“El Gringo,” he shouted!

Thought I’d share:

I walked into a small and a bit seedy neighborhood pub in Las Condes (upper class neighborhood in Santiago) ordered a bottle of (red – is there any other color?) wine, and asked the elderly bartender if he remembered a gringo who used to drink there way back in the early 80s. He looked, sort of stared at me with a kind of puzzled and confused look on his face until suddenly a look of recognition shot over his face as he shouted “El Gringo!”

He then proceeded to tell a couple of guys standing at the bar this story.

Back during some of the more “complicated” years of the Pinochet era this gringo that we had ne’er seen before walked in here one day and he could not speak a lick of español. After a few months of him coming here a few of the old timers invited him to play cacho (a dice game) with them. Surely hoping that he would lose and have to buy everyone rounds, which he usually did. Thing is, slowly but surely, the old timers, all long since gone to their reward, taught this guy how to speak Chileno and drink wine.

One day he comes in here with another American and orders una guagua. (A guagua is like a sangria and is usually ordered to celebrate the birth of a baby. Guagua is slang for baby in Chile.) The Chilean wife of the other American (had originally come to Chile via the Peace Corps) had recently had a baby and they were celebrating the new arrival, but the proud father does not like wine and wants to drink beer instead so El Gringo orders a meter of beer. A meter of beer back in the day was one square meter of 12 ounce beers standing tall and each touching its neighbors on all sides, no idea of how many beers that was but let’s just say that I never thought the two of them could polish them all off.

Many hours later all of the beers are gone and the two pour out the door headed to only Dios knows where. A minute later one of my customers tells me that there is a dead American in the middle of the street just in front of my bar. I look out and see El Gringo, not dead but resting comfortably in the middle of the street. Me and my waiter ran out and picked him up and then I had my waiter escort the two sloshed amigos home.

Now El Gringo Loco walks back into my place 20+ years later and asks me if I remember him. Of course I do. This guy is still famous around here and his capacity – the stuff of legend. The story about the day that he and his friend drank a meter of beer has been repeated and distorted over time until no one knows what really happened, just that something “muy muy diferente” occurred here on that day.

Back to me and the present. I remembered ordering the beer, and I sort of remembered waking up the next day. Until a few months ago when the bar owner told his other customers that story, I did not know that I only made it as far as the street.

By the way, all of that story above was carried out in Spanish. Since then I have drunk vodka with the Russians so am better trained now than I was then. My Russian gets pretty good after the fourth of fifth shot but at some point, so I’ve been told, begins to degrade horribly. До свидания (dasvidanya / goodbye) това́рищ (tovarisch / comrade).