Saul Elbein Makes Another Poor Decision

There are bad sounds to hear when you’re road tripping, and then there are bad sounds. In the first category, we’ll put squeals, engine knocking, police sirens. And in the second, let’s put unexplained explosions. The whumpf of a body hitting the car. Or that New Years Eve when my friend Danny Fisher turned to me—right as we entered the mountains outside Santa Cruz—and said, “Dude, the brakes just stopped working.”

In late fall of 2007, Fisher and I decided to spend our winter break from the University of Texas driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH, from San Diego to Seattle. I think it was my idea, but he went along, making it clear we could see anything so long as it included the Redwoods.

For my part, I was captivated by the idea of an epic trip across foreign land. A summer working in Israel for The Jerusalem Post had left me entranced by how wonderfully strange and diverse America was. Stepping off the plane in New York, my suitcase filled with the assorted detritus of four months in Jerusalem, I realized I knew almost nothing about my own country. I wanted to see it all.

There was one small problem with this idea, though: we wanted a road trip but had no transportation. Fisher’s sister needed his car, and I was reasonably certain mine would die around Albuquerque. We were too young to rent. We floated ideas: buses, trains, hitchiking. Until Fisher said, “You know, we could just catch a cheap flight to San Diego and buy one.”

We were eating Chinese at the time, and I almost choked on my lo mein. “Buy one?”

“Yeah, sure. Like on Craigslist.” Fisher spent most of his waking life surfing Craigslist.com, reading user rants and looking for free furniture. “We find a cheap car in San Diego, then resell it in Seattle.”

I considered. “How cheap?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. Not expensive. I’ve seen some on there for seven or eight hundred.”

I stared at him. “Seven or eight hundred? We’re going to be leaving engine parts all the way up the PCH.”

Fisher laughed. “Yeah, man, but it’ll be cheap.”

File this, please, under ‘obvious foreshadowing.’

* * *

But to make a long story short, that was what we did. We flew to San Diego and stayed with Max, a friend who claimed to know cars. For the next few days, he, Danny, and I tooled around the metro area checking out Craigslist postings for cars under $1500. They were generally disappointing. A transplanted Midwesterner tried sell us a Bonneville with 300,000 miles and a bad transmission. I drove an old Forerunner with an engine that sounded like a belt sander. It convulsed every time we shifted gears. We began to get nervous. We had to be back at school in less than a month. We felt time running out.

And then I saw the listing for the Jeep. From the moment I read the ad, I knew it was perfect. It was jet black with jarring chrome wheels, just beat up enough to be cool. Four wheel drive. Lots of space. Price: $1500. Call Mike in Rancho San Diego.

We called Mike on Christmas Day. He turned out to be a jovial, grandfatherly type. He ran a motorcycle repair and supply shop near the house, and had bought the Jeep to go off-roading with his buddies. After five years he had used it perhaps half a dozen times, and figured he might as well stop kidding himself and sell it.

Or so he told us at the time. There was something off about him—he smiled a little too big, talked a little too loud, absolutely refused to negotiate price. Just yesterday, he told us, he had refused an offer for $1400.

We went outside to talk. We didn’t like him. But we liked the Jeep, and we wanted to get on the road. Even at $1500 it was a good deal. When we made Seattle, we reasoned, we could re-sell it. We decided to take it.

Mike led us into his house. A Christmas Tree stood in the family room. Various family members smiled politely at us. We gave him the cash, he gave us the title and the roughly 17 sets of keys he had made for his children and grandchildren. We drove back to Max’s, packed up, and by the next morning we were gone. This was, you understand, before we had bothered to get the car inspected or, oh yeah, insured.

I look back on my pictures from that trip and find myself fascinated by how little of it stands out in my memory. I see myself rock climbing at Joshua Tree National Park, wearing every stitch of clothing I own because it’s so damn cold. I see our tent on crowded Pismo Beach, a big off-roading site north of LA, where we talked some young farmers from Fresno into letting us stay the night in their campground. I see us in Moro Bay, Big Sur, Carmel, standing on that tall, looping highway between the mountains and the sea, the cliffs at our backs falling down to the roaring Atlantic surf. In every shot, we are grinning ear-to-ear.

I see these things, and I remember—dimly—how cool they were. How fresh and gleaming and new. But they have been eclipsed in my memory by what came next.

* * *

“Dude,” Fisher said, in the mountains outside of Santa Cruz, “the brakes just stopped working.”

It took a second for this to process. “The . . .?”

By way of response, Fisher mashed his foot down on the brake. The Jeep slowed barely. We were 100 yards from the next intersection, and when we finally stopped our front tires were parked in the crosswalk.

I looked at the intersection, at Fisher, at the brakes, back at the intersection. Cars were speeding by inches from our front bumper. I couldn’t speak.

“Dude,” Fisher said, a touch unnecessarily, “this is bad.”

“Yeah,” I said. My brain was yo-yoing back and forth between the ‘anger’ and ‘denial’ stages of grief.

Fisher looked at me, then suddenly slammed the car across the right lane, slowing to a painful halt in a drug store parking lot. “You drive.”

I shook my head. “Man . . .”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. Fisher said, “So what now?”

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, December 31. Our goal had been to make San Francisco for New Years Eve, the better to find wild partying. Clearly, things had changed. The smart thing would be to stay in Santa Cruz for New Years, find a place to camp, deal with the car when we could. I knew that was what we had to do.

“Well . . .” I said. “It’s a hundred miles to San Francisco. We have no brakes or insurance.”

“Yeah,” Fisher said.

“The car isn’t safe to drive.”

“Yeah.”

“Even if we made it without dying, we would be in San Francisco. Without brakes.”

“Yeah.”

We sat a while longer.

Finally, he said, “Do you really want to be stuck in Santa Cruz for New Years?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

He pulled the keys out of the ignition and handed them to me. We switched places. I put the keys in the ignition and turned the Jeep on. I looked up at the windshield and noticed, with morbid interest, that it was dusted with rain.

Oh well, I thought. Let’s go for it.

So I don’t always make the best decisions.

I pulled out of the parking lot. Within ten minutes we had begun to hit traffic. I discovered that if I braced my back against the seat and jammed my foot onto the brake, we would slow a little. Add the handbrake and we would even stop—sort of. And then we got back on the freeway and the road began to climb.

The next two hours are a blur of something approaching terror. We stayed in the right lane as traffic swerved around us. We skidded on the wet asphalt whenever I touched the brakes. When the road dropped, we accelerated to dizzying speeds. When it climbed, we slowed. My hand never left the handbrake, although, as Danny pointed out through clenched teeth, if I pulled it we would probably flip. I aimed that Jeep like a guided missile toward San Francisco, my heart jumping into my throat every time someone cut us off. Which, this being California, was frequent.

I don’t know how we made San Francisco intact. I expect the karmic backlash will be ugly. But somehow we survived.

It was a day before we could get the Jeep to a mechanic. We spent New Years Eve on the couch of some college kids we met on Fisherman’s Wharf, New Years Day touring the city. We assumed the brake issue was minor, probably worn pads or not enough brake fluid. After the holiday we took it to a shop nestled among the halfway houses and porn shops of the Tenderloin district. We were shocked when the owner told us that the brake pump was bad, and it wouldn’t be worth our time to fix.

He was middle-aged and of ambiguously Asian descent. His face was wrinkled, giving him a sage, knowing look. He listened to the Jeep, ran his hands over its innards, and shook his head. He told us he could change the part for $400. He also told us that the brake system was so byzantine that there was less than a forty percent chance of that solving the problem.

“Boys,” he said, “if it were my car, I’d sell it. Fix it and you’re just throwing your money away.”

We towed the car back to the hostel under gathering clouds. That night the worst storm to hit the West Coast in fifty years battered the hell out of San Francisco. We sat in the hostel. Neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say. I sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the rain rattling the windows. Fisher hunched over his computer, looking at standby flights home.

The storm raged all night and all the next day, and as it died Fisher announced he was going back to Dallas. He had come to see the Redwoods, he said. Now that was impossible. He hadn’t seen his family in months. He invited me to come with him. We would sell the car on Craigslist, cut our losses, get out.

I didn’t blame him for going, and I was tempted. All of a sudden I was sick of the cold and wet, sick of the stress of being stuck with a car that didn’t work. Sick of bouncing from hostel to hostel. A cough I had developed in Joshua Tree had gotten worse, doubling me over with fits. I couldn’t do this anymore.

I wanted to go home.

When the storm finally broke, we walked from our hostel down through Fort Mason to the marina.

I stood coughing on the wharf, the cold, wet wind biting through my jacket. Off in the distance, the sun was sinking through a break in the storm clouds, bathing the Golden Gate Bridge in a rich orange light. Seabirds wheeled and called above the waves. Behind me, the city was coming back to life. And suddenly I knew I wasn’t going home. The thought of going on alone terrified me, rattled my pulse in my ears. But I had come too far to turn back. I would go on to Portland.

It was at that moment, standing on the wharf in San Francisco, my plans in ruins and a long road ahead, that everything changed. Before that moment, I was someone who went on trips; afterward I was a traveler. Standing, looking out at the clouds moving through the the Golden Gate, the gulls shrieking in the wind, I felt the ground fall out from under me. And I jumped off and I flew.

They Were Proud

Chris and Allun didn’t have to live on the streets. They were young, strong, reasonably healthy. They had jobs and families to fall back on. But they were proud. That was their problem.

“What am I supposed to do,” Chris asked me when I spoke to him outside the downtown shelter where he lives, “go to my family? They told me that girl was trouble. They told me she’d turn on me. So when she kicked me out, I’m supposed to say ‘you were right,’ ask them for help? Nah, man. I came here.”

The Austin Resource Center for the Homeless lies downtown, on the corner of 7 Street and Neches, separated from the Salvation Army by an alley. Standing three-stories of soaring glass and steel, the ARCH is a beautiful building.

But the alley next to it is not. During the day, that’s where the homeless squat. They sit there, every afternoon, waiting for the daily lottery for a bed for the night. If there aren’t enough beds, they will sleep in the alley as well, on blankets or cardboard pallets.

Last Saturday afternoon, when most of my friends were in Dallas for the OU game, I put on some ratty clothes and walked down to the ARCH. I wanted to talk to homeless people; I wanted to watch them without being noticed. I expected a few people, a brown bag or two of Southern Comfort. The Drag, I guess, writ larger.

But walking into the alley was like walking into another world. There were homeless everywhere, mostly Black and Hispanic, some white. They mingled, talked, stared into space. Dozed on the asphalt. Some read. A woman pushed her baby in a stroller, yelling angrily into a cell phone. Gaunt men with meth sores on the sides of their faces leaned against the concrete walls. A stocky black man in a UT jersey offered me good weed, cheap. At the end of the alley, two paramedics were loading a woman onto an ambulance.

I walked about halfway down the alley, down to a gated loading zone in the side of the ARCH, and sat down to watch people. They seemed to move like clockwork; the afternoon passing action after repetitive action. A couple of men threw a football back and forth, pass after pass, for hours. A tall black man and his tiny white girlfriend messily broke up, and made up, to the laughter of everyone watching. Every few minutes a lean, disheveled black man would walk into the alley and announce, to everyone and no one, the progress of the UT-OU game.

More than anything, the scene in the alley reminded me of a block party on a summer afternoon—people sitting out on the street talking, laughing, drinking. The time going by slowly. Except that too many were sitting on their backpacks, motionless, eyes glazed and fixed on the concrete walls. And when the party ended, no one was going home.

Three young white men in their mid twenties—two dressed in work clothes, another in designer jeans and flip-flops—walked up and sat down close to me. Two, one pudgy and smiling, the other scruffy and intense, were carrying new bags from a video game store. A third, big and tattooed, carried a bucket sized Styrofoam cup from Sonic.

Scruffy was dressed in work clothes and ragged sneakers. He pointed at the space next to me. “Could we get some butt room, man?”

I moved over. They sat down. Flip-flops turned to me. “Hey, you new here?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Cool, man,” he said, reaching out his hand. “I’m Allun.”

Allun had been at the shelter three months. He looked less homeless than like the out-of-work musician he was. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, he had left his family home in eastern Tennessee three months before and boarded a Greyhound for Austin, where he planned to make it as a folk singer. Unlike Memphis and Nashville, he said, Austin’s music scene was “real. None of that mother-of-pearl-shirt Grand Ole Opry crap.

“I’ve already done a couple open-mikes here,” he said. “Give me a year and I’ll be big.”

I had been worried that no one would believe I was on the streets. I needn’t have. When asked, I muttered something about being kicked out by my girlfriend. No one asked for more details.

“Yeah, man,” Allun said. “That’s why all us white guys are here. Like Jan,” he gestured toward the big, tattooed man, “he’s from Amsterdam. Here illegally. Came to Austin for a girl . . . well, now he’s here.”

“Rotterdam,” Jan said. His accent was thick and Dutch.

“Whatever, man,” Chris said. “Take me. When my girlfriend moved in with me, she just brought her clothes. When she kicked me out, I just left with mine. Woman stole everything.”

“So it’s your first day in Austin,” Jan said to me. He passed me the Sonic cup. “Have some of this.”

I hesitated. Chris laughed. “Take a hit, man. Afternoon goes by a lot faster when you’re drunk.”

Chris and Jan worked construction during the day, which was how they were able to afford video games. It wasn’t at all clear what Allun did, although he said something about waiting tables.

“You got a job?” Chris asked.

I shook my head.

“Then stick with me. I’ll talk to the foreman, we’ll get you a job.”

I thanked him.

The sun was going down. The few who had watches were glancing at them anxiously. In a little while, Jan said, the staff would hold the lottery for the beds.

“If your number’s in the top 50,” he said, slowly, in his halting English, “you get a real bed.”

“Good food, too. You don’t have to sleep on a pallet,” Chris said. He paused. “You got money?”

I nodded. “A little.”

“Don’t worry, man. If you get a high number, we’ll help you buy a better one. Just takes a couple bucks.”

I thanked them. The gate opened a few minutes later. There were a hundred beds. If they ran out, they ran out. So people mobbed it, pulling numbers from the bucket, one by one.

I stood in the line, thinking. The football announcer from earlier started talking to me about football, then about what, exactly, you could get away with in terms of drug possession. What got you a ticket, what sent you to jail. He seemed oblivious to the people around him, jostling the line. He talked very, very fast.

I nodded to him, turned, walked away. I had a place to sleep for the night. There were more people around me than there were beds. I couldn’t take one of theirs. As I walked away, he was still talking.

Chris saw me and called out. He was already on the other side of the gate. “Get in line, man!”

I shook my head. “Nah, man. I told a buddy I’d crash with him. But I’ll be back. It’s not like I have anyplace else.”

I felt guilty as I said that. I had someplace else.

At the edge of the alley, I saw a dark, ageless man, next to me—he could have been twenty or sixty. He was smoking hash from a pipe made of tinfoil. I asked him if it burned his hands; he looked at me, slowly.

“Shit, man,” he said after a while. “It burns like crazy. But what else am I supposed to do?”

As I walked across the parking lot and up Seventh Street, I saw the sun burning the ARCH gold, its clean lines and glass speaking of modernity, the world of the haves. Next to it, the old brick Salvation Army. The alley a crack between them. And in that crack, a hundred men fighting for a bed.

Rootlessness as a Way of Life

When I was on the islands with the Kuna, I felt a buzzing in my pocket. I pulled out my phone; there was a text from my friend Mary asking if I had the physics homework.

It occurred to me at that moment that our generation-and by ‘generation,’ I mean basically this graduating class, and a few years on each side-is the first to come to adulthood without any sense of inaccessability. By which I mean, back in the day-oh, you know, in 1998-before cell phones and wireless internet, the only places you could be reached were at home or at work. Imagine your life as a network of nodes where you could be contacted, by phone or mail or email. When you’re between nodes, you’re off the grid. You’re inaccessible.

But that isn’t true anymore. Now it takes work to leave the grid. With wireless internet and cell phones, you can be reached virtually anywhere. Before, you needed to have a set home, a set office, if only so that people knew where to reach you. That’s not as true anymore, and it’s getting less so.

(Incidentally, this is why the term ‘Generation Y’ as a cultural descriptor is bullshit. There is basically no similarity between people born in 1976 and people born in 1994. Those born in ‘76 graduated college just as the tech bubble hit its peak. Those born in ‘94 will have only the most academic understanding of the principle of being unreachable, unplugged. In fact, there’s little similarity between ‘80 and ‘88, or ‘85 and ‘90.)

Now, it’s not up to me to decide whether this is good or bad. It just is. And it doesn’t mean that the Kuna islands are in some way like Austin just because you can call one to the other, because they aren’t. At all.

But I have to wonder what effect this change is having on us. I think you see it now, in a sense of rootlessness that many of us are growing up with. Sure, our parents backpacked Europe and Asia. But for someone to decide, last minute, to go to Panama–I think this was rare. There’s no reason my dad couldn’t have done it when he was growing up–I assume ticket prices were comparable. But he didn’t. There’s no practical reason he and his friends couldn’t have planned to blow off school to make a mid-semester trip to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, as I and mine are. But they didn’t. And I think-conjecture here-is that the big difference here is not that certain things are more possible so much as that they seem more possible.

I’m playing with the idea here that a transnational youth society is growing in a way that hasn’t existed before. That if you take a backpacker from Japan and a backpacker from Mexico-even if they can’t communicate with each other-then they will be more similar to each other than different. More similar to each other than they are, even, to other, less privileged kids in their own countries.

I’m not sure where all of this is leading, but I feel like it’s leading somewhere, and that when all is said and done, in twenty years or so our generation may be obvious as a sort of turning point.

Thoughts from Panama City

Some random thoughts that occurred to me today while waiting for a cab in Panama City, Panama.

• They say Panama City is the Miami of Central America. This is a lie. What with the gritty, decaying sprawl, the new high-rises, and the near constant rain from June to November, it’s actually the LA of Central America. Or to be more precise, the neo-noir LA from Blade Runner, minus the flying cars and murderous robots. Or at least, minus the flying cars.
• I was walking through the grocery store yesterday and came upon rum-and-coke, sold in six-packs, in a can. In a can. Let that sink in.
• When you talk about ‘Colonial Era’ Panama City, you have to remember that the Colonial Era ended less than ten years ago. Except that from 1903 to 1999, the colonizers spoke English.
• I´ve been here for a week, and I still haven’t figured out whether the Panamanians have their own currency. They use dollars for everything, except that they call them Balboas, and they use local change interchangeably (if you will) with American.
• On that note. People I’ve talked to here are eyeing our burgeoning economic crisis with some amount of anxiety. Because while what happens in America may affect the entire world, it really affects Panama, because their currency is (see above) the dollar. Which is very interesting, when you think about it, because it means that American economic policy is directly affecting an entire nation of people who have no say-not even the purely symbolic act of voting-in determining it.

And that’s what I got. It’s raining hard in Panama City.

The Best Guide in Kuna Yala

So for this story to make sense, the first thing you have to understand is that the Kuna are about 50 years out of the Stone Age, okay? True, they have outboard motors, small diesel generators, a few tiny TVs. They’ve upgraded from spearfishing to nylon line and hooks. But that’s about it.

The Kuna are a tribe of about 35,000 scattered across the archipelago of Kuna Yala, or San Blas, in the eastern part of Panama’s Carribbean coast. They live in dense, dense communities, hundreds of people on an island about the size of a football field, all living on top of each other in family compounds of bamboo and grass huts. The islands are so small and crowded that Kuna Yala may be the only place in Latin America where no one plays soccer. There just isn’t the space. Instead, they play volleyball. And the houses are built next to the ocean, and the outhouses are built on piers over it, and the Kuna bathe within spitting distance of their bathrooms. I mean, they don’t drink the water, obviously, and they don’t seem to be suffering from any obvious skin diseases, so more power to them. I’m just saying, real traditional culture. Most of the women wear traditional molas, made of colourful, exquisitely embroidered cloth. Pigs and dogs and chickens running around everywhere. They fish in dugout canoes. They’re poor, but only in the sense that they don’t have modern conveniences. Everyone seems clean, well-fed, friendly-but like I said, real traditional.

Anyway, so I’m standing by the water, looking out at the other Kuna islands, watching the last dugout fishing boats heading back home. It’s getting dark. And this Kuna guy, maybe five-foot-even, real skinny, with black hair and this really thin moustache, comes up to me and says, real fast, “Buenas tardes. ¿Como le aparecio aqui?” Good afternoon. How does this place seem to you?

Now, all I’ve been getting from the Kuna all day has been frigid politeness. On Wichub-Huala, the island where I’m staying, everyone treats you politely, and asks you to take pictures, and tries to sell you molas. But unless they’re in the tourist industry, they don’t make eye contact. It’s clear that you’re a necessary evil. But this guy, I warm to him, because I’ve been trying to talk to the locals all day, and they haven’t been responsive.

He says his name is Izrael. He’s talking about a million miles an hour in this heavily Kuna-accented Spanish. The Kuna language only has 16 letters, so they have some trouble with Spanish pronunciations. I’m nodding politely at whatever he’s talking about, not getting any of it, when finally I figure out he’s a guide. He works for a resort on another island. And he’s offering to make me a deal, $75 a night for lodging, tours, three meals a day. For Kuna Yala, this is outrageous. I’m paying $35 now for a bed, food, tours. Hell, I even have running water, which, considering all the water on the island is brought in from the mainland on canoes, is something. And even that price is high.

But I’m trying to be nice. I’m tired, sun-sick, my Spanish is almost gone. But I tell him, look, I can’t afford that.

He looks both ways. Okay, $65. He’ll talk to his boss. He’ll hook it all up. Plus, I get him as a guide. He’s the best guide in Kuna Yala. He knows everyhitng. To prove it, he tells me where the name ‘Kuna’ came from, but he’s talking so fast it’s impossible to understand him.

He says, “See? Ask any other guide that. Ask them, where did the name Kuna come from? They won’t know. They’ll just give you a lot of bullshit. I know a lot of other things too. $65.”

I tell him no, I’m sure he’s a phenomenal guide, but I just can’t afford him. He looks hurt. I say, hey, look, when I get to Panama City and people ask me where to stay, I’ll suggest his resort. I’ll tell them Izrael is the best guide in the islands.

This, by the way, is a bald-faced lie, because I’ve never met a backpacker who would pay $85 for a room anywhere, let alone a place like Kuna Yala, where the going rate is more like $15. But this seems to cheer him up. “He says, good. We will be friends, yes?”

I tell him sure.

He asks me again what I think of his village. I say it’s different from anything I’ve ever seen.

He cuts me off midway to tell me that he is “un hombre muy abierto,” a very open person. He studies everything but believes nothing. Others have the church, but he has the bar. Or words to that effect. He asks me if I want a beer.

I say sure, why not.

We walk to a concrete kiosk with coolers and stacks of bulk merchandise in the back. All kinds–foods, soaps, you name it. Whenever anyone from the community buys anything, they buy in bulk, and most of it gets turned in to be distributed communally. The outside of the kiosk is decorated with hand-painted frescoes of ads for Pepsi and Lysol.

A Kuna girl is working the register. Izrael hands me a 35 cents, says the first round is on him. I go up and order two Balboas. The girl looks at the change, looks at me, and says, “Uno cincuenta.” A dollar fifty.

I say, “What?”

From the back an old woman in a mola yells, “One dollah fitty cent. Two beeh.”

I look back at Izrael, who’s grinning goofily. I look back at the Kuna girl.”You realize that’s crazy.”

She shrugs. I hand over the dollar fifty and take the beers back.

Izrael’s still grinning like an idiot. “I guess for extranjeros it costs more than for Kuna.”

He guesses. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the best guide in Kuna Yala.

He says, “Hey, $55. Can you do $55?”

I look at him, downing his beer like someone’s going to take it away from him. “Izrael, if I can’t do $35, how am I going to do $55?”

He thinks a second. “I am the best guide in Kuna Yala. I’ll take you around, introduce you to the important people. Only $55. I will do this for you because we are friends. You are my best friend in the world right now.”

He’s touching me as he talks, apologizing every time. I tell him I can’t afford it. He nods slowly.

“Okay, okay.” He thinks. “How do you like our village?”

He buys the next beer, then the next. As Kuna walk by, he calls them by name, tips his beer at them. They wave politely, a little coldly, as though just barely acknowledging his presence. He doesn’t seem to notice. He’s fading fast, his head lolling against the concrete slab behind him. He’s talking in short staccato bursts now, telling me about the professor he had in Lima who tried to lump all of indigenous American history into one semester. Imagine! And the professor called him tú, in the familiar. You don’t call an indigenous person tú, he says, it’s disrespectful. Like calling an American Black ‘boy.’

He runs out of steam. He gestures jerkily at the girl behind the counter for another beer, but she yells something back in Kuna and doesn’t move.

“She says she’s done working,” Izrael says. “But I want more beer.”

He’s quiet for a while.

“Tell me,” he says suddenly, “how much would you pay for that room. Make me an offer.” Grabbing my shoulder while he talks.

“$15,” I say. “Otherwise, I can’t.”

He nods blearily. “Right, right.”

His hand’s still on my shoulder. “Sabes,” he says, leaning in close, “¿sabes que te quiero, si?” His eyes focusing in and out of space.

“Te quiero” means “I love you,” but not, my Spanish teacher once assured me, in an erotic way. That would be “Te amo.” She was very emphatic about this. I brush Izrael´s hand off my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I say, “I know.”

“Bueno, bueno,” he says. “¿Me quieres?”

I say sure.

“Bueno.” He leans in again. “Tell me,” he says, looking around to see who’s listening, “have you heard of coca?”

Oh. So that explains everything. “Like the drug?”

He shushes me, then nods emphatically. “You know it?”

This has gotten ridiculous. “Yes, Izrael, I know it.”

“Quieres . . .” he says. He puts his hand on my knee.

So much for my Spanish teacher. I start thinking of all the ways girls have politely let me down, wonder if those techniques are transferable across gender lines.

“I’m sorry, amigo,” I say. “I’m tired and I have an early flight.”

He moves the hand up to my thigh. “¿No coca?” He’s squeezing.

“No.” I say. “Gracias para las cervezitas.” And I walk away, leaving the best guide in Kuna Yala sitting behind me on the bench, beer in one hand, the other outstretched.