Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. I moved to the US when I was in my twenties. I lived in South Carolina for almost a decade. I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina (the original USC) before moving to Clinton, SC, where I worked as a part-time adjunct professor for a year. I currently live in Bucaramanga, Colombia, but I intend to visit my friends in SC as soon as I am able. I still prefer not to travel North of Virginia, unless it is absolutely necessary.
A Morning in Bogotá
Bogotá is cold, rainy, and restless. When you see it, when you really see it for what it is, you get the feeling that you are alone, walking through someone else’s nightmare. This city does something to you. It does something to everyone who lives in it for long enough. This place ends up changing all of us.
Julio Cruz is my father; he was born in December 1962. But this story is not about him; it is about Crazy Pedro, a man my father knew when he was a teenager. My father grew up in Chapinero, a traditional neighborhood in Bogotá. He attended the Calasanz School and, in 6th grade, he was transferred to the Victoria Regia high school. Since he was never the most dedicated student, he spent most of his time hanging out with his buddies; some of his closest friends were Carlos Mario—the school’s soccer star—and Mauricio—the neighborhood’s playboy. They were all very close during their youth, and they still see each other occasionally. Mauricio’s brother, who everyone called el flaco, was a good friend of Crazy Pedro.
My dad and Carlos Mario studied in the same high school, but they met Carlos Mario through some mutual friends that they had in Pontevedra, the middle-class neighborhood where Mauricio and his family lived. In the mid 1970’s Pontevedra was very popular among local teenagers, because of all the alcohol and drug consumption that took place there. Of course, gangs of middle-class young boys were common in the area. My father, who was never keen on drugs, liked to party as much as most kids did. And so, he and his buddies used to visit Pontevedra every weekend. This is how he met Mauricio, el flaco, and Crazy Pedro, also known as el loco.
Crazy Pedro’s family was very wealthy. He had a hardworking father, who died at a young age. His mother was a heavy drinker. She enjoyed hosting huge partiers, where she used to buy considerable amounts of alcohol for her underage sons and their friends. Soon enough, Crazy Pedro went from booze to pot, from pot to cocaine, and from there to bazuco and glue. Bazuco is a cheap drug, made with the byproducts of cocaine. It is not very different from crack, and it is the curse of a considerable part of Colombia’s homeless population.
Eventually, assisted by his mother and his siblings, Crazy Pedro dilapidated his father’s fortune. He ended up homeless, living in one of Bogotá’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. But before all of this, Crazy Pedro was Pontevedra’s mascot, some sort of local hero, the neighborhood’s quintessential rebellious tough guy. He carried a gun, and he had a very beautiful girlfriend, who followed him everywhere. My father says that she was one of the most beautiful women that he ever saw. He found it hard to believe that she would put up with Crazy Pedro’s antics, but she was also a drug addict and a party-animal, and so she was used to her boyfriend’s lifestyle.
Once, Crazy Pedro got into a fight in Pontevedra. He waved his gun around and threatened everybody. He said that no one would dare face him, because he was a real man. To reinforce his argument, he yelled that his girlfriend sucked his dick very often. Apparently, he believed that this made him quite manly. Throughout the whole fight, Crazy Pedro’s girlfriend was standing right beside him; according to my dad, she did not seem to mind the whole business at all. At the end, no one dared face Crazy Pedro and his gun; and in this way, he retained his top dog status among the local boys. Crazy Pedro and his girlfriend, whose real name I do not know, had two girls. She eventually rehabilitated and left her boyfriend; she wanted her children to have a better life. Crazy Pedro was not as wise as her.
Even though Crazy Pedro was a violent fella, he still had some redeeming qualities, like I suppose we all do. That infamous fight, for instance, had started when he was trying to defend a younger boy from the neighborhood named Bernal. When the fight started, many neighbors were yelling at the boy, because he had taken a friend’s car and—without any real knowledge of the art of driving—driven it from a local mall to his garage. Of course, due to his lack of experience as a driver, Bernal damaged a considerable number of vehicles on his way home. Needless to say, the neighbors were rather mad about it. In his defense, Bernal argued that the owner of the car, and some of his friends, asked him to wait inside the vehicle while they got some things at the mall. After waiting for them for what he considered to be a long time, Bernal decided to try his luck at driving, and went back home. My father is unsure of whether Bernal was high during the incident; most people said that he started doing drugs at an early age. Although the fight was a most unfortunate incident, many people were touched by Crazy Pedro’s defense of his young buddy.
On a different occasion, my dad and his high school friends were attending a party in Pontevedra. Carlos Mario and Mauricio were there too, as was Crazy Pedro. At some point, and for reasons unknown, a fight began between my father’s high school friends and the Pontevedra boys. Since Julio had friends in both groups, he decided not to pick a side. Crazy Pedro pulled out his gun again and shot twice into the air. Naturally, someone called the police. After the police left, the party continued. The boys from Pontevedra had left the house, and my father’s high school friends were drinking and chatting in the living room. Curiously enough, the only one of the Pontevedra boys that decided to stay was Crazy Pedro. It seems that he did not mind drinking with the very same people that he had been about to shoot dead a few minutes ago. After all, this man was a truly fascinating individual; they did not call him el loco for nothing.
Even though there is some glamour in pursuing a life of excess, nobody can live like this for very long; not without facing the consequences. After losing his girlfriend and his children, Crazy Pedro became homeless. The life of a homeless person in Bogotá is usually a short one. Some years ago, my father read about Crazy Pedro in the papers. According to the article, he had been found dead on the street. Apparently, he had been stabbed several times, and he bled to death. My father was rather shocked by the news; he had never been very close to Crazy Pedro, but he sure felt some sympathy for the man.
Years after that, on a windy afternoon, my father was hanging out with his old friend Mauricio. They were walking down the street in a working-class neighborhood, when Mauricio turned pale all of a sudden. My father told me that his friend looked as if he had seen a ghost. As Julio soon found out, that was exactly the case. When he turned around, he saw Crazy Pedro walking towards them. He was dirty and high on bazuco, but he was alive. The man was alive!
A few years later, my father saw Crazy Pedro again. He was wearing dirty rags, and he was pulling a rickshaw full of garbage; this time, however, he was not alone: a woman in rags was walking with him, and they both seemed content. My father felt somehow sad when he noticed that Crazy Pedro and his girlfriend had no teeth. Still, he found some comfort in knowing that Crazy Pedro was not alone.
This city is a strange place. You can be at the top of the world and then fall as a beaten pugilist when you least expect it. The constant rain also does something to your soul; it gets into your bones and changes the way in which you look at the world, the way in which you look at others. I swear this place does something to you. It changes you. It makes you into something new; something bad. I have seen it happen to some of my friends; I wonder if it will happen to me someday. And if it does happen, will I even know it?
In the late 1990’s Mauricio’s brother, el flaco, was driving his car in the old neighborhood. It was a beautiful morning. He stopped at a traffic light, and he saw a homeless man approaching him from the left. He began to roll up the window, but he soon realized that this man was his old friend Pedro. El flaco was heartbroken. He turned the parking lights on, killed the engine, and greeted his friend with an affectionate handshake. He asked him how life was treating him, and Crazy Pedro told him a couple of stories about his life on the streets. Suddenly, Crazy Pedro’s eyes filled with tears. He said: “Forgive me, flaco.” He snatched his old friend’s wristwatch and ran away as fast as he could.
