Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals

by Wendy Dale

  “Sorry, I’m late for work. I got drunk last night.”

  “Oh, I was almost angry—but if you got drunk—well, what are you supposed to do?”

  Of the Costa Ricans I had met, none of them wore seat belts, and given the number of cabs that had left me stranded halfway to my destination, few taxi drivers could even be bothered to remember to put gas in their tanks. The electricity went out constantly, but no one complained. Buses broke down all the time, but passengers were rarely refunded the cost of their tickets. And open manholes were to be found along nearly every city sidewalk, but no one sued. After all, nothing could be done to avoid such calamities—if it was God’s will that you should fall through an opening in the street, land in a pile of hepatitis-infected crap, and break a leg, so be it. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.

  This Costa Rican laissez-faire may have worked well for Jessica and Francisco’s attorney, Jorge, but I was a woman of action and I needed a more American way of dealing with my problems. I needed to do something, not lounge around slurping papaya juice while things just happened. I needed the advice of people who saw the world as I did—so I figured I would try and plead my case at the U.S. embassy.

  Walking up the steps of the imposing grandiose building, I knew I had come to the right place. The American flag waved proudly in the wind, marines guarded the entrance, and you could practically smell the apple pie wafting through the air. They would help me out here, I figured. I was one of them. I was a citizen of the most powerful country in the world.

  At the entrance, I smiled patriotically at the guard, envisioning myself as a brunette Elisabeth Shue seeking solace at the embassy in the movie The Saint:

  Chased by a Russian mafioso, Elisabeth Shue’s life in peril, it’s only fifty steps to the U.S. embassy. Then thirty, twenty, ten. She’s finally three slow-motion steps away. The Mafia guy reaches out to grab her shirt and at the embassy gate she screams, “I’m an American!”These are the magic words. The gates are flung open as Ms. Shue runs through them in slow motion and embraces the marine who so kindly opened the gate.

  Granted, my entrance wouldn’t be quite as dramatic.

  “I’m an American,” I said, smiling patriotically at the guard and walking past him.

  “Whoa! Hang on a sec,” the guard said, blocking my path. “You think you can just stroll on in?”

  Gee, they hadn’t asked Elisabeth Shue for ID. I pulled my passport out and handed it to the guard.

  “Now I need to check your backpack.”

  After performing a thorough search, I figured I was free to go.

  “Where you going there, sweetheart?” the guard asked me.

  Damn, how many Russian mafiosos did a girl have to be chased by to be let onto American soil? “What now?” I inquired, hoping this marine knew he had ruined all chances of getting a hug from me. He pointed to the metal detector and I walked through.

  Inside the embassy, after deciding that American Citizens’ Services was the office that would probably deal with my particular problem, I entered a room that looked more like a DMV than my romantic notions of a U.S. embassy. A group of bored-looking people filled the waiting room, whiling away the time until it was their turn to plead with a U.S. official.

  “Number 56,” a woman’s voice called out in a dull monotone over a speaker. “Number 56,” she repeated.

  A tall, blond man stood up and walked up to the counter as I took a number and sat down to wait.

  After half an hour of reading pamphlets on topics such as staying healthy overseas and registering at the embassy during travel abroad (I noted with some concern that there was nothing on freeing your loved ones from a Central American prison), my number was finally called.

  “Seventy-eight,” the monotone voice announced.

  I stepped up to the counter and addressed the woman behind the bulletproof glass, hesitating to announce my problem out loud to the room of waiting people. “It’s kind of personal. Isn’t there any place I can discuss this matter in private?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not allowed for security reasons.”

  “Well, I have a legal problem,” I said, hesitating before speaking the words out loud into the microphone in front of me. “My boyfriend is in prison here. They’ve accused him of several crimes and they are holding him without proof, without bail, and without having set a trial date. He’s been there for seven months now. I was hoping you could offer me some help.”

  “I have a list of attorneys,” the woman informed me, as formal as if I had just asked her to withdraw three hundred dollars from my account. “However, I’m required to inform you that their appearance on this list does not constitute endorsement by the U.S. embassy. These are simply the names of attorneys compiled by Americans who in the past have claimed to have positive dealings with them.”

  “I already have an attorney.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s all I can do.”

  I was completely appalled. I wanted a new U.S. embassy, one that actually helped its citizens, offering safety, comfort, and hugs at the entrance. I needed help, not a scripted answer, carefully worded to avoid any potential legal ramifications.

  My look of distressed agony must have been pathetic enough to make its way through even the bulletproof glass, because the expression on her face softened and exactly as I had imagined in my fantasy, she reached out to me with all the comprehension in the world and gently asked, “Listen, are you okay?”

  I wanted to tell her that of course I wasn’t okay, that I had left everything behind in the United States—my friends, my apartment, my clothes, my furniture, my car—and now I was stuck in a foreign country in love with a man who I couldn’t even go to the movies with. I lived in a tiny room without a kitchen or a phone and had to pretend that everything was fine every time I sat down to lunch with the people who were not my family. My boyfriend was in prison for crimes he didn’t commit and no one in this country gave a damn, least of all his attorney. And my own country, with all its rhetoric about justice and the pursuit of happiness, didn’t intend to lift a finger to help me. How could I possibly be okay?

  This is what I wanted to say, but there was a plate of bulletproof glass between us and these weren’t the kind of things you said over a microphone. So I shrugged my shoulders and uttered, “Sure,” as I walked out of the embassy and onto the rainy streets of San José.

  Ironically enough, I had come to Costa Rica with the fantasy of finding my perfect life. I had imagined an idyllic existence, shaded by palm trees and warmed by ocean breezes—Jessica, Francisco, and I in our reclining beach chairs lined up side by side. In the land between two oceans, I planned to live out my second childhood, away from the meaningless monotony of life controlled by the clock, of always having somewhere important to be. I had never counted on a prison breakout to interfere with my fantasy. It wasn’t the kind of thing I generally needed to figure into my plans.

  Now I had all the time in the world in a country bordered by two breathtaking coastlines yet my potential beach buddies both had other commitments. These days, when Jessica wasn’t visiting Olman, she was preparing to visit Olman, and now that Francisco had been transferred to La Reforma, her path rarely crossed mine. Even more distressing was the situation with Francisco—the possibility that he would one day join me at the beach was beginning to look more and more remote.

  On my last visit to Costa Rica our visits at San Sebastian had been casual, friendly, even fun. In fact, it was one of the things that had so impressed me about Francisco—he had remained amazingly upbeat in spite of such trying circumstances. San Sebastian had been filled with lesser offenders (lots of the men were there for simply failing to pay their debts), but La Reforma was a completely different place, a prison that averaged ten murders a year. And Francisco was in top security, living with the country’s worst offenders. A week after I arrived in the country, a knife fight had broken out in the next cellblock that had left Francisco nervous and depressed. “The guards just stood back
and watched,” he explained to me, trembling. “They bet on who would win.”

  Two days later, a group of prisoners had crept up on Francisco while he was sleeping, surrounded his bed with newspaper, and lit it on fire. Luckily, only Francisco’s legs had gone up in flames and he was spared his life, but I couldn’t look at the blisters on his skin without wondering how much more time he’d be able to hold out there.

  If there was ever a time for me to flee responsibility, this had to be it. Other men had required less of me and I still had fled the burden of their problems. Yet the very gravity of the situation was what compelled me to stay. My boyfriends in the past may have lost a few nights sleep over me; I knew that Francisco would be in serious jeopardy of losing his life.

  Although Francisco was mild mannered and gentle and had little chance of holding his own in a fight, he had an advantage over the other inmates: my money. Twenty, thirty, forty dollars a week was a small price to keep Francisco alive, and with it he was able to make friends, offering cigarettes, food, and a bill now and then to the other prisoners who knew better than to bite off the hand that fed them.

  This was what it had taken for me to commit to the long haul with a man—the threat of my boyfriend’s impending death if I didn’t. It was the universe’s big joke on me: “You can’t deal with another person’s neuroses, annoying personal habits, and bad morning breath? How about this: Fall in love with a man who loves freedom as much as you do and now, let’s see here, we’ll have him locked away in a prison.” Good God, even destiny had a sense of irony.

  Reaching out and touching someone was relatively simple if you had to dial a mere seven numbers plus an area code, but making contact with my family was getting increasingly complicated. It wasn’t just the elaborate international prefixes, the problem of being heard over crackling Third World phone lines, the prohibitive cost of a ten-minute call; the reason I didn’t pick up the phone to have a detailed heart-to-heart about what was currently happening to me (i.e., the whole boyfriend/prison/breakout inconvenience) was because of the fact that it was completely impossible to have a serious conversation with my parents. Sure, they were a blast to hang out with when everything was fine, but when it came down to the worst tragedies of my life, my parents had always proven themselves useless in a crisis.

  Recently I had traced the path from birth to this point in my life and all the places where things had gone wrong, guess who was to blame. That’s right: Mother & Company, headed by none other than Cathie Dale herself. (My father was like a low-ranking receptionist at Make Wendy’s Life Miserable, Inc., sharing a small portion of my resentment but only loosely affiliated with this baneful institution.)

  I submit the following examples as proof:

  Conclusions

  Wendy Dale’s unhappiness quotient is due in large part to the actions taken on behalf of Mother & Company, with blame laid at 98.4 percent and 1.6 percent for Mother & Company and other factors, respectively.

  If you will bear with me for a minute, let’s examine the chart in detail. Items 1 and 2 are relatively apparent: Cathie Dale was obviously a witness and at times a participant in issues ranging from childhood through doctor visits. Item 3 has been discussed previously in this book (see page 25); however, Items 4 and 5 may require some additional explanatory materials (see Addenda 1 and 2 below):

  Addendum 1

  PUTTING SELF THROUGH COLLEGE

  WITH NO OUTSIDE HELP

  A scene by Wendy Dale

  (Based on a true story)

  Wendy, age nineteen, a student working for five dollars an hour struggling to put herself through college recently wound up in the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. She is currently at her sparsely furnished apartment in Los Angeles going through her mail. She opens up a letter and stares at it.

  WENDY: (takes a deep sigh) Woe is me. Oh dear! Whatever shall I do? Five hundred dollars for my recent stay in the hospital where I was diagnosed with a very painful stomach ulcer as a result of the extreme stress I am under working three jobs where they pay me five dollars an hour while I try to put myself through school. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to pay for it with my tuition money that I worked so hard to save.

  Two weeks later Wendy is making a phone call from her sparsely furnished bedroom in Los Angeles. (She does not have a cordless phone. She could not a ford one.)

  WENDY: (takes a deep sigh) Mom, would you please loan me five hundred dollars for my tuition at UCLA?

  CATHIE: (in a very mean voice with no compassion whatsoever) Wendy, you know how expensive our trip to Morocco, England, and Spain was. Plus we just bought a new car.

  Addendum 2

  LIVING OUT OF A CAR

  (A sequel to “Putting Self Through College

  with No Outside Help”)

  Another scene by Wendy Dale

  (Based on a true story)

  Wendy, age twenty, a college student who has paid her own tuition for two years now has wound up with no place to live due to a psycho roommate who changed the locks on their shared apartment. (Note: This psycho roommate also took most of Wendy’s things.)

  Wendy is at a pay phone with her car full of clothes in a very bad neighborhood that any normal mom would not want her daughter to be in.

  WENDY: Hi, Mom, it’s Wendy.

  Wendy’s mom is in a very nice house eating very expensive chocolate imported from Germany. It’s obvious thatWendy’s mom does not have any serious problems whatsoever.

  WENDY: Mom, my roommate just kicked me out. I’m homeless. I don’t have anywhere to live.

  CATHIE: (takes a bite of chocolate) That’s must be very hard for you, Wendy.

  An hour later,Wendy snuggles up in her car, rubbing her hands together trying to get warm.

  WENDY: It sure is hard being homeless. I guess it’s going to be a long night.

  Granted, this was a somewhat one-sided version of events as they occurred but it was the way the scenes played out in my head. And it was relatively close to the truth: My mother did refuse to loan me tuition money after I’d wound up in the hospital. She claimed that they just couldn’t afford it right now since they’d just returned from Europe and purchased a new car. And I really did live out of my car for two months, to which my mother’s only response was that my situation was undoubtedly very difficult.

  These were the reasons I never told her any of the significant details of my life. These were the things I held against her—against her, not my dad.

  Granted, my father had played his part in my life problems, but my mother was the one I blamed, mostly because my contact with him had always been so limited. He was continually working long hours to support the family, in part because my mother rejected the notion that she should get a job. He was never home when I called so any information to be imparted to him had to go through her first. I never got to plead my case with him directly, so I absolved him of any blame. Besides, we all knew that my father didn’t care for material comforts. How could we accuse him of depriving us of something that he didn’t value himself?

  Now that I was alone in a foreign country facing what was undoubtedly the most difficult obstacle of my life, I had a very good reason not to call. I desperately needed someone to be there for me, but I already knew what my mother’s response would be: “Oh, that must be very difficult for you.”

  I had survived tough circumstances before. Even homeless, I hadn’t gone running to my parents’. I would do it again. Costa Rica wasn’t going to get the best of me without a fight.

  The embassy offered no help, Francisco’s lawyer was discouraging, and my own formal legal training was nil, but I figured that I had years of experience in its twin discipline: ad copywriting. I reasoned that if I could sell shampoo to bald men and fireplaces to residents of Malibu, it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch to sell justice to Costa Rican officials.

  “The first step,” I said to Francisco excitedly at our next visit, suddenly knowing what I had to do, “is ge
t you out on bail. They’ve already denied you this five times because they say you’re a foreigner with no ties to Costa Rica and that you’ll flee if they release you.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “What we do,” I said, uttering the triumphal phrase that had gained me prestige and hefty paychecks in corporate offices across Los Angeles, “is construct a public-friendly image of you.”

  Francisco let out an appreciative “ohhhhh.”

  “The way I see it, they view you as this foreigner who came to Costa Rica with every intention of stealing your ex-wife’s car. We’re going to create a different image. You are a father, a responsible citizen, a man with a Costa Rican daughter who considers this country his home. What is missing from your files is the other side of the story: that you lived and worked here for four years, that you have a daughter here, that you have good credit, anything that will show you’re a respectable human being.”

  “Respectable human being?” Francisco let out a dejected “ohhhh.”

  “Yes, I realize. I have my work cut out for me.”

  Knowing that Francisco had worked at a travel agency for three years in Costa Rica, I figured I could get a good reference from his employer.

  “Where do you think your old boss is now?”

  “That seems to be the million-dollar question, doesn’t it?”

  I wasn’t the only one looking for this man; half of Costa Rica was after him. The travel agency where Francisco worked had turned out to be a front for laundering Yugoslavian money, which meant that even if I could get in touch with him, his reference probably wasn’t going to do Francisco a lot of good.

  “But the travel agency manager will help me out,” Francisco said.

  “Great. Where do I find him?”

  “Well . . .”