Saturday night I developed a massive headache and tried to leave the club early. On my way to the locker room, a Hispanic man stuck out his arm and stopped me.

“Sientate,” he said, pulling me onto his lap. A string of Spanish followed.

“Lo siento,” I said, “Hablo español un poquito.”

He switched to heavily accented English. “How much to fuck you? One thousand?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I told him. “I don’t do that.”

He pointed at himself. “Rafael Caro Quintero,” he said, pointing at himself. Then he covered his lips with a finger. “Shhhh. Tell no one.”

“Go look it up,” he said, “Then come back and tell me how much to fuck you.”

“It doesn’t matter, sir,” I said, trying to pull away. “I really don’t do that. I’m sorry.”

He resisted my efforts to leave his lap and fired off more Spanish, as if he hadn’t understood me.

“Quieres un baile?” I asked, exhausting the last of the only Spanish I know.

He sighed and pulled out two twenties. I danced for him. His pants were wet. Eww. My headache increased ten-fold.

After the songs were over, I thanked him politely and told him I had to go.

“Remember,” he said. “Rafael Caro Quintero!”

I looked up the name when I got home. Wikipedia had this to say:

“Rafael Caro Quintero (born October 3, 1952) is a Mexican drug trafficker who founded the now-disintegrated Guadalajara Cartel with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and other drug traffickers in the 1970s. He is the brother of fellow drug trafficker Miguel Caro Quintero, the founder and former leader of the extinct Sonora Cartel who remains incarcerated.

Having formed the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1970s, Caro Quintero worked with Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and Pedro Avilés Pérez by shipping large sums of marijuana to the United States from Mexico. He was allegedly responsible for the kidnapping and murder of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena Salazar, his pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar, American writer John Clay Walker and dentistry student Alberto Radelat in 1985. After the murders, Caro Quintero fled to Costa Rica but was later arrested and extradited back to Mexico, where he was sentenced to 40-years in prison for murder. Following his arrest, the Guadalajara Cartel disintegrated, and its leaders were incorporated into the Tijuana Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel and Juárez Cartels.

Caro Quintero was freed from jail on August 9, 2013 after a state court concluded that he had been tried improperly. However, amid pressure from the Federal government of the United States to re-arrest him, a Mexican federal court issued an arrest warrant against Caro Quintero on August 14. He is a wanted fugitive in Mexico, the United States and several other countries. The United States is offering a $20 million bounty for his arrest.”

Jeeeeeeeesus. Did I just dance for a murderous former cartel leader with a twenty million dollar bounty on his head?

When I first started dancing, these were not the questions I thought I’d be asking myself.

This job just keeps getting weirder.