Chapter 2
When you move in with your best friends and have to see their faces every day for years, it ends up not being all fun and games after a while.
It’s hard to live in harmony when somebody steals your food out of the fridge, leaves their dishes piled up in the sink, floods the bathroom floor, pees on the toilet seat and doesn’t clean up afterward.
Piglet was the main culprit for our fights in the apartment.
We had a lot of arguments over the years, and we even went a while without speaking.
But I would always give in. He was incorrigible, an unabashed slacker, but what can you do? He was my best friend.
Piglet had dropped out of school after the first year because he couldn’t stand the strict schedule, all those tests and demands.
Having obligations didn’t suit him. He wanted to be a free man.
While we studied and worked, he played video games, watched Star Wars marathons, and binged Netflix.
And he had a fetish: He would spend the whole day wearing headphones, listening to (but not watching) porn.
He liked the sound of women moaning, their high-pitched shrieks during sex.
But Piglet was also religious. Whenever he met somebody new, he’d immediately tell them he grew up in an evangelical family.
He liked to sing worship songs and even listened to them from time to time, when he wasn’t listening to porn.
His religion didn’t stop him from earning a living creatively, running little scams on the internet: He sold nonexistent products and counterfeit pharmaceuticals to old ladies with cancer; he hacked into computers and made online transfers from unprotected accounts.
He earned some Bitcoin, which paid the bills for a time.
When we found out about his illicit activities, we were pissed.
The last thing we needed was trouble with the law.
But he was also a lot of fun. He knew how to turn on the charm, and he assured us he wasn’t doing anything wrong and that his scams were safe and discreet.
In that little world inside his bedroom, he didn’t hold back.
Holding back was for the thin, the healthy, the ambitious, the ones with a future ahead of them.
Piglet went all out. He embraced the cliché of a junk-food-guzzling glutton who loved pigging out on McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC, always with extra cheese and bacon.
He loved every cuisine—Thai, German, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, Italian, and Brazilian.
He was the type of person for whom eating was not a necessity but a pleasure, a reason for living.
For him, food delivery was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.
And ordering online was the greatest invention of the twenty-first.
Piglet insisted on paying me a few bucks just to drop off his letters at the post office every week. He also paid a kid to deliver weed to our door. He went out very little, only to bars, where he ate and drank like a horse. Apart from that, he spent his life online.
My feelings about him were complicated—a mix of pity and indignation, with a sprinkling of affection and concern.
It was on a Monday in September that Hugo and Miguel came into my room together, saying they had an “important matter to discuss.” I was sitting at my desk, watching a TED Talk on YouTube about how to build a financially healthy business, chowing down on an old slice of pizza I’d found in the fridge.
“What’s up?” I asked, pausing the video.
“It’s Piglet’s birthday next Monday. We need to decide on what we’re getting him.”
Every September it was the same thing: Piglet celebrated each year of his life as a victory. We always pooled our money to buy him something fun, usually Blu-rays of nerdy movies. This time I suggested a fish, a hamster, or a parrot, since he spent most of his days alone.
“It’s just that … this year we wanted to give him something special…” said Hugo, exchanging glances with Miguel, who was chewing gum with his mouth open. I quickly understood they’d already made other plans. “It’s just that … like … I was thinking … What’s one of life’s greatest pleasures?”
I sat there quietly, then realized he was waiting for me to guess. I rolled my eyes impatiently.
“What?”
“Getting laid!” said Hugo. “I think we can all agree Piglet isn’t exactly a ladies’ man, you know?”
“What exactly are you suggesting?”
Hugo beamed. “Let’s get Piglet a hooker!”
Hugo was back on the market, and now all he thought about was sex.
He was turning more and more into a chauvinist caveman and there was no point arguing with him.
Hugo was the definition of an alpha, a guy blessed by genetics, with green eyes and long, honey-brown hair (usually tied back in a man bun or covered with a baseball cap).
Women always took the bait, and it wasn’t hard to see why: He was a moody, muscular chef covered in tattoos and piercings.
But just like Hugo didn’t last long on any job, he also couldn’t keep a girlfriend: His ideas and contempt for the world were just too much.
He treated women like food. After a while he got sick of them.
I always had the impression that Hugo was the kind of person whom I’d have hated if I met him when I was a little older. But we’d been friends since grade school, when our differences didn’t seem so glaring. Time had made us opposites, but our friendship remained secure.
“No way,” I said. “Hiring a prostitute must cost a fortune.”
“So what?” Hugo said in a blasé tone.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, man, but we’re fucking broke!”
I decided to refresh their memories. Everything was just getting more expensive. Our rent had practically doubled since 2018. It was a tightrope act trying to stay there, and I didn’t like the idea of moving someplace worse. That would be admitting failure.
“We should save our money, not spend it on a birthday fuck.”
“What’s your problem, man?” said Hugo, punching me in the shoulder. He knew I hated that and did it to provoke me. “Our little Piglet’s turning twenty-three and it’s pretty obvious he’s still a virgin. It’s up to us to set him up. For fuck’s sake, this is Copacabana!”
I was also sure Piglet was a virgin. But he was happy listening to porn and playing MMORPGs and first-person shooters. Why pile on even more? Besides, it wouldn’t exactly be easy to convince someone to sleep with him, even if she was getting paid.
“Sorry, guys, I’m broke,” I said, and that was that.
I put on my headphones and pressed play. Still standing there, Hugo said something to Miguel that I couldn’t hear, then unplugged my headphones from my computer.
“I’ve got a solution, tightwad. We know you’re just scraping by even though you’ve been putting in the hours at the bookstore, but we’ve got you. We’ll put up the money, all you’ve gotta do is find the girl.”
Sometimes the ease with which Hugo spouted off offensive things was shocking. He wasn’t doing it to be mean; he was just clueless. Even worse, now goody-two-shoes Miguel was in on it, a guy who’d only ever dated one girl and would probably marry her.
“This isn’t right,” I said, almost begging them to give up on the idea.
Hugo reached into the pocket of his worn jeans and took out his wallet. He tossed five hundreds onto the table:
“We’ve got the cash; you’ve got the time. Piglet’s never seen a pussy in real life. Everyone will be happy.”
Maybe I was less persuasive than I thought.