At that collapsing house of addiction and trafficked sex workers, far away in another country, in the times when I learned how torturously cruel things could be, I sat on a sofa watching a fat guy on an identical, battered, beer-stained sofa across the room. It was a small room in the front of the house. The fat guy was only a few yards from me. His knees trembled and his forehead was dripping sweat, the source of which was fear, not drug withdrawal, which would have been normal in that place where violence was as thick as the terrible cocktail of human and chemical smells in the air.

The fat guy may have been twenty and his eyes seemed too close together, his chin a bit too narrow, his eyes not very quick despite the fear. I had heard him called Mensito, which is a soft way of calling him dumb, and I guess that was his nickname.

I left my camera in my bag because taking pictures at moments like those could be deadly or merely inappropriate enough to earn you an ass-kicking by the thugs and bichos. I wanted to leave before whatever was coming actually came. That wasn’t possible given the odd, inflexible politics of the international gang — really just a bunch of kids under orders from old men who got rich, never got their hands dirty — and ran the place from a distance.

There are times and places when a step out of the door, no matter how close, is a step toward your own tomb. You are a witness to something, or about to become one. Showing your disapproval marks you as an enemy, a traitor and later, a target. I was not part of that world but I was knee-deep in it. Deeper than any outsider had ever been. Showing a low threshold for violence would have shown weakness, and the weak become prey for every predator in a jungle, no matter how small. I stayed put, nursing what was supposed to be the last beer, but wouldn’t be.

Two more young men walked in off the street, sweating from the heat outside. Both looked like they were in their twenties. They were not afraid. They were soldiers in that world. Their heads were shaven and they went shirtless, shoulders high, the purity of youth that was never innocent and never would be. They were just boys, but they were terrifying. There were in charge and they took turns explaining to the fat guy just how he had screwed things up. I didn’t get the context, but I got enough of it to know he was in deep.

“It’s your fault Mercurio got busted you dumb fuck,” one of them said.

“You made it all hot out on the street and got the cops out here,” the other said.

“You fucked up bad and now Mercurio’s in jail, the poor fucker,” the first one said.

“Bad,” the second one said. “You fucked up bad. What if he talks?”

It wasn’t just two tough kids balling out another for fucking up. It was the underworld equivalent of a capital trial by two judges, and I dreaded what was to come. But there was nowhere to go and everyone involved was at the very least, an acquaintance of mine. I considered some of them friends. I tried to imagine that it was all a movie, a rough documentary, but nonetheless, something in the past tense. I ordered a beer from the waitress who was paying no attention, a liter this time, and downed half of it in a few gulps. I took a sedative I had stashed in my pocket. I walked to the tall screened window that looked out on the street and watched taxis and pickups loaded with campesinos roll past, headed home for their cantones from the market.

The sun was blazing outside. Broad daylight at 5 pm as is so common near the equator. When I looked back the three young men were gone. Only the waitress remained, sitting by the tall coolers, cutting an orange into slices, and salting them before slurping them down and spitting out the seeds on a dirty napkin. It was quiet for a long time. I drank, a gulp of anesthesia for someone else’s looming pain. I drank more until the tall, brown bottle was almost empty. I ordered another, opened it with the back of my cigarette lighter, and took the longest gulp I could swallow. I felt sick. Sick from beer. Sick from the stench from the bathrooms far away, and sick from the sweet chemical aroma of crack cocaine wafting like Agent Orange from places I could not see.

As a photographer I always avoided covering wars. A man who takes a picture of someone being killed rather than trying to save his life is no man at all. It was a line I repeated often. But the world was never black and white that way and most wars were never declared or reported and never ended. I felt sick for the stupid fat guy, who knew what was coming. I said a Hail Mary. Word for fucking holy word, hoping for an intervention that would not come, because jumping in myself would have gotten me killed. Maybe not there. Maybe not that day or that week. But they would find me, kill me, and leave my body in a place where it would never be found. I knew that story well. I felt sick as I contemplated my own cowardice.

The fat guy would get a terrible beating. It would last a ritualistic 18 seconds, a length of time that referred to the name of the gang he’d betrayed. What did I know about it, really? Maybe he deserved it. If he was lucky, and there weren’t too many kicking him, he wouldn’t die. If it went the other way, they’d heave his body over the back wall and nobody would think twice about the fat guy.

I kept drinking beer and the jukebox stopped leaving only a mournful, terrible silence. There wasn’t enough beer for this kind of bullshit. And if there was, I couldn’t fit any more of it in my stomach. So I asked for a shot of guaro, something like rubbing alcohol made to taste like mescal. I swallowed it hard and felt a burning down through my tight throat and to the pit of my stomach.

When it went to my head a few minutes later I heard the ruckus of kicks and punches up on the second floor. They were really hammering the piss out of him but he didn’t shout and his punishers didn’t say a word. I thought of Jack Dempsey. I thought of Trevor Berbick knocked senseless by Mike Tyson. It lasted far longer than 18 seconds, because the rule may be 18 seconds, but in practice, a referee counts to 18 at the speed he figures appropriate for the severity of the betrayal. Eighteen seconds could last 10 or 60 I looked at my own watch. Fifteen. Thirty. Forty-five seconds. It stopped. There was silence. I exhaled and my eyes watered, from relief, hate, anger, sadness and things primeval in the structure of human blood that had no names but boiled deep in my chest, beneath my values, beyond my cowardice.

One of the punishers came down the stairs and sat next to me. I knew him. His forehead dribbled with sweat and he breathed deep and hard like a guy who’s just come off a basketball court. I knew him well. We’d shared drinks and food. We’d spoken for hours about gods, the law, corruption, poverty and hope.

He went back to dump a bucket of cold water on his head. I didn’t see the fat guy again.

I stood up and made for the door, heat and humidity waiting outside. As an impotent, shameful protest, I asked the waitress, who had not blinked, what had happened on the second floor. I wanted someone to say what had happened, openly. Somehow, my fogged brain believed that would make it all ok. Even my miserable lack of action.

“Oh you know the boys, John,” she said, looking at her fingernails, and lying. “They get drunk, high and pretty soon they want to fight. Come back Friday. There’ll be more girls here, and a live band, ok? I know you love music.”