Mixed metaphors

Behind the ping of raindrops on corrugated ceilings, over the rumble of the Pacific -- the heavy surf breaking over the jagged boulders scarring the beaches at Las Peñitas, the asthmatic wheeze of water sucked back to sea -- the perceptible sizzle made me grimace, my body tensing the way one does anticipating impact, being struck.  Like incandescent gashes suddenly torn into the night, electrical surges lurched across the black, horizontally, branching out and crookedly out, like NCAA tournament brackets from a Parkinson's afflicted hand unfurling in reverse, the spiderwebbing of cracking glass radiating away from the point of origin; then, extinguished, ocean and heavens remarried in darkness, the only remnants the etherial singes on unblinking irises.

Alone on the unlit street, power in Las Peñitas having gone out some time ago, I decided my life was worth more than seven dollars, approximately what I'd budgeted for a going away feast of pescado frito, tostones, y arroz, accompanied by either a cold Toña or Coca-Cola, the latter to this day concocted with real sugar in Central America.  With beach spread to my left and nothing in the way of trees or houses for several hundred meters,  I moved from a walking to jogging lightning rod.  

Back in my beachfront hostel, the same one that advertised "Horse Ridding" as an activity coordinated for visitors -- and someone must have taken them up on it; I saw nary a horse in my two days at the beach -- I reclined under a thatched roof and scarfed down the package of ten Oreos in my pocket, admiring the most violent display of lightning I've ever seen.  

The sky was ablaze.  It was like sitting inside a tent that light could hardly penetrate as an army of Samurai warred on the outside, frequent and errant sword strokes tearing gashes into the walls, unpredictably scattering across the canvas blinding streaks of light that were, inexplicably, cloaked anew in an instant.  In the moments between sharp flashes a dull glow would pulse on all sides, like the night sky of a city under siege, a city in flames, observed from a distance, evidence that beyond, behind clouds and obstacles, the storm raged.

The next day I was back in León, wandering the city one last time, in the evening catching a microbus to Managua, then a cab to the airport.  The cabby and I chatted the whole fifteen minute trip, which cost me under five dollars after tip, and he gave me his phone number -- another friend the next time I'm in Nicaragua.

At the airport, going through security, I inexplicably thought back to the bottle of Smirnoff Ice someone had left in my hostel room in León.  "What a waste," I thought, "How hilarious it would have been to hide the twelve ounce and thus not carry-on legal bottle in my carry-on, and then explode with a 'You got iiiiiiiicceedd, bbiiiiiiiiiiiiiittcchh' when bag-screening security personnel uncovered it in my bag."

I wonder if they play that game in Nicaragua.  I wonder if Nicaraguan airport security personal are allowed to have a sense of humor.  I wonder if sometime I'll get so intoxicated pre-flight that I'll think it's a good idea to ice airport security.  I hope so.

Delta Air Lines plays an instructional safety video before flights, during which passengers are advised that "most seat cushions can be used as flotation devices."  One would presume that Delta knows which particular seat cushions are floatable and which aren't, considering that all distinct cushion types -- headrests, seat backs, seat bottoms, etc -- should be constructed according to identical, type-particular specifications.  Yet, the company chooses ambiguity, promising survivors extra post-crash insanity -- amidst flames and wreckage and scattered limbs and torsos, screams and wails -- a mad and savage scramble to figure out which fucking seat cushions will keep your legless torso afloat until rescuers arrive.  

More likely than anything, Delta knows, should your plane crash into the ocean, nobody is going to survive.  So it really doesn't matter.

Toward the end of my trip, after my Spanish had edged out of rusty unpracticedness, I was asked, by native speakers who had known me for several days, once if I was Spanish, another time whether I was Argentine or Spanish.  And there was no asterisk, nothing about me being latino but retarded.  Which felt nice, complimentary without being an intended compliment, and it almost made me forgot an encounter weeks earlier in Masaya, when I was getting back into the groove of español 24/7; I'd unintentionally indicated to two  chatty and obviously gay teenagers, after having clarified I was a connoisseur of titties, a fiend for the latina, that I would consider joining them in a romp of the homosexual style.  "Pero no sos gay, verdad?"

Indeed not.

So now I'm back in the States, with a trip booked to Guatemala just after Thanksgiving, a little mission work.

That mission: to educate a few café-colored, Católicas Chapinas about the advantages and pleasures of contraception, a pocketful of Trojans and a healthy libido my teaching aids.

The top Latin American travel accessory: white girls.

If we've talked business, money gettin' schemes, anytime in the last year, I've probably mentioned my interest in robbery: bank and tourist.  Minutes after arriving in León, sipping an average and overpriced, at thirty Córdobas, mojito at Bigfoot's hostel front bar, chatting to a German girl who'd just recounted the story of how she'd found herself in the hostel's dorm for the last month, a story that began with her being robbed, I found myself prefacing my monologue: "You know, I probably shouldn't be saying this in a hostel, especially a hostel swimming with irresponsible travelers who've yet to experience any significant setback."

I outlined why I hate working.  Because I'm lazy.  And that I like working with kids, especially chavalitos in Latin America.  And that volunteer work gives me a boner.  Because this variety of altruistic endeavour, at least in Latin America, seems to attract, almost exclusively, women; and these typically European or Australian or Canadian, sometimes Brazilian or Argentinean or Chilean women, let me assure you, are inarguably ones, one representing an affirmative vote on the binary scale, you would or you wouldn't.  And they're the best kind of ones -- ones even before you've taken them out to the Peruvian disco, even before you begin the usual debaucherous descent toward flirting with the toothless Chicklet vendor on your lonely stumble home; they're ones before you begin slamming the free drinks purchased by ticket currency distributed indisciminately outside, on disco row, where a gaggle of hype men hoping to entice white people, but especially gringas, into any of many indistinguishable bars push multicolored confetti into your chest, your pocket, your hand; some of the slips will fall into the recesses of your pocket to be fished out, wrinkled and faded, some weeks later, by the local woman doing your laundry.  If that slip of paper could talk, it would chuckle, reminding you why you love volunteering in Perú, surrounded by tons of ones: because every time you go out there's the chance someone else might do what you can't -- because even your expansive moral spectrum has boundaries -- and slip a roofie in a white girl's drink, and you might be around to benefit.  There's your boner.  Or potential boner.

But I digress.  To my enraptured German audience of one, I spilled the beans.  "What I think would be a great idea, something that would allow me to travel and volunteer and not exert too much effort, would be robbing tourists.  Digital cameras, wallets, laptops, all those valuables that travelers have a bad habit of leaving around, in the open, while they shower or sleep or take day trips."  She didn't seem particularly amused, but that's probably because she's German, who aren't allowed to laugh as punishment for their history.  I turned and talked to a Swiss kid who was checking in.  The German girl left at some point.



The next morning I awoke to the Swiss kid, who happened to bunk in the bed over mine, tearing the sheets off his bed, dumping his bags out, belly to the floor searching under the bed.  "Somebody stole my wallet," he said.  "It was in these shorts last night," shorts that fell off the bed sometime in the night, maybe scattering their contents on the floor.  I did the usual frowning, overturning of things, then went back to sleep, hoping the German girl, who was two beds over, wasn't witnessing this.


That night, or maybe it was the next, I ate some good pizza.  The first good pizza I've had in Latin America.  I went out to the underpopulated beaches at las Peñitas, forty five minutes on the hottest, most cramped chicken bus I've ever had the misfortune of riding; after the seats and aisles were completely, one hundred percent overflowing with sweaty flesh smushed against sweaty flesh, the fare-collecter holding a rail, hanging halfway out the front door, seven gringos, replete with backpacks, showed up.  People must've sucked in their guts, or maybe they shoved children under seats, because the gringos made it on.  Sitting on the right side of the bus, there was a wall of people, standing, the length of the aisle, making it perfectly impossible for me to observe anything except bellies to my left.  All the way to the front of the bus, and down the stairs, were people standing, preventing me from seeing anything out of the windshield.  My field of vision was a rectangular tunnel: all seatbacks and heads to the front of the bus, a human wall to my left, windows to my right, mercifully open.  The warm water washed away the sweat and grime, and a couple of cute Caleñas I met, after they waved and yelled at the gringo punishing his calves with a soft-sand run, the older of whom is studying medicine in León, made me forget the grueling ride to arrive.

Last night I met Justin, a cool kid originally from Greensboro, who'd studied at UNCC and the University of Michigan, with whom I share a love of alcohol and Latina complexions, and we ended up on a six hour binge -- beer then tequila then more beer then a lot of rum then more beer, some driving -- with a random group of Nicaraguan men we shared a table with at the crowded BárBaro.  I woke up to a cleaning lady telling me it was time for check out, and was I planning to stay another night?  I wasn't, but I didn't really have a choice.  Still in León.

With word of good pizza spreading fast, I joined a few nice British girls from the hostel while they ate.  Dinner was unceremoniously interrupted by a heavily intoxicated, well dressed Nicaraguan gentleman, with a nice collection of shiny gold teeth; I'd noticed him standing behind our table, admiring the white skin of my companions, and my Buenas, apparently, was an invitation to sit down.  He knocked over one of the girl's drinks, didn't seem too perturbed, and wiped up the spill with his elbow.  Within a minute or two he'd picked up the glass and started drinking what was left.  He never reached for the pizza, but I tried to move it out of arm's length.  His English was indecipherable, mostly gibberish, but he was proficient in drinking lingo: "You give me beer. Yes!"  He was stroking the girls arms regularly, shaking hands with everyone, repeatedly, every time he thought he'd mastered another phrase in English, which was often.  "I am English!"  He'd cock his head and coo at the girls, "Amor. Entendés? Jooo are wuv."  He told us he was driving himself. 

I went to the bathroom, which I thought would be his cue to whip out his cock, after the girls assured me they'd be fine.  When I came back, he was gone, and I'd missed the best part: the stagger slash lean-in for kisses-that-never-materialized when he said goodbye, shaking hands with the girls, his head just hovering in the vicinity of their faces.

Waiting for the dinner check a car stopped in the street, far from the intersection, far from the stop sign, in front of the window in which we were sitting.  A different Nicaraguan man just staring and smiling.  Then he waved.  After thirty seconds or so, he made his way to the stop sign, and then off. 

White girls.

Choridedos and Vení, cagame! Muriendo de risa en Estelí

I finally pried myself away from Masaya, hitching a ride to the bus station at the back of the Mercado Municipal from Marbel's dad, loaded up with gifts from the family -- trinkets and snacks for the road, zapote and a heavy portion of moist sopa borracha, a traditional spice cake bathed in a sugar-sweetened aguardiente.  Off to Estelí.

The drive to northern Nicaragua is refreshing, driving through verdant mountains, distant volcanoes framed against the sky, the air noticably cooler.  Arriving in Estelí I thought I'd check out my old digs, Hospedaje El Chepito.  There was a new TV in the corridor around which the rooms are arranged.  Inside the rooms, the walls had been redone, extended all the way to the ceiling, buffering sleepers from the snores and proclivities of their neighbors.  The concrete floors had also been tiled.

On the other hand, huespedes now gathered in front of the TV, watching at full volume until some hour long after I'd gone to bed.  There was also an impressive cockroach infestation; when I brushed against one of my shoes the next morning, two cockroaches scuttled from their dark refuge under its sole.  The shared toilet was also sans seat, yet someone had bricked the lay-up, smearing a portion of the extra-wide rim with waste (it was cleaned, mostly, by the next morning).  My bed was covered in some sort of crumb, and there was no sheet with which to cover myself, so I was forced to rise at various points of the night to layer myself against the cool.  A long sleeve shirt, first.  Later, socks.

I changed hostels the next morning, spent a night in a dorm at a backpacker-populated joint, remembered that, for the sake of undisturbed sleep, I prefer to have my own room, and moved to Hostal Santa María the next morning.  More cheaply rented rooms in a nice family home than a true hostel, it was a gem: clean, cheap, a nice family and a desayuno típico included in the price.

My days in Estelí were spent walking familiar streets; sitting on the curb, sipping cans of Toña with Eddy and Santiago; chatting with Isamara.  Not sweating.  More than anything else, I spent afternoons with Luz Marina, relaxing on benches in the shaded parque infantil, chatting for hours, laughing frequently como retardados.  We're a silly pair, from two separate worlds.  Her favorite food is gallo pinto. She lives in one of the barrios somewhere far across the panamericana, somewhere I've yet to visit.  She doesn't like to walk there after dark, and she needs to help her mother prepare dinner, so the descent of the sun whispers for us, hasta mañana.  Her mom toils, sunup to sundown, and earns less than US$100 monthly, and on afternoons that she plays the lottery, at a dollar per ticket, accompaniment for the gallo pinto becomes a longshot.  Her father, with arthritic knees, is barely able to work.  A brother contributes some, and gifts Luz Marina a few pesitos when he can.  A cousin in the US wires money, when he can; infrequently, recently, as he'd been saddled with expensive personal medical bills.  She can't afford the medical attention she might need.  She hasn't gone out to enjoy the city's nightlife since I last took her out, over two years ago.  She's as good a friend as I have.

We walked out of the city to La Casita, went out to lunches at restaurants she had only glanced at before.  Mostly, we laughed, and smiled, and enjoyed.


Yesterday afternoon we said goodbye, I caught a cab from my hostal to Cotran Sur and, a bus change later, stepped down in León, drips of sweat from the tip of my nose discoloring the dust at my feet.  If I were sleeping in a leak-free coffin equipped with an industrial air conditioner, it might not be enough. 

Staying in what's truly a backpacker hostel, at least fifty beds, the bar area is a whirlwind of English-speaking, Spanish-butchering Europeans and a bilingual staff; loud packs of travelers cackle drunkenly from every corner.  I'm suddenly at a loss for how to communicate.  I drink a liter at the bar, aware of the path of each individual drop of sweat sliding and stopping and sliding again down my back.

But the city is beautiful, the architecture impressive.  And every new destination promises new culinary experiences, like the repocheta asada, a corn tortilla, estilo nicaragüense, folded, filled with cheese, and grilled, served hot with pickled onions and a cabbage salad.  To combat the heat, a raspado -- quite simply, shaved ice swimming in condensed milk, or whichever other syrup of your choice.  Whether the ice is frozen agua pura, and whether the haggard iceman has washed his hands anytime, ever, before scraping the block, then molding the shavings into a packed dome in your bowl, are questions one can't really consider, especially with a size large not even rounding fifty cents.  And the blackish flecks caught in the cloyingly sweet, light-brown stew, well, I'm just hoping that was cinnamon crusted under his fingernails.

A Gringo Again

I kept sweating out visits at sixty cents an hour at a random Cyber (internet without café) in Masaya, Nicaragua, returning daily with aspirations of composing a few paragraphs that'd charm jealousy out of air-conditioned offices back home.  It's took me three days to arrive at this period.  I guess twelve Córdobas for an hour in a computer-equipped sauna isn't bad.

(I struggled to the end of that paragraph sometime last week, and now I can't figure out how to type a semicolon, so I'll just state the obvious, but, first, a moment to lament being also unable to locate the colon.  And I just adjusted the keyboard, now reset to the United States configuration; victory.  Also, I've since relocated from muggy Masaya to Estelí, in the cooler north.  Now, to that belated sentiment hinted at toward the beginning of this loquacious, meandering parenthetical: I've been headbutting, for over a year, I guess, the last time I was regularly updating this blog, against some creativity-stifling, word-suppressing monolith that dwarfs any structure of this world.  Las palabras no me quieren salir.)

I thought it'd be easy to share some stories from my travels; it's been anything but.  Maybe it's because the only English I've spoken in the last ten days, with the exception of a beer-and-beach native-language binge with a couple of USA coeds nearing the end of summer internships in Nicaragua, has been of the take-a-breath-between-each-monosyllabic-word variety.  The sort of thing that catapults into perspective the patience of your Spanish-speaking friends.  I'm sure I'm of the confidence-exceeding-competence variety of gringo, confidence intact thanks to my many friends never stating the obvious, unlike the Colombian who once declared he'd mistaken me for a Colombian, but retarded.

On the other hand, he mistook me for a Colombian, which is some small victory, surely.

To the specifics.  My flight landed in Managua sometime after midnight, the wee hours of Saturday, August 7.  I'd told myself before the seventeen day trip it was okay to splurge.  There was no reason to cling to the professional backpacker's survivalist mentality that, at it's worst, legitimized two entire afternoons of comparison shopping in Panama City, pitting against each other every shoe vendor in a half-mile stretch, all for an ultimate savings of somewhere between two and three dollars.  Splurging 2011 meant a ten dollar reservation in a fan-cooled dorm room in tropical Managua.  Eight human bodies and a non-oscillating fan.  If only my idea of splurging capped out somewhere closer to thirteen dollars, the magic price at which air-conditioning became available, the cleaning lady might not have been able to read my mattress, a sweaty canvas into which was saturated, pending evaporation, the form of gringo sleeping.

I entertained the notion of spending a day in Managua, but the allure of surprising the friends I'd ventured to Nicaragua to see, unannounced, because I have no idea how to contact the vast majority of them, was too great to delay.  I hopped on a microbus to nearby Masaya, where there was no relief from the heat.  I booked a room without ventilation, but with a fan I could dedicate to my body.  At no point during the next seven days, which were approximately five days more than I'd planned to spend in Masaya, was I not sweating, or sticky from having sweated.  My bathroom was an unventilated closet.  Even after a cold shower I'd be sweating before having toweled off.

And so we've arrived where I began: how can I coax a bit of jealousy out of you, back home in the US, when we're experiencing the same sultry heat, but I'm doing it without air conditioning, and very often without fans?

Having booked my Masaya hostel, I began retracing the steps I remembered having carried me to the house of some friends, los Huete.  I navigated the barrio, the rare gringo, until I arrived at the alleyway entrance that leads into the family's living space, a collection of structures, housing various relatives, nestled between and built upon the two concrete structures sandwiching the property.  The house is composed of several rooms, a patchwork of wooden planks and aluminum and cement that retains heat on hot days.  Which means every day.  Outside the door is a small patio space where people, weather permitting, can congregate around a small table, throw a few chairs and stools onto the dirt and pray for a breeze.  Between the patio and the outhouse and the separate shower closet, the latter two of which are set a few meters back, at the end of the property (and between which, the first night and a six-pack deep, I was unable to distinguish, aiming my watery stream inside a bucket-rim, faintly visible in the ambient lighting, that, embarrassingly, turned out not to be a toilet), sits, shaded by corrugated aluminum, the multifunctional, multisectional concrete sink common to Latin America -- a deep central basin that collects water from the faucet atop the metal piping rising from the dirt; floating in the water is a wide and shallow plastic bucket, like a doggie-bowl, for ladling water into either of the side compartments; to one side, a shallow ridged section for washing clothes and hands, brushing teeth; the other side deeper, segregated for washing dishes.  The family has aspirations for structural improvements, though barring a sudden change of fortune, employment, that's a longterm goal; for now they crack jokes about the three little pigs, if only you could have seen what they had before the wolf tore through.

As with many of the friends I've made in Latin America, there seems to be no correlation between financial means and generosity, the former frequently limited, the latter typically boundless.  The reverberations of laughter and chatter keep the corrugated ceiling busy even on the driest of days, echoes a welcoming breeze singing down the alley, out to the street.  They have family and friends; fresh food and a culinary creativity to accompany ingredients of tropical amplitude; and a home to keep themselves dry and warm, simple but perfectly functional.  At no point were there discussions of flatscreen TVs.

And so I stood beside a line of clothes strung to dry and smiled, projecting a quick buenas tardes down the alleyway; an improvised door groaned and a head popped out.  Immediately, it was like I'd never left, there was no two-year disappearance.  Inviting me to delicious homemade meals, preparing diverse Nicaraguan dishes -- indio viejo; sopa borracha -- solely because we'd identified a litany I'd never tried.  Filling my palms with ripe, exotic fruits -- zapote; nispero; nancite (encurtido); others with names that escape me.  Bringing me icy glasses of tiste, other traditional beverages.

Erick and Marbel escorted me above Masaya to the fortress Coyotepe one scorching afternoon -- the only day Eric might see off work in the foreseeable future -- where we scaled stone walls to enjoy three hundred sixty degree views and a sweat-stalling breeze.  At night, Eric would whip me around town on the back of his motorcycle, dodging traffic and pedestrians to pick up a case of Toña, a bottle of Flor de Caña, some Ranchitos to snack on; our last night, my despida, swerving to pick up a case of Toña after we'd polished off a liter of Flor de Caña, etiqueta negra.  (Zooming through town, down barely lit, potholed streets, hurtling through intersections with little more than a few shrill shrieks of the horn, a perfunctory tapping of the brakes, protected by nothing more than a buzz and the invincibility of youth, I was reminded that, if one has to die young, being chucked from a motorcycle isn't a bad way to go.  Assuming it's a quick, clean death, of course.)

I don't know if saying I love that family is too strong a sentiment.

Equally responsible for my many days extended stay in Masaya were los Castro, a family who I'd befriended in Masaya's Mercado Municipal a few years back, having frequented their comedor for the finest and fullest plates of desayuno nicaragüense.  When I walked back into the baking diner, I was greeted at once by a chorus of Pa-trick! Ya vino! and a strangling wall of stagnant heat, insulated by concrete and aluminum, stoked by various burning stovetops and fires and human bodies.  It's so hot, the only reason you worry about how long the fried chicken has been sitting out is that all the juice might have cooked out since it was snatched from the pan.  That first day I was presented a plate of Baho, my favorite Nicaraguan specialty, and refused to let me pay.

I visited Everth -- who has now expanded business from the comedor, selling used shoes, used clothes, and, in two separate stalls, used toys, "a diez la pieza" -- and his family daily, his beautiful daughters Evelinda and Macy, voseando with Everth and the girls, reverting to the somewhat less comfortable Usted with the rest.  He'd lead me around the market in his free moments, inquiring if I'd tried every of myriad variety of fruit, picking up pounds for pennies, bags bulging with jocote, mamón, zapote, and others unnameable.

One evening we went out for the Latin American version of pizza, which almost always, almost impossibly, leaves me craving even the fifty-cent pizzas untouched at Food Lions back home.  We went out for pupusas salvadoreñas (elaboradas con ingredientes nicaragüenses) another evening, and the waitress seemed impressed that I, flaunting those few weeks in El Salvador, asked for loroco.  I invited the family to the shores of la Laguna de Apoyo, where I stripped to my Dickies and jumped in, while the family, unsure swimmers, watched from the shore; we ordered platters of fried fish, a few liters of Toña, and otherwise laughed away an evening.

Best of all was the goodbye asado at Everth's mom's house, where also reside various relatives, all who I consider friends; especially the precious Anita, who'd blather to me about any topic, flashing the semi-toothy smile of adolescence at every frequent fit of laughter.  Everth and the family got a kick out of watching me, initially, struggle to cut the slabs of beef into long chains; then came the grating of various vegetables, onions, chilis, celery, garlic; finally all was bathed in olive oil, a hailstorm of salt, and mixed by hand, a mouthwatering aroma expelling from the mixing cauldron.  There was corn to be grilled.  We chopped, finely, tomatoes, onions, and cilantro, squeezed fresh lime, and covered in perfect avocado, chimol.  Rice on the side.  A fresh salsa made from chilis, onion, and tomato, bien picante.  Everth stoked the charcoal fire and arranged long strips of beef across the grill, cobs of corn in a circle, ringing the sizzling meat.  When I saw my plate, the chimol served inside a leaf of iceberg lettuce, browned strips of beef atop a pile a rice, two hot tortillas on a dish aside, plenty of picante, two charred cobs of corn, I went into a photo shooting frenzy.  In the juryrigged lighting, the dim light, cast from the single overhanging bulb, further shadowed by objects hanging from the ceiling, made it somewhat more difficult to shoot without flash, as much as I was trembling in anticipation.

The food exceeded my lofty expectations.  Como decimos: Barriga llena, corazón contento.

When peering down into the recesses of a smoking volcanic crater barely warrants a mention, you know you've had a good vacation (though, to be fair, pretty much anything short of a violently erupting volcano is going to pale in comparison to Guatemala's Volcán Pacaya, having melted the soles of my shoes toeing lava).  Visiting friends on a daily basis, conversing always in a second language, struggling to stay hydrated, paying for, maybe, half your meals, the rest enjoyed en casa, homemade, disregarding sage advice and eating unpeeled fruit, bathed in tapwater and massaged by unwashed hands, hands having just handled raw meat, drunkenly chugging tapwater and breakfasting on liquados made with powdered milk and tapwater, enjoying streetfood; amistades and immersion, this is life.