We got off the metro around 11 at night and began navigating the cracked pavement, zigzagging into the outskirts if the Santa Martha ghetto. Five of us, sore legs from el chopo and the huge free ska show in the Zocalo where I watched my friends beat the shit out of a guy with brass knuckles and chains. The streets in Santa Martha are eerily dark, only the odd-functioning fluorescent streetlight every block or so provides and relief to the smoggy blanket of night. At night, the streets are closed and stray dogs carry on while people rest inside their cinder block homes.
I carried my camera, Maniaco a crowbar, Robert a broomstick he found in the garbage, and his brother a sharpened tree branch that he had been lugging around all over the city since the show this morning. We rounded a corner four or five blocks from the house, and I stopped to photograph some graffiti.
Ahead of us a rickety motorcycle taxi, a third world chariot, sputtered to a halt. Out leapt two guys with baseball bats, and suddenly a gang of fifteen guys wielding bats and 2×4s materialized directly behind us. Before I had time to get a bad feeling about all this, my friend yelled “CORRE!” and we made a sprint-for-our-lives through a muddy pile of garbage with the angry mob in close pursuit. We got to the locked door and pounded on it, and my three armed friends assumed defensive postures a few feet ahead of us. The attackers began to throw stones, and one guy hurled a cinder block which shattered in front of us and sprayed bits of rock at our muddy feet. I stood there, figuring my luck had run dry, lifted my camera and snapped a poorly-exposed photo of the situation.
Suddenly the door flung open and I ran up five flights of narrow stairs to the roof, where I hid my camera under a propane tank. I grabbed several loose bricks and sat on the edge of the roof, ready to hurl them onto unsuspecting heads.
A two hour argument in incomprehensible Spanish ensued and eventually ended with agreements of “Chido, chido,” and the angry mob dispersed. We all congregated in the living room and I found out it was a retaliatory attack because my friend had beaten up some skinhead the night before. So began my three night stay in Santa Martha.
