BAD MOON RISING

We head off for the bus stop after eating empanadas in the park… lying in the grass, stargazing and laughing. This is what I came back for, to spend time with her. The bus is jammed packed and I have to put the camera bag on the ledge next to the driver in front of the windshield so that he can shut the front door. When we stop to pick up another three passengers its amazing that he can still get the door shut. We jump off fifteen minutes later after hopping on and off the freeway, crossing the river to get outside of the capital and get in line at La Joya Disco. Tonight is cumbia night and I’ve been wanting to go to a cumbia club for some time now, just to check it out. There is not one foreigner in site.

I pay for two tickets and after a thorough pat down they tell me they won’t allow me to enter with the camera bag. I try to explain that I won’t take pictures but always have the bag with me. If you want to leave the bag in the office that’s fine, but we will hold no responsibility for it. That’s obviously not going to happen. Finally Samy comes back outside and suggests we jump into a cab and zip back to the city, drop the camera at the house and come back… she has half an hour before the contest starts. It’s 1:30AM. “The thing is… the ‘boliches’ or clubs are the most mafia of anything here,” she tells me. Hmmm… I’ll leave the mafia topic for another post, but basically they use that term synonymously for corruption, at whatever level. But people die regularly at the hands of the mafia here in Argentina, all over South America.

Like the other day, this homeless guy approaches me while I’m sitting with Julia, one of my flat mates, in the plaza down the street from our house here in San Telmo. First he asks me to take his picture, but doesn’t want to look at the camera, rather look upwards towards the heavens. Then he trys to hustle a stack of post cards on us, you know those postcards you get for free at bars – the publicity ones? I agree to give him one peso, half of his asking price, not so much for the post card but for the story that he tells us about the way things are here in Argentina. About the death of ex-presidents Menem’s son (he’s the one that sold off all of Argentina’s national industry, including their international airline which is now bankrupt, to private interests, basically robbing the country of its wealth and spearheading the economic crash in 2001 which the country is still recovering from) and how it wasn’t really a ‘helicopter crashing into some power lines´, but rather a perfectly executed mafia hit, the helicopter which was transporting the presidents son receiving gun fire from all sides and crashing it into the ground killing all passengers aboard… but more on this later.

We finally make it back to the club just before 2AM, just in time for the first cumbia band, Los Avilas, which is really a cross between cumbia and tropical. After another two hours the band does its final encore and the MC comes back on and says let’s get this dance contest underway, to the screams and whistles of the fans. There has to be at least a thousand people in this huge two-story club and here comes the Credence – Bad Moon Rising. The first eight dance pairs, one at a time each perform for about a minute, all to the same Credence song. Then, the MC asks the crowd, which three couples out of eight should advance to the semi-finals. I can’t imagine that this is much competition for Samy and her dance partner for tonight, Luis. He reintroduces each couple one at a time and the crowd clearly selects the best three out of these first eight. Samy and Luis are number twelve and won’t compete until after the next band.

Finally at 5:30AM the band wraps up and its time for the dance contest to continue. And here comes the Credence once again – Bad Moon Rising. Pairs nine and ten go and so far, no one has really busted anything out of the normal fifties rock and roll style of dancing… not until pair number eleven, friends of Luis’ which were sitting at our table upstairs. They blow everyone out of the water and finish to a fervently screaming crowd. I don’t think Samantha and Luis can compete with that… but its finally time for them to perform. And it’s a solid performance and Luis even does a couple of flips during their one-minute routine, finishing with a one-handed handstand. The crowd actually is strongly behind them and they easily pass to the final round along with five other couples. Pair number eleven winds hands down and are amazing to watch. He spins her around his back, over his head, under his legs and I don’t know what else. Samy and Luis take an easy second place, winning a small trophy and three hundred pesos… not bad for a nights work. Later Samy confides in me that her and Luis have never even practiced and dance once every three months or so together, just for fun. That´s my girl.