I’m not sure exactly what happened last night after Fatima and I shared a bottle of bootleg Four Loko she’d made by following an ancient recipe passed down through generations of her people, but somehow it apparently ended up with us pantsless and in bed together. I don’t want to know what those toad skins on the floor by the bedside were used for.

I slipped out at daybreak, shaking off a raging hangover and a feral cat. I tried to hail a cab, not knowing how I was going to pay for it. The first one to stop for me also happened to be the only cab that was a bike rickshaw.

The driver wore horn-rim glasses, skinny jeans, and a track jacket. His hair was wild and unruly, like a 360° mullet. He had a black eye and a bloody nose. I told him I had no money, but for a ride to Guatemala’s virgin wilderness, I could trade him a driver, a three-wood, a five-wood, a putter, a sand wedge, a pitching wedge, or any iron from two through eight. (The sleeping Fatima still had my nine-iron clasped tight in her toothless maw.)

The beat-up hipster cabbie sighed. “Okay, gimme the sand wedge. Let’s go.”

I climbed into the back of the rickshaw and introduced myself. “Oh, God,” he said. “A blogger on a journey of the soul? Good luck with that, mac. I’ve been there.”

The cabbie, whose name was Alexx (he made a point of noting the double Xs), told me his story as he dodged the clattering rickshaw through traffic, occasionally whacking at cars and trucks with the sand wedge when they started creeping into our lane.

“Yeah,” he said, “I used to be a blogger. A damn good one, too. Wrote for Gawker, The Awl, Thought Catalog…all the big ones. For a few months in summer 2010, I was ‘Carles’ and wrote Hipster Runoff. I was getting too old for that shit, so I passed that job off to Allie Teilz and hit the road. I needed to get away, get offline, get laid by someone who didn’t follow me on Twitter.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “I thought Carles was Carles. Isn’t he?”

Alexx shot me a look of annoyed disdain. “You naive bitch,” he said. “Don’t you know that blog is owned by Rupert Murdoch? He invented Carles like he invented Glenn Beck.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Alexx shook his head and turned back towards the road, swinging the sand wedge and knocking a rearview mirror off a rusty VW van as he pulled into the passing lane. “Anyway, I came down here, but it didn’t take me long to realize that you can’t get away. Bloggers are everywhere, and they were stealing my shit. I don’t even know how, but I would write a pithy observation in my Moleskine, stuff it under my mattress, and by the time I came back from the bar with a bottle of absinthe and a transvestite, my pithy observation would be all over Tumblr.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it sucks. So I just gave up and went back into the business. Now I make enough to live on by writing a name-dropping column for some blog in Vancouver.”

“From Guatemala?”

“Yeah, it’s easy. It’s not like anyone keeps it a secret where they are—you just write it up and pretend you were there. People have even started dropping my name in return. Apparently last weekend I was doing body shots off a Seattle performance artist. There are blurry Twitpics of it.”

“Shit. So where’d you get that shiner?”

Without even turning around, Alexx passed back an iPad. “I’ll tell you when we get to the mountains. But you’d better blog about this first—the trees have ears around here, and if you don’t post a rendition of this quirky adventure I’m taking you on, someone else will. You need those hits.” He glanced back at me, his face bearing a tight smirk. “I can tell.”

“Jay Gabler‘s Guatemala” is The Tangential’s weekly travel series. Previous installments:
• Uno: A journey of the soul
• Dos: Journey of the soul takes a wrong turn

Photo courtesy Guatemala Better Business Bureau