Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals

by Wendy Dale

  I couldn’t help but snicker. He started cracking up too and we found ourselves in a contagious bout of laughter, both of us gasping for breath and hanging on to each other to keep from falling over. I gripped his shoulder for support, and as I raised my head, we found ourselves in one of those well-choreographed movie positions, my lips just inches away from his.

  But the moment was quickly destroyed. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

  I was hoping he’d complete the sentence with something lighthearted, something like, “You have great hair,” but of course, the only time you heard that phrase was when you paid a stylist forty bucks to say it. Besides, “You have great hair” didn’t need to be prefaced with the severe “There’s something I have to tell you” line. “Hey, girlfriend,” “Miss Thang!” or “Well, sop me up with gravy and call me a biscuit” usually sufficed.

  “What’s the matter?” I wanted to know.

  “Have a seat.” We sat down at a nearby bench. “You know, this really isn’t the best time for you to be meeting me.”

  Sure it was, I thought. No matter what drama he got me mixed up in, I still had a prepaid ticket out of this potential relationship in a matter of weeks.

  “I really wish I could take you out to dinner and the movies, but I’m stuck in a bad situation.” He took a deep sigh. “I originally came to Costa Rica to try and buy a house for my parents. When my brother died, they were devastated and I thought the best thing would be to get them away from the memories. It was also to make things up to them—right after my brother got killed, I disappeared on them. I ran off to Venezuela, to stay with a friend I had known in boarding school. Anyway, I was living in Venezuela and I called my family and mentioned the idea of them coming down. We thought Costa Rica would be the perfect place. It was a great idea. I was going to make amends with my family and we’d all be away from Kuwait for a while.”

  “What happened?”

  “I found the perfect house. This yellow Spanish-style place with a pool, six bedrooms. It was beautiful. So my mother sent me a check for the down payment. I had to go to the town of Limón to complete the transaction and I got robbed. They took everything. The check, my wallet, my passport. They even took the suit I was wearing.”

  “How terrible.”

  “It really wasn’t that bad. I figured my mother could cancel the check and all she’d have to do would be to transfer more money to me. She wired twenty-five thousand dollars to a bank here, but there was a problem: I had no way to pick it up. The robbers had taken my ID.”

  The same thing was always happening to me: I had money, but so many times it seemed as if there was no way to get it. Latin America was filled with fickle ATM machines that spewed out money on a whim. With thousands of dollars in my account, in Mexico I had been denied a twenty-dollar withdrawal. Another time, my balance was down to a matter of pennies when the machine in Honduras cheerily spit out fifteen twenties. “Open the pod bay door, Hal,” I intoned as my mantra every time I walked up to one of these temperamental machines.

  “I needed a passport,” Michel continued, “but there’s no Kuwaiti embassy in Costa Rica. So I had to go through the OIJ, the Costa Rican equivalent of the FBI, who would verify my identity and give me a temporary ID. But this wasn’t free. They wanted to charge me 320 dollars.

  “Well, I didn’t know anyone in this country. I hadn’t eaten for days. And I met this girl, this chubby girl who began taking care of me. She brought me sandwiches and said she’d help me. She came up with this idea of transferring the money in her name. She offered to pick it up for me and said she’d give it to me. Guess what?”

  “She ran off with the money.”

  “Yep. I was going to offer her half, but she took it all and disappeared.”

  Financial problems were always wreaking havoc with my life too. Chubby girls, fickle ATM machines—it was all the same thing. I couldn’t help but sympathize with his plight. “I don’t have tons of cash on me, but the least I can do is buy you lunch,” I offered.

  “You really don’t have to. You have to understand that this is really humiliating to me. But I really thought you should know.”

  “Don’t mention it. Rice and beans is not going to bankrupt me.”

  Ironically enough, the thing I always missed most about the United States was Mexican food. You couldn’t go more than two blocks in Los Angeles without running into a taco place—how come it was so difficult to find Mexican food in Costa Rica? I imagined warm enchiladas, cheese-laden burritos, spicy tacos, and crunchy nachos as I stared at the unappetizing meal in front of me: white rice, flavorless black beans, and a slab of meat, the same ingredients as Mexican food but without the spices. Edible, but boring.

  Luckily, if you were able to say the word “guanábana ” (pronounced wah-NAH-bah-nah) the whole meal was redeemed by the drinks. Guanábana con leche was a blended mixture of milk, sugar, and a rich white fruit with a thick sweet pulp. Unpeeled, guanábana was terrifying looking, the kind of fruit even Adam would have had no problem refusing. Sometimes reaching the size of a football, the whole thing was covered in a thick, green lizard-textured skin. But after giving me a description of the creamy drink, Michel had tempted me into trying it and now we were slurping down guanábana juice like old friends.

  I had to admit that I was having a great time. Here I was in what was undoubtedly the most peaceful, dull, and overtouristed of all Central American nations, and I’d already found myself in the midst of an adventure—accompanied by a wealthy, well-traveled Kuwaiti who was trapped by unpleasant circumstances. I couldn’t help but up the ante.

  “Send the money in my name,” I impulsively said.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Michel responded.

  “Look, I have to be back at my parents’ in time for Christmas, but if you think your transfer will arrive by then, you can have your mother send it in my name and I’ll be happy to pick it up for you.”

  “That’s so nice of you. Wow, I don’t know what to say. Yes, I do— I’ll give you half of it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Just buy me lunch when your money arrives.”

  “I hope you like Venezuelan food. When this is all over, I’ll treat you to lunch in Caracas.”

  It did occur to me that receiving a twenty-five-thousand-dollar transfer from a stranger in Kuwait could have serious implications. Drug money, stolen bills—who knew where the money had actually come from? But as I gave it more thought, I realized that I was blowing the situation out of proportion—unscrupulous bank transfers were just the kind of things they wrote books about. And since I was considering putting together a book about my travels, receiving a little tainted money wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

  Besides, this was Costa Rica and nothing exciting ever happened in this country. At least this was what my copy of Costa Rica: A Natural Destination warned:

  There’s something different about Costa Rica. It is a country without an army in a world that counts tanks and missiles and nuclear warheads as the measure of a nation’s strength. The national hero is not a general but a young, barefoot campesino (farmer). Schoolchildren, not soldiers, parade on Independence Day. . . . Located in a region where violence is too often the order of the day, Costa Rica lives in peace. It has one of the highest literacy rates in the Western Hemisphere and a Social Security system that offers health care to all its people. Costa Ricans like to say they gained through evolution what other countries try to attain through revolution.

  Lines of literate Costa Ricans waiting for their social security benefits—it wasn’t the kind of event that made for compelling material. My only hope was that Michel would actually turn out to be an internationally wanted criminal.

  Besides, at the moment, I was going through another more immediate ethical dilemma which was the fact that although Michel and I were getting awfully cozy on my bed, I was having second thoughts. I was seeing someone else in Los Angeles, who had nothing to do with Michel, who I was seeing
in a completely different way, being that his naked body was the one directly within my line of sight at the moment.

  I had been casually seeing Chris for just over a month now, and although I had warned him that I was wary of commitment and even of monogamy, we had settled on an open relationship qualified by a fair warning clause. This meant I could see whomever I chose; I just had to tell him before I actually slept with anyone. It had sounded like a good compromise that night over Absolut Kurant, but now that I was nearly nude in a hotel room with an exotic and attractive Kuwaiti, I was beginning to realize the inconvenient aspects of this agreement.

  I had my own moral code and although it did not preclude me from going to countries illegally or having more than one beau at a time, I did have a problem with lying to anyone who wasn’t an American border official. I was a woman of my word and dammit, I was going to make that telephone call.

  “Hi, Chris, just want to let you know, in accordance with the terms of our relationship, that I am about to have sex with another person.” That was how I rehearsed it in my head—quick, efficient, and to the point. I reached over to grab the phone, when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the phone in my room for some time, which made sense considering that there had never been one. The lobby phone was a possible option until I remembered the large sign in front of it that politely requested no overseas calls. That left the international phone center, which would require a walk of six blocks to get to, not to mention that the staff preferred to deal with customers who were fully clothed.

  At this point, torn between two difficult options, I decided to leave it up to the reader, like those “choose your own adventure books” so popular when I was a child:

  If you think Wendy should sleep with Michel, continue on to the next nonitalicized paragraph.

  If you think Wendy should keep her promise and wait until she is able to find an international phone line before sleeping with Michel, proceed on to your nearest Mormon church and ask for the conversion application form.

  It was definitely the right decision. Hours later, as the sun came up and both of us collapsed exhausted finally ready for sleep, I closed my eyes, thinking happily that this was the way traveling was supposed to be.

  The next day, while Michel went to the bank to make the arrangements for the transfer, I decided to check out San José on my own and turned to my guidebooks for advice, opening the less utopian of the two, the Berkeley Guide. The most interesting sight sounded like the criminology museum, a monument to the most notorious crimes committed in the country, which promised formaldehyde-preserved body parts and aborted fetuses.

  Just as I was preparing to leave, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me that seemed to have nothing to do with the thought of seeing amputated hands and feet. What was worse, for the past week, a red rash had been steadily getting worse on my left hand.

  My guidebook had been so eloquent on the subject of grim attractions; I hoped it would be just as informative when it came to Central American diseases. Sure enough, in addition to the usual warnings against cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, yellow fever, and dengue, the authors had been kind enough to go on about other less glamorous illnesses.

  Filariasis is contracted from mosquitoes that transfer a parasitic worm, which then inhabits the lymph nodes and tissues. It can occasionally lead to enlargement of the extremities (elephantiasis).

  Leishmaniasis is contracted through the bite of a sand fly. It causes fever, weakness, and in some cases a swollen spleen or skin sores.

  Chagas’ disease is contracted from the excrement of the reduviid bug, also known as the cone nose assassin or kissing bug. You may have no symptoms or fever in the early stages of this disease, but it could lead to heart disease, an enlarged intestine, or possible paralysis. There is no vaccine available and treatment is limited.

  This wasn’t the kind of cheery reassurance I was looking for at the moment. Figuring a slightly more optimistic outlook couldn’t hurt, I turned to the section on staying healthy in my other guide: “I used to say it was okay to drink the tap water in San José and most other cities in the Central Valley.” Of course you did, I thought sarcastically. “Then in 1991, a study revealed that only 50 percent of municipal systems have water not contaminated by fecal material.” I threw Costa Rica: A Natural Destination against the wall and vowed to never use that guidebook again as long as I lived—which, come to think of it, didn’t seem like it was going to be that long.

  Feeling sicker by the minute, I raced to the bathroom just in time for an unpleasant intestinal experience. Deciding to put off the criminology museum until the day when my stomach would be a bit more up to the sight of amputated body parts, I put myself into bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  “Hello, I am your doctor and I will be forcibly tearing your fingernail out this morning.” Any normal mother would have taken this introduction as a bad sign. I was six years old, living in Peru, and my mom had taken me to the hospital for a tetanus shot after I had stepped on a rusty nail. And since we were there, she had thought it would be a good idea to have the nice doctor take a look at her daughter’s fingernail, which had slight indentations and was pale yellow. There was only one cure, he informed us. I did not understand what he was proposing—my six-year-old vocabulary did not include the word “extraction.” But he wrapped me tightly from head to toe in a sheet to prevent me from struggling, shot me up with a mild local anesthetic, and began ripping my fingernail out from its roots with a scalpel and a pair of tweezers as my screams echoed throughout the halls of the hospital.

  After some time, my fingernail grew back in (pale yellow and indented, I might add), but my fear of Latin American doctors remained. (The upside was that this event had created copious amounts of guilt material to be used as needed on my mother: “Remember that time you took me to a doctor and he performed the same technique on me used to torture prisoners of war?”) Now that I was in Costa Rica, concerned that I had contracted some terrible tropical disease, the last thing I wanted to do was visit a medical practitioner, who would surely advise that the best way to get rid of a rash was to amputate my hand.

  But Michel had insisted. His Costa Rican friend Jessica knew of a great doctor, he informed me, and too weak to put up much of a fight, that afternoon I found myself on a bus headed toward the office of another Latin American M.D. Twenty minutes into our ride, I couldn’t help but cheer up slightly as we left the dirty, loud, and congested center of San José and entered an area of rolling green hills and peaceful farmland. Besides, my visit to the doctor had turned into quite an impromptu party.

  When Michel had first mentioned Jessica, I had expected her help to extend as far as a telephone number and an address, but earlier that morning, as my hotel room had gotten more and more packed with Jessica’s friends, relatives, and loved ones, I began to suspect that my diarrhea had become the social event of the season. After the onlookers shook my hand and wished for my speedy recovery, the room finally dwindled down to three others and myself, the number of people who would be accompanying me to the doctor. In this part of the world, even getting over a bad case of the runs was seen as a group endeavor.

  Now there were four of us on the bus. Michel was at my side, and Jessica, who had turned out to be much more beautiful than I had expected, was behind us, bubbly, radiant and with a head full of dark corkscrew curls that bounced along with the bumps in the road. Seated by her was her buddy Maritza, a slightly plump, good-natured twenty-year-old who went along with anything Jessica suggested. At the moment, that seemed to be shouting out the window of the bus, informing male bypassers on the street that they had very attractive hindquarters.

  This was performed all the time in Costa Rica—shouting out a compliment at an attractive stranger was called a piropo—but it was never done by women. Men were stunned to hear a woman dispensing information about the shape of their buttocks, and the fact that Jessica was so charming and beautiful only unnerved them further:They didn’t know wheth
er they were being victimized or complimented. They generally turned a bright shade of crimson, their staunch machismo dissipating with every step as the four of us rolled in the aisles. By the time we arrived at the doctor’s office, even I was in good spirits, considering the fate that surely awaited me.

  In my own country, a physician’s questions generally had something to do with the symptoms at hand, topics such as fever, achy muscles, and congestion. However, I was in a distant tropical nation where the professional queries were a little less to the point.

  “Citrus fruit?” Dr. Guzmán asked after I had explained the nature of my visit.

  “No, thank you. I’m not up to eating anything right now.”

  “No, no—I mean what has been your contact with citrus fruit?”

  My contact with citrus fruit? I had always thought oranges and lemons were the right kind of fruits to be hanging out with, but he was making them sound so dubious.

  “I . . . eat them?” I said, hoping it was an acceptable response.

  “Yes, yes, but do you peel them first?”

  Apples, pears, peaches—those were the kinds of fruit you sometimes didn’t peel. But citrus fruit? Who ate oranges without peeling them first?

  “I haven’t eaten any citrus peel, not that I’m aware of.”

  “That’s not my question. Have you been peeling citrus fruit?”

  Of course I had—how did you eat an orange without peeling it? On second thought, come to think of it, in Costa Rica, the bags of oranges came with the fruit already peeled. Actually, I hadn’t been peeling any oranges in Costa Rica.

  “No lemons or grapefruit either?”

  I thought back. There hadn’t been any citrus fruit—unless you counted the innocuous-looking limes in Tegucigalpa whose peel I had used as a garnish for one of my mother’s Christmas cakes.

  Dr. Guzmán nodded accusingly and pointed to my left hand. “This is what happens when you peel citrus fruit in Central America.”