I went there for so many reasons, none of them any good. I was angry at my mother and wanted to maker her angrier at me. I hated college and had spent my entire time there stoned and/or tripping on something or other. I think I hated all authority figures, really, after my father died, mainly because I hated myself for causing his death, even though of course it wasn’t my fault (you can’t really blame anyone for leukemia, which is why you blame everyone). And I wanted to get away from my sister, because she was so sad, and reminded me too much of how sad I was. So I just bought a plane ticket with the money I’d made working at the school coffeehouse but hadn’t spent on drugs because I was always able to get my drugs for free off friends and boyfriends, and told my mother I was going. She didn’t like it but she couldn’t really stop me. Plus it was the beginning of summer, so she didn’t know that I had no intention of going back to school for my senior year. I didn’t really know myself at the time, but I certainly couldn’t picture myself going back, since I’d failed two of my classes and fucked my art history advisor — so while I knew I would get a decent grade in his class, I didn’t particularly want to pursue that career any more since the idea of seeing him again, after the terrible sex that he’d told me was the best he’d ever had, poor man, turned my stomach. I didn’t feel bad for him really, though; just another old white guy with a fetish for Asian girls.
My flight had three stops, in Toronto, Chicago, and Florida, but it was extremely cheap, and I can sleep anywhere, which came in handy a lot at that time in my life. I’m also good at languages, so I picked up Spanish within a couple of months of arriving in Antigua. I had a job in a bar pretty quickly too, and I figured out how easy it was to earn enough to get by on. And once some situation got too annoying, like my boss was hitting on me, or there was some attractive guy going on a trip that sounded fun, or the hostel I was staying in filled up with a tedious group of Italians (I stayed in hostels everywhere, because I didn’t know how long I’d be staying, and then I could end up working in them too), I just left. I saw some amazing things that way — colonial buildings and churches galore, incredible waterfalls and jungle, monkeys, snakes and lots of birds, even a quetzal, once — but because I didn’t always pay that much attention to where I was headed, I can’t really tell you how long I spent anywhere, or where all of the places I saw those things were. That whole time is kind of just a blur of images and sensations.
One morning, the usual happened: I woke up and found myself sick of where I was at. It was a finca run by these Australian guys, brothers who thought they knew everything about running a ranch because they were Australian, but of course knew nothing, and it was a fake finca. It still went over well with the tourists, because the scenery was lovely, with a little brook that snaked through the property and plants and flowers that went wild around it. They had sort of the petting zoo version of livestock, goats and cows and chickens, and they did get fresh milk and eggs from them, which they used in the “farm-to-table cuisine,” which was really just whatever old Doña Manuela, the cook, felt like making that day. Sometimes, when they were too hungover, they made me gather the eggs and milk the goats and cows, which was funny, because I had no experience with animals — my mother had never let us have pets, she thought they were dirty (which they are, very). But it turned out I loved chickens, I know you won’t believe this but they can be very sweet and cuddly. Goats too, in their own hilarious way, as long as you feed them. So I enjoyed that place for the animals, but it was a typical case of employment creep, in that they hired me to wait tables, then they expected me to take care of the animals, then they wanted me to take care of the books when they found out I could do that. Being a quick study does make me valuable, but basically they just couldn’t keep anyone else around because they were so rude to everyone who worked for them, except for Doña Manuela, who they knew they couldn’t afford to lose because she was a goddess. I stuck around for her food and because I knew I could leave whenever, and before I knew it I was running the place. Plus, because I was doing the books and had the combination to the safe, I could skim as much as I wanted. I considered it perfectly fair to make up for how shittily they were paying and treating us all — I cut the rest of the staff in on my “bonuses” or just let them keep all of their tips, which the brothers usually expected half of. Yeah, I could have made that place my bitch, and I kind of did, but I knew they’d catch on eventually. And no matter where I went, it all got on my nerves eventually, even the chickens.
I’m not sure what it was this time, Rory trying to grab my ass once too often, or the fact that I ran out of cigarettes and was sick of bumming them and knew Lawrence was going to make me pay an exorbitant price to order more, like he did with shampoo and sunscreen and everything else, which he could, since we were miles from anywhere. But one morning, I just packed my things before breakfast, and waited to find someone else who was leaving who I could travel with. I knew never to travel alone, and there was an endless assortment of tourists who just loved to become your best friend for a day or two. Sure enough, there was one of them, an American, with longish dark hair and wrinkles and a nice tan — she’d obviously been there long enough to have acquired that. I spotted her first because she by herself, and her Spanish was pretty good, which was always an asset, I hated having to do all the talking. Plus, she seemed like she was friendly enough to start conversations with people, but she didn’t talk so much as listen and occasionally take pictures when she thought no one was looking with what looked like this huge, ancient DSLR. Seemed like she’d be tolerable.
“Hey, are you leaving today?” I asked when I served her her breakfast.
“Yeah,” she said. “Heading to Rio Dulce, to this hotel in a swamp, you know it?” She pulled out her rather trashed guidebook and searched through it.
“I don’t know the place but I’m headed that way,” I said. “Meeting up with some folks in Mariscos.” I wasn’t, but I always lied about stuff like that, so they wouldn’t expect me to be their travel buddy forever. I’d heard about this Russian-run resort in Mariscos with a spa and minibars in every room, which sounded about as resort-y as Guatemala gets. Seemed like a good place to pamper myself on someone else’s dime. “Can I tag along with you?”
Her name was Lydia, and we left shortly after breakfast. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone, since that’s how I preferred things, and I also didn’t want the jefes to know I was leaving. I knew they’d try and persuade me to stay, plus I had ripped off an extra large chunk of their cash as a parting gift, which I felt that I entirely deserved as severance pay for taking care of their asses for so long for next-to-nothing, but they probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. It was easy enough to pull off though, since they never got up before noon.
We trudged out on the dirt road that led to the carretera. I just had my small backpack — I’d refined the art of traveling light — but Lydia had this huge rolling pack, which of course wouldn’t roll on the dirt, she more or less just dragged it, but she said it was really too heavy to carry as a backpack, so she’d just given up trying. You could see that in the holes that had been worn through the pocket on the bottom, thanks to all the “rolling.”
“One less pocket,” she sighed.
“One less pocket to fill,” I replied. “Did you really need whatever was in there anyway?”
“Well, I was using it for my toiletries,” she said, “so now I have to squish them into the side.”
“You know you can bum those wherever you go, right?” I said. “Somebody always leaves some in the shower.”
“True,” she said. “Better than what I have too, since all I could find at the grocery in El Remate was Suave.”
We both made faces. Cheap shampoo is the worst.
“I have gotten better, though,” she continued. “I only carry one book at a time, and exchange it for something else when it’s done wherever I am.”
“Good,” I said. “How many shirts do you have?”
She looked sheepish. “I’ve gotten it down to eight.” I rolled my eyes. “But I arrived with 12, so I’ve given away four, as well as the jacket I bought in Xela. And I’ve only got two pairs of shorts and one pair of pants. And of course tons of underwear.”
I gestured at my bag. “Basically all underpants. It’s all you really need.”
“You obviously don’t sweat as much as I do,” she said, looking me over.
“You’d sweat less if you didn’t have that stupid bag,” I laughed.
We reached the carretera and waited for a while in the dusty humidity, while trucks rolled by and honked at us, until finally a car pulled over. It was dented and looked like it had never been cleaned, but it had four wheels and a guy and a girl inside, which is always safer than just getting picked up by guys. We told them we were headed to Rio Dulce, and they said they could take us to Poptun for 60 quetzales each, which was not too much more than the bus, and we’d be riding in style (sort of), so we agreed. Always better to have a clear financial transaction too, then you know that’s all they expect.
On the way, I gave Lydia the full scoop on the finca, about the bosses and the chickens and Doña Manuela, how she could chop the head off of and cook anything, and might do that to you if you crossed her. She told me about how she’d come to Guate to get over her ex-boyfriend, and how she’d been there for a little over six weeks, and how much she’d enjoyed traveling alone, even though she hadn’t expected to.
“I was supposed to travel with someone but it didn’t work out, and I’m kind of glad,” she said.
“You meet a ton more people this way,” I agreed. “And you don’t have to deal with anyone else’s bad decisions.”
“Yeah, I only like my own bad decisions.”
“Have you made a lot of them?”
“Yes, but the good bad kind, if you know what I mean,” she said, wagging her eyebrows.
She proceeded to tell me about the three guys she’d hooked up with on the trip, a small number in my mind of which she seemed proud (I’d stopped telling people how many hookups I’d had in my now-going-on-12-months on the road. Other women either get jealous or they think you’re a slut, and neither has a positive outcome).
We made good time to Poptun, where we got some sandwiches at the Maxi Dispensa. While we were eating them on the curb outside, I overheard a couple of guys who were cracking open the beers they’d just bought talking in the broken English of mixed Europeans about how they were going to stay at a hostel called El Gringo Perdido outside of town, which supposedly baked its own bread and had horses and “unbelievable” parties.
“Hey, that sounds like fun,” I piped up, giving them my coyest smile when they turned to look at us. “How are you guys getting there?”
As it happened, the place had a shuttle from town once a day, and we were just in time to catch it.
“Nice,” said Lydia under her breath as we followed them to the stop.
“Eavesdropping has served me well,” I said.
“Me too, but usually more to vet people. Like if they’re talking too much about who they’ve ‘pulled,’ or their zodiac signs?” She shook her head. “Plus you get good stories for your journal that way.”
“There’s something else you don’t need to be carrying around,” I said.
“Really, you don’t have a journal? But then how will you remember anything later?”
I shrugged. “You remember everything important. Everything else, who cares?”
Gringo Perdido was not a bad place, although everything about it was loud — the drunk guys (they assumed we were going to join them in drinking their way through the rest of the day because they’d told us about the shuttle), the Spaniard in our bunk who kept yelling in his sleep, the party that was very not unbelievable but still wouldn’t end. Still, we enjoyed swimming in the water hole, which was extra refreshing after the long dusty trip and the Euro BO, and their pan integral was actually pretty good. The rest of the food was nothing to write home about. A lot of these hostels think that anything with quinoa and a couple of vegetables is going to make gringos happy, and by and large they’re right, but it can make for some very boring meals. If I’d been helping in the kitchen, things would have been different.
“Really?” Lydia asked when I remarked upon this. “What would you have done with this?” she said, pointing at her dried hunk of veggie burger.
“Well, I’d make it from scratch, with some kimchi and chopped shiitakes, for starters.”
“Can you get kimchi here?”
“You can get kimchi anywhere if you know the right people.” I reached into my bag (I almost never leave my bag in a hostel dorm room, just dump out my clothes there) and pulled out the container I’d sequestered from somewhere, several hostels or fincas ago.
“Really? You won’t carry shampoo but you’ll carry that?”
“This is a necessity,” I said, using my fork to spread a little on my boring quinoa bowl. “And it lasts. A little goes a long way. Want some?”
She spread a little bit on her burger and took a bite. She nodded. “It helps.” Then her eyes popped and she dove for her water glass as I laughed. “And has a kick!” she sputtered.
“The real stuff does. Clearly you’ve only had hipster kimchi before now.”
The next day, we got a lift back to Poptun from the produce delivery guy, which meant we had to ride with turnips and kale and dandelion greens, but as Lydia pointed out, it was actually pleasantly fragrant. We caught a shuttle for Rio Dulce, and from there, we had to hitch again to get to this hotel Lydia wanted to stay in, Casa Perico, which was actually in the Park Biotopo Chocon Machacas, aka swamp. It was an interesting place, on all these wooden platforms that snaked into the brush, or whatever you’d call that flora that’s all marshy plants. The guys who ran it were unfriendly Euro types, who gave us a hard time when we spoke to them in English, so then I showed them how good my Spanish was and that shut them up. Then I saw them talking in German to other people and I was like, “What the fuck?”
“We just don’t see why English should be the lingua franca. It’s American hegemony,” said the one who tended bar after we’d gotten drunk enough that night for me to ask him what his deal was. Plus he was cute. “That’s why we don’t speak it.”
“Oh right, because German hegemony has been so good for the world,” I replied.
“Well, we’re Swiss actually,” he said, the German accent making his Spanish sound extra precise.
“Oh, and the fact that you speak German doesn’t have anything to do with German hegemony?”
“Yes, but we live here, and here the colonial power is the United States,” he replied. He was liking our banter, I could tell, though he also liked having the upper hand of being more sober than me.
“He’s got a point,” said Lydia, who could hold her own in a Spanish political conversation decently for someone with only four weeks of conversation classes. “We Americans fucked this place up but good. That’s been our MO for the region.”
“I’m Canadian. We also speak English,” I said. “And we didn’t do anything. We are very nice people.”
The dude laughed at that but I saw him reappraising the quiet-ish white chick, and thought maybe I should surrender this one to her, but then she yawned and said she was going to bed. Guess he’s mine, I thought, as he poured me and him another round, on him. He passed out before we got past second base, but that was fine with me, at some point I’d realized I was just kind of going through the motions anyway. I couldn’t understand why; he was certainly hot, especially now that he was shirtless. But sneaking out of yet another creaky-doored room of yet another bartender whose name I’d already forgotten (or had he even told it to me?), I suddenly just felt exhausted. Then I screamed when what looked like a giant roach crawled out of my toiletry bag, and woke Lydia up, and I felt bad about that, even though she sleep-laughed about it when I told her about the Godzilla roach. It occurred to me that I usually didn’t feel bad about anything I did to anyone, so this was unusual: that I actually cared enough to not want to wake her up. I went to bed making a mental note that I ought to split soon, and to keep every bag zipped as long as we were in swampland.
The next morning, I found Lydia talking with a young couple at breakfast. “Roy and Maeve are going to take a boat tour of Canyon…What’s the name of the canyon?”
“Canyon…Bob?” said Roy. They all laughed, already bonded. “Anyway, it’s supposed to be beautiful, they told me about it at Atitrans.”
Atitrans, the local travel agency, was for suckers, but for some reason I put on my agreeable face and said, “Oh yeah, they can be good at finding stuff that’s not in The Book.” That’s what we called Lonely Planet, since it was practically the only guidebook anyone had.
“Do you have to head to Mariscos to meet your friends or can you come with us?” asked Lydia.
I could tell Roy and Maeve were those trusty Irish types who are pretty much game for anything if you make it sound fun, as somebody clearly had already done with this canoe trip. They seemed like they’d be perfectly fine people to leave Lydia with, giving me my easy out. Things felt different in the light of day, though, and why couldn’t I act like a tourist too for once, even if I didn’t feel like one any more? Plus, on the road you have to stick with the people who don’t annoy you for as long as you can stand it. I made a split-second decision. “Oh, yeah, they texted and told me they’re stuck in Coban for a couple of days, somebody got a stomach thing. So I’m not in a hurry.”
I threw on some clothes and we all walked into Rio Dulce, where we caught the bus that the Atitrans guy had directed them to take, then hitched a ride in a pick-up to the edge of the river. There we found a dock with a few lanchas, and an old guy named Juan Carlos agreed to take us into the canyon on his for about 80 Quetzales. I pretended to negotiate because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but this guy stood firm. Truly, after I’d been there a month, I always acted like the moron Canadian when it came to negotiation, on purpose.
Roy was still grumbling about the fee as JC oared us into out into the water (I never actually called him “JC,” because saying that in Spanish is actually harder than saying Juan Carlos, but I like to think of him that way). “I think he’s kind of screwing us. $10 is actually quite a lot for Guatemala…”
“Yes, it is,” I replied. “It’ll feed his family for a nice long time, and you’d use it for what? One night of drinking?”
“How do you know he won’t use it for a night of drinking?” mumbled Roy, looking chastened but still disgruntled.
“Because he’s not Irish,” I said, in one of those snappy comebacks I always regret — or would have, if I hadn’t seen Lydia suppressing a laugh. The Irish are one of the few groups you can still stereotype for the sake of humor. “No, I’m kidding, but seriously, we’re supporting the local economy. Get with it.”
“Of course we want to do that,” said Maeve, “we just don’t want to seem like easy marks, you know?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Wow,” Lydia said, quietly, but significantly enough to shut us up. Or maybe it was the echo that made it seem that way, because we looked up and saw that the stream was drawing us into the narrowing corridor of limestone that formed the canyon. For the next couple of minutes, we could only see light glimmering in from up above the walls, and from the sliver that must’ve been the end of them somewhere way ahead. The plants that had managed to slither their way up the sides over the years dripped their slimy green on us in trickles that ended in slow, profound plops when they made it to the water. That, along with the oar dipping slowly in and out, first on one side of the lancha, then the other, and a little bit of grunting and wheezing from JC (who knows how old he was? He had amazing, ropy biceps), and the sounds of birds and insects that was the non-stop symphony of the biotopo, formed a cocoon around us. It had been a long time since I’d been away from people long enough to hear something like that. It’s easy to forget how often our pointless yammering is drowning what’s beautiful out.
Eventually, the walls widened to form a sheltered area with large pool, which shallowed at one end into sort of a beautiful little stone and pebble beach.
“Vayamos a la playa,” said JC with a smile.
Roy helped JC pull the lancha up out of the water, and we all went swimming while JC watched us and ate Elotitos (basically corn nuts. The lime and salt was my fave). I was also keeping one eye on him and our stuff the whole time, even as I got into a splashing battle with the Irish, which seemed to be their way of letting bygones be bygones. Lydia just circled us, floating on her back.
“You should try it. Very peaceful,” she said, as she got out, shook herself off, and took out her lunch. As she shared her sandwich with the old guy, I took a moment and did, lying back and staring up at the sky that formed its own pattern combined with the walls above us. For a moment it felt like I was merging with the water, hearing every sound of it lapping, ebbing and flowing in that canyon and back down the stream. For a few minutes — I don’t know how long it was — I just let everything go. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt safe enough to do that.
After we all dried off and ate, JC rowed us back downstream. As we came out of the tallest canyon and the light got brighter, I was surprised to see Lydia pull that huge camera out of her backpack and start snapping pictures. I couldn’t believe she’d been hauling that thing around with us the entire time, though I supposed it was smart that she waited until the trip back to take it out. Maybe she had learned something in her six weeks in country.
When we arrived at the dock, I tipped JC and he smiled for the first time all day.
“You tip better than most Chinese.”
“Maybe because I’m Korean,” I said.
“Ah,” he replied nodding sagely. “Samsung.”
Lydia was finishing loading film into her camera when I joined the others to head back to the road.
“Wait, that’s a film camera?” I asked. She nodded. “So that means you’re also carrying around, like, a million rolls of film?”
“If by a million you mean, say, 30, then yep,” she said.
“So, but…you can’t look at the pictures until you get them developed,” said Maeve, sounding a bit bewildered. Riiight, I thought: Millennials.
“Nope,” said Lydia.
“Then how do you know if your pictures are any good?”
Lydia shrugged. “You just take a lot of them and hope for the best. It’s how pretty much all photographers did it since photography was invented until, like, 2002.”
Maeve shook her head in amazement. “You’re quite the chancer.”
“Risk-taker,” inserted Roy, when he saw us looking bewildered.
Lydia smiled. “I’ll take that.”
We finally flagged down a car — a really nice car, a shiny, gold-painted SUV. I hadn’t seen any cars like that since I’d been in Guatemala. When the driver rolled down the window, the waft of AC and purr of a smooth sound system confirmed it: money. I saw there were two passengers already, a large man and a skinny younger man, so I figured we wouldn’t fit.
“Hi. Have you got room for two to go to Rio Dulce?” asked Roy, in English.
Lydia and I stared at him, then at each other. How rude was that?
The driver looked us all over, giving particular attention to the three girls with a final landing on Maeve, unsurprisingly I guess: she was young and had big breasts and that cute Irish nose.
“We can take all of you if two can ride in the back,” he said. His English was good too. Do drug dealers speak good English? Maybe the ones near the top of the food chain.
“Vaya! Muchas graçias,” I said, pulling out the Spanish, and my good accent, to subtly show Roy up and let the guy know we weren’t all 100% gringo.
“De nada,” he said, smiling. “Adelante.”
Lydia and I took the way back, of course (yet another thing you’d never do at home. Auto safety is a much lower priority in Guate), and the driver had his friend move out of the front so Maeve could sit with him. He chatted and flirted with her the entire time, while Roy was stuck between the two other guys in the back seat, trying to stay in the conversation by asking questions about the car and what the driver did for a living (the guy replied that he was a “businessman”). Roy eventually gave up and sulked.
“Serves him right if the ‘businessman’ steals his chica sexy,” I muttered to Lydia, who tried to stifle a laugh, but ended up snorting, which made me laugh, and soon we had an attack of the giggles that nobody else in the car could understand.
After we got back to the hostel and showered, I came out to the bar and found Lydia talking to a Chilean couple, with whom we ended up spending the evening. They were from Santiago, and made me think maybe I should go there because they were so cool. He was an architect, had a little sketchbook were he had amazing pictures of the plants and birds and other things they’d seen — the kind of artist who doesn’t need to say he’s an artist. She had just finished her masters in psychology, which made sense: she had a lot of funny comments about Europeans, how they talked like they were the only ones who knew anything, and ate “like they weren’t hungry.”
“How do you meet all the interesting people and I meet all the losers?” I asked Lydia as we headed off to bed.
“Oh, like Maeve and Roy?”
“Oh right, you also landed those two didn’t you? Though they did have a good idea with the canyon trip.”
“Exactly. You win some you lose some.”
Still, when she asked me if I wanted to go on to Quirigua with her, I found myself saying yes again — like she’d become my lucky charm or something. I didn’t know anything about the place, but things were just working out so well, it didn’t make sense to break the streak. She navigated (she was pretty good at that too), and we took a chicken bus to another chicken bus that eventually got us there. I was beginning to doubt Lydia’s luck, though, when several locals we spoke with on the second bus told us there was no hotel in Quirigua.
“Have you seen Quirigua?” one of them asked.
“There are actually some nice ruins there,” Lydia said. “According to the guidebook.”
The guy just shrugged. “If you say so.”
When we got off the bus, I had to admit it did look like just a bunch of ramshackle houses around a tired-looking square with one big, whitewashed church — not one of the pretty ones. Nobody else got off the bus, and the people we passed in the street couldn’t seem to help giving us peculiar looks, almost like they’d never seen tourists before. One of them finally told us there was a hotel, then gave us the typical useless directions (“Turn left at the small church, not the big church”), but the next person did better, and we arrived at this little family-run place, which was really just their house that had a couple of extra rooms. Our room was not the best, but not the worst either, and the pollo frito the proprietress made us was actually pretty tasty. While we ate it, we were harassed by a giant four-year-old who desperately needed a playmate.
“Can you understand anything she’s saying?” I asked Lydia, who interacted with her more than I did. She’d keep running over to the electrical outlet, touching it, and making an exaggerated “AY!” and running back to us. I wondered if maybe she’d seen someone get electrocuted and had turned it into a game.
“Nope, can’t understand her, or really anyone,” she replied. “Their accents are so thick.”
“Hick towns,” I sighed.
But we did have a television, which gave us a few hours of fun, laughing at the crazy commercials. There was one where people were smearing this cream on various parts of their bodies, first their stomachs, then their hair, then their skin, making it all thinner and straighter and whiter I guess. I mean, it was sad too, given the racism behind it all, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so much.
“Oh, man, we have got to get to sleep,” Lydia finally said, checking her watch. “We have to get to the ruins early tomorrow.”
“THE RUINS,” I said, with earth-shaking dramatic flair, because she’d been talking about them so much. They were the whole reason she’d dragged us there. “Why do we have to go early again?”
“I’m catching the bus back to Antigua to meet my friends tomorrow evening,” she replied. “Remember?”
I didn’t remember. I guess maybe we’d talked about it when we first started traveling together, what her trajectory was, what mine was. But I’d been lying about mine.
“Have you heard from the friends you’re meeting in Mariscos?”
“No,” I said. “I have no service here and have you seen any internet in this godforsaken place?”
“Well, if you want to come with me to Antigua, it might be hard to find a place to stay because it’s Semana Santa, but maybe you can sleep on the floor of the room I’m sharing —“
“No, I’m sure my friends are there by now. I mean, hopefully I haven’t missed them with this little detour. THE RUINS better be worth it.”
When we went to see the ruins the next morning, it was raining, which didn’t help my mood. I was angry that Lydia was leaving but I couldn't admit that, angry at myself for getting too comfortable and happy with the situation we'd had when I knew it was going to end, angry that I didn’t really have any friends to meet but I had to keep pretending that I did — heck, that I didn't really have any friends period, but I certainly couldn't admit that to anyone, least of all myself. So I just got madder and soggier, waiting for her to take the million pictures she just had to take. We were the only ones there, which drove home for me, at the time, that going there had been a mistake. But afterwards, I weirdly couldn’t get the place out of my head. I was glad when Lydia sent me pictures a few weeks later, and sort of thought, “Oh right. It was like that,” because my pissed-offedness meant I’d kind of managed to miss, at the time, what exactly was so cool about it. These massive stone monoliths looming over you, 20 feet high, maybe more, carved with huge faces and Mayan inscriptions, and these gigantic zoomorphs, which are like stele but rounder and flatter and carved into animals — one was a turtle, another a bird — and all of it surrounded just by this green silence, broken only by the pat-pat-pat of the rain. You could see why people got religion there once, if that was what the things were for.
Other than messing up my own day and the memories of it, my anger didn’t amount to much, or at least not anything dramatic, since the way I expressed it back then was to clamp up and go distant. But it did make for a shitty goodbye. When my bus came, I didn’t even hug her, I just waved and got on it, leaving her behind to wait for hers in the drizzle that was still coming down, and would for another day, matching the mood. I didn’t even turn to look back as we drove away. I never did.
By the time I got those pictures, I’d already found a new spot in Mariscos: a fancy hotel, just like I'd expected, and lo and behold, they needed someone to work the front desk. It was nicer than any place I'd been hired yet, and I could tell that soon I'd be running it, too, just like I'd done everywhere else. But I also could tell I'd be fighting off the slimy Ukranian boss who brushed against me on day one, and dealing with the French cabana girl who'd wanted the front desk job and now shot me daggers every day, just assuming I was sleeping with him (because she probably had and was pissed it had only gotten her a cabana job). And the rude guests, mostly from Romania, who somehow expected some fancy resort, I guess fooled by the website and the fact that it said there was a trouser press in each room (pressing trousers to go where, exactly? In Mariscos?), a “spa” which turned out to be one, always-clogged hot tub, and a “wellness center” (I still have no idea what that was supposed to refer to. The pool house where the old lady handed out towels and pretended to book a massage with the masseuse who inevitably had to cancel an hour before?). It all just made me tired, even though I was sleeping like 11 hours a night. Why not? The place was pretty, but after a month I couldn’t see it any more, and the people were the opposite of interesting — or maybe I’d just lost interest in people, at least the kind that came and went. I had a hard time caring about any of it. I realized that I missed having someone who I could talk to about nothing important, someone to watch my back, someone who knew me almost as well as I knew myself, even if that wasn’t saying much.
In her email with the photos attached, Lydia told me that she was back in New York, had found an apartment in some neighborhood that was far enough out that she could afford for it to be shabby but big, with good light. She said she was looking for a roommate and a job, which wasn’t fun, but she was still glad to be home.
“And if you ever want to come visit New York, you know you’re welcome!”
I looked at that sentence for a while, wondering if she meant it, then deciding it didn’t really matter. A week later, I was on a plane, then making my way from JFK to Bed-Stuy, not that I knew where that was at the time. Still, getting there, while annoying by most people’s standards — because you have to take the Air Train to the right A train to the C train — felt like such a dream compared to everything I’d been doing for the past year. I mean, people complain about the subway, but they don’t realize how great it is to have public transportation that can mostly be relied upon to show up on the regular. Of course, Lydia’s building was a walk-up, but you know me, I travel light.
“Hi!” I said, casually leaning against the door jamb, “I heard you were looking for a roommate?”
The People Who Don't Annoy You
Enjoyed the excerpt and am looking forward to the next chapter!
Thanks Mom! ❤️