Ghetto Beach, All Right

This place is all right.   Local soothsayers will tell you that there exists a magnetic pull which draws one to the event horizon here, at the edge of the sea. Spiral centric you go, like a barrel ride, down the Dionysian Tube to emerge on the other side of a vortex that may take you to a surrogate dimension of your alter ego. This is a dimension where you cruise in an elliptical orbit of some celestial body, young and supple, one that you might otherwise recognize as a reflection of your Id.

You find yourself surrounded by a set of uncoordinated instinctual trends, and you embrace your child’s mind in this most polarizing place.  Everywhere you look, every place is packed with stars, asteroids, and quarks all moving in a deterministic wave and vibrating a low and blissful note.  Effortlessly, you glide among the free radicals, agents of lust, hope and despair all bouncing off each other in the ocean mist, randomly forming loose-fitting bonds that are neither permanent nor destructible. Irresistible chaos.  Today is a good day to get a tattoo.

At Graffiti Restro Cafe you meet a butterfly collector who tells you that the Barba Roja is good and invites you to a round. You tell him that earlier in the day  you helped carry freshly hatched sea turtles to the edge of the surf. Pints clink. You finish your beer and stroll down the strip. Before you know it a voice from Los Amigos is calling to you. “Curry, most spectacular curry,” the voice says and you are intrigued.  You continue walking and start to think a Poke Bowl might be nice right now and you say Holaloha three times fast.  You are thirsty, too.  Maybe another craft beer at Puddle Fish, a kombucha, or an imported beer at Los Amigos. The other option is a shot of ginger turmeric and a lemon gelato.  This is when you get a WhatsApp message from a girl who writes “hola bby” sealed with a ruby red kiss.   Every wish and every desire comes to you all at once and you pile them like river rocks in a stack. Yoga poses become part of your daily routine.  A street person in the reflective vest of a parking attendant waves a baton and halts traffic so you can merge with the flow. Namaste.

Ghetto Beach is like a film of everything you ever imagined reeling through the windows of your bus, train, plane or spokes of your bici.  Across the inside of your Ray-Ban sunglasses, you blink and see a sign. Abruptly, you realized that you have arrived. The Central Pacific town closest to the capital city.  How did you get here? This is a  place that is different for every traveler. Mystical and polarizing, enigmatic and as common as fried chicken, welcome to Ghetto Beach. It’s all right.

Here you will come to learn there is no such thing as an expat.  There are travelers and there are tourists. There are vacationers and there are immigrants. A cast of extraordinary characters filter their way into your psyche and now they narrate your story.

Zen Dog Duke and the Bobble Head Baby Jesus walked west from the Venezuelan’s blue house in Barrio el INVU where they had a booked a room through Air BnB.  They headed towards the beach.  Under a charcoal sky, grey shards of morning light pierce the windshield of an abandoned car covered in dew.  A girl lay passed out in the back seat. Her name is Jenny, but some call her ‘La Loca’ and others address her simply as Crazy.  A few steps past the girl in the car, a guy with one leg sits on the curb offering bamboo wind chimes that he stole from a neighbor’s yard. “Una teja, compa?”  He held out his hand. “Una teja para ayudarme.”  Zen Dog walks past the gimp.  The Bobble Head Baby Jesus pretended to look for change. They walked past the chickens and a small  parcel of land cluttered with tin-shack-makeshift construction in the center of the lot under the branches of a sprawling Guanacaste tree. They walked past a pack of zaguates, stray dogs gathered in front of the pulperia where a Coca-Cola truck blocks the street as the driver unloads.  They walked another block and cross Avenida Pastor Diaz, continued one more block west to the beach.  It was all right.

Ghetto Beach is almost abandoned this time of year. Hardcore surfers and howling street people share the town with stray dogs.

The tide was coming in.  Kids were surfing and photographers had cameras with big lenses to take their pictures.  The beach was rocky and the Zen Dog was careful where he stepped.  It was all right.

They walked.  Zen Dog Duke and The Bobble Head Baby Jesus walked along the edge of the surf to the south in the direction of the surfers with their boards. Slowly and deliberately they headed to the Sunday Surf, a Mass of Saints where the watched and the watchers were in a state of flux, interchangeable and impermanent. Waves kept flowing into waves as thoughts flow into other thoughts and then again into other thoughts and then disappear as if they had never been. It is this constant cycling that gives the illusion of permanence.

Can you surf? Zen Dog Duke asked The Bobble Head.

Can I surf? The Bobble Head Baby Jesus rolled his eyes.  It’s a cake walk.

Zen Dog Duke scratches his left ear. Something small was buzzing.

So yes, continued The Bobble Head Baby Jesus, I can surf but I would like to be better.   I’m a little stuck.

The buzzing had stopped, but a small mosquito had landed in a dainty fashion on The Zen Dog’s ear.

Are you afraid, or are you unwilling to improve? asked Zen Dog Duke.

My will is selfish, said the Bobble Head Baby Jesus. It’s going to take the grace of something bigger for me to become the surfer that I want to be.

The reason you want to be better is the reason that you aren’t, said Zen Dog Duke.  Then he heard a buzzing in his ear again, and a small voice said: Isn’t it funny how gurus hate each other?

…more…

Copyright © 2018 by Rafael Stumbo Tarasco

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