Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  We drive west to Santa Ana to see Escuela de Rafael in San Rafael, a nearby school that has been improved with John’s money. Meranda helped run the small foundation that receives a $60,000 annual injection from John. They dole out the money as the need arises. Escuela San Rafael, for example, has a few students who require the use of wheelchairs. They were no ramps, so Meranda paid for a little cement and labor, and now the school is wheelchair friendly. Sixty grand can go a long way in Costa Rica.

  Cecilia was the one who came up with the idea to help a bunch of kids get an education in San José, and John put up the money. That was a long time ago, but John continues to contribute each year. Meranda took over the administration of the program after J & C split up.

  We shift over a couple streets to a recently erected, imposing three-story edifice to which John contributed money. More than a community center, the new Escuela Municipal de Artes Integradas, Santa Ana Center, San Rafael, contains a recital hall, music practice rooms, art studios, and a large ballet room with pristinely polished and as yet unused wooden floors (with a sign that prohibits shoes that mark). The director gives us a pleasant tour, although I can’t make out much of what he’s saying. Meranda translates occasionally. Outside, a painter on scaffolding high above lets his inspiration flow, mapping out his design on one of the cement walls. Eventually, it seems, the expansive exterior will be entirely covered with original work by local artists commissioned by the center.

  Around 11:30, after we’ve seen the public school, the arts center, and the Artista restaurant, Meranda drops me off at a spot where I can meet up with the chauffeur once more. Most of the time I’m with him, the chauffeur works the phone. We sit in a dining room—or dining room in theory. He has PCs positioned at each end of the table. He’s talking on the phone with a man from Asia. It sounds like he’s talking to an unreliable Costa Rican about Tico time being fatal to business deals. The guy can’t seem to pull things off that fast—he has to go by local banking rules. The chauffeur shakes his head. Hey, you want to do business or not? “A day. Twenty-four hours!” He sounds like he’s rapping knuckles.

  Later, the chauffeur is elated. He might have scored a huge deal with a merchant. Ramping it up, working on something big. “We’ll see about the money when I get it,” is the caveat, because the guy could just blow him off for his commission. It’s not clear what the business actually is, but the chauffeur tells me that he’s lived on a few hundred a month when he’s had to. In one of the lean phases, an old friend bought him a car to get around. Whatever business he’s in, it’s boom or bust.

  After lunch, around three o’clock, I make my way back to the B&B to do some writing. Meranda is working until around seven, and then we’re heading out for dinner. She decides on the Apolos Restaurant, another of John’s favorites. Great pizza. When she explains how her dad did not defend her against her stepmother in her teens and how she was kicked out of her own home and forced to fend for herself, it is difficult not to be moved. I’m impressed by her resilience and evergreen optimism.

  Wednesday morning I’m up early. I didn’t want the hassle of a driving a car, so with Matteo’s help I booked a seat on a van that picks up customers at a number of hotels around town and travels west overland and then south along the coast to, among other places, Dominical on the Pacific side. That’s where a couple of Neteller pals bought a small oceanfront hotel. It’s a long, possibly tedious journey on twisting roads through mountains, but maybe it’s worth it—once—to see the countryside.

  Don is back to drive me to the Courtyard Marriott to await my EasyRide pickup for Dominical. Right away, he finds a traffic jam because of the construction just down the hill from the B&B. Don does what he needs to do—he drives on the opposite side of the road, on the opposite shoulder, weaves here and there to avoid congestion—to get me to the Courtyard Marriott in San Rafael Escazú by five to eight. Don’s improv is entertaining first thing in the morning.

  Alas, he needn’t have worried about the eight o’clock rendezvous. The black “Tourismo” van doesn’t arrive until nine. There is room for seven passengers. The first guy is an old gent from Australia who works in Toronto and Montreal for Domtar. I switch to the front seat when our driver picks him up. Better view. We head down a steep hill on Avenida 9. I notice a sign, Night Club Nicole, jutting above tenements in the next block. The shacks look seriously run-down—fatally dilapidated, actually. I decide I should snap a shot but it’s too late, we’ve already passed it. No matter, our neophyte driver can’t find the Best Western Hotel in this sector of town, Tangas, which is a little dodgy, being adjacent to the Zona Roja (due south of the Costa Rican Center of Science and Culture), so he has to circle around to catch the turn for Avenida 7. I nail the picture the second time.

  I send it to John the next day, once I’m relaxing at a boutique hotel called Costa Paraiso, in Dominical, mainly because I’m proud of my lucky grab. The shot is chock full of contrasts—gambling, prostitution, poor shacks, rolling hilly streets, belching buses, traffic jams—representing the flagrant duality on display in this city. John replies: “Thanks, I’d almost forgotten just how mad it is there … valet park at Club Nicole and kiss your car goodbye. Hang onto your shit, man. And a great ride.”

  Now it’s around 10:30 in the morning. I’ve been on this journey since seven, and we’re still in San José. Tico time. We pick up a young woman who hails from L.A.’s Koreatown. She’s dressed in a light top with beads hanging around her neck, one of those forever hippies, maybe, who is between jobs, on the road for a while, going to a festival in a couple of days with friends—kinda reggae, kinda Burning Man—happening at Dominical. It’s called the Envision festival, I find out later, and it’s the inaugural burn in the town and on the beaches of Dominical.

  A half hour later we pick up the middle-aged woman from Lethbridge, Alberta, who talks about the weather here and how cold it is this winter. The AC in the rear of the van, right behind my head, actually, is dripping cold water, and she jokes about how she’s been avoiding it. I keep getting stabbed with the odd drip rolling down my back. At first I thought, Wow, am I perspiring that much? No, just cold water dripping from the ineffective AC. It’s eighty-two degrees outside, but it’s ninety-five inside the van. When we reach the highest point of the ride west, we stop for a washroom break. The view is a visual feast of plunging heights and greenery, but no water yet. Around 1 p.m. in our slow boat to the Pacific, about halfway down to Dominical, we pick up a hipster-ish, Hacky Sack–looking couple in their late twenties. Another hour goes by. There is one last Rocky Mountain–like climb before heading down to sea level. We chug along in this standard black Tourismo and move to the passenger lane as soon as an ascending passing lane opens up. No way we’re passing anyone in this boat. Our driver shuts the AC down. He tells me, in a way I can understand, that we’ll never make it up that hill with it on and seven adults in the car.

  The countryside is generally wild and tropical. Beside the highway are perfect rows of African palm trees, plantations for the production of palm oil. Beyond those rows is nothing but jungle or cleared farmland down to the ocean. One of the disappointments of the journey is how little of that ocean we see from Jacó on down. The highway veers inland and mostly stays that way.

  By 2:30 we’re in downtown Dominical, former fishing village, current surfing mecca, possible annual alternative-lifestyle festival site. It features beat-up gravel streets, shanties serving cerveza and fruit and ice cream, and super-buff and over-tanned surfer dudes wandering by with slightly overweight girlfriends. In Dominical, the garb is mostly hippie and post-hippie with a strong accent of post-Lollapalooza tattoo culture. Some have long, straggly hair, some look like direct mail orders from Santa Cruz, with super-bleached blond hair, long and straight. Some older Americans, maybe Canadians, too, look like they’ve opted out of the rat race for good.

  • • •

  On Thursday, I awaken to the realization that
this coastal area is a gorgeous place, but the hotel itself is awfully close to the highway. From the road, it’s a walk down a steep-grade driveway and right turn into an open-air tiki lounge restaurant and small office. You’re here. Above you, on the road, every so often the truck drivers blast their brakes decelerating, which is not the kind of thing you want to hear in paradise. Noise pollution is rampant. There is also this high-pitch whirr that erupts every so often, like right now, at 7:30 in the morning. I have no idea what it is but it’s intrusive and off-putting. Eventually I figure out the sound is from tropical cicadas. They’re louder than the ones in New York or Toronto, but also mesmerizing. Don’t call it noise, call it natural art.

  The cicadas are one prominent feature of paradise. Another is a security guard stationed at the entrance to the office. He arrives before six to light the outdoor candles and languidly paces back and forth near the restaurant customers to check his cell phone. Not exactly the best way to give new customers a warm, fuzzy feeling, but once rationality kicks in you realize the owners probably wouldn’t hire a security guard, gun hanging at his side, unless something untoward had happened one evening around dinnertime. As one fellow tourist said, “He’s not there to make sure everyone eats their vegetables.”

  The next morning, Friday, I walk down the highway for a mile or so to pick up some food and drink for the stay. I catch up with the couple staying in the next cabin. They were looking for the trail that leads down to the beach, immediately north of Costa Paraiso, but are way past it now, sweltering along the highway. They discover the trail on the way back, walking along the beach. I see where the trail ends as they come onto the main road just outside the inn. Peggy and Paul live at Chestermere Lake, about twelve miles directly east of Calgary. They decided to come here because they know Bob Edmunds, one of the owners, well. They met Bob a long time ago at Chestermere, probably at Bruce Ramsay’s place. Paul used to sell sailing equipment there. He’s a fireman now. Both Peggy and Paul say the Denis Leary series about New York firefighters, Rescue Me, is spot-on. The guy comes home and tells his wife nothing much happened at work. A few years later, it comes out that he fished a dismembered body out of a car that day—a real clean-up job.

  They’re also good friends of Bruce, and know John. They’ve known John for a long time. John has really changed, says Peggy. He’s not the same person. Oh yeah, says Paul, I don’t see John so much these days, so I really do notice it. I say to them, well, I don’t know, I’ve known John, a little bit anyway, for quite a while, and he seems to be the same guy to me, give or take, so what’s a for-instance?

  Peggy: “He’ll pour a perfectly good wine down the drain because it’s not a $500 bottle” and “Bruce is not like that at all. He’s exactly the same.”

  Paul: “Bruce now has more money than John.”

  Bill: “Well, stands to reason if you give away most of your money.”

  Paul: “Bruce has grown his money”—whereas John shrank his.

  They seem judgmental about the way John has chosen to live his life. I suggest that if a guy wants to rent the most expensive studio and hire the best musicians, he ought to be able to do that. They have no problem with that. Could be the wastefulness they don’t approve of—and the showboating. Reminds me of the story my friend Grant told me about John ordering a drink after the bar had closed, just before a One Yellow Rabbit theater show in Calgary was about to start. John threw the guy a fifty-dollar tip. Grant thought that was tacky, even if John was a major donor to the company.

  Peggy and Paul like Bruce because, even though he’s rich, he acts low-key and “real,” whereas they think John must feel a need to flaunt his wealth and, dare I say, have an entourage. I’m guessing they think it’s reckless and unseemly. Peggy is a nurse (with an MBA) and was a sessional instructor at U of C for three years, teaching third-year commerce students about building businesses and relationships and teamwork. She said she loved it, working from home mostly, and thought her insights were valuable, but it was a mandatory class so, naturally, most of her students hated it.

  I reunite with Paul and Peggy for dinner at the Costa Paraiso open restaurant. There is a roof over our heads but no walls, just pillars. We are surrounded by ocean and verdant flora as the sun’s orange glow fades into the horizon. They tell me they think of themselves as blue-collar workers. They talk about how for some reason they seem to know an inordinate number of people who are exceptionally well off, who have had a streak of luck, or who have been at the right place at the right time, sold high just before the market dumped, etc. I say to them a couple of times, well, you’re here in paradise aren’t you, so things can’t be so bad. They agree, but, still, I guess there is wistfulness about their means in relation to these others. They feel like they’ve missed out somehow.

  I’m not sure about that. Their kids seem to be doing well and they’re down here roaming around without an itinerary for two weeks, using Bob’s hideaway as a base. Things can’t be all bad. Peggy says Bob and his wife Lesley were struggling, like anyone else, before Neteller came along. They also say Bob didn’t make out nearly as well as John, Steve, Bruce, and Vic. That may be true, but my response is, hey, I’d like to have their problems.

  Paul and Peggy tell me Bruce is the hardest-working guy they’ve ever known. He’d worked twenty-two-hour days two or three days in a row at Nesbitt Burns when he had to. He had always been hard-working and would have made a good living without Neteller. But Neteller was the thing that made him truly rich. Paul says he knows how much Bruce invested initially, but it’s not his place to tell me. I said, well, how about giving me a ballpark number? He wouldn’t take the bait. Then, a little while later, he started talking theoretically about how, say, if you invested a few thou of your money and all of a sudden this thing you didn’t think could possibly fly—just another one of Johnny’s pipe dreams, just helping out a buddy (again)—earned back millions and still more millions, and you’d been pounding away in business for years making good dough but nothing like this, well, life was ironic, right? Maybe just a bit of a joke?

  Paul says he’s known Bruce forever, and one thing he knows about Bruce is how private he is. He just goes about his business. He won’t talk to anyone. Once your name is in the paper then it’s over—that’s the way Bruce thinks. Then people come after you and want to talk to you. “Bruce,” he says, “likes to keep under the radar.”

  Bruce’s “under the radar” attitude extends to his common-law marriage to Deb Cullen, John’s cousin and Peggy’s best friend, or almost her best friend. Why did he leave her after all those years, I ask them? Who knows, they say? He’s not telling anyone, not even his old pal Paul. Now he’s in Nelson, BC, with a woman named Lisa, whom Peggy says looks exactly like Deb Cullen did twenty years ago. John has his type; Bruce has his type; maybe we all have our types.

  Bruce comes back to Chestermere during the year. Deb Cullen has since built her own house there. For a while Bruce stayed in the trailer at his man-made waterskiing course. It’s a professional course. He had a buddy build it. About twenty feet wide, don’t know how long. You have to know how to ski. There are little loop turns at each end. Paul says it’s a big deal. From an airplane you can see them dotting the landscape in Texas, for instance—really popular. They don’t cost that much to build. Bruce had his built quite a long time ago, before the bonanza. He bought the strip of land but didn’t actually develop the course until some time later.

  • • •

  Steve Glavine told me I need to meet a guy named Travis Shipman while I am in CR. He might connect a few more Neteller dots for me. I get a chance to chat with him on Saturday morning at breakfast. Sometimes Travis crashes at a place next door to the hotel. He’s a big guy, friendly, with a pronounced Southern drawl. He says “totally” a lot. His neck is thick, his head bald; he wears his black sunglasses on his dome when he’s in the shade. Travis talks to everyone, including the pair of attractive, deeply tanned
women who’ve been boogie-boarding in the bay just off back lawn of Costa Paraiso. They really like him, his soft speech and smooth patter. Travis loves Jon Krakauer’s writing, especially Where Men Win Glory, about NFL football star turned Afghan war friendly-fire casualty Pat Tillman. Travis went to the same school as Tillman and, he thinks, may have played football with him in college. Travis himself played in the 1994 Rose Bowl.

  On Wednesday nights, Travis helps out at the restaurant and also fills in for other staff members. He says he’ll come off the bench whenever they need him. After football, he spent ten years in L.A., met a lot of great people, and loved the life there. It wasn’t until he got away from it that he understood the madness of the city. He probably meant more than the traffic jams.

  Three years ago, Travis sailed for three months as Steve Glavine’s first mate. He didn’t know anything about sailing, but he said to Steve, you holler and I’ll be there. He learned the ropes but also says Steve’s setup was so sophisticated it almost ran itself. They sailed Doris (Steve’s mom’s name) from one Virgin Island to the next, for example—a few hours’ sailing, stop and visit friends, and that’s about it. They once sailed for thirty hours straight to meet Bob and Lesley and their kids in St. Lucia, but that was unusual, Travis says, being out on the open water for that long.

  Travis’s roommate in college was Dave Graham, who cofounded Arizona Bay with Jeff Natland. That’s how Bob heard about Costa Paraiso, through Dave. They went and saw the property. Bob was convinced it was a good investment and told Steve about it, who bought in sight unseen. That was five years ago. Steve did many of the upgrades himself.