Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  Meranda receives another flashback while we’re driving around in San Rafael, Escazú, looking for the Scotiabank John used. As we watch trucks belch fumes, she remembers John and Steve, the two principles, waiting at an intersection near the Neteller offices downtown. The cab’s windows were down. When the light changed, the bus just ahead in the adjacent lane excreted its exhaust straight into the cab. While they were eating thick, acrid, bluish smoke, Steve said, “Now that’s the smell of money!”

  Now we’re in Paseo Colón, San José, on a street that is close to the actual downtown borderline of San José proper. Meranda is looking for the internet café Neteller first used for its fledgling operation, as well as the Dos por Uno Pizza joint nearby. They’re both gone.

  Up ahead, the terrain is crawling with vehicles. “You see that—that’s San José. Uh-oh, I hope we can get out of this.” The cars and trucks hit the downtown in the morning and—BAM!—the flow slows to a trickle. Wait and crawl, wait and crawl. Meranda looks a little panicky. “I have to get back, Merissa’s class is almost over.” Is there an escape hatch, one last right-hand turn down a one-way before we get sucked into the great blue maw of exhaust, heat, and human stewing? She can’t remember. Ah, there it is, hang a right, get the hell out of this. Now I understand why they prefer living up the hill in Escazú.

  To be continued tomorrow morning, I hope. I had asked Meranda about the Hotel y Casino Del Rey, the supposed world-famous gambling house with dozens and dozens of prostitutes milling about. It’s located in downtown San José. She demurred. In the old days, ten years back, the boys would offer to take her with them to their business meetings in these sorts of joints. She doesn’t need to prove anything now, so she’d asked around and found a guide for me, a guy with whom she used to do business, known only by his sobriquet.

  Around six o’clock, “the chauffeur” zips into the B&B driveway in his late-model SUV. He lives miles from the B&B but was willing to pick me up. He drives to some restaurant that looks like a typical American yuppie joint in a new suburban-like strip mall. It looks like a place acceptable to a certain kind of gringo: well lighted, decent furniture and stereo system, high chairs and tables along the window, which is to say along the outside, because it is wide open. At first I wonder about someone racing out of the parking lot to steal money, but the strip mall is so shiny new the neon business signs must have been unpacked yesterday, and the ambience disarms me.

  It’s usually packed, says the chauffeur, but Monday is light on patrons, maybe twenty in total. Might be a pickup bar, hard to say. We order margarita after margarita and talk about this and that for an hour or two until a buddy of his, Tony, shows up. Then we all climb into the chauffeur’s SUV and head to the Del Rey. Meantime, I interview the chauffeur at the restaurant for his take on Costa Rica, bookies, gaming, and companies like Neteller.

  “No recordings, please.”

  “How about a few brief notes?”

  “Umm … I guess that’s okay.”

  The chauffeur knows the biz, all right. He’s still in it, although since the big busts went down everything’s been on a “First Rule of Fight Club” basis. You don’t necessarily hang a gaming shingle up in web-land and declare yourself open for business. But the chauffeur says it’s still a going concern, probably bigger than ever. He laughs at the federales. He thinks they’re not only hypocrites; they’re as thick as a just-opened bottle of Heinz if they believe the U.S. government can seal every web-created perforation in gambling laws and jurisdictions.

  The chauffeur orders a fifth margarita. I decline. He’s smoking cheap cigarettes throughout our conversation, a buck for a twenty-pack. Taste lousy, but I keep snagging them off him. Sensing I might need ballast, the chauffeur orders tapas. The ones he picks are kind of like tostadas stuffed with chorizo meat shavings and vegetables. Not half bad. We wolf down a few before the chauffeur saves some for his buddy.

  Tony arrives. He’s in a foul mood—he had a bad experience with the cab driver—and famished. The chauffeur hands him some tapas, and Tony starts to chill out. They’re single straight guys and, I’m thinking, have women on their minds a lot. Tony confesses later that he really likes good-looking Costa Rican girls. That’s one of the beautiful things about being in San José, he says. When the chauffeur insists on picking up the tab I accept his gesture gratefully yet can’t help but wonder about the cash flow situation.

  As we head off to the Del Rey, I take a look around at San José at night and think, yes, it could help to have a guide with a car. You never know when you’re going to get the runaround from a cabbie. You never know when you might get beat for your wallet. You never know when you’re walking around here which street is dangerous and which one isn’t.

  The chauffeur is a fountain of wisdom. He tells us about new online companies that do everything Neteller once did but using electronic tokens. This way, gamblers buy the tokens and retain their anonymity. His big dream, he tells me, is for some heavy money to silently invest two mill in some new can’t-miss project of his. He was workin’ on something big, as Tom Petty once sang. The chauffeur swears online gambling is bigger than ever.

  “Except for the Americans, you mean,” I say, correcting him.

  “Well,” he replies, “there are ways around that.”

  There are a lot of online businesses out there in the world now, he tells me. It’s not like 1999. Every company needs to do business online. Some companies—small companies, say—might be run by people who are attracted to the idea of jacking up their revenue intake a bit and are open-minded to a little side action. They might even need a little extra to stay solvent. Say you’ve got a hair product website or old-school shaving supplies website or designer florist website. Whatever it is, it’s a legitimate business. It’s established. People buy stuff and you send it to them. Fulfillment. Well, what if someone comes along and says to you, “Hey, how’d you like to boost sales steadily over the next year or two?” You might say, “I’m listening.” They show you how to run online gambling transactions through your company as hair-product transactions or shaving-product transactions or flower-arrangement transactions—whatever. Over the next several months, you double and then triple your business. Your business looks like it’s successful and growing, and, indeed, it may be trending upward all on its own, but it’s being assisted by online gambling transactions.

  And, well, you’re not the only guy who’s been approached, are you? They’ve got a whole bunch of guys like you, all guys who would love to make a little extra dough. You might think this a little outlandish, a little nickel-and-dime, a few too many hands on the take, a few too many finks who can talk, but it can be done.

  As I listen to the chauffeur’s disquisition I’m thinking, you know, the DOJ decided the computerized system John and Steve invented for transferring bettors’ cash amounted to money laundering and racketeering. Once the locking pliers were firmly applied to them, the guilty plea was a big step down from money laundering and racketeering. Still, they were tailed for six months and then arrested for those offenses. I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest there was in fact any real money laundering going on. Neteller never hid anything it did, and was upfront about its risks in the American market. But this stuff the chauffeur’s telling me? Oh yeah, that definitely smells like something you’d call money laundering.

  The chauffeur also claims Western Union remains involved in the gaming world, as does Visa. Actually, with Visa it’s a little more than that. He figures about twenty percent of all U.S. credit cards are still used for gambling. And when feds come around asking questions, Visa replies: Hey, it’s not our job to figure out what each legal cardholder is spending his money on. Visa might have a point.

  The chauffeur, Tony, and I head east down Highway 27 into the core. The Del Rey is located on the northeast corner of Avenida 1 and Calle 9, one block southeast of Parque Morazán. The park itself has the Templo de la Música, onc
e a center for political speeches but now a band shell for symphonic and popular music concerts; the Monumento a Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan political and military visionary who brought independence to many Latin American countries; and the Monumento a Julio Acosta, president of Costa Rica 1920–24. But I’m not here for rabble-rousing or the symphony; I’m here to see what John saw ten years ago when he met with bookies to pitch Neteller at the Del Rey and other bricks-and-mortar gambling houses, or when he hung out with them at places like Nicole Night Club over in the Zona Roja (the red light district).

  The hundreds of middle-aged men inside the building might be here for the gambling or the drinking or the pool. The Blue Marlin Bar looks like a combination of oversized suburban rec room and generic sports bar. There is a smaller room called the Little Marlin that we don’t go into. Across the street and across the parking lot is Key Largo, run by the same people who own the Del Rey. It’s a smaller joint with a live mariachi band on one side and basic bar with pool table on the other. They attract the same two depressing demographics—old men and young whores. Moving in the Del Rey is like worming through patches of fans at an oversold club show. Crowded in the gambling rooms, crowded at the bar, it’s difficult to find space to breathe. The pros make repeated attempts at eye contact. In one room, the gambling looks intense. Once we order beers I say, “Looks like any American or Canadian sports bar, except guys get to gamble and play poker.”

  “Yeah,” Tony says, “except it’s a whorehouse.”

  Young women, still girls basically, take their marks upstairs and pay the club a fee for using the rooms. Girls look up at me and say hi in sweet, quiet voices. One girl puts her hand on the middle of my back and rubs me in a clockwise motion and says, “Hi, want a good time?” That’s as forward as they get. Ten years ago, the girls would have acted differently, and that’s what John was counting on, his little joke, when he said I had to go to Costa Rica to experience what he had experienced—young women grabbing your testicles, not rubbing your back, when you entered the premises.

  No, not like the old days, the chauffeur says. When you walked into the HDR then, it was like “fish in a barrel.” You were the fish, as in hold on to your wallet. Men everywhere, older men, old men, falling-down old men—well okay, I only saw one elderly gentleman in a cowboy hat fall off his high-back stool, literally right over, slam, onto the floor: three pros moved in, helped him up, their quarry near incapacitation and capitulation—all gauged on a scale of one to ten as marks.

  No matter, the girls figure out I’m not there for a business transaction. To them I’m just a voyeur. There are about four hundred men to one hundred hookers, so the odds for them are good. If you go to the washroom, you walk by dozens lined up along a railing. Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica. Sex tourism is big business. These old guys, they tell their wives they’ve gone on a fishing trip. They spend at least one day going through with that charade so they can send back the pictures or post them on Facebook to prove it. The rest of the trip it’s whiskey, women, and song. Meranda says the rooms rent for ninety-nine a night. “Can you imagine, when you know what goes on in those rooms?”

  “The HDR,” Tony says, “it’s got to be the most profitable business in San José.”

  We hang out at the Del Rey for about forty-five minutes, at or close to the bar. Swarms of hookers don’t bother us much after initial contact. The chauffeur takes off and circulates. I begin to sense, maybe falsely, that the reason Tony has joined us tonight is that they might want to look for action together. This thought makes me uneasy. I don’t want to come across as a voyeur, yet here I am with my notebook in hand, looking like the king of stupid. I can’t open it and start writing, I’d look like a narc or a dork. I don’t feel like just coming out and asking Tony why he’s here tonight, but as time passes, my sussing-out alters—they’re here for girls, but only if they run into a couple they really like. Tony is not interested in women of foreign provenance. “I hate Asian girls,” he spits out at one point, head turning away.

  The chauffeur returns and suggests we go across the parking lot to Key Largo. “I like it better,” he says. “Way less crowded.” Before we leave the Del Rey, a girl along the railing manages to get in the chauffeur’s path. He strikes up a conversation with her. I can’t hear them, so I can’t tell whether he’s asking what kind of sex she offers. Whatever the answer, she’s coming with us to Key Largo. Tony displays consternation. I’m thinking maybe it’s because he disapproves of the chauffeur going ahead and choosing his hooker-du-nuit without consultation. Once at Key Largo, he is succinct about his dismay: “She’s ugly.”

  She is not ugly, and she is not perfect. She looks young and malleable—about five-foot-two and skinny, shoulder-length straight dark-brown hair center-parted, pretty face marred by a mild case of acne; her dark eyes telegraph longing looks—and she would probably do exactly as you say. Her docility is creepy.

  We watch the mariachi band for one tune and then drift to the pool-table side. It’s less crowded than the dance floor, almost laid-back. Here we can stand around, drink beers, talk shit, and watch the working girls work the vacationing men perched on stools around the bar.

  Tony, like Meranda, believes in reincarnation, I find out. Meanwhile, we haven’t seen much of my host, the now-inebriated chauffeur, because, I’m guessing, he’s decided that he’s made a dumb move by encouraging our girl pal and is currently trying to shake her. But she is patient. She has latched on to a good thing for the evening and is not easily discouraged. She hasn’t gotten the message. It’s his fault—he allowed himself to be engaged.

  Finally, she departs, chirping something indecipherable. Tony and I order another round of beers, watch old dudes engage with young girls, and talk about politics and global warming. We’re relaxed now, ranting about things we can’t change. About ten minutes later, the chauffeur’s new friend returns and introduces us to two buddies. The language barrier between us had been insurmountable, but she figured out the problem: we weren’t expressing interest because there weren’t any girls for us. So she went back to the Del Rey to round up a couple. See, now we’re all happy. Party time.

  Tony and I try to explain there’s been some misunderstanding, with little success. Tony speaks some Spanish, so I can’t see a problem with communication. They won’t take no for an answer. There’s nothing left to do but turn our backs and ignore them. We continue jawing about neo-conservatives versus liberals for a bit before I look over for a peek. Girl number one stands there, waiting for our private meeting to end, giving us a mournful look. Maybe she’s trying to save face with her pals. Maybe she guaranteed them customers. They’re not as patient—there are a few hundred other fools around to lure in. They slip away and, eventually, because the chauffeur has been avoiding us now for at least an hour, she slinks away as well, defeated, back to the Del Rey in search of a new source of revenue.

  I wonder about being a tourist in the sex and gambling house—talk about an inauthentic activity. Maybe I shouldn’t be here unless I mean to conduct business, and the business of this bar is not to shoot pool or to gamble or to drink or to dance to mariachi or to hang out and soak up the atmosphere for my book. It’s to pay money for sex. I start to feel lousy about girl number one and then I start to feel lousy about all the girls here, about the exploitation, about the nature of man’s inhumanity to such girls everywhere.

  Tony and the chauffeur want to stick around past midnight, but I’ve had about enough. I ask the chauffeur if he’d mind if I grabbed my notebook out of his SUV, which I’d tossed in the back seat on the way over to the Key Largo. He finds a cabbie for me, one he knows to be honest. He is an excellent host, the chauffeur. Back in Escazú, it’s not that late, about 12:45, but everyone’s in bed. I have to roust Matteo to let me into the compound, which makes me feel just that little bit more existentially crappy about the whole evening. There’s always tomorrow, the second half of the aborted tour.


  On Tuesday morning, we’re on the road by 9:30. Meranda and I head east along Carretera John F. Kennedy toward San José to see a place that was dear to John. Café de Artistas is right on the main boulevard in Pavas, a couple of miles east of the B&B. I snap pictures while Meranda points out the exact table in the restaurant where John would hold court. The gang came here often because he liked the place so much. Brightly colored tile adorns every surface, and local art is hung everywhere. The visuals are intricate but the atmosphere is informal, hippie-ish as opposed to hipster-ish. Not a lot of irony here, but lots of food, coffee, beer, and joking around. They were a team and they stuck together, toiling to make Neteller work in CR.

  They started to learn the language and understand the customs, and they played hard whenever they could. They were all so young and eager, and they had a boss who could match them in every category except age. Sometimes he even acted like a boss. He’d cock his head toward them and say, “Hey! You know, I don’t think we need to be doing that, do you?” He was signaling that he was on the verge of getting pissed and maybe they ought not push him any further. So there had been limits, but not many. What difference did it make? They were pulling in the merchants, convincing them to sign up with Neteller. The company was growing, they were all making money, and they were having fun.

  Even staff meetings were held at Café de Artistas, known for its delicious potato salad. Ten years later, the café is still here and looks the same but is under new ownership. Meranda peeks at the menu and sees they’ve deleted the potato salad. That’s a mistake, she says. She hasn’t been here since John left in 2004. It still has lots of local artwork on the walls and that gorgeous tile work.

  In one of Meranda’s café photos from the era, Steve Glavine and Scott Morrison, the IT guys, are missing. That’s because they had to cover the office in case something went down. “Steve Lawrence was like a ghost,” she says. “We’d be in the restaurant finally taking a break and there was the bloody phone, and it was Steve. The server had just gone down and there he was, on the phone saying, ‘It’s down, what’s going on? How long has it been down?’ So other Steve’s like, ‘Okay, I’m on my way.’ That was his life.”