A: Nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. I’d rather be robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered than live a life bowing to the Nothing. The Neverending Story got it right: the Nothing devours and shreds life, particularly the life of the brain, the imaginative forces that give a semblance of meaning via story, via adventure, and the structures that help us cohere the stories within us. Meaning is the structure. Meaning is the way we paste together characters and visions. In the Neverending Story, the Nothing eats the forces of “evil,” just as surely as it eats the rock-troll, the racing snail, the riders of life. All that is left is the luck dragon and the dreamer.

And maybe the meaning I’ve been structuring lately is a little dark, but it’s better than the impulse I’ve been struggling with, to simply stop structuring stories, allow the flow of life to take over, to not “lift the stick” or “imagine that fire is magic.”

Q: What is the worst that can happen?
WA: Not having friends.

Friday night, and I’ve spent the day fiddling around with computers, sending a few emails, watching TV, and missing people. I think about the people I miss. I start a list and am surprised by the combination of people I was spending lots of time with before I left, people I was spending little time with, and people I have not spent time with in a very very long time. I dream about all these people, and wake up surprised at how effectively my brain can construct a person’s face, the details and expressions of such variety. I have dreamed about a new student-turned-friend of mine, and also of high school associates, and surely I didn’t have enough time to so perfectly observe all those turns of heads, smiles, laughs, etc.. Surely?

I sit in front of the TV and want to leave, get out of this place. I call Tomito, but he is in Montanita with some buddies of his, and I don’t have the time to go there this weekend. I just want a couple of beers. Big Tom, his own story, is upstairs watching TV too. I can hear it through his window when I go outside and shout up for him. He either ignores or does not hear me. I still think he’s pissed I’m a dyke. I think of my resources: Richard and his wife are in their fifties and not the type of folks for me to run the beers with. There’s Chris, the German woman, who asked me three time via telephone text, “Who are you?” and then apparently was unable to translate any of the variety of answers I gave her… name, description, abstraction. Nah. I think about how odd it is to live in a place where I have no female friends.

On the TV, Kieran Culkin gets hit, that Irish dude stands in a phone booth to avoid the explosion of a bomb, and Ben Affleck lays a “gorgeous” lesbian (wasn’t there another flick with that same rough idea and cast? I think about writing a paper about Men-Getting-the-Pretty-Dyke Movies: Chasing Amy, Gigli, She Hate Me).

Q: What’s the worst that can happen?
A: Getting lost.

Outside, it is dark. Sunset and sunrise are depressingly well-spaced – 6:00 and 6:00. I waited until 10:40, thinking about how nothing starts really until at least 11. I spend a girlish amount of time choosing my clothes, but in the end, it comes down to the following question: which underarms stink the least? When I’m done, I think I am cute, but tough-enough looking that I hope nobody will mess with me. I head out, waving to the security guard as I pass through the quiet streets.

If I were to listen to the fear-mongers, there wouldn’t be children playing with their fathers on the swingsets at 11:00pm. There wouldn’t be kids running back home with freshly bought ice cream in their hands. There wouldn’t be people sitting outside little kabob kiosks, smiling and licking the sauces from their faces. I imagine this place darker and dirtier when I am not out in it. I imagine going around a corner and having a knife pointed in my face. But it is warm, a slight breeze, and everybody smiles except when they see me. Although I’ve been told that Ecuadorians are extremely friendly to outsiders, I’ve noticed that some sort of light goes out in them when they look at me, and they always look at me—long and surveying. I’m not sure what they are mapping out.

My plan is to wait for the downtown bus. I figure that it won’t be working when I’m coming home, but that it probably runs until midnight. I’ve asked Lola just to be sure, but she doesn’t know. She “rarely goes downtown.” I wait on the sidewalk for the 55, and watch as three 57’s go by, each spaced about 5 minutes apart. I look at all the people walking by on the busline street, and start to relax. I’m not going to get lost. It really isn’t a big deal; it’s just a town with a bunch of people like me, like Bvilleers, like everyone the whole world over, living and breathing, eating and laughing, and as I remember this, I start smiling. I start feeling good, maybe it’s the way my muscles relax.

When the buses start passing by with their lights turned off on the inside, I decide to catch a taxi. To catch a taxi in Guayaquil, you just stand in the road, watch the thousands of taxi’s that pass by every moment, and flag down the one that doesn’t seem to be sending sparks from a dragged-along-the-road transmission. I get one, and he understands my Spanish.

A note on my Spanish: I am in the no-progress zone. Someone once described language acquisition as a process that resembles a lightening bolt caricature on the graphs. Up up up, and then you hit the gorge. Or chasm, as it feels in this instance. I mean well, but I’ve been scared to talk lately. I’m starting to realize how different the Ecuadorian Spanish is from Mexican Spanish. The accent sounds to me as though a Mexican shoved two cotton pads in each of his/her cheeks. G’s and C’s and others are simple “removed.” Amiga becomes amia, Cola becomes –ola, etc. And the words aren’t the same either. I’ve been in a state of Spanish-panic and try not to open my mouth, which I know is the worst thing I can do, but I’m allowing myself a few more days to process the realization that I am not a ten-year old in Spanish like I thought, but more like a two-year old. Regression is the hardest thing to accept.

But the taxi driver needs no repetition and takes me downtown, charging only a simple two dollars when normally they try to stick me for five or six since I’m a gringita.

Downtown, I am lost for a few minutes. I cannot find the street names and I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be. But I feel content about it, pleasantly tranquil. People are walking soft through the streets. The downtown at night is so quiet, clean. I walk past a semi-gothic cathedral with pink lights reflected along the sides. An abstract sculpture with a body raising hands in supplication. A store that makes me laugh: Elizabeth, el Centro de Belleza Unisex. Before long, I pass a street crowded with cars, Latin techno pumping through. I notice that on the hill in front of me is a lighthouse, and I know where I am: heading the right way, towards Las Peñas, the little knob on the edge of the city and river.

Q: What is the worst that can happen?
WA: Embarrassment

I know where, approximately, I want to go: a discoteca called El Vulcano, a queer spot that I looked up online since there aren’t exactly queer listings around town. The adverts make it sound like it is mostly men, but I figure even if I am the only girl surrounded by all men, at least they won’t be paying attention to me—better things to look at and all. I find the street, but do not see any blaring signs, only a large white wall with a large white door. Several men in yellow shirts standing by, and a bunch of good-looking men glancing curiously, idly, at me. I walk by, and head around the block.

I tell myself that’s where I want to go. I want to dance, I want to see something. I want to take a risk, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a horrible nasty place with men fondling men and looking at me as if I shouldn’t be there. If it’s bad, I go in, buy a drink, look around, find characters for a story, and then leave. It doesn’t matter if I’m embarrassed. What matters is that I tried, and that I don’t just walk around this block seven times pumping myself up for something that I don’t even have the guts to check out. I take a deep breath, and when I get back to the white door, I ask, “Es el Vulcano?”

Si, si, es el Vulcano. I follow a group of men into the canal corridors of the discoteca, and pay the seven dollars it takes to get me in with a white-light stamp on my arm and two tickets for beer. Inside, it is almost all men and a bunch of empty space. The music is extreme techno, but nobody is dancing, but rather hanging around in the corners. I breathe, tell myself it’s okay to be noticed, and go and grab a beer at the counter. The bartender asks me where I’m from, but the music is so loud he has to repeat himself several times, switching into English the third time. He smiles when I tell him, and tells me he has been to New York twice. I nod and flee to the corner with my beer, try to look busy by taking out my cellphone and pretending to call the person who is going to meet me here. I think I’m pretending to myself as well as the watchers.

A half hour passes and a man begs me to dance although nobody is on the floor, and then swings lecherously close to me as I agree. I manage to slip away for awhile, and then he is back, his hand out. “I need you.” I shake my head and notice three fat lesbian-looking women by the bar, one of whom is beckoning to me. To escape, I go join them. The beckoner starts talking to me rapidly in Spanish, and I swallow and tell her that I don’t understand much Spanish. Might as well be open about it. Her face opens up with understanding and she smiles and slows down, introduces herself.

Viviana is the one who beckons. She is large and wears a bright red shirt. A tongue stud snaps in her mouth, and she has a tattoo on the small of her back. “Tres equis,” she tells me, and I struggle to understand. XXX, one more equis than the beer. She is the feminine one of the group, and her face fills with smiles. She puts a hand out to halt the man who is still begging me to dance: “Ella no quiere bailar contigo.”

“How did you find yourself here?” she asks in Spanish.
“I wanted to dance.”
“But you know this spot is for gays and lesbians.”
“Yes.”

She gives me the names of her friends, Annie and a girl whose name I can’t quite catch. Lilia or something. Lilia is huge and surly-looking (a fact that doesn’t change all evening). Her hair is pulled behind her head, and she is wearing drab-looking clothes and a suspicious glance. Annie is an older, matronly-looking butch, reserved. She switches back and forth between English and Spanish to show me she can. I strive for Spanish. Annie plays soccer and is a secretary at a school. Viviana is a student of graphic design. They are pleasant, and I can’t help noticing how grateful I am for their company.

As the evening goes on, I notice that they are a little subdued, and like many subdued dancers, they sway rather than move. They stay in a circle, and I try to break it up a little, move into the floor where people gather thicker as the evening goes on. Nothing much starts until midnight. Around midnight, the place is filling, and I am relieved to note that there seems to be an even mix of men and woman. There are plenty of good-looking women to glance at, and I glance at them while trying to ignore the fact that Annie is looking more and more interested in me as the evening wears on.

I look at the faces, the handsome men, the goofy ones with beer bellies and ragged goatees. Nobody dances as well as I’d imagine gay Latin men and woman would dance. I watch the pretty girls, making-out on the floor and gathering each other into arms they couldn’t wrap in public. When I see that effusion, the dance-joy, flash here, there, here across the room, I am full, nowhere near the Nothing I swim against almost every moment of every day. I dance hard, no longer embarrassed to be the only blue-eyed person in the joint. When you’re happy, there’s no room for embarrassment.

Q: What’s the worst that can happen?
WA: Falling in love.

Before the evening is over, there is a drag-queen show. It starts at 3:00 am, and I am wondering how long this crowd could hold on. The drag-queens are incredible in various degrees. Most have gorgeous legs, some the best asses I’ve seen. I’m entranced by their outfits, examine whether they have shaved their legs and arms. To what extent would I believe them women if I passed them on the street? A few of them, I’d have no idea if they were XX or XY. They give a show that leaves my mouth dropped, closed, dropped; they dance sexy, sometimes furiously, waving bleach-blond wigs across the audience. Jennifer Lopez, Shaquira, and Priscilla-queen would be jealous of their likeness.

Watching the show, I fall hard hard in love with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her eyes are huge, and her hips are perfectly flush and round. She smiles the hugest and sweetest reflection of soul I’ve seen. Her face is the epitome of the kind of values I need to surround myself with. I want to sit and stare at her the whole evening and longer, want to consume everything about that face. I want to talk to her, hear what her life has been, how she got to be the most beautiful creature in the world. I fall hard in love with a drag-queen, and my heart hurts that I will never meet her to tell her how she gives off the same sound as wind passing through a long chime.

I make up for the heart-hurt by loving her via distant speculation. This is enough.

Q: What’s the worst that can happen?
A: Nothing.

I dance, and that’s not nothing. I fall in love, and that’s not nothing. I ride the taxi, find my way, give it a shot, get some phone numbers of people who might be fun to hang out with. I am gentle with Annie, who is by the end of the evening rubbing her hand across my back. I do not tell her that she’s not my type (butchies never are), or that she is too old for me (by about ten years), or that she doesn’t dance well enough to attract me (I never go out with anyone who can’t dance), or that I’m not looking (one risk at a time). I simply smile, kiss her on the cheek, and move away into my taxi.

When I get home, I feel like writing about possibility.