Skid Row

In my most recent post, I wrote about someone who came to our island and told incredible stories. And when I say stories, I mean Whoppers. The purpose of my post was, I believe,  clearly stated in the beginning and throughout as a light-hearted piece poking fun at an obvious BS-er. In many ways, ¨Face¨ is just an extreme example of the type of tourist that blows through here every so often and leaves all of us ex-pats shaking our heads. I think for the most part, the post was taken tongue-in-cheek by other ex-pats who have seen tourists like him come and go plenty. I did, however, receive a different kind of feedback from a ¨serial tourist¨ which is a phrase we use to describe someone who lives somewhere else but visits multiple times, often for several months. I thought the feedback was intelligent, insightful, and yet mostly irrelevant in this case. There is one point concerning ¨bully tactics¨ that brought back memories of other tourists who came, thought they were staying, only to be ¨bullied¨off of the Island.  First, check out the feedback  I´m referring to below,  and then I want to take a trip down memory lane. ¨Face¨ is only one of many who have played ¨Ex-Pats vs Tourists¨ and gotten sent packing.

¨Hey writer, hope you remember that your artistic licensed writings are derived from another persons artistic licensed right to have an approach to be storytelling his own life in any way he wants, and it should be credited as such- as mutual inspirational. But, from what I’ve read so far, I only get a foul taste of old-fashioned bully tactics, freakshow mentality, an us -better -than him group grease. And I´m left with a question if this is values you´d really want to pass on to the people surrounding you, and what you´d do in case someone promoted, posted and spread around similar characteristics, hairsay and gossip of your heir visiting their bar to simply have fun or promote their business?. Would it be fine? But by all means, please keep on writing -it´s a good thing that, expressing oneself. Hope you just make sure you have the right emotional motivation to pull it through in the future to please a crowd, cos most really good writers exhibits a certain skill in order to be separated as gold from grit by taking your reader through your protagonists´ situation or chain of events by describing multi-facetted motivations, emotions and outcome with some sort of empathy. This lacks it. Too bad, could have been quite good.¨

OK.  I´ve lived here for 5 years and run Skid Row for 3.  Most of my regular customers consist of North Americans or Europeans who have lived here for say 3 years up to 40 for some. Those of us who end up staying have all been interrogated, scrutinized, and graded by our peers. The phrases ¨Policing Ourselves,¨ ¨Survival of the Fittest,¨ or  ¨Protecting Our Own¨ seem to apply here, and it´s pretty obvious how it works after only a short time. We all have agreed in principle to stick together to achieve a common goal; Maintaining a community comprised of people we like or at least can tolerate and weeding out those we don´t or can´t. If it´s determined that someone is not going to make it, we begin to take action. We will ignore them and make them an outcast, ridicule them for all the stupid crap they do and say, and humiliate them while calling them on all their BS. Eventually, they will disappear, and things return to normal.

Episode 1 ¨Spongebob¨

Spongebob came to us from Washington D.C. via Belize. He had an eraser shaped head with red curly hair and a huge  mustache. Tall and skinny, he was one of those people that always had his mouth open a little bit. Kinda made him look dopey.  The first clue I had that I wasn´t going to like this guy was when after he had visited all of the bars and restaurants on the island, he gave me a list of all the things he would do differently. The conversation went something like this:

SB: I´ve noticed there doesn´t seem to be any kind of reasoning behind menus on ths island. Look at yours. You´re in Honduras, and you don´t have rice and beans anywhere on it. You serve breakfast, but only til 11. Even though you still have all the ingredients on hand to do breakfast all day. You don´t have small portion items…..yada yada yada

Me: Sounds like you need your own restaurant….I have one for sale.

SB: No, I just came from Belize. I built a bar and restaurant from the ground up. Beautiful horseshoe bar. I designed it to be the most efficient bar I´ve ever worked…..

Me: So why are you here telling me how to run my place? Shouldn´t you be in Belize getting rich?

It went on like that for a bit, with my snarky comments turning into flat out insults by the end of it.  And that´s about how every conversation he had on the island went. He´d bitch about how things were, and then tell people how he would do it better. Because of the repetitiveness, people stopped sitting next to him at bars. He never developed any sort of friendships. He was ignored to a point of invisibility. He probably would have tried to stay in spite of it all, but then came the straw that broke the proverbial camel´s back.

Spongebob rented his apartment from a German ex-pat who has been in Utila for 17 years, and the apartment and house are in the same yard and share a common water supply. Spongebob got piss drunk one night went home to go to bed. He turned on the water to take a shower and proceeded to pass out drunk. The water ran until the tank was empty, and then the water pump ran dry until it burnt up. The German is a loose cannon half of the time to begin with, so when he woke up waterless and with a trashed water pump, the fireworks began. He started pounding on SB´s door. ¨Wake the F up you MFér. WTF did you do?¨ SB, eyes still shut… hungover to death….opens the door. ¨Oh, hey man. What´s going on?¨ ¨You MFér. You fried my water pump. Get the F out. You´re done. You owe me $ 700 too you piece of S***.  WTF man.¨

Spongebob moved down the road, and the German came into Skid Row as fired up as ever. On and on he went telling everyone what happened. Then he went into the apartment to see what was going on in there. After a quick mental inventory, he found stuff missing. He lost his mind. He came to the bar with a gun tucked into his  shorts. (It´s never funny when someone starts waving a gun around, but it WAS really funny that because he was wearing loose fitting sweat shorts, the gun kept falling out.) Anyway, after telling us that he was not going to shoot someone that stupid, he still wanted to go ¨Scare him a little¨ and get his stuff back.

He comes back to the bar an hour later to tell the scare story. ¨I called that dude out of the apartment and told him to give me back my stuff or I was going to kick his ass. He told me he didn´t take anything, dropped like a sack of rocks, and started covering up and crying. I told him to bring my stuff back today or I come back to get him. The cops came with SB and his new landlord, and they all had words outside. Everyone left and went home, while the rest of us wondered where this was going. The next day we heard SB´s version, and how he had made his plans to go live in Columbia and that he was leaving the next week. SB sold all of the stuff he wasn´t taking with him, and another one bit the dust. The craziest part of the story, however, happened a few days after the incident. The German came into the bar and said, ¨I heard that dude is leaving. Well, I went into the apartment again and found everythng I thought he took. Poor bastard. I guess I was too drunk to account for everything the first time. Oh, well. He wasn´t going to last anyway, so I don´t feel too bad.¨

And then he broke into song.

¨Na na na na….Na na na na…Hey hey hey…..Goooood-Bye¨

Poor Bastard indeed. Next edition: Taylor

You all know or have met/dealt with someone like this at some point. In fact, according to Face, you probably have met him directly. You see, Face has been traveling for 16 of his 33 years. He’s only spent one month at home in his native Canada during said 16 years, and he’s on a budget. These are good points to remember should you choose to spend several nonrefundable minutes of your life reading this entire post. Left to travel at 17. Been back for 1 month. Is now 33. On a Budget.

Locked and Loaded with fake orange fingernails, toenails, and fresh Che Guevara and Maple Leaf tattoos, (All, and when I say All, I mean let’s be real here. Stereotypes exist for a reason. ALL Canadians need some form of proud home country representation. When the 51st star is finally printed on the flag, tattooists from BC to Nova Scotia will rejoice at the fresh workload. OK, I’m taking this Canadian thing too far. Let’s focus on Face), the legend known as “Face” began his tour of the world. A tour so grand, with stories so rich, and with so many people left in awe and enchanted, even a Dos Equis wouldn’t suffice as a proper thirst quencher.

As we move on to the Canadian bacon and poutine Meat and Potatoes of the story, let’s set a couple ground rules.

1. Everything in ” “ are actual quotes spoken by Face, himself.

2. Everything in Italics are responses to Face by myself or others, entries or additions by yours truly to add to or finish a Face story as though he would have, or complete embellishments on my part in an attempt at humor.

3. Persons involved in writing this blog, recording Face’s quotes, and encouraging more material from Face are/were under the influence of alcohol.

The first time I was in the presence of Face, the base of his legend was established. Face and a brutally ugly  “Hot Swiss Chick,” sat at the bar, and he ordered 2 beers, and 2 Guifity Challenges. Two things were obvious in the first five minutes. First, he was looking to score. Second, she understood maybe 20% of what he was saying. Her English was piss poor at best, and he spoke so fast it’s as though he was high on Office Coffee, Columbia’s finest uncut, AND had just seen his first naked breasts on Cinemax at 11 years old. He started with, ” I’m going to buy these drinks but I’m not going to be able to pay for everything all the time I’m on a budget and I’m not even sure if we are dating Is this a date? We never talked about that beforehand.”  I want to get laid, but without spending all of my beer money.  Expressionless and unperturbed, the facially challenged  “Hot Swiss Chick stared adversity in that face and allowed the  romantic first date that maybe wasn’t a date to continue.

I buzzed around the bar making cocktails and what not when I overheard this nugget:  “I was in Mexico for a while traveling around in my bus. I had this VW bus that was painted like a flower field, and I drove it all over Mexico. It was crazy because one day the  Federalis stopped me asking if they could look around inside my van, and I was thinking they were gonna shake me down. You know what happened? They spent like 15 minutes looking it over and told me ‘you have a really cool car!’ ” I was like ‘that’s sweet’, and after that I had Cops pull me over every day just to tell me how cool my bus was! I drove it all over Central America and sold it when I got to Panama. I’m serious. I still have a picture of me standing next to it somewhere. Oh, and I drink the water all over Central America. The cops didn’t give you any hassle at all? No, they just  thought I was Mexican. I’ve just got that face. Look at my face. The color, the structure. I could be from anywhere. I could be Honduran. I could be Moroccan. You’re Jewish I’ve just got that face. I don’t know what race I am. Jewish I could be from anywhere. I’d like to think that I can use any accent in English. It’s like I’m a local everywhere I go. But I grew up in Vancouver.  1/2 the people I’ve ever known are tourists. I’m a tourist, and I understand what it’s like to be a tourist. That’s why growing up I wanted to be a spy. I could blend in with anyone. My friends told me it wouldn’t work though, because people like me too much. Wherever I went, I would be too popular, and it would blow my cover. ” Meanwhile, the date chick was staring blankly and sipping her free for now drink. No head nods, no smiles, no uh-huhs or uh-uhs, nada.
At this point,  I’ve heard enough to decide that I wanted to remember these stories and share them with others. I went and grabbed a friend, and told him to eavesdrop, prod, whatever needed to be done to get more Face. After a busy stretch of bar tending, I asked my friend for an update. Here you go. “Back home, I write pamphlets like user guides for nuclear power plants.” I tried to make bombs in my parents’ basement.…………I own an IT company. Well I bought the domain name at Go Daddy. Danica never does get naked either.  I’ve worked for every part of the UK government. I write their IT white papers……..Someone told me once about flipping houses. I don’t know about that, but I did buy a house once just because it was a good value………..In Asia, I studied Karate, specializing in machete catching. I can teach you. And you know another thing about Asian girls is that they hit on me all the time. I don’t even have to try. I learned how to say ‘how much’ in Thai  I went through India, and became a curry addict. If you’re a curry addict like me, you know it’s better than sex. I’d like to think I’m a very considerate lover. I’m a sexy Indian Goddess. You should come to my house.”

Did Face carry around a paper bag? Did the facial expression change on  la chica fea at any point that evening?  Is Face INDEED a considerate lover? I ‘m not sure we will ever know.  In our next installment we will focus on what it takes to be the “Face” of Utila.