Roses All the Way

I went out for a night on the town in Buenos Aires and got a look at what the city has to offer these days. I haven't tooled around in Buenos Aires in a couple of years and it's good to see that things haven't changed much.

The booze is still relatively cheap, the ladies look fine, and the locals are as gregarious as ever. As one buddy of mine said, "People here just seem to age well." He's right. There aren't that many old-looking people in Buenos Aires. I'm not sure if that's because the plastic surgeons are working overtime, or if people just die a hell of lot earlier around here, but my friend has a point. People dress well, eat well, and look well in these parts, and the obesity rate is to be envied because you can't find any fat people.

I did, however, run into a couple of little girls at 3AM. One of them was trying to sell a crummy looking rose, and the other was trying to sell a crummy looking arts and crafts project. I don't know what the thing was, but the kid seemed to think that I would want it if she said "Por favor," fifteen times in twenty seconds.

Those two kids got me thinking about where their parents might be. It's not often that you find two eight-year-olds hawking stuff at three in the morning. I took it for granted that these children are probably on that same street corner every night, because they knew the nightclub bouncer's name, and he didn't try to shoo them away unless they were being a pain in the ass to the customers trying to get in the club.

After asking me a hundred times if I wanted to buy their stuff, they sat down on a bench in front of the bar. It was mildly depressing to see that they were actually about fifty years old. Ten seconds before, they'd been plying me with the cute faces and the sing-song voices. As soon as they sat on the bench to take a load off, they looked like any construction workers during a lunch break: tired, bitching about a long night, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Through their body language, I could almost translate the conversation:

"Cheap gringo won't buy a damn rose," says one.
"Roses don't sell anymore," says the other.
"Better than that cardboard crap you've got."
"Cut me some slack, it's all I could find."
"You think that lady's got money?"
"With those shoes? No way. Let's keep working the drunks that come out of the club. They always have spare change."
"All right, but gimme a minute, my feet are killing me."

They didn't look poor. They had well-combed hair and they looked as if they'd had three squares that day. Yet here they were, life's little lost ones. Their eyes darted from tourist to tourist and drunk to drunk, looking for a sucker or someone that wasn't paying enough attention to their wallet. They knew more about the street than I ever would, and they weren't old enough to enter high school.

And that's the way it's going to go for them. Roses, to heroin, to jail, to infection, to death in no time at all, and we'll still be going to the clubs and telling the next generation that we don't want their crummy flowers.