A place I know, where the train goes slow

There´s a man who waits at the Coronado bus stop every day. He´s short, with dark skin, grey, parted hair, and gangly teeth he keeps covered up with a tired but relatively handsome face for his condition. His fingers are always curled. I´ve only ever seen him lift is a cigarette, a broom and his coin bag. He walks with a gimp, moves left foot forward with head tilted in front and right foot forward with head tilted back, and when he moves fast he gets ahead of himself and needs to lean against the bus. He has no home, and makes his money off donations from people getting onto the bus, who he´s hardly able to speak to anyway. He just hangs his head and looks at the ground with blinking, starved puppydog eyes. His name is Mario.

At one point the bus stop managers gave him a bureaucratic job of sweeping the floor. I say bureaucratic because that floor will always be dirty, but for some reason it didn´t last because I haven´t seen him at it in a number of weeks. The other day he was wearing a new jacket. Not actually new, since I judged by the sky blue color and long, rigid collar ends it had to have been from the 70s. But you could see the color in it, not yet molested by the dirt stained into his other clothes.

There are plenty of beggars I turn down. A variety of factors come into play: maybe I don´t have time or money at that moment, or occassionally a bum is way too threatening to even stop and think for, like this one muscular bald guy with half his face doused in green paint (Why? No clue.) who emerged from a bush and followed me for two blocks. They, like everyone else, come in all shapes and personalities. Avenida Central is a mix of open-air mall and middle class society rung on the corners by the equivalent of a circus freak show. People with no legs limp around on special-made seats like dirt saddles; dwarves with stubby fingers play three-string guitar and sing in indiscernable howls; and at any moment when you´re buying ice cream a man can walk in, show you the bruise where he last shot up, and ask for money to buy more. There are plenty of Costa Ricans in this shape, but many of them are immigrants from even poorer Latin American nations who heard about the more developed Costa Rica and didn´t know they´d be out of luck before they even got here. They pass out on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court, light up crack pipes in cardboard boxes, and dig through the trashbins to find anything to eat like rotting pineapple skin to something they can at least wipe themselves with. These are the treasures they found. San José is riddled with the human aftermath of busted dreams.

Mario is one of the better cases, if only because I´ve seen him smile. I can never tell if he hangs his head while the line of people walk by because he´s just tired, lost in thought or actually ashamed to be begging. Every day for the last two months I´ve dropped a 100 colones coin into his bag (only about 20 U.S. cents). It´s helped us become friends though, and now he looks over other people´s heads when he sees me coming and slowly lurches up past a few people to get closer to me. I asked him his name about a week ago, and now he knows mine too. We don´t say much, because it´s hard for him to talk, but it reminds me that sometimes a look in the eyes coming with a smile can do a lot for people. Mario is one of the most important friends I´ve made here. He reminds me of several things: that an upper-middle class white boy from Alabama can be friends with someone from a completely different world, that my problems aren´t as bad as what others got dealt, and despite what you are handed, despite all the evil forces in the world waying down on you, there is still room for compassion. And maybe with that comes a little bit of hope...for all of us.

Mall shootings and free resorts

Next Friday (the 29th) I went out to the San Pedro Mall (in a suburb of San José) with this girl named Katie (pronounced Kah-tee) who works down the street from the Tico Times office in a little convenience store. She recommended we go see a movie at the mall when she got off work at 4:30. I had stories that were due so I told her 5.

This time difference is important because it´s a good thing we weren´t in the mall at 5 o´clock when we pulled up front in a taxi, because that´s when 10 shots rang out inside and all hell broke loose in front of us. People running in and out of the mall, falling down stairs; pedestrians running in herds around the corner; more shots going off; people locked out on the second and third floor balconies; mass hysteria.

The taxi driver let me use his cell phone to call the Tico Times, and they told me to start grabbing witnesses. So, suddenly, on my date..thing, I was interviewing witnesses who were inside when the shooting started. And speculation was there were anywhere from 2 to 3 guys, but only one of them was caught on the scene. Two cops dragged him out flailing and shouting. He was shirtless, fat and had a shaved head. He kept shouting in Spanish and English, the only English part being ¨You wanna fuck with me?!?!¨ I was interviewing people right next to the police van that they shoved him into, so I actually have him shouting it on my digital recorder. Traffic in front of the building was at a standstill with everyone trying to get a look, and the same went for traffic on the bridge across the street where people had parked their cars to walk out and get a bird´s eye view. I have pictures of all of it too, crazy stuff. And that was how I got my first news assignment for the Tico Times.

About an hour later, we were on our way to another mall, and we watched the only movie playing other than Shrek, Duro de Matar 4, also known as Die Hard 4.


I spent that Saturday and Sunday at this resort on the Pacific in Punta Leona, maybe 10 kilometers north of Jaco, this popular beachtown for gringos that I have dubbed ¨New Florida,¨ for its significant Latino population, overwhelming number of American restaurants, and array of hooker-hunting men who resemble Jimmy Buffet. I can´t stress enough that maybe 1 out of every 10 upper-middle class suburbanite (and richer, like company CEOs) you see in their 50s or 60s has probably come down to Central America for some afternoon delight with a side of VD. There are books on how these guys develop obsessions with this dirty lifestyle down south. There are so (so so so) many of them here, and they´re all here alone, and they´re all flanked by 18-year-old(?) prostitutes.

But I´m talking about Hotel Punta Leona, which is a resort that´s actually fairly balanced between Costa Rican and Latin American clients and North American ones. And it´s family friendly. I stayed there for free because it was the host to a press conference on the 17th annual Festival de Musica, which sets up shop in all these resorts across the country and brings in these classical music acts from all over North America and Europe. The (new) photography intern Allison and I also happened to be surrounded by journalists from every top media outlet in Costa Rica, and were (I´m getting used to this) the only Americans. I said before, it was all free, and I lived better in those 24 hours than I may have ever have ever erverner. The beach was clear and blue and beautiful. The press conference lasted for one hour, no one took notes, and we just drank expensive Spanish wine and I told Allison that at no other point in our lives will we be treated with this kind of respect for being journalists.

After that they bused us to another resort for dinner, called the Zephyr Palace, because it was like something from Indiana Jones on the outside with stone walls like the Incas built and huge red columns. It´s right on the top of a mountain bluff that just cuts off at the Pacific Ocean. We were so high up that some of the people we were with were able to identify cities that were an hour away up the coast or on the peninsula in front of us. The dinner included salad, sorbet, a main course that was fish topped by steak topped by shrimp and it was all SO GOOD, and then we had this chocolate mousse desert and I had one of those yuppy travel show moments when I took my first bite smiling and thinking about how awesome life is...because of fancy pudding.

Anyway, they continued to pour on the wine, and then amaretto, and then vodka, and then whiskey, and suddenly I was surrounded by a lot of extremely happy Tico journalists. On the van ride back to the resort we were staying at, the Ticos all burst out in these Costa Rican drinking songs that I´m going to have one of them write out for me before I leave. I made a lot of new friends, and I think my favorite is the ex-chileno now Tico journalist Patricio from Channel 13, who was more than up for talking and celebration as long as the night would last. As we sat around by the pool with some of the other late nighters, he sparked up this passionate talk about CAFTA* (*Costa Rica is the only country in Central America yet to approve the free trade agreement. The opposition was so great that it forced the decision out of the hands of Congress and into a public referendum to be held Oct. 7), and how the movement against it was the strongest the nation had seen since the formation of the second republic after the 1948 revolution* (Led by José Figueres, the father of Latin American democracy, whose wife at the time was named Henrietta, a young girl from Birmingham who is now an octagenarian woman living in Montgomery and in-law of the family I´m staying with). He talked about businesses exploiting the poor, how the future of the world in the face of these special interest forces was all in the hands of the youth (as the younger journalists sat there silent with eyes like those of deer in the headlights), and how if the public voted against CAFTA they would make the wheels start turning...

It was on that note that I, too opinionated to hold back my opinion on another country´s affairs (I try to stay out since it´s technically none of my business), suddenly was giving this political speech to everyone around the table how CAFTA failing in Costa Rica was not enough. That the world is changing every day and it´s all in the hands of a few people, and that these businesses will always find a way to get what they want, no matter what the human cost (It´s true and you´re crazy if you don´t believe that.) and one tiny nation cannot stand alone in the battle. I talked about how there needed to be a global movement to overcome them, and somewhere in the middle of that I realized that they were all really listening to me more than smiling at my broken Spanish, and taking me seriously and that got me even more caught up in it so I just kept going...and when I was done, I don´t know, the mood was something I´m still dwelling on. Serious but excited, hopeful but sad. Suddenly though we all connected on this very important level. Talking about global unity with people from other countries who agree with you does that, I guess.

Later that night it was confirmed to me (after flipping the channels and finding this movie for the umpteenth jillionth time) that whenever I miss home, something to remind me of it is never too far away. At any given time, you can find Forrest Gump playing on at least one Costa Rican channel. The other piece of him that follows Alabamians is when you introduce yourself to anyone, from anywhere. ¨Oh, you´re from Alabama? Sweet home!¨ Yeah, get used to it.

Weekend on the mountain

So, I am a very bad blogger. It´s been two weeks since I´ve updated. I´m a bad blogger. So for the next three days (the deadline I´ve given myself) I´m going to try very hard to catch you all up.

(Scene of Mike at Uncle Tony´s laptop computer rapidly pounding the keyboard with his index, middle, ring and sometimes pinky fingers fades into obscurity, and suddenly it´s the afternoon, and we see Mike in a taxi cab curving along an old road up a mountain somewhere in Costa Rica. The day is June 23.)

I´ve made a lot of interesting friends in Costa Rica, from a variety of places and generations. One of them, we´ll just call him Turbo, invited me to his bed and breakfast for a weekend to stay and meet some of his friends and family. An older hippie who´s seen the world a few times over and can´t get enough of it, we seemed to know we stood eye to eye on a lot of things before I´d even got halfway done with my interview with him a few weeks back. He´s a radio host and journalist, and I admired him because I basically saw him living the dream I wanted for myself: to just travel, meet important people, do what you love and keep going with it. I wanted to know more about his life, and maybe learn a thing or two.

The bed and breakfast had a 14th century look to it at the front, with a black painted steel door that stood maybe 7 or 8 feet high and a peephole at the 5-foot mark. Aside from a few tiny houses and closed up shops, there wasn´t much else to be found on this mountain road where the taxi driver left me, and it actually brought me a sense of peace as I rang the doorbell. San José is so crowded, so loud and so filthy that it makes you never want to take the boring but innocent countryside for granted ever again. Turbo invited me in, where it was much more like a modern villa, with a wall garden, a long patio for dining under the shelter of the second story walkway, and showed me to my room, which came with a view of a sprawling green mountainside full of coffee plants and clouds in the distance covered up the summit of Poas Volcano. That afternoon me, Turbo and his wife listened to music, and I heard him talk about living on the West coast in the 60s and I told him about living in Alabama now and how I got to Costa Rica. He´s had radio shows in Turkey, Europe, Seattle, and Central America. He´s worked in Hawaii and in Cuba. He´s friends with Woody Harrelson. As we talked and I basically sat back and unexpectedly let him give me some much needed advice on life, the clouds rolled over the mountain top and the patio filled with fog. He talked about how life´s an adventure, and you should try to expand your mind, not blow it, then the rain began, and it rained.

Turbo´s friend Steve from Toronto, who along with his Phillipino wife Sarah will be running the restaurant at the bed and breakfast, showed up as it was getting darker. They´d been at the market all day looking for the best vendors to buy their groceries from. I was lucky enough to come when they still hadn´t decided what would be on the menu, and Sarah was cooking experimental gourmet dishes to find out what might work. She´s a good cook. That weekend I would eat steaks, pastas, salads, an omelette and fresh breads for free, and all they asked in return was ¨D´ya like it?¨ The restaurant is towards the front of the bed and breakfast, and it has this romantic, European accent to it. Along the walls is a line of wine bottles from all over the world, except for in one spot there´s wedged a canister holding the ashes of Turbo´s father. His father, who spent his life being contracted to ship cargo by plane all over the world, has a story of his own worthy of an epic novel.

Steve, who admittedly looks like a character from the Sopranos with grey, slicked back hair and darker skin from his Spanish ancestry, is also a freelance journalist. As a young man out of college he came down to Central America on his own to report on what was happening with the Contra scandal (thanks to Ronald Reagan, the greatest American, cough cough, puke puke) and also spent seven years living in Cuba. All of his journalistic travels and writing he did on his own, and supported himself without the assistance of any one particular media outlet. Steve, who wears copper bracelets around his wrists because he says it helps the blood flow, has never been to the deep South, but said a number of years ago he developed this obsession with Civil War history. After dinner on my one night stay, the three of us guys sat around with Cuban cigars and a bottle of Jim Beam on the patio with candles flickering and a few rain drops still pouring, and I felt like some hot shot telling stories about my homeland and family with Steve hanging on every word.

As I walked up the stairs by myself that night, and looked out into the distant valley where the lights of the nearest pueblo could be seen, and the hard beat of Reggaeton could be heard faintly emanating from the local discoteca, something happened to me. I knew there wasn´t a single thing around me that reminded me of the world I´d always known, and I counted up every day of the 21 and a half years I´ve already managed to put behind me, all the way up to that night when I found myself on a balcony in the mountains of Costa Rica thinking about the past, and what I could or should or might have done. And I let it go, and slept easy.