Wednesday, September 24, 2014

It's No Joke Being Broke


A few months ago I came to spend a few days in Tela, a city on the north coast of Honduras, before flying out of nearby San Pedro Sula. I’d paid half of all the money I had for one night in a hotel, and I was getting screwed. I sat in my room covered in sweat with a remote control to a dead TV. The fan wouldn’t spin, wouldn’t oscillate, and my lips were bleeding from eating unripe mangoes. The skin of an unripe mango is full of urushiol, the same kind of oil that makes poison ivy poisonous.

I went to take a shower. The towel was on the rack by the sink and had the words Hotel La Hacienda written on it in black permanent marker. There was no curtain or shower-head, just a tube sticking out of the wall. I turned the nozzle, half expecting no water to come out, and none did. I smelled smoke, a sort of burning plastic smell, and turned to see that the fan was on fire. I’d left it on and the internal gears were grinding themselves away.

In the morning my stomach was rumbling like crazy. I went down to the restaurant, which was on the second floor, to get the free breakfast. It was early and the room was dark and out the large rectangular window on the far side of the room I could see the main square and beyond it the grayish-blue line of the ocean. I felt better. The woman came out and I told her I wanted coffee. She pointed to the food on the counter. There was cereal and oatmeal. I emptied a bag of oatmeal into a plastic bowl and added some hot water. They were decent but not at all the way I remembered them. Halfway through the bowl I saw that I was eating maggots, little larvae squirming in the bowl. I finished the coffee and headed to the beach.

There was a bridge over a small river that emptied into a lagoon. Water from the lagoon flowed across the flat sand and met the onrushing water from the ocean and the currents made fantastic patterns. Palm trees lined the beach in neat rows and every so often there was a large blue garbage can next to one of them. A large ship loomed close to shore. It revved its engine and black smoke came out of it. I thought it was searching for something or practicing staying in one place because it did not leave an area within four bright orange buoys. The beach was empty but I still buried my wallet in the sand before getting in the water. There was nothing in my stomach but coffee and a few maggots. In the water I bobbed like an empty pop can. The ocean felt like forgotten tea.

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