In my subway car everybody looks like a professional athlete. Their physiques bulge under flame-red tracksuits inscribed with a snorting bovine logo and the word Toros — Bulls. Muscular arms are wrapped around duffel bags, protecting their athletic equipment from snatch-and-grab subway gangs. Black and mestizo and Indian faces are stoic under cheap meshbacks. The Toros must be some kind of low-rent baseball team, I guess. But I never find out for sure, because they get off at the next station, leaving behind an odor of muscle balm and moldering jockstraps.

Other riders pile into the car. A gang of tattooed punks is arguing about their next move — get off at Trincondero, or keep going to El Centro? Several day laborers are drinking their way somewhere, passing a plastic bottle of tequila around. A full-skirted senora rides herd on five — no, six — cherubic kids. Threading down the aisle, a pair of shady-looking businessmen in guayaberas search for a quiet nook. A subway cop in body armor stomps after them and drags one away. What the hell did he do? Nobody knows — with the possible exception of his flop-sweating partner.

On my bench a Panamanian chemist, seeking work in Mexico City, asks me questions with delicate persistence. He seems troubled by my nationality. Why is an American like me riding the subways alone? Aren’t I afraid of getting mugged or kidnapped? How did I get this Spanish and my knowledge of Mexico?

Only a weird-ass chica distracts him. The girl wedges herself between us, ranting. Her language is an angry diatribe of half-Spanish, half-gibberish. I can’t tell whether she’s high or mental. Maybe high, since her hair is a glossy tangle and she wears a goth amount of eye makeup.

Perfect timing for my exit. I stride through a subterranean colonnade of antiseptic white tile and brushed-aluminum doors, one of the cleanest stations in the world’s busiest subway system. The passenger lounge is tucked behind a sweep of robin’s egg plexiglass, like a giant aquarium filled with people. I’m stuck with a taco wrapper in my hand, searching for garbage cans that don’t exist — until I notice a Japanese tourist feeding trash into the wall. The receptacles are recessed, almost invisible.

Up a flight of granite steps is the smoggy glare of Polanco, the longtime address of Mexico City’s uber-rich. The district is a posh triangle of glassy office towers, honey-colored condo highrises ringed with balconies, Depression-era mansions in California Colonial style, baroque foreign embassies with obscure flags waving. You can’t jump out a window without landing on a luxury sedan. Overhead is a canopy of elm trees, genus and species unknown to me. Back home all the elms — ulmus americana — are deceased stumps that fell to Dutch Elm Disease, but this type is thriving in the Darwinian crucible of Mexico City, an arboreal cockroach.

Soon I find myself at the address of an office tower that isn’t very towering at all. The lobby is so generic I feel like I’ve walked into it before, in Des Moines, in La-La Land, somewhere else in Mexico City. A security guard is standing like a statue, unexpectedly Caucasian, a sidearm holstered on the belt of his merle uniform. He has small heartless eyes. I’m waved through a metal detector while another security guard — also white — roots in my backpack. They chat like old women in a language that could be Russian.

Eventually I’m allowed to ride the elevator up to the 16th floor. My destination is a spacious corner office with a smoked glass view of Mexico City’s dreaded “beltway”, as the Circuito Interior — interior highway loop — is called. The office is lined with display cases almost bursting with the flotsam of suburban American life — bowling trophies, books that have never been read, a framed shot of doughy men in waders pinching together for the camera.

The gringo rising from the desk is fat and oatmeal-faced and blinking through wire-rimmed glasses. He’s dressed business casual in a horizontally-striped polo shirt that exaggerates his girth, black jeans, and patent leather tasseled loafers. He beckons me across the plush carpeting, hand extended. His shake is soft but enthusiastic. “Elliot Parner. Got my doctorate from the program in 1986.”

I spot the framed diploma in his proud collection of life memorabilia. Yep, the date says 1986. “I’m Nick Roberts. Great to meet you. I should get my Ph.D. later this year, or maybe in 2009 — if I don’t take my M.A. and bail.”

Parner nods, understanding my dilemma. I’ve already explained it over the phone. I discovered him while researching the UCLA Department of Latin American Studies alumni directory. Former hotshot in the Ph.D. program, now working as a research analyst for an elite Mexican bank. Just the dude I need to talk to.

“You want anything?” he asks, retrieving a Gatorade from a small fridge. “A sport drink? Coffee? Soda?”

“Nah. I’m fine, thanks. Are you usually in the office on Saturday mornings?”

“Four times a year. That’s when I produce our copper industry report. I release it during the first full week of every quarter.” Parner opens his Gatorade and points at a wall decorated with framed magazine covers. Banco Commercial de Ciudad Mexico - Quarterly Mexican Copper Industry Report. “That’s my baby, right there.”

I think of my own baby, riding around in Nooshin’s bulge. “You have a family?”

His face clouds over. “Three kids, two boys and a girl. They’re back in the States with my wife. She doesn’t want to raise the kids in Mexico. Too dangerous, she thinks. So I fly back every couple weeks to see them.” He plays with his wedding band, sliding it on and off, then forces himself to brighten. “What about you?”

“I’ve got a girlfriend, and we’ve got a baby on the way.”

“Ah,” Parner says. He leads me over to an L-shaped couch in a corner of the office. He takes the side with the window view.

I’m left with the side that looks across his office at the wall of magazine covers. I wonder if he’s insecure, always needing to remind his visitors of what he does for the bank. I ask him how his academic career ended and his corporate career began.

“I never had a career in academia. There was no future in it for me. I figured that out after knocking around for five years. The only jobs I got were temporary teaching contracts. Never anywhere good, or I might’ve held on longer. Imperial Valley Community College, University of Montana at Dillon. Those kind of places.” Parner gives me a lopsided grin. A couple decades of living well has tempered the pain of those memories. “So I told Palmerston I was hanging it up, and I took a job as a — ”

“Palmerston was your dissertation advisor?” I interrupt. The alumni directory only lists dissertation advisors going back to 1992.

“Yep. Lord Palmerston, everybody called him behind his back. He must’ve been 80 at the time. Semi-retired. But still collecting a six-figure paycheck. I wanted to land a tenured position like that.”

“Was it tough for white grads back then?”

“In the job market, you mean? It sure seemed tough to me, although the old boy network was still around. Palmerston and his cronies. The jobs I got, I got thanks to him. But things were changing fast. Hercules and the other Hispanics were already throwing their weight around.”

“Hercules is my dissertation advisor.”

“Really? I never would’ve guessed it. He didn’t even have white students back then. We avoided him like the plague. Hercules was…” Parner raises his palms in a shrug.

I know the feeling. It’s hard to put the old reptile into words. “Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. You were telling me about your first corporate job.”

“Right. I was.” He glugs down more Gatorade, the bottle slowly emptying of neon-green liquid. “You get a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, that’s instant credibility with any company dealing with the Hispanic market. They assume you can walk the walk, talk the talk. And back then redlining and community lending was a big deal in LA. Banks were legally obligated to lend to Hispanics, and the regulatory agencies were cracking down. So I got a job as a compliance officer at Wells Fargo, making sure we did enough business with Hispanic homeowners and businesses. I did that for a couple years, then transitioned into research. It’s similar to graduate work. You do profiles on markets, on companies.”

“It pays well, from the looks of it.”

“Don’t even get me started about compensation. Compared to the best teaching contract I ever had, my first job at Wells Fargo was a 300% raise. Now I make more than any academic ever will.” Parner tosses the empty bottle at the wastebasket, halfway across the office — and misses. He heaves himself off the couch and goes after it.

Not sure if I’m being dismissed, I rise to my hiking boots and drift over to the smoked-glass wall. The view of downtown Mexico City is stunning, a forest of glittering mirrored shafts rising out of the haze. At this height the cityscape seems ethereal, the skyscrapers filled with reflections — ghostly clouds, the dull orb of the sun, other skyscrapers. Hard to believe the largest city on earth is hidden somewhere behind this idyllic backdrop. 25 million souls are grubbing an existence out of the squalor, inhabiting slums that coat the valley floor like a fungus of cinderblock and plastic tarpaulins. Out of sight, out of mind.

500 years ago it was Montezuma looking down from the massive Templo Mayor, the double pyramids dedicated to Tlaloc the god of rain and Huitzilopochtli the god of war and death. 1 million Aztecs grimed the canals and “floating islands” of Tenochtitlan, as the city was known then. They probably seemed like ants to Montezuma, if he ever noticed their pathetic lives at all. Maybe there’s nothing new in Mexico, only the past repeating. Maybe Mexico is just a wheel of shit spinning round and round.

Parner joins me at the window, a portly figure in my peripheral vision. “You haven’t told me much about yourself.”

I keep the backstory simple, focusing on my trajectory through academia, the only thing we have in common. When that seems to bore him, I switch to highlights from my solitary treks across Mexico, especially the near-calamities I’ve survived — corrupt federales demanding bribes, machete-wielding robbers, blah blah blah.

“Driving all over the country like that, weren’t you…worried?” he asks, more intrigued than concerned. “It’s not hard for an American to get kidnapped down here, or worse.”

“Yeah, I worry sometimes,” I admit, and my gaze falls to the plush carpeting. “My girlfriend…” I start to say, but the words die out. This conversation is beginning to tread on my soul.

Parner is telling me that it didn’t used to be dangerous. “Back in the early 80s when I was doing my dissertation research, nothing bad ever happened. I think I paid two, maybe three bribes the whole time. And driving around was safe back then. My Mexican girlfriend, we used to jump in her old Bug and go touring for weeks on end. The only thing we ever worried about was a flat tire.” He says it with a hint of disbelief, as if doubting that such a Mexico could’ve existed. “Now there are bandits on the roads. Pickpockets everywhere. Christ, the government is even declaring martial law in places. It doesn’t feel safe to leave the condo, not even with a bodyguard assigned to me.”

“You have a bodyguard?” I ask jealously. I’ve always wanted a bodyguard.

“Well, he’s my driver too. A driver-bodyguard. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not that important. The bank’s insurance requires it. All the research analysts get a bodyguard.” It’s a weak attempt at false modesty. His voice still drips with pride. “So what do you think you’ll do? Take your M.A. and leave the program?”

“Hell if I know.”

Parner spins clumsily and jump-shoots the bottle at the wastebasket again. It bounces off the rim. “Hey. Are you doing anything tonight? You could come over to my condo for the game.”

“The game?” I blink at him. “What game?”

“The UCLA game! They’re in the Final Four again. This is going to be our year.” Noticing my lack of enthusiasm, he nudges me with an elbow. “Aren’t you a basketball fan?”

“Yeah, sure. I usually watch the games. But I kind of lost touch this season, I don’t know why.” A lie. I do know why — because I don’t watch Bruin games with Hercules anymore. That was our time-honored tradition, my secret visits to his house to watch football games during fall semester, basketball games during spring semester. It was a convenient fiction. Neither of us wanted to admit the real reason I was there. I was his eyes and ears among the grad students, a glorified spy. Lacking brown skin, I could only suck up to him by trading on gossip.

“The last two Final Fours broke my heart too. To get so close, and then — ” SMACK. Parner pounds a fist into his palm. “But I’m not kidding. This is going to be our year. I know it, man. I just know it.” His eyes are glazing over, dreaming of another banner hung from the rafters of Pauley Pavilion. Then he refocuses on me. “So what do you say? Come over for the game tonight, Nick. You’re the only UCLA alum I know down here. Bring your girlfriend if you want.”

“Yeah. Thanks, dude. We’ll take you up on that.” I try to disguise a sigh. Nooshin and I were supposed to do something with Inez later. Given her emotional state it won’t be easy — or pleasant — to spring a cancellation on her. And for what, really? A night of watching genetic freaks, scarfing down nachos and salsa, and boozing while Nooshin can’t. But still, it’s a no-brainer. Inez doesn’t have the juice to find me a job, inside the ivory towers or outside of them. Elliot Parner, research analyst for Banco Commercial de Cuidad Mexico, just might.