Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Well that’s fuckin’ ominous.”
“No, I’m saying it’s Easter. The buses… your chicken-buses... aren’t going anywhere.”
“Well…”
The German couple that was also staying at Santa Maria turned out to be pretty cool. Having toured more of the United States than I had, they were of a mentality both incredibly accepting and seemingly the epitome of expensive, not being able to brush their teeth without sparkling water and a brand new toothbrush. And I probably wouldn’t have made Managua in time if it weren’t for them.
“...shit.”
Shoving everything I owned into my book bag, I hugged the sweet old woman, and darted out the door, spurred by laughable desperation, piss-poor timing, and the promise of a full, English conversation just days away.
Keep calm, drive on, and everything would be just fine.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present:
My luck wasn’t lost on me when I bought the ticket and climbed onto the packed bus, my trip home building momentum where a brick wall could have been. Beyond the reminder of how beautiful the wild world can be, the trip back to Managua and my hotel was uneventful.
The hotel was beautiful, a large, lavish building made of adjoining rooms held together by a massive lobby set up to make it seem all the larger, the Victorian aesthetic melting into the background by culture and time.
This structure was squeezed between a highway and a fierce drop in socioeconomic housing, holding it’s verisimilitude with a fence of thick iron topped with barbed and razor wire.
I spoke with the clerk, who sold me a beer before I had the key in my hand, then walked to my air-conditioned room. The sweltering heat had sapped me of strength, so I stood in front of the cool breeze coming from the vent above me, lifting the ice-cold Tona to my lips and thanking whoever would listen for the sweet reprieve.
From there, I walked out onto the balcony, a full inch and a half wide deck that protruded like a zit from the side of the building, lit a cigarette and stared at the a man living next to a dumpster.
After finishing the smoke and collecting myself, I walked past the homeless man and down a few blocks to the supermarket where I could get a few simple supplies to last me the next couple of days.
Once I had what I needed, bread, peanut butter, jelly, rum, the basics, I approached the cashier, waiting for him to ring everything up before he decided to demand “Saluda.”
I stared at him, confused. “Saluda” means greeting. I thought I’d greeted him once it was my turn to be rung up.
“Hola?”
I was grateful for his patience and slight chuckle. He then extended both thumbs and forefingers, making an invisible box in the air.
“Passport.”
It was a pleasant exchange, the sort that reinforced the commonality of man.
With this moment placed lightly over my subconscious, I walked back to the hotel happily, reserved to the idea that this trip had broadened my world in ways that I could never have expected.
So it threw me off when the homeless man sitting by the garbage started yelling at me after I gave him the change in my pockets. I ignored him and started to walk away.
But as soon as he mentioned “muerte,” my kindness switched off and I grabbed my knife, my finger on the flicking mechanism, and turned to see a man with nothing to lose.
He saw where my hand had going and shut up immediately, forcing me to realize the scenario in which I’d found myself.
Forcing me to realize that my hand was shaking with adrenaline, my eyes wide with expectation, and all in a split second.
It reminded me of Afghanistan.
So I reached in my wallet, handed him five American dollars, and with an apology, I walked back to my room to watch television and try to forget that being bipolar comes with a terrible responsibility.
This point was driven home with every cigarette I smoked on that little balcony.
Like clockwork, I was met with the man by the garbage, yelling obscenities at the passersby. I waved at the man and he showed me his middle finger, choosing me as his target of anger every hour, on the hour, one cigarette at a time, entirely forgetting the exchange we’d had just moments previous.
Oddly, something his open hatred reminded me to text my girlfriend, so I opened my phone to the message that I had 10% charge left on the battery.
No stress.
I smiled at the man, waved, then closed the balcony door and went to plug in my charger, secure in the knowledge that everything was taken care of.
I had been responsible.
Of course, that quickly turned to frustration and panic when I realized I’d forgotten my phone charger in Esteli.
Sonofabitch.
And the rum wasn’t helping me calm down.
It was more than just my source for emergency phone calls. It was my Rosetta Stone, my map and compass, my breadcrumbs in the forest that connected me to my home and the world around me.
However, the phone case I had brought with me had a solar panel on the back that fed an external power source. At the acknowledgement of this, I relaxed slightly and pressed the button to activate the backup battery.
Two days.
I can make it two days.
Fuck it.
By the time night had cooled the air, the man by the dumpster left, presumably to write his thesis on the expansion of Chinese ideologies in relation to their assimilation of foreign financial debt.
Or maybe he was off to chase cats in the unlikely event that there was a treasure map tattooed onto one of them.
The gold is right... here...
It was a fun thing to think about while traveling gently into dreamland.
But there was something hidden in that world that came to the fore that night. Something that forced from me a scream born from a world shattered, from the untethering of moors tied to the sole port in a perfect storm.
I woke up in a pool of sweat, my throat sore, the bed sheets spread across the floor like spilled milk.
So I kept it easy that next day, only going out for a 6-pack of Tona and to hand the swearing, scowling garbage man any loose change on my way back.
Posting up in my room and watching television in between reading chapters of Dune, I waited until late that night before setting up my wakeup call and taxi reservation. I walked down the wide staircase to the large marble main room, my footfalls the only echo in an otherwise deafeningly silent spread of lost aristocracy. I reached the front door for a little walkabout, but before I could try it, I saw the padlock hanging from a pair of metal loops meant to hold the door fast.
No maids, no cashier, no staff or guests. Just a lock hanging from the front door and the heavy atmosphere of being alone.
Once the craving for nicotine flooded me, I walked back out to the tiny balcony, ignoring the man by the dumpster blanketed in shadow. From there I recognized that the outer gate, the one with barbed and razor wire, was also closed and padlocked. I looked at the giant air-conditioning box on the inside of the perimeter and took note of it as a potential exit if the need came. No stress.
It took two hours of going downstairs every commercial break before I became truly concerned.
I was locked in, no help in sight, no epiphany to save me from my own assumptions.
Only a task laid before me.
My plane would leave at 8:30 that morning. That means I needed to be at the airport by 7. From there, it would be a short trip home. The things that were in my way?
Surmountable.
By one o’clock that morning, I was struck by a moment.
There I was, aching and exhausted, leaning out over a one inch porch into the city of Managua, rum in one hand, lighter in the other, a cigarette dangling through a shocked bristle of mustache, foot infected, knife in pocket, aware that in a couple of hours I would have to climb down a ladder I’d made of paracord and jump a barbed wire fence, run a couple of blocks, and hail a cab before I was stabbed by the homeless man who’d been threatening my life for the last few hours.
Chase the rabbit... down the hole... through the roots... shit, let me start over...
But that wouldn’t happen. Instead, I’d greet the people in the morning who had just arrived for a long day’s worth of waiting for patrons, then get me a cab and that’s all she wrote.
I just had to be patient.
So, every time the little hand on the clock face touched a number, I’d walk down to the receptionist station, thinking “This time it’s gonna work.”
But once that little hand touched 7, I laid the paracord ladder on the table and walked downstairs one last time, checking off each box on the list of how I could get out of the hotel and on that plane.
One more time I checked the front door, this time pulling on the handle, rather than concluding it was locked via the padlock. It opened up so easily that I had to question whether it was mocking me, the padlock holding tight only the upper and lower portions of the door, and not the door to the wall that held it.
I chuckled to myself as I used my book bag to press down the barbed and razor wire before throwing myself over and into the twelve foot drop. I looked around quickly, assessing the shadows before wearing the bag and jogging to the main road.
The garbage bin had cast a long shadow on the street, the light behind it perched atop the back doorway into a large, closed restaurant.
The shadows stayed still…
...until I passed by them.
“Que?!”
The garbage man’s voice sounded like a series of explosions of spat from the mouths of volcanoes, atom bombs, or demigods, his throat torn asunder by years of stark conversations with people that may, in fact, have never been there.
I kept running, the weight of my pack forgotten as I reached the main road. Ten long minutes later and a taxi pulled up next to me, charging the typical $20 for the ride.
I got to the airport, checked my bag, and waited patiently for the other shoe to drop.