Some Come and Go. Some Stay.
Expats fill in the ‘next chapter.’
Stan watched from his shady spot just under the hotel’s portico. Distracted by something passing on the uneven, cobblestone street, he dripped coffee on his two-tone, button shirt.
“Aw shit!” He said within earshot of the barista attending the coffee stand just a few feet away.
“Oh oh, Mister Nolten, you spilled your coffee again, amigo? The ladies stealing your attention again.” The young barista smiled a toothy smile.
“Goddamnit Mario, how many times do I have to tell you my name is Norton, with an R, okay? Just call me Stan for Christ’s sake.”
“My friend, I show you respect. Maybe someday I can call you Stan. Why don’t you come with me to the working lady’s house in San Juan Obispo, huh? After you spend a short time with a nice, young lady, I will call you Stan. What do you say, Señor? Easy for me and easy for you.”
Stan couldn’t connect the logic. Couldn’t immediately make it come together. Still, he had to admit in an odd sort of way, somehow Mario’s comment rang a bell.
This was how his days had creeped by since arriving in Guatemala, to this tourist town Antigua. After arriving and getting settled into his room, he couldn’t shake the nagging thought that he probably took this trip too soon.
He’d experienced a sharp doubt after arriving at the capital city’s airport, its general mayhem, then the drive through Guatemala City with its horrendous, non-stop, exhaust clouded traffic jam.
Since he’d been let go as a salesperson selling kitchen lines, domestic use for the last thirty-eight years. Sold Westinghouse, G.E., Whirlpool and others. Over the years, new brands had appeared. It took him some time to accept that Europeans and Asian brands were more than likely better than the traditional names.
After all, most of the old brand names were being manufactured in Mexico and Bangladesh. For a while he kept track of which of the old, favorite brands were still made in the USA.
This became a rather obscene joke because, mostly honored, favorites nowadays were a mixed bag of US produced along with foreign. Stan could no longer tout the greatness and the superior quality of the once highly regarded, exclusively American made product.
Stan’s situation took a short-lived change for the better when he had the brainstorm to buy out his fellow sales colleagues in a tri-state region, buying their priceless clients’ sales base lists. He’d brilliantly set up a scheme where he paid off his colleagues on a schedule. Stan’s sterling, hard work reputation won the day for him. His colleagues were happy to get out, have incoming cash which greedy family couldn’t snatch away. So where before it was ten people handling the tri-state area, now it was just Stan. The business flowed. For a while.
But like the rainy season in Guatemala, it eventually dries up.
For a while. Stan stuck with it until the manufacturers began phasing out its remaining sales people. The product lines were going online with the latest in cyber marketing set up by young grads who worked three days a week.
And more often than not, domestic equipment made in other countries held a healthy edge over American made! The foreign sales force out sold their American counterparts. They offered house calls, follow-ups after sales! As though it was a new concept completely forgetting and most likely never knowing this was an American invention! This was seen decades ago in the US. Now? No way. Can’t compete.
He walked away from the job, rather it walked away from him. He had several pensions to show for along with his social security, which he’d been enjoying for about a year. So, while not a wealthy man, he’d created a solid base under his feet.
Marlene, his once wife, was a leggy beauty, a woman that most men could not handle, could not love passionately enough and for which she had no bones letting the poor bastards know. She went to a shrink specializing in sex addiction and they wound up throwing stuff off her desk to make room for an explosive session. This desire, a bonfire of lust, manifested in Marlene in her later years. Stan had, for some time, closed the shop, so to speak.
Stan knew the final round was approaching when Marlene took a job as a cocktail server at the local country western bar and grill. In her day off, she opted to come to work as a pole dancer, which she discovered she had an innate skill for. They voted her two years in a row as the queen of the city’s country western bars association.
Even more amazing when considering Marlene is just at sixty-five.
His wife was just reinventing herself! She soon became the regular desire of several men, and women in the community, though Stan could never catch her at it. He’d overheard a drunk party guest at a colleague’s house make some incredible comments.
All things go through changes, and Marlene was no exception. She got pancreatic cancer and divorced Stan in the same year. She married the owner of a regional beer brewery. Stan, the kids and many others in the community mourned her passing one brightly colored fall day.
It was soon after that he informed his grown kids he had a one-way ticket to Guatemala. He was going to the highlands, a tourist town named Antigua searching for peace and solitude, a new chapter, a new phase. After reading in an expat popular blog, a retiree could live like a king on a Social Security check.
That was all it took. He wasn’t interested in Antigua's famed cobblestone streets. In fact, they bothered his ankles. Bougainvillea vines that grew profusely in rich purples over most of the over five hundred-year-old buildings didn’t fill him with wonder and awe. Even the magnificent, ancient cathedrals sprinkled throughout the Antiguan valley failed to draw a sustained attention.
He didn’t much care for the youth that wandered the night-time streets from bar to bar and carrying on mayhem, though he enjoyed watching the tanned legs in pretty sun dresses go by. He’d remind himself of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung: ‘eyeing little girls with bad intent’. Though his ‘little girls’ would rarely get below thirty years old.
Not to give the impression that Stan was a Grinch, a sleeze,or an ageing grouch or that he was a dullard. His motivation to leave the US and settle in Antigua had more to do with taking deep, slow breaths, bringing to mind that there were many good reasons to conclude that life, given hard work, was good, was worth the sweat.
It wasn’t about things. There was something that floated in and around everything. Though Stan found it impossible to define in so many words, it was there never the less.
He knew that his reasoning for pulling up stakes was unclear. He’d actually forgotten just an hour after he went through his reasoning for leaving the US. Stan suffered from memory loss. Something that had manifested a year before.
Adding to this, neither did he feel he had to explain himself to anyone, though he tried to bring some peace to his grown children. Almost as though a double insulation against most people’s perceptions of moment to moment reality.
“Yeah Mario. So that they can take me for every dime I’ve got? No thanks amigo.” Stan was trying to get the coffee out of his shirt with a wet napkin and not making progress.
“How’s that, ‘take me for every dime’ Mr. Norton; this is one of those English things, right?” Mario was cleaning up behind his stall, placing two napkins in front of a young couple that had just sat down.
“Oh you know Mario, take me, means, you know, it’d just, thieves will steal from you…”
The young couple parked a few spaces down from the portico, a gleaming black BMW. ‘Buenos dias’ Stan learned one responded to this common courtesy. The young man’s girlfriend looked like a copy of one of the shorter and bustier Kardashians.
Mario quickly took the couples coffee request and turned back to Stan. “But a dime Señor, why the bother, not too smart thieves.” Mario chuckled at his own joke. “Señor, at this place with the ladies, they have sofas and a big TV. There are no thieves. Maybe thieves can lose their balls there, but for real, you understand? But you are my friend and you will meet a gracious lady.”
“I don’t have the time for that shit, Mario. I have too much to do and I can’t go off on a wild goose chase like that.” Immediately regretting his use of, ‘wild goose…’.
“You mean like a big goose, Señor? The meat is too tough; why do you say that, you…”
“Jesus Mario, it’s just a manner of speaking. I, hey don’t you need to take care of your customers?” Stan leaned back in his chair and continued his constant survey of the world passing by.
“Mr. Nolten” Mario kept the back and forth alive. “I know what your situation is, amigo. You don’t worry. I have Viagra for you, okay? Just give me five dollars. You’ll be like a stallion.” Marion extended an arm and fist upward at an angle. His young customers surmised the nature of the talk and exchanged amused glances.
“No, no, no. Just drop it Mario. I appreciate it. Just let it go. And it’s Norton.” Stan was shaking his head and couldn’t control a smile.
“Ah, I know now, I am surprised, I can take you to some young men, ok? I will wait for you outside.”
“Hey! That’s enough Mario, really, don’t want it, don’t need it, okay? I’m fine. Hey, who knows maybe after a little more time it’s something I might want to take you up on. The ladies.” Stan said in a friendly pleading that clearly said, this topic is over.
“How do you mean: ‘take you up on’, they never teach that in English classes?”
Stan reflected that he’d been in Guatemala for a little under two months. Mario, for some unapparent reason, felt it his duty to promote his gringo friends’ fulfillment. Are two months an unofficial time frame of no sex, after which people and friends might find cause to question things? Questions about one’s sex life.
“Hey Mario.” The barista raised his head from what he was doing on the work counter before him. “So now I’m curious. How old do you think I am? First. And second: how often should an old fart like me have sex?”
“Every second week in your case, Señor.” The sincere man in the young couple spoke up, his good English caught all present by surprise, except perhaps for his female companion.
Mario and Stan fixed their gaze on the young man. His girlfriend had her mouth open.
Mario shook his head back and forth and his face expressed clear dismay at the young man’s opinion. He continued cleaning off the stainless steel of the Italian machine.
“What?!” the young man visibly irked by Mario’s reaction. Suddenly, it became a thing where Mario was at risk of offending the young man by laughing at his answer to Stan’s question. This would not translate well in the eyes of his girlfriend, might even reflect an undesirable impression about sex in the young woman’s mind. “What do you know anyway, you peon?”
Suddenly the friendly glow that had been present was gone and the young man questioned Mario’s standing in the economic society by questioning out loud about Mario’s claim on knowledge. Guatemala still has a vast difference amongst its classes and race profiles. Sad but true. “Peon” word was unnecessary…
Stan had read that one still encountered the deep entrenched separation of the classes. The moneyed versus the ones struggling to feed families. The tension was very much alive in Guatemala. Antigua had seen a lessening of this, as it was a bohemian tourist mecca. Most tourists from other countries, especially backpackers, would not tolerate elitist attitudes.
“Whoa, wait here, you two. Wait a second, okay? We’re just having a friendly talk guys, okay?”
The man with the woman said: “Sir, if you permit me, allow me to say that one cannot show disrespect to another, it doesn’t matter the class or social standing.” The young mans’ English was good and more than likely he’d spent time in a US university. Something Mario could never hope for.
As long as many of the old class inspired social mores were respected, things went smoothly. Antigua, however, delighted in bending these traditional standings, which found their start way back in the 1500s in the days of the conquering Spanish armies.
“So let’s get back to what you were telling me, Mario, about a nice young lady. No offense, Miss, I just want to make things clear here with my friend.” Stan smiled his salesperson’s best at the young lady who responded likewise. “I’m too old for a young lady, but it might be nice to meet someone with some years.”
The couple and Mario stayed quiet. Mario licking his wounds and the couple simply not knowing what to add. Stan decided it the right moment to say goodbye, left a tip and headed towards Central Park a block away.
Stan walked towards Antigua’s Central Park and the conversation he’d just had now mostly gone. It didn’t affect him, at least not in the usual way. An unusual peace.
&&&
Central Park was Stan’s second stop in his day. A green, tropical oasis, centered with a large, magnanimous fountain with sculptured, bare topped women. The ladies have their hands over their breasts and yet the squirting milk issuing forth is almost enough to overshoot the containing pool wall. Stan never failed to immediately be transported to a place not of this planet. A place of abundance and giving. He sensed something in his line of enthusiastic thought betrayed a certain civility.
He sat near the fountain as venders passed by. Already the indigenous venders had recognized the old gringo. Another old guy from the US who never tips. They just passed him, leaving him in his space of peace. The flute venders, being the exception, joked with Stan, sitting next to him on his park bench. “Hey you, buy five flutes for all your women, okay?” Laughter. “Hey, today, just for you good discount, five dollar each.” Stan smiled but learned to keep conversation at a minimum, otherwise any hope for restful bliss went out the window. “Hey you, old man, I talking to you, four dollar each, hey.”
On a corner of the parks’, many crisscrossing walkways the expats gathered. Stan wondered if he, too, was an expat. This group appeared to stick with themselves, holding court about many things, from medicine prescriptions not being accepted in the local pharmacy to eating red beans that had gone bad.
Stan sat amongst them when he first arrived in Antigua. He wasn’t sure how they’d receive him at first, but was pleasantly surprised by the friendly greeting extended to him by most. Sure, there was one or two old fogies who barely deigned to even look at him. That first day, introductions went around the circle. One old guy named Joe pointed out the various individuals, “Carrol from Boston, that’s Maurice from La, doesn’t say much. Those two Jimmy and Leonard are our one happy gay couple.” A few friendly smirks, others utterly ignoring the comment.
“Then up until LeeAnn decided to sit in his spot today was where Mark used to sit. They found him dead at his apartment last Thursday. LeeAnn used to live with Maurice in LA, but now they no longer talk. Hell, they drove down here together fifteen years ago.” Maurice just looked down at his worn out wing tips.
“People have spots?” Stan couldn’t help himself. What was this, some sort of hierarchy?
Joe explained, “Well, not really, but you know how it is. It’s like sitting at a dinner table night after night for years, you stay in your place.”
LeeAnn couldn’t resist: “Aw hell Joe, why in the world do you want to confuse him? Jesus. Hey, Stan, right? You can sit wherever the hell you feel like it, it’s like…” She stopped mid-sentence then continued: “Not like we’re members of congress where you sit in your special place okay?” The group found cause for laughter at her spot on comment.
The group was an endless source of information. Where the latest, best prices were for groceries, best rental places and what various costs were in town, what were the best and not so expensive doctors, dentists in town, where to go to renew one’s tourist documents, places where being of the ‘third age’ provided price cuts, cheapest and best restaurants, what to do if you got sick at three in the morning. What to do if you died…
Stan found them to be friendly enough, though his preference was to be alone. Still, something told him to cultivate his friendship with the expats. One never knew when one might need emergency help. It was interesting to Stan that the group accepted him on those terms: not a bosom buddy, but certainly a friend.
Mario the barista had finished his shift. Another took his place. Stan wasn’t on a first name basis with this guy, so he enjoyed silence and watching the people walking by, enjoying the ladies. On his way back to the hotel, two men who always stood at a certain corner called out to him: “Hey old man, you want some weed man? Good stuff, no shit added, just good weed.”
He’d rolled a joint up in his room. The small baggie cost twelve bucks, and the supply lasted the previous two months. After lighting up, not being obvious, holding the joint just under his table top, he leaned back and waited. His coffee was perfect.
The once brilliant sun filled sky clouded over and a light drizzle settled on Antigua. A cool breeze coming off the high flanks of the massive, twelve thousand foot volcano Agua was wonderfully refreshing. Light sprinkles just reached Stan’s face. The barista unbidden brought Stan a slice of warm, freshly baked banana bread. “For your appetite señor, enjoy.”
“So far so good.” Stan said to no one. He decided that at least for now, he was glad he’d come to this town. A couple expats walked by the portico and waved “Have a good evening Stan.”
