A Gringo Doing Time In Costa Rica. Final part XII La Junta

On Saturday the 13th of March Don Gregory, Rigo and Don Vicente came to make their first visit.

The visit began with Don Gregory alone who greeted me as I exited the building through the iron-gated baths to join the visitors in the exercise yard. He was soon joined by the other two. They were delayed because Don Vicente had to rent a pair of Levis from a guard to change for the green pants he had worn. Only the guards can wear green clothes.

I called them “La Junta Directiva del Proyecto para Mantener y Liberar a Terry” (JDPMLT). I had the meeting all set up, I had been thinking of this for days. I wrote an agenda for the meeting which was divided into sections titled “Legal,” “Business,” “Obligations,” “Family,” “Defense Committee” and “Necessities.”

I had made up my mind that I was staying here for awhile. I had thought about what the legal realities were or seemed to be. This might turn into a war of attrition. To avoid that, I wanted to demonstrate that I would not break. Or in the event that a full scale war did break out, I wanted to have already made myself ready.

To do that I had to establish some stable sources of assistance and communications, and Don Gregory, Rigo and Don Vicente came through for me. Gregory even brought me a ‘prison laptop:’ a clipboard and some ruled paper. The three men who came to visit me that day each brought a special gift. I have been very fortunate.

Don Gregory is a gentleman with more than 70 years. Originally we met in Santa Theresa drinking coffee sometime in early 2009. We shared a newspaper and a conversation. He was educated, raised in Ecuador, Uruguay and went to USC, the son of a 1950’s US diplomat.

He had recently had his car robbed in Santa Theresa. The thief was well-known to everyone in the town including the police. It was so brazen that the thief personally offered to sell Gregory his car back. I didn’t see Don Gregory again until quite a few months later.

The way things are, it turns out that I now work for the taxi company that this rumored-to-be-car-thief is part owner of. When I’m working, I spend hours parked in the taxi lot just outside of his house which is currently being nicely remodeled and expanded, waiting my turn to answer a call in the line.

Much later, Don Gregory and I again ran into each other when we were both patients for a couple of weeks in Hospital San Juan de Dios (HSJD) in San José last September. We survived our individual traumas at that point and have been looking out for each other ever since.

The event that had me in the hospital on that occasion was that one morning I temporarily died of a severe asthma attack in the Red Cross ambulance on the way from my mountainside to the hospital in the city 14 kms distant. Recovering from that took me awhile and brought me up from the foundation as it were. I decided to let go and just settle for putting one foot in front of the other.

You might imagine how grateful I was to the hospital staff, the nurses in particular, they had saved my life.

I got out of the hospital broke, under an agreement to pay $100 a month toward the bill for $2000. I was still waiting-hoping-desperate for a promised photography/design deal to begin, getting hungrier all the time and under the constant threat of being served with a notification leading to an arrest warrant because I could not pay the pension to Doña Violeta. The deal never came, and on top of that, the same client skipped out on a large bill. I was busted flat.

Making friends with an elderly man just seemed natural, we made good company for each other. I was long since too tired to get freaked out every time things got worse. I mean, I had just come back from being dead, so I guess I had a new perspective. I decided to try something else, try to pass my time making things a little more pleasant for someone else at least. I thought it might make me feel better to help Don Gregory play online games and keep his email straightened out. Feeling better was something that I had not yet accomplished as I tried to get through this avalanche of lousy breaks. I was about to lose my (rented) house for being late on the rent one month after using up the deposit. Feeling better might make things better, at least feeling better felt better when it didn’t.

This was when I started going to Mass every Sunday. The priest always talked about how God wants us to be happy. I had already been spending a few minutes every day praying in whatever Catholic Church was nearby. Irish roots, Américan fruits.

“The solution is not in the problem”- Vicky the Buddhist Waitress!

But I had lots of good reason to feel terrible, and mostly I did. After a visit with Don Gregory, I would come back to my shack, open up, go inside and go to sleep. There was no food, no gas in the car, nowhere to go anyway. Actually, not exactly nowhere to go, thanks to the church, and one of my oldest friends here, the business administration student junior executive pot-head, Rigo.

Rigo was 17 when I met him in 2005. We used to drink beer together at a bar that has changed hands now four times since then. He was hitting on the skinny negra Tammy, who worked there and turned out to be the cousin of the more Raphael-esqe and blanquita Violeta, who I only saw there once and whom I subsequently married. Rigo vanished in 2006, into University.

Me and Rigo and another buddy named Pancho always kept in touch after life took its course and moved us apart. Somewhere along the line it became obvious that Rigo liked to play hand drums. He wanted to do more of that, which after I decided to really believe him, pleased me greatly. I have my Valgis bongoes and my Alexandria darbuka, they have been with me through several lives now, parallel universes, fractals, all different but made of the same essence and faithfully manifesting unique instances of archetypical scenarios, like drumming on a porch in the fading afternoon heat with a small group of amigos. Rigo and Pancho and others would show up every once in a while and we would drum lost pieces of my soul back into shape. Unexpected to say the least.

There is no generation gap in Costa Rica. In the US, I remember that when talking to people 20 years or more my junior I always ended up at some kind of dead end. The references were all out of synch, and though that might be interesting at first, soon enough it just gets frustrating. One is constantly having to contextualize everything and establish fundamental concepts that the other person’s symbol-scape lacks capacity to describe. These need to be explained and converted into analogs to make them understood at all, and even common sense seemed to be deformed and get perverted in process.

That really can’t happen in Costa Rica, because it just doesn’t fit with what this place is and has been forever, which is small and very close. Everybody’s symbol-scape jibes and transforms together in an enormous slowly undulating mass of culture, language, hard knocks and all-knowing gossip that drifts across the mountains and settles in between the valleys like dew permiating everything with a Tico rubric. Pity the poor immigrant especially the illiterate, but even they fit, everything fits in an undulating mass.

For a middle-aged gringo, having a bunch of 20-something year old friends just isn’t a problem in the terms mentioned above if only because the whole subject of shared frame of reference is non-operative between us. It wouldn’t matter if I was a gringo from the 19th century we would be as equally disconnected culturally.

As for sharing cultural cardinal points, aside from MTV music videos, forget it. And that was problematical because I don’t know squat about MTV. I had spent the 80’s and 90’s alternatively confronting Senators and riot police blocking offices and streets to end the current War du Jour and then concealing myself in my shack in L.A. avoiding aerial malathion spraying and conspiring to escape from the 20th century altogether. Come to think of it, I don’t think I stopped any wars, but the conspiracy was a definite success.

My young friends and I just had to meet with a clean slate and figure out what meant what on our own. We couldn’t depend on trading chunks of pre-digested popular clichés to establish common ground and meaningful communication, we have to make it up. Happily this necessity happens to have a positive effect on the drumming which is improvisational and spontaneous. We make that up too.

Of course, about cultural dislocation I am exaggerating the point. There are millions of cultural clichés that everyone on the whole blue earth shares in common like Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bob Marley, Jennifer Lopez and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Thanks to music videos and commercials, all of time since the beginning of Video Tape has been placed onto the same stage where long dead crooners and John Travolta dance cheek to cheek with Lady Gaga and Daddy Yankee. The four year old crawling on the rug in front of the TV in San José Costa Rica gets the same cast of characters as the 60 year old divorced California security guard staring into the box sitting on his stool at the parking lot gate in the middle of the night. What generation gap? We are the world, mae.

Rigo and Gregory both take friendship seriously and they were right there for me now that I was in trouble. I understand that good intentions aside, it is extraordinary to get visits and even receive precious goods like cookies and cucumbers and laundry soap from the people who you leave behind after you get sent up somewhere. Having their eyes and ears and arms to help me outside and their counsel and company here on the inside was a blessing from God.

Rigo and Gregory, at far ends of the cycles of life, mis amigos verdaderos.

In between them on the ladder of age is my landlord Don Vicente. He’s a busy man from one of the families who own a lot of the mountain where I live.

They’ve always been ranchers like everyone up in in Madrigal de Santa Theresa. Don Vicente is about 40. After retiring from a fútbol career he took to drinking and hanging out at Bar Chepitos, at the crossroads to Barrio Mango in the center of Madrigal. That was before I knew him though, he is a different person now.

Don Vicente is an up-and-coming developer. He’s built 4 or 5 houses up in the valley that his family has farmed for generations, which he rents out. That’s how we met. I used to rent one of his houses, the smallest one, back when I was a successful graphic designer/photographer. That is, while I still had the millionaire gringo with the 4 star hotels as my patron client. I made calendars, advertisements, posters, billboards, websites and all the logos and photography for him for almost 4 years. Paying rent, playing drums, eating lunch once a week with my best friend Maria. Paying Doña Violeta. All good until the market crashed in late ’08.

I was in that house for 1 year and 11 months before the bottom fell out of my life for the thousandth time and I had to make other arrangements. By November 2009 my Other Arrangements Department was closed for budget cuts though. Therefore I was preparing to be homeless and live in my car, when my car broke down.

Don Vicente and I met frequently in the yard, he was always around, so we had developed some understanding about my economic condition. He knew about feast or famine and he knew that he could depend on me in any event to take care of my debts. He knew about my client’s deteriorating corporate and financial conditions. He had been waiting along with me for months as I made trips to Bahía Gaviota to meet with the millionaire and returned empty handed carrying nothing but the same whiskey and coke soaked promises.

When Don Vicente asked me where I was going to live, I told him that I had to sell my belongings and move into the street because my car was broken down in a neighbor’s yard. I had no cash to fix it, and it was almost time to get the annual technical revision sticker, which meant it was time to do mechanical work, for which there was no money either.

My friend Julio the Taxi Driver came up with a plan and an offer about how to make money and get my car repaired. he said that he would put up the money to make the relatively minor repair that currently had the car idled and then pay me ¢7.000 a day to drive my car as a taxi. He needed a car starting in December but only for a week or 10 days he said because his car was going in the shop. Julio thought that I could get my car back then before Christmas, complete with new shock absorbers. In December Julio started driving my car.

Don Vicente had a lot of sympathy for me. He had first-hand knowledge of what kind of things Doña Violeta was capable of. He was ashamed of her as an example of Costa Rican society or culture. He was completely opposed to me living in the street when by rights I owned my own house but by the aggressive acts of my “wife” was prevented from living in it or taking any benefit from it at all. He told me to hold off on doing anything for a day or two to give him a chance to figure something out. I relaxed those two or three days for the first time in weeks… waiting to hear what he would say.

50 mts down the road is a small wooden shack at the front gate to the “finca” (“ranch”) that belongs to Don Vicente’s father, Don Beto. What Don Vicente did was get Don Beto to agree to let me move all my things into the shack and live in it without paying until I can get on my feet. The rent will be set at $100, one third of what I have been paying for four years. I’ll pay the lights, the water comes from a tank up the hill. Don Vicente, whom I had met as a landlord, turned out to be much more than that as he and his family took me under their wings with their generosity and moral support, keeping me from being turned out into the street when I had no money.

The walls of my new home are simple planks nailed to a wooden frame, the shower is a cold water tube, the shack and its unfinished concrete floor slouch downhill at an angle, falling off of the small hill on which they are perched due to the erosion caused by neighbor Don Cleto when he made his driveway wider. It is full of trash and scorpions.

One Saturday in late November, Rigo, Pancho, their friend Alejandra and I moved my things into the shack. That night I slept well. I woke in the dawn fascinated by the shining stripes of early morning light bursting like hot blue and yellow rocket exhaust through the cracks in the walls. A curtain of black shadow and incandescent light separated me from the world outside. I said prayers of thanks as I laid in the rising dawn.

In December I got a little job and I was also rescued by my daughter and my brother. They each wired me money and so I paid some rent, I got the car registered, I ate.

At some point it occurred to me that maybe my español was good enough by now that I could drive my own car as a taxi and not just collect rent on the car. Stood to reason that I would make at least double the 7 mil that Julio was paying. I asked him and he agreed. he told me that he would negotiate for me with the proprietors of the Taxi business, so that I could have a space in the line.

Eventually I did get behind the wheel and start driving as a Pirate Taxi. That story has its own trajectory but its contour sheds light on my state of affairs at a time when unbeknownst to myself I was on the eve of going down for a 6 month sentence in Debtor’s Prison.

As 2009 ended I was looking forward to my 6th year in Costa Rica as an opportunity to at last be able to settle the consequences of the mistakes I made in my first 5. Just get on with life. I had always heard of ugly divorce battles that went on for years. Being so completely mangled by one myself had just kind of snuck up on me, I never saw it coming or expected it to do what it has done since it started. I just wanted to have my day in court at last, because I had the proof and I knew that eventually the truth is always going to come out.

On my way to that day what had occurred had led me to a Saturday morning in March, united in the exercise yard of a prison with three good people whom I had grown accustomed to calling my friends. We had an agenda to execute in order that I could hunker down for a long hard fight.

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Written by Terrence who is a 53 year old Gringo living in Costa Rica.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.