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.