The Night I Didn’t Meet Don Omar
By: Will Conway
Tags: Travel, Love, Dance, Nightlife, Colombia

It was Friday. The hour was late. One by one, my close friends retreated back to the comfort of their hostel twin beds, and I found myself in a crowded club with one other acquaintance. He was a newer addition to our hostel cluster, and we weren’t terribly close.

Whether he behaves this way regularly or he was just in a mood was unclear to me. But one thing is certain: he was on the prowl for women.

I wasn’t.

Our conversation slowed to a crawl, as it’s prone to do when the painful realization dawns that your relationship with one human being is entirely reliant on the chemistry of a larger group. I stepped in line for the bathroom, because that’s where you go when conversation dies and you’re not ready to go home.

And that’s where I met him.

Not Don Omar. Not yet. You clicked on this story knowing full well it’s an eight minute read. Give it a sec.

I met an odd American character in the bathroom line who claimed to write music for J. Balvin, Bad Bunny, Daddy Yankee and all those other pop-reggaeton chart toppers. He wore a black t-shirt and a gold chain, which perfectly complemented his even blacker hair moosed atop obnoxiously bronzed skin.

If you’re thinking Pauly D from Jersey Shore, you’re on the money.

He claimed he was a multimillionaire living in Colombia, and after we relieved ourselves, I should join him and his writer/producer/whatever friends for a drink.

“These dudes are dope yo.”

I’ve met a lot of that weird American bro energy in Colombia. More per capita than in the United States. But it was a poppin’ club in Colombia’s hippest city, so his story wasn’t, like, completely implausible. And I can hang with bro culture for a night. After that, it unravels. But I’ve got it on lock for an evening.

And anyway, the guy was amusing. Either he was telling the truth and this would be a fascinating night, or he was lying, and it’d be one hell of a weird story. He also said he had bottle service and all the shots of tequila and aguardiente I could want. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t tip the scales.

So we zipped our flies, hopped over a VIP barrier, and took back a few shots. At the beginning of every song, my bathroom-line-friend would point to some random person nearby and say, “Hear this song? That dude wrote this song, bro.” That friend would always be a somewhat unfortunate looking fella dancing with an exceptionally beautiful white woman. I suppose it checked out. I would look back in perplexed amusement, high five the friend, and do another shot. I grabbed my hostel friend from the crowd of plebeians — among whom I no longer seemed to be — and pulled him into our section.

I had a new dynamic in which to insert my hostel acquaintance. The chemistry of our reluctant friendship was restored. All was right in the world.

All was right, that is, until my bathroom-line-friend fell completely silent. He stopped dancing and glared over my shoulder.

“Don’t look now, but the guy behind you is Don Omar.”

Well, that’s pretty cool. I didn’t know any reggaeton before I came to Colombia, but I knew Don Omar’s Danza Kuduro. Because, yeah, I’m a human with ears and stuff.

I turned around. That’s — that’s not Don Omar. That’s Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

Don Omar looks like this:

I met a guy who looks like this:

For full transparency, I didn’t meet Eddie Murphy either.

Drop the tie and tweed and replace it with a wife beater and a gold chain. But I mean, yeah. That’s who I saw.

“It’s totally Don Omar dude. I wrote for him twice,” he said. He shuffled over to the Nutty Professor, whispered in his ear, and introduced me.

Ok, so we’re firmly in weird story territory, I decided. This isn’t real. And my hostel friend wanted nothing more than to meet a beautiful Colombian woman.

Back to the plebeians we went.