IN THE WORLD OF YOUNG ADULTS

The "Tower of the Clock" an icon of the city. This was a donation of the city of Seville to the city of Guayaquil in the early 1930's




I was a collector for Editorial Gonzalez Porto for three years in a row, perhaps the most productive years in my life in what regards to learning street smartness and knowing the good, the bad and the ugly among all the people I dealt with. It also helped me getting familiar with almost every street, every corner of the city of Guayaquil, the city I love as much as the village I was born in, the city I feel so proud of considering my home town, even though these days I only spend a few months at. These were the three years of transition from being a child to becoming an adult at the age of 18. These are also the three years I slowed down in my progress of my academic education.

I entered the Borja Lavayen Night High School, almost at the same time I changed jobs from the bakery to the book store. I was the youngest student in the whole school, even though I was registered in the fourth level (out of six). All the other students were 18 or older, some as old as forty and even fifty plus, simply because this was a school for full time working people over 18. My adult classmates “adopted me” almost as their pet, because of my age and because I was so little. Many of my classmates were married and had children children, and most of them were role models to follow, but among the single ones, who were the vast majority, there were those who were not the ideal role models for me. Some of them had already started drinking, a very few of them had already tried and liked pot, and most of them were in partying and women. They were in their early twenties, these were the students I interrelated mostly with. I tried beer a few times but I just didn’t like it. Once they tried to have me smoke pot and I flatly refused it and I never did, but among the things I really started to like were the partying and womanizing, as a result, my performance as a student dropped. The first year I flunked, I just did not concentrate enough in Inorganic Chemistry and I got a very low score, though in most other subjects I did OK, and as always, I excelled in math and physics. In those days however, if you flunked in one subject, you flunked the whole academic year, which was preposterous to me then, and it continues to be today, but that was the way it was.

One of our classmates was this fifty year old blind guy. His name was Jorge Bravo Landin. He had all classes tape recorded and took notes in the Braille writing system. Interestingly enough, he was a good student and was an extremely likable person. He used to sing with a very nice voice, played piano, accordion and guitar, so we use to take him partying and playing serenades to our girl friends after classes. He enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his’, in spite of the tricks we used to play on him, jokingly abusing his handicapped condition.

One day, long after classes (ended at 11PM), we took him with us for a serenade to the girl friend of one of the students in our group. That night he played his guitar and sang a series of romantic boleros for about fifteen minutes, much to the enjoyment of our group, and I’m sure, of the young girl who was listening to the serenade behind the Venetian window of her bedroom. Before George Bravo sang the last song, we decided to hide behind the columns of the house nearby and pretend we were gone. Our blind friend, started calling us to take him to the nearby parked taxi, to no one’s response, this went on for about five minutes until the poor guy got really nervous and began to call our names in high voice for help and in a combination of pleading and threatening he said “Come on guys, don’t do this to me, please!”, and added “ if you don’t show up right away I won’t ever sing and play again for you in your entire f… lives, you bunch of bastards”. Soon after we all came back, embraced him and apologized for our bad taste joke. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes and George was loudly laughing with us. George was the oldest and youngest student in our group at the same time. The following year he got married to a nice looking lady who used to sing with him at a catholic church nearby. The following year they had their first child and were the happiest couple in the whole world.

George Bravo was a great classmate and a great role model for me. His handicapped condition did not prevent him from pursuing and reaching his goals. He wanted to become a Lawyer, and he did become one. About ten years later, as a lawyer, he dedicated a great deal of his time to help the abused and dispossessed ones, of which there were, and there still are, many in our country. I learned from Jorge Bravo a great and life time enduring lesson: You can be happy and can help other people be happy regardless of your physical condition. Jorge Bravo was my hero then, and remains one of my heroes today, fifty years afterward.

After a short period of school holidays, we resumed classes in May 1959. I was getting terribly bored in my classes because, other than Inorganic Chemistry, I had approved all subjects the previous school year, but I had to start from zero this new school year anyway. I was almost 17 then and was making enough money in my job to afford certain “luxuries” as inviting my girl friend to the movies on Sundays and then take her to an ice cream parlor to chat before taking her back to her place, or taking a weekend at the beach with my friends and schoolmates once in a while. Of course, as a group we always checked in at the “Beaches Hotel” as we jokingly used to say (sleeping out there, on the beach). It was really fun, especially because most of our girl friends would join us on Saturday nights to party until late in the night. Then we slept until the sun started to burn our semi nude bodies and early beach goers began to walk and get noisy around us.

Other than the above, the school year went by uneventfully, except that I started to take Judo classes in the evenings, right after the regularly scheduled classes. Later on also took on basket ball, a sporting activity that I was neither especially prepared for (I’m only 5”6”) nor I liked it very much. I excelled in neither of the two and quit doing both of them after a while.

It was by midyear this year that my classmates Biacino Laprea (21), Fidencio Flores (25), Ballardo Arellano (24) and Florentino Di Capua (22), invited me one nigh to have fun at a night club. All four of them worked as “banana quality control officers” in one of the largest banana exporting companies in town. Their job was to make sure the banana fruit going through the rubber conveyors up from the shipping yards to the vessels’ refrigerated warehouses was in top condition for the two week navigation to the US and European ports where they were bound to, or just plainly reject it to be trucked away from the port for selling at a very cheap price for local consumption. My classmates made lots of money, not only because their salaries were good, but also because they used to take bribes from the banana producers who wanted to have their fruit well rated and shipped to go overseas.

This was going to be my first time ever to be in a night club. The place, “La Villa Ivonne” was located at Calicuchima Ave. and 9th St., in the South West outskirts of Guayaquil. We arrived at about 11:30 PM and the place was full, but we found good seats and a small table. At about midnight show started, with a trio of “bolero singers” with two guitar players and a crooner, playing old “Los Panchos” music. The guitar players did very well; the singer was OK.


In my next posting: MY FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH AN ADULT WOMAN