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What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

  By Steve Banks

  I can’t tell you about banana republics like Panama… about the joy of little freedoms… about cigars, Cuban – go ahead light them in public. About discos, on Calle Uruguay – open ‘til the sun starts shining. About beer tunnels, my favorite – models ask you how many they can open for you before you drive off. About hookers, Colombian – 18 years old (más o menos) that you willingly ignore are pros until your buddy tells you the taxi money home was enough keep them in blow for a month. About Christmas, just another excuse for a party – where pasty white skin like mine is actually checked out by women hotter than the girls that threw beer in my face at college. Fucking enjoy them, because these freedoms come from a lack of due process… enjoy them, because whether you do or not one day this lack of due process will come sneaking up behind you and bite you in the ass. Remembering these freedoms can keep you from losing your shit in a Panamanian jail. I know.

  Maybe I should begin at the beginning. If you want to know the truth, it has a lot to do with Paul. Paul Newman.

  Anna Nicole Smith, Oh My God! Is the surge working? Mortgage meltdown, arctic meltdown, how is your iPhone? Did you hear Angelina has new babies? This was the dorky banter I participated in, which made me a big fat dork. I paid my mortgage, I was going to vote for Obama, and I never cheated on my wife. Then Paul Newman died.

  When I first heard, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” in the Guns and Roses song, I ran down to the Blockbuster and got all Paul’s movies. Cool Hand Luke from the aforementioned song was my favorite. He got the shit kicked out of him in jail and when no human could take more, and all he had to do was lay down, he got up to get the shit kicked out of him again. I never understood the movie or why he did that but for some reason I loved to see him get the shit kicked out of him. Like, fuck you, hit me again.

  Two things sucked that day. For one, Paul died. It wasn’t so much that he died as it was that he got old and then died. Eighty three … when did that happen? The second thing that sucked always sucked - my boss, the man who perpetually looks like he took a dump in his pants. Tom (my boss), if for some reason you are reading my blog – YOU SHIT YOUR PANTS DIDN’T YOU – EVERYDAY!

  “So,” he said. “Paul Newman.”

  Hmmm, maybe Mr. Poopy Pants is not such a douchebag after all, I thought.

  “No, Steve. I don’t care one way or another that a Hollywood actor died. I mean Paul Newman is too bad. ‘Don’t tease me bro’’ is too bad, and all the Rihanna videos are too bad. And Facebook is really too bad. Too bad for you.”

  He slowly pushed a piece of paper in front of me that I had signed a few months earlier. I thought it was companywide policy that everyone had signed about internet use. I never really read the thing.

  “That was your second warning,” he said.

  I know now why Biff stole the pen in Death of a Salesman. I left my boss’s office imagining the pen from his desk sticking out of his bleeding eye. I didn’t want to work there anymore. I didn’t want to work, to pay my mortgage or be a husband. Fuck it. I didn’t need to do the right thing anymore. Fuck it… I would leave and not vote for Obama.

  They tried to get me to stay and finish a project I was already six months behind on. I had been working on my own project instead – a Facebook project called ‘Latina ‘Ginas’-- a competition to see which country could be best represented on three different Facebook profiles of me. In the end Panama won. Not because I had more hot girls added from Panama, but because of Estrella. A super-hot girl from the country’s third largest city, David, with whom I decided I had to study horizontal salsa. Also, my buddy Matt was teaching English in Panama City. Two weeks after I quit my job I left a note on the bed for the wife to not wait up for me. I was in Panama. More than she deserved.

  They say that Panama City is like Miami, except that they speak English in Panama. This is not true. One night at the casino I tried to ask for a michelada, which is beer, lime and salt. I didn’t get the ‘lada’ part, so what I had actually asked for was micha, a very bad word for vagina. Like ‘cunt’. I asked for a cunt while I was playing Texas Hold’em. The best I got all night were rude looks and pair of deuces. The next day I was supposed to head to the San Blas islands with my buddy Matt but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to see if the winner of the Facebook ‘Latina ‘Gina’ challenge was as hot as her profile picture.

  I checked into Hostel Bambú, a cool little place with a pool and a one eyed dog aptly named Stinky. I was supposed to meet Estrella a few hours after checking in, so I proceeded to drink coffee and a distilled sugar cane alcohol called seco. One moment I was sitting around the pool while the owner of the hostel played Leonard Cohen on the guitar, and the next I was waking up in my underwear in a strange apartment. There was a note on the table in Spanish from some guy named Sergio. I had no idea what it said. I imagined he was some gay guy that found me face down in a puddle in front of a gay bar.

  In my pocket was a piece of paper with a drawing of two stick people sitting on a bed with tape over their mouths. And a phone number. I called and to my delight it was Estrella, not Sergio, at the other end of the line. She said something about going to the bush.

  Again I must emphasize that there really is more English in Miami. Language is an issue. A gringo I met here said he never took his girls to his apartment-- only to the bush. I thought this was okay for him, but I could be a bit classier.

  So eventually, Estrella and I get into a taxi, and I am looking around to see which bush we are going to when we arrive at a push. ‘Push’ is actually an English word that American G.I.’s popularized when they ventured out of the Canal Zone with their girls to go to love motels. You drive into a little garage and push a button that closes the garage door. Then you push another button that opens the bedroom door. Lots of pushing, hence the name.

  Panamanian men do not have their own house until they are fifty because they spend all their money on spoilers, fins, duel exhaust, etc. for their 1985 Lada, and when they finally do have their own pad they have already had numerous girlfriends on the side and illegitimate children. So when the Americans left, the push stayed. People often party in the push, and sometimes they die in some crazy car explosion. Often Colombian drug runners die in a push after stealing coke bound for Mexico. Live hard, have sex, die – the push is like the Disney circle of life, Panama Style.

  Estrella and I took a taxi to a push called Beverly Hills. In our room I discovered even more buttons to push -- a vending machine of sex toys. After 25 minutes at Beverly Hills I fell in love with both Estrella and La Serpiente Mágica.

  There were pros and cons for both Estrella and La Serpiente Mágica, but the sex snake did not have replaceable batteries, so I decided to focus on Estrella. She, however, had Sergio. Does ‘novio’ mean gay buddy or boyfriend? Again my Spanish was an obstacle so I just chose it to mean the former. But one day after I called her and she spoke nothing but high speed Spanish and hung up, I decided to release my stress on a couple of Swedish backpackers back at the Bambú. I was helping them with their bags behind a locked door when Estrella decided to show up out of the blue and knock. Funny, my holy-shit-what-are-you-doing-here look was not enough to get her to leave. The girls in my room were topless from the pool, so I pushed Estrella out and locked the door. Estrella banged on the door shouting something about mothers, vaginas, sharp objects and juice in Spanish. I am not 100% about the juice part-- I am still learning. Just don’t order a ‘chucha’ if you want juice.

  So Estrella took a break from tearfully pounding on the door to grab a knife from the kitchen. She tried to jimmy the door open, but fortunately the hostel owner heard all the talk of juice and whatnot, and because he thought she was trying to kill me, he called the cops. They threw her kicking and screaming into the back of the cop car and asked us to come along. Stupidly, we followed in a taxi. Well,
during the drive I guess she convinced the cops that I was trying to rape her and she drew her knife in self-defense.

  No due process. I was handcuffed and sat down next to ugly hookers in paint to my right and hairy hookers with dicks to my left -- both eyeing me like the last M&M at a party for fat kids. Their boozy sweat and cheap perfume could not overpower the stank that flew out of the holding cell and introduced itself to the back of my mouth.

  The cop called my name. Finally he’s gonna let me take a piss, I thought. But when he took my belt and shoe laces I knew I was going into that holding cell.

  “No soy criminal,” I protested.

  He muttered something in Spanish and pushed me into the holding cell.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw faces around me on the floor. They were all shirtless and sweaty and lying in about a quarter inch of what smelled like piss.

  “He said I know you are not a criminal,” a dark figure in the cell said in English.

  “What?”

  “The guard. What he said was that he knows you are not a criminal. If he thought you were guilty he would have beaten you already.”

  I was hit with a sudden rush of fear. Her Facebook said she was nineteen. She looked nineteen. But it was hard to tell with these Latinas.

  In jail I committed my first voluntary crime. Full time inmates in the cell above us used string to lower weed rolled with pages of the Bible. The weed was just to get you in the mood for the Oreos that came next. I made friends with the half inch of piss and sweat and the juvenile delinquents that were there for the night. In the morning I was handcuffed and taken down to the fiscalía, sort of the Panamanian version of the D.A’s office. I sat there until a man told me I could go home. Charges dropped, I guess. That’s due process.

  I didn’t go back to the hostel. I didn’t call her. One day I stopped into an internet café and checked my Facebook. “I want seeing you,” was all she wrote. But she had written it twice each day for the ten days I hadn’t checked my Facebook.

  A couple of days later I checked my Facebook again. There were two notifications.

  One was a ‘friend request’ from my wife.

  I clicked ‘IGNORE’.

  The other was another message from Estrella. “I want seeing you at new,” it said.

  What we have here is a failure to communicate.

  What would he do if he could do it all over again? What would Cool Hand Luke do? Would he keep taking a beating? Maybe he took all those beatings and kept asking for more because he knew one day he would be eighty three…

  Cool Hand Luke… if you are up there… give me a sign… What would you do?

 

  The Trail of the Black Christ

  By Mathew Hope

  There’s this Panamanian windshield wiper finger wag I picked up that is actually pretty effective. It came in handy the night I had to venture into Cinco de Mayo and turn away transvestite prostitutes and street children that growled when I refused to buy their stickers. This is not my Panama. My Panama is the other way… it is in the money laundering banking district where I teach ESL in a tower by day and party in the discos below by night. Cinco de Mayo is the hot, greasy transportation throat of Panama City. The tourist police are the gag reflex that spits anyone with a camera and shorts out and onto the white-washed cobblestones of Casco Viejo. In Spanish I told the cops that I knew where I was going – to El Cristo Negro, The Pilgrimage of the Black Christ.

  Only this was not true. My buddy Steve and I were booked on a sailing trip that departed just past the pilgrimage site to the San Blas islands. Only he decided that it would be way cooler to ditch me at the last minute to chase a girl half his age that he friended on Facebook. Even worse, I was supposed to meet the boat captain in Portobello, and the line at the main bus terminal was out of control with swarming Christian pilgrims off to see this black wooden Jesus idol. It didn’t matter – in Cinco de Mayo I decided to catch a diablo rojo to take me to the coast solo.

  A diablo rojo was once a shiny new school bus cast out of the Promised Land by the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicles Standards Commission and then retrofitted with duel chrome exhaust and wild graffiti. They roar and spit like demons – hence the name, Red Devil. I boarded my hell on wheels and came face to face to face with wide eyed Evangelicals expecting to join the pilgrimage. Aha, the bowels of Satan are filled with conservative Christians.

  Her face appeared when I needed it most. In this sea of penitent alien eyes she locked onto me. The first thing anyone would say about her is how cute she looks- in her photos she wears a smiling mask of innocence that makes you feel guilty for admiring her beauty. But by the way she held my eyes without smiling I had a hunch she was not penitent. Without intimidating obviousness, she slid over just enough to invite me to sit. Her head was not buried in her cell phone, so I knew she wasn’t Panamanian, but I knew she wasn’t a gringa either. She was dark, olive skinned and beautiful. Plus, she had a backpack with baby blue flippers sticking out the back. When I sat next to her, she didn’t drop her gaze. She just silently chewed on the side of her thumbnail. Finally, as if she found what she was looking for in my petrified silence, she smiled slightly and held out her palm. There were two red pills.

  “Tómala,” she offered after she popped one of them into her mouth.

  I smiled and of course refused. She buried the pill in her jeans pocket. The bus did not move for more than an hour, and during the time we were sitting there in virtual silence, an obedient looking schoolboy sandwiched me closer to her. Now we were ass to ass in silence. She broke a long period of window staring by spitting out in perfect English, ‘Holy fuck, when is this bus going to move!’

  The pill was a valium you can buy at most pharmacies in Panama, and this one, I guess, was particularly strong. She told me you could bounce on a bus with no shocks and wake up feeling like you had a great eight hours of sleep.

  If the Devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, You Only Live Once.

  I popped the pill in my mouth. She offered me a swig of her water and I accepted. But the pill sat at the back right hand side of my mouth between my teeth and cheek. As far as I could tell she wasn’t watching to see if I swallowed. I could feel it dissolving in my mouth and was starting to taste the chemicals. But I managed to spit most of it out and onto the floor. Finally the bus started to move. Packed, sweaty pilgrims started to sing gospel songs.

  To get to the San Blas islands, you have to take the boat from Portobello, not far from Panama City. But traffic was a nightmare of stale, stinking moments of gridlock followed by sudden, seizure-like fits of jerking and weaving. At times I wished I had trusted her and swallowed the pill. She was out cold before the bus hit the main highway -- her head resting, sometimes bouncing, on the lip of the open window. When we finally made it to the highway, even more people crammed onto the bus and every last bit of space was filled with one fluid mass of human flesh. The last of the oxygen was consumed. The singing stopped. The honking and roaring of engines in the traffic jam took over, and everyone was silent and devoid of expression again. They looked as though they were hoping elevator doors would open soon so they could become reanimated. But we held like this for hours. So long, in fact, that the old man in the seat in front of us who had to urinate took the matter into his own hands -- he had a plastic Pepsi bottle that he pissed into. Aside from me, this drew no attention.

  Then the spindly old man held the bottle out the window and began dumping it out. It would have been fine if the bus hadn’t suddenly jerked forward causing the piss to spill down the man’s arm and through the window back at us.

  The bus suddenly roared forward again, and although there was only a ten meter stretch in the road, the bus driver mashed the pedal down, and the piss splashed back right into the face of the Latina Lolita next to me. She was too stoned on valium to even feel it. I tapped on the pisser’s shoulder, and he mad
e one feeble attempt to turn back, but the lack of space and his old joints wouldn’t permit turning and facing his mess.

  I took her pack and did my best to use her flippers to shield her face. I have never been so attracted to a piss soaked girl.

  Then the bus driver shouted a jaw dropping string of offensive words in Spanish at the traffic. He stopped the bus and pulled up the emergency brake in defeat. The bus reluctantly unloaded. When the kid to my right got up, I moved over slightly and the girl’s head flopped onto my lap, still completely unconscious. Her long black hair fell into my hands and I shivered at the sudden thought of running my hands through it. Her thin frame was light, but it was hard to juggle her and our bags off the bus.

  That I had an unconscious girl draped over my shoulder fireman style should have attracted attention, had I not entered a carnival of the absurd. Every other pilgrim had a purple robe and they walked like tired automatons three steps forward, two steps back. The way was lit by candles and glow-in-the dark rosaries sold alongside the road. The closer we got to the church, the more people in the procession dropped to their hands and knees and crawled on the asphalt.

  With a girl over my left shoulder, a pack on my right and another in my right hand, I couldn’t get far. Where was I going anyway? I was walking toward the church and never thought to think about the way to the boat taxi.

  Then I saw it. The Black Christ, carried by men with shaved heads and purple robes, was slowly coming up behind us. They walked the same as the pilgrims, three steps forward and two steps back -- except they had rhythm. They were grooving. They were dancing. And beside them people praying. And beside them people singing. And beside them people crying.

  I gave up my pixie cross to bear and sat down about thirty meters from the church, on a little patch of grass next to a table selling figurines of the Black Christ. What the hell were these people thinking? Why did they need redemption so bad? Were these the corrupt cops, drug lords and prostitutes crawling in front of me in a bizarre parade of atonement?

  Legend says the Black Christ came to Portobello on a stopover in the 15th Century, on its way to Cartagena. By that time Portobello had already become a fortified port for the Spanish to load their plundered Incan gold onto ships protected by cannons from the likes of Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake. Henry Morgan sacked Panama City and Sir Francis Drake died while laying siege on the other coast. The ship carrying the Black Christ attempted to leave Panama five times, but each time the winds refused to carry the boat. Fearing the life sized black idol was a bad omen, the sailors pitched it overboard. It washed up onto shore and has been venerated ever since. The idol, they say, did not want to leave Panama.

  It was like the Black Christ charged the air as it drew near. Singing and chanting gave way to wailing as the idol passed. People dripped burning candle wax onto their arms. The Black Christ was within feet of us when the sleeping beauty at my side suddenly sat up. She stood and slowly followed the crowd toward the church.

  I decided to watch from where I sat. I had to. I couldn’t leave the bags. My seated vantage point prohibited me from spotting her in the crowd. I had no idea what to do except wait.

  Then I saw her again. People parted to let her walk up the steps to the Church and toward the Black Christ, now at the entrance. One of the bald men that had carried the Christ put his hand out to stop her from entering the church. When she turned I could see her face, blood running from her forehead and hands. She stretched out her arms and fainted. I saw her collapse at the top of the stairs when suddenly I felt a sharp pain, like someone kneed me in the groin. Something happened to me. I can’t explain, except I imagine it had to be a panic attack. Everything grew black around the edges and the next thing I knew I was on the ground with people gathered around me.

  I got to my feet and looked frantically for her. For some reason I drastically wanted to find her. But she was gone. I never learned her name. I didn’t get to say goodbye.