Disclaimer: This is an actual lie. The events of this article did not actually take place. I wrote this for class.
I woke up in my little haphazard tent, that I set up using a plastic tarp I found on the side of the road and some line a sympathetic fisherman generously gave me. This makeshift home was just off the main road, in the backyard of a pink house that belonged to a stranger I had met at the airport. I had initially set off to Costa Rica, where I now was, with a revoltingly sunny disposition, the kind you see in the eyes of fourteen-year olds who think that they have found their lifelong soulmate in the first person to plant a puppy kiss on their lips, the naivete of a recent high school graduate who had always wanted to travel, but only knew what he knew about travel from stupid Travel Channel shows, and now had the time. Unfortunately, this was me.
Under the tender shade of a Guanacaste tree, the tree that held up my polyester roof, I recounted the story of how I found myself in a tent that leaks every night and a bathroom that was basically a bucket I shit in and tossed out everyday.
As I mentioned earlier, I was a starry-eyed recent high school graduate, out to see the world before I was locked up again for another four years. I had always wanted to travel and now seemed like the perfect time. I had just saved up a bunch of money working the line at Mcdonalds, enough at least for the thousand dollars it would take to fly to Costa Rica from California. And I had the Costa Rican friend I met online, Pedro, a trusted merchant of the internet Magic: The Card Game market. He promised that he lived in Costa Rica. That it was just beaches and parties and legal drinking age at 16. That he loved it and would love for me to visit! I can’t tell you what was on my mind when I booked and took that flight to Costa Rica. Maybe it was the promise of free booze, or the prospect of exploring unspoiled rainforest, or even the mesmerizing words of Anthony Bourdain, Travel Channel extraordinaire, that convinced me to do it, to fly to a place where I did not know the language, to come without an itinerary and 2.38 left in my bank account.
Now, Costa Rica isn’t exactly a Third World Country. When you fly in to San Juan, the capital of this Central American gem, you see the same glass high-rises, luxury condominiums, and sprawling little boxes that blight the average American city (Sorry, not a city person.) The Juan Santamaria airport, where I was finally able to escape that god awful metal tube in the sky they expect us to sleep in, was a cosmopolitan hub of people in sweatpants, who dressed for flying, and people in business suits who dressed to impress. It was the sort of airport that was far from the city center, a place that occupies the zone between the suburbs and undeveloped patches of rainforest dotted by multicolored shantytowns. It was the place that I was supposed to meet Pedro. The first stop to a grand two week voyage of self-discovery among new faces and a new locale. Needless to say, Pedro did not show up. He turned out to be a middle-aged Chinese man who ran a Magic selling sweatshop in Hong Kong. I found out about this as the minutes turned into hours and the email exchanges between Pedro and I had descended into witty strings of Cantonese curse words. In hindsight, a Costa Rican online merchant of Magic cards probably would not know Cantonese. I did not want to assume.
I very much don’t remember how I felt. It was a sort of a mix of anger, confusion, and vertigo. The kind of feeling you get when you are blindsided by deep and personal betrayal, like a printer breaking down when your paper is supposed to be printing. The kind of feeling that the world stops for, that your heart skips a beat and palpitates and gets all clogged up and explodes for. You feel as though that all the world is pitted against you right at that moment; that somehow in the vast cosmic stream of things that bitch Karma came for you, right then and there, revenge for all the sins you’ve ever committed in your lifetime, and slapped you real hard right across your face.
When you’re done sulking about the cards you were dealt, you pick yourself up. I met a stranger and I spent two weeks in a tent in his backyard. After that, I flew back to California and after that I flew to Chicago and took the Van Galder to Beloit.
