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"Of course."
"So, what do you have in mind?"
"Come on," Devin said, and took me by the hand. We got in the first cab we could find. "Coliseo Gallistico," he said to the driver.
The driver let out a sneaky kind of laugh and drove on. "Where are we going, Coliseo—where?"
"What happened to your sense of adventure?"
"Okay, this is where the within reason part kicks in. See, I’m probably gonna be down for whatever we’re going to do, but the common sense part of me, go figure, says you’re in a foreign country with two men that you don’t know very well. Maybe I should at least know where I’m going," I said sort of jokingly, but I was serious.
Devin inched a little closer to me in the backseat. "It’s nothing illegal, and it’s nothing sexual either. But it is violent, and some people find it distasteful."
"Si, si," the driver agreed.
"But I assure you, Avonte, you’ll be perfectly safe. And anytime you’re ready to go, you just say the word."
And that seemed to hold me until we arrived at Coliseo Gallistico, and I realized that it was a cock-fighting arena. "Cock-fighting?" I asked with my hands on my hips. "You into this?"
"No. This will be my first time," Devin said, as we continued walking toward the door. "I wanted to do something different."
"Well, it’s definitely that."
Devin stopped and turned to me. "If you don’t want to go, I mean if it’s too much for you, we don’t have to go in. We can find someplace else to go. I just thought, you know, this kind of stuff you can’t do in New York."
"’Cause it’s barbaric, not to mention illegal."
"We don’t have to go," Devin said and turned away.
I looked at him as we began walking away. His shoulders had dropped, and his once proud and confident walk that I found so sexy, had all but disappeared. He was really looking forward to doing this, just like I was all hyped about the Wall City. Now I felt selfish. And I wondered should I care.
I had decided back at the Cathedral de San Juan that I wasn’t going to sleep with him tonight. We’ll probably never see each other again. So do I really care if he’s upset that I don’t wanna see mindless violence masquerading as a sport?
The answer was no. But I’m not a selfish person and my opinion of me at this point, was much more important than what Devin thinks of me. So I stopped.
"Wait a minute, Devin."
"What?" he asked and sulked back to me.
"Come on." I looped my arm in his and began walking. "We’re going to a cock-fight."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I’m sure—sure I never wanna see that spoiled child look for the rest of the night."
"Was it that bad?"
I didn’t bother commenting. The answer was obvious.
When we got inside the arena it was almost full, but still kind of quiet. We took our seats in time to watch the handlers as they teased the birds with a third bird, before teasing them with each other to make them more aggressive—I guess. All roosters were outfitted in white or blue ankle bands.
As the fight began, the roosters knew what to do. The atmosphere totally changed from the second the first bell sounded. People were shouting bets all across the arena. "Five hundred on azul!" Azul means blue in Spanish.
At first it was quite shocking, then it got a bit disgusting, but after a couple of matches, I was surprisingly into it. By the fourth match I was making bets, and during the match I was on my feet yelling at the top of my lungs, "AZUL, AZUL, AZUL!"
After ten matches, I had had enough and was ready to go. We took a cab back to our hotel, and Devin checked his watch. "What’s that wife of yours gonna say when you drift in after midnight?"
"Nothing. We’re leaving in the morning, so she’ll probably be asleep when I get there. And if she’s awake, I’ll tell her that I went to the cock-fights. She’ll say, fine, because that’s her answer to just about everything when she’s like this."