Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (15 page)

I was sitting right next to a man who had done things I couldn't begin to imagine. It was like coming face to face with the Godfather. Did you run in fear or did you stick around to hear his stories? What I really wanted was to start over with the truth, to spend days getting to know him again in an attempt to understand. I wanted to comprehend this man who had been willing to lay down his life for a political cause. I wanted to know what had drawn me to him and, stranger still, why that attraction still remained. Did I see the good inside of a bad man or had he been a good man all along, one blurred by false truths?

The world was such a complex place. Memorizing the dates and names of world events was easy, but understanding the meaning behind these conflicts, what compelled people to lay down their lives for a cause was something I would never fully comprehend. Had I been born in a warring Middle Eastern country, had I watched my family members get killed by an oppressive government, would I have made the same choices as Michel?

I watched the guard lead Michel away, wondering who he really was, this man with the boyish charm and the complicated life. I would never really know.

“You are the most dangerous person I have ever met,” were the last words he said to me. It had been his idea of a compliment, his joking way of explaining his need to confide in me. He claimed I had been enough to shake his worldview.

But he was wrong. I hadn't been trying to change his mind. I had just wanted to figure him out. I had learned long ago that it was impossible to draw that moral line for anyone else. And anyone who foolishly believed they could invariably got themselves mixed up in a violent armed conflict. Lebanon versus Israel, Cuba versus the United States—had any of these attempts made progress? Was it really possible to alter anyone else's view?

Bill, George, Fidel, Ehud, Benjamin, Ariel, and Yasser
—they
were the dangerous ones. I was simply trying to understand. I was just trying to make sense of a war-torn world.

Chapter Five

Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals

Before visiting Costa Rica, I'd only ever met one person who had ever been there, but now it seemed that everyone I ran into had spent significant amounts of time in the country. Wherever I went in Los Angeles, somebody had a story to tell. A guy I bumped into at a bar wanted to talk about Guanacaste. A friend had photos of the Caribbean coast tacked up on her office wall. The checker at the grocery store turned out to be from Limón. It was like the experience of looking up a new word in the dictionary—you go twenty-five years without ever needing to use a term like salubrious, but the minute you learn what it means, all of a sudden the word pops up everywhere.

I had only been back in Los Angeles for a month, but while salubriously tossing items in my cart at the health food store, I began to think over all the things I had heard about Costa Rica since my return. My own experiences were nothing like the stories I had recently been told, which got me thinking—was it possible I had visited an entirely different country? Maybe Costa Rica was like Vietnam and Korea—maybe it was a nation divided; perhaps there was a communist part and a regular part and I had gone to the wrong half by mistake. How else was I supposed to reconcile my bizarre, prison-related experience with the stories I kept hearing of aqua-colored beaches and picturesque cloud forests?

At least I knew who could give me the answer. Since returning to Los Angeles, I had kept in touch with Jessica through a series of faxes and overseas phone calls. We had become friends during my last three days in Costa Rica. After Michel's arrest, she had raced over to my hotel in San José to see if I was okay—an article about Michel had come out in the paper and she had recognized my name. After hearing my side of the story, she quickly shifted her alliance from him to me, figuring I would make a better friend anyway: I was unlikely to swipe her money and, besides, it would be a lot easier getting together for coffee with someone who wasn't in prison.

As I waited until there was space available on the bus to Tegucigalpa, she had helped me pass the time. She had made me temporarily forget all that I had just been through, and hanging out with her had been surprisingly fun. She was seven years younger than me and at first I thought the age difference would mean we had nothing in common. After all, I had been on my own for the past nine years whereas she still lived with her parents. However, it was this very fact that ended up appealing to me. She reminded me what it was like to be nineteen—or what it would have been like had I not been somber and hardworking, weighed down with the anxiety of putting myself through college. Spending time with her was like getting back the teenage years I had missed. The act of smoking a cigarette or drinking half a beer was still a major event for her; to me these actions had ceased to be any big deal, but she made them fun again. Together we reveled in the depravity of it all. Just walking down the street, we'd crack each other up. A simple walk to buy ice cream was an event that would inevitably turn into an infectious gigglefest.

Although my life in Los Angeles had greatly improved over the past year, it still paled in comparison to my last few days with Jessica. I wanted to laugh like that again. I wanted to act silly. I wanted people to roll their eyes at me as I giggled too loudly in the street. Maybe I had missed out on all the fun things there were to do in Costa Rica. Maybe I should give the country one more chance.

While waiting for my bags at the San José airport, I thought to myself that this trip to Costa Rica really was going to be different. It was going to be a real vacation, just as Jessica had promised. I was going to visit nature preserves, museums, and exotic restaurants. I was going to sip tropical drinks out of ripe coconuts. I was going to throw caution to the wind and get myself a tan. And no way in hell would there be any need for me to visit the local jail.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” I asked Jessica once I had arrived at my hotel in San José and was able to use the phone.

“Actually,Wendy, I hope you don't mind, we're going to visit the local jail.”

This was not a good sign.

“Jessica, I'd love to, but I have to go to a beach or a mountain. I have to get a tan.”

“Wendy, remember when you said how lucky I was to have a boyfriend who wasn't in prison?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I'm not so lucky anymore.”

The irony of this situation was not lost on me. The last time I'd been in Costa Rica, we had turned Michel's incarceration into a joke. Every time Jessica uttered the slightest complaint about her aching feet or her growling stomach, I'd turn to her and jokingly remind her that things could always be worse: She could be in my shoes. “At least your boyfriend isn't in prison” had become my ongoing refrain.

How was I supposed to console her now? “Well, at least you know he's not sleeping with other women” didn't come out as encouraging as I had hoped. But more important, what was going on in this country? Given the number of men I had met in Costa Rica and the percentage of those men that had wound up in prison, I was beginning to suspect that getting arrested was something that went on all the time.

My phone conversation with Jessica ended before I got any real information. Her father walked into the room she was calling from, and since he was blissfully unaware of the recent events in his daughter's life, Jessica was unable to give me any details of the situation, leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions. Lying in bed in my hotel room (I'd gone back to Hotel Venecia, not because it was especially nice, but it was cheap and familiar—it was a wonderfully worldly sensation to arrive in a foreign country and get recognized by the hotel staff), I thought over what I knew about my new friend. As far as getting involved with criminals went, she didn't seem the type. She made the sign of the cross every time we walked past a Catholic church, ran her own business at age nineteen, and refused to sleep with Olman until they got married (which at the rate things were going looked like it wasn't going to happen anytime soon). The only thing in her life resembling corruption was her one-cigarette-a-day habit, which she indulged in with the same guilty glee as if her menthol Virginia Slims had been laced with crack.

I chalked up the strange turn of events to being in a foreign country with a penal tradition different from the one found in the United States. Unlike in my own country where wealthy and powerful criminals actually had to have a trial before being declared innocent and freed from prison, here they often did away with the inconveniences of scheduling hearings. Bribes were standard practice throughout Costa Rica and it was common knowledge that a checkbook was the most important legal document anyone could carry.

This sort of simplified the whole judicial process and made life a lot easier on wealthy, law-disregarding citizens, but if you were foolish enough to have been born poor and got on the wrong side of the police, your chances of seeing the outside world again were about as good as those of Siberian tigers hoping to get paroled from the San Diego Zoo.

“The police can do whatever they want to you,” my father had explained to me in Honduras. “In fact, if you get robbed, think twice about going to them. They won't do anything unless you bribe them and they've even been known to plant drugs on unsuspecting Americans.”

Given this information, I was just glad that my admission to the prison the next day was scheduled to take place through the visitors' entrance.

“Jail is no picnic,” my mother used to warn me on the especially mischievous days of my childhood. Being just nine years old, it was hard for me to imagine what prison could possibly be like: nothing to do all day, living without my siblings, no mother or father to eat breakfast with. Of course, I was sure there must be a downside too. Jail couldn't possibly be a fun place to be.

But walking up the steps to San Sebastian prison with Jessica on my second day in Costa Rica, I began to suspect that my mother had been wrong. The scent of hot dogs was wafting through the air, men were busy grilling pork over a barbecue, and families were relaxing on blankets spread out over the ground. It seemed like—well, prison sure looked like a picnic to me. It reminded me of the huge company outings my dad felt obligated to attend and would routinely drag us to as kids, except that here everyone seemed to be having a good time—which I attributed to the fact that on prison visiting days half of the people came here willingly.

Jessica and I were in a long line filled mostly with women, all of whom carried plastic containers filled with steaming meat, gravy, rice, and potatoes. In order to be allowed into the outdoor courtyard on the other side of the chain-link fence, we had to sign in with our passports and subsequently get patted down by a female guard. Once we finally made it inside, Jessica and I seated ourselves on a bench and watched the prisoners filing out of the cellblock and into the arms of their families.

While waiting for Olman to appear Jessica had the chance to tell me the story. Three days earlier he had been arrested in a mix-up, in which he was mistakenly accused of selling drugs. The OIJ had recordings of Olman's phone calls that went something like this:

“Meet me at the gas station in fifteen minutes. I think I'm going to sell at least five thousand
colones
worth today.”

“Well, I have a contact at the Pepsi plant. He has plans to help me distribute.”

It would have been very incriminating if Olman had been discussing cocaine or heroin instead of the raffle tickets that he was selling for the Costa Rican Foundation for the Blind. But the OIJ had shown up at his house one morning and led him out in handcuffs, along with his uncle and brother who were with him at the time.

Olman entered the courtyard just as Jessica was nearing the end of the story. She spotted him in the distance, raced over, put her arms around his neck, and asked how he was doing. I walked over, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and asked him what it was like being a drug dealer.

I would have continued the conversation further, but I realized that Olman's tongue was tied up with other things (namely Jessica's)—which was my distressing first clue that I was going to have to find a way to kill the next four hours on my own. For a brief moment, I thought that I would just mingle, but then I remembered that the attendees at this picnic were not my dad's innocuous mining engineering colleagues—these were convicts.

And even assuming I would be brave enough to strike up a conversation with one of them, what would we possibly talk about? Of course the nagging question would be what the guy was in for but asking that was sure to be a breach of prison etiquette. “Hi, I'm Wendy. What crime did you commit?” didn't seem the best way to start a friendly chat. And even if I did manage to get the question out, what would I say to his response? “Oh, you killed your wife and three children. So, tell me, what was
that
like?”

The fact that I was visiting yet another Costa Rican prison was just beginning to sink in. Did these things happen to other people on their vacations?

I figured the best course of action would be to keep a low profile and take advantage of this unique sociological setting by merely observing. Sitting at an outdoor picnic table under a covered awning surrounded by Olman's family members, I timidly nibbled at the food Jessica had brought and spent the next hour as follows: for twenty minutes I watched Jessica and Olman's near-pornographic display, for twenty-five minutes I came up with possible escape plans in case I ever arrived at this jail by the back door instead of the visitors' entrance, and for fifteen minutes I stared dumbly at Olman's brother Jorge, wishing to God I had something to say other than, “So, what's it like being in jail?”

Luckily, Jorge finally broke the silence by piping up, “Do you want to know everyone here who's gay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Him, over there, with the red half shirt. Gay. And the one with the long hair and bad skin. That's his boyfriend.”

That topic of conversation having worn thin, there followed a long uncomfortable silence. Finally, I had to ask, “So, what do you do all day?”

“Mostly just drink.”

“Really?” I asked, relieved to have finally found some common ground. “I thought it wasn't allowed.”

“It's not. We make it ourselves. That's why the guards won't let anyone bring in fruit, juice, or tortillas. We ferment them in a plastic Coke bottle and hide it under our mattresses.”

“And makeup? Why couldn't I bring in makeup?”

“Some prisoners have tried dressing up as women to escape.”

“Say, would you do me a favor?” Olman's uncle chimed in.

“Sure,” I said, hoping he wasn't going to ask to borrow my lipstick.

“A friend of ours couldn't come out into the courtyard because no one is here to visit him. Would you tell the guard you're here to see him?”

The first thing Francisco Sánchez did after thanking me for having called him out was plop himself down at my side and ask what a nice girl like me was doing in a place like this.

“Just visiting,” I answered with a nervous laugh. “But the more important question—”

“What's a nice guy like me doing here?” He pulled out a picture of a smiling, doe-eyed little girl. “That's why I'm here.”

“Pedophilia?” I wagered.

“She's my daughter. I'm in jail because I came here to see her. I'm from Colombia. But it's no big deal. It's just a mix-up. I should be out of here in a week or so. Do you want to hear the story?”

Had this been a U.S. prison, I would have shrugged him off and found a plausible way to slip away, uttering some excuse like “Sorry, but I have to go sneak someone a file,” but he seemed so nonthreatening. In fact, looking around me, everyone at the prison did. Men were cuddling their babies, kids were tossing balls on the lawn, husbands were snuggling up with their wives. This was not the way prisoners were supposed to be. Where were the knife fights and swearing matches? Someone had to have a swastika tattooed on his forehead.