I met Juan Angel Santelana during the worst smog alert in Mexico City’s history, a humid burning July when the sky congealed with pollution, trapping 25 million people beneath a lid of misery. It was like something out of Revelations, dark all night and all day, as if the sun had been snuffed out by a vengeful god. The haze was so impenetrable that the airport was forced to close, and vehicles waded through the toxic soup with headlights stabbing weakly, and you couldn’t even see to the end of the block. People ventured outside with respirator masks or handkerchiefs tied around their faces. Every factory with a smokestack was shut down, all diesel trucks were ordered off the roads, any kind of burning was prohibited. Churches were swollen with masses begging for two things — heavenly relief and fresh air — and ambulances wailed with victims who only got the former.

It was my first time in Mexico, which had seemed like an okay country until I crested the mountains rimming the Vallee de Mexico and causing the atmospheric thermocline trapping Mexico City. I almost turned the Explorer around and took my Iowa license plates home, but I didn’t drive 3,000 miles to wuss out. Not even when I was staring across the lip of a gigantic witches’ cauldron, black and boiling over. I hit the gas and followed the highway, dropping down into darkness like a satanic thrill ride.

A couple days of defiant sightseeing later, I was a wreck. My eyes were red-rimmed and watery, my lungs felt like I was breathing baking soda, my skin was a carpet of rash. I resolved to blow a wad on the Holiday Inn near Chapultepec Park, an overpriced touristy joint with one redeeming feature — air filtration. But when I hustled in from the parking lot, I discovered the place was booked solid with a convention of some kind. Story of my fucking trip.

Standing in the palm-draped lobby, wearing a white t-shirt stained almost gray by the day’s pollution, sucking in lungfuls of that sweet filtered air, I began to wonder if suicide would be more pleasant than going back outside. Not the kind of internal debate you want to have with yourself in a foreign country. So I decided to linger the only way I could — I headed into the hotel bar for a beer or dozen.

The posh oak-paneled bar was overrun by Mexican businessmen, all cloned from the same basic blandness — dark hair and eyes and skin, neatly trimmed mustaches, neutral-colored suits with power ties. And they were all SMOKING.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. The bartender was a thick-necked bull of a man engrossed in a soccer match, waving me off like a pesky fly when I tried to order a Dos Equis…then a Negra Modelo…then just a goddamn Corona. Finally he rumbled that the bar only had Bud and Bud Lite. Bottles or tap, my pick.

“What the fu–?” I started to groan, then stopped myself. The hotel bar had probably run out of good beers, and replenishment would have to wait until the smog emergency was over and diesel trucks were allowed back on the roads. “God, I hate Budweiser.”

“I’d keep it down if I were you, amigo,” said a smooth voice in barely-accented English. “This is a Budweiser distributor convention. That’s all they stock when we’re here.”

I glanced over and discovered a blank-faced Mexican parked at the bar, a man of indeterminate age and sexuality. His oily hair was slicked back in a Valentino helmet. A bushy mustache hovered above his upper lip. His suit matched the sky outside, only with pinstripes.

“Is that why you’re drinking tequila?” I shot back.

His flat gaze fell to the shotglass in his hand, then returned to me. And changed. Deepening. Warming a little, even. I could tell he appreciated my quick observation. “Me llamo Juan Angel Santelana,” he introduced himself, testing my Spanish. “Como se llama usted?”

“Me llamo Nick Roberts. Mucho gusto.” His handshake was firm but comfortable, the mark of a self-confident man. I took the barstool next to him and shrugged apologetically. “That’s about as far as my Spanish takes me. This is my first time in Mexico.”

“Really? I couldn’t tell.” Juan swallowed his shot with a grimace and motioned for two more, one for each of us. The same bull-necked bartender who’d been such a dilatory asshole to me was suddenly all action and solicitousness. “So Nick, are you here for business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure, I guess. I needed something to do this summer, so I decided to drive down for a visit. And I gotta say, I’m loving your country. Well, except for the smog here.” The tequila turned into a trail of fire when I gulped it. The last thing I needed was more body parts burning in irritation.

“Drive down?” He was paused with his shotglass held in front of him. “Drive down from where?”

“You probably haven’t even heard of the American state. It’s way up by Canada.” A defensive answer. The Mexicans I’d met knew as much about American geography as I knew about Mexican geography.

“Try me,” Juan said, tipping the shotglass against his mouth.

“Iowa.”

“Iowa? You drove here from Iowa?” He chortled in sympathetic disbelief. “I’ve flown up to Missouri a few times, to the world headquarters in St. Louis. I thought that was a long trip!”

We fell into easy smalltalk, a conversation that meandered a little more with every round of tequila shots. I learned that he was from Chihuahua City, the state capital of Chihuahua, a glorified cowtown I’d visited on my way down. He learned that I’d stopped in his hometown to visit the Pancho Villa museum and gape at the legendary bandito’s bullet-riddled Dodge, because I’d been taking a class about the Mexican Revolution at Iowa State. I learned that he’d gone to college at UNAM — Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the best public university in Mexico — and gained his MBA and English at the University of Texas-El Paso, where he scandalized his family by dating an African-American woman. He learned that I’d had a black girlfriend during my sophomore year of college, although my family was more scandalized by the fact that she was Baptist. And so on.

Eventually the conversation was fragmented to death by interruptions from his fellow distributors, slurring goodnights on their way upstairs. I was feeling no pain by that point, not even my legs as I lurched into mysterious time-delayed motion. I fanned at my ass, trying to get a hand into the back pocket of my jeans to fish out my wallet.

Juan beat me to it, tossing a wad of multicolored Mexican money on the bar. He rose unsteadily to his cowboy boots. “Where are you staying?”

Maybe that was a pickup line, maybe it wasn’t. I really didn’t give a fuck. I was too preoccupied with the alarming tilt of the room. “Uh, in the back of my truck…”

“You stay with me. In my room. No no no, I insist!” A fastidious man, he noticed his pantscuff was askew. He bent down to fix it — and lost his balance, almost headbutting the bar. “Mierda!” — shit! — he groaned, straightening back up again.

Somehow we managed to stumble to the elevator, a glassy ride up the open interior of the hotel. Both of us turned away from the rushing view before we got sick. The hallway carpeting was so plush it felt like we were wading. Past a decorative table topped with a spray of fabric flowers was his room. He fumbled with the cardkey for a million years — upside down? backwards? is the lock turning green yet? — before ushering me into a surprisingly small suite.

Surprisingly small, because there was only a single queen-sized bed.

I stood there a little dumbfounded, about as sharp as a bagel, buzzing with a tourism hangover and smog poisoning and god knows how many shots of tequila. My gaze swam around the room, searching for a pull-out sleeper loveseat, or some kind of fold-up cot, or just spare blankets I could spread on the floor. Meanwhile Juan was stripping down to his tighty whities and sliding into bed, taking one side, his hairy back turned toward the middle. “Buenas noches,” he mumbled, and started snoring like a jet taking off.

I gingerly settled myself on the absolute edge of the other side, mirroring his sleeping position. The future was collapsing into a bleak coin toss — either I’d wake up with a dick in my ass, or I’d choke on smoggy alcoholic vomit and never wake up at all. I was trying to decide which was worse when I passed out.

But neither of those things happened, and when I left for Chiapas the next afternoon I was carrying the business card of Juan Angel Santelana, Budweiser distributor for District #173 in south-central Chihuahua. He told me to stop in Chihuahua City on my way home and look him up, and after a hellish month in the Zapatista highlands of southern Mexico that’s what I did.