Every morning when I wake in my cabina, there’s a single engine plane coming at me. I lay there with my morning cough, unable to move out of the way of the blades.
The other cabinas in the village, even the outhouse I slept in my first night here, they offer small desk fans or medium-sized, freestanding fans, usually with the face-plate and chest-plate removed. The one in my outhouse had some green fluid dripping from its exposed heart and lungs and it squealed sharp in the night, mimicking the monkies outside the thin walls.
But the cabina where I stay now has a ceiling fan, and it is made from the blades of a plane. It has an enormous wingspan and is ultra effective. It even gets rid of the pot smoke, though I try not to do it in my room. I’d hate to be kicked out. But ever since Milton slipped me that bag that night, I’m back to smoking first thing every morning like I did in Florida. Usually, I wake up and take a walk down to the pier and smoke and then come back and lay under the intimidating ceiling fan, coughing and pretending I’m some dumb pelican humming through nothingness when suddenly there’s this plane coming at me.
This morning, I played the plane game before I got high, and I thought of the pelican I saw yesterday. In Florida, pelicans are as rare and beloved as assholes. But yesterday, when I spotted one floating off the end of the small pier, it dawned on me that I’d lived on the Costa Rican water for a week now and hadn’t seen one pelican. So I was actually really happy to see the worthless, brown turd bobbing out there. As I stood and admired the pelican, as if for the first time, the broad hammer head of a shark eased out of the water, and took the bird under. It was nothing like I imagined, maybe because there were no tense, orchestrated strings in the background warning me that it was about to happen. Or maybe because, though the shark was the biggest I’d ever seen in the wild, it didn’t ATTACK, but rather, seemed to come up for a calm breath of dry air and in the process, inhale the bird like second-hand smoke, and then just disappear with a ripple subtle and quiet enough to earn points in an olympic high-dive competition.
Altogether, playing the plane game on my cabina bed between coughs, and remembering that whole bit about the hammerhead shark, ate up 20 minutes of my day, with only another million left. I decided to take a shower.
The only reason I’d stop smoking pot, the only bad thing it’s ever done to me, is this nagging cough. This Costa Rican pot is especially thick and smoky, like toking on a dirty, wet rag, and I wake in the mornings with bits of charred cloth in my lungs, weighing down my chest and brain. It hurts, but it’s calming too. The dragging feeling puts me in synch with this village. But I’d almost trade it all to lose this cough. Especially since there is no hot water in my cabina, and that’s the only thing that would help. Unlike alcohol hangovers, pot hangovers can be cured by 15-minutes of coughing in a steaming shower. But I don’t have any hot water, so my cough lingers all day, or until I’ve coughed up the whole rag.
I turned on the cold water and undressed. There was a small roach on the floor of the shower but I left him alone. Normally, I would at least cup my hands under the nozzle until they filled with water, and then throw the handfulls onto the roach in an attempt to clear him down the drain. But this morning I had no urges like that. Things are different here. It’s good; I feel little changes in myself. I could never stand cold-water showers either, but now I love them. So me and the roach took a shower together and I wondered what to do with my day. I don’t know what he was thinking about.
I decided I’d go to the beach, but I still continued to bathe; the cold water was like conditioned air. Plus, it would be my only shower of the day; after I swim in the ocean, I like to come home, dry off, then change into clean clothes, all without showering. The rest of the day my hair feels like clumpy straw and the sun heats all the dry salt and it burns my skin, but in a way that makes me feel like I’m being cured.
After I was clean I was still coughing as I dried and changed into my swim trunks. As I slid on my chaffing flip-flops I hoped that gargling with ocean salt water will help my throat. I turned off the airplane fan and the lights and stepped out my cabina door, mid-hack, and was met with a spoonful of honey. Beyond the honey was the long thin arm of a silver spoon, and then long, thin, brown fingers, leading to a long, thin, brown arm, ending in a long, thin, brown, 15-year-old girl; the daughter of the woman who owns my cabina. The young perfect girl is an inch taller than me and she looked down into my eyes, her brow furrowed, and said something in Spanish which I assumed meant, "Open up!" So I did, and she fed the honey down my throat. A smile took over everything on my face and I thought of hummingbirds, even though hummingbirds take their sweets with their long, needle tongues. When the honey was gone, her face relaxed and she smiled. She looked like Alana.
Then she pointed back into the open door of my room. She said something and pointed at my bed and my heart jumped. She continued pointing in there as she strung together words I couldn’t catch but in the end I knew she was asking if I wanted her to clean my room, change the sheets.
"No, no, no." I said reflexively. She was so soft, I didn’t want her to go near my dirt, my urine trails like Costa Rican waterfalls down the sides of the toilet. I didn’t want her to find my pot. I tried to tell her I would clean my room myself. She nodded and sprang off like a gazelle. Then I hoped that, after I hid my pot, she would assume I was just expressing myself wrong. I didn’t want to clean it myself.
I walked down the road past the dust and the mechanics and their dead cars, and barbed wire and more dust, and tires full of dirt and whatever flowers could stand the heat, and those two giant macaws still fighting way way up there in that exact same tree every time I walk past. The tide was very low again. Everything was sand flats and I felt at home; I’m used to the same thing in Florida, only our beaches are white. I wonder if the color of the sand coincides with the color of the residents of all beaches.
Way down where the beach bends to the left, past the bar on the water where I met Milton Chapman, there is nothing. There are mangroves and a sea wall and more sand flats, but more than all that, there is nothing. And though I’ve seen Ticos smoking marijuana in the streets, I’ve found that this nothing place out there in the mangroves, is the best place to hide out and smoke.
As I walked toward the mangrove nothing, I watched a dog running after white birds across what was left of the water. I’d always thought dogs looked so happy when their owners brought them to the beach to play catch and swim. But it doesn’t compare to the energy exhibited by an ownerless dog chasing a flock of birds. When I was almost to the magroves I took my pipe out of my pocket and packed it as I walked and watched the dog following the flock far away to the other end of the dark brown, dry inlet.
I almost couldn’t see the dog as I rounded the first thick of mangroves and stepped into the middle of a clicking mass of thousands of pale red fiddler crabs that fled from my floppy feet, looking like British soldiers running from American troops in those simple elementary school history books. I smoked some pot as they dispersed into holes. The crabs cleared the brown, wet sand, and I noticed in the empty ground, a line of giant paw imprints. I lifted my head and looked around into the vines expecting a cougar or a lion. The mangroves are thick. I was hidden in there. I wondered what kind of tigers lived near the sand flats. Or bears. I kept smoking as I turned to leave the hidden place.
On the edge of the thick, still hidden, I stopped for one last toke. It scratched my throat and I coughed and stepped out into the open. The cough kept on, hard. It hurt and I stopped again and bent over waiting for it to finally die. I needed more honey. As I stood back up and walked, I noticed the wild dog, 300 yards away, bounding in my direction. He’d chased off all the birds and he was heading for me.
Had he been 10 yards away, I would have instinctively knelt and met him with a big hug and maybe even let him lick my face even though I hate that. But as he came flying at me from forever, there was time for all kinds of thoughts to surface; I thought of Milton Chapman telling me, "Don’t forget that this isn’t America." I walked and watched the dog getting closer and I thought of the two camps who’d told me, ‘Don’t go in the water by the pier, there are crocs everywhere,’ and it’s inverse ‘There is no chance there’s a croc anywhere near the peninsula’. When the dog was halfway to me, he swung an arch to his right, to come up on me from behind, and I kept walking, worried, thinking also of the other two camps who tell me, ‘Don’t trust anyone here,’ and ‘The Ticos are the nicest, most trustworthy people I’ve ever come across in all my travels,’ respectively.
The dog never slowed on its trajectory. That worried me most; the aggressive velocity. So when he was 100 feet away I stopped, arms at my side, and stared ahead as if I didn’t notice him with his lips curled back, sniffing my legs. I felt it working. I was uninteresting and eventually he turned and jogged off to piss on a rusted piece of a car cresting from the wet sand. As he lifted his leg I allowed my body motion and began walking again but the dog immediately clapped his leg back down, stopped peeing before he started, and was back at my frozen figure, sniffing and snarling. It wasn’t an easy situation to read, so I stayed still and didn’t look at him, as if I’d just wanted to stop. He lost interest again and walked back over to pee. I stayed frozen.
When he finished peeing he strolled off. I stayed frozen still. I noticed him look back at me several times on his way to the mangroves. When he disappeared into the green and when I started to walk I realized they were probably his paw prints I’d seen in the mangroves.
As I walked toward the pier I found a half a banana on the ground and I thought how horrible it was, they way the tourists just litter the beach. And then I realized the banana had fallen from the tree above. I punished myself for my stupidity by peeling the banana and forcing it into my mouth. I crunched on the sand. The banana didn’t taste the same as what I’m used to but the whole thing made me laugh, which then caused my throat to cough up the banana mush and sand back onto the beach. I’ve noticed, when I’m alone by myself for a week straight; I start doing funny things to make myself laugh, the same way I would to make Alana laugh and wilt onto my chest.
That’s not to say there’s no one here to talk to. Everyday I meet several new people and half of them speak English. No one will even let me practice Spanish because they all want to practice English and that’s a sucker punch to my laziness because I always choose the easy way out and just go along with it, and we have long conversations in English, at the expense of my education.
I’ve met many gringos here and the question, "How’s your Spanish coming along?" is as ubiquitous as the conversations New York transplants share, discussing the battle for their apartment: In which neighborhood? How many square feet? For how much? You’re kidding? And I tell people here that my problem with Spanish is, I can get across all the things I need to, I express myself eloquently, but then I can’t understand a word that comes in response. When I tell people this, they back off and re-focus on me like they’re eyes are adjusting their eyes to the new light I’ve been bathed in, and they all say, "Really, I’ve only heard of people understanding but not being able to speak. That’s really weird." And whenever they say that I think of some rule I heard somewhere about writing where, if your output exceeds your reading input, you are doing something wrong, you are too hung up on yourself. So, I’ve kept my mouth shut and devoted myself to listening to Spanish, and from there I have evolved into, for the first time, a soft spoken person. Even with the English speakers.
On my way to the pier, after the standoff with the dog, I took off my shirt and lolled in the water and drank a rum and coke. They sell rum and coke in cans here. When I was done lolling (and you never really know when you’re done lolling - you just have to stop - like when working on a painting; you must just decide to give up) I ran into a dreadlocked, tan guy who said he lives here and in California. He seemed very native, there was a bend in his English. I asked him to walk with me and smoke pot. He agreed.
I was quiet as we walked and smoked. His long, watery dreadlocks left a wet trail in the sand behind us and I at least knew we wouldn’t get lost. We passed the pipe and he told me he is here studying monkeys. Actually, he is here trimming their toenails.
He spoke very slow. I need to get used to that from people. He said, slowly, "Well, there are these trees. In English they’re called Glass Trees, in Spanish they’re called…" I don’t remember the name. We stopped on the beach and he handed me the pipe, spotted one of the trees and pointed it out to me. The tree was smooth to the point of being reflective. "And these (INSERT SPANISH NAME FOR COSTA RICAN MONKEY) monkeys live in these Glass Trees." He continued. "They’ve evolved so that they are really the only animal that can climb them. They have these really long special nails on their back legs that dig into the those crazy, slippery trunks. They run up there to escape being eaten, and nothing can follow them up. Plus, their favorite bugs live up there…
"But the tourists love the trees. So people started chopping down these trees and making these like, compact mirror cases out of them…" He looked around on the beach until he bent and picked up a dead clam, the hinge was still together, the two perfect halves; it was his compact mirror, he pointed into the clam’s mouth where the mirror should be and said, "They put a round sliver of the tree’s bark in a compact, and when you open it up you can kind of vaguely see your reflection in it. It’s kinda cool but it’s not worth the lives of these animals…"
I looked around into the jungle and didn’t see but that one Glass Tree. And as I searched I just marveled at they way it is here; anytime someone stops long enough to talk, you get to hear some crazy shit. He continued, "So anyway, for the past six years we’ve been down here trying to save these trees. But it’s just not working, man. And these monkeys’ have nowhere to climb or hide because their nails are so long, they’re clumsy on regular trees. These monkeys’ are especially suited for that tree…" He pointed at the lonely Glass Tree.
"It looks like we can’t save the tree. So in order to save at least the monkeys," He said, "we’re down here capturing them, trimming their nails, and releasing them."
Every time I hear some crazy shit like that I always think I’m not giving a good enough reaction. I was floored into silence by his amazing story.
"It’s working too." He said. "They’re doing well."
"Don’t they grow back?" I asked. "They’re nails?"
His thin, tan mouth curved up, "Hey, if the government pays me to come out here twice a year and trim toenails…" He shrugged. "Jah bless."
"Oh, so that’s how you live here." I always want to ask everyone I meet. But I restrain myself. "The government pays for you to live here?"
"Well, they give me some money." He said, while grabbing the little, colorful hippy satchel from around his neck, undoing its string, opening it and pouring something into his palm. "But I make better money selling these."
He extended his palm out and I looked into it: monkey toenails.
"Do you want to buy some?" He asked.
I actually thought about it, but then said, "I’m sure I’ll see you around a lot. I might actually buy some later."
I turned away from him and looked one more time at the Glass Tree, remembering its station so I could come back and point at it and tell someone else the story. When I turned back, the dreadlocked guy was gone. That happens a lot here too; you’re definitely going to see each other again, not much sense in formal hellos and goodbyes.
As I walked on, I noticed a white man fishing at the end of the pier. He was using a rod and reel. No one uses a rod and reel around here. Everyone hand fishes. As I came up the pier behind him I realized it was Milton Chapman.
He waved before I was upon him and he watched me walk, waiting for me as I reached him. He wasn’t wearing any sunglasses; insanity. When I was next to him I said hello as he re-cast his bait far out into the water.
"Hey, man." He said, thick and slow, turning to me. "How are you?"
I wanted to answer but my words stuck; his lip still bled down the middle of his face, but now, on the tops of his ears were purple sun blisters, congruent on the sides of his head like the markings on an oriel’s shoulder feathers.
"Oh, man, don’t you wear sunscreen?" I blurted out. It was horrible, really.
"Don’t worry about me." He said. I waited for more. But no. His purple head and face were like a thermometer sticking out of his shirt, telling the dangerous temperature of the meat inside that cotton oven. He was splitting and cracking like an old wallet, only with blood.
And then there was, of course, more of his famous silence. He concentrated on fishing and I studied all his sun damage. I wanted to do something for him. I remembered a story Father Michael had told at Catholic summer camp. I liked Father Michael because we had the same name, and also he told this gory story about some religious figure who’d martyred himself, let himself be killed for some cause. They burned the guy on a grill. All the time they asked him to admit he was wrong, which would, in some way, have meant turning his back on The Lord. When he was blackened, they asked him again, to repent, and Father Michael told us that the burned guy replied to his torturers, "I’m done on this side. Turn me over."
I kept that to myself. I told Milton Chapman about the hammerhead I’d seen, the one who breathed in that bird.
"That’s the same hammerhead that ate someone’s baby, man." His hook through the bait was at the tip of his rod. He cocked his shoulder and arm back then triggered forward, he pitched the bait out farther than any Tico’s hand reel had ever landed them. "You didn’t hear about it?" He asked. "That’s all anyone in town’s been talkin’ bout."
It really upset me to hear about this; if everyone in the town was talking about it, why hadn’t anyone mentioned it to me? I was indeed, as a matter of fact, outside the social circle of the village. It was proof that I was being talked to less than others. I hope Alana introduces me to trustworthy people when she arrives.
Maybe I asked the question to remind him that we're from the same place, maybe I was trying to impress him with my quirky sensibilities, or maybe I really wanted to know, but I asked him, "Why is the sand brown here and it’s white where we come from?"
I heard a small ‘tissssss’ sound like a fire being pissed on, and then a cigarette butt floated by in the water. I hadn’t noticed him smoking. I folded my legs under and sat down with my back to him so I wouldn’t have to look at his blistered face and feel the pain. I was closer to the cigarette butt as it floated on.
"Well," he said. "It used to be white too, but I’ll tell you that story when I have some beer and grass in me."
I liked how he called it grass. When I return to Los Estados Unidos, I will call it grass from now on.
"I have some grass." I told him. "But I already smoked twice in the hour so…I’m cool." I handed him the tiny, hand-carved pipe I bought in San Jose. It’s one-of-a-kind, and after the first time I used it I realized: now I have to throw it away before I leave the country.
We didn’t talk while he smoked. 10 silent minutes later, when he finally handed the empty pipe back he accompanied it with, "The beach here used to be white because the color of the beaches is determined by the color of the seashells in the surrounding area. And my mom, and me too, but I was really little and I didn’t know any better; we raped this little inlet of all these junonias and angels’ wings."
My head wanted to swim around and find out where that consistent stream of well-put words was coming from, but the brain inside knew. But I’d never seen such a dynamic change in a person from straight to stoned. Milton blossomed open.
"What happened?" Was all I could respond.
"Well, this used to be the craziest best place to find junonias, this real pretty shell that my mom really loved. And we’d come here every summer…that’s how I started coming here…and while we were here we’d collect all these shells and sell them to the shell shops in San Jose. I still have all the operculum, I built one wall of my cabina with them."
"What’s an operculum?" I asked in the killing sun; we were having class outside today.
"It’s their foot." He said. "That hard part that they used to walk and they pull it against their hole to protect themselves, lock themselves inside. But these junonias, they have a sharp operculum, and they swipe at you when you pick them up. They kill other shells and eat them. So at one point, they had eaten all the other shells in this area. They ruled, man. And so the beach was white with their bones."
His last sentence was the first time he’d showed any connection between Milton Chapman, my favorite young writer, and the guy who was too dumb to wear sunscreen. The guy with that tree sloth voice. But, "The beach was white with their bones"? What a beautiful sentence. I guess the trick was to get him high, wind him up, let him go.