The Gringo: A Memoir (14 page)

It turned out that some pesky jungle bacteria had worked its way through my man plumbing and lodged in the spermatic cord. In the sonogram I could actually see the bacteria clogging up the thin cord attaching my left testicle to the rest of my body. Just the picture of that replaces all adequate descriptions I could give for the pain originating in this part of my body. The doctor said the infection was small enough that instead of surgery, I could continue blasting it with antibiotics like Cipro, which I began taking every day. Beyond that, he said, there was nothing to be alarmed about.

I left Loja while the sun was setting. By the time we got close to Zumbi, it was dark out and I could see the lights from town as we wound down the road. The bus was packed; I was crammed in a window seat, with my face nearly squished against the glass, clutching the x-ray paper in my hand. The combination of the lights of Zumbi shining on the other side of the river and the pictures of my balls in the manila envelope seemed to highlight my loneliness. Tired and pissed off, I felt a tear roll down my cheek.
Aha, my first Peace Corps tear
, I thought. There in the bus—manila envelope, lights of Zumbi, clenched prostate, throbbing balls—I felt the tear crawl down my face nice and slow. I let it hang there as I looked out the window into the night. And then I wiped it away and said to myself—actually
said
it aloud—“Stop being a pussy.”

In the week that followed, the pain receded. The Peace Corps doctor said in addition to the spermatic cord infection, it might have also developed into a prostatitis, which explained the sphincter-clenching agony that resulted when the lightning bolts of pain seemed to originate not just from my testicles, but also from the deepest recesses of my man plumbing.

The diagnosis came toward the end of an eight-week period in which I was dangerously depressed.

CHAPTER
26

W
hile the pain continued and I was in Zumbi alone with no work to do, I would lie in bed and become infuriated with everything around me. I hated Ecuador—this disgusting, pitiful country that had put me in so much pain. I hated it for what it had done to me in such a short time. It had nearly crushed me. Everything from my old site boiled up and ruined me inside. When I’d first shared the story with friends, an abduction attempt in the desert wastelands had seemed thrilling. But now the hideous nature of it all got to me. It gave me nightmares and crept up on me while I was awake and left me cursing the assholes I’d met there who treated my well-being as carelessly as they treated everything else in their pathetic lives.

Those motherfuckers
, I would think, as I clenched my teeth and my fists. I fantasized about someday telling those people what I really thought of them after I’d stayed quiet like an abused child, bottling it up day after day because I was scared of the consequences. I pictured going to La Segua on my last day in the country and doing something fantastically violent to each and every one of them.

Now, months after leaving that place, I would receive vaguely threatening phone calls on a weekly basis from the coastal scumbags. I thought about changing my number, but there was something exciting and menacing about answering the calls and holding my palm over the receiver as Juan’s friends and relatives shouted obscenities and also truisms like “I know you’re there.”

Some of the numbers I resaved in my phone as “
xxx
” instead of a name so I’d know not to answer it anymore. Sometimes they called rapid fire, twenty times in a minute, as I struggled to press
end
as quickly as they came in. Or they’d call from a number I had made the mistake of deleting, so I’d pick up and say hello in my gringo accent only to hear “Aha, motherfucker! We know it’s you. Motherfucking son of a bitch!” on the other end. I used to stay on the line listening in silence to the threats with the same arousal kids get by ringing a doorbell and hiding in the bushes to observe the neighbor yell in anger from his porch. With my silence, I tried to drag the calls on as long as possible. I wanted to burn away the precious minutes they were always so scant on that they begged to borrow my phone. Take that!

One day they gave up and the calls ceased, but my solitary war of anger raged on. I felt like South America—the land I loved so much that at one time I’d felt
part
of it—had done this to me.

And here I am now
, I thought,
angry and all alone
.

The thought that this country was worthy of receiving my help filled me with sinister and self-loathing laughter.

I was angry with the Peace Corps. How do you send some volunteers to frolic in the rainforest or mangroves with good organizations while you send others to work with a Napoleon-complexed child in a community resembling an open-air insane asylum?

The anger exploded from every one of my pores.

How does your boss in the office, stammering on the other end of the phone, tell you these “misunderstandings” are “common” and then try to convince the country director to keep you out there? I envisioned walking into his office on my last day in this despicable country and telling him what I thought of him, too: “Your job is to help me but you did the opposite because you didn’t want extra paperwork. You put me in danger because you forgot I’m a human and not just a name on a piece of paper.”

My blood boiled more as I strolled through Zumbi with nothing to do. I’d pass the FODI people I worked with for all of two months and they’d ask me, inexplicably, if I’d still been going into the office. I explained that neither they nor anyone else was
in
the office. I wanted to scream in their face that they didn’t have any work for me to do even when they were actually employed there.

And then I’d go back to burning with rage over how I got sent there. How could Winkler have pawned me off on this community to work with government-paid babysitters who only wanted a gringo they could flirt with?

Winkler had acted like it was the worst inconvenience he’d ever faced to come down to my site and see if they still wanted another volunteer, all while I sat on my ass in Quito for nearly two weeks. The result of his haste was that he chose the worst host family possible.

Graciela became more crazed by the day. And Consuela kept flirting with me and would
just happen
to walk through the kitchen seminude at odd hours of the day when I was eating alone. The idea repulsed me and further entrenched me in the solitary confinement of my bedroom—my cocoon of hatred.

I also stewed at my family back home. On one hand, I’d hated their response to the incident in Manabí: Some told me to quit and come home. On the other hand, my spears of hatred hurled their way for not
understanding
what I now realized: that being here was all a sick mistake. I was pissed at them for thinking I could get through it.
You weren’t here
, I thought.
You didn’t have to be around those people like I did
. Eventually I gave up on trying to relay any more feelings or descriptions their way. The anger would hurt them. The loneliness would frighten them. There really is nothing lonelier than anger being thrown in all directions.

Now, Winkler was assaulting me with manic emails and phone calls about Reconnect, the Peace Corps meeting where we had to show up with our counterparts and give presentations explaining what we’d discovered in our interviews and analyses of our communities in the first few months.

“What do you mean you don’t have anyone from your community to bring to the meeting?” he barked.

“Well, everyone you sent me here to work with has been fired,” I calmly explained. “Just as you predicted.”

He’d chortle and come back with something like, “Well, this just won’t do.”

His calls and emails became increasingly frantic and devastating for my mood. I’d invited everyone in my town I could think of, including my former coworkers. They all said no. They said it sounded stupid, to which I had no effective reply.

In a sign of just how unsettling Winkler’s calls were becoming, I’d even committed the potentially disastrous maneuver of asking Consuela to come. She was, after all, an important political figure in town. I knew she’d say no and she did—she was busy touring around the county on political business—though I’m sure she managed to mistake my invitation as some sort of signal, which led to more nausea-inducing come-ons from her every day when we passed each other. (One day while I was eating breakfast alone in the kitchen, she came in wearing only a bra and short workout shorts. She pointed out to me how hard she was trying to lose weight by only drinking smoothies and how she just needed someone to massage her midsection like so to allow the rolls of billowing flesh to tighten up. I believe she was fishing for a compliment, so I told her she looked good, not wanting to hurt her feelings. She eventually left the room, but I’d lost my appetite.)

The frequency of Winkler’s calls and the despair in his voice started giving me more anxiety than the threatening calls from the animals at my old site. His calls ended with him saying, “Please,
please
, we just
can’t
have you show up to the meeting alone.” I was beginning to think showing up solo to this thing was the Peace Corps equivalent of career suicide.

In the second week of September, after traveling seventeen hours on a bus, I finally arrived in Puyo for the big event. At the meeting, more than half the other volunteers had no counterpart.

CHAPTER
27

T
oward the end of October, the testicular pain that had momentarily waned staged a forceful comeback. When the cattle prod-like jolts of pain again became too much to take, I called the Peace Corps doctor.

Now I needed to go all the way to Quito to get checked out by some specialists, he said. The trip would probably include another ultrasound in addition to other exams. The following week, I took the fifteen-hour bus ride.

On the trip from Loja to Quito, I sat next to another volunteer who was leaving her site and Early Terminating. She was throwing in the towel after about three months at her site. She said she didn’t like the community. She hadn’t had any incidents, but she said she felt unsafe and uncomfortable. She asked me why I was going to Quito and I told her. We said no more and both slept for the rest of the ride.

I got to Quito at 7 a.m. By 11:30 a.m. I was naked in the fetal position on the exam table of an internal medicine specialist named Dr. Mendez. His office was inside a private hospital in northern Quito—by far the nicest medical building I’d ever been in. Dr. Mendez wanted to get to the bottom of my unusual amount of pain.

First he ruled out a torsion (which is kind of like a game of tetherball between your testicles). Next he administered a prostate exam. Holding up his index finger inside a latex glove, he said in perfect English, “If this is merely uncomfortable, your prostate is fine; if it’s painful, we’ll need another exam.” He wiggled his finger and I let out a whimper. He concluded that I had some combination of epididymitis and prostatitis. Just to confirm it, the next morning I would return to the clinic for my second testicular ultrasound. As a bonus, I would roll over for a rectal sonogram right afterward.

I left Dr. Mendez’s office and walked up the street to the Peace Corps headquarters. Once there, I stopped by Winkler’s office to say hello. I sat down for a few minutes, squirming in the chair as the bolts of pain tore through my body and he bitched at me for not having an official counterpart. I told him I was working on it. His griping made me a bit dizzy so I said we’d talk later and walked over to the doctor’s office.

The doctor asked me how the consultation with Mendez went. I told him.

“Well, how you feeling, man?” he asked.

“All right, I guess,” I said. “That’s the first finger in the butt I’ve gotten from a doctor.”

“Yeah, no fun, dude,” he said. “Well, let’s get you ready for the rectal ultrasound tomorrow. You doing okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“How about your pride?”

We both laughed.

In preparation for the test the next morning, he handed me some laxatives and told me to take them that night.

“One more thing,” he said. “Have you ever done an enema?”

“No.”

He handed me the prescription paper.

“When do we have to do it?” I asked.

“Oh no, you’re going to administer this one yourself, man.”

“When?”

“Um, hold on . . .” he pulled up the WebMD website on his computer. “Seven in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“And, Grigs, don’t squeeze it in too fast because it can have a nauseating effect.”

My alarm went off at 6 a.m., and I used the next hour to get myself mentally ready for the self-administered enema. The squishy plastic bottle with its nozzle like a hummingbird’s beak had been on the nightstand staring me down all night. The directions on the box were in Spanish with drawn diagrams: There were two options for how I could go about this.

The first option required a doggy-style position, which seemed to have no amount of dignity to it. I chose the second, which involved taking the pose of the inside person of a couple that is “spooning.” The directions then called for you to use one arm to pull your knees closer to your chest while using your other arm to reach around behind and . . .

THE SPERMATIC CORD WAS NO
longer infected, but the rest of the testicular ultrasound and the (harrowing) rectal ultrasound were inconclusive. So after a trip to Quito and multiple things getting shoved up my ass, I still didn’t have any real answers on how to ease the pain. In addition to having me continue with the Cipro, Dr. Mendez prescribed Celebrex, making me probably the first person under the age of fifty to take said drug.

On Sunday evening I took an overnight bus back to Loja. I stayed in Loja Monday night to watch the Denver Broncos on
Monday Night Football
. I was back in site Tuesday morning and went a solid week without nut pain.