El campo, the countryside, of colombia is populated by a specific kind of man. Here’s a starter kit of sorts for any of you aspiring to be colombian dudes.

Have dark skin. From blue-black to dirty-water brown, the shade doesn’t really matter, but what it does for you underneath the fat colombian sun, does. protects. You don’t burn. Not as easily. When you work, you work outside, pretty much exclusively, unless you’re one of those maricas, wimps, working in stores or as, sneer, waiters. You work long hours for little pay (an important point, because those premature wrinkles on your cured-leather face are most likely from money worries or bitterness…or one because of the other). You build things. You destroy things. You plant, water, tend, fumigate, and harvest things, you fix things (usually oily, greasy, heavy things made of metal), you lug things from one place to another (almost always for someone else, one of those rich maricas…sneer), you hoist things, pull things, lift, set, cut, bend, remove, screw (not that kind, that comes later), and hammer things.

You come in basically two sizes: brick shithouse and steel whip.

Your forearms are usually enormous barrel-like things of muscle and sinew (unless you’re of the steel whip variety, then they’re wiry and veiny, but no less powerful) and your hands and fingers seem like creatures apart, calloused and scarred five-limbed beasts, dangerous.

You may or may not have all of your teeth, it doesn’t really matter to you one way or the other, in fact a lost tooth is always a good excuse to blow a month’s wages on a fake gold one. Intimidates the men, woos the ladies.

You wear jeans, usually. Old, worn, torn things, the cuffs rolled up to the lower calf. Shirts are usually button-up, long or short sleeve, again, such trivialities don’t mean anything to you. If it’s clean wear it, if it isn’t have your woman wash it. You might wear leather boots if you’re a cutter, bender, destroyer, builder and rubber boots if you’re a planter, fumigator, waterer, harvester. But if you’re a bad ass, and let’s face it, you are, you’ll just go barefoot and do all that shit, anyway. Your feet’ll be splayed out wide, the bottoms covered in strata of callouses so hard you could walk on a sea of daggers and not feel a thing. Nature’s sole-leather.

At your hip you always carry a machete. A very big machete. If it’s not three feet long than it’s just another knife. The metal is rusty and nicked, but the edge is don’t-fuck-around sharp and you keep it that way with an unthinking religiosity. It swings right now in a rough leather scabbard that you made yourself from the skin of a bull you killed with this very machete, big long fringes of hide give it a little pzazz…but not marica pzazz…man pzazz. Oh, and you use your machete every day, because there’s always something to cut, chop, sever, rend, split, delimb, cleave, halve, and/or disconnect quickly. always. And you’re ready.

when you’re not working, you’re either drinking, eating, sleeping, or screwing. (now we get to the other meaning of the word). But mostly you’re drinking. A little open patio bar, clapboard and tin. But the important thing is that it has a stack of amps three high sitting right next to your table, a sound system that would make metallica drool. Everything turned up to eleven, blaring out some local vallenato, all accordian, guitar and cheesy lyrics (”I offered warmth, but you were looking for cold” and “If you won’t love me, I know your neighbor will”). Big trucks rolling by on the highway can’t even compete.

You, with maybe two friends. And beer. And you drink it. You don’t let the waiter…marica…sneer…take away any of your empty bottles. A forest of empty 12 ounce trophies on the table. You don’t talk with your friends. The music makes that impossible, and what is there to say, anyway? Everything important is accumulating right there on the table, little glass tower by little glass tower.

If it’s too hot for working and just a couple minutes too early for drinking, you sit. In the shade. Rocking back on some old chair, making it creak with the strain. If you’re of the brick shithouse build, you roll your shirt up above your belly, and yeah, you have a belly, but it’s a manly one, a proud symbol of your beer drinking abilities. If you’re a steel whip, though, you usually forego the shirt altogether. The ladies love a six pack.

And speaking of the ladies. You’ve got a wife. Kids. They’re ok. It’s what you do, right? have a family? But the real fun is with the whores. Jump in a beat up truck with fifteen to twenty other real colombian men and head to the nearest town big enough to support a whorehouse. Drink. Bottle-covered tables, rolled up shirts. And whores. All kinds of ‘em. Big, bitter, old, burnt-out, bony, indian, fat, new, brown, hard, black, trusty, dull, short and tall,

they’ve got ‘em all.

And if you haven’t blown this month’s check on a new gold tooth or too many beers,

so can you.