More Murder in the Barrio

A stray bullet during a shootout between rival gangs killed a university student last evening, a few blocks from my office. This is the third murder this year that has taken place within a short walk of my office that I know of. Contrary to what many might think, this neighborhood is not a slum. In fact, it’s one of San Jose’s better neighborhoods, featuring a collection of small offices, decent restaurants and nightlife. But crime is out of control, and the authorities are unable and unwilling to do anything about it. It is indeed an unfortunate commentary on this society when you can’t walk along a crowded thoroughfare at 5:30 pm in a good part of town without an imminent risk of danger.

The Only Coffee Shop In Town

The only coffee shop where I can sit down, enjoy a steaming cup of joe, open up my computer and work unmolested is the McCafe at McDonald’s. This is an unfortunate fact. It’s not that I love the ambiance, of screaming children, beeping registers, bubbling grease, and a tinny sound system playing cheesy Spanish love ballads at concert volume. But McCafe wins by default. As the police have reiterated in the press, one must not walk around with a laptop computer in public. If one does, and gets rolled, then the theft is classified as “carelessness.” Additionally, most coffee shops lack internet, or comfortable seating, or more than 3 tables, or proper ventilation, or a management policy that prohibits bums from begging or selling pencils or stealing your bun when you’re not looking.

It’s the armed guard at the door, however, that gives me the greatest sense of security at McCafe. I know that I have a persona gumshoe mere feet behind me, ensuring that I reach my parked vehicle intact. Because after dark on the streets, anything goes. So I’ll sit here, sipping my McCappuchino, while some Mexican skank bleats on about how she likes it when you touch her, with an aromatherapy of Special Sauce and stale fries, banging away like one of those monkeys who just might write the complete works of Shakespeare.

Back In Action, or, Still Rotting

Sometimes The Rot comes in bursts. The other day I was leaving my house at four in the morning, at the end of the block, were two young women dressed in Jennifer Lopez urban nightwear. This would not be strange if I lived in the city, but with a much higher bovine population density than bipeds, it gave me pause. Were they in distress? Lost? Kidnapped and abandoned? I asked if everything was all right. “Are you going to the serenade?” they asked. No, I knew nothing of a serenade, and in fact, I informed them, we were in the middle of the countryside. Then a car came barreling down the hill, honking like a lost calf, and the girls ran over and got in. The driver had an ashen face and clutched a bottle of beer which evidently was not his first.

Last night a couple of dudes threatened to shoot me. They were riding my ass in Santo Domingo, so I gave them a shot of my new Rebel 90 210-lumen superflashlight to let them I meant business, hoping to illuminate these young gentlemen as to the proper methods of driving. They pulled alongside me and I gave them another dose of the Rebel 90. They squinted and squirmed, inquiring as to whether I’d like to be shot. I told them that I didn’t mind, that the Rebel 90 would protect me. Problem averted.

This is not to mention the dressed up man wandering the streets of Heredia drunk as other were going to church. Or the street theif who stole a cheap cellphone, was pursued, caught and then professed his innocence. In order to prove to the angry mob that he was no criminal, he even stripped down to his boxers. No phone. The crowd did find it, however, neatly tucked into his anus.

That’s 24 hours of driving around. Every day brings new adventures.

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Brief Thoughts on Why I Travel

I just read a couple of quotes from an essay by Bob Shacochis regarding travel and vagabonding. “Whatever your resources,” he writes in an essay called Something Wild in the Blood, “the world is yours to the exact degree to which you summon the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life.”

And this is how I felt when I first abandonded life in the States for the unknown lure of the tropics: “I was unaware that there were other people like me, people who might think of their urge to travel as an acceptable characteristic of a bona fide lifestyle. Romantics, to be sure; fools, possibly; escapists, probably. Dreamers who pursued irregular but nonetheless intrepid dreams of dubious value to the social order, their minds flaring with extravagant narratives.”

Now, after nearly eight years away, time has done nothing to quell this spirit. If anything, each venture outside of my daily bubble adds fuel and further stokes the fire, making the possibility of a life of convention more distant with each passing day.

Easter Crime Report: San Rafael Burns, and, A Killer on the Loose

Behind my house there is a wooded lot that goes about 50 meters down to a dry creek bed, which if you cross and hike up the other bank, you’ll get to where a full-fledged, recently-released-from-prison murder lives. We’re neighbors. He was just released from La Reforma, the maximum-security prison in Alajuela. Some of you might know La Reforma from news reports of such hijinks as “Escape in the Laundry,” “Cell Phone Ass-Smuggling” and “Pin The Pecker on the Trannie.” This fine fellow just graduated from ten years of a 17-year program in social penance for murder. It would appear that he didn’t learn too much, however. Within hours, he had stabbed a fellow who was camping just up the street from me. The camper didn’t die, but the police did show up after irate neighbors stopped calling and drove to the police station to demand action. “We have no gas,” the coppers said, as I imagine them looking up bored from a game of pinochle. But they found some, came up, and got in a shootout with the Familia, the band of ne’erdowells who live behind me. Killer was handcuffed and taken to jail.

A group of neighbors stood in the street, firing their guns skyward like a bunch of tan Yosemite Sams, barking and growling from the safety of their own gated estates, proclaming that justice had been served.

In true Tico form, however, the judges could find no reason to hold him, so they let him out. Now he’s terrorizing the neighborhood.

There have been a number of home robberies here lately, including a brazen attack in which a neighbor saw the crooks bust a window, called 911, and waited two hours for the cops to show up. By that time, the thieves had left with everything in the house, down to the showerheads and the kitchen sink.

Thursday resulted in the arrest of some 80 of the Future of San Rafael. Burning tires, felled trees and garbage blocked roads as a maddened throng of youth danced around, bashing in windows of passing cars and hurling molotov cocktails at the police. It was Judas’ fault. Thursday the Ticos take out their anger on Judas for his purported betrayal by blocking roads, burning all kinds of shit, and in this case, setting some mechanics’ shops afire, breaking all the windows at City Hall and tipping cars.

With each passing year, the road to my house becomes scarred with more and more scorched asphalt from where these future bottom feeders decided to express their ire. Maybe the only way to get the Familia out of their cave is to put up a sign: Judas Lives Here. Of course, then they’d probably burn my house down, too. I guess I’ll just have to wait to get rolled.

Dispatches from Colombia: Me Versus the Volcano

I climbed up the flanks of an active volcano, stared into the bubbling crater, and dove in.

OK, so I didn’t dive in. I don’t like to fool around when it comes to geothermal massifs, so I climbed in. The volcanic shaft is purported to stretch 2,300 meters into the earth, and the prospect of becoming a Jules Verne joke wasn’t something that I had on my itinerary here in Colombia.

I’ve been here for five days now. Colombia, specifically Cartagena, has dazzled me with a cosmopolitan selection of lodging and restaurants, sparkling parks, exquisite architecture that spans five centuries and a vivacity and joie de vivre that dresses in bold colors and dances to the tropical rhythms of ballenato.

The country-wide celebration is growing as Colombians are beginning to look at their country as a viable place to live. Many writers have documented the disturbing contrast that this South American country presents: some of the hemisphere’s most educated, sophisticated people who are also brutal terrorists, marauding murderers and first-rate kidnappers amid some of the most stunning landscapes on Earth.

The last seven years have started to change this story, however. President Alvaro Uribe has been successful in weakening the FARC, the left-wing rebel group (once dedicated to social change. Now, they are essencially a drug mafia) is on its knees, and the right-wing paramilitary groups have also been fiercely fought. Hasmel, my guide, tells me that the 40-minute ride along a modern highway to the volcano would have been impossible just a few years ago. Before Uribe, nobody traveled by land. It was simply too dangerous.

As the rebel groups have retreated, the government has placed checkpoints every few miles along the highway. There is a slightly militarized feel that will be familiar to people who have traveled through Chiapas or Michoacan in Mexico, but traffic is brisk and there is no tension in the air.

Back to the volcano. I was expecting a giant conical geological feature, the kind of brimstone and fire, the things of Ruben Dario poems. I was quite surprised, then, to bounce down a gravel road into a rustic parking area lined by dilapidated straw huts, where the local Afro-Colombians sought refuge from the blaring equatiroal sun. There were no other vehicles around. And then there’s the volcano. I actually thought it was a joke at first. It is indeed a cone, perhaps 50 feet high, and you walk up a rudimentary staircase to arrive at the top. Sulpher tinged the air slightly acrid, although a strong breeze whipped off the nearby river mouth and helped offset the stench. A man followed me to the top, and this guy looked like a middleweight boxing champion, sans teeth. His name was Enrique, and he would be my masseuse.

The crater was full of a grayish, bubbling mud. I’ve had volcanic mud baths before, and it’s always a novelty to cover yourself in dirt in a way your parents wouldn’t let you as a child. But now I had to dip into a crater that dropped over a mile into the earth. I didn’t know what to expect.

If I had expected heaven, it wouldn’t have done it justice. The crater’s muddy concoction was so dense that you couldn’t sink even if you tried. It was so think that I was actually showing a local boy long division in the muck, and it remained, undulating like a taught waterbed, until eventually enough bubbles broke through. I liked the bubbles: they looked the exact size and shape of a completely gray fried egg. Like a buoyant, thick gel, this primordial stew held me in place until Enrique began, unsolicited, the massage.

He worked my entire body with hands that could have crushed walnuts and collapsed soup cans effortlessly. The gritty, mineral-rich mud scrubbed my pale skin, and the sun injected warmth into the scene. Hasmel, a 21-year-old tourism student who was doing an internship with the local tourism board declared: “Ah, yes. This is the life I deserve!”

The muck was so thick that it nearly sucked my shorts into the bowels of the earth (a term I thought fitting, given the consisency of the slop). After squeeging myself with my hands, I went to the river, where again unsolicited a woman began bathing me, instructing me to take off my shorts as she made sure my natural pink tone shone through.

“What did you think?” she asked.

“Incredible. I was actually 52 when I went in. Now look at me.”

She gave me a once over and asked how old I was now.

“Thirty.”

My cleverness went unappreciated, and I retreated to the van to put on some clothes. The others in my group arrived, rubbed down and bathed, when the locals surrounded the van. “Tip time,” they said.

A tip was certainly deserved, and Hasmel suggested a reasonable amount for the services. Reasonable to him and the driver, but not to the locals, apparently, as their disapproving looks and grumbling evidenced.”Three people, three massages, three baths. That’s six services,” said one woman.

I was uncomfortable, but Hasmel didn’t seem to care. He laid out the facts: “Split the money. Remember that a tip is voluntary.” And with that, he ushered us into the van and we headed back to Cartagena.

A University Dwelling

When you think of college towns and university districts, you probably conjure up images of stately old homes, tree-shaded streets and quaint shopping districts peppered with funky second-hand stores, independent restaurants and bookstores. This paradigm does not hold true for Costa Rica. In Heredia, the district around the Universidad Nacional is rife with flourecscntly lit copy shops (no copyright laws here), a smattering of fast food/greasy spoons, and a horrible buzzing throng of reckless drivers piloting rickety cars. At the entrance to the Universidad Nacional, next to Burger King, is my favorite house in the area. While all homes are surrounded by high cement fences topped with barbed wire, and have bars on the windows and doors, this apartment takes the concept of “house arrest” to a new level.

Sweet Digs

Every time I see this particular house, I imagine it full of criminals clutching the bars, banging their tin cups, desperately watching the masses below as they scurry with their napsacks to a class on philosophy or dentistry or industrial engineering. Maybe the architecture school could use this house as a project. Then again, maybe they designed it.

Just Another Night At The Bar

I lost power at home at 4pm yesterday (it was still out when I left home at noon today), rendering both my internets and my kitchen worthless. So I fired up the Lesbo Rider and made my way down the hill to Bulevar, a college-type bar in Heredia, for some people watching, chicken fingers and suds. Once again, the local didn’t dissappoint.

The sun was setting and the drones where scurrying back to their nests. I especially enjoyed watching the women. Other than leering offensively as the lone gringo peering out at the sidewalk, I watched these women propelled briskly onward, stairing straight ahead, clutching their purses tightly under their arms. Every one the same. You can see it: these women are afraid. They don’t amble, they don’t stroll. She’s trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible without being fucked with. This, in the heart of a city that isn’t even considered that dangerous (although I could show you five spots within a few blocks where people have been killed recently).

I was contemplating this when the horns started honking. Hundreds of them. A taxi driver swooped into position, blocking the cross street like a police car setting up a parade route. And a parade it was. A steady stream of red taxis trundled past, honking like the Ticos just won the World Cup, in a pace known locally as tortuguismo, or “turtleism,” which consists of moving as slowly as possible without actually stopping. These taxistas drank beer, hooted and whistled at the frightened women, running lights and basically having a good time protesting whatever it was that irked them; there was no way to tell what the cause was. Not a single police officer or traffic cop was around.

Then, once the blockade moved on to new urban mayhem, the normal pace of life returned. The speeding. The noise. I came to realize that there is no pleasant sidewalk cafe experience in Costa Rica. The locals won’t allow it. Motorcycles, cars, buses, delivery trucks overloaded with bananas or furniture or coffee pickers, they all barrel down past Bulevar as if the bar were an observation deck on the Autobahn. And because many of the vehicles are in poor condition, and many others have either removed their mufflers or installed glass packs, the decible level is like drinking beer inside the turbine of a 747, vibrating the streets with tremdous levels of sonic pollution.

Once, I drove the Lesbo Rider around for a couple of weeks with a hole in the muffler. The resulting rumble was deafening. I sounded like I was tooling around in a Formula One race car, until you looked and saw a dented, fat Subaru slowly rolling past, it’s pasty driver grinning at pedestrians. I should have painted flame and fake bullet holes on it.

In this condition, I gave a guy I just met at a party back to town. I was actually a bit chagrined when I fired up the LR and our heartbeats all changed with my RPM, but my new passenger nodded his head and said, “Dude, this car sounds sweet.”

So I’ll just continue sipping my Imperial, staring out the glassless front of Bulevar and seeing how life unfolds.

A Black Girl Scrubs My Pots

This negrita works every day, at least on the ones I choose to wash dishes.

It would appear that the brass at Clorox de Centroamérica, who produce this sponge, have not read Mammy and Uncle Mose, and are thus uninformed regarding current protocol regarding race-related imagery. It almost seems like a throwback to Darkie Toothpaste. I suppose many Costa Ricans find solace in a double-use black girl dutifully scouring caked-on bits of hamburger or fetid feta. I see it, however, as an extension of the passively racist attitude that many Costa Ricans hold. While ticos are quick to point out that the United States is a racist nation and has a long history as such, the next breath might let loose phrases like me tenían trabajando como un negro, (they worked me like a black man), to which someone else will reply, si, pero es que hoy los negros no trabajan (yeah, but blacks don’t work any more). Then stupid chuckles all around. Well, I’ll tell you what, my negrita works dilligently and effectively.

This theme is rich and deserves a longer analysis, which I don’t have the patience to post right now. If anyone has any specific questions, let me know and I”ll try to answer them.