Karen was puffing her upper lip, holding her heart in that quintessential good-white-woman way, with a well-practiced watering eye. “I just heard what happened!” she consoled Jennifer by the blue tiled pool in the dingy courtyard. Because Jennifer had just discovered a used condom in the folds of dirty linen on her hotel bed, and even though Karen wasn’t immediately responsible, she was the director of an academic program that had rented the establishment. “If you’d like to exchange rooms, I’m happy to do that,” Karen reiterated. “Because…believe me, I’ve seen it all!”

This was an odd framing: Jennifer being unable to deal because she was less worldly. “Yeah, I’ve seen it all, too,” she retorted, initiating a battle of the sheltered by a dirty pool courtyard in a small colonia outside of Mexico City. This hotel was obviously rentable by the hour, a place borne out of a religious culture that was also quietly permissible, rooms without windows and toilet seats, the walls stained by fumar and glossed by mysterious grease.

Even though it was only six months earlier that I had first checked into an hourly hotel somewhere in Doctores, I wasn’t keen to enter the debate of who had “seen it all.” We were all gringos in Milpa Alta, and a used condom in a hotel bed didn’t land in my top ten reasons of not wanting to be here.