I was just at the pharmacia buying condoms. Beforehand, I walked all over the village, a trickle of sweat running from under the back of my hair, down into my underwear, as I worked up the nerve. Which is ridiculous, because no one winks at you conspiratorily, or blushes at the mention of sex. It was silly to feel embarrassed buying protection here. Except maybe for the fact that no one here uses condoms, only gringos; maybe I looked like a prude or something. The pharmacia lady humorlessly took the little package off the hook ($2 for three), and blew a smoke screen of dust off them before ringing me up. My nervousness dissipated into laughter, "Polvo en los condones!" I giggled. But she remained stoic.

I bought the condoms for the date I have tonight. This woman is so amazing on the outside that I’d never be able to work up the guts to ask her out in Los Estados Unidos. But here, I whispered eight sentences to her as the guy she was with used the john. After the eighth sentence she told me where to meet her tonight.

My sixth sentence was the Spanish version of, "I am here writing a book, my second book, I have my first one right here in my bag." And I showed it to her. Though she doesn’t speak of read English, she was impressed. Then her guy came back from the bathroom and they took off. On the way out the door, she mouthed to me our meeting time and place. So, today I bought some condoms.

To you, this seems presumptuous. But Juan had told me days ago, when we’d seen her across the street from the restaurant where he and I were eating, "If you go out with her, bring five thousand colones, and condoms."

"She’s a hooker?" I asked, expecting to hear for the fifth time: ‘They all are.’

"The best. But she’s only a semi-professional," Juan said. "She might not charge you."

Juan is a gopher; he procures things. Anything you need. He makes a living hanging out in the street, talking and laughing, and if you mention, as I did when I first met him, that you wish you had a laptop, his response will be, "When do you need it?" And while gopher is a lowly title to North American ears, Juan is indespensible here, and, if he can find a laptop computer in the rainforest, he is very very good at his job.

Most of his missions are legal, mainly because little is illegal here. He’s not a hustler, because he doesn’t have to hide. He only talks in whispers out of professional discretion, which can have you thinking you’re dealing with a hustler, but in the end, it’s safer that way. One time when he procured me some dope, he came back with a bag of dust and seeds. But I still pretty much trust him.

When I pointed to the semi-professional girl across the street, he said, "She’s really busy right now, but I could get her for you within a few days."

I laughed it off, as nervously as I’d laughed at the dusty condoms, but kept it in mind. And a few nights after, before I hooked it up myself, my Tico friends got me wasted on beer at a local bar, and Juan asked me how I was doing with her; progress report. I told him I’d had no luck, then half-jokingly added that he should go get her, "Now. Go." I said.

"No, she busy tonight," Juan said.

"Well what other ones are creeping around this late?" I asked. In the day I always think, ‘That’s all so silly.’ But fill me with beer, and paying a prostitute sounds as reasonable as renting a boat for deep sea fishing.

"Oh, I have good one for you…you like skinny?" He asked.

"Yeah sure. Skinny is my favorite but... "

"She skinny man, she live next door."

He was talking about my friend from the other night. "The one with the missing tooth?" I asked.

"You know her already?" He asked.

"Yeah yeah, I actually saw her at the school the other day. And today when I walked past there again, she was at the blackboard teaching the class! Was it career day or something?"

"No, she’s a guidance counselor." He answered.

We laughed, but he never said he was joking. I continued, "Yeah, she tried to charge me $50."

Juan’s body straightened into an exclamation point, "$50!? She’d charge me $50 for a week! She must think you’re rich or something. She usually only charge $15." I knew there was no way I could be mistaken for rich, so, inside somewhere, I was a little hurt. He continued, loping his bag over his shoulder as if readying to split, "I have perfect one for you. Go to your room, I meet you there in…"

A bolt of sobriety shot erupted in my brain, shooting down into my crotch, then rickoched out my mouth, interrupting him, "No, no man, I don’t want to…"

"No, you go to your room, and I throw a little pebble up at your window in five minutes and you let us in." At night, there is a locked gate in front of the cabinas. Juan knew my room, which faces the street, because earlier that day I’d seen him sitting on the bed in the room next door, with an older gringo wearing a toupe. They were haggling over something that cost $80.

I repeated, "No, no, no." Laughing, but the business with the pebble sounded adventurous and I thought I might be coming around to the idea. I said, "I don’t want you to go run get some girl without my seeing her first, when you bring her I might not want her," I said. "I’m really picky."

"No, no," Juan assured me, "You no like, I give her to my friend who live next door to you."

That toupe was pretty ugly; that guy couldn’t afford to be as picky as I claim to be. The plan sounded air-tight to my drunken ears. At 2 a.m., Juan and I were paying our tabs and walking out of the bar; me to go back to my room, brush the sand out of my sheets, and wait for pebbles hitting my window, and he to go off into the night and fetch me some ass.

I swear I am not always like this. I have eight days left in this country, and then back to my normal world; so I feel the need to push things while I still can. But though I entered the situation as a lark, when fifteen lonely, pebble-less minutes had elapsed, I started to actually worry. To care. Antsy, I walked down the stairs, unlocked the big gate, and stepped out into the nighttime gravel, looking down the street. Empty. Where was he?

I returned upstairs and made sure my cabina door was unlocked, and also left the big gate slightly ajar, so that, in case they came by, they could wait in my room. I stumbled off down the silent street in the direction I’d seen Juan walking.

I was drunk enough where it was hard to traverse the gravel wearing my flip-flops. But I walked and walked, intermittently looking back, checking for Juan by my cabina as it grew smaller in the distance. The village was dead but still glowing. There were a couple men sleeping drunk in the gutters. It was all very exciting.

I passed the bar where Juan and I had made our arrangement. All the lights were out at the hooker/teacher’s shack house next door, where hundreds of pieces of small clothing hung still on a long white line. I haven’t bought any souveneirs for the many people back in The United States whom I’ve thought about quite a bit during my time here. This was on my mind at the toothless hooker’s house, as I unlocked her gate, ran in, and snatched a small pair of hanging white panties, thinking I would mail them, as a souvenir, to my writer friend Jonathan Ames. I was shaking with giddy lunacy and the fear I might be caught; just like Jonathan describes in his books, as I stuffed them in my pocket quickly and ran back to my cabina to wait for Juan.

I was drunk enough to have already forgotten about the underwear by the time I reached my cabina. When I remembered, I jumped up, flipped on the lights, and dug deep in my deep pocket. I unfurled them to discover, to my horror, that the tiny white piece of cotton was actually a frilly shirt, made for the torso of a two-year-old girl.

No sight could have better reminded me that I am a sinner. An evil evil man. I thought of the hooker, the other night, flashing fingers in my face, telling me she had, "Four babies." I bounded out the door and back down the street, my flip-flops slapping up dust in the night.

As I reached the hooker’s house and pinned the little shirt back up on the line, I looked back toward my cabina. Far away, two figures were exiting the open front gate and walking away in the other direction. I almost yelled, "Wait!" but the severe quiet of the night talked me out of it. As if I was missing my plane, I ran back to try and catch them. Why would they jet if I’d obviously left the gate and my door open for them? ‘It couldn’t be them,’ I thought, but never found out, because by the time I arrived, they were gone.

With an optimism as thin as my alcoholic blood, I went upstairs to my bed, and laid down facing the opposite way, with my feet where my pillows usually are, so my ear could be close to the window, listening for pebbles.

In the morning I awoke in that same position, though sober, with a stomach ache, and thankful to have missed that particular plane. But that next night I made the date with the semi-professional; I was with some friends, two Tico guys and two Panamanians. They were all impressed with my maneuvers in setting things up. They watched her intently as she wiggled out the door of the bar, smiling a full mouth of teeth.

"She so hot man." My Tico friend Felix said. "She a hooker though."

"Sort of." I replied, then ordered more beer.

"Yeah, she not a hooker really," Felix conceded. "She don’t always charge."

"I’m hoping she doesn’t, cause I’m poor."

"No, man, you can’t say that!" Felix warned.

"It’s true."

"It don’t matter, man. If she think you’re poor she won’t go with you at all." Felix shook his head affirmative as punctuation. "You tell her you get a lot of money for your book: Thirty thousand dollars." He suggested.

"If you want her, you must say this," He continued. "Or she will go with the old gringos with the money...And I saw a video of her with two old gringos with one fuck her in ass, the other in the pussy...very hot"

I was horrified, but kept my composure while Felix described the video as if this were a good thing. "She very very hot," he said.

There were other hookers in the bar with us. None as perfect as the semi-professional. The one Panamanian guy didn’t speak much English but he scanned all the hookers saying something about how he likes, "big poo-sees." And every few minutes he’d cough up a frustrated and loud, "I want to fuck them."

We suggested he just walk over and talk to the hookers.

"No, no, I no pay money for poo-sees." He seemed to think it was beneath him. "I offer her merchandise!" He said.

"Huh?" We all said, in a couple different languages. "Merchandise like what?"