with as much fanfare as possible. Thankfully the small trashcans on the bus had openings large enough to fit a bottle and no one paid us much attention as we sloshed and clinked about while the driver did his best Ayrton Senna impression, probably egged on by the desire to partake in the same activity we were so flauntingly doing in his workplace.

By the time we got to her neighborhood we’d run out of the bottles we’d brought for the party. We stopped into a little grocery store to pick up another case of mid-range beer and one overpriced energy drink. The Red Bull had an RFID alarm tag, like what you’d expect used to prevent theft on electronics, crudely attached with an excessive amount of packing tape. The can wouldn’t scan properly, so the middle-aged checker wandered off to the impulse-purchase cooler to pick out a few more cans to try. They all had tags and wouldn’t scan either, so she resorted to hacking at the thick layers of tape with her long chipped nails. The line behind us continued to grow, and all the older women buying store-brand basics looked impatient with the half-drunk foreigners wasting everyone’s time trying to buy conspicuously fancy drinks. The checker finally got the tape off, and we rushed off.

Neither of us knew exactly where Joan’s house was, so Stan ambled up to a guy selling hundreds of pirated DVDs in the dim light spilling out of an open air bar on the corner. He pointed us toward a dark street that wound up the side of a lightly forested hill. All of the houses were surrounded by large walls topped with razor wire or broken bottles sunk in the concrete. A guard dog showed up to do his job, barking at us from the roof of a house we’d already passed.

Joan lived near the top of the hill, and the small entrance to her property opened up into a big sloping backyard with a small garden and a fire pit on the lower level. A few dogs and a chicken wandered about while most of the crowd hovered around either a large spread of home-cooked food at the back of the house or the bonfire below. The whole scene gave me one of those occasional flashbacks – one where you can’t remember specifics, just the feeling – that made me think of my parents and friends barbecuing in the middle of our backyard corn crop when I was about four or five in L.A.’s South Bay.

After saying hi to Joan, I started talking to a blond girl that looked clever enough to deal with the dumb things I’m always bound to do. When you’re learning a new language, some speaking days are good and others bad, and unfortunately I was feeling more towards the latter that evening. At least the drinking helped a bit with selling her on the fact that I knew what I was talking about. She told me something about visiting Santa Monica and that she’d spent the last year making her way down to São Paulo from California by whatever means possible. It was helpful to have her tell such a wild story simply because if I had no idea what was going on I felt I could still get away with responses like “wow”, “really?” and the like. Joan’s boyfriend Paulo, a good guy who always knew cool things to do and on this evening happened to be wearing no less than three XXXL flannels (buttoned only at the top, I’m not sure where he picked that up), came and stole me away to try out some hillbilly drink that amounted to a giant pot of boiling gutrot cane liquor with fruit and cinnamon tossed in, but I promised Bel that I’d be back to bother her later.