It’s not often that I drink Tecate, but when I do it’s always a learning experience.
The first time I sipped this Mexican beer was with a friend who had just returned from Baja California.
He told me that Tecate gave you a good bang for your buck in Mexico, better than any of the usual domestics here, but you shouldn’t pay too much for it.
The second time I nursed a nice cold Tecate, I learned two new words:
Tecatos is slang for Hispanic heroin addicts, and tecate is slang for heroin.
The third time, a responsible drunk pointed out that the can’s colors are similar to Coca-Cola.
“Yeah, it’s the perfect road soda,” she said, “because it looks like you’re drinking Coke.”
The fourth time I drank Tecate was not too long ago. Unlike the previous lessons, no one told me anything new while I was in the act of drinking.
This lesson happened afterwards, and it went down in two parts.
Part One took place in the bathroom. I was sitting on the toilet, a copy of The Castle in my lap, when my nose picked up an unusual scent, a foreign aroma that smelled like the Tecate I had been drinking earlier.
I took this redolence as a freak occurrence, an anomaly, and I wasn’t sure if the smell of Tecate was coming from my mouth, pores, or indeed my gas and excrement.
I didn’t have enough courage to talk about the fragrance until morning, when I sat down with my girlfriend and fessed up. Here’s Part Two:
“Yesterday, when I was in the bathroom…”
“Yes.”
“Well, it smelled like Tecate.”
“It?”
“You know, my download.”
She immediately related and went on to explain the little-known phenomenon of beer poop.
