Editor’s Note: C.S. Louis has spent the majority of his life serving the God’s of core. And now we’ve given him a chapel in the form of a new column he likes to call: Every Wall a Door to preach his gospel. You’re likely to find wisdom, surfboards, dusty backroads, a lot of frustration with the idea of “air wind,” bars, third-world discotheques, waves with juice and lengthy discussions in regards to the route taken to find them. You’ll probably end up hungover. In this first installment, he recaps his youth on the road. —Travis

I used to be fierce! I got chased down dirt roads by drunken Mexican banditos in the Ensenada night, only to negotiate a liquid settlement on the shoulder in the moonlight.

I had a chili bowl haircut and after that it was an unkept mane halfway down my back and I didn’t give a fuck when a beautiful 19-year-old dirt-stick sucking, Gold Coast Aussie outside Jupiter’s Casino told me it didn’t suit me.

I cheated and lied and laughed. I booked a ticket to Charles de Gaulle for the first week of my first semester of university and never mentioned it to my girlfriend before lift-off. I wore headbands gifted by morenas in San Sebastian and got pneumonia in Bundoran from packing too many Irish car bombs and then jumped into the bushes of Capbreton with the Dutch.

I purchased a starch-collared shirt solely for the nightlife of
Condado and cheersed Derek Jeter as I pierced a Boricua caught between the bar and my ever-thrusting adolescent pecker. I was without a doubt the finest rum connoisseur in the Caribbean for over a month, and star-gazed flat on my back at Soup Bowls with Tolan Goetz of Florida and Boatman, who taught me to fuck chicks indiscriminately, God dammit. They were both divorced.

A twenty four hour, two thousand kilometre solo road-trip from Vancouver to San Diego to party for one hour before hopping the border to scrape paint off the shiny flanks of a vehicle that had been pushed far beyond her capabilities both on and off road. That night I sleep-molested one of my best furry mates while dreaming of a hippy-virgin I would imminently deflower in the boot of the same trusty wagon.

I perished in a Chicama mechanic’s shop of dysentery and recovered by twirling plump little Mayans around the dance floor in Montanita. I have no recollection of what happened on Calle Suecia on New Year’s Eve, but I was proposed to at Punta de Lobos on New Year’s Day. I traversed the Andes on cross-country skis with Gary Australiano and fought a forest fire with the local bombederos in Puertocillo.

I propositioned girls (and not women) at the empanada stand outside a discoteca and brought their leader to tears with the sway of my rubio locks on an otherwise motionless eve. (Be blonde in South America by the way.)

I have intentionally never been to Indonesia before. In lieu, I spent several years combing the Cape of Good Hope for wintery peaks on the summer solstice and scared the living shit out of myself almost every day. I always thought I would desire Indo more appropriately once I got a wife.

I’ve read only one book, but I read it thrice and frankly: fuck Johnny Depp for that horrendous sham of a major motion picture adaptation. I’ll never forget Chenault’s innocence slipping away like panties off her naïve hips in a moment of regretful ecstatic bliss encircled by Vieques savages.

And then I lost my African virginity in a small town nobody’s ever heard of during the first night on the continent. Then I fell in love and never came home. —C.S. Louis