In a bid for normalcy, I tried to get a date, with a nice Tica girl. This bid came in the face of my finding out that the phone I’ve been using on my VISA card has been costing me $14 for the first minute, and $2 every minute after, so there’s no slack in my bank account to entertain this silly prostitute silliness.

So there’s this nice, normal, very sexy and strong Tica girl that wanted to go out with me. She said yes when I asked her out and proceeded to reminded me of our upcoming date several times over the next days, as its time neared. But then something happened and the thing never happened; we never found each other at 3 p.m.

I do assume the best, however; that I was walking around one side of the block looking for her as she did the same on the other side of the same tin bars and food stands. I figured I’d see her at the dance at night in La Palma; the three-day rodeo fair with bullfights (they don’t kill the bulls here) and high flying metal rides.

From far away (100 yards - in case any parts flew off) I stared at the Costa Rican ferris wheel, standing beside the people I’d come with: two scraggly California girls who probably cleaned up nicely in the comforts of North American style civilization, but after a couple months in Central America with the dust and salt water and sand and lots of nights drinking without the option of sleeping late to compensate (because the cooking sun wakes you in the morning) they, like me, looked to have struggled with a climb up the side of a deserted Earth.

One of the girls was a redhead. Me and the redhead watched some little Tico kids’ ride, a massive mechanical swingset machine, all spinning chairs and whipping chains, the guts of the big robot ride squealing louder than the tiny Ticos spinning through the air at its mercy.

Between disgusting shots of supposedly "good" whiskey, the drunk meter rose and as we feared the carnival rides, the redhead posed the question again, "Do you guys wanna go in and dance?"

There was a chicken wire cage with the psychedelic mobil DJ Disco Movil and all the sexy Tica women. But I didn’t want to pay 2,000 more colones ($6) to enter and not dance to the traditional salsa/meringue music they were playing. I am unable. So we stood outside with the haphazard rides and drank 60cent Heinekens.

Eventually there were enough shots and Heinekens, and the music in the chicken cage went hard Panamanian dance hall reggae, so we paid and went in.

All this time I’d been wearing a black shirt, and all this time, on the shoulder of the shirt, had been a soft gray moth. He’d landed on me, plastered against my heart, as we traversed the jungle in the back of the pickup, on the way to La Palma. And he was with me when I danced with the California girls and another guy they’d teamed up with, all of us very drunk. And the moth was on my shoulder when I saw the prostitute from the other night. I waved at her but she just smiled her pretty missing tooth and looked away. I almost went up to her, but remembered my normalcy.

Here I was then, amid a crowd of the most beautiful and friendly sexy forthright women in any land. It was time to be normal.

Dancing weird with the white girls was normal and good. Outside in the background was the smell of cows which has never seemed abnormal. And across the joint was a white Tica girl. I’ve heard that the Ticos consider themselves Caucasians. I’ve tried to talk some of them out of this idea of aligning themselves with them but...

But many of them do have European skin. While others have African skin. It’s a very broad pallet. But hers, across the dancing chicken cage, was cream off-white. What there was to her shirt only covered a small part in the front. Her black hair was a straight bob, a haircut not often seen way out here in the nowhere parts of this country. But I knew she was a Tica from looking at her parents.

The old woman sitting to her right, and the old man on her left, were cocoa colored and withered, smiling astounded as if they weren’t used to such a mad scene with kids drinking and lights flashing. When the white girl in between them noticed me standing next to the dance floor far away, I thought she smiled, and so my drunk arm waved her over. She mimicked the gesture, I repeated it, she mimicked, until fuck it, I walked over, nodded to her mother, and took her hand and asked her to dance, wondering if I needed to ask her parents permission or some crazy thing. But she dragged me out into the sweat and thumping dance hall music.

She told me, in Spanish, that they were indeed her parents. She was visiting them on her Spring Break from The University of Costa Rica in San Jose. She’d dragged them out, though they didn’t want to come.

Frighteningly enough: the girl’s name was Alana…same as that character I made up for the book I’ve been writing here. Right after she told me that, she noticed the moth on my shirt, stopped dancing and bent close to it, staring, and then brushed it off. Exactly what myAlana would do.

We danced for a long while. You sweat so much here at the outside dances, more than I ever have, and all the sweat makes the Tica women with tiny clothes look crazy with sex, it’s easy to want to stay out there with them and go and go staring smiling. My Alana and I were sweating so much that it was making us laugh when we’d meet up eyes in tentative glances. So, eventually she wanted to stop, to go check on her parents. She asked me to come with her. But meeting the parents required more beer so I offered to buy us drinks. She told me to get her a coke.

When I came back holding a Heineken, a coke (in a glass bottle) and a cup of ice, she was smiling at me but I suddenly became self-conscious of my crawled-up-the-side-of-the-Earth appearance in regards to her parents. Their daughter was sharp, to the nines in her school clothes, while I was whiskey-teeth drunk, a dusty puddle of perspiration in a moth-eaten Public Enemy T, so happy that I had to have looked suspicious.

When I shook their hands I thought everyone would smile but her parents minds were still lost in the amazing scene of the lit up dance and didn’t seem to mind me. I talked to them for a while as we drank our beverages. My Spanish was doing fine and I attributed that to the drunk, which was stronger than any I’d yet had in Costa Rica. Whiskey makes you want to dance and meet the folks.

We left her parents to dance some more and on the floor, through smiling teeth, she made a disparaging remark about the beer bottle in my hand; drinking is gross, she said. She was already trying to change me.

Soon after, the DJ stopped the music for the night. At the first sound of silence, hundreds of Ticos began herding out into all the waiting 4 X 4’s with eight people in back, two up front, rattling their teeth on the almost-roads of the jungle. Alana was swept up in the current, but as it pulled her out and away she asked me to come out and meet her again the next night. She was looking at me as if we understood and liked each other. She was gorgeous, so I, of course liked her, but I honestly only understood half of her words, and whenever we were dancing and she’d lean in to say something to me, I’d recall a fast, nervous prayer in hopes that I’d understand whatever came out her mouth.

Far across the fair grounds she was reaching high above the heads of the crowd to wave goodbye to me. I did feel normal enough. But the California girls and the kid they’d picked up came back to my room after and my small dorm room was flammable with our collective alcohol breath, and the red-headed one stretched out on my bed and I lay next to her, trying to send telepathic signals into her head, ditch your friend, and stay here, in my room. while the kid they brought with them smoked cocaine on the end of his cigarette, though I couldn’t see it from my angle, over the sunset horizon line of the redhead’s flat, bare stomach.