The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (2 page)

Two things sucked that day. For one,
Paul died. It wasn’t so much that he died as it was that he got old
and then died. Eighty three … when did that happen? The second
thing that sucked always sucked - my boss, the man who perpetually
looks like he took a dump in his pants. Tom (my boss), if for some
reason you are reading my blog – YOU SHIT YOUR PANTS DIDN’T YOU –
EVERYDAY!

“
So,” he said. “Paul
Newman.”

Hmmm, maybe Mr. Poopy Pants is not
such a douchebag after all, I thought.

“
No, Steve. I don’t care
one way or another that a Hollywood actor died. I mean Paul Newman
is too bad. ‘Don’t tease me bro’’ is too bad, and all the Rihanna
videos are too bad. And Facebook is really too bad. Too bad for
you.”

He slowly pushed a piece of paper in
front of me that I had signed a few months earlier. I thought it
was companywide policy that everyone had signed about internet use.
I never really read the thing.

“
That was your second
warning,” he said.

I know now why Biff stole
the pen in
Death of a
Salesman
. I left my boss’s office imagining
the pen from his desk sticking out of his bleeding eye. I didn’t
want to work there anymore. I didn’t want to work, to pay my
mortgage or be a husband. Fuck it. I didn’t need to do the right
thing anymore. Fuck it… I would leave and not vote for
Obama.

They tried to get me to stay and
finish a project I was already six months behind on. I had been
working on my own project instead – a Facebook project called
‘Latina ‘Ginas’-- a competition to see which country could be best
represented on three different Facebook profiles of me. In the end
Panama won. Not because I had more hot girls added from Panama, but
because of Estrella. A super-hot girl from the country’s third
largest city, David, with whom I decided I had to study horizontal
salsa. Also, my buddy Matt was teaching English in Panama City. Two
weeks after I quit my job I left a note on the bed for the wife to
not wait up for me. I was in Panama. More than she
deserved.

They say that Panama City
is like Miami, except that they speak English in Panama. This is
not true. One night at the casino I tried to ask for a
michelada
, which is beer,
lime and salt. I didn’t get the ‘
lada
’ part, so what I had actually
asked for was
micha
, a very bad word for vagina. Like ‘cunt’. I asked for a cunt
while I was playing Texas Hold’em. The best I got all night were
rude looks and pair of deuces. The next day I was supposed to head
to the San Blas islands with my buddy Matt but I couldn’t take it
anymore. I had to see if the winner of the Facebook ‘Latina ‘Gina’
challenge was as hot as her profile picture.

I checked into Hostel Bambú, a cool
little place with a pool and a one eyed dog aptly named Stinky. I
was supposed to meet Estrella a few hours after checking in, so I
proceeded to drink coffee and a distilled sugar cane alcohol called
seco. One moment I was sitting around the pool while the owner of
the hostel played Leonard Cohen on the guitar, and the next I was
waking up in my underwear in a strange apartment. There was a note
on the table in Spanish from some guy named Sergio. I had no idea
what it said. I imagined he was some gay guy that found me face
down in a puddle in front of a gay bar.

In my pocket was a piece of paper with
a drawing of two stick people sitting on a bed with tape over their
mouths. And a phone number. I called and to my delight it was
Estrella, not Sergio, at the other end of the line. She said
something about going to the bush.

Again I must emphasize that there
really is more English in Miami. Language is an issue. A gringo I
met here said he never took his girls to his apartment-- only to
the bush. I thought this was okay for him, but I could be a bit
classier.

So eventually, Estrella and I get into
a taxi, and I am looking around to see which bush we are going to
when we arrive at a push. ‘Push’ is actually an English word that
American G.I.’s popularized when they ventured out of the Canal
Zone with their girls to go to love motels. You drive into a little
garage and push a button that closes the garage door. Then you push
another button that opens the bedroom door. Lots of pushing, hence
the name.

Panamanian men do not have their own
house until they are fifty because they spend all their money on
spoilers, fins, duel exhaust, etc. for their 1985 Lada, and when
they finally do have their own pad they have already had numerous
girlfriends on the side and illegitimate children. So when the
Americans left, the push stayed. People often party in the push,
and sometimes they die in some crazy car explosion. Often Colombian
drug runners die in a push after stealing coke bound for Mexico.
Live hard, have sex, die – the push is like the Disney circle of
life, Panama Style.

Estrella and I took a taxi to a push
called Beverly Hills. In our room I discovered even more buttons to
push -- a vending machine of sex toys. After 25 minutes at Beverly
Hills I fell in love with both Estrella and La Serpiente
Mágica.

There were pros and cons for both
Estrella and La Serpiente Mágica, but the sex snake did not have
replaceable batteries, so I decided to focus on Estrella. She,
however, had Sergio. Does ‘novio’ mean gay buddy or boyfriend?
Again my Spanish was an obstacle so I just chose it to mean the
former. But one day after I called her and she spoke nothing but
high speed Spanish and hung up, I decided to release my stress on a
couple of Swedish backpackers back at the Bambú. I was helping them
with their bags behind a locked door when Estrella decided to show
up out of the blue and knock. Funny, my
holy-shit-what-are-you-doing-here look was not enough to get her to
leave. The girls in my room were topless from the pool, so I pushed
Estrella out and locked the door. Estrella banged on the door
shouting something about mothers, vaginas, sharp objects and juice
in Spanish. I am not 100% about the juice part-- I am still
learning. Just don’t order a ‘chucha’ if you want juice.

So Estrella took a break from
tearfully pounding on the door to grab a knife from the kitchen.
She tried to jimmy the door open, but fortunately the hostel owner
heard all the talk of juice and whatnot, and because he thought she
was trying to kill me, he called the cops. They threw her kicking
and screaming into the back of the cop car and asked us to come
along. Stupidly, we followed in a taxi. Well, during the drive I
guess she convinced the cops that I was trying to rape her and she
drew her knife in self-defense.

No due process. I was handcuffed and
sat down next to ugly hookers in paint to my right and hairy
hookers with dicks to my left -- both eyeing me like the last
M&M at a party for fat kids. Their boozy sweat and cheap
perfume could not overpower the stank that flew out of the holding
cell and introduced itself to the back of my mouth.

The cop called my name. Finally he’s
gonna let me take a piss, I thought. But when he took my belt and
shoe laces I knew I was going into that holding cell.

“
No soy
criminal
,” I protested.

He muttered something in Spanish and
pushed me into the holding cell.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I
saw faces around me on the floor. They were all shirtless and
sweaty and lying in about a quarter inch of what smelled like
piss.

“
He said I know you are not
a criminal,” a dark figure in the cell said in English.

“
What?”

“
The guard. What he said
was that he knows you are not a criminal. If he thought you were
guilty he would have beaten you already.”

I was hit with a sudden rush of fear.
Her Facebook said she was nineteen. She looked nineteen. But it was
hard to tell with these Latinas.

In jail I committed my first voluntary
crime. Full time inmates in the cell above us used string to lower
weed rolled with pages of the Bible. The weed was just to get you
in the mood for the Oreos that came next. I made friends with the
half inch of piss and sweat and the juvenile delinquents that were
there for the night. In the morning I was handcuffed and taken down
to the fiscalía, sort of the Panamanian version of the D.A’s
office. I sat there until a man told me I could go home. Charges
dropped, I guess. That’s due process.

I didn’t go back to the hostel. I
didn’t call her. One day I stopped into an internet café and
checked my Facebook. “I want seeing you,” was all she wrote. But
she had written it twice each day for the ten days I hadn’t checked
my Facebook.

A couple of days later I checked my
Facebook again. There were two notifications.

One was a ‘friend request’ from my
wife.

I clicked ‘IGNORE’.

The other was another message from
Estrella. “I want seeing you at new,” it said.

What we have here is a failure to
communicate.

What would he do if he could do it all
over again? What would Cool Hand Luke do? Would he keep taking a
beating? Maybe he took all those beatings and kept asking for more
because he knew one day he would be eighty three…

Cool Hand Luke… if you are up there…
give me a sign… What would you do?

The Trail of the Black
Christ

By Mathew Hope

There’s this Panamanian
windshield wiper finger wag I picked up that is actually pretty
effective. It came in handy the night I had to venture into Cinco
de Mayo and turn away transvestite prostitutes and street children
that growled when I refused to buy their stickers. This is not my
Panama. My Panama is the other way… it is in the money laundering
banking district where I teach ESL in a tower by day and party in
the discos below by night. Cinco de Mayo is the hot, greasy
transportation throat of Panama City. The tourist police are the
gag reflex that spits anyone with a camera and shorts out and onto
the white-washed cobblestones of Casco Viejo. In Spanish I told the
cops that I knew where I was going –
to El
Cristo Negro
, The Pilgrimage of the Black
Christ.

Only this was not true. My
buddy Steve and I were booked on a sailing trip that departed just
past the pilgrimage site to the San Blas islands. Only he decided
that it would be way cooler to ditch me at the last minute to chase
a girl half his age that he friended on Facebook. Even worse, I was
supposed to meet the boat captain in Portobello, and the line at
the main bus terminal was out of control with swarming Christian
pilgrims off to see this black wooden Jesus idol. It didn’t matter
– in Cinco de Mayo I decided to catch a
diablo rojo
to take me to the coast
solo.

A
diablo rojo
was once a shiny new
school bus cast out of the Promised Land by the U.S. Federal Motor
Vehicles Standards Commission and then retrofitted with duel chrome
exhaust and wild graffiti. They roar and spit like demons – hence
the name, Red Devil. I boarded my hell on wheels and came face to
face to face with wide eyed Evangelicals expecting to join the
pilgrimage. Aha, the bowels of Satan are filled with conservative
Christians.

Her face appeared when I
needed it most. In this sea of penitent alien eyes she locked onto
me. The first thing anyone would say about her is how cute she
looks- in her photos she wears a smiling mask of innocence that
makes you feel guilty for admiring her beauty. But by the way she
held my eyes without smiling I had a hunch she was not penitent.
Without intimidating obviousness, she slid over just enough to
invite me to sit. Her head was not buried in her cell phone, so I
knew she wasn’t Panamanian, but I knew she wasn’t a
gringa
either. She was
dark, olive skinned and beautiful. Plus, she had a backpack with
baby blue flippers sticking out the back. When I sat next to her,
she didn’t drop her gaze. She just silently chewed on the side of
her thumbnail. Finally, as if she found what she was looking for in
my petrified silence, she smiled slightly and held out her palm.
There were two red pills.

“
Tómala
,” she offered after she popped one of them into her
mouth.

I smiled and of course refused. She
buried the pill in her jeans pocket. The bus did not move for more
than an hour, and during the time we were sitting there in virtual
silence, an obedient looking schoolboy sandwiched me closer to her.
Now we were ass to ass in silence. She broke a long period of
window staring by spitting out in perfect English, ‘Holy fuck, when
is this bus going to move!’

The pill was a valium you can buy at
most pharmacies in Panama, and this one, I guess, was particularly
strong. She told me you could bounce on a bus with no shocks and
wake up feeling like you had a great eight hours of
sleep.

If the Devil could be persuaded to
write a bible, he would title it, You Only Live Once.

I popped the pill in my mouth. She
offered me a swig of her water and I accepted. But the pill sat at
the back right hand side of my mouth between my teeth and cheek. As
far as I could tell she wasn’t watching to see if I swallowed. I
could feel it dissolving in my mouth and was starting to taste the
chemicals. But I managed to spit most of it out and onto the floor.
Finally the bus started to move. Packed, sweaty pilgrims started to
sing gospel songs.