Writing All The Wrongs

Judgement.

2010-10-12T20:13:00.000-04:00

When you don’t know what a man is thinking, you judge him on his actions.

Drunk, he threw his alarm clock at the wall and smiled when he heard the familiar sound of the battery case breaking off. He picked up his cell phone to throw it, but paused and saw her text message from earlier in the day: “How are you doing? I’m worried about you.” The girl was clearly concerned. He sat down and texted her back, saying that he’s a piece of shit and worthless. He thought it was true. She texted him back, saying that it wasn't. He dialled her and she picked up. She was worried. She asked him to come over so that she could take care of him. He said okay, he would be on his way. He hung up and looked for his flask of whiskey. It wasn’t where it usually was. He threw everything off of the dresser out of frustration. Then there it was on the ground, among the mess. He grabbed it and shook it to see if it was full. It was half full. Or half empty. Good enough. He took a swig and kicked his garbage can over for good measure. Semen-encrusted tissues, old newspapers, banana peels and pieces of plastic junk joined the clutter.

He put his sunglasses on and grabbed his flask and his cell phone and 5 dollars and his keys and some Kleenex tissues and stuffed them all in his pockets. He put his shoes on and paused to look at his friends lying on the futon in the living room. They were asleep. He took a swig.

He pressed a button and waited for the elevator to appear. Once in the elevator he stared at himself in the mirror. He tried to see if he could see his eyes through his sunglasses but he couldn’t. Mirrored lenses. His eyes were now mirrors, and all he saw was himself staring back at himself staring back at himself staring back at himself.

He left the building and took another swig of his flask. It didn’t burn going down anymore, but he felt warmer. It was dark, and the people on the sidewalk were frightened of him. He knew they were. Their faces shifted and the women clung to their men. He liked how they avoided him so methodically. The five-metre bubble surrounding him amused him. He smiled. He staggered down the ten blocks to her apartment.

He rang the buzzer and she came downstairs and greeted him. He followed her up the stairs. He sloppily took his shoes off and plopped down on the couch and picked up a cat and hugged it. It squirmed out of his hands and ran away. He stared at the ground and felt pathetic. She told him he wasn’t and offered him evidence supporting her theory. He tried to deny it but he knew a lot of it was true, he wasn’t a complete piece of shit. He had done a great thing once or twice in his life at least.

He asked her to hug him over and over again, and each time she did. He asked her if she loved him and she hesitated but then she said yes. He smiled and said nothing. He was drunk but he still remembered that most people wouldn’t ever dare tell a drunk what he didn’t want to hear. He started to talk about what was bugging him but then he couldn’t. It was too hard. He knew she wouldn’t really understand. It would get awkward. He started to feel like a burden. Going there was a mistake. He considered leaving but he was exhausted and he knew it would just worry her even more. It would only make both of them feel worse.

He asked if he could go to sleep and she said yes. He took his clothes off and awkwardly stumbled into her bed. He shut his eyes. It felt good to lie there. She took her clothes off and joined him soon after. He grabbed her wrist and draped her arm over his torso. “I want to be little spoon,” he said.

She let him be little spoon.

Stripped.

2010-09-20T17:47:00.000-04:00

It was still daylight. The three of us were walking down Ste-Catherine street when some guy, a gaunt weasel of a man wearing a motorcycle jacket and a shitty comb-over, waved at us. Neon bulbs splashed senseless colours in random patterns onto the building behind him. The sign above him read SEX APPEAL. A strip club. I’ve always thought it was bizarre for a business to waste money during the day on superfluous electricity.

“You guys wanna see a lesbian show?” the man asked.

“Yes,” I blurted

The man puffed on his cigarette. Paul puffed on his cigarette too. The smoke clouds met briefly. I couldn’t quite explain it, but I was disgusted by the sight of that. The smoke clouds touching. It made me think that Paul and the weasel man were maybe not all that different and that sickened me.

“You guys eighteen?” he asked.

“Fuck yeah,” Paul said. Jeff grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

“So whatcha waiting for then? Come inside. It’s all waiting for you inside.”

“Just give us a minute,” I told the man.

We huddled into a circle and debated whether we should go into the strip club. None of us were single and we knew none of our girlfriends would approve. It took us all but ten seconds to decide that we would be idiots if we didn’t go in. Paul and I had never been inside of a strip club. Jeff had only been in one before.

“It’s not like we’re cheating,” Jeff said. He paused. “But whatever we do decide to do tonight, we shouldn’t tell our girlfriends.”

Paul made us swear an oath that whatever we were doing that night would stay a secret forever. I was unsure but agreed to it anyway.

“What will we have to hide, though?” I said nervously. “We’re not doing anything wrong, right?”

“Don’t worry,” Jeff said, smirking. “It isn’t cheating.”

“Yeah, Marc,” Paul said. “Stop being a fucking pussy.”

That seemed good enough for me.

“We’ll be right back,” I said, turning back to the weasel. “Just gotta take out money.”

“Take your time,” he said. “And hey, while you’re at it, could you get me a chocolate bar or something?”

Paul and Jeff laughed as I waved at the man dismissively. We walked to a pharmacy and found an ATM. Jeff took out one hundred dollars. I took out one hundred dollars as well. Paul had no money. We teased Paul and threatened to go inside without him. He started to get angry and when he gets angry he gets violent so I agreed to pay for his cover if it was less than ten dollars.

Before leaving the pharmacy, I bought a Snickers bar, thinking it would be funny to give to the man outside the strip club.

We walked back and I offered the Snickers to weasel man.

“I’m allergic to peanuts,” he said, disappointed. “But thanks anyway.”

Paul and Jeff laughed as I re-pocketed the Snickers bar. I planned on eating it later. Waste not, want not. We paid the cover – I paid for Paul’s as I’d promised – and descended down the stairs of the strip club. Twenty bucks poorer. It was dark. Really dark. A large man in a suit greeted us at the bottom. He didn’t seem surprised at our appearance – I was wearing combat boots, was flaunting a 4 gauge, stainless steel circular barbell as septum jewellery, and sported a 16-inch mohawk. Jeff had a black-blonde bihawk atop his head and Paul’s teeth were chipped to such a degree that he might as well have owned fangs. The strippers immediately screamed in delight when they saw us. Half a dozen of them ran up to us and squealed, petting our hair. Some of them were topless, and nearly all of them were gilded with various types of glitter. Paul’s jaw slackened as he stared at their tits. Jeff and I just smiled and enjoyed the girls petting our hair.

“Hello, ladies,” I said. The girls squealed again.

“How do you get your hair to stay up like that?” one asked.

“By spending 45 minutes upside down,” I said. “And using a lot of hair spray.” One of the girls laughed.

“Hey,” Paul said. “It’s not like you spend any less time on your hair.”

On cue, they giggled. We felt good. I felt good.

The place was relatively dead, with only about a dozen people other than us sitting around. Most of them had white hair and sat alone. We sat down at a table and two strippers sat down with us. One sat next to Jeff and one next to Paul. The one talking to Jeff could only speak French, which he couldn’t speak. He told her so, and she switched places with the stripper that had been talking to Paul. I noticed some bright white specks in my peripheral vision. I looked down at my shirt. I was wearing all black, and the black lights in the establishment revealed an embarrassing amount of dandruff, lint, and fluff on my clothing. It made me uncomfortable.

The stripper talking to me and Paul introduced herself.

“My name is Melanie,” she said as she shook our hands.

I smiled. “No it isn’t,” I said.

Paul leaned in close to me.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growled. “And quit being an asshole.” I did.

I leaned in to hear their conversation. Melanie was chatting with Paul about Canadian politics. I rolled my eyes.

The stripper talking to Jeff was a little hotter than Melanie. She had a tight white top on and a glittery purple tie. I turned my attention to her. She introduced herself as Tiffany. I asked her what her background was. She was half Jamaican and half Quebecoise. She bit her lip and raised her eyebrows at Jeff when he talked, as if she was concentrating on a specific aspect of his face.

I turned back to Paul and Melanie and joined in on their Canadian political debate. It wasn’t long until the inevitable question came. The question I was terrified of hearing but wanted to hear all the same. The question we had paid ten dollars each – save for Paul – to hear over and over and over and over. Melanie leaned back in her chair, looked at us, and asked, “So, do you guys want a dance?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

She turned to Paul. “You?”

He looked down sheepishly. “I don’t have any money,” he said.

“But I do,” I smiled. Paul frowned, envious.

Melanie stood up and grabbed my hand. I followed her through several dark corridors and into a small booth.

Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to turn back, a voice in my head protested.

Melanie removed her thong and top. I looked her up and down. Okay, now it’s too late to turn back.

“Is this your first time at a strip club?” she asked.

I nodded wordlessly.

“Here’s how it works. You can touch everything except my crotch and my face. It’s ten dollars for every song. Easy, huh?”

I nodded again.

“Okay, so let’s start,” she said.

Du Hast by Rammstein came on the sound system.

She sat on my lap and grinded her ass into my crotch. I instantly got hard. She took her time, slowly dragging her ass across my face to the beat of the music. Like a metronome. I reached over and grabbed her boobs and pulled her down on my lap. She turned around to give me a better look at them. They were milky white. I could tell they were fake. I wasn’t a boob guy but I squeezed them anyway. They didn’t feel that different from real boobs.

I started to feel a bit out of my element. A bit guilty, even. To fight the feeling, I asked, “Where are you from?”

“Rimouski,” she answered, still dancing.

“Cool,” I said as I gripped her ass. I felt better. Injecting some normal conversation into the lap dance helped ease my guilt and insecurity. “Between Rivière-du-Loup and Gaspé, right?”

She turned around and took her thong off. Her cunt was right there. I tried not to stare at it. I grabbed her left ass cheek and gripped it harder.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

The song finished and her body suddenly stiffened.

“Do you want to continue for another song?” she asked. I was surprised at how frank she was. It abruptly struck me that a lap dance was just like going to the arcades. Insert credit to continue.

“Not right now,” I said, feeling increasingly guilty. I didn’t want to think about why. “Maybe later.”

She stood there, looking at me.

“What?” I asked.

“The dance. It’s not free, sweetie.”

“Oh. Right.”

I took out 12 dollars and handed it to her. “Here you go.”

A small coin purse appeared out of nothingness and she stuffed the money inside. “Thanks,” she said, smiling. She grabbed my hand and led me back to the table.

32 dollars poorer.

“I’m going to go freshen up. I’ll be back though. I like talking to you.”

“Okay,” I said.

I sat down. Paul had his head in his hands. “Dude, I’m so fucking jealous,” he said. “What happened?”

“She got naked.”

“Whoa, man. I’m so fucking jealous. What else? Did you see her tits?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get to touch them?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you lick them?”

“Nah.”

“Whoa. Fuck, man. That’s awesome. And metal was playing too. That’s fucking awesome. Or it must have been. That chick’s really cool too. You know she’s a separatist, eh?”

“Would you rather see her naked or talk more about separatist politics with her?”

Paul sipped his beer and thought it over. “I guess I’d rather just see her ass, man.”

I took a 20 dollar bill out of the wad in my pocket. “Here you go,” I said. “Have fun. You owe me, though.” 52 dollars poorer.

Paul’s eyes practically welled up with tears. “Dude. Dude. Thanks so much. You have no fucking idea. Thanks so much.”

Melanie came back and Paul struck up another conversation with her about Canada-Quebec relations like I knew he would.

I smelled my arm. It smelled like cheap perfume but it smelled good. I sniffed it again. Over at the other side of the table, Tiffany and Jeff were still talking. She seemed engrossed in whatever he had to say. Her chin in her hands. Leaning forward. He was talking about the crackwhores in Toronto he’d met.

I ordered a beer. Jeff soon got up and followed Tiffany to the back. Shortly after, Melanie and Paul did the same. I was alone at the table. My beer came. With tip, it cost me $11.50. 63 and a half dollars poorer. There was some wretched, aged thing up on stage. I couldn’t see how she got the gig. Matted red hair, enormous flanks, outdated attire. The years of experience were apparent in more ways than one, though. She knew how to dance. The older patrons were into her and threw money at the stage. Some clown threw change and was kicked out. She finished her dance and picked up the money – even the change. Then she walked over and sat next to me.

She spoke to me in French. “Hey sexy, want to buy me a beer?”

“Not really,” I said. I kept my eyes on the awful porn movie playing on the TV in the corner.

“Wanna give me a sip of yours, then?”

I looked at her lips and then at my beer again. I took another sip. “Listen, I don’t want a dance.”

“You don’t know that yet. You haven’t even given me a chance.” She leaned in. “You know, they say I’m the acrobatic one in here.” She winked at me.

“Really? That’s nice. Were you in the Olympics?”

“Haha. You’re funny. So, can you give a girl a break and buy a dance?”

“I don’t have any money.”

“How did you buy that beer, then?”

“My friend bought it for me.”

“Come on, give a girl a break, honey. Why won’t you help a girl out?”

“I don’t know. Can you give a guy a break and leave him alone? I’m just waiting for my friends.”

“I’ll be your friend. I can give you the best break you’ve ever had.”

I sighed. “Listen, unless your body is actually a costume that comes off and you’re magically twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger under there, I’m not interested in what you’re selling. Right now you’re just annoying me. Please leave me alone.”

She gasped and struck me on the shoulder with her purse. It didn’t hurt.

“Fucking idiot. You look like a bull, anyway. Or a horse. You’re ugly as shit.” She pointed at my septum piercing. “Christ, you’re like a fucking farm animal. Mooooooooooo.”

It took some effort not to flinch. I didn’t like hearing that, but I felt like I deserved it. I took another sip and looked at her.

“Yep.”

She ambled her thick ass away from me. She went over to a bouncer; I couldn’t hear her but she was gesticulating wildly and pointing at me. He shook his head and laughed and shoved her away. She flipped him off and disappeared. What a world, I thought.

I put my hand up and ordered another beer. The waitress was pretty but not pretty enough to be a stripper.

It was taking them a long time. I was starting to feel pretty lonely. I wondered if Tiffany was falling for Jeff. Or if Paul was in that booth and talking politics instead of enjoying Melanie’s ass. Their girlfriends would be pissed. Well, mine too. For a second I wondered what my girlfriend was doing, six hundred kilometres away. Probably studying or thinking about me or something. Maybe cheating. Probably not. I missed her. The beer came and I pushed the thought out of my head.

I paid the girl.

I drank the beer.

I pulled out the Snickers bar. It was crushed and melted. I ate it and wiped my fingers on one of the empty beer bottles.

I was 75 dollars poorer.

The Man in the Yellow Shirt (Part 4)

2010-06-21T19:59:00.000-04:00

“¿Está vivo?” I asked. Is he alive? Gonzalez widened his eyes momentarily at that, and exploded into raucous laughter. The other policemen laughed with him. “¿Habla francés o inglés?” I asked. They continued laughing.

Frustrated, I shook my head and looked up at the fluorescent lights. Jen and I were sitting in dusty office chairs in the Managua National Police Force’s headquarters. The walls were painted a chartreuse yellow that made me nauseous. We were constantly shivering; the building was over-air-conditioned and freezing. The cops didn’t seem to mind. Some of them looked busy, but the majority of them hovered around us and made small talk to each other. They were like school-children; they persistently made fart noises at each other, mocked my Spanish, and threw racist insults at Jen.

Every time I tried to stand up and say something in protest, Gonzalez and his partner Rodriguez – a man who never laughed or smiled, sported an imposing mustache, and frequently furrowed his eyebrows at me – placed their hands on my shoulders and gently forced me back onto the chair. After I did it enough times, they resigned themselves to keeping their hands on my shoulders, which I repeatedly tried to shake off. Jen and I barely said anything to each other while we waited. She asked me a few times if I was okay and I would answer with a numb, faraway expression on my face that no, I was not really okay.

After what seemed like an hour, Gonzalez and his partner motioned for us to get up and follow them. We walked with them through the building and into the unit’s homicide detective’s office. The office was small and painted the same disgusting chartreuse yellow as the room we had just left. The detective was sitting in a computer chair. He was built like a truck, but he slouched to the point that his neck was touching the top of the chair. He didn’t bother to introduce himself. He just pointed at a computer monitor in front of him and asked me to identify anyone who looked familiar to me.

He began scrolling through pictures that he’d taken of criminals arrested in the past. I said, “No,” every time a new man showed up. It was an asinine task. After a while, I let out a laugh in spite of myself. They all looked the same. Every one of them had a mustache, and almost all of them wore wife-beaters. I told the detective that they all looked the same to me; he asked me to describe the men who robbed me in great detail. As I told the story of my mugging, he looked into my eyes, feigning attention, and sporadically glimpsed at the computer screen. I couldn’t help but notice that whenever he caught me making eye contact with him and not looking at the monitor, he would click on the computer mouse as many times as he could in order to go through the pictures faster. I couldn’t tell if he was naïve enough to really believe that I’d been tricked, or if he was just blatantly trying to get rid of me. I decided to just stare at him until he was done. He rapidly went through the rest of the photos. The detective said something to Gonzalez, who tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for us to follow him.

As we walked out I turned around to see what the detective had been up to before we’d bothered him. He was playing solitaire.

Gonzalez led us out of the detective’s office and into his own office. Rodriguez stood in the doorway and watched us. We sat in front of Gonzalez’s desk; I had my arms crossed and was still shivering. “Frío,” I told Gonzalez. His face showed no emotion. “Demasiado frío,” Jen added helpfully. Too cold. He gave her a weak smile but said nothing. He turned on his computer and looked out the window while it loaded.

His computer was slow. It took a long time.

Once his computer was turned on, he began asking me questions about the mugging. I answered to the best of my abilities but was somewhat reluctant to cooperate fully – I was still in shock at what they had done to the man in the yellow shirt – but I knew I needed the police report in order to apply for a new passport at the embassy. After I answered all of his questions, he printed out a copy of the police report and stamped it. He handed it to me and told me to sign it. I did. He signed the space next to my name. My sloppy signature looked like beautiful calligraphy compared to his own childish signature. He told me to bring it to the Canadian embassy. I nodded.

Jen asked Gonzalez if we could leave the police station now. He told her that there was one last thing for us to do before going. Rodriguez led us outside to a concrete walkway. The cracked concrete slabs led to a small jail. Rodriguez asked me to follow him but insisted that Jen stay with Gonzalez. I shrugged and followed him to the jail. He opened up a slot in the front door and asked me to peer into it. I did.

The man in the yellow shirt was in there. Except his yellow shirt wasn’t really yellow anymore. It was a mixture of colours and textures, of magenta, crimson, sand and soil. There were pieces of it missing. However, if he hadn’t been wearing the shirt I wouldn’t have recognized him. His face was brutally swollen. His eyes hid inside the puffy skin of his temples and cheeks. His jaw was set an awkward angle, and his leg, broken at the tibia, sagged away from him. There was sand and dirt in his wounds. He hopped a little on his good leg in order to keep himself balanced. Rodriguez yelled something and the man in the yellow shirt shuffled around until he was standing at a 90 degree angle from us. I looked back at Rodriguez and said, “No. Este hombre no robó.” This was not the man who robbed me. He was not pleased at my statement. He did an about turn and rushed back to Gonzalez and Jen at the other end of the concrete walkway.

I followed him back. Rodriguez shoved me towards Gonzalez and motioned for Jen to follow him. “It’s the guy they tortured,” I told her. “He’s in there. Rodriguez wants you to say that he’s the robber.” Rodriguez heard his name and pointed a finger in my face and screamed at me. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I assumed that he was telling me to shut up so that I wouldn’t bias Jen’s opinion on whether the man in the yellow shirt was a criminal or not.

Rodriguez asked Jen to walk in front of him to the jail. I watched as he stared at her ass and legs when she peered into the slot. It made me livid but I was too exhausted to even consider doing something about it. I turned away and looked at a pile of rocks leaning against a building. Then, Gonzalez spoke up.

“Este hombre ha sido detenido antes. Es un ladrón y un mentiroso. Ha luchado a policía. El me ha luchado,” he said. This man has been arrested before. He is a thief and a liar. He has fought police. He has fought me. He smiled when he finished saying the last sentence.

I did not believe him. The urge to grab his pistol and shoot him was overwhelming. “Verdadero?” I asked. True?

“Ah, si,” he said, chuckling. “Si.”

Jen came back with Rodriguez following closely behind her. Tears rolled down her cheeks. He was still looking at her ass. He looked up and realized that I caught him in the act, but lowered his gaze at her thighs once more before Gonzalez barked, in English, “Come. Walk.”

Rodriguez crossed his arms and stood there, watching us. He furrowed his eyebrows at me again. I furrowed mine back at him. We followed Gonzalez into one end of a building and out the other end, back to the police station’s parking lot. He asked, “¿Quiere ir a la embajada canadiense?” I didn’t know what that meant, but I understood the words embajada and canadiense.

Canadian embassy.

“Si,” I said quickly.

Gonzalez pointed at a young, bearded police officer standing next to a gold-coloured SUV. He motioned for us to go inside. I climbed into the front passenger seat next to the police officer. Jen sat in the back. Gonzalez leaned into the open window and told the driver to go to the Canadian embassy. The officer nodded silently.

Gonzalez stepped back and put his hands on his hips. “Goodbye,” he said in accented English. He smiled.

I smiled back.

“Va chier mon tabarnak,” I said in French.

The driver stepped on the gas pedal and the SUV lurched out of the parking lot. I could see Gonzalez waving at us in the rear-view mirror. I sighed and slumped into my seat. Everything is going to get better from this moment on, I thought. I’m going to hang out in the embassy, get my passport shit sorted out, and get the fuck out of this hellhole.

As the truck drove onto the on-ramp to the highway, Jen tapped my shoulder from the back.

“Marc? There’s a gun back here,” she said.

I looked back. There was an M-60 machine gun sitting next to her on the backseat. There was a magazine clip in it and though I’d never shot an M-60 in the Canadian military, I immediately recognized that the safety on it was off. The M-60 was pointed right at her.

“Okay, Jen,” I said. “Listen to me carefully. See that little thing sticking out? That lever thing?”

“Can’t you just do it?” she asked. “I’m scared.”

“No, I don’t think this dude’s going to like watching me play around with his gun,” I said. “It’ll be less obvious if you just do it. Just flip that lever there and it’ll be done.”

“You promise it won’t shoot at me?”

“I promise.”

“This one?” she asked pointing at the safety lever. She sounded uneasy.

“Yeah, that one. Flip it up. Make sure it’s up and not down.”

“Will something happen to me if I flip it down?” Her voice cracked.

“No, nothing bad will happen. I swear.”

She fumbled at the safety lever until it finally went up with an audible click. The driver opened his eyes a little wider but didn’t look away from the road. I sighed and put my head in my hands. I looked at my ratty shoes through my fingers. I felt an intense desire to cry but found myself unable to.

After a while, the SUV grinded to a halt in front of a building surrounded by a barbed wire perimeter fence and dozens security cameras. A Canadian flag flew in the front yard of the building. A Nicaraguan man carrying a pump shotgun sat in a cabin on the street side of the fence.

“Uno momento por favor,” I told the driver. I got out of the SUV and walked towards the cabin. Jen stayed in the truck.

“Are you open?” I asked the security guard.

“No,” said the guard in accented English. “Open Monday.”

“Okay,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Thanks.”

Discouraged, I walked back to the SUV, trying in vain to keep myself together. I got into the truck and looked at the driver. He looked back at me, waiting for me to say something.

“Can’t your shitty country have embassies that are open on a fucking Saturday?” I asked him. My hands were shaking. He looked at me, unsmiling.

“Lo siento,” he said. “No entiendo. ”

“Yeah, no fucking kidding. None of you do,” I said. “You’re all too busy fighting crime, right? I bet McGruff leaves his machine gun loaded in his backseat, too.”

“Jesus, relax,” Jen said. “He didn’t do anything to you.”

I turned around to face Jen. “I don’t care about this guy. I cannot leave this country. I am stuck here. Until that changes, I’m going to treat this guy however the fuck I want.”

“Okay, but that isn’t going to open the fucking embassy any faster,” she said, rolling her eyes.

I shuddered at the realization that I was going to be stuck in Managua for a while. Two days at least. Probably more than that. Probably even a week. I crossed my arms and looked out the window at the embassy. I wanted nothing more than to be inside of it, to speak to my family, to feel safe again. I’d have slept on the floor if I were allowed to. I’d have starved for the privilege.

Jen asked the driver if he could drive us to a hostel in her Lonely Planet book. He nodded and stepped on the gas again. The ride to the hostel took a long time - he had to drive through the neighbourhood I’d just been mugged in. I couldn’t look out the window. I looked at my shoes again and didn’t look up until the SUV stopped in front of the hostel.

Jen thanked the police officer and we got out of the truck. Jen still had her bags. I had mine, minus my passport, camera, wallet, and money. I kept feeling my pockets just in case I hadn’t really been mugged. Each time I checked, I felt an intense wave of pain at the realization that I wasn’t getting my possessions back. I felt powerless. After remembering that the muggers had put their hands in my pockets, I hastily took my hands out and spit on them and furiously rubbed them against the ground or on my jeans. A family, presumably the owners of the hostel, watched as I did this. They looked amused.

We went inside the hostel and checked out one of the rooms. It had hot water, a rare luxury. We took it. There were no other tourists staying in the building; it would only be us and the family who owned it.

Jen paid for the room and immediately jumped in the shower. I sat on the front steps of the hostel and cradled my face in my hands again. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the man in the yellow shirt through that jail slot, looking back at me but not seeing me. I felt someone put their hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw a Nicaraguan kid, probably about ten years old. I yelped involuntarily and put my hands up in reflexive defence. He stepped back and said, in English, “I am sorry.”

I realized that he was the hostel owners’ son. “Why are you sad?” he asked.

“Your English is really good,” I said stupidly.

“Thank you.” He smiled. “I go to school. Why are you sad?”

The boy’s grandmother came out to check on him and sat down next to me. For her benefit, I reconstructed the story of my mugging and the events that followed in broken Spanish. It was tough, and I had to ask the boy to help me translate parts of it. They listened impassively until my story was over.

“That’s why I’m sad,” I said.

The boy put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

“It will be okay,” he said.

They both stood up and wordlessly went back into the hostel. I was alone. I shoved my face into my hands again. I thought of the injustice of my being robbed, and then I remembered the man in the yellow shirt and felt like a fool, like a selfish, white, privileged fool. I wondered if he was ever going to get out. I doubted that he would have a normal life afterwards, if he did get out. I wondered if the robbers were happy, and I wished with all of my being that they would die, that they would die an excruciating and dreadful death. And then I remembered that once I got home, my quality of life would be exponentially better than any life those thieves could make for themselves, and I felt guilty again. They would probably die before me, and it wouldn’t necessarily be deserved. Not to mention the man in the yellow shirt. His death in jail, if it came, would be because of me, and he didn’t deserve to die.

I desperately needed to manifest my anguish into tears. I closed my eyes and tried to cry. I couldn’t. I never was able to.

53 Hours (Part 5 of 5)

2010-04-12T12:17:00.002-04:00

General disclaimer: If you’re under 18, you probably shouldn’t read this section of 53 Hours. Actually, if you like to pretend that sex, poops and that red stuff in your veins don’t exist or just think that they’re gross in general, you shouldn’t read it, either. And shame on you if you ignore this advice. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

My stomach made a weird noise. The noise was accompanied by a sharp pain in my gut.

“What was that?” Sarah asked.

“His stomach,” Jen said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s probably the spicy-ass spaghetti. I think I need to go to the bathroom.”

“It’s right around the corner, to the left,” Sarah said.

I got up and followed her instructions. The bathroom was too beautiful for a one bedroom apartment. It was pristine. I hope I don’t ruin it, I thought.

I sat down and evacuated my bowels. When I was done, I stood up and turned around. The toilet was filled with shit and blood. There was more blood than shit. I sighed. It had been a few weeks since the last time; I’d hoped for a longer interval.

I wiped myself and flushed, but there was still residue in the toilet from the blood. I looked for some kind of cleaner and found a bottle of Comet on a shelf. I washed my hands before grabbing it. I shook it a few times at the spots of blood, the dry tangy powder gradually covering the reddish dots. I ripped off a few pieces of toilet paper and wiped most of the blood away. I flushed the toilet again. I stared as the last bits of blood flaked off and swirled around and around in a whirlpool of Comet, like cardinals caught in a blizzard. Then the blood disappeared. The toilet was clean.

Somebody scratched their nails on the bathroom door. The noise startled me.

“Did you fall in the toilet or what?” a voice asked. I couldn’t tell if it was Jen or Sarah.

“Yes,” I said.

Nobody answered back.

I washed my hands and came back out to the living room. I was exhausted.

“You okay?” Jen asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I will be.”

Sarah frowned.

“Was it the you-know-what?” Jen asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What’s the you-know-what?” asked Sarah.

“AIDS,” Jen said.

We all broke into fits of laughter.

“Don’t laugh,” I told Sarah, struggling to keep a straight face. “I actually do have AIDS.”

Her laughter stopped immediately and her smile disappeared.

“Just kidding,” I said. Sarah sighed in relief.

“But I have colon cancer, though,” I said. Jen exploded in laughter. Sarah didn’t.

“He’s got a medical condition,” Jen said. “He’s just fucking with you. He shits blood sometimes and they don’t know what it is. I got to witness a surgeon ass-raping him with a camera once.”

“Yeah,” I said, putting my hands behind my head. “Those really were the days, eh?”

Sarah giggled.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But the way you say it almost sounds like you enjoyed it.”

I gave her a side-long glance. “Oh, I did. I shit you not.”

The room was filled with drawn-out bursts of laughter for a long time. Most of our jokes revolved around fecal matter. Jen brought up the time she had a job filming Asian girls shitting and pissing into a wealthy Jewish lawyer’s mouth. Sarah talked about how she held her shit in for a week once when she was young and then took a shit on her bathroom scale; it had weighed several pounds. I joked that I had considered wearing tampons in my ass but that I was worried about getting Toxic Shit Syndrome. Our shirt sleeves were drenched in tears.

At around 1 AM, Sarah looked at the clock on the wall and remembered that she needed to get up at 6 to go to work. She gave me a spare set of keys to her apartment. She reminded us that both me and Jen would never see her again; we would be gone by the time Sarah came home from work. She asked that I put the keys through the mail slot before I left. She thanked us for making her laugh.

“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “Thank you.”

She went to her room and closed the door.

I looked at the time again. My shoulders sagged.

“Holy shit,” I said. “In less than twelve hours you’ll be on a plane.”

“I know,” Jen said. She sighed.

She hugged me. I grabbed her ass with one hand.

“I know,” she said.

“You better.”

She kissed me. I bit her lip.

She grabbed my cock. I was getting hard. I still needed to piss, so I pushed her down on the blow-up mattress Sarah had lent us to sleep on. She gasped when she landed. I went to the bathroom and pissed. When I came back, our sleeping bag was on top of Sarah’s mattress. Jen was on top of it, naked and on all fours, with her ass hovering in the air. It was dark in the room, but the backs of her legs glistened in the light from the blinking VCR display. She looked back at me and smiled.

“Fuck me,” she whispered.

“Okay,” I said.

I mounted her. She was extremely wet. I thrust hard a few times. The movement made the mattress make a weird noise.

“Careful,” Jen said. “She’s going to hear us.”

I slowed down and pulled a blanket over us, fooling myself into thinking that it would mute our actions. I positioned her on her side and went in behind her, in a spooning position. Jen moaned loudly and constantly, ignoring her own advice. The last time I had fucked her had been a week prior, and I was backed up. It was too much; I soon couldn’t take it anymore and had to pull out. I finished myself off on her ass and legs. I felt that I had underperformed. The last time we were to have sex was supposed to be incredible. The disappointment was intense; I could practically feel it coming out in my ejaculate. Wordlessly, I got up and went to my backpack to get some tissues. I came back and wiped her legs and ass dry. I vainly wiped at the sleeping bag.

I laid down next to her and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“That was the last time, and it was shitty as fuck.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I just don’t want the last thing you remember me by to be a shitty lay where I didn’t get you off.”

She kissed me. “That’s not true. Don’t say that.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to remember the amazing lays. Plus you can’t say you didn’t have a good time this time,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back. “Yeah,” I said. “Also, you’re not the one sleeping on the wet spot tonight.”

She kissed me again.

We fell asleep naked and clasped tightly to each other.

I woke up at 10:15. It hurt to look at my watch.

“Wake up, Jen,” I said. “You have to catch your flight soon.”

She groaned and pulled the blankets over her head. In doing so she slowly revealed the lower half of her naked body. It amused me.

I walked to the kitchen. Sarah had left a note saying we could eat the left-over spaghetti in the fridge. I microwaved two bowls and brought them to the living room. Jen had gotten dressed and was deflating the air mattress. I frowned. I realized I would never see her naked again.

I gave her a bowl of spaghetti and we ate together in silence. I wanted to talk but forced myself not to. I wanted to relish this last meal with her. After the meal, I showered and she did the dishes. I helped her with her bags and made sure I wasn’t keeping anything in my bag that belonged to her.

She shouldered her bag and I picked up my my small backpack. Hers was filled with all the material possessions she had accumulated in the previous three months of traveling. Mine had food, some water, and a book. I left my large duffel bag behind; I was coming back to Sarah’s apartment before going to the Greyhound station.

“Well, we’ve got to go,” she said.

“Yeah.”

We left the apartment and I locked the door behind us. We walked to the bus stop and got on the next bus heading to the San Antonio International Airport. On the bus, we mostly talked about all the strange, funny and random things that had happened to us on our travels: how I had gotten mugged at knifepoint, the racism she encountered, the man dressed up as Shrek in a small Salvadoran peasant village. It was a good way to distract me from the reality of Jen’s departure.

We walked through the airport doors. My heart felt like it was sinking into my guts. I found it difficult to breathe. Jen checked in her luggage and stood in line for the Los Angeles-bound flight. There was a velvet rope separating us. It was already happening so fast.

I hugged Jen and kissed her as many times as I could before the security guard asked me to step away. I told him I would only be a minute. He backed away. I kissed her again. I kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her ears, her neck. Tears streamed down Jen’s face. She laughed.

“Marc, you kissed me a million times. You’re going to have to stop eventually,” she said.

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Fuck, I love you.”

“I’ll come visit in July or August,” I said. “Wherever you happen to be. Just let me know if it’s San Francisco or LA or New York or whatever.”

“Okay. I’ll email you as soon as I get to my parents’ place in LA. Good luck on your bus trip.”

“Yeah, email me a ton of things so that I have something to look forward to when I get home from the bus ride.”

“I will.”

Two security guards appeared, one on either side of me.

“That’s enough,” one of them said. “You need to come with us.”

I backed away from the velvet rope and walked backwards, still looking at Jen. Jen looked back.

“Jen!” I yelled. “I love you!”

She cried. “I love you too!” she yelled back.

The two security guards grabbed me by the arms and turned me around.

“It’s okay, I’m going, I’m going,” I said. They let go of me but continued walking with me to the exit.

I didn’t look back at Jen. I knew it would be more painful to look back than to just keep going. I left the airport and walked to the bus stop. I was the only one at the bus stop save for an old man. After a few minutes, the old man walked up to me.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “This bus goes to Houston Street, right?”

“Yes sir. You just looked lost,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said.

The bus arrived shortly thereafter. I asked the bus driver if he could warn me when the bus turned on Houston Street. He said he would be more than happy to. I sat on a seat close to the front. I stared at my hands. My mind was reeling. I had spent nearly 24 hours a day with Jen, for almost 3 months straight. I’d told her that I would visit her in the summer, but I knew in my heart that I would never see her again. I was sure she knew it too. It was painful to dwell on – I had to force myself to imagine that I was still planning on visiting her. I shook my head. I needed to think clearly. I still had to get to Sarah’s apartment; to the Greyhound terminal; to Montreal; to 53 hours from now.

I took H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man out of my backpack and opened it to a random page. I didn’t read. I just stared.

Slow Wave

2010-03-30T12:27:00.000-04:00

I woke up with a start. My neck felt stiff. My room was freezing. The pillows, the blankets, the covers, the sheets, everything was gone. I was lying on a bare mattress on the bottom bunk of my bunk bed. I looked at my watch. It was 5:30 am. I reluctantly got out of bed to look for my bedding. I looked in my closet and underneath the bed and on the top bunk. The bedding for the top bunk was still there. I made a mental note to sleep in the top bunk if I couldn’t find the missing bedding.

Thinking that someone had played a trick on me in the night, I instinctively walked to my brother’s room. He was asleep. He didn’t wake up when I entered his room and snooped around. The bedding was nowhere to be found.

Next I went to my parents’ room. My mother woke up and asked me if I was okay when I entered the room. I told her I was fine. The bedding wasn’t there, either. I left their room.

I groggily walked down the hallway to the kitchen. On the way there, I thought I heard a voice yell out, “John!” It terrified me. I stopped walking and looked around for the source of the utterance. It had been a man’s voice, but it hadn’t come from any of the bedrooms. I started to think that I was going crazy. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:37 am.

I went to the kitchen. The blinds were open and the first light of the day was starting to come in. That’s when I heard the noise. I had no idea what it was. It was a long, protracted pshhhhhhhhhhhh sound. Almost like the sound of gas leaking. It was coming from the basement.

I walked to the edge of the basement steps. It was pitch black down there, save for a sliver of light coming from the bathroom door, which was open a crack. Oh, I thought. It’s probably just somebody showering. But everyone’s asleep. And who would shower this early on a Saturday?

I reluctantly walked down the steps to the basement.

I closed the basement door behind me, and the air pressure abruptly forced the bathroom door open a few inches. It creaked as it opened; it scared the hell out of me. Steam was coming out of the bathroom. It’s definitely someone showering, I thought.

I wrapped my hand around the door knob and pulled.

I could barely see into the bathroom. It was filled with steam. I walked into the room with my hands out in front of me. And then I saw it. My bedding was in the shower, the whole lot of it. The shower was turned on full blast. It was incredibly hot. I turned the crank to turn the shower off, until the pshhhhhhhhhhh noise disappeared altogether. I poked my finger at a wad of sheets. They were completely soaked. I wondered how long they had been in the shower. I became furious, suddenly sure that my brother had played a prank on me in the middle of the night. But the problem was that I knew I would have woken up if he had tried to take all of my bedding from me. And how had he gotten the mattress liner from underneath my body? It made no sense.

I grabbed as much of it as I could and rushed upstairs to put it in the dryer. I repeated this three more times until it was all in the dryer. After I turned on the dryer, I went down to the basement and looked for any clues that someone had put my bedding in the shower. There was nothing except for an empty bag of potato chips a few feet from the bathroom door. I threw it in the trash, certain that my mother would yell at me if she found it.

I went back up to my room. I tried to go back to sleep in the top bunk but I couldn’t. I wanted to play video games in the basement but I was too scared to go back there. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I decided to wait until my family woke up.

It took forever. At around 8 am, my parents woke up. I asked my mother if she had taken my bedding downstairs during the night. She looked confused. I told her that I had found my bedding in the basement shower. She told me that in the middle of the night, I had walked into her room carrying some pillows and asked if it needed to be washed. She had been half-asleep and said, “Yes, it all needs to be washed some day.” I had also grabbed a bag of chips from her nightstand and asked her if she wanted any. She’d said no. I left with the bag of chips and the pillows.

My father told us that he had heard someone walking around the house for a long time during the night and had assumed that I had been running back and forth from my room to the bathroom to throw up.

I had no recollection of me getting up at night. I had gone to sleep at 11 pm and woken up at 5:30 am.

Later on, my brother woke up and told us that he had heard someone go down and turn on the shower – his room was directly over the downstairs bathroom – and that the footsteps had kept him up for part of the night.

We ate breakfast together. No one really spoke about what happened. My parents tried to act normal. But I always recognized when my parents were alarmed. Understandably, they didn’t want to deal with the potential for therapy, psychologists, dealing with an eating disorder, and whatever else they felt might be necessary solutions to what they perceived as a problem. They didn’t have a lot of money, and the last thing they wanted was to pay more bills. But I understood now. It was both a curse and a great relief.

I had sleep-walked.

53 Hours (Part 4)

2010-03-29T00:03:00.006-04:00

The Alamo was okay. First we got an off-duty police officer to take a picture of me and Jen in front of it. He didn’t want to take the picture at first, but Jen told him that as a tax-payer she felt that it was her right for him to take a picture of us.

The tour itself was semi-interesting. However, I was annoyed by a Texan historian’s monologue to a group of tourists about the Mexicans’ brutality. He had compared Santa Anna to Hitler. I explained to Jen my theory that any historian who compares a historical figure to Hitler is not a real historian; at the very least, they’re a shitty one.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” I said. “First off, Santa Anna fucking won, and yeah, boo-hoo, that’s so sad that all the Texans died. But then they went and won the whole goddamned Texan Revolution. So many Mexicans died during that, and Mexico lost an enormous chunk of its territory. So what does he have to complain about? ‘Wah, wah, my grandpa died in the Alamo.’ Put a sock in it, you piece of shit.”

An old man overheard me and glared. I glared back.

He lost the staring contest.

“Yeah,” Jen said. “They deserved to die.”

We laughed.

The historian who had led the tour overheard her and looked hurt. We laughed harder.

After the Alamo, we went to the mall to see Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Every time the movie made any mention or nod at the state of Texas, someone in the cinema would invariably yell out, “Yeah! That’s here!” It was funny at first, but it quickly lost its humour as the movie progressed.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jen yelled. “Or I’ll make you.”

“Fuck you,” someone bellowed back. “I’d like to see you try you little bitch!”

Jen stood on top of her seat and looked around at the people around us. “Show yourself you motherfucker. I’ll fucking kill you.”

The cinema became silent.

“Yeah,” Jen said. “That’s what I thought.” She sat back down.

I shivered. Her anger jolted me.

No one said anything for the rest of the movie. No one even laughed.

After the movie, we walked back to the Greyhound station and into the storage facility. We asked the black guys we had met earlier for our bags and they were happy to oblige. They insisted on fist-bumping with us before we left, and wished us good luck on our travels. I asked them if they had gotten in trouble for helping us with our bag situation and they insisted that everything was alright. I thanked them again and met Jen at the payphone next to the station’s entrance.

“You know, you just seem like you’re full of white guilt when you do that.”

“Huh? When I do what?” I asked.

“When you’re asking them if they’re in trouble and shit.”

“What? I don’t follow.”

“It just seemed weird earlier, like you didn’t trust a bunch of black guys with your bag.”

“It had nothing to do with that. I wouldn’t trust any strangers with my bag, period. The last time I did it was robbed at the Albany Greyhound station, remember?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.” She didn’t look convinced.

“Hey,” I said. “Remember that thing I said where you were going to try not pissing me off?”

Jen nodded.

“Now would be a good time to try to implement it. I don’t like people insinuating that I’m racist.”

“Aww, you’re not a racist,” she said. She kissed me. “You’re going out with an Asian. That proves you’re the least racist man on the planet.”

I laughed. “You certainly are a racist, though,” I said. “Your revenge against the whites is to go out with them and torture them.”

She smiled and hit me lightly in the shoulder. “I’m going to call that girl now. Sarah or what’s her name.”

“Yeah, Sarah’s her name,” I said.

Jen went to the payphone and called the Couchsurfer we were set to stay with for the night. It was a short conversation. Sarah had just gotten off of work and was on her way to pick us up at the station.

We waited a few minutes outside of the station’s entrance doors. A green Hyundai Accent rolled up to us. A girl got out of the car. She wore a black and white polka dot dress and large sunglasses. It didn’t look good on her; mixed with her pale skin, her clothes were an eye sore. She was quite fat, but exited the vehicle gracefully. She lowered her sunglasses, as if to inspect us.

“Jen and Marc?”

“Yes, that’s us,” I said.

“Hey, how’s it going?” She hugged us.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Alright,” Jen said.

“Y’all want to go grocery shopping?” Sarah said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I haven’t eaten in a while.”

“Yeah, let’s go buy some food,” Jen agreed.

We got into the Accent and Sarah drove us to the grocery store. On the way I learned that Sarah was a Francophile. She had been to France several times, had had many French boyfriends, and preferred France over Texas. While we shopped for groceries she asked me if French was my first language and I told her that it was. I filled my basket with a loaf of bread, a bottle of peanut butter and a bottle of jelly. Jen was looking for Rice-a-roni and couldn’t find any. Frustrated, she walked away from us to ask a stock-boy where it was.

I took the opportunity to talk to Sarah in French. “Where did you learn French?” I asked her in French. She smiled awkwardly and didn’t answer. I looked in her basket. She had a baguette, a stick of butter, some meat, and a bottle of wine in there.

“Can’t you understand me?” I asked in French.

“No, I find your Quebecois accent difficult to understand,” she said in French.

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t offended. It wasn’t the first time that had happened in my life. I switched to a France-like accent.

“How about now?” I asked.

“Yes, I can understand you fine like this.”

“Have you never been to Quebec?”

“No, I prefer France.”

“Why not? It’s so much closer, and you can speak French as much as you want there. It’s amazing.”

“Listen,” she said, switching to English. “I don’t do, Quebec. Okay?” She looked peeved.

I was shocked by her rudeness. “Okay,” I said. I don’t do fake-ass French-loving obese monsters, you stinking cunt. I’m closer to what you want to be than you’ll ever be.

Jen walked back. She had two boxes of Rice-a-roni in her arms. “I’m good to go now,” she said. “You guys ready?”

“Hell yes,” I said.

Sarah started asking Jen questions about our trip. Then she started asking about her life and her childhood and her Korean background. I was completely absent from the conversation. I didn’t mind. By the time they had finished their conversation, Sarah had parked in her apartment’s driveway. The sign next to her parking spot read, PARKING FOR FRENCH ONLY.

I laughed at how stupid it sounded.
“What’s so funny?” Jen asked.

“Nothing. Nothing’s funny,” I said, still giggling.

“Well, something is clearly funny to you,” Sarah said.

“I just thought the parking sign was pretty clever,” I lied.

“Oh, well thank you,” Sarah said. She smiled. “I’m glad you like it.”

“Thank you for having put something so clever up,” I said.

Sarah showed us her apartment. I thought it was too large for one person. All of the walls were painted yellow, which I didn’t like. She lived alone but claimed to have a boyfriend in France who visited sometimes. I put my bags down and sat on the couch. I took out a notebook and calculated how much money I owed Jen. Sarah and Jen made spaghetti in the kitchen.

Sarah popped her head into the living room.

“Want your spaghetti sauce spicy or not spicy?” she asked.

“Spicy, please. And no meat sauce. Ask Jen, she’ll make sure it’s vegan.”

“You got it.”

I flipped through my notes four, five, six times. No matter how many times I looked through them, I still owed Jen a lot of money. It was only a rough estimate, especially considering that I couldn’t yet look at my finance notes on my e-mail, but I owed her something to the tune of six hundred dollars. American dollars. I remembered how Jen had once sued her ex-boyfriend for over a thousand dollars. He had owed her a lot of money. She went on The People’s Court and won. I had seen the episode. Even though her ex-boyfriend was clearly losing the case, Judge Milian had to yell at Jen several times for not keeping quiet when it was his turn to speak. She only shut up after the judge warned her that she would be kicked out of the courtroom.

In the end though, she had won. Her ex-boyfriend – a destitute graffiti artist who could hardly make ends meet – ended up paying her the money. I didn’t empathize with him. But I didn’t want to end up on The People’s Court, either.

Jen and Sarah came into the living room with steaming hot bowls of spaghetti. Jen gave me mine.

“Thanks, babe,” I said.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sitting down next to my notebook.

“Looking at how much money I owe you. Please don’t sue me, I’ll pay for it all soon after I get home. I just need to work first.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. She put her hand through my hair. “It’s okay, I know you’re good for it.”

“Aww,” Sarah cooed. “You guys are so cute.”

Jen took a bite of spaghetti. “What’s cute about it?”

“Just how you trust each other with money and all. It’s really cute. I wish I could be like that with my boyfriend,” Sarah said.

“Oh, but I know he’s going to pay me,” Jen said. “Because if he doesn’t, I’m finding him, and I’m chopping his balls off.”

We all laughed. But I was aware that Jen had only been half-kidding.

“Please,” I said. “I’d much rather be on The People’s Court instead.”

53 Hours (Part 3)

2010-03-22T23:57:00.003-04:00

Judging by their accents and stories, the other people waiting in line with me were mostly Texans. I was confident that I was the only person going to Montreal from San Antonio. I took The Invisible Man out of my backpack and started to read it again. I found that I wasn’t able to – all I could think about was how much I hated Jen and how glad I was to be going home again. I decided to put the book away so I could focus on daydreaming about my friends, my family, and my cat Jelly.

After a few minutes I felt a soft poke on my shoulder. I looked down. It was Jen. I frowned.

“What?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, “You could come stay in San Antonio tonight with me.”

“Oh, so you change your mind now?” I asked. “Seemed like you were pretty adamant before about me getting the fuck out of your life.”

She gave me a sheepish look. “Everything outside is really scary,” she said. I smiled at that. The way she spoke was really cute. “Especially the homeless people. Can you come with me?”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Let me think about it.”

I thought about it for a minute. She looked pitiful just standing there, waiting for me to make up my mind. In some sick, twisted way, I enjoyed it. I liked knowing she was dependent on me for something.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re not going to yell at me, then.”

She nodded.

“Ever,” I said. “If you even get a little bit mad at me, I’m going back home. Got it?”

She nodded again.

“So you’re not going to yell at me?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean, no I won’t yell at you.”

“Good.”

I picked up my duffel bag.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Are you even sorry?”

She said nothing. I already knew she wasn’t capable of apologizing but I had to try.

“Whatever,” I said. “Let me go change my ticket.”

I went to the front counter and paid fifteen dollars to postpone the next scheduled bus ride of my trip by 24 hours.

The guy behind the counter printed out a new set of tickets and stretched them out.

“Damn,” he said. “You crazy.” He showed the tickets to his colleagues. They laughed.

“I know, everybody keeps saying that,” I said, annoyed. “But I’ll bet you anything that the closer I get to there the less crazy people will think I am.”

“Good point,” said the guy behind the counter.

I walked back to Jen. We had a few hours to kill before the Couchsurfer who we were going to be staying with got off work, so we decided to find a place to store our bags.

“I don’t see any storage lockers here though,” I said.

“That’s easy,” she said. “Follow me.”

I followed her to one end of the station, to a set of swinging doors that were clearly marked with signs reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

I didn’t want to go through the doors. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Where does that go, anyway?” I asked.

“Stop being a pussy,” she said.

I figured that was a good idea, so I followed her.

On the other side of the doors was some sort of storage facility. There was luggage on hooks, on the ground, on racks. In one corner, three black guys in were rapping to each other and laughing. They were wearing uniforms – I couldn’t tell what their jobs were, though. One of them leaned on a hand truck. None of them seemed to be doing much work. We approached them.

“Hey guys,” Jen said. “Do you know a place we could store our bags for just a few hours? We can pay you.”

“Sure, honey,” one of them said. “There’s a place right in here I can hide it.” He pulled back on a tarp covering the wall and revealed a hole that could fit our luggage. “These boys won’t touch ‘em, I won’t touch ‘em. The bags are safe here, y’all.”

I didn’t want to trust a bunch of strangers with my bags, but I felt that it was too late now to stop what was happening. The man seemed to read the hesitation on my face, because he repeated himself. “The bags’ll be safe. Y’all don’t worry.”

“Huh,” I said. “Yeah.” Jen looked at me accusingly. I knew she thought my indecision had to do with the fact that they were black.

“We’ll pay you, obviously,” Jen said. She passed the man a ten dollar bill. “There’s more in it for you if our bags are nice and safe and unstolen when we get back.”

The men laughed. “Nah, y’all are alright, nobody’ll touch these bags,” the man said. “Actually, keep the money.” He handed the money back to Jen. I was relieved. I felt it was much easier to trust them if they were so keen on doing us a favour for free, even after being offered some money.

“Look at this niggah, he look like he seen a ghost,” another one of them said.

“Nah, I’m just tired man,” I said. “I just want to go take a shit on the Alamo and then pass out.”

They laughed. “I hear you man. Y’all been traveling far?” the first man asked.

“Yeah, we just came back from Central America. We spent three months there,” Jen said.

“You two at the same time? I mean, you two traveled together?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jen said. She looked at me. “Three months with him. It was awful.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

“That’s the world’s biggest understatement,” I said.

“Yo, you got an accent, man. Where you from?”

I pretended to be indignant.

“Accent? What accent?”

“Come on man, you got some little accent there.”

“I’m from Montreal. In Canada.”

“Oh! I was banking on somewhere north but not that north.”

“Yeah, Montreal’s pretty north.”

They looked amused until a man carrying a clipboard walked past them.

“Alright, we gotta do some crew work, so y’all take care and come back later, we’ll be here till six o’clock if you need anything. Don’t worry about your bags. They’re cool, niggah, they’re cool.”

They shook hands with me and Jen. We left the storage facility.

We stopped inside the terminal. “Wanna see the Alamo?” I asked.

Jen nodded.

We walked out of the Greyhound station. It was bright and sunny out. The sun felt good on my skin. There was a small park in front of us. Jen had been right. There were plenty of homeless people outside. Most of them were lying down in grassy areas and sleeping. After having seen homeless people walk around with guns, swords and knives in Central America, though, I wasn’t threatened by men who were able to take naps in parks in broad daylight with no fear of getting stabbed in their sleep. We walked through the park towards the downtown area of San Antonio. The sun was bright and we both squinted as we walked.

“How Asian of you to accept to take the money back,” I said.

“At least I don’t have an accent,” she said.

She took my hand in hers and I squeezed it. She squeezed back.

53 Hours (Part 2)

2010-03-18T12:06:00.002-04:00

I was the last person in line. I hoped that I could have a seat next to Jen but I knew I wouldn’t care that much if I couldn’t sit next to her. I gave the bus driver my Greyhound ticket. He unfolded it out to its full length – it was almost four feet long. He laughed and shook his head.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. He gave me back my ticket and I got on the bus.

The bus was packed, except for three seats. One of those seats was the one next to Jen. I made my way to the back of the bus and sat next to her.

“Hey,” I said. “We made it.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” she said. “What if I had ended up on the bus by myself?”

“Well, the important thing is that that didn’t happen,” I said. “I’m here right now and we’re together again. Let’s just enjoy the time we’ve got left, okay? San Antonio’s going to be great.”

Jen took out an anarchist zine and skimmed through it.

“You know,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t stop in San Antonio like you planned.”

She looked into my eyes. “Maybe you should keep going until you get to Montreal.”

It was unexpected; I didn’t know what to say at first. I kept opening my mouth but I couldn’t get words to come out. After a few attempts I was able to say something.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Don’t stop at San Antonio. Just get on the next bus and get out of here. I’m done with you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Fine,” I said. I took out H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man out of my backpack and opened it. “I’ll go.”

I pretended to read the book but I couldn’t. All I could think about was how ruthless and impatient Jen had just been, and how I could never be like her. I wondered how and when she had transformed into such a monster on this trip. She wasn’t the same girl I’d known 3 months earlier.

Every 20 seconds or so, I turned a page of the book so that it looked like I was reading. Jen kept reading her zine. She looked calm.

Some time went by – maybe 30 minutes or so – and I was finally able to accept that we were breaking up and I was heading home. I started looking forward to it. I still felt hurt by her words, but I felt a sense of liberation now.

I turned back to the first page of The Invisible Man and started to read.

A girl sitting behind us started to talk loudly to her friends who were sitting in the seats on the other side of the aisle from us. She had an English accent. I could tell Jen was getting annoyed by it because her face started to scrunch up and she put her zine down. She turned back several times to give the girl dirty looks, but the girl either didn’t see her or simply decided to ignore her. I could tell it drove Jen crazy.

“God,” she said. “Don’t you hate fucking British people?”

I didn’t say anything. I kept my eyes glued to my book.

A few minutes went by.

“Goddamn it, she’s so fucking annoying. I want to slap her.”

A few more minutes went by.

“Fuck! Don’t you hate fucking annoying British people? They’re the most annoying tourists ever. Why couldn’t she just like, take a plane back home or something?”

Jen looked at me. “Why aren’t you answering me? What’s wrong with you?”

I didn’t answer her.

She scowled and looked out the window. I could tell it hurt her that I was ignoring her. She wasn’t used to that. It made me sort of happy.

Eventually, the bus stopped in San Antonio. I was terrified and excited at the same time. Adrenaline rushed through me at the anticipation of leaving her and at the near-certainty of her yelling at me one last time.

I got off the bus and hurried to grab my duffel bag from the man unloading baggage. Jen waited for her luggage to be unloaded. I walked to a vending machine. It cost four US dollars for a large bottle of water. I figured that since I wasn’t going to be in America for much longer and that I needed a new bottle anyway, it was worth the expense. I put four dollar bills in and the machine gave me a bottle of water. Jen walked up to me as I untwisted the cap to drink some water.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What’s it look like? Drinking some water.”

“But it’s four dollars. Are you crazy?”

“It’s my fucking money. I can spend it on what I want.”

“Whatever. Let’s go.”

She walked towards the exit and I walked towards the line for the Dallas-bound bus.

“Wait, stop. Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home,” I said.

“Why?”

“You told me to go home and I asked you if you meant it and you said yes. So I’m going home. I don’t want to be around you.”

“Oh,” she said. She looked surprised and hurt. “Fine. Bye.”

“Bye,” I said. “Have a nice fucking life.”

She turned around and left the Greyhound station.

I walked to the back of the line where the people were waiting for the Dallas-bound bus.

53 Hours (Part 1)

2010-03-16T00:21:00.003-04:00

I woke up first, at about 9:30 am. We had to be at the Greyhound station for 11 am. That was when our bus to San Antonio was set to leave. I got up and stretched my limbs out. I watched Jen sleep for a minute. She snored. It was loud. I felt a pang of anger at the recollection of all the times she had woke me up, jabbed me in the ribs, yelled at me in the night, for snoring. She was guilty of the same crime but I knew it was ludicrous to try to punish her for it. I felt that I was better than that.

I didn’t bother to wake Josh or Caitlin up at first. I had so rarely been alone in the previous 3 months that I relished whatever solitude I could get. I took a shower. After that, I ate a banana and read some magazines.

At 10 am, I decided to wake up Jen. I shook her awake and told her it was time to get up. She looked at the time and groaned. She stood up and screamed at me for not having waked her up at the same time as me.

“We’re going to be late because of you. Fucking idiot.”

I tried to defend myself but I had no real excuse. I had just wanted to be alone for a while. Josh and Caitlin woke up. Josh came into the living room.

“Don’t worry guys,” he said with a Texan twang I still wasn’t quite accustomed to. “We’ll make it to the Greyhound.”

Jen pushed past me and packed a bunch of her bags. Josh and I shared a look and chuckled. He helped me pack a few things and then went to the bathroom and took a shower.

At 10:40 am he got out of the shower and unpeeled a banana. He was still in a towel. He looked like he had all the time in the world. I envied him. Jen looked annoyed by his relaxed demeanour.

“We’ll make it,” he said through a mouthful of banana. “Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time.”

At 10:45 am, Caitlin, Jen and I got into Josh’s SUV. Josh came out about a minute later with another banana. He started the ignition and drove us to the Corpus Christi Greyhound station. It was 10:55 am when we got there.

We all got out of the SUV and I hugged Josh and Caitlin. Jen didn’t. Caitlin gave me a Corpus Christi flag. They were hard to come by, so I was touched. I put it in my luggage. I hugged them again and told them to visit soon. They went back into the SUV and drove away.

Jen and I ran into the Greyhound station. Jen didn’t need her bags checked, but I did. There were four people in line. I cut in front of them and told the man behind the counter that I wanted to check my bags in. The man was black and had a dark blue dress shirt on. He had a moustache and wore large glasses. He looked like he had never smiled in his life.

“Listen, boy,” he said. “You can’t just jump in front of line, here.”

“I know, but I-”

“But nothin’. Get your ass back in line and then I’ll talk to you.”

I wordlessly walked to the back of the line.

No one in the line smiled. For some reason I expected them to.

Jen stood outside the cordoned off area of the line and stared at me. I could see her gritting her teeth.

“We’re going to miss the bus because of you,” she said.

“Then go on without me,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood there. I wondered why she didn’t get on the bus.

“Just go up to the driver and tell him to wait a minute,” I said.

The man behind the counter heard me and hollered, “The driver will not do that under no circumstance, man.”

“Well, never mind,” I said. “Just get on without me and I’ll take the next one and meet you there.”

“God, you’re useless,” she said. I was confused. Why doesn’t she just get on the bus if she’s so pissed?

Eventually I got to the front of the line. It was 11:04 am.

“Can I help you?” asked the man behind the counter.

“Yeah, I want to check my bags in. But only if the bus hasn’t left yet.”

“There’s no way I can check that for you. If you’re lucky it’s still loadin’ right over there, but otherwise you gotta pay fifteen bucks if it ain’t there.”

“I’ll risk it. Just check my bags, please.”

I gave him my passport and Greyhound ticket. He looked at the ticket and laughed. When he smiled I could see that he was missing several teeth.

“You goin’ to Montreal? Ain’t that in Canada?”

“Yeah, last time I checked.”

“That’s damn far. You crazy. Shit. Corpus Christi to Montreal.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re what?”

“Crazy.”

“Why you doin’ somethin’ stupid like that anyway?”

“Cause it’s less than a hundred bucks.”

“Still, man. That’s three days on different buses.”

“Can you give me my ticket back? I’d like to get on the bus.”

He put the Greyhound ticket in my passport and gave it to me.

“Have a great ride,” he said.

I looked around. Jen was gone.

I ran to the bus depot and grabbed a bus driver smoking a cigarette.

“Quick, where’s bus number seven? The one going to San Antonio.”

He took a haul of his cigarette and pointed at the bus I needed to get on.

I ran to the other side of bus number seven and saw that there were still passengers getting on. I was relieved.

Jen was in the middle of the line. I walked past her and stood at the back of the line.

Mister Nicaragua (Part 1)

2010-03-09T22:37:00.005-05:00

“I really want to go swimming,” Jen said.

I was lying on my side on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, watching Lethal Weapon in Spanish. I was naked. “I don’t,” I said.

“Then do you have any other ideas for what you want to do for the rest of the day?” Jen asked.

I sat up. “Where do you want to go swimming? I kind of just want to stay in and watch TV for the rest of the day. Maybe we can have a little mini-date at the diner later or something.”

“I hate that place,” she said. “Remember the shitty service from this morning?” I did. Earlier in the day, a waitress had served a group of eight American surfer guys before us, even though we’d arrived at the diner before them. Jen had exploded, yelling at the waitress and refusing the Americans’ apologies. She then yelled at them, instantly losing their sympathy; thereafter, they turned on her and teased her, which infuriated her further. I’d buried my face into one hand and stared sullenly at Jen through my splayed out fingers.

“Yeah, but that diner is the cheapest and best one around,” I said.

She ignored me and took out the Lonely Planet book. “You know, ever since you got mugged you never want to do anything but watch TV and eat.”

I looked at her. I wanted to get mad, but she was right.

“Okay,” I said. “Where the fuck is this place?”

“Here’s the beach I want to go to,” she said, pointing at the map. The island we were on, Isla Ometepe, was made up of two volcanoes joined by an isthmus. The island was shaped like an hour glass. She scratched at the north-eastern part of the isthmus. “Right there,” she said. “Playa Santa Domingo.”

“Okay,” I said. I got up and searched my bags for a pair of boxers that didn’t stink. “How much water should I bring?”

“Don’t bring too much,” Jen said. “We’re not going to stay there that long, and there’s probably shops around there anyway.”

I found my King Kong boxers and smelled them. They were starting to turn but weren’t too bad yet. I put them on. “Good point,” I said.

“Why are you putting on your boxers?” Jen asked haughtily. “We’re going swimming.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. I took them off and put my swimming trunks on. Then I put on the money belt and put my jeans on over the trunks. The money belt stuck out a little above the jeans. I found my rattiest t-shirt – it was the white one that I had bought in a market in Esteli and that I had been wearing when I was mugged in Managua – and put it on. I packed my black hoodie, a 2 litre bottle of water and some sunblock.

I looked at Jen. She was putting on a bikini; the top was pink and the bottom was green. She looked like a watermelon. She looked hot.

“You look like a watermelon,” I said. “You’re pretty hot as a watermelon.”

She skipped towards me. “You look like a homeless guy,” she said. She kissed me.

“That’s the look I was going for,” I said.

“Get your shit ready,” she said as she put on shorts and a shirt. “We’re going.”

We walked to the main road and waited next to two other tourists, a couple. The guy was built like a truck and wore shorts and sandals. He had no shirt on. He could have killed me easily. The girl had flip-flops on and wore tight jean shorts. She had a shirt on. They were white. They kept looking at my stretched earlobes and snickering. It annoyed me.

“People who stare are fucking assholes,” said Jen, loudly enough for them to hear. They stopped laughing.

As usual, there was no set schedule for the bus. We just waited for a while until one appeared. The guy standing next to us took a step back to let us on the bus first. “Thanks a lot,” Jen said sardonically.

The bus was full of noisy and excited locals. There were two benches left on the bus. Jen and I sat on one of them and the other couple sat on the one next to ours.

“Hmm. Not awkward,” I said.

“At least you’re not sitting next to them.”

“They can hear you, you know.”

“I don’t care. I want them to know I think they’re stupid.”

“Well, they certainly know now.”

“Good. I hope they aren’t going to the same beach as us.”

The couple looked sad. They just sat there, staring at the seat in front of them. It made me laugh for some reason.

“Well,” I said. “If they were, I don’t think they will be now.”

I looked out the window. The scenery didn’t change much. A volcano on the left and another volcano on the right. Water, jagged rocks, beaches, tall grass.

“Hey,” I said. “How are we going to know when to get off?”

“There’s going to be a sign saying ‘Playa Santa Domingo.’”

“I hope we didn’t pass it yet.”

“We didn’t. We haven’t been on long enough.”

The bus stopped to let some people on. I peered out the window and saw the sign for a hostel. Someone had spray-painted, “Amusez-vous tabarnak!” onto it.

I laughed. “Hey, check it out,” I said. “Some Quebecer wrote on that sign.”

“Where’s the sign? I can’t see it,” she said.

“It’s right there. It says, ‘Have fun tabarnak!’”

“I still can’t see it. Are you sure it’s right there?”

“Jesus, you’re blind. Open your eyes, you fucking Asian!” I joked.

She mock gasped.

“You’re a typical chink,” I said. “Blind as all fuck.” She smiled and slapped me lightly on the back of the head.

“You’re a baguette carrying frog piece of shit,” Jen said.

“Stop smiling. I can’t tell if your eyes are open or not,” I said.

“You eat frogs,” she said.

“You eat dogs,” I said.

“Speak white,” she said.

“At least I am white, bitch!” I said.

A few locals turned back to look at us. Jen tried to keep a straight face but I could tell she was breaking.

“You’re my favourite gook,” I said. “A total dog eater.” I knew I was pushing it but I didn’t care.

Fortunately, neither did she. She laughed and leaned in to kiss me. I squeezed her by the sides and kissed her hard.

“Mmm,” she said. “We should fuck on the beach.” I kissed her again.

“There’s probably going to be people there,” I said, shaking my head. “But anyway, saltwater and sand aren’t good lubricants.”

She stopped and pondered for a moment. “I really need to take a shit,” she said. “Think I could go on the beach?”

“There’s still going to be people there.”

“I don’t care, I’ll still go. I’ll show everybody here what an Asian turd looks like. I’m sure they’re curious anyway.”

I noticed the couple next to us gawking again. They looked disgusted. Jen gave them a dirty look.

“Are you guys going to stare at us again?” she asked.

The guy opened his mouth and let out a barely audible, “No.”

Jen turned back to me, but I was looking out the window.

“Isn’t that the sign?” I asked. I pointed at a skinny piece of wood sticking out of the ground with “Playa Santa Domingo” scratched onto it in tiny blue lettering. It was barely legible.

“Oh. Yeah, that’s it.”

We stood up to make our way to the front. Jen looked at the couple and said, “I hope you guys have a great time here. Enjoy.”

The couple stared at the seat in front of them.

We got the bus driver to stop so we could get off. It took us a few minutes to walk back to the sign. I couldn’t see a beach anywhere, just a dirt trail leading into a rainforest. There was a large hog’s corpse rotting further down the trail. I could hear it too – the flies were loud. There were some kids playing with toy cars and pieces of garbage close by. There were no adults around.

“Think this beach is gonna be worth it?” Jen asked.

“No,” I said.

We continued into the rainforest.

Citrus xsinensis

2010-03-02T09:33:00.006-05:00

General disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I'm not in the habit of writing stuff like this, but I felt like it so here it is. If you can even stand the morbid implications of this story, enjoy.

It was February 24, 2010. A Wednesday. At 9:29 am, I drove my bucket loader up to the weigh station and abruptly braked. I dropped the bucket down to the ground, smashed the parking brake on with the heel of my hand and stuck my iPod back into my pocket. I turned off the ignition but didn’t bother to take the keys out. I descended the loader’s ladder and hopped off the bottom rung. It was cold and snowing heavily. I was only wearing jeans and a t-shirt, so I jogged to the weigh station and entered it through the sliding glass door. The weigh station was small; it was only meant to be an office for Will – my boss – and to serve as a lunchroom for the loader drivers.

There was already a man in there. I didn’t know him. He was wearing coveralls and was picking up the dirty rugs from the floor and replacing them with new, clean ones. He didn’t say hello and neither did I. We both avoided eye contact with each other. I got my lunch bag from the fridge and made some hot oatmeal while I waited for him to finish. At 9:32 am, he left and all of the rugs in the weigh station were new. I was alone now. I sat down at the lunch table and took an orange out of my lunch bag. I opened up a newspaper and read the statistics from the previous day’s Olympic events as I unpeeled the orange.

At 9:33 am, I ripped the orange in half with my hands. I held one half in my hand and looked at it. I popped it in my mouth and chewed once, twice. It tasted good. I swallowed. My eyes went wide and I stood up out of my chair, knocking it to the ground. The orange half was stuck in my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.

I tried to stay calm and thought about what I had learned in my first aid training. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do exactly. I tried to give myself abdominal thrusts but I knew I wasn’t doing them correctly. I grabbed Will’s office chair and tried to fall onto it so that the top of the chair hit underneath my ribs, but the chair kept rolling away. I was getting faint. It was 9:35 am when I started passing out. I got my cell phone out and called my father, who was working in the next building. I let it ring five times and then hung up. I fell to the ground and tried to keep my eyes open. It was agonizing. I managed to call 911. I never heard it pick up. I passed out at 9:37 am and never woke up.

I died at 9:43 am. My head leaned against the sliding glass door and my eyes were halfway open.

The first person to see me was Will. He entered the weigh station for his break at 9:45 am. He asked, “Are you okay?”

I didn’t answer. He shook me by the shoulders and I still didn’t answer. The last thing I had said to him while alive was, “Do you want me to raise the black iron powder or focus on the blue clay mixtures?”

My cell phone warbled, “Oui, allo? Êtes-vous là?”

Will picked it up and answered it. The 911 operator instructed him to check for my vital signs and he did so. I was obviously dead. He told them the address and where the weigh station was in relation to the other buildings. He was pretty calm considering the circumstances. He ran out of the weigh station to the building my father worked in. He left the sliding glass door open. Once inside the adjacent building, he yelled out, “André! André! Marc-André’s dead!”

My dad took off his reading glasses and put down the blueprints he was reading.

“What?”

“Marc. He's dead.”

My father’s secretary asked, “Do you want me to call 911?”

Will said yes even though he had my cell phone in his hand and was still on the line with them.

My father bolted out of his chair and ran to the weigh station with Will. Because Will had left the door open, there was a layer of snow covering my face now. My father attempted to give me CPR. He forgot to tilt my head when he gave breaths, and he pumped too many times. His cadence was way off. He did this until the paramedics came. One of them took his place and checked my vital signs. “He’s dead,” one of them said. And I was. My father wept.

He got in the ambulance with me and hugged my legs and refused to let go until we arrived at the hospital. They rolled me into the ER and it was determined immediately that there was nothing to be done. I was dead and wasn’t coming back. My father punched a concrete pillar in the waiting room until his hand bled. He broke his middle finger.

My last words to my father had been, “You finish at five, right? See you later.”

-----------------

He called my mother and told her. She cried and was unable to speak for a minute. She asked him to come home right away. He drove over there as fast as he could. She was in the living room, sobbing. He had to pass a portrait of me on the way to the living room. He fell on the floor and cried when he saw it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to do that, but he did it. He explained what happened to my mother and after about 30 minutes, they were too tired to cry anymore. My mother told my father that he had to call my brother. She said she didn’t want to hear his reaction.

My last words to her had been, “Have a nice day! I love you very much.” She had heard one of the best ones.

My father tried to call my brother but he wouldn’t pick up; he was writing an exam. My dad left a message asking him to call him back as soon as possible and that it was an emergency. At 1:28 pm, my brother called and my father told him what happened. My brother was in his car with three of his friends. He bawled his eyes out and made them all get out at the next intersection. They yelled after him as he drove away. He drove to my parents’ home in Sainte-Victoire. It was 2:41 pm when he got there.

The last thing I had said to him was, “Okay, I'll look for it and if I find it I'll give it to you to fix.” I had been talking about my broken cell phone charger.

My brother had dealt with the brunt of the emotional blow from the news during the drive. He called my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins to let them know. Sometimes they picked up and they cried. Some of them didn’t cry. Most of the time, he had to leave a message for them to call back. That was a mistake. The phone rang off the hook for the rest of the evening and into the night. At 5:43 pm a telemarketer called trying to sell travel insurance. My mother answered it. She screamed, “My son just died! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” and then hung up the phone.

The man was probably upset and confused by that.

At 6:40 pm, Paul called. My parents hadn’t called him. He just wanted to hang out with me. He was the first friend to find out. He didn’t cry while on the phone with my parents. He calmly said, “I’ll call back tomorrow,” and sat down next to his son and sobbed.

He was pretty lucky. The last thing I had said to him was, “Talk to you Saturday. I love you man.” It was sarcastic but it was still pretty good.

-----------------

My brother eventually fell asleep, but my parents never did. My dad was too angry that it was an orange that did me in. “Une crisse d’orange de marde!” he kept saying in between bouts of blubbering. He went as far as to throw all of the oranges in the kitchen into the garbage. On February 25, 2010, at 4:13 am, my brother woke up and asked my parents if they wanted to go to my apartment. They agreed that it was better to do that and sort through my stuff than to sit around and do nothing.

They got to my apartment in Montreal at 5:32 am. They used my keys to get in. Ramón was up getting ready for work. He was surprised to see them. They told him what happened and he didn’t seem to know what to do. He was conflicted because although he was too upset to go to work, he really needed the money. My father convinced him to go to work anyway. My brother offered to drive him, and Ramón accepted. They left.

The last thing I had told Ramón before going to my hometown was, “Hasta mañana, niggah!”

My parents went to my bedroom and started to go through all of my books and school documents. They looked at every sheet of paper. When my brother came back, he helped them pack some of my stuff into boxes. They took down all of the pictures I had on my wall. They looked at each picture together. Sometimes they smiled and sometimes they cried.

A folded piece of paper fell out of one book my dad pulled out. He unfolded it. It contained all of my passwords – for my e-mail, computer, router, and so forth – in case of an emergency. ONLY USE THESE IF I’M DEAD – CONTACT FRIENDS/FAMILY, the paper said in sloppy handwriting. It was the closest thing to a will that I had ever written. My brother took my laptop and tried different passwords to open Windows until one worked. That was the only password he ever bothered to use.

It was 6:42 am. My brother logged onto his Facebook account and went onto my profile. My last status update had been, “I don’t really see the difference between Google Earth and Google Maps.” He sighed when he read it. He wrote a stock message that he then sent to everyone who had added me as a friend on Facebook. The message explained how I died and asked people to call my cell phone –my brother had it in his pocket – if they’d like to know further details on my death and if they’d like to attend the funeral. While my brother did this, my parents read through my travel journals together.

My cell phone rang continuously for the rest of the day. Sometimes there were text messages. One of them read, “Hey man, you okay?” It was from Josh. Another one read, “This is a joke, right?” Kelly wrote that one. My brother never bothered to text back. First Rob called, then Anna, then Alexandra, then Mike. At 11:43 am, Julia called and asked my brother what had happened. He had described my death several times by this point; he didn’t feel like crying when he told her the story. She asked where he was and he told her that he was at my apartment. Then she asked where I was and he said, “The morgue.” She cried silently. She told him she would be over there right away and then hung up.

My brother briefly wondered if she had meant my apartment or the morgue.

Not long thereafter, there was a buzz at the door. My mother answered it. Julia entered and hugged my parents and brother. She had never met them before. She cried and my parents cried. They shared stories about me and after a while Julia asked what they were going to do with my cat, Jelly. My parents didn’t know yet. She offered to take care of her and they accepted. My mother was relieved because she was allergic and didn’t want to deal with a cat. They talked about me for a great deal longer. Eventually, Julia put Jelly in a pet carrier and took her to her apartment. Jelly didn’t seem to mind.

The last time I had seen Julia, I had hugged her and said, “Bye. I’ll miss you.” She was the last person I had hugged before I died.

The night of February 25, 2010 wasn’t easy for my friends that had read my brother’s message. None of them slept very well.

-----------------

On February 26, 2010, I was at the funeral parlour on Logan and Parthenais in Sorel. There was another cadaver in the room with me. When he had been alive, his name had been Yannick Bouchard. He had worked for the Hell’s Angels. I wouldn’t have gotten along with him. A man who worked at the funeral parlour named Jacques had drained my blood as well as Yannick’s. He had embalmed us too. We both smelled relatively pleasant.

My funeral was set to be on Sunday at 6 pm. My father wanted it to be earlier but that was the earliest it could be arranged without it being done in a church, and he knew that I would have hated having my funeral done in a church.

On February 28, 2010, at 6 pm, my funeral started. People had come from all over to make it. Many of my friends showed up; the funeral parlour was barely big enough to fit everyone. There were more friends than family. Even a few of my ex-girlfriends showed up. I would have been impressed at the turn-out. Several people had traveled from Toronto to make it, even though they had work or school the following day. Many of my friends in Toronto felt guilty about not going. I wouldn’t have wanted them to. Many people brought alcohol. My friends wanted to talk to my brother about me but he was drunk and told people to leave him alone. It was an open-casket funeral and he was the only person who refused to look at me. I wouldn’t have been offended. The make-up that Jacques had caked on to my face looked unnatural and creepy. My lips looked redder than normal and my earlobe jewellery was gone, leaving my ears looking dry and shrivelled. I was wearing a dress shirt that was unbuttoned at the top so that people could see part of my chest tattoo. My arms were at my sides and looked artificial and stiff. My eyes were closed and I had a hint of a smile on my lips.

My paternal grandmother repeatedly walked up to the casket and made the sign of the cross. She wandered around the parlour saying, “He’s in Heaven now,” to anyone who would listen. My mother walked around the room and asked all of my friends for their e-mail addresses. “In case I want to write down your stories about Marc-Andre,” she told them. My father stood in a corner of the room with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t speak unless someone spoke to him first. All of my cousins looked at their watches and wondered how long one has to stay at a funeral in order not to be rude. My brother took the piece of paper that I had written all of my passwords on and took it out of his pocket. He looked at it for a moment and then crumpled it up and put it in the trash. He grabbed his bottle of vodka and walked to his car.

My friends formed a few circles close to my casket to talk about me. At one point, Josh said, “If he hadn’t been vegan, this wouldn’t have happened.” I wouldn’t have liked that. Mike said, “His brother’s got 75% of his same fucking DNA and he won’t even talk to us.” He took a sip of whiskey. “He’s the closest thing we’ve got to him, too. What an asshole.” My mother overheard but didn’t care. She just asked for Mike’s email and he gave it to her. Right next to my casket, Ramón told stories about all of the pranks I had played on him and on other people. Everyone listening to him thought the stories were hilarious. People were leaning on my casket as they laughed. I would have thought that that was pretty great. Jason and Dustin put their drinks on my casket at one point and my grandmother scolded them, but I wouldn’t have minded at all. At 7:35 pm, Dustin made a joke about how funny it would be if he leaned over and opened my eyes. It didn’t go over very well.

At 7:58 pm, Paul asked my father if it was okay to play a song that I had liked. My dad didn’t think it was a big deal and allowed him to. Paul put a portable stereo on the bottom half of my casket and pressed play. The song “Disciple” by Slayer came on. It was loud, loud enough to make the casket vibrate. It made everyone uncomfortable, and my grandfather angrily threw the stereo across the room. I would have laughed. He started to yell at Paul and then looked back at me and broke down crying. Paul picked up the broken pieces of the stereo and put them into his backpack. He was unfazed.

My friends started to leave. Most of them had school or work the next day. I would have appreciated them having made the effort to come. Some people loitered around in the parking lot sharing more stories for a while. By 10 pm, the only people still in the funeral parlour were my parents, my grandparents and Paul. My grandfather apologized to Paul and shook his hand. My brother was passed out in the backseat of his car. There were empty bottles scattered everywhere around the funeral parlour. It looked like the aftermath of a party.

-----------------

My mother tried to convince the government that I had wanted to donate my body to science, but the province refused to listen to her. I hadn’t applied the proper sticker to my health insurance card before I died. Additionally, I had no life insurance, so my extended family pitched in to help my parents pay for my burial. I was buried, even though my mother recalled me telling her a few weeks prior that if I were ever to die, that I would have wanted any part of my body left over from donation to be cremated and thrown into the Richelieu River. I wanted it to be as unceremonial as possible, and I had joked that I would prefer my ashes being scattered from a coffee can like in The Big Lebowski. My mother told no one about this. My parents purchased a plot in a Catholic cemetery in Sorel. There was a modest tombstone with a fleur-de-lys and a slogan underneath it. It was the only tombstone that had English written on it. It read, “To all the friends I’ve lost, we’ll meet again.” I would have wanted to believe that. My brother had found it scratched onto a piece of paper from when I had been trying to come up with lyrics for a song back when I had been in a band in high school.

A few months went by after I was buried, and except for my brother, people got on with their lives. My brother dropped out of school and focused his time on drinking. He eventually quit cold turkey and went back to school. My parents made a shrine out of my old bedroom in their house. My parents gave most of my possessions away to my friends, but kept some of them neatly stacked in a corner of the room. There was a giant portrait of me hanging on one wall. Every once in a while, my grandparents would come visit and hang around in the room for an hour or so. I would have thought that was creepy.

About a year later, my mother got an idea. She e-mailed everyone who had attended my funeral and asked for their addresses. By then, I had mostly decomposed. Most of my friends sent back their addresses. My mom had over two thousand different pictures of me. She made a point of sending two a year to each address that she received. When she couldn’t let go of certain pictures, she made copies for herself first. She kept this tradition going until she died.

Eventually, I became little more than crumbs of flesh buried deep in the soil next to a driving school and a St-Hubert restaurant. But I was still remembered, and that’s what I would have liked.

The Man in the Yellow Shirt (Part 3)

2010-02-22T13:40:00.003-05:00

The cop forced the gun downwards into the man’s face to stop him from smiling. The man flinched from the pain but kept smiling anyway. The policeman looked back at us, still holding the gun to the man’s face. The cop didn’t look as relaxed as before. I could tell he was bothered by the fact that we were walking away from him. The crowd looked like it was going to explode any second. Suddenly, he pointed the gun to the ground and walked towards us. I started breathing again. He turned around every few seconds to make sure no one from the crowd was going to attack him. He spoke on his radio as he walked towards us. He looked at me and a small smile crept to his lips. He spoke into his radio again and grinned. The crowd looked on, perplexed.

He was only a few metres away from us. “¿Dónde están ellos?” Jen yelled to the cop. Where are they?

He chuckled and scratched himself indifferently. “Está aquí.”

I was suspicious. The cop looked way too calm. He didn’t seem worried at all. Where the fuck is the back-up if he's so fucking calm? I thought.

He looked back at the crowd again and spoke into his radio. The man wearing the tattered shorts was gone now, and the crowd was slowly dispersing.

I wasn’t ready for what happened next.

The cop spoke hurriedly into his radio one last time and then sprinted towards the crowd, gun still in hand. The crowd reacted instantly and scattered. One man in the crowd seemed to realize that the cop was running towards him. He was wearing a yellow t-shirt and black shorts. He was barefoot. He took off running and the cop chased him down the street. Out of nowhere, a dark blue pick-up truck appeared and blocked the man’s way. Painted on the side of the truck was a crest with the words “DELEGACION DE POLICIA, MANAGUA, DISTRITO No 3” written inside. In the bed of the truck were six cops carrying AK-47s and M-16s. The man in the yellow shirt froze; the cop chasing him took the opportunity to tackle him. Two cops jumped out of the truck and began beating the man. After they had each punched and kicked him a few times they helped him up and threw him into the bed of the truck. They jumped in with him. The truck peeled out of there and drove down an alley, leaving a trail of dust in its wake.

We were alone.

“Where the fuck did they go?” I asked. Jen took my hand and I squeezed it, hard.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “The best thing we can do is just keep our cool and walk slowly.” I cracked my knuckles nervously. “Don’t panic, and don’t run.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked much calmer than me.

We walked down the street towards where the truck had been. There were only about two dozen people outside now. A few of them approached us and asked me questions, but I couldn’t understand them and I didn’t care. No one was laughing at us anymore. The same woman that had offered her cell phone earlier offered it again. I didn’t say anything to her. I just shook my head whenever anyone approached me.

We got to the point where the truck had been. I had no idea what to do, so I walked past it.

Then there was a commotion behind us. I turned around and there was the pick-up truck, back where we had been before. The cops were beating the shit out of the man in the yellow shirt. He was screaming. They looked at me and yelled; I couldn’t distinguish what it was they were saying. They motioned for me to hurry up and run towards them - they did it the Latino way, with the palm facing down.

I looked at Jen and grabbed her hand. “Run,” I said.

We ran towards the truck. And then it took off again.

“What the fuck?” I yelled. “What the fuck is the matter with them?”

I let go of Jen’s hand and clenched my fists. I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “We’re just going to go back to where we were, and we’re just going to wait.” Jen said nothing.

We walked back to where we had last been standing.

We stood there in silence until the roar of the truck engine materialized again. The truck burst out of an alley – it was momentarily airborne – and stopped a few metres away from us. The police officers laughed as they were thrown forward by the truck's sudden halt. Then they started shouting at us in Spanish. I still had no idea what they were saying. I couldn’t see the man in the yellow shirt but I assumed he was laying down on the bed of the truck. I opened the rear door and helped Jen climb in. I pushed her ass with my hands to force her to go in faster. Then I climbed into the truck after her and saw that I had shoved her into a policewoman’s lap. The cop helped her sit up, and Jen immediately started to complain about what I had done in my hurry to get into the truck.

“Ow, what the fuck? You’re such an idiot.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” she said. “You know how fucking bad you could have hurt me?”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP,” I said.

She did.

As the truck got onto the highway I looked out the back window. In the bed of the truck were the same cops from before: the six cops with the semi-automatics. The man in the yellow shirt was indeed with them. One of the cops held him in a half-nelson, and the other cops took turns pounding his arms with the butts of their weapons. Eventually, his arm broke. I could tell because he wasn’t able to use it to defend himself anymore. When the truck got to a red light, they changed positions and laid him on his back. One of the cops pressed his thumbs into the man’s eyes as hard as he could. I heard the man in the yellow shirt scream. Another one of the cops tapped on the window and motioned for me to pay attention.

“Hey!” I yelled, tapping back. “Hey! What the fuck are you guys doing? Stop! Hey! Stop! ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?”

I looked at the policewoman sitting next to Jen. She was skinny and had shiny black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Even with everything going on, I thought she looked beautiful.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey you! Policía!”

She looked down at her combat boots and stayed silent.

“Hey! Fucking bitch! Look at me!” I said angrily.

I poked Jen on the shoulder. “Tell her to stop all this shit. Now.”

Jen translated for me. The policewoman shook her head solemnly.

“Now tell her she should be fucking ashamed of herself. All of these motherfuckers should be fucking ashamed of themselves.”

Jen translated. The policewoman hung her head lower and said nothing.

In the passenger seat of the truck was the first cop we had dealt with, the one who had kicked the man wearing the tattered shorts in the balls. He was chatting with the driver and evidently thought the whole ordeal was quite funny. The driver, a chubby woman, laughed at everything Jen said.

I grabbed the cop in the passenger seat by the shoulder and asked him, “¿Qué es su nombre?” What is your name?

He laughed. “Es Gonzalez,” he said. He laughed again.

“Tell him he is one of the worst people on earth,” I told Jen. She did.

Gonzalez and the driver both howled at that. The cop sitting next to Jen stayed silent. I turned around to watch the man in the yellow shirt again. The cops were kicking him in the face now.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Jen said. “If we try to stop them, they might do the same to us.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t really believe it, though.

Jen and I sat in silence for the rest of the ride. I stared straight ahead and tried to ignore the screams coming from the back. I didn’t look back again. It seemed to take a really long time for us to get to the station. Finally, we arrived at the police station and got out of the truck.

The six cops threw the man in the yellow shirt out of the truck and onto the pavement. He screamed. They took turns stomping him. He screamed again.

“!Espera!” I yelled at them. Wait! The six cops all stopped and looked at each other, unsure of what I was about to do or say. They all had smiles on their faces save for one man holding an AK-47, whose face was sweaty and cold as steel. His eyes were partially covered by long black hair. I took out my Spanish translation book and desperately flipped through the pages in the “Dealing with Crime” section. Finally, I found what I needed.

“¡Eso no lo es! ¡Eso no es el hombre que me robó!” I said. That’s not him! That is not the man that robbed me! Some of them didn’t seem to know what to say. Some of them kept smiling. And then the man in the yellow shirt slowly stood up by himself. His arm hung at an unnatural angle. He gazed into my eyes; his were brown and glassy. His bottom lip shook uncontrollably and tears and blood were streaming down his face. He said something in Spanish, and then he repeated it again. And then he said it again, louder. Jen turned to me and said, “He’s saying, ‘You see? This man even says that I am not the robber. He says I am not the robber. I have done nothing wrong.’ He’s repeating it over and over.”

Jen said something to the cops in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. The man in the yellow shirt started limping towards me and one of the cops kicked him in the knee cap. The man in the yellow shirt collapsed and raised his one good arm to me. One of the cops batted his arm down and grabbed the man’s leg so that his foot was touching his ass. The sole of the man’s foot was unbelievably filthy, and the cop was visibly repulsed. The cop muttered something to the others, and in the next instant the officer with long black hair smashed the butt of his AK-47 on the man’s tibia. A sharp audible crack pierced the man’s scream, and I knew that his leg was now broken. He made a noise that I had never heard before. It was the most primal sound of desperation imaginable, a combination of sobbing and screaming. It was a wretched, terrible sound. Dark red blood ran down his leg and formed a puddle around his foot.

I turned and looked at the cop named Gonzalez. He was smiling and had his arms crossed. The policewomen were gone.

The cops talked amongst themselves again. Two of them grabbed the man’s ankles and started to drag him away. He struggled violently to free himself. The cops let go of him and his legs crashed to the ground. He yelped at the pain. He raised his one good arm to me and yelled something. I tried to look away but I couldn’t. Parts of his yellow shirt were now purple from all of the blood and gravel that had rubbed into it.

“What is he saying?” I asked Jen.

“He says, ‘Please help me. Help. You are the only one who knows I did nothing wrong. Why? Why is this happening to me?’ He’s saying a bunch of stuff like that. It’s pretty random.”

I felt helpless and unable to move. “Lo siento!” I told the man in the yellow shirt. “Lo siento!”

I’m sorry!

They were the hollowest, vainest words I ever produced. Saying them felt worse than saying nothing.

The two cops hoisted him up by the feet again and began walking away with him. I could hear the man’s torso scratching against the rough pavement as they towed him away. His face bobbed up and down as it was forced over potholes. His shirt bunched up around his armpits. He shrieked like a banshee. For a moment he attempted to free himself but he soon gave up. He fell silent and stared straight into my eyes. Even as they pulled him through the door to the police station, his eyes never left mine.

I forced myself to stare back. There was tremendous guilt and nothing else. His pain was my creation. So I stared back at him.

It was the least I could do.

City of Bridges

2010-02-09T09:31:00.004-05:00

I remember one time, we were hanging out under that tree that was halfway between my place and yours. I knelt down and picked at the wood chips on the ground surrounding the tree, and I asked you, “Why can’t you walk?”

Please understand that I didn’t mean to be tactless by that. I didn’t see you as some permanent part-boy part-mechanized entity. I saw you as my good friend, and I wanted you to be able to walk like me, to ride a bike like me. You looked sad when I asked you that. “I was born like this,” you said. “I’ll never be able to walk in my whole life.”

I remember that I stood up and I looked you in the eye and I said, “Sure you can. If you try hard enough, you can do anything. So you can definitely walk if you try really, really hard. You just haven’t been trying hard enough.” You shook your head, but I saw hope in your eyes. I was young and naive and believed that you could walk. You were young and, I assume, feared the reality of endless confinement to your wheelchair.

So I remember when I unbuckled the belt in your lap and grabbed one of your legs and put it on the ground. “Ready?” I asked. You answered, “Yes.” I put your other leg on the ground, and then grabbed your torso from the front and lifted you up. I let your shrivelled legs make contact with the ground. You were unable to stand on your own, of course. But not from lack of trying. Our faces were inches from each other, and I remember vividly the look of determination, the struggle on your face.

“I’m going to let go now,” I said.

“No,” you said. “Please, don’t.”

I let go of you. Of course, you crumpled to the ground. You didn’t cry. You sat there for a moment, just breathing. And then I watched you as you crawled along the ground - the manure glued the wood chips to your body, but you didn’t care - and climbed up your wheelchair again. I remember I said, “You can still do it. You just have to practice and keep trying hard.” That was unfair. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I recognize now that I was overly callous. Please understand that I wanted to help you, even though my attempts hurt you.

After that, you wanted to play video games with me at your house. It was a steep hill down to your place, remember? Down Ridge Point Circle, I mean, not Lark Tree Circle. Really steep. Most of the streets attached to Hunting Ridge Road had pretty sharp inclines. Do you remember how I would let go of your wheelchair sometimes and let you ride down really fast, and you’d be scared, but then I’d catch up to you again and make you stop before you hit a parked car or a tree? You pretended that you hated it, but you always had a smile on your face whenever I caught up to you, and you never had your hands anywhere close to your emergency brakes, because you knew I would never have let you hit anything. And because you knew that I wanted you to know how it felt to go real fast, to do regular kid stuff.

Once we got to your place, you got out of your wheelchair and crept up the stairs to your room. We went to your room and played Ecco the Dolphin on your Sega Genesis. I remember that your mother was strict and religious and never wanted me to eat supper at your place, so I had learned to go home before she could stomp up the stairs and condescendingly ask me to leave. I’d eat supper at my place and then watch cartoons in my parents’ room, patiently waiting for your phone call so we could hang out again.

In 1996, I moved back to Canada. Before I left, we both hugged and I promised to come visit you again. I remember that we both cried, and I said I’d miss you. I meant it – it was a long time before I had an opportunity to see you again. In 2000, my parents finally decided to take us back to Pittsburgh so my brother and I could visit our old friends.

Remember Brian? Well, when I went to go visit him, I went to watch him play baseball against some other school. It was our school, South Fayette, versus some other one. It didn’t matter, because Brian’s team - our team - won. After it ended, we sat on the bleachers and watched two other teams play. I asked him if he knew where you lived now and he didn’t answer me. I asked him if we could hang out with you after the game, and he still wouldn’t answer me. His face got white. I asked him if you were okay, and then he turned to me and said, “Timmy’s dead. He died last year.” For a moment I didn’t react, and then I started to cry. I asked Brian how you died and he said you died of heart failure. I imagined you on your death bed in the hospital, with translucent tubes vainly pumping useless liquids into your body, while I was in Quebec riding my bike and playing video games with my friends. My world unchanged, but your world crumbling around you.

I sobbed uncontrollably. Every family on the bleachers stared at me, but I didn’t care. I kept asking Brian if he was joking. I wanted it to be a joke. But of course, it wasn’t. Brian asked if this was going to ruin my vacation, and I said yes, yes it was going to ruin my fucking vacation. And even then, I thought of how you would have gasped if you had heard me swear, and I cried harder. I felt like I was alone in some dark, empty cosmos, just crying there. Timmy, the tears were so bad, I had to throw my shirt away. I couldn’t bear to look at it after that.

I ran through all of my memories of you. There was the time where I pretended to smoke a cigarette butt I found in the street and imitated a scene from Saved by the Bell and you freaked out and threatened to tell my mother and I ran away home, scared shitless, and you followed me up that hill, by yourself, and you rang my doorbell over and over again to apologize. I remember when we had super soaker fights in the summer, and you crawled behind trees and made jokes about peeing in your water gun so that we were extra scared to get hit by you. I remember us both wanting to be Brooklyn from the Gargoyles cartoon whenever we played, and arguing endlessly with you on which one of us would get to be Leonardo when we played Ninja Turtles. I always ceded to you and chose Donatello, and you’d call me girly for choosing the purple one.

And now all of that became hear-say all of a sudden. No one could really prove that any of that had happened. You were gone. Vanished. It was like you had never been alive. And once I went back home, you really were a ghost; there was no one else that could acknowledge you. My parents were so busy with their lives and it had been so long since I had seen you that you were barely even a memory to them. You haunted me, and only me.

Every once in a while, my parents go back to Pittsburgh to visit their friends. They always offer to bring me along, but I've always refused to go. Because I know that if I go, I’ll have to go back to where I lived, and I’ll have to see that tree and that hill. I’ll think of how unfair this was for you. And I’ll think of what we had and I’ll feel the gargantuan pain of losing you again.

Timmy, do you remember that song we used to sing? We used to sing it a lot when we hung out as kids. You know, the one about us being super heroes and best friends at the same time. It was really nerdy. I don’t remember the words exactly, but I remember the gist of what it was about, and the music too. Timmy, I never forgot it.

The Man in the Yellow Shirt (Part 2)

2010-02-06T11:22:00.004-05:00

I looked back at the elderly couple on their rocking chairs nearby. How could they have just let this happen? I found myself thinking.

My moment of clarity was short-lived, and I went back into a sort of trance. Jen was speaking to me, but I couldn’t really hear her. My whole perception of the world was warped. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how it happened so quickly. I stuck my hands in my pockets again several times and felt the same feeling of perplexity each time they came back empty. A plethora of thoughts swirled around in my head, all fighting for dominance. The predominant feeling was terror. How am I going to get home? I wondered. Am I even going to live through this day? I walked around in a small circle over and over again, staring at my feet. Every once in a while, I grabbed at my socks to feel the debit card and the credit card I had hidden in each one – it gave me a momentary sense of relief each time I did it. Jen and the elderly couple watched me perform this ritual.

I felt the wind tugging on my hair and the heat of the Nicaraguan sun on my skin, and I was deeply afraid.

“Hey,” Jen said. I looked up. “Are you okay?” she asked. I nodded, even though I wasn’t.

I looked around us. There were half a dozen people walking around; most of them must have witnessed the mugging. “Why didn’t they do anything? Why aren’t they helping?” I asked. Jen didn’t answer me. I stared at the ground, helpless.

“We have to go get them,” she said. “Those gangbangers are going to fucking die.” Searching for them seemed like the worst thing we could do, but I gave her a small nod anyway. Part of me did want revenge.

“We need to call the police or something,” I said. “What’s the number for 911 in this piece of shit country? It’s 112 or something like that, right?”

That’s when I saw the police officer. He was about 100 metres ahead of us on the sidewalk, walking in our direction. Jen and I screamed at him simultaneously. “Ayuda! Policía! Ayuda! Policía!” The police officer’s reaction was subtle. He picked up his pace but not by much. He was still only walking. I couldn’t believe it. “Why is he so fucking slow?” I asked Jen. I decided to run towards him. I sprinted as fast as I could. When he noticed me running, he stopped walking. When I got to him he had a smile on his face. I was too upset over the mugging to ask him what the fuck he thought was so funny. In broken Spanish, I succintly told him that two men had just robbed me. As I tried to explain what had happened, Jen caught up to us. Her Spanish was superior, so I let her describe the whole event to him. He nodded but said nothing. He then dramatically took out his pistol, making a big show of it.

I didn’t have a good feeling about this. The cop started walking up the sidewalk, back the way we came. We followed him. We pointed at the ghetto where the two thieves had run off to, so he turned onto the side street and led us there. He occasionally waved his gun in the air as he walked, almost as if he was batting at flies. There were a few dozen people sitting outside in the ghetto; everyone stared at us. A small boy dressed in nothing more than glorified rags walked up to Jen and asked her what was going on. After she answered him in a few words, he grabbed a wooden stick and followed us. Many other boys saw him and decided to follow suit.

The cop clearly had no idea what he was doing. He brought us to the back of a public school – a building so decrepit that I was concerned that pieces of discoloured brick would fall on us if we got too close to it – and made a spectacle of waving his gun around, as if he was looking for the men who robbed me. Meanwhile, a small band of nearly a dozen stick-carrying boys followed closely behind, pretending to shoot at invisible robbers. It was laughable and pathetic. I wanted to kill the cop for not taking this seriously.

I wanted someone competent to help us with the situation. “Back-up?” I asked the police officer. He looked confused. “No hablo inglés,” he said, chuckling. “Okay, then,” I said. “Can you please bring mas policía? Mucho mas fucking policía, por favor?” He closed his eyes and laughed, hard. I struggled not to punch him as hard as I could in the jaw. I pulled on my hair out of frustration. “Si,” he said. “Más policía viene.” He took his radio out of his pocket and spoke into it. All of the boys got excited upon seeing this. I grew more frustrated. Is the back-up even going to help?, I thought.

The policeman brought us away from the school building and back to the side street that had led us into the ghetto. By now enough commotion had been brewed by the children that a crowd of roughly a hundred people had formed. Seeing such a large number of people startled me. I was scared. Jen kept muttering to herself. I could tell she was about to lose it. People started to approach us, asking what had happened. She would tell each one, “La muerte a los ladrones!” Death to the robbers! Many people thought this was hilarious. Some people yelled out at her, “China! China!” This made her furious. She started to chant the same words over and over again, screaming it at the crowd. “LA MUERTE A LOS LADRONES!” The crowd laughed back. The policeman laughed too.

I wanted this to be over. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I didn’t believe in what we were doing; I knew that we were hunting these robbers in vain, and that even if we caught them it was likely that they had guns as well and would use them against us. On top of that, I didn’t trust the policeman, either. I didn’t want to die over what had been in my pockets. For a moment, I longed for my home. I wanted to be back in Quebec, gorging myself on vegan poutine and paté chinois, watching dvds, hanging out with friends, cold but comfortable in knowing that I could go outside any day of the week without feeling anything even remotely associated with fear. But I knew in my heart that this situation had to be dealt with now, and that I had to use everything I had in order to make it out okay. I couldn’t give up, just then. Not yet.

I opened my eyes wide and clenched my fists with new determination. A Nicaraguan woman walked up to me. I instinctively flinched and grabbed my switch-blade. She put out her hands to show that she meant no harm. I looked her up and down. She was wearing a torn dress, caked with mud. She asked me in Spanish what had happened, and I briefly told her the story. A few men nearby laughed at my attempt to tell it. She asked me if I needed to use a cellular phone to make a call, and offered hers. I thanked her but told her it wasn’t necessary. She nodded and disappeared back into the crowd.

I turned around and saw Jen still screaming, “La muerte a los ladrones!” She had let her anger take complete control of her. The crowd pointed and laughed at her every time she yelled it. It suddenly annoyed the hell out of me that she was taking this so badly when she hadn’t been mugged herself.

“Jen,” I said.

“La muerte a los ladrones!”

“Jen,” I said again.

“La muerte a los madrones!”

That was it.

“Jen? Jen! Shut the fuck up! They’re going to kill us if you don’t shut the fuck up!” I yelled at her. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. She punched me in the shoulder, but stopped chanting. She looked at a man standing close to us. “Muerte,” she said. She mimed having her throat slashed with her hand, the international gesture for death. I thought she looked like a fool doing it. The man giggled hysterically.

My attention was abruptly turned to the cop. He was arguing with a man. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. Most of the crowd was behind the man, and openly supported him, taunting the police officer. The man had no shirt on, was wearing tattered shorts and two different shoes; he was holding a bowl of soup over his head and threatening to throw it at the cop. The cop pulled out his gun and aimed it at the man’s head. “Whoa!” I yelled involuntarily. The crowd gasped as well. I grabbed Jen and backed us slowly away from the cop. I wanted to put as much distance between us to send the message that we weren’t connected with whatever he was doing. I knew the odds weren’t good between us and a mob of roughly one hundred destitute Nicaraguans. Where is this fucking back-up? I wondered.

We were about 10 metres from the cop when he unexpectedly rushed forward and kicked the man in the balls. The man crumpled to the ground, but still managed to hold the bowl of soup upright with one outstretched arm. Not one drop spilled out of the bowl. Two men came forward and offered to help him up, but he refused to be helped. He stood up and made as if to throw the bowl of soup onto the policeman. The situation rapidly degenerated. They got into a shouting match until the man spat straight into the cop’s face.

The cop cocked his pistol and pushed it flush into the man’s face. Right next to his nose. The man sighed, closed his eyes and smiled.

Suing for Peace with José Napoleón Duarte

2010-01-29T20:45:00.007-05:00

For strictly legal reasons, I am required to present this story as a work of fiction. However, all other stories I write can still be considered truthful. I would never lie to you, babe.

“You should bring it,” she said. She crossed her arms. “Just leave it in your bag and we’ll walk across.”

I had a better idea. “How about we just don’t bring it with us? Wouldn’t that be the simplest solution? If we’re just going to argue about this anyway, let’s just ditch it here or something. It cost us like, ten fucking Belizean dollars,” I said. "It’s not worth the risk, seriously.”

“Well, it’s your fault that we didn’t finish it all in Guatemala in the first place, and I put it in your bag when we crossed to Guatemala from Belize and nothing happened. If I get caught, I can’t go to law school. For you it won’t be such a big deal if you get caught,” she argued.

I was stunned. “You put that shit in my fucking bag without my knowing? And what the fuck are you talking about, that it won’t be a big deal if I get caught? I want to be a goddamn teacher, not a fucking prisoner! I can’t teach if I have a criminal record!” I yelled.

She was unmoved. “Lawyers are more important than teachers. I stand to lose a lot more than you if I get caught with it,” she said.

“Yeah? Like what?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Like I can’t take the BAR exam,” she said. “Duh.” I wanted to punch her teeth in.

The wad of Belizean weed was inside of a Ziploc bag that was inside of a sock that was inside my duffel bag. I put the bag down, pulled the sock out and thrust it in her hands.

“Listen, if one of us gets caught, we’re probably both in fucking shit. So this time, you’re taking it,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I’ve had the fucking switchblade on me since the start of this trip, and I still have it now. You haven’t risked fucking shit. So you’re taking it. If there’s any left by the time we get to the next border crossing, maybe I’ll take it. I’ll even think about it. But right now, you want this shit so fucking bad? You’re taking it.” My eyes were wide with rage. She grimaced and bared her teeth.

We were standing on a commercial road on the Guatemalan side of the Guatemala/El Salvador border, about 75 metres downhill of the customs building. A handful of semi trucks were lined up next to us, waiting for their turn at customs. Saying I was worried would have been an understatement. In the eventuality that we were to be caught with the drugs on the Salvadoran side, one of us – or both of us – would certainly go to jail. In El Salvador, being arrested automatically carried with it a mandatory minimum sentence of three days in jail, regardless of the crime. I had a feeling that being caught transporting illegal drugs across an international border would carry a much harsher reprimand than just three days in jail. I didn’t even want to think about what the punishment was for cross-border trafficking in Guatemala.

Jen took the plastic bag of weed out of the sock and put it into her left sock, the one she was wearing. She handed me my sock back.

I looked at the Salvadoran guard patrolling the border not 50 metres away. He was standing on a large concrete square next to the customs building; I assumed that the edge of the concrete signified the start of his nation’s boundary. “Nice going,” I said. “Very discrete. You deserve a prize.”

She flipped me off. “It’s almost 8 pm, it’s dark enough for him not to see.”

“Yeah, it’s dark, but they’re not fucking blind,” I said.

I turned around and started to walk away. Maybe I’ll calm down if we get some space from each other for a minute, I thought. Out of nowhere, I felt a deep pain in my left shoulder, and then heard a distinct, tinny clanging noise. To my left rolled an empty nalgene bottle. On the side was printed, “The Onion: I Will Never Take This Camping.” I did not find it amusing. I grabbed the bottle and circled back towards Jen, who was headed for the border.

I sprinted up to her. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again,” I said. “You can’t fucking hurt me.” I grabbed her arm. “Are you listening to me? You cannot hurt me if you want to be in this relationship.”

She twisted her arm away and said nothing. I grunted out of frustration, and then made as if to give her the nalgene bottle. When she went to grab it, I threw it as hard as I could towards the border. “You’re being overdramatic,” Jen said. The border guard suddenly took a great interest in us. He walked as close to us as he could, taking care not to step over to the Guatemalan side. He pointed his pump shotgun at the ground. “And so is he,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m being sane. You know you’ve got a huge anger management problem?”

“You know you’ve got an annoying problem?” she countered.

I struggled to keep my composure. I sat down on my duffel bag and took out a bottle of purified water. I noticed that my hands trembled as I drank from the bottle. I looked around. There was nothing but farms around us, and a few concrete buildings. I could hear farm animals making noise nearby. I was anxious to get the hell out of Guatemala and go to sleep in a presumably superior Salvadoran hostel. When I turned to my right, I saw Jen standing at the border. The border guard was talking to her. Holy shit, I thought. That probably isn't good news. I hurriedly put the bottle back into the duffel bag and attempted to saunter inconspicuously towards her and the guard.

The guard stopped talking when I approached. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt. He was as short as Jen, about 5' 4". Under regular circumstances I would probably have found that incredibly humorous. “Buenas,” I said.

“Buenas,” he said, smiling.

Jen continued to speak to him – I couldn’t follow any of it, as her Spanish was much better and faster than mine. The guard grabbed my shoulder and guided me towards an open window in the customs building. “Su pasaporte, por favor,” he said. I complied and offered him my passport. “No,” he said, pointing at the window. “Oh,” I said. “Gracias.” Jen gave her passport first. I waited until she was done, and then offered the customs agent inside my passport. He didn’t bother to look at me; he simply swiped my passport and looked at a computer screen. He stamped my passport and handed it back to me. The whole process lasted less than 30 seconds.

I looked at Jen. “What were you talking to the guard about?” I asked.

“He was calling you a maricón because of how you threw the bottle back at me,” she said.

“A what?” I asked, irritated.

“Maricón,” she said. “It means faggot.” She smiled at me. “Cause you’re a faggot.”

I laughed uncontrollably. I laughed partly because of the absurdity of the situation and partly because there was nothing else I could do to make me experience a semblance of normalcy. I didn’t feel like feeling insulted; I didn’t have enough energy to get angry again. I looked at the customs agent through the window. He looked unimpressed. “Va chier toé too,” I said, even though he had never called me a maricón. I smiled. He smiled back.

I put my passport in my pocket and turned to Jen. “So, where do you think the bus stop is?” I asked. I picked up my duffel bag.

“I don’t know, let me ask the guard if there’s one around,” Jen said.

While Jen and the guard exchanged words, I noticed that Jen was fuming and the guard was clearly amused. I didn’t know what they were saying, except that the guard kept repeating, “No, no, no. Mañana, mañana.” Tomorrow, tomorrow.

“Fuck,” I said, biting my lip. “It’s not good, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Jen. “The buses aren’t running anymore. They stopped at 6 pm.”

“Can’t we just walk to a hostel or something close by?” I asked.

“I asked him,” she said. “And he said that it’s too dangerous at night to recommend doing anything like that.”

“Fuck,” I said again. I looked at the sky and put my hands behind my head. The stars were starting to come out. “Looks like we’re going to have to try some place on the Guatemalan side, then.”

“Yeah,” said Jen. She spoke briefly with the guard again. “He says that if there’s nothing on the Guatemalan side, that it’s cool if we cross the border to El Salvador again tonight,” she said.

I laughed sardonically. “Great,” I said, still staring at the sky. “I’ve always dreamed of having two Salvadoran stamps in my passport.”

We slowly made our way back down the hill towards one of the buildings on the Guatemalan side. The guard snickered as we passed him. “Oh, shut up,” I said under my breath. Jen laughed and grabbed my hand. I looked at her. “Meow,” she said. That was her way of trying to make up: meowing. I knew I would never get an apology and that this was the best I could expect. The sole cry of a cat.

“Meow,” I said back.

Leaving Chiriquí

2010-01-24T20:30:00.006-05:00

There was a tarantula in our bed.

I didn’t know what to think about this. I simply got out of bed as calmly as I could, pointed at the vague shape of an arachnid lurking underneath the sheets and quietly declared, “There’s a tarantula in the bed.”

”What?” asked Jen. She had just come out of the shower, and was still wet and naked. She stopped brushing her hair and instinctively hugged her shoulders. “Where?”

I pointed at the lump moving underneath the sheets. “There,” I said.

I had never seen a tarantula in the wild before – if you could call the inside of my hostel room a wild environment. I looked at the window. It was wide open, confirming my suspicion that the spider had gotten in during the night and had presumably slept inside the bed with us. This did not bother me as much as I thought it would.

The tarantula emerged from underneath the sheets and began climbing over the covers. It was alert and moved in quick, jerky movements.

“Do something!” screamed Jen as she shuddered helplessly.

I grabbed a pillow and slowly descended it on the spider, sealing its fate. I waited a few seconds, with one hand still applying pressure over the pillow. I suddenly became aware of how ridiculous the scene looked. Although I was acutely aware of how harmless the tarantula really was, I could not help but feel vulnerable and exposed in my King Kong boxers. I knew that tarantulas weren’t venomous, but I still could not fight my impulsive urge to lean away from the bed as I continued to apply pressure.

It suddenly occurred to me that I might have been exerting too much pressure and out of curiosity, I slowly lifted the pillow up again to observe the state of the spider. It moved more slowly than before and it was obvious that I had injured it. It zigzagged erratically around the bed. I had no idea what to do. I grabbed one end of the covers and pulled it over the spider. The tarantula was quicker than me, however, and ran past where I dropped the covers. Almost mechanically, I grabbed one of the spider’s legs and pulled it underneath the covers. I then tucked the covers into the bed. There was nowhere for the spider to go. It was trapped.

“There you go! Dat’s it, dat’s all!” I said in a Quebecois accent. I clapped my hands dramatically. “Impressed?” I asked.

“Are you sure it’s stuck? I mean, did you make sure it won’t come out again?” asked Jen.

“I don’t think it’ll escape,” I said. “In any case, I’m not touching that thing again. That’s the best I can do.”

“Your best isn’t always good enough,” said Jen. She looked away and started brushing her hair.

I ignored her and looked at my watch. “Better hurry up,” I said. “The bus to David is leaving soon.”

I quickly got undressed and showered. Jen came into the bathroom with me and sat on the toilet, silent. It amused me that she was so frightened of something so small. How can something so small scare someone who routinely yells at local gang-bangers?

When we had all of our stuff ready to go, I checked the bed one last time to make sure the tarantula was still alive. I poked the lump. It moved. I started to feel guilty for leaving it there inside the bed, and for having hurt it. It hadn’t done anything wrong. I asked Jen what I should do. She insisted that we leave the bed the way it was, and that Pancho could deal with it later. I was quite keen on giving him some kind of revenge, especially after all of the trouble he got us into as a result of his horrifically careless advice concerning his paramilitary “amigos” that hosted us at the top of the volcano we climbed.

“I could have been raped,” said Jen. “Let him deal with the goddamn tarantula. I bet they deal with that type of shit all the time anyway.”

“Yeah, probably,” I said. I shouldered my duffel bag. “Let’s go,” I said.

Jen and I left the hostel room. I saw Pancho in the kitchen. He walked up to me and shook my hand heartily. “So, everything good?” he asked.
I gave him the keys to the hostel room. “Yeah. Everything’s good,” I said.

I thanked him for letting us keep some of our bags in the hostel free of charge while we climbed the volcano, and for reserving the room for us for when we came back. He smiled and put his hands on his hips. “No problemo,” he said. I felt bad. “We gotta go now,” Jen said all of a sudden. “To David. Adios.”

“You are welcome here always. I see you maybe in Niagara Fall sometime, eh?” said Pancho.

I laughed. It didn’t sound very authentic.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. Jen tugged on my hand. We walked the hell out of there.

The Man in the Yellow Shirt (Part 1)

2009-08-23T21:47:00.002-04:00

I sighed quietly.

Jen and I were in a collectivo van with five Nicaraguans. I couldn't see any houses or paved roads anywhere for kilometres, only the unmarked, barely visible dirt road we were on. There was not much traffic apart from a few 18-wheeler trucks that roared by from time to time. Occasionally some small children would skitter forward and throw buckets of water in front of trucks - it was a vain effort to control the dust that would inevitably be brewed up from the vehicles' tires. Sometimes our driver would slow down and give the children a few cordobas. More often he gave them nothing.

I wonder where those kids get their water, I wondered. And how far they have to walk to get here. I sympathized with them but also caught myself thinking that their efforts were in vain and therefore undeserving of any real reward. My own thoughts surprised and frightened me. My unlucky and unfortunate experiences in Central America was making me bitter.

You're not here as a politician or a sociologist, so stop judging shit and enjoy the scenery. Nicaragua's beauty was undeniable. I stared off at the great deserted plain that led to three volcanoes at the horizon. I snapped a few quick pictures of the volcanoes and quickly pocketed my camera. After absent-mindedly checking the time, I brought my attention back to the road again, where a truck driver ahead was throwing change out of his window at a small child.

The van bounced violently as it hit potholes in the dirt road. Our feet were on top of our bags - I had insisted on bringing them in with us instead of storing them in the back, as a security measure - which forced to sit slightly higher than everyone else in the van. Our heads struck the ceiling at every pothole. "This is first class stuff," I whispered to Jen. With her eyes half closed, she nodded.

Bored, I took out a 2 litre bottle of tap water and put two purification pills in it, watching it turn a muddy-orange colour. I made a mental note not to drink the water for a at least 15 minutes so that the pills could take effect. "I'm thirsty," Jen said. "How long is it going to be?"

"Fifteen minutes," I said.

"No," she said, shaking her head lazily, "I mean how long until we get there?"

"Oh, I have no idea," I said. I looked ahead and saw nothing but a few semi-trucks. "Probably a half hour or so."

I proved to be wrong. After about ten minutes, the dirt road ended and the collectivo van turned into what was quite obviously a city. The metamorphosis from desolate plain to urban city was immediate and astonishing. We drove through shantytowns and embassy districts until we finally arrived at our destination: the collectivo van and taxi depot. I paid the driver of the van 50 cordobas for the ride and shook my head vigorously at the man offering to take our bags out for us. I took our bags out myself. The taxi depot was not impressive - a flat piece of asphalt with about fifty cars and vans and just as many drivers yelling their destinations. We were immediately hounded by a swarm of taxi drivers asking us in accented english where we needed to go. "We're still figuring it out," I said. "Leave us alone." They reluctantly backed off and solicited other potential passengers.

"So this is Managua so far," I said. "I'm sure it will be better than Tegucigalpa, at least." I wasn't worried. I had high hopes for Nicaragua.

Jen and I took out our Lonely Planet map of Managua. Our hostel looked to be eight or nine kilometres away. "Want to just walk some of it?" I asked Jen. "I sort of want to stretch my legs and see what Managua has to offer before we put our bags away and relax."

"Sure," she said.

We were both sick of being stuck in so many chicken buses and vans, and walking for a little while would be a breath of fresh air. I only knew that the hostel was north, in the direction of the lake, but I didn't know how to say the word north in Spanish. I stopped people on the street and asked, "Donde esta el Lago de Managua?" I received several puzzled looks, and some people looked concerned and asked us why on earth we would want to go there. "La hostal," I would say, shrugging. We had a rough idea of how to get to our hostel, so we headed north.

After walking for about twenty minutes, I noticed that the neighbourhood seemed to be getting grittier. Razor wire covered school buildings, the side streets were really just glorified dirt roads and alleys, and many of the houses were made of cardboard and sheet metal. I was used to seeing this type of neighbourhood in Central America and I was fairly desensitized to it, so I was not particularly worried about anything.

I took a look at Jen. She looked tired. "Want me to hold your handbag?" I asked her. "Aww," she said, swooning. "What a gentleman!" I took her handbag and grinned from ear to ear. This is going to be a pretty good day, I thought.

There was some traffic on the street but barely anyone outside. We were practically the only people on the sidewalk. The only other people were ahead of us, two men walking in the same direction we were walking in. One of them was tall, a giant by Central American standards; the other man was short and squat. The tall man wore a white shirt with black shoes and the short man wore a black shirt with white shoes - I laughed out loud at how ridiculous they looked next to each other. The tall one looked at us and double-taked, but I thought nothing of it. They turned left at the next corner and disappeared.

"Want to take a taxi?" Jen asked. "No, it's okay," I replied. "Not right now. Maybe in five or ten minutes. I'm not in any hurry." I smiled, looking at the horizon towards the lake.

We walked in silence, with me holding Jen's handbag in one hand and holding her hand in my other hand. All of a sudden, two men appeared in front of me - they were the same men I spotted earlier, incidentally - and screamed at us in a slurry of Spanish. One of them held a long knife and held it in front of my face, still yelling at me. It was extremely dirty, but it glistened in the sun in the spots where the steel shined through. He pressed it against the right side of my stomach and began slowly driving it into the meat of my belly. I had no choice but to walk backwards with the knife or be stabbed. The other man put both his hands in my pockets and began stealing their contents; his hands were filthy and disgusted me, even in my moment of panic. I instinctively dug my hand into my right pocket and grabbed my switch-blade. The tall man noticed and raised his knife up to my chest, carving it in slightly below my right nipple. I let go of my switch-blade and took my hand out of my pocket, letting the short man steal my wallet with his dirty hands. He left the switch-blade.

Jen grabbed the tall man by the shoulder and pulled as hard as she could, yelling, "No!" He turned around and threatened her with the knife, and then went back to me. I continued backing up slowly as I had been before, moving in tandem with the knife. Suddenly, the short man yelled something to him and they both turned around and sprinted into an alley.

I stood there, still holding Jen's handbag, and listened to their footsteps dissipate. I looked down at my white shirt, checking for any red spots. There were none. Not even a tear in the shirt. I was in shock. I checked my pockets and was surprised each time that my hands came back empty, with the obvious exception of my switch-blade. They had stolen my digital camera, my passport, my wallet, all of my identification, and about 40 dollars' worth of Nicaraguan cordobas, Honduran lempira, and American dollars. I knelt down slowly and touched both my socks and felt a slight sense of relief. I still had my debit card and credit card, which I had hidden inside my socks. I then looked at my left hand and realized why I had been such a perfect target. I had been holding Jen's handbag the whole time.

I stood there in silence. An elderly couple sitting in rocking chairs had seen everything from their front porch, barely fifteen feet away from us. They did not offer any help or react in any way. It was as if nothing had happened. I stared blankly into the horizon at a volcano. "Fuck," I said, silently. I heard Jen yell, "Policia! Policia!" but it seemed so distant to me that I disregarded it. Then I felt her lifting my shirt up, touching my stomach and chest, turning me around several times in the process. I felt like I was moving through molasses; everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. "Are you okay?" she asked me. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

I snapped out of my trance. I looked at her. "I'm not hurt," I said.

Her face suddenly twisted in anger. "Those fucking gangbangers are going to pay," she said.

I did not believe her.

Backfire

2009-07-23T21:19:00.004-04:00

I heard the first set of gunshots clearly.

They came from behind us, deep in the woods. Curious, I stood up suddenly. I walked a few metres out of the woods and into the baseball field. The baseball field was deserted. I looked to the right at the townhouse block where we all lived. There was no one loitering outside. I shrugged and walked back into the forest. No one noticed that I had been gone; my brother and my friends, Wolfe and Brian, barely noticed the noise. I squatted back down next to them and directed my attention to the log we were turning over. Wolfe and Brian pushed one end of the log, turning it over. Immediately, some earthworms rushed back into the soil and a few centipedes ran out in random directions. However, the species we were after, although relatively well camouflaged, was too slow to escape our eager hands.

I caught one first. I held it up by the tail for everyone to see, relishing the attention I received for catching the first one. It was a red back salamander. With their tiny legs, we often mistook them for garter snakes, which was half of their appeal. I lifted it over one of the open jars we brought with us, but it wiggled out of my fingers' grasp and fell to the forest floor again. It buried itself into the dirt. I tried to find it, but in vain. It escaped. I sulked and hung my head as I took on a barrage of insults from my peers.

My brother caught the next one, and the next several salamanders. I was desperate to make a come-back, and doubled my efforts. We moved from place to place in such a way that from a bird's eye view, we were traveling in a large circle through the woods. Moving in this way ensured that we would finish back where we started at the southern point of the circle, where our backyards met the forest. After about an hour or so of hunting for small wildlife, Wolfe and Brian each held a jar holding a modest amount of animals, mostly salamanders and some worms to feed them. Even I managed to find some novelty amphibians, like a bullfrog and a strange yellow newt. However, my brother had caught the most animals, carrying five jars full of diverse species. It seemed like enough animals to start a whole new eco-system. I took out a guidebook on North American reptile and amphibian species and tried to identify the animals in each of our jars, starting with my brother's.

My brother did not brag, but my friends congratulated him over and over again and showered him with compliments. I was intensely jealous. I wanted the same attention he was getting. I said nothing, because there was nothing I could say. My brother did, after all, catch more animals than me or anyone else.

That's when I heard the gunshots for the second time. This time everybody paid attention. My brother and Wolfe were instantly excited. Brian and I were visibly nervous. We decided to keep heading north, deeper into the woods and away from the safety of our neighbourhood. After about ten minutes of walking, the woods opened up to a large field quartered off by a barbed wire picket fence with a sign. The sign was wooden and obviously hand-made by the land-owner. The sign said, WARNING! ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT!

"What does trespassing mean?" I asked.

"I don't know. But my dad says that there's a farmer that lives on the land there and he's really mean. He's a dumb butt," said Wolfe. We all laughed.

After less than a minute of discussion, the general consensus was that we should go over the fence and continue. I had absolutely no clue where we were going or what we were after, but I wanted another chance to impress my friends - most of all, I wanted to show my friends that I was better than my brother.

Walking on the farmer's land, we followed the fence north-east until we saw a donkey standing alone next to a creek. I walked up to the creek and threw some water at the donkey. It made no noise and didn't seem to mind the attention. Wolfe punched the donkey in the flank. The donkey kicked wildly into the air and then walked away silently. Wolfe almost fainted from the shock, but the rest of us laughed uncontrollably.

That's when the third set of gunshots rang out. It was deafening.

"Crap," said Brian. "That's way closer."

I dipped my hands in the creek and pretended to grab at the crawfish in the water. I was frightened.

"Let's go check it out," said Wolfe.

They started walking back into the woods again, towards the direction of the gunshots. I reluctantly kept pace with them.

After a few minutes we reached a large patch of open space in the forest. The ground was very sandy, almost orange. Someone had planted onions nearby, and the smell hung in the air. My brother and I thought it would be funny to transplant these onions from the fertile ground to the sandy section to see if they could survive. It took us the better part of fifteen minutes. Wolfe and Brian thought it was a stupid idea, and spent the time admiring the animals we caught and pacing back and forth. Wolfe was concerned about how we were going to split the animals up. We were sharing jars, and the ownership of certain animals was immediately contested.

After my brother and I finished transplanting the onions, we moved on deeper into the forest. The clanging of the jars against each other in our bags began to annoy us, and we all expressed our annoyance out loud.

I started complaining loudly about how annoying the jars were, until I heard Wolfe speak. I thought I heard Wolfe ask, "What?" I foolishly started to repeat myself. He spoke louder and it was clear that he was actually saying, "Shut up. Shut up." I did. We could hear the distant sound of people talking ahead of us.

The foliage was blocking our view, but it was obvious that there were people ahead of us. There were some pick-up trucks parked to our right. In the back of one I could clearly make out some open weapon cases and a stripped down 12-gauge shotgun.

Growing up, I often saw my father's weapons stripped down in the living room. The basement even had a rifle up on display for anyone to touch and hold. Its firing pin and chamber had been removed, but in my mind it had always been a real weapon. My brother and I would take turns holding the rifle and yelling, "Pow! Pow!" at each other. My father had taught us how to use a cheap, mostly nonlethal air rifle. I would shoot at paper targets hanging from tree branches. My brother would ruthlessly kill squirrels and robins. We were both familiar enough with weapons. However, neither of us had any idea how to act around people with weapons.

My brother smiled and motioned for us to move forward. Hunched down, we slowly made our way forward until we could make out a group of men holding weapons. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed what looked like an open carton of milk. My immediate instinct was to get up and kick it. This is going to be so funny, I thought in anticipation of what I was going to do. I spotted another few random open cartons of milk open on the dirt.

Real funny.

"Let's get out of here," Brian said. At that instant, we all spontaneously sprinted through the group of men, surprising them. Our sprint even surprised us, as we dropped some of our jars. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. I kicked the first carton of milk and kept running. I heard a loud metallic noise but thought nothing of it and just kicked the other cartons. By the third or fourth carton, I realized that what was coming out of the cartons was not milk.

It was handgun and shotgun ammunition.

This realization struck me with guilt and fear. I immediately froze. Everyone else kept running until they were out of sight.

I looked towards the group of men. There were about a dozen of them, all of them Asian. Most of them seemed to be in their late 20s. Some of them wore head-bands and some of them wore jeans and some of them had no shirts on. All of them held guns. I might have imagined it, but I could have sworn I heard the sound of a gun being cocked. I didn't know whether it was the sound of a bullet entering the chamber of a rifle or the sound of a weapon being unloaded.

I dropped down to all fours and began picking up as many bullets and shells as I could. Every few seconds I looked up and saw the men staring at me. The expressions on their faces were identical and unreadable.

"I'm sorry," I kept saying. "I'm so sorry."

None of them said a word. One of them, suddenly bored, loaded a crossbow and shot it at a paper target.

I felt like I had been on the ground for hours, filling up cartons with grimy, dirty shells and bullets. After a while I couldn't take it anymore. I stopped and looked up. Most of the cartons were filled, but it was evident that a lot of ammunition was still strewn about. "I'm so sorry," I said one last time. "I'll never bother you again."

I ran away and never looked back. I didn't really expect anyone to shoot me, but I half-expected to hear warning shots. I was not mentally ready for that eventuality, and ran as fast as I could out of terror. I had no idea where I was running. Out of nowhere, I heard my brother yell out, "Stop!"

"On te regardait," my brother told me in French, relieving me. They had seen everything. Wolfe and Brian put their fingers to their mouths and shushed my brother. We walked silently and methodically through the forest again.

We didn't stop until we made it back to the creek. I looked down at my pants and noticed that I had urinated at some point. No one seemed to notice. I quickly dunked my hands into the water and splashed some onto my crotch; my attempt to mask the pee stain only brought further attention to it. However, no one seemed to care and no one teased me. Our experience with the armed Asian men was fresh in our minds.

"Ching chang chow chong!" yelled Wolfe. We all laughed. It felt good to break the silence.

"Holy crap, those guys were probably Japanese ninjas or something!" added Brian. "Imagine if they had ninja stars or nun-chuks. They're probably like the ninja turtles or something."

"Yeah, right," I said.

"Hey, where are our jars?" my brother asked. There were only two left; we had dropped the other ones in our hurry to leave the scene earlier. All of the jars were of shoddy quality and had weak trap-doors so we were confident that the animals would escape - this was exactly what worried us. My brother pledged to find the jars the next day. I begged him not to, but he was set on it.

We walked past the creek, the donkey, the barbed wire, the sign. We left the woods and crossed the baseball field to reach our townhouses. Brian asked us if we wanted to play Super Nintendo at his place. We all said yes. My brother and I entered our townhouse and washed our hands. I let him keep his jar of amphibians under my bed. My mother asked us where we were going. "Chez Brian," I said.

Brian lived next door to us, so we walked right in and went to his basement, where he was already playing a Super Nintendo game with Wolfe. The video game was called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time. He offered a controller to both me and my brother at the same time, hovering it back and forth in front of our faces. My brother grabbed it and gave it to me. I smiled, and chose Donatello.

The Banality of Travel

2009-06-16T22:14:00.003-04:00

I was aware that the Ontario Provincial Police knew my name, what I looked like, and the city I was currently living in, so I took some precautions before going out. The previous night, Mary and Ashley had dyed my hair green and given me some raggedy old clothes for me to wear.

Presently, I stepped out of Mary's house slowly, careful not to let any of her dogs out.

The dominant feeling was one of overwhelming paranoia.

It was around 11 in the morning and I was the last one to leave Mary's house. I sat down on the curb, careful not to sit in any of the snow or mud on the lawn, and wondered why there was still snow in Sarnia in mid-April. It was a grey and cloudy day and I was not looking forward to my errands, especially with the newfound knowledge that many of my friends had been pulled out of their classrooms by the police and questioned on my whereabouts. Additionally, the Sureté du Québec police force had successfully hacked into my e-mail and read my online conversations with friends. I was not in a particularly good mood.

However, I was desperate for something to do.

I took the cell phone I had purchased a few days prior out of my backpack. I also pulled out a pay-as-you-go card and dialed the number listed on it. I scratched away at the secret code required to add more money to my account with a small pocket knife, but accidentally erased the last two digits in doing so. I foolishly tried entering numbers at random to fill in the last two digits, hoping I would get the one correct combination out of 100. This soon proved to be impossible.

Fuck.

I called the customer service line and asked them what I should do, and was told to go back to the convenience store and explain what had happened and that they would probably provide me with a new card. I thanked them and hung up. I was now determined to buy a new pay-as-you-go card, since I wanted to call my friends but didn't want to take the risk of using Mary's home phone.

I walked up to Confederation street and stopped myself from turning left when I noticed a police cruiser parked at the corner. I found myself gulping and snickered at myself. You're being an idiot, I thought. Just act natural and take a detour.

I crossed Confederation and followed Ontario street. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the policeman in the cruiser staring at me. It suddenly occurred to me that what I saw as a disguise actually demanded people's attention. I saw the convenience store ahead, just next to a Canadian Forces military base, and continued forward as I tried my hardest not to turn my head to look at the cop.

Not breaking my stride, I stepped onto the path leading up to the store's front door. I could hear my quickening breath over the sound of my shoes crunching onto the snow covered concrete squares. I was certain that a hand would reach for my shoulder before I made it to the door.

I closed my eyes and entered the store. I turned around. Nobody was outside. Nobody is following me, I thought, relieved.

I turned to the clerk, a short Asian woman with rugged features. I briefly looked around the store to see if anyone else was going to buy anything so that I would have ample time to discuss my situation; there was no one else there. I wasn't worried though. After all, I had bought my pay-as-you-go card here.

"Hi," I said, smiling.

"Hello," the woman responded in accented English. She did not return my smile and seemed uneasy.

"I have a situation that I have to explain to you regarding this pay-as-you-go card that I bought here a couple of days ago," I said.

"Okay," the clerk said, clearly uncomfortable.

"Well, I scratched out the last two digits by accident and called the customer service line, and they told me to take the card back and that you would be able to replace the card with a new one," I continued.

"No! I not do that. You no steal from me," the woman said, shaking her head furiously.

"Why?" I was not prepared for that answer. "I can show you the receipt, and I can call the number right now and show you that the card hasn't been used yet," I said worriedly.

"I said no! No! No! You no steal! No! Get out of here! You want me to call police? You want me to call police?" she screamed, suddenly grabbing a rotary phone from behind the counter.

Part of me wanted to laugh at the sight of her using a rotary phone to dial 911, but most of me felt terrified at the thought of wrongfully being charged for fraud. I was frozen in place and yelled, "No! Don't do that!" because I didn't know what else to say. I waved my hands in an attempt to calm her down - she had the phone up to her face and was waiting for the other line to pick up - but it only agitated her more, and she suddenly threw the telephone at me.

She missed. I heard the phone clang onto the linoleum floor behind me.

I grabbed my pay-as-you-go card and threw it at the clerk, yelling, "Fuck you!" It struck her on the cheek. She flinched and screamed and clawed at the air in front of her face. Full of adrenaline, I ran out of the store as fast as I could. A green-haired maniac running as fast as he can looks sort of suspicious! I heard a voice inside of me say. I ran to a side-street and started walking slowly and determinedly, as if I was walking to a bus stop.

I noticed a telephone booth at the next corner and decided to hide inside of it for a while. I picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone until a pre-recorded message started playing. After repeating this a few times, I looked down the street and noticed three police cars, sirens on and lights flashing, driving to the store I had just run out of.

There was a giant, writhing ball of embarrassment and fear inside of me. The fear superseded the embarrassment. I was terribly afraid. I was afraid of being arrested, of having a criminal record, of having to return to my family in Québec, of having to go back to school, of living a life of shame for having run away from everything I had. However, deep inside I knew it was only a matter of time until I was caught by the police; if I was caught, Mary's mother could go to prison for harbouring me illegally. I was afraid.

Not sure what to do, I thought of calling the customer service line to complain about what had happened.

I searched for the number on my cell phone and started dialling it on the pay phone.

After a few seconds I hung up the phone and thought. I thought long and hard.

I pressed 0 and requested a collect call from the operator. The phone picked up on the first ring.

"Oui, allo?"

In that voice I felt countless fits of crying, sleepless nights spent sitting next to the telephone, indescribable depression, and the infinite pain of losing a child. I suddenly understood the gravity of what I had done. It wasn't just about me anymore. I had hurt people so deeply and had not even realized it. I did not know if I could ever be forgiven or if I even deserved it. I simultaneously embraced and rejected the thought of banishment.

Bathing in the alternating red and blue lights of the police cruisers down the street, I kneeled down in the telephone booth and sobbed. And my mother sobbed with me.

Kevin of the Yukon.

2009-05-28T21:37:00.003-04:00

Kevin, a virtual stranger that I was hosting from a website called couchsurfing.com, was sitting on the couch across from me with his arms wrapped around his knees. He wore a black tuque and a red and white polka dot shirt with buttons but no sleeves. I thought it made him look incredibly effeminate for some reason. He was the first "couchsurfer" that I had decided to host. My girlfriend and I sat on another couch; I had my arm casually around her shoulder. The conversation with Kevin was not going well - I was not convinced that I would be using the website again.

“You can’t really think they were capable of doing that themselves," Kevin said with a dismissive hand gesture.

“Actually, I don’t only think they were capable of building the pyramids, but I know that the Egyptians built the pyramids. It’s an established fact,” I said, incredulous. "It's been proven."

“But the pyramids are too complicated for human design," Kevin continued. "Human architects can’t create something as complex as that, and imagine the tools the Egyptians had!”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “So you’re saying that aliens came to Earth 150 million years ago and built the pyramids themselves…as a gift to the Egyptians.”

“Yes. Exactly,” he said.

I looked over at Rachel. When we locked eyes, it struck me that we were thinking the same thing. This guy is bat-shit insane.

"Well, I'm sorry," I said, "But I'm never going to believe your argument and I'm not convinced. Also, I'm not calling you a racist or anything, but I don't really like it when people completely underestimate a sophisticated people like the Egyptians and their ability to build tall buildings."

"No! No! I'm not calling them stupid or anything," Kevin said, waving wildly with his hands.

"I hope not," I replied.

I felt Rachel's hand squeeze my side. I glanced at her and decided to drop the issue.

"It's just that it makes more sense that extra-terrestrials did it," he said, smiling hopefully.

Biting my lip and trying hard not to roll my eyes, I changed the subject. I asked Kevin to tell us his life story. He told us about how he was born and raised in the Yukon Territory. He experienced an epiphany of sorts as a teenager and subsequently decided to become a raw vegan. He traveled the continent in search of the meaning of life. He joined a survival cult in Phoenix, Arizona but was kicked out - he wouldn't elaborate on why. He then joined another survival cult in the mountains of British Columbia but was kicked out of that one too. He was 25 years old and his reason for needing a couch to crash on was that he had just moved and was looking for an apartment of his own.

The more he spoke about his background, the more tense I felt. At some point - I think it was right around when he was talking about having just moved to Montreal to make it big - Rachel got off the couch and left. I couldn't blame her. Kevin was a talking machine .

"Did you know that food has a soul? And that it has an aura that you can take pictures of? You know that, right?" he asked smugly.

"Well, I don't believe that vegetables have souls, if that's what you're saying," I said.

He smiled. "Yes, that is what I'm saying, and you'll see what I mean," he said.

He jumped up and got on my computer, browsing the internet until some high-contrast pictures of green bell peppers with auras popped up. "See?" he asked. I just stared at the screen and pondered his craziness.

"I don't understand. Where is the scientific basis for this? What kind of camera takes these pictures?" I asked. He smiled and started on a long monologue that I tuned out of after the third sentence. From what I caught of it, all foods have auras, and when you consume them they combine with your aura.
Rachel came back into the room, munching on a sesame seed cracker. "See, even that has a soul!" Kevin claimed, pointing at her snack.

The situation would have been funny to me if I was not stuck with the unfortunate obligation (which I would later realize was never an obligation at all) of hosting this odd man.

"Who's hungry?" I interrupted a little too loudly.

"Oh, I am, actually," said Kevin. "Do you have any fruit stores nearby?" he asked. I informed him that yes, there was one across the street. That's when I remembered that he was a raw vegan; although I was a vegan as well, he couldn't really eat anything I had to offer.

He insisted on going to the fruit store by himself. As he walked past me to put on his sandals, a pungent odour hit my nostrils. He smelled like earth. If one were to put a handful of worms in a bunch of soil and leave the whole thing in a closed container for about a week - that's what he smelled like.

While he was gone Rachel and I discussed whether Couchsurfing was still a good idea. It sounded like a decent concept, but this situation seemed like it could go awry at any moment. He was courteous but complacent, and I could not tolerate an overly smug guest in my home. After some deliberation we decided to host him for at least one night.

When Kevin came back, he was stressed out and jittery. "The people working in that store really didn't like me," he said. I asked him what happened. "I asked them if they knew when the fruits I bought died, so I could tell what kind of aura it has," he said. "They didn't like that for some reason and told me to get out."

Rachel and I told Kevin that we needed to go to sleep soon, since we both had school the next day. He agreed that it was time to go to bed, and I gave him a pile of blankets and pillows for him to sleep on the couch. The couch pulled out into a bed, but he insisted on sleeping on the couch.

I distinctly remember that he did not snore.

The next morning, Kevin left at the same time as me and Rachel; we did not give him a spare key. However, we told Kevin that he was welcome to stay at our apartment again that night.

That evening, Kevin and the stench of old compost that followed him everywhere showed up to my apartment. I was done with the majority of my homework, so I turned around in my computer chair and chatted a little bit with him. The subject began to veer towards what he felt like talking about.

"Today at some point I was lost and I was starving, and didn't know where there were any stores around, so I climbed inside of a dumpster and ate some bread," he said.

"Okay," I said.

"But it made me sick. I mean, I threw up everywhere. And I know why."

"Because you ate expired bread from a dumpster?" I asked.

"No, it's cause like I'm so pure, right? Cause I'm raw and everything."

"Oh," I said, disappointed and annoyed by his answer.

"Hey, I have a secret," he said.

"Oh yeah?" I said, feigning interest.

"Yes. It's the biggest secret in the human world. It's the secret to not eating."

I laughed. "The secret to not eating? Isn't that just not eating?"

Kevin smiled one of his little smug smiles. "Actually, it's something you do that makes you not have to eat for a really long time. Let me explain it to you."

I got comfortable in my chair and heard him out.

"First, you have to go to an elevated place. For example, Mount Royal here is perfect for that. You have to get there before sunset. As the sun sets, you have to stare directly at the sun in 15 second intervals. So 15 seconds staring, 15 seconds with your eyes closed, and so on. Oh, and also your bare feet have to be touching the earth."

"And if you do this you don't have to eat? For how long?" I asked.

"Yes, the raw energy you get from the sun sustains you for four hundred days," he said.

I initially heard him say four days, not four hundred days.

Four days. The human body can live without food for two weeks, I thought. So four days is definitely possible.

"Four days? That would come in handy," I said.

Kevin gave me a serious look. "No, four hundred days, I said."

"What?" I asked.

I couldn't take it. The thought of someone doing that and then living their life normally for four hundred days was absolutely absurd to me. I doubled over and laughed uncontrollably.

"Do you even go to the bathroom during these four hundred days?" I asked through my laughter.

"No," Kevin said, "they only pee. No poo comes out."

This was too much. I left the room, trying to stifle my laughter.

I came back a few minutes later, still snickering a little bit. Kevin had a grin on his face.

"I'm guessing you thought that was funny," he said.

"Yes," I said a little sheepishly.

"Sorry, but until I try that out myself or something, I'm never going to believe that it's possible to do that. And if it is, it's some crazy placebo thing or something," I said.

"That's okay. That doesn't make it any less true," he said stoically.

That sobered me. I didn't like his superiority complex and assumptions that his beliefs should be taken as truths by anybody.

"Wanna make some chocolate?" Kevin asked.

"Sure!" I was taken by surprise.

Kevin got the ingredients ready in our kitchen as Rachel and I watched. At the last possible moment, he inexplicably poured some jalapeno pepper flakes into the chocolate batter as he was cooking it. He poured the batter into our penis-shaped ice cube tray and let it sit in the refrigerator. A few hours later, we had penis-shaped chocolate treats. Unfortunately, due to his putting the jalapeno pepper flakes in, the chocolates were completely inedible. I was disappointed.

I tried really hard to get along with Kevin, despite our differences. I brought him to St-Joseph's oratory and taught him some Yukon history. We danced awkwardly to Burnt By the Sun. We hosted him several times; whenever he needed a place, our door was open. However, all of that changed one day.

Rachel was home alone and I was on my way home from school. The phone rang, and she picked it up: it was Kevin. He wanted to know if he could stop by to say hi. By then, he had been getting on our nerves a little bit and overstaying his welcome, so she told him she was on her way out so he could only stop by to say hi. He said this was fine and that he'd be there in a few minutes. He showed up a few minutes later.

After greeting each other, he got down to business. He opened the fridge door and picked up a jar. It was a particularly large jar. It was translucent, and inside of it were over 2 litres of mustard - my mother's home-made mustard, that she made especially for me. He held it up to Rachel. "Your boyfriend said that I could have this," he said.

She was skeptical. "Are you sure?" she asked.

He nodded.

She had no reason to think he was lying; after all, who would steal a jar of mustard? Still, she thought it was odd that I would have kept this from her.

Never to be seen again, Kevin left with my jar of mustard. I got home a few minutes later. Rachel told me everything that happened. I was furious. I kept opening the fridge door and peeking in, as if the jar of mustard would suddenly appear again. I couldn't believe that he stole from me - and mustard, of all things!

Mustard, an acrid condiment that I have never particularly liked, that I would have gladly given to him had he asked me politely, that I would have probably never eaten in the first place!

I hate mustard.

Farnham

2009-04-15T21:40:00.002-04:00

I stared at the map I held in front of me in disbelief. I couldn't even begin to understand it. It might as well have been a blank piece of paper. I had no sense of direction - no idea where we were. Behind me were 15 of my fellow soldiers, impatiently waiting for me to make my decision. To my left was Sergeant Gadoua. I concentrated on the map, thinking that I might suddenly understand it better. I could hear the Sergeant yelling at me, but I wasn't paying attention. It was my turn to lead my section towards an area marked on the map, using nothing but a compass and the math in my head. I was terrible at math, let alone orienteering. I had to accomplish this task as quickly as possible, at 1 am, in the middle of an enormous forest. I just stared at the map, dumbfounded.

Sergeant Gadoua continued to yell at me. I still wasn't listening. At a certain point in the army, you become numb to the yelling and the push-ups. They stop meaning anything. They roll off your back, and this was no exception. The soldiers in my section all glared at me, impatient for me to come to a decision. One of them suggested I at least take my compass out.

I checked my pockets.

"I can't find it," I said.

"Fucking amazing. Where was the last place you took it out, Phaneuf?" the Sergeant asked.

"At our original starting point, close to the bivouac," I answered.

"Well, then, Phaneuf, I guess you're going to have to march all of your buddies back there to fucking get it, won't you?"

"Yes, Sergeant," I said, confused and exhausted.

Everyone groaned. "Way to go, Phaneuf," said Private Mansour.

"Fucking idiot," someone else said.

We walked the three kilometres back to the starting point - the last thing anyone wanted to do after hours of marching. We got on our hands and knees and looked for the compass. After a few minutes of searching in the muddy grass, Private O'Toole found it and pressed it into my hand. "Try not to fucking lose it this time," he said.

This is just what I need, I thought, embarrassed. I already had a reputation for losing things in the army. Usually, I only lost my own personal items. It was a much bigger deal if it was military property.

I put the compass over the map and pretended that I knew what I was doing. I chose a spot in the horizon at random and decided to lead the section there, wherever it was. At least I look like I know what I'm doing, I thought.

We marched through swamps for about an hour. Everyone had mud up to their knees and water in their boots - everyone was miserable. I was terrified that someone knew that I had no idea what I was doing. I knew my section would kill me if they knew. Eventually, Sergeant Gadoua ordered me to order a halt to the section. I ordered the halt, and we all stopped in our tracks.

Sergeant Gadoua said, "Congratulations, Private Phaneuf, you have successfully completed the task asked of you."

He paused to roll his eyes and clasp his hands behind his back.

"You have successfully found the checkpoint marked on your map."

I looked around, dazed. I had slept a maximum of five hours a day for the past four days and it was now 3 am - the beginning of my last day of basic training - and I just wanted it all to end. I didn't see any marker for the checkpoint, but decided to act natural if it meant ending this hell called sleep deprivation any sooner. I kept silent.

Private Kryviak took his turn leading us towards a checkpoint on a map. He was the last person left in the section to do this; he finished his task in about ten minutes versus my two hours.

We got back to our bivouac at 3:30 am. It stopped raining. I was just happy that everything was over with and crawled into my sleeping bag with my rifle. I didn't bother undressing; I knew that I would encounter a rude awakening in about an hour, since 4:30 was my scheduled time for fire picket duty.

At 4:15 am, I woke up to Draganic violently shoving me and screaming in my face. "Wake the fuck up, Phaneuf! You're up for fire!" I fell back asleep instantly. He shoved me again and grabbed me by the collar, shaking me. He let go and I hit the ground with a wet smack. I looked around me and groaned.

I apparently hadn't set up my tent up on good terrain. The front half of my body was completely immersed in water, and half of my face was lying in a pile of mud. I could barely move. Confused, I peered out of my tent and realized that we were in the middle of a thunder storm. It took every ounce of strength that I had to raise my miserable self out of the muck for fire picket duty. Too tired to bother looking for my rain gear, I grabbed my rifle (which had been lying in a puddle next to me) and started walking towards the fire picket tent.

"Get a fucking move on, you're late man!" Draganic yelled after me. He kept yelling, but the booming thunder gradually replaced the sound of his voice as I walked away. Draganic, what a stupid name, I thought absent-mindedly as I awkwardly stepped over soldiers' tents. I can't believe his grandfather would change his last name to that, just because he thought it sounded bad-ass, I thought. Draganic, Draganic, Draganic. Like a dragon. So stupid.

Through the darkness I made out the vague shape of Lieutenant Hahnel's tent. I made my way to it and sat down on a chair - too tired to even think of patrolling the area. I struggled to stay awake as I made a vain attempt to scout the surroundings for any signs of danger. No fucking way will there ever be a fire in all this rain.

I was shivering. After a few minutes, Lieutenant Hahnel crawled out of his sleeping bag, looking well-rested and content. He was wearing nothing but green boxer briefs and military issue socks, but looked undaunted by the weather. He walked over to a counter and prepared himself some coffee with an instant fire kit. It suddenly struck me that his tent was the military equivalent of a five star hotel in this bivouac.

"You look like shit, Phaneuf," he said, slowly sipping his coffee.

"Thank you, sir."

"Are you shivering? Don't tell me you're fucking shivering. Why don't you have your rain gear on, Phaneuf?" he asked angrily.

"Aww, damn it. I left it in my ruck sack, sir."

"You're a fucking idiot, Phaneuf. A fucking idiot. You know that?"

"Yes, sir," I said, knowing there was no other answer.

And I was.

Roseanne.

2009-04-08T23:00:00.002-04:00

"I'm telling you, Phaneuf, you have to name it after a fat bitch! Preferably one that you hate."

I didn't look up from what I was doing. I was sitting, legs crossed, with my C-7 rifle in front of me. I was busy field-stripping it. Next to me were fifteen other soldiers busy trying to field-strip their weapons as quickly and efficiently as possible.

"What are you talking about? That makes no sense," I said, keeping my eyes on my pistol grip as I removed it from the rest of my weapon.

"No, really. Think about it. This thing is made to put the fear of God in our future enemies, right?" Private Baffour asked.

I nodded without looking up from my work. I was almost finished; I glanced eagerly at Lieutenant Hahnel. Tall, thin, and wearing his beret slightly further to the left than was considered standard military protocol, he was a confident and imposing figure - I had a hard time looking him straight in the eyes. He paced back and forth across the room and monitored our progress. Please look at me, please look at me, please look at me! I screamed inside of my head.

Lieutenant Hahnel passed by me without looking once at my field stripped rifle. "I completed the field strip, sir!" I yelled out instinctively. The officer pivoted in place and kneeled down to ensure that all my pieces were laid out correctly. "Very good, Phaneuf. Now do it again, but faster."

"Yes, sir," I replied, stoical about my obligation to do it all again.

Private Baffour finished stripping his weapon as I was putting mine back together. "Okay, so I was saying. Fat bitch," he said. "It has to be a fat bitch."

"I don't know any fat bitches," I said.

"Come on. There has to be one fat bitch that has bugged you in your lifetime."

I stopped putting my rifle together for a moment and bit my lip as I thought about all of the fat bitches that had affected me in any way in my life. As I sifted through all of my life's memories, only one stood out.

"Roseanne," I said.

Private Baffour laughed quietly, so as not to alert Lieutenant Hahnel of the fact that we were having a conversation that didn't pertain to field stripping of any sort. "See? That's the spirit. When you put your rifle back together again, 'cause you're all Catholic, I'll baptize it and it'll officially be named Roseanne." He stared at me, knowing that he hit a nerve by bringing up religion.

"Yeah, we'll see," I said, giving him a side-long glance.

"Attention!" yelled Lieutenant Hahnel. Along with everyone else, I raced to my feet and stood at attention. "Alright. You guys are due for SHARP training in 10 minutes. Everybody stop what they're doing and put your weapons back together. If it's not done in less than 5 minutes, the whole section is doing one hundred pushups during the SHARP training. Go." He calmly walked out of the room.

The room was immediately filled with the sound of steel clanking against steel, of pins being driven into springs, of combat boots nervously shuffling on ceramic tiles. I rushed to finish putting my weapon back together and then assisted Private Baffour with his. The squad leader for the day, Private Montesanno, noticed me doing this and asked everyone in the room that wasn't doing anything to please help someone else assemble their rifle. I glimpsed at my watch and noted that four minutes had elapsed since the officer's departure. I looked nervously outside the door and saw Lieutenant Hahnel casually leaning on a pillar, drinking coffee.

I looked around the room and saw that all of the section's weapons were assembled. "Okay, everyone stand where you are at attention with rifles in hand!" Private Montesanno said. I grabbed my rifle and stood at attention at the same time as everyone else in the room. The room boomed with the sound of sixteen boots simultaneously striking the ground.

I stole another look at my watch. The five minutes were up.

Lieutenent Hahnel and Sergeant Gadoua walked into the room. They both walked up and down the row of soldiers, randomly and silently grabbing onto a soldier's rifle to inspect it, and then moving down the row to another random soldier. Lieutenant Hahnel stood in front of me and snatched my rifle from me. "Did you perform a function test, Phaneuf," he said. It sounded nothing like a question.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"So I can trust you to kill someone with it if I give you ammo to put in it."

"Yes, sir," I said.

He looked down the barrel and frowned. "There's some rust here at the end, Phaneuf. What the fuck is this? Are you an idiot, Phaneuf? You can be charged for this, you know. I want some fucking CLP on this before the end of SHARP training. You're a fucking idiot, you know that?"

"Yes, sir," I said, completely desensitized to his criticism.

"Apart from that one thing, good job," he said as he shoved my rifle into my chest.

I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. I had heard worse and for lesser things. I had screwed up, and I knew that the tiny bit of rust at the end of my weapon was actually a bigger deal than he let on.

Lieutenant Hahnel stood in front of the section. "At ease." The room cracked once more with the sound of sixteen boots hitting the floor.

"Montessano, your section can do a lot better. Don't forget about CLP," he said, sighing. Sergeant Gadoua was staring right at me. I pretended not to notice and stared at the wall. This is taking too long, I thought.

"Go to room E301 for SHARP training. Dismissed," the officer finally said.

"Yes, sir!" yelled Private Montessano.

He saluted the officer, who saluted him back, and then led our section out of the room and up the stairs to room E301.

A man in civilian clothing greeted each of us as we entered the room. He wore a brown polo shirt with a small Scooby Doo patch on it. He wore glasses that were too big for him and never stopped smiling.

I sat down at the nearest seat to the door. I felt a little nervous; this man in civilian clothing scared me a little bit, despite how friendly he looked.

He waited until everyone sat down and then began his lecture. "You may have noticed that I'm not in uniform. Just to warn you right now, I'm an officer."

He paused for dramatic effect.

"A Captain, to be more precise. Captain Duval."

The tension in the room increased ten-fold.

"But you'll quickly notice that I'm a nice guy. Obviously you're not going to perform any of your formal obligatory duties towards me. I'm wearing Scooby Doo on my shirt for pete's sake."

Everyone chuckled, and I relaxed a little bit.

"But this training - SHARP training - that you're about to receive, is very important. I consider it paramount in the Canadian Forces. If this shit doesn't get drilled into your head, you will be a terrible soldier, and in my personal opinion, a terrible Canadian. SHARP, as you all know, is an acronym for Sexual Harassment and Racism Prevention. But that goes for prevention of any sort of discrimination. While I'm sure most of you are already knowledgeable in how to..." he struggled for the right words. "How to not be a shitty human being," he said, smiling, "I'm still required to persuade you that it is a very, very bad idea to ignore this training at any point in your military careers. Got it?"

I nodded along with everyone else.

I looked around the room, at my section. Two women, both openly gay. Two Italians. Two Lebanese. One Pole. One Chinese. One Japanese. One Irish-American. One Persian. One Pakistani. A bunch of mutts.

I looked at my hands. And one minor, I thought.

Sixteen soldiers. With me being the sole French-Canadian in the sole Anglophone section of the Laval Basic Military Qualifications Base. Does this section really need SHARP training? I thought. We're about as diverse as the Canadian Forces can get.

"I'm going to show you a video. Pay attention. I know you're all tired from sleep deprivation but this shit absolutely has to stay with you for life."

He rolled a moveable platform housing a television into the front of the room, and popped a VHS tape into the VCR. He toyed with the dials and the screen lit up with electronic snow. After a minute or so of fumbling, he managed to get the VCR input to work and the video started.

Three soldiers appeared on the screen. They were sitting down and cleaning parts of a tank.

"So I heard a rumour about there being a fag on this base," one of them said.

"I bet it's you, Robbins," said a tank mechanic.

"Nuh uh! Shut the fuck up, I bet you're the homo," said Robbins.

I furrowed my eyebrows, in astounded at what I was seeing. I was simultaneously puzzled and incredibly amused. I looked over at Baffour, and saw a small smile creeping on his lips.

A large, imposing First Nations man, presumably the tank mechanics' Sergeant, appeared. "Hey! Knock it off! Stop talking about that, you guys know it's not okay. Shut up or you'll be charged," the Sergeant warned. He walked away.

The three tank mechanics ignored his advice.
"Do you think it's Seaver?" one of them asked.

"No way. Seriousy, I think it's Robbins," said the other.

"Guys, shut up. If anyone's a faggot, it's Seaver. He's in the Black Watch," said Robbins.

The First Nations man appeared again. "You guys are soldiers. I said to knock it off! Be professional. I'm warning you! Stop gossipping and get back to work. And stop saying that word!" he said, walking away from them.

Again, the three soldiers disregarded their Sergeant.

"You think Lieutenant Marshall could be the gay?" asked one of them.

All of a sudden, the Sergeant came pounding back. "I told you guys to mind your own business! Now I'm going to have to settle this once and for all. You know who's the fag? You guys want to know? I'm the fag! I'M THE FAG!" he roared.

I cupped my hand over my mouth and tried to hold back the laughter that was slowly bubbling within me. I looked around - everyone in the room was on the verge of cracking up. The Captain, who presumably had seen the video a thousand and one times, was the only person in the room who kept perfect composure. With his legs crossed and eyes locked right onto the screen, I envied his maturity.

I looked back towards the screen. The three mechanics looked puzzled. One of them put his hand on his hips and said, "Well, he can't be gay. He's an Indian!"

The scene faded to black.

There was a brief pause, and then the entire room exploded into manic laughter. The Captain's face remained deadpan.

He sighed and took his glasses off. "Everybody always laughs at that part," he said, smiling and shaking his head.

"Alright," he said. "Let's get serious again."

He waited until he had our complete attention.

"Did you know that 1 in every 7 Canadians is a homosexual?" he asked us. Can that really be right? I wondered stupidly.

"I can see that you all look pretty confused. That's a normal reaction to hearing something like that, I guess. Statistically speaking, several of you in this room might be gay. I strongly suggest that if any of you happen to be homophobic, to get rid of that thought process as quickly as possible. It is not compatible with the Canadian Forces. In any case, you have all spoken to homosexuals in your life whether you were aware of it or not. Probably many. Probably today."

For the next couple of hours, Captain Duval showed us a series of videos (that were notably less humorous to us, I might add), gave us pamphlets and lectures, and made sure that we weren't going to molest, offend, or touch anyone as long as we were in the Canadian Forces.

SHARP training was the last military instruction that we had for the day. After we finished, Captain Duval shook all of our hands as each of us in turn looked confused as to why an officer would bother being so courteous to a lowly recruit. Private Montesanno led us out of the classroom and into our section's tent.

I put my rifle on my cot and sat down. "Today wasn't half-bad. Not anywhere as bad as HAZMAT training," I commented as I scratched my head.

"Well, all he really taught us was to not hate faggots and queers," said Draganic. A few recruits laughed, and the rest of us looked uncomfortable or pretended not to listen.

"Actually," said Private Kryviak, "he did say something about 1 in 7 Canadians being gay, and we're 14 in this tent right now."

I noticed that Kryviak purposely excluded the two women in our section who were in the tent with us - and who also happened to be gay. I looked over at Privates Wu and Biancardi. Biancardi, looking mad as hell, stood up and stalked out of the tent. Wu shifted uncomfortably on Private Dennis's cot, and after a moment, followed Biancardi to the women's tent. She left her C-7 rifle behind.

Draganic said, "So come on. Out with it, fuck. Who's the fag? We won't care. Just fucking say who you are."

Private Cho had his arms on his hips and stared at the ground, biting his lip. Kryviak smiled. Baffour looked concerned. I sat on my cot with my hands on my knees. Apart from the creaking of soldiers leaning on cots, silence.

The dead air was suddenly cut by Private Mansour, who loudly exclaimed, "This is not important. If anyone in here is gay, who cares? Just leave it alone, Draganic."

"Aww, but come on," said Kryviak. "I want to know now."

"Me too," Private Juzda uttered quietly.

Mansour shook his head and sat on the chest in front of his cot.

Goddamn it this is stupid, I thought. Fucking Draganic can't keep his fucking mouth shut. The tension in the room was killing me.

Out of nowhere, I felt an intense anxiety bubbling up within my guts. I knew it would only go away once the situation was done with.

Without really thinking it over, I stood up on top of my supply chest and declared, "I'm the fag!"

Draganic laughed. "I can't believe my buddy is gay. Are you serious?"

"Dead serious," I said, lying.

No one laughed. Private Mansour stood on top of his cot and raised his rifle in the air with one hand. "Guys. He's lying. I'm the fag."

I smiled and said, "Man, I wasn't lying." The atmosphere suddenly felt warmer, more accepting.

Private Cho put his rifle on his cot and said, "Guys. I want to tell you. I am also the fag." Baffour put his hand up and said, "Me too!"

Kryviak said, "I guess I'm gay too, then!" and laughed.

Everyone started giggling and said things like, "I was just kidding man, I don't care if anyone's gay," and "I'm not really gay, I was just joking." But the tension was gone, and that's all I cared about.

Draganic walked up to me and slapped me on the back. "Phaneuf, I don't give a shit if you're gay. I was just curious. It's good to know whether you're buddy is gay."

"Well, I'm not actually gay," I said.

"I knew it. You're too Catholic to be gay. Everyone knows Catholics hate gays," he said. "Except you, though."

I noticed that Wu and Dennis were in the tent. I wonder how much of this they heard, I thought. "Here's your rifle. It's the right number on it, right? You're positive it's yours?" Dennis asked Wu. She nodded and took it from him. Dennis grabbed a small cloth off of his cot and left the tent with Wu.

After a few more minutes of pointless chatter, we all brought our rifles outside. Biancardi, Wu and Dennis were sitting on some crates, field stripping their rifles and polishing them. We joined them; I sat down on a skid across from Private Dennis. The sun was setting, the sky painted a pink and orange hue. The Hilton hotel on the other side of the barbed wire fence was a familiar sight to me by then. Even the roar of airplanes flying in their pre-planned trajectories overhead was comforting. And that day's sequence of events had turned out not so bad. I smiled and sighed as I started taking my weapon apart.

"Tired, Phaneuf?", Dennis muttered without looking up.

"Nah, I'm good," I said, still smiling.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Private Wu staring at me. I looked at her. She mouthed two words to me. I could have sworn she said, "Thank you." I'll never know for sure.

Before I could ask her to repeat herself, Private Baffour sat on the ground next to me and poured some CLP over my stripped rifle. "I now pronounce you man and Roseanne!" he yelled. This exclamation cracked everyone up, including me. "Told you I'd baptize your C-7, man. Anyone else want to name theirs?"

"Mine is called Mrs. Mansour!" Private Mansour shouted.

"Well, there you go, let me give her some," said Baffour as he shuffled over and dripped some lubricant onto Mansour's rifle. "I now pronounce you man and Mrs. Mansour," he said.

Everyone cracked up even more at this last remark.

After we had our gear ready for the next morning's inspection, we crawled into our sleeping bags. I set the alarm on my watch for 5 am the next morning. The lights shut off soon after. I read my Bible inside of my sleeping bag with the aid of a pocket light. For a few minutes there was dead silence, until Draganic started snoring loudly. "Goddamn it, Draganic, shut the fuck up!" someone yelled. Someone else threw a magazine loader at him and everyone laughed.

"Hey," Kryviak whispered. "What do you call a guy in a wheelchair who has AIDS?"

A pause.

"ROLAIDS."

Again, laughter. Everyone exchanged dirty jokes as I tried in vain to read my Bible.

Out of the darkness, a voice: "Vos yeules, tabarnak! On essaie de dormir, icitte!"

"Okay, sorry! We'll shut up," said Kryviak.

I put my Bible underneath my pillow and rolled over onto my back. I clutched my rifle and tried to fall asleep.

Even though the steel pressed against my bare chest was cold, and most of the recruits in my section were essentially a bunch of immature children, I was still sort of having a good time. It was a good day in the military. I could stay in the service forever, I thought as I slowly lost consciousness.

The Boquete Incident (Part 3)

2009-03-30T23:37:00.003-04:00

I took out my digital compass key-chain and read the time on it. It was 10:02 AM. I was already exhausted, and we had only been hiking for about half an hour. I put my key-chain back in my pocket and grabbed the straps of my back-pack as I continued walking. Jen and I were sweating bullets from the heat, and the acrid odour of onions was omni-present. "At least," I said, panting, "the higher we climb, the colder it will get." Jen was silent; her mouth hung open and she stared at the rolling hills to our right as she trudged forward.

We made a point of stopping once every hour in order to take a breather and get some food in our bodies. We occasionally passed a remote farm or a compound holding sheep; we spotted a tent that I could only presume held some other turistas like us. At around 1:00 pm we witnessed the inexplicable sight of a jeep climbing up the extremely rocky terrain with great difficulty. We encountered a few people going down and greeted them. One man, a Swede, stopped us and told us that the view from the summit was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

By 2:30 PM we were completely shrouded in fog and could not see more than five metres in front of us. It was getting chilly and the thermometer on my key-chain read that it was about 15 degrees out - a stark contrast to the 30 degrees at the base of the volcano. Jen and I rarely talked. I whistled Dethklok songs occasionally but the majority of the noises heard were of birds flying overhead and our feet stamping themselves into the rough, dry ground. As I whistled a song and continued my steady pace, I suddenly felt something soft hit me on the head. I stopped and patted my head with my hand. My hand came away with a coarse, gooey substance that I immediately recognized as bird dung.

Still in shock over what happened, I rammed my hand into my hair and grabbed more of the stuff and held it in front of my face in disbelief. My jaw dropped. "A fucking bird just fucking shit on my head!" I screamed. Jen looked at me and laughed. A bird cried out to my left and I immediately turned towards it and met its gaze. It was a quetzal, and I was absolutely positive that it was the one that defecated on me. "You fucking piece of shit!" I yelled at the bird. It stared at me and I imagined it to be mocking me. "What the fuck? I'm going to meet these rangers at the station with fucking bird shit in my head? Thanks a lot you fucking piece of shit quetzal!" I continued yelling. "I can't even wash my hair until tomorrow! Thanks for making my day, bitch! Seriously, thanks so fucking much!"

Jen was doubled over herself, laughing uncontrollably. I grabbed a bunch of leaves off of the ground and threw them at her. "Okay, okay, I get it, it's funny," I said, discouraged.

"They must have a sink at the ranger station," Jen said. "Don't worry, it will wash out."

"Yeah, maybe," I muttered as I kicked a rock off the side of a cliff.

At approximately 3:30, I noticed a sign about a hundred metres ahead of us. Excited at the prospect of almost being at our destination, I sprinted up to it, only to see that we still had a few more kilometres to go. I sat on a boulder next to the sign with my head resting in my hands, and waited for Jen to catch up. "We still have at least an hour to go," I said. "I feel like I'm going to pass out before then. That ranger station better actually be up there."

We walked slowly but steadily with our heads hanging, both of us beat and weary from hours of hiking. At about 3:45, I noticed a break in the fog. We walked through the break, and suddenly a steep embankment revealed itself to us. I looked up and saw what looked like flat land up ahead. I was sure the flat land held the ranger station. "Oh my god. I am running up this thing right now," I told Jen. I was too fatigued to force myself to run the entire way up, but I did my best. I used all the remaining energy I had left and managed to make it to the top in fifteen minutes.

I put my hands on my knees and smiled. I finally made it to the ranger station, a stone's throw to the summit. I looked around as Jen caught up with me. I could not see off of the edge of the cliff; fog surrounded us everywhere. I could see about five buildings to the left of us and five to the right of us. I had no idea where the rangers were supposed to be. An extremely loud, electric hum filled the air. A few fork-shaped towers ringed some of the buildings. I assumed that the humming came from the towers. I turned around and saw Jen behind me. "I really hope they know we're coming. This is creepy as hell," I said. The humming was incredibly discomforting; even the sound of our footsteps seemed eerie as we walked on the milky white gravel. We stepped cautiously as we explored the compound. I felt nervous and started to suspect that maybe the rangers weren't aware of our arrival or presence.

I looked at Jen and pointed at a door on one of the buildings at random. We were closer to the source of the humming and I had to speak louder for her to hear me. "Let's try this one!" I said.

I gave the steel door three hard knocks. There was a tense moment where nothing happened.

We waited.

I heard some noise coming from inside. "Did you hear that?" I asked Jen. I took my backpack off and started kneading my fingers awkwardly.

We waited.

I swallowed and walked up to the door again and gave it another three knocks.

Again, I heard a commotion coming from the inside. I absent-mindedly scratched my head and covered my hand in bird dung.

The door opened slowly with an audible metal screech. A thin but muscular Panamanian man wearing a black military uniform appeared. He held an M-16 rifle up and pointed it at my chest. I suddenly felt an intense desire to urinate. He looked back, still holding the weapon at me, and yelled something in Spanish to another man who was sitting on a bunk bed behind him and putting on socks. The first man looked at me in the eyes, then at Jen, and then at me again.

He uttered one word. "Que?"

The Boquete Incident (Part 2)

2009-03-23T22:35:00.003-04:00

I reluctantly woke up to the ring-tune alarm on my cell phone. She wants it, so I gotta give it to her, sang Justin Timberlake. I felt incredibly sore and the last thing I wanted to do was climb a volcano. I forced myself up, making sure not to crush Jen on my way out of bed. Jen groaned and I imitated her with a genuine groan of my own.

"I don't want to climb a fucking volcano," I said as I stretched. "Can we just forget about it?" I asked, knowing there was no way we weren't climbing that volcano.

"No, no. We're gonna do it," said Jen groggily, as she slowly emerged from the bed.

We got our backpacks ready and locked our rooms. Pancho waved at us from the kitchen. He sauntered over to us with another one of his huge grins.
"So you are ready to climb the volcano. Good luck. Your bags and room will be safe here!" he reassured us. I smiled as I left the hostel, but I still couldn't shake the weird vibe that I got from Pancho. He was almost too nice; nobody is that nice. And if I owned a hostel I would go crazy from all the horrible guests, I thought.

We turned left onto the main road and walked to Boquete's bakery, which was obviously built to satisfy the needs of all of the American ex-pats living there. I bought two pieces of cake and 24 bread rolls. Next we walked to the grocery store where I bought 18 big granola bars, 9 bananas and 2 apples. We were counting on this to provide enough fuel for us to climb the volcano as well as come down from the summit.

We walked to the intersection we thought the bus heading towards the volcano's hiking trail would stop at. We waited for about an hour, and at 9 am I finally decided to ask a local if the bus was coming at all. I stopped a man crossing the street and asked him, and he told me that the bus stop had moved to a few kilometres away. After a few minutes of brain storming, Jen and I decided that taking a taxi would be the best course of action.

After a short walk, we reached the taxi depot in the village square, where the taxi drivers - contrary to the majority of cabbies in Central America - ignored us and did not solicit us whatsoever. I picked a cabbie and asked him how much it would cost to get to the base of the volcano. He shrugged and said, "Uno. Quizá." I said, "Bueno," and opened the back door for Jen to get in before me. I followed her inside as the cabbie said goodbye to the other drivers. He drove slowly and methodically out of the square.

Soon after the taxi left the town limits, I noticed it slowing down, until it stopped completely. A short man wearing a grimy grey shirt got into the car and sat next to me. The driver and him conversed; I had no idea what they were saying.

The taxi climbed up a steep incline and the air became noticeably foggier. An old man wearing a simple white t-shirt and shorts waved from the side of the road a dozen metres ahead and the taxi ground to a swift halt next to him. He got in and said nothing. Puzzled, I just figured everyone was going to the same place. I turned to my right and saw a group of workers in a field, picking onions. My eyes began tingling and the scent of onions was overwhelming. The car suddenly stopped and everyone except for me and Jen got out. The cabbie put his arm on the passenger seat and looked back at us. "Volcan Baru!" he said matter-of-factly. I smiled and gave him two Balboa coins - the exact equivalent of two American dollars - hoping he wouldn't throw a fit and make us pay more. He grabbed the money and said, "Buenos dias."

As soon as I my feet hit the dry, rocky ground, I stumbled and almost fell flat on my face. The incline was so incredibly steep that it was exceedingly difficult for me to keep my balance. The onion pickers in the field stared at me; some laughed. As Jen was getting out of her side of the cab, I could hear the taxi driver chuckling to himself. Jen helped me up as the cabbie drove away. On impulse, I grabbed an onion off of the dirty road and bit into it, feeling my eyes tearing up as I did so. A few onion pickers saw and yelled at the others to look at me. I waved at them and started walking up the road.

"You're crazy," Jen said. She paused. "And disgusting," she added.

"I know," I replied, not quite sure if she was genuinely disgusted or not.

We walked uphill with our packs for about a kilometre, hoping we were going in the right direction. I was already tired. We passed a shack where a bunch of little Panamanian children - they could not have been older than six or seven years old - poured out and greeted us, laughing. They were adorable, scruffy little children, and obviously lived in a state of poverty. The shack they lived in was no bigger than the average living room. They were dirty and clearly had not bathed in a while. I suspected their parents were out working in the onion field. They were curious and all-smiles the whole time we talked to them. I fell in love with all of them, and especially with one precious little girl who wanted to shake my hand.

As we said goodbye and started up the trail again, we heard a tiny, shrill chorus of "Buenos dias!" I looked back and saw all of the children jumping up and down and waving frantically. It was too much for me. I quickly turned forward and started walking faster. I did not want to talk to Jen and I did not want her seeing my face. For a few minutes, I cried silently as I walked. I faced the sun as I walked, and with my eyes closed, hoped that my tears would dry quickly to avoid any potential embarrassment.

I knew that if I kept it up for too long I would just make Jen suspicious or angry. I forced myself to concentrate on something else. I slowed my pace and walked alongside Jen. She simply stated, "I'm tired." I agreed. I didn't know how I could possibly make it up to the summit at this pace.

Fortunately, the entrance to the volcano's official hiking trail fell into sight. A small cabin was next to the entrance; a rooster and some hens eyed us cautiously as we approached it. We could see a man looking at us through the window of the cabin. We entered the door of the cabin and the man greeted us, sipping his coffee. Jen and I had a very difficult time deciphering his fast, accented Spanish. "Mas despacio, por favor!" I repeated emphatically. The man told us that the toll fee was three dollars per person. I held a crumpled 20 dollar bill in my hand and asked, "Tienes cambio?" He shook his head. "What kind of idiot doesn't keep change at a toll station?" Jen asked. I knew that we were actually the idiots; no one is stupid enough to try paying with a bill that's considered much too large to use pretty much anywhere in Panama.

Through charades and school-yard Spanish, we managed to come to an agreement: that the rangers at the top of the volcano would give us the change we needed, and that we would pay the amount due when we came back down. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to me but I was done with arguing. We signed his guest book - I noticed that there were no Quebecers but many, many Swedes - and left his cabin.

I looked to my right at a portion of the summit. The summit itself was shrouded in fog. Fourteen kilometres through dense jungles separated us from the top. I sighed and took out a banana.

"Anyway. Here we go again, I guess," I said in between bites of my 5-cent banana.

Pointless.

2009-03-16T22:46:00.002-04:00

In full military attire, I sat down on my cot and picked up my Bible. I had read this specific Holy Bible - the New Testament if one wants to get into specifics - three times already since I had embraced Catholicism. It was a King James Bible - and therefore belonging to the Protestant denomination of Christianity - but I was a callow youth and thought nothing of it. I believed that the very least I could do to show God my devotion for Him was to read at least two pages of the Bible every day, regardless of how tired I was from Basic Military Qualifications training. Despite my best efforts to stick to my commitment - for example, reading the Bible even in the wake of a brutally long and hot day of orienteering lessons - I periodically forgot to give God my two pages of reading. To make it up to Him, I would read triple the amount of pages due to Him on each subsequent day.

I assumed that God was pleased. I was 16 years old and felt that God had high hopes for me in the Canadian Armed Forces. Although I didn't flaunt my age, the men in my section knew me for what I was.

Before reaching the end of my page, a voice killed my concentration. I looked up, annoyed. "What?" I asked.

"I said, Arsenault. Why do you read that stuff? Is it for a girl or something? You're just doing it for pussy, right?" Private Kryviak asked.

"No," I said, sticking my thumb into the book so that I would not lose my place.

I looked into Kryviak's eyes from across the tent. Three other recruits were paying attention.

"I'm doing this because God wants me to," I said in a soft, sinister voice. There was an awkward moment as two of the recruits awkwardly shuffled out of the tent. Kryviak looked exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Oh, cool," he said. I knew he didn't think so but appreciated his politeness. "Is it any good?" he asked, feigning interest.

"It's the best book ever written," I replied. I meant it.

Kryviak said, "I should read it sometime."

I didn't want to push the issue. "It's okay if you don't," I said. I put my Bible with pages open on my cot, face down so that I wouldn't lose my place.

I picked up my C-7 Service Rifle and strapped it to my back. "Nobody touch my book, please," I said as I slowly marched out of the tent.

The world outside of the tent was one of fences, grass, drill, concrete bunkers and about 75 soldiers - most of them French-Canadians like me. And directly to my left upon leaving the tent was Private Draganic, scratching his head. The person who was, according to Canadian Armed Forces terminology, my buddy. My buddy was Draganic. And I was his buddy. We were the only two recruits who, after our training, were going to work in a service battallion. He was a mechanic and I was a trucker. Or, according to Canadian Armed Forces terminology, a mobile support equipment operator. And my buddy, my future personal military mechanic, was cursing under his breath and pacing back in forth, while staring at the barbed wire fence behind our section's tent.

"What's up, Draganic?" I asked.

Draganic took off his military-issue vest and held it in his hands. "I'll tell you what's up," he said. "I'm going to break out of this place."

"Why?" I asked calmly. I knew that if he was caught doing what he planned on doing, he would be severely reprimanded, and maybe even kicked out of the Army Reserve. "Why don't you just change into civvies and leave the compound like everyone else?" I asked. I knew that in order to eat real food - the delicious poutine at the P'tit Quebec restaurant across the street was to die for - all soldiers had to do was change into civilian clothing, sign their name on a form in front of a Corporal working as a supply technician, and then leave. The only requirement was to come back before lights-out and to not consume drugs or alcohol in the two hours or less per night one might have of free time.

Draganic obviously did not want to deal with the supply technician.

"I already left earlier and I just changed into my military shit and I don't want to fucking change again, it takes too fucking long and I want to sleep in my clothes. So fuck that shit. I'm just going to do this the easy way." Draganic threw his military-issue vest onto the barbed wire fence. In the dim light it looked like it was suspended in mid-air.

I laughed uncontrollably at the absurdity of the situation. He's going to kill himself, I thought.

"I can't believe you're doing this," I said in between bouts of laughter. "You're going to get in such deep shit if you get caught. Sergeant Gadoua's gonna be pissed. And all for what? Do you want to buy a poutine or something? Can't you just wait till the buffet breakfast tomorrow?" I asked.

"No," Draganic insisted. By this point Private O'Toole had joined us and wanted to know what was going on. Before I could answer, Draganic explained why he felt it was logical for him to break out of the military base. O'Toole took a sip of water from his canteen and smiled. "Do it!" he said.

"I am, too. Give me my coat there, Arsenault," Draganic said. I walked five paces towards the tent and ducked my head in to grab his coat. Kryviak and the others stared at me, and I made a point to maintain eye contact with them for a few seconds. I walked back to Draganic and gave him his coat. He promptly threw it over his vest on top of the barbed wire. He looked at me and said, "Watch this." I looked at O'Toole and shook my head.

Private Draganic jumped up to the fence and started climbing. He was too heavy and had a lot of trouble climbing. "Help push me up you assholes!" he yelled. O'Toole and I rushed up to his feet. O'Toole used his hands to push up at his left foot, whereas I deemed it smarter to align my shoulder with Draganic's right combat boot. When Draganic used my shoulder as a stepping stone I realized two things: that all of the other recruits in the base could see us, and that I would have to wear a different uniform for tomorrow's inspection thanks to the stain Draganic's boot left on the shoulder of my uniform.

Draganic rolled over his vest and coat and tumbled into the grass on the other side. "I made it!" he yelled triumphantly, while doing a Rocky-style victory dance.

"Man, shut up, you're going to get caught," I said, suddenly feeling like an accomplice to something illegal. Draganic smiled and ran off into the darkness, in full military attire except for his vest and rifle. O'Toole and I looked at each other. I told O'Toole that I thought Draganic was a complete idiot for this and that he was going to get caught. O'Toole agreed. We both walked into the tent marked "Section 4" and sat on our respective cots. I grabbed my book and tried to read again but couldn't get into it. I grabbed my C-7 and aimed it at the Hilton Hotel a few blocks down. I looked through the sight and saw a man looking over the balcony, and imagined what he would think if he could see me aiming this deadly semi-automatic weapon that I had never even shot yet right at his head. Of course I was weeks away from actually having any ammunition coming into contact with my weapon, but in my imagination I saw my rifle as being an extension of my patriotism. The man leaning over the railing of his Hilton Hotel room's balcony could have been a Bosnian terrorist.

I put my rifle down and frowned. What Draganic had done wasn't very patriotic. I debated in my head whether or not Draganic would make a good buddy outside of our basic training. If I served in Bosnia, would Draganic be a loyal partner? After all, he regularly violated military protocol to serve his own needs. He thought for himself, and it seemed pointless because it didn't help Canada at all. If anything, it wasted Canadian tax dollars.

I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and wrote,

Draganic, what would you do if there was a war and they called you up to go there and kill people?

- Arsenault

His cot was across from mine, and while no one was looking, I reached over and stuck the note in his sleeping bag. As soon as I did so, all of the compound's lights went out. I looked at my watch and pressed the indi-glow button. It was 11 pm. Lights-out. I took off all of my clothes save for my boxers and socks. I crawled into my sleeping bag, but had a hard time falling asleep. I kept thinking about Draganic and whether he would make it back okay. I eventually dozed off amid the guys' dirty jokes, the terrible sounds of airplane engines overhead and the wind rifling through the tall grass around our tent.

My watch's alarm set off at 5 am. I woke up with a start. I was the first one up. I was still clutching my C-7 Service Rifle when I noticed a note wedged into the ejection port window. I grabbed it and read it.

Hey Arsenault. I would snort as much fucking cocaine and drugs as possible so that I could get out of going to war.

-Draganic

I looked across the tent, at the soldier snoring and spread-eagled on his cot in full military uniform, minus a vest and a rifle.

Worlds Apart (but not really)

2009-03-04T22:31:00.000-05:00

From Almirante, we had to take a boat to Bocas del Toro. On the cab ride to the port, I witnessed children playing with garbage and vultures walking around babies. There were several large mounds of human waste and garbage next to the dock. Some of them were on fire; all of them were surrounded by vultures. Almirante was hell on earth, and I was anxious to get to the supposed Arcadia that our Lonely Planet guide promised.

The boat ride was choppy but essentially uneventful. Bocas del Toro struck me as a poor attempt at a man-made paradise, akin to a cheaper man's Cancun. Our Lonely Planet guide claimed that it was the place to be in Panama. What it failed to mention was that it was the place to be for rich white people; I was shocked at how hostels, food, and basic goods that I had taken for granted in the rest of Panama had shot up to an astronomical price range - one that I could scarcely afford on my budget. The atmosphere was different as well. Hostel owners were now consisted of bubbly 20 year old American girls who insisted that guests stay indoors and drink at the bar as opposed to adventurous middle-aged Panamanians who told wild stories and urged us to explore as much of Panama as possible.

I immediately began referring to the city as Bocas del Bullshit.

The south-eastern tip of Isla Colon - or Bocas del Toro province - was reserved for the city of Bocas del Toro. After a few short minutes of debate on what we should do, Jen and I decided to explore the unknown and to stay in the north-western tip of the island, which was a lot more isolated.

We waited in a coffee shop, where the staff got my order for a vegetarian empanada wrong an astounding four times. Most of the customers were well-off Americans. Most could not speak Spanish and made little or no effort to speak it to the staff. I heard one ignorant man ask a girl at the counter, "What's cheese in Spanish again? Anyway, just put a lot of cheese on it." She had no idea what he had just said.

I was disgusted by the apathy and tactlessness of these tourists. I had not been around this many white people - let alone Americans - in two months. It made me embarrassed to have any affiliation to these people; even being in the same room as them made me uncomfortable. They embarrassed me and they embarrassed themselves.

After what seemed an eternity to me, a van pulled up to the side of the street. I asked the driver in Spanish if he was going to the north-western tip of the island. He did not answer, but a young teenager who I could only assume was his son answered for him that they were indeed going there.

"Cuanto cuesta?" I asked.

"Uno," the boy answered while holding one finger up for additional emphasis.

"Sweet!" I said, turning to Jen. "The first time on this island that someone doesn't try to rip us off!"

Jen and I got into the van and waited with our bags, sweating bullets. There was no air conditioning in the van and it was extremely warm and humid outside. A few more people got in the van, and after waiting a few minutes, it took off.

With still no real idea where we were going, I smiled as all of the pasty white faces were replaced with dense jungle and small wooden shacks. The van dropped off and picked up people as it made headway. Soon, we were the only ones in the van save for the man and the boy. I noticed that it was getting dark outside. After about 30 minutes of driving, we finally reached a dead-end. The dead-end was a piece of rope tied around two trees cordoning off part of the beach, and on the other side of the cordoned-off area were middle-aged white men eating supper outside. I groaned inside of my head. The man driving the van parked next to a small shack. I took the cue and paid him two American dollars. After we left the van, the boy stuck his head out and explained that a van would be coming by every half hour every day from 6:30 am to 6 pm, and that their van would be there every hour or every hour and a half. We thanked him and watched as the van took off into the dimness of the jungle.

We had taken the last van to this part of the island, and were stranded in every sense of the word. I took note of my environment to see what we were dealing with. There was a large, beautiful beach, a large building on stilts that must have been a hostel, an outdoor restaurant where the middle-aged white men were eating, and a large sign with writing in English, Spanish and another language that I didn't immediately recognize. The sign pointed to a building and read, "MARINE SPECIES RESEARCH CENTRE". There weren't many people around. The population of what was our immediate vicinity couldn't have been more than fifty or so.

We decided to get a bite to eat before checking into the hostel, and were surprised and disappointed to find that every meal at the restaurant cost about five dollars. I approached this potential budget crisis with a stoic attitude, and reminded myself that most people back in Canada would pay much more than twenty dollars a day for three meals and a place to sleep, not to mention a vacation on a tropical island.

While eating our relatively expensive suppers, I overheard some of the men speaking in a language I recognized as Afrikaans. It soon became evident that this beach had no tourists apart from us. The middle-aged men that were on the beach were South African biologists who were working everyday. They casually switched back and forth from Afrikaans to English. While I pointed this out to Jen, a dog strolled up to us and begged for attention. I rubbed it behind the ears and laughed at the way it kicked its leg in ecstasy. After finishing our meal, the dog followed us to the hostel.

There was no office to the hostel, just a small patio with a refrigerator and some chairs. A Kuna man about my age looked at me and smiled cautiously. I smiled back, consciously trying to reassure him that I wasn't crazy. I asked him if there were any rooms available. Some of them were occupied by researchers, he explained in accented Spanish, but we could choose from one of three rooms. He gave us the keys to all three and insisted that we look at all of them and pick the best one. All of them had small holes in the walls and screen doors and windows, but in typical Jen (and in my eye's mind, American) fashion, she calmly asserted her desire for the biggest room, which had an unnecessary amount of furniture: two large bunk beds, one queen-sized bed, and a dresser.

We walked back down and paid the man and gave him back the other two keys. I pointed at the fridge behind him and asked him how much a coke cost. I was exhausted and didn't pay attention to his answer, and just gave him a dollar. He gave me 60 cents back in change. I grabbed the glass bottle from him and downed the whole delicious thing. I had become addicted to Coca-Cola during my trip through Central America, and I was fully aware of it. Almost as an afterthought, I told him, "Gracias!" He laughed and walked away, shaking his head.

A stunning Kuna woman came out from the building and the man, who seemed to be her son, pointed at me and began talking to her in another language, which I later learned was Dulegaya. Before I could react to this, the dog that had begged for my attention earlier was at my feet and exhibiting very odd behaviour. It began violently rubbing its face into my ankles and jumping up at me. It then ran up to Jen and bit her in the arm as she tried to calm it down. She yelled and I put my hands out and tried to hold down the dog, which only made it more aggressive. It bit my hand and my thigh in the process. The Kuna man ran up to us as quick as lightning and began hitting the dog with a stick and yelling at it. The dog immediately stopped attacking us and stalked away with its tail between its legs. The Kuna man laughed and apologized for the dog's behaviour. We weren't hurt very badly, just a bit frightened, so we laughed along with the Kuna man.

He sat back in his chair on the patio and listened to the Kuna woman speak to him, but his eyes were set attentively on the dog.

Jen and I went back to our room and changed into our swimming attire. I was nervous as to what reaction, if any, the Kuna people would have to my tattoos, but they barely paid any attention to us. Ever since going swimming in El Salvador - where it was illegal to show tattoos in public - I was leery of exposing my tattoos, but I had forgotten that Kuna women had visible body modifications and were unlikely to hold any judgement towards me for my own.

We swam for about fifteen minutes when we noticed the dog staring at us again. There was another dog next to it. It was obviously pregnant. We got out of the water and bolted towards the stairs leading up to our room. One of the dogs, the one that had attacked us, ran after us excitedly, but we easily out-ran it when we reached the stairs. We got to our room and slammed the door shut. I looked out of our window and saw the dog sitting outside of our room's door. It whinnied and occasionally turned in circles, clearly distressed that we were not playing with it.

Jen, sympathetic to the dog's feelings, opened the door and let it into our room. I was surprised at her behaviour and asked her if she was crazy. "Don't you remember that this dog viciously attacked us not half an hour ago?" I asked.

She was unphased as she played with the dog.
"It's okay now, it's not doing anything anymore," she said assertively.

Before I could throw in a comment edge-wise about how unpredictable the dog was, the pregnant dog we had seen earlier entered the room. A small white puppy of a different breed then followed suit. Then a housecat came in, and then another. The puppy yapped and the cats meowed. The dog that attacked us panted and wagged its tail. The pregnant dog made no noise and showed no emotion. Feeling completely weirded out, I left the room, and a convoy of domesticated animals followed me outside. Anywhere I went, they followed me. The Kuna woman saw me from her perch on the patio and laughed hysterically. I looked at her as I descended the stairs and smiled.

I walked up to her with the animals trailing behind me and with my mediocre Spanish tried to ask her if all of the animals were hers. She laughed so hard that I couldn't understand her answer. Her laughter was contagious and I laughed along with her. Two Kuna men came out from the building behind her and started laughing as well when they saw the spectacle of the animals following me. It was simultaneously the cutest, funniest and most disturbing thing I had seen any animal or animals do in my lifetime.

The Kuna man grabbed the puppy from the bunch and the convoy immediately broke off, with each animal going in a different direction. I was weirded out beyond belief. "Buenos noches!" I spontaneously yelled as I ran back to my room.

Jen slept soundly. I could hear the Kuna family laughing long into the night about what had happened. It took me a long time to go under. I fell asleep with a half-embarrassed, half-amused smile on my face.

The next morning, I saw the beautiful Kuna woman on the patio by herself, her bright leg bands flashing beautifully in the sunlight. Jen was reading a book on the bed. I mustered up the courage to talk to the woman. Maybe it was just the novelty factor, but I knew I would regret it if I left Panama without talking at least a little bit with people from the Kuna tribe. It didn't matter to me what the subject was about; I knew I would feel accomplished if there was any dialogue at all.

I walked up to the woman and asked her for a coke. She smiled, and her gold septum piercing glistened in the sun as she reached forward to hand me my coke. Her piercing inspired me to talk to her about body modification. Why didn't I think of that before? I wondered stupidly. As I handed her the forty cents for the coke, I tried, in extremely broken Spanish, to tell her about my own stretched septum piercing. I didn't know how to explain how 00 gauge is a unique size for a septum piercing for the average Canadian, but as I stuttered with, "Mas grande por Canadiense," it struck me that she was flabbergasted that a white man would ever get a septum piercing at all.

She grabbed my wrist with both hands and I was suddenly mesmerized by the colourful bands covering her arms. I was caught off guard and spaced out for a few seconds. We looked each other in the eyes and something clicked. It was nothing romantic, but it felt almost supernatural. She spoke rapidly and I only caught bits and pieces of her excited exclamations. She wanted to know why I would get a septum piercing and how it was done on me. I tried my best to explain the dynamics of a dermal punch using a BIC pen and my fingers, but it wasn't a very good means of communicating how I got it done. I showed her the jewelry, which she picked up and admired, looking through the hole. I became self-conscious and hoped that there weren't any boogers inside of the jewelry. Either there weren't any or she didn't notice or care.

She told me in Spanish that she had to tell her sons about this. I was equally amused and excited by this point. I waited outside as she grabbed her sons and told them about me, this white man from Canada who has stretched earlobe piercings and a stretched septum piercing. They immediately thought it was hysterical. Since only Kuna women get their septums pierced, the idea of me having one seemed laughable to them. They thought I was girly. Their mother playfully shoved them and told them something to the effect of, "Grow up!"

She put her hands on her hips and looked at me with a smile on her face and sighed. "You are the first white man to come here in my lifetime who has not demanded a picture of me, and who has large holes," she told me in Spanish. "Really?" I asked, as I felt my ego increase in size. I was secretly almost relieved that my digital camera had been robbed from me in Nicaragua, as I would otherwise almost certainly have asked for her picture.

As I pondered this, she said something that I did not understand at all. I asked her to talk slower, but my Spanish was simply not good enough to understand. She made the universal "forget about it" hand motion and walked back inside the building, still smiling.

I went back to our room and told Jen about what had just happened. "That's great," she said, not looking up from her book.

During the few days that I spent on that island, I went snorkelling, reached the mainland of Panama by kayak, brought the convoy of animals swimming with me, and witnessed Jen defecating on a beach. I would trade all of those memories, all of those unique experiences, for those precious minutes I spoke to the Kuna woman. I would give up the entire trip to Isla Colon just to find out what it was she last said to me.

I never thought I would connect so fully to another human being regarding my body modifications. Despite our different cultures, we both lived through the same experiences vis-a-vis body modification, and knew what it was like to be stigmatized for having the piercings we did.

I'm not sure why I still place so much value and sentiment in this experience. Maybe it was the novelty of meeting someone from a radically different culture than mine. Or maybe it was because I was surprised that I could see myself so clearly in someone else, regardless of their background.

The Summer of '93

2009-02-16T23:13:00.000-05:00

In the summer of 1993, I lived in a small, American, suburban town called Bridgeville. I had a much greater grasp of English than when my family and I had first moved there a year prior. But I still had no concept of government, of true love, of satellites, of the Pythagorean theorem. I had no idea to what extent the differences between Pennsylvania and Quebec amounted to, apart from the obvious fact that different languages were spoken in each. I was an innocent child, simple-minded like the rest of them.

One blazing hot summer day that year, the phone rang in the living room of our little tan townhouse. My mother gave me the phone and told me, “C’est pour toi.”

“Hello?” I asked after taking the phone from my mother.

It was my friend Michael. He was seven years old, like me (but I was a bit older). He had been in my first grade class.

Michael asked me if I could come over to his house to play. I told him I had to ask my mother first.

“Maman? Est-ce que je peux aller chez Michael pour jouer?” I asked.

“Oui, mais il faut que t’ecris son addresse,” she replied.

I did as I was told, and wrote down Michael’s address. I told him I would see him soon. Before I could hang up, he asked me to bring my Attack Pack toys, those cars, trucks and tanks that morphed into monsters. I agreed that it was a good idea for me to bring them, and then hung up.

I carefully put as many Attack Pack vehicles as I could inside of my backpack. Almost as an afterthought, I put in a small Super Soaker pistol, already filled to the brim with water. I couldn’t remember whether Michael had a Super Soaker or not, but I didn’t want to take the risk of not bringing mine.

My mother gave me fool-proof directions on how to get to Michael’s house. I had never walked there before, but had walked through that neighbourhood several times. I had nothing to worry about. I drank a glass of milk before leaving and kissed my mom goodbye for the afternoon.

Backpack in tow, I crossed Ridgepoint Circle and made my way to Hunting Ridge road. It was a magnificent day; the heat was intense but the scenery more than made up for it. Hunting Ridge road was surrounded by trees and flowers. Community-maintained flower patches surrounded the sidewalk. I purposely walked in front of automatic sprinklers to cool down.

I had walked for about twenty minutes – a very long time for a child, anyway – when I decided to take a shortcut off of Meeting House road through a playground. I followed the dirt path, surrounded by coarse bushes and tiny flowers, and absent-mindedly tried to avoid getting stung by the bees hovering around the blossoms. The playground was deserted save for two older looking boys. They must have been about 8 or 9 years old. They looked alike and dressed similarly, with one wearing a red plaid shirt and the other a blue plaid shirt; I instantly assumed they were brothers, if not twins. One of them sat on a swing, and the other sat on the bottom rung of the jungle gym. Both of them stopped talking and stared at me. I immediately slowed my pace, naively thinking that I would attract less attention by walking unhurriedly. I glanced at them and saw that they were smiling, laughing even. I knew that they were talking about me.

One of them jumped up and blocked my path. I stopped walking and stood there, watching him. The boy smiled. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a jack knife.

“What’s in the bag, little boy?” he said.

I felt the tears running down my cheeks, down my chin, down my neck. The entire world froze. The sound of my tears hitting the sand was thunderous.

The second boy got up off of the swing and stood next to his presumed brother. He reached into his own pocket and took out a swiss army knife. He pulled the blade out and pointed it at me.

“What’s in the bag? Do you have toys in there?” he asked.

I knew I had to act.

I ran.

I heard the boys’ feet hitting the ground faster than mine were. I ran as fast as I could while I sobbed, distinctly aware that I was at a disadvantage because I had to carry a bag full of heavy toys. I thought I was going to die.

I turned back and looked at the boys as I ran away. They were grinning and still pointing their knives at me as they chased me.

”What’s the matter, little boy?” asked one of them. “What’s the matter, little boy?”

They repeated that question hundreds of times – or so it seemed to me – as I kept running. I knew they were able to catch up to me if they wanted to, but I forced myself to keep going as fast as I could despite the fact, and to not look back at them, not even for a moment. Every time I looked back meant a few more precious seconds that could potentially be used against me.

After what seemed an eternity, I exhausted all of the energy I had. I had no adrenaline left in my 7 year old body. In a fit of crying, I collapsed onto someone’s lawn. I felt my toys jab me in the back. The sound of my bawling mixed with the sounds of birds chirping, people mowing their lawns, and the sprinkler that was spraying warm water on me as if to add insult to injury.

I remembered the two boys and got up suddenly. They were nowhere to be seen. In fact, no one seemed to be outside. Dejected, I started the slow trek back home. Every time I counted to twenty in my head I looked back, to make sure they weren’t following me.

When I walked through the front door of my home, my mother asked me what happened. I mumbled something about how Michael couldn’t play anymore and had to go somewhere. I can only assume that my mother assumed that my tears were the result of my being upset over Michael not being able to play.

After that incident, I was always leery of other children in Bridgeville. My friends were skeptical as to the authenticity of my story, especially Michael, who I later had to call and explain why I never showed up at his house as previously planned. This only made me more cautious in my social interactions.

I was a shy boy.

I never saw those two boys again.

The Boquete Incident (not even close to finished)

2009-02-13T18:37:00.000-05:00

It would be an understatement to say that Pancho was an energetic man. As soon as we walked into his hostel, he burst into the room and spread out his arms. It was like a sitcom; I almost expected to hear electronic whooping.

“Are you amigos looking for a room?” he asked with a grin on his face. His English was accented but very good.

“Yes. Is there one available?” I replied. I had to look up to answer him. He was much taller than me and Jen, let alone compared to the average Panamanian.

“Yes! Come with me!” He pivoted in place and walked down a dark hallway. The hallway led to an open space outside, but still within the compound of the building. He swung his arms back and forth and whistled a song while we followed him to a door. He unlocked the door and excitedly gave us a short tour of the room. There was a window that could open and close (a novelty and luxury after nearly three months in Central America), a small bed, a mirror and a bathroom with hot running water. The price for the room was 8 dollars a night. I was sold.

I looked at Jen’s face for a sign. She gave me a non-committal look.

I turned back to Pancho. “We really like it,” I said.

Pancho’s smile broadened even more. He stretched out his arm and kept his fist clenched. I hesitated – still mesmerized by his constant eye contact and his eerie grin – and placed my open palm underneath his fist. He dropped the key into my hand and yelled, “Bingo!”

“Put your bags in your room! I want to talk to you!” he exclaimed as he jogged back to the living room. We did as we were told and I carefully locked the door behind us with the padlock. I put the key in my left sock.

We walked into the living room as Pancho was setting down a large square sheet of paper on the coffee table. “Where are you from?” he asked us, still smiling. “Estados Unidos,” said Jen.

“Canada,” I added.

“Canada!” Pancho yelled. He jumped out of his seat and ran up to a wall. He pointed at a postcard with a picture of Niagara Falls on it. “Canada, si? It is great!” he said.

“Si,” I said, perplexed.

He sat down again and giggled like a child.

“So what is your main reason for coming to Boquete? Do you have interest in going to the top of the Volcan Baru?” he asked us, his grin slowly dissipating.

We nodded our heads emphatically.

“Okay, let me draw you a map.” He spent the next fifteen minutes drawing unintelligible directions to the volcano. Jen and I routinely looked at each other and laughed when we both realized we were equally confused. Pancho tried to explain his directions but it only confused us more. Eventually he got us a photocopy of a real map, which was of infinitely superior quality.

“Do we have time to go up and go down in the same day?” I asked.

“Yes, you do, but I do not recommend. No sir, I do not. You will be tired. It can take up to 8 hours to climb the volcano. If you climb it you must sleep there,” Pancho said. “But do not worry! There are police rangers that live at the summit. I know them, they are amigos. It will cost you about 8 dollars each to stay with them. They have beds and warm blankets; do not worry, do not worry.”

I was slightly skeptical but ultimately relieved. This is great, I thought. But this is just too good to be true. There has to be a catch to all of this.

Pancho said, “If you want you can rent a sleeping bag from the hiking store on the street here. It is about ten dollars for 24 hours and it is very warm. I have used it myself. It is very cold at the summit. But it is up to you.”

“We’ll think about it,” said Jen. I already knew that we weren’t going to rent it. We were willing to simply wear more clothes if the situation demanded it. Besides, this is Panama, and I’m from Canada. It can’t be that cold at the summit, I thought.

“Okay, so everything is good then for your departure to the Volcan Baru tomorrow!” said Pancho. He stood up abruptly.

“We do have one problem though,” Jen said.

Pancho put his hands on his hips and beamed. “What is your problemo?” he asked.

”We can’t bring all of our bags with us, and we don’t know where to put them,” Jen said. “Is there a place, like a locker or something, where we could put our stuff for 24 hours around here?” I added.

“Ah, that is no problem,” Pancho said. “Come here and follow me.”

We followed him to the kitchen, where he pointed at a table. “You will put your bags underneath this table?” he suggested.

I was skeptical. “Will our bags be safe there?” I asked. “No one will steal them? No robar?”

“Of course!” Pancho exclaimed, still smiling. “It is very safe. No one will touch your bags. I will make sure of it!”

“Okay then, I guess we’ll put them there tomorrow morning before we leave then,” I said, still skeptical. I remembered that I had a lock on my bag and that the only way to rob the contents would be to slash the bag open. This gave me a false sense of security, and I recognized it as such. It still made me feel better.

“Oh, and I will keep your room free for you for when you come back, do not worry. Your bags will be okay and your room will be okay,” Pancho said.

“How much do we owe you for that?” I asked him. Jen shot me an angry look for even daring to ask such a question.

“Nada! Do not worry. It is all okay,” he said, laughing.

He stuck out his hand and I shook it, as if to seal the deal. It was eerie and unnatural to me. I was never a fan of verbal contracts.

The Worm in San Salvador

2009-01-31T07:03:00.000-05:00

We walked down another random street, trying to figure out where the bus station was. San Salvador wasn't exactly the easiest place to navigate. I followed the five second rule, with her walking in front of me by about five metres. This made a lot of sense to me; I thought it was an easy way to avoid further conflict. Both of us were angry at the other. She was furious because we were lost, and her annoyance grew after discovering I could defend myself when she took her anger out on me. In turn, I was livid due to her unfair treatment of me as her scapegoat. Bitter or not, we had to find that bus station if we wanted to get to our host’s house outside of San Salvador.

About once every block, one of us entered a hotel or gas station and asked someone inside where the bus station was. When it was my turn to ask someone for directions, she followed and waited impatiently with crossed arms. Whenever it was her turn, I stared at my feet and leaned into whatever wall was closest. Apart from when one of us spoke to a hotel clerk or a gas station attendant for directions, neither of us uttered a word. It was just the sound of our feet hitting the cracked pavement alongside the honking of traffic.

Suddenly, I noticed a figure lying down on the sidewalk, far away. It was a man on his stomach. From my point of view it looked exactly like the man was doing the worm. I thought this was incredibly amusing and started giggling. He was on the other side of the street from us, and as we approached it looked more and more to me like he was doing the worm. I was convinced that he was dancing in order to make some money at the red light where the cars had to stop.

I couldn’t hold my laughter anymore. He looked utterly ridiculous to me.

“Check out that fucking clown over there,” I said. Jennifer looked towards where I was pointing, to the man who was now directly across the street.

Jennifer looked at me and gave me a stern look.

”What the hell is the matter with you?” she asked condescendingly. I didn’t understand why she was so upset.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I replied. “It’s just a guy dancing.”

“What are you talking about? He’s a cripple. Look.”

I squinted through my glasses and got a better look. The man had no legs. He had a large, dank piece of cardboard underneath his abdomen. It jutted out to about a metre behind his body. I watched him carefully as he moved. To propel himself forward, he thrust his torso up with the aid of his arms as if he was doing a pushup, and then dragged his lower body against the cardboard so it would follow him. He repeated the action. It was as if it was going on in slow motion. My jaw dropped as the reality of what I was experiencing set in. A deep sense of discomfort settled into my entire being.

Simply put, I was mortified.

Jennifer gave me a dirty look and I stared at the ground. She walked ahead of me and continued the search for the bus station. I just stood where I was for a few seconds.

Was he in the civil war? What side did he fight for? Does it matter? I thought.

I had seen many veterans of the Salvadoran Civil War in El Salvador and even met a handful. However, the guilt I felt for having said what I said and for thinking what I thought outweighed anything rational in my mind at that moment. My disgrace kept me glued to the sidewalk. In the corner of my eye I could see Jennifer, orange from the reflection of the setting sun. She was looking at me and waiting for me to start walking. I slowly made my way towards her. Ten seconds went by, and I decided I had to look back one last time.

We found the bus station shortly after that. Eventually, we made it to our host’s house. I went to sleep soon after arriving there. The evening was a blur, filled with memories of shame,

The one memory that stands out in my mind from that day is what I felt when I looked that final time. I saw the silhouette of a man slowly and methodically dragging his disabled body towards the sunset. I thought about what that man went through, and how fortunate I was compared to him in every way. And I felt depraved, disgusting, and damned until the end of time.

Because despite all of that, to me he still looked like he was doing the worm.

1, 2, 3!

2009-01-30T21:21:00.001-05:00

Testing, testing!