Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals

by Wendy Dale

  “You like him, don’t you?” Jessica accused me outside of the prison as we waited on the curb for a taxi.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What’s not to like? He’s gorgeous, he’s nice, he’s a great singer—”

  “He lives in a prison.”

  “You seem to be fixated on that fact.”

  “Jessica, in my country, people I hang out with don’t go to prisons.”

  “So . . .”

  “Here, everyone seems to.”

  “But you like him. I can tell.”

  “Sure, he’s cute. But attraction is cheap. You can come across it just about anywhere. And sometimes you just have to walk away from it.”

  It was a sound sensible mantra—and what’s more, I truly believed it, but I was still worried. I was completely capable of blowing off a handsome man, but a handsome man with entertaining stories, whose words bore the mark of a life well lived, this was the kind of man whose secrets I was dying to tear into. I hated the fact that Francisco was a prisoner, and what I hated even more was that I had more to talk about with him than the men I ran across in Los Angeles, guys who saved their passions for Range Rovers, the film industry, and arugula salads with radicchio.

  As Jessica and I jumped into the cab she had flagged down and sped off through the streets of San José, I thought back to the last conversation I’d had back home, days before I had boarded a plane to come to Costa Rica. At a bar, a tall attractive stranger had scooted his stool up closer to mine and had tried to break the ice with mundane questions: “Where are you from?” “What do you do?”A month earlier, I might have been excited by the possibility of where the conversation could lead and would happily have responded to his queries, but my experience with Michel had changed me in a way I had not realized until that moment. As I began to answer, I suddenly felt that writing radio commercials and being born in Arizona were arbitrary details. They had nothing to do with my real life. What mattered to me was that I had just visited a Costa Rican prison. But this wasn’t the kind of topic you broached with a stranger; I was having a hard enough time explaining these things to my friends.

  This travel thing had started to get to me and I was losing the ability to separate my double existence. A year ago, Lebanon, Honduras, and Cuba had been like distant movie settings that I could walk out of any time and back into my reality. But now Costa Rica followed me around. Even in Los Angeles, I hadn’t been able to shake it from my life.

  And that was really why I had returned. I had come back to Costa Rica to try to make sense of how a lover of mine could have wound up in prison—and the irony of it was that the man capable of explaining it to me was a soulful, kind Colombian inmate. I was completely screwed.

  “So where do you meet all these men?” my friends in Los Angeles would later ask me. “Coffeehouses? Movie theaters? Singles bars?”

  “No, actually singles bars would be a step up.”

  Meeting men in prisons had its advantages. So they didn’t have a phone number and sex was a bit inconvenient, but you always knew there was someone keeping an eye on them while you were away. Besides, if every man I met in Costa Rica was going to wind up in prison anyway, wouldn’t it simplify the process to just start meeting them there? This was what passed through my mind as I walked through the entrance of the prison with Jessica on Friday.

  “So, what’s the cover?” I jokingly asked the woman at the front counter as I handed her my passport.

  “There’s a donation of five hundred colones,” she said, serious as a prison guard. Figuring I couldn’t finagle my way in for free by sneaking in a back entrance, I handed her a bill as she stamped my hand.

  I spotted Francisco in the courtyard twenty minutes later and nervously walked over to greet him. The day before, he had just been someone to talk to, but given that only adult women were allowed in the prison during the dance, today it felt suspiciously like a date, and one I wasn’t completely prepared for. After all, first dates were awkward enough when you were in a room filled with quiet music and candlelight. They were even more unsettling when you were surrounded by rapists, murderers, and thieves.

  “So, would you like to meet some of my friends?” Francisco asked after giving me a kiss on the cheek.

  “These friends . . . I don’t assume we’re talking about doctors and accountants and engineers?”

  “No, most of the people in here are politicians. Come on,” he added, grabbing my hand and leading me through the courtyard.

  He introduced me to Valencia, a short, thirtyish Colombian who felt the need to lecture me on injustice.

  “It’s unfair, unfair, unfair! The cops cook up these false drug charges because they don’t like that I’m a foreigner and I own beachfront property in Puerto Viejo. So they plant cocaine in my hotel. That’s the kind of thing that goes on all the time in this country. Not like in Colombia where the cops are people you can trust. Have you ever been to Colombia?”

  “No, but I may get there this Christmas when I visit my parents in Cochabamba, Bolivia.”

  “That’s a great city,” he said, lost in a moment of reverie. “Some of the best cocaine in the world.”

  “Really?” I said, making a mental note to pass this tip on to my parents.

  We walked past the mariachi band and over to a group of men who had gathered by the fence. Francisco pointed to a tall, chestnuthaired one and explained that he was an American who had been caught selling drugs. Apparently, this American hadn’t made it to a beach or volcano either. (I decided not to ask him if he’d managed to avoid having a boyfriend who was in jail.)

  As far as first dates go, I had to admit that it was going rather well. We weren’t sitting in a four-star restaurant and there was a decent-sized possibility that someone might try to kill me, but at least I wasn’t going to be faced with the tough decision of whether to ask him up to my apartment.

  Besides, the man sitting next to me was beginning to get to me. Jessica was right—he was awfully good looking and he had the most striking blue eyes I had ever seen. And in spite of what had happened, he seemed to be strangely in control of his life. Granted, he lived in a prison, but this was beginning to seem more like a positive attribute than a flaw—where else was I supposed to meet a man capable of relating to my bizarre existence? Blockbuster Video? The Dairy Queen?

  With other men, I had always blindsided them with any discussion of my past. I couldn’t help it, but my experiences were always disastrous conversation stoppers. “So, there was this time that I lived out of a station wagon with my parents and two sisters.” What could any normal person say in response to that? And the only thing lonelier than not ever sharing any personal details about myself was making a difficult disclosure only to receive a blank stare.

  But somehow I sensed that I could trust Francisco with this information. Without making any effort, the stories of my life came pouring out. He didn’t flinch when I talked about my recent visit to a prison in Limón or when I spoke of my trip to Beirut.

  Over the next hour, the topics of conversation kept spilling out. Every story he recounted inspired two anecdotes of my own, which reminded him of four more incidents. It was a conversation of geometric proportions. I had topics lined up like ducks at a shooting gallery—I’d have to let some of them slide past—there wasn’t time to get to them all.

  Finally, knowing our time was growing distressingly short, I wanted him to explain again how he had wound up in prison—I hadn’t really given him my full attention the first time and suddenly the topic seemed terribly important to me.

  “Nice to know my stories really matter to you,” he said with a wink.

  “Well, back then, for some strange reason, I had somehow assumed you were, you know, a criminal.”

  He smiled and indulgently launched into the story one more time. He had visited Costa Rica on vacation, fallen in love with a woman, and stayed in San José to live with her for four years. The marriage had fallen apart and he had finally retu
rned to Colombia, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the daughter he’d left behind. He made plans to go back to Costa Rica, but there was a problem: His relationship had ended badly, in bitterness and disputes, and in a final act of vengeance, Laura, his ex, had filed charges against him, claiming that he was a mere acquaintance of hers, that they had never had a relationship, and that he had stolen her car. After all, Francisco had gone to Colombia and wasn’t around to tell his side of the story, which was that he had bought her the car in the first place and had sold it when she had run off to Holland and had been incommunicado for over a year.

  By calling a friend in San José, Francisco had found out about the false charges, and knowing that officials weren’t too understanding about listening to both sides of the story at the border, in a rather foolish but very typical Colombian move he decided the only way to enter the country would be under an assumed name with a fake passport. He crossed the Costa Rican border successfully but ten days later he’d been unlucky enough to be asked by several police officers to show some identification and he had pulled out the false document.

  So here he was. His lawyer said the case was cut-and-dried, that the car charges were a hoax, and that walking around with a fake passport wasn’t such a big deal in this part of the world.

  Francisco gave me his lawyer’s phone number to verify his story. I took it, thinking that I would call just in case, but I really did believe what Francisco had told me. What was worse, I found myself sadly wishing that the two of us would be able to walk out of the gate together once visiting hours were over. But, of course, I knew this was impossible.

  All too soon the prison bell rang. Over the loudspeaker boomed an authoritative voice. “The visit has come to an end. Please make your way to the front entrance.”

  “They want us to leave,” Francisco said. “Guess we’d better go.”

  He walked me to the gate. “So, what should we do now?” I asked. “Shopping, the beach, maybe catch a movie?”

  “Why don’t we grab a bite to eat?”

  “I’m starved.”

  “Me too. Wait a minute,” he said, slapping himself on the head. “I just remembered, I have somewhere I have to be.”

  “What a shame,” I said.

  “What a pity,” he echoed.

  “Actually, I’m going to be pretty busy for the next few days. But I think I’m free on Sunday from 8 A.M. to noon.”

  “Where should we meet?”

  “Why don’t I see you here again? You seem to like this place.”

  “All right,” I said, quickly pecking him on the lips. “Don’t be late.”

  “Isn’t it great?” Jessica said to me the next day, while milking Lorenzo, her family’s cow. “Who ever thought we’d have boyfriends who were roommates!”

  Apparently Cellblock A-2 was a prestigious place to be. The day before, we’d read in the paper about a high-ranking government official who had been caught trying to sell cocaine. “He’s in A-2,” she said excitedly. “We’ll have to ask Olman and Francisco if they know him.”

  In addition to the advantage of being able to network with top government officials, hanging out with a man who was incarcerated began to feel strangely safe to me. During the next few visits, I shamelessly poured out the darkest secrets of my life to him in part because I knew that soon I would leave. Getting seriously involved with him was so unreal that it posed no danger; it was a fantasy that couldn’t possibly be. Before, my international flings had ended with my departing flight. This one only existed from 8 A.M. to noon on Thursdays and Sundays.

  In between those days, I would hang out with Jessica and occasionally with her business partner and friend, Maritza, trying out strange Costa Rican fruits and teaching my friends English swear words. But this proved to be a bit of a challenge.

  “Shit,” I told Jessica, when she asked me to teach her a bad word in English.

  “Yeah, yeah, I already know that one.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, I know that one too.”

  We went through the list: bastard, dick, pussy—but she’d heard them all before. And this was a woman whose only other English expression was “Happy New Year.”

  “What is it you want to know how to say?”

  She thought about this for a minute. “I know,” she said in Spanish, “teach me how to say, ‘I sucked him off and then kissed him, spitting the cum into his mouth.’ ”

  “Jessica, I thought you were a virgin!”

  “I am, but Maritza’s been talking to me.”

  “Maritza!” I said, looking at my other Costa Rican friend in a whole new light. Apparently she’d learned more than just a few English swear words from her boyfriend, Marco. There was just one problem with her relationship, she explained. Marco only wanted to see her one time a week.

  “You should have Marco arrested,” I advised her. “Then you’d get to see him two days, on Thursdays and Sundays.”

  “And you’d get to talk to him on the phone every day,” Jessica chimed in.

  This was a bit of a ritual with us. Every day, sometime between seven and eight-thirty at night, Jessica and I would sit in her kitchen, eating and chatting, waiting for the phone to ring. This arrangement presented just one small problem. Jessica’s parents were often huddled around the table at this hour and she had yet to tell them about her boyfriend’s change of address. What she had explained was that he was in northern Costa Rica for several months because of his job and he could only call her once a day.

  This fib worked rather well until I started getting a phone call too. “Take care of yourself, Olman,” she’d say, ending the call and handing the phone to me. “Wendy, Olman wants to say hello to you too.” Telling Olman I was thinking of him, that I was looking forward to seeing him again may have seemed a bit overly affectionate, but fortunately, Jessica’s parents never said anything.

  Every time I had started up a relationship with someone in Los Angeles, it had been the norm to have sex first and ask questions about each other later. There was no “Where were you born?” “What is your family like?” “Who should I contact in the event of an emergency?”The guys I became involved with revealed more information to their employment applications than they ever did to me.

  However, the man I was currently seeing didn’t live in Hollywood or Santa Monica or Pasadena, which meant that sex was definitely out of the question—he wasn’t free to come over to my place, and although I went to see him at his place twice a week, staying the night was not a possibility. After all, Francisco had 230 other roommates.

  With our situation the way it was, there was nothing left to do but fall back on spending quality time together. Over the next few weeks, we continued to delve into the inexhaustible well of subjects we had to talk about. I discussed California and Arizona and he went on about Cauca and el Valle; I mentioned American Coke and he explained about the Colombian kind.

  On the few occasions when the strain of translating my stories into Spanish became too exhausting for me, we would sit on a blanket spread on the ground, my head resting comfortably on his lap while he sang to me. Slowly I was beginning to distinguish the baladas from the boleros, the cumbias from the vallenatos. Sometimes he would write down the lyrics to his favorite songs and hand them to me as visiting hour drew to a close, timidly turning them over like secret love notes.

  I was even growing accustomed to the amount of effort required to see Francisco. I was getting used to the early mornings, the long prison lines, the women patiently waiting outside with their shopping bags filled with food. There was a camaraderie there. Everywhere else in Costa Rica, I was a gringa, an outsider. But at the prison, I was a woman whose man was locked away. This mutual circumstance was bigger than issues of culture or race. They treated me as one of them.

  How easy it was to arrive in a new country, how simple to brush up on a foreign language, to taste new foods, learn new customs. How difficult it was to leave.

  Several days before my flight w
as scheduled to depart from San José, as I sat alone in a café writing in my notebook over a strong cup of Costa Rican coffee (while Jessica took care of some errands for work), I thought back on all that had happened to me in this country so far—meeting Michel, Jessica, then Francisco. How had I managed to get so involved with the place?

  A month earlier, I had planned to lounge on the sands of white beaches, drink pineapple drinks laced with rum, dance late into the night, and plunge myself into the warm waters of the Caribbean. I had done none of those things. So why was I struggling with the idea that soon I would have to leave?

  As I scribbled my thoughts down, fittingly enough, a group of noisy and enthusiastic American backpackers filed in to the café and settled in at the table next to mine. By now, I knew their type well. These travelers sauntered their way through Latin America, weighed down by nothing but their backpacks, their specially designed gear offering ideal weight distribution, lightweight aluminum frames, and a wide assortment of pockets that were perfect for quick storage of Swiss Army knives, portable alarm clocks, and collapsible silverware. I knew—I too had read the catalogs.

  On my previous trip to Costa Rica before Jessica had shown up, my loneliness had made me want to be part of them. Walking past them in the streets of San José, having given up Christmas and then Michel, I had longed for one of them to start up a conversation with me. I had wanted to discuss the inane details of traveling, notes about where to go and how to get there, details as insignificant as the brand of jeans it had seemed so essential to be wearing in high school. But now I realized that it was too late. What these people had to say about traveling seemed as worthless to me now as the prom queen’s advice on what type of lip gloss to be using. They were so far removed from my notion of Costa Rica that I really had nothing to say to them.

  Just like the popular kids at high school with their homecoming parties, proms, and football keggers, these travelers had their own obligatory events, a list of required sightseeing that in order to be one of them, you had to necessarily attend. But I didn’t have the right brand of extra-durable, element-resistant traveling jacket and never would. Hell, I didn’t even own a backpack.