“If you offer to bribe a policeman you have to pay him.” My father, my uncle, and my father’s girlfriend.

Word of the day: La Mordida: Literally a bite, or the bribe you paid an official.

A lunar eclipse, a Chinese meal, and a skirmish with the police, all part of a typical Saturday night? After a lovely Chinese dinner with all the family in one of the zona rosa finest restaurant I get invited to go out dancing to celebrate a friends birthday. We go to a cheesy but posh club a couple of blocks away. Cheesy because it plays nothing but the best romantic ballads of yesteryear, and posh because if you don’t look right you can’t get in. I don’t look right but the birthday boy (BB) has pull and they make an exception for this gringa. Nerdy glasses and overgrown curly hair is not the look this club strives for.

On the blank concrete floors Colombia’s beauty queens and their boyfriends dance the night away to the interspersed sounds of Paulina Rubio, Chayanne, Joe Arroyo, Diomedes Diaz, and Techno. Midway through the night one of the owners gets up on the bar that is the center of the whole club. He swears he is in NY, London, or Rome. A couple of songs later the rest of the bar crew joins him. All seven boys strut their stuff to Joe Cocker, an odd choice, but it works for them. I blink and off come the shirts. The men in the club are suddenly tense, the women stunned but elated. The gay boy in front of me tries to muffle his squeals and I laugh. Now if the tallest of them would just turn around enough for me to wink at him. But no cigar he is to busy flirting with the women who have gathered at his feet. Oh and I do not look like the first runner up in one of the country´s many beauty contests. An example in this link.

Time to close, the shirts come back on, the lights are turned on, and we all vacate the building in a haze of cigarette smoke, drunkenness, and confusion. Where to next? After locating the BB stuffing himself with potato chips he bought off a street vendor, we decided to keep on going. The next club is a couple of blocks away, pass the whiskey bottle and get in the car. Five women, one gay man and the BB driving, pass the whiskey bottle! BB drives fast, cranking up the music as I sit up front with another of the girls. We turn a corner and so does the police. The police pickup truck with six officer stops in front of us and demands we stop and get out. “I don’t want to call my father from jail!” I scream internally. American style, I get out ID in hand I step next to the car expecting to be checked out. My friends instead all gather around the cops and proceed to flirt with the police. Cleavage out, sexy kitten voice they try to charm the cops. BB instead gathers his ID, and storms off towards the truck. He just as hurriedly returns and yells at us to get in the fucking car! I jump in first, and end sitting right behind BB as he drives off. Everyone screams and it is hard to tell who is saying what.

“Take a photo of the cops license plate!”

“Don’t let them shake you down!”

“Park the car in a parking lot they can’t do shit if you park it now!”

“Shut up, I am going to pay them off”

“200,000 pesos! ($220) What? You can’t give them that much!”

“I don’t want to call my father from jail!” has become my mantra and I chant it repeatedly inwardly.

BB follows the cops down one block to an ATM. He goes up to the door of the bank and it does not open. He tells the cops, and he gets back in the car. The cops pull an illegal U turn on the street expecting us to do the same. Suddenly without warning BB runs, he says nothing to us, he just starts accelerating towards the freeway. The yelling in the car starts once we realize what he is doing. My mantra becomes louder in my head along with if “I die it has been a good life”. This second thought becomes louder once I realize I don’t have a seat belt on, and he has to make a hard right to get on the freeway. At the speed we are going I don’t think we are going to make it. Neither does anybody else based upon the volume of the screams.

We luckily make the right turn, only to quickly realize that there is a police drunk driving checkpoint ahead near the entrance. The screaming intensifies, and suddenly out of nowhere one voice becomes louder than the others screams.

“Park the car and turn off the lights!”

And BB does just that, stopping right in front of a building’s garage door. We all crouch down as the Police pickup truck whizzes by us and gets on the freeway. We scream elated and slightly scared. BB quick maneuver saved us from having two sets of cops stop us and point their M-16´s at us. The police do not take kindly to bribery shirking.

The Costeña (A woman from the Caribbean coast of Colombia) is sitting up front yells at us to calm down! She is going to ask the night watchman to let us park the car in the garage of the building we are in front of. She rings the doorbell, cleavage out, accent pronounced; she takes out a 10,000-peso bill (five dollars). He agrees to let us park a half an hour. We walk to the nearby park where we are going to wait until the checkpoint is moved. Except half of our party keeps on going past the park. “Hey where are you guys going?”

“The club! It is this way!”

Well to make this long story short, we wait out the checkpoint, and end up at the club until five am. And my new mantra becomes what my father, my uncle, and my father’s girlfriend say repeatedly chastising me.

“If you offer to bribe a policeman you have to pay him.”