Third World Explanation

I can only explain the Third World like this: it’s like sleepaway summer camp. You sleep next to a fan. If you get sick, an adult who is not your parent takes you to the doctor. The roads are bumpy and unpaved. The cars are all old pickups that need paint jobs. Conditions alternate between dust and mud. The furniture is old and worn, even in places like insurance agencies or restaurants, and the padding will be popping out of the leather or there will be scratches or little drips of paint on it if it's wood. It's still comfortable, and functional, but it would never fly in the States. Someone would have said, “It’s time we got rid of that thing,” and that would be the end of that. New fuckin’ table. At summer camp everything and everyone looks a little grimy. But you get used to it, so much that when you leave the first thing you notice are the colors. There's such contrast between the white shirts and the red sweaters. Your eyes are adjusting. Then your mom says you need to take a shower before you go out to eat. You realize you're dirty as hell. Most people in the Third World are spared this rude realization because their camp session lasts forever.

We never had packs of wild dogs at summer camp though. One night around 2 a.m. I watched a street battle, a swirl of ribcages and muscle, in the cobblestone intersection below my balcony. I had a great view but I can’t say I enjoyed it much. When it was over, the one pack was charging up the hill, looking like a cavalry regiment after a successful raid, and the other gave a half-spirited pursuit before trickling back down the hill. One of their number, a thin and beautiful creature that looked like a wolf, was sitting like a sphinx in the middle of the road. His back leg stuck out oddly behind it and it from where I stood it looked like a ripped pillow. He made no noise but beat his tail and looked at the other dogs plaintively. They gathered around him and licked his face and whined after they’d smelled the oddly-bent leg. I returned an hour later to smoke a cigarette and the dog was alone and looking alert, listening to the sounds of the empty street. It was a starry clear night and he looked like a castaway. I don’t know what happened to him and I can’t think of a better outcome than not knowing. Maybe it’s the way dogs grin even when they’re hurt or dying that makes their plights such a concern to people. Of course many people don’t care, and anyhow it's not an actual grin. 

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.

Fish Girl

There was a fish on the sidewalk. 

“Hey!  Hey!  I like your sunglasses,” she said.

 She was flopping alongside of me.   

“You snuck up on me there.”

The sun slid a rainbow up to her pouting lips. 

“What’s your name?”

A heave:  “Mary.”

Mary was covered in flies.

“Where are you going Mary?”

“This way.” 

“Well come on then.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

 “Tennessee.  Thirty miles south of Chattanooga.”           

“So that’s eastern Tennessee.” 

She stopped and looked very impressed.

“Baby,” she said.

I thought I saw a smile, the rainbows around her gills switching poles.

 “Well, I live right up here by Morocco Street. Do you know where that is?”

“I do. I’m staying there with some friends.”

“What a coincidence. What are you doing in town?”

“I just got a job at Babes’ Cabaret.”

“So you’re going to be a stripper?”

“I start tomorrow night. You should be my # 1.”

“OK,” I said. “Take me home with you?”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Just pick me up.”

I put my hand around her

and she felt like old sandwich meat.

"Hm, maybe if I..."

Then I caught my finger on a spine.
"Ouch!"

"Sorry." 

I tried my hand like a spatula

and one of her scales peeled off into my hand.

She was stuck to the pavement.

I didn’t want to go home with her anymore.

“Just wondering," she asked,
"do you have water or anything at your house?”

I looked down the street for the bus.

“Uhm. What they don’t have a fish bowl where you live? Or at least a cup of water?”

“No, they just say they love me.”

“Well that’s something. Hey, you want some beer?”  

I had a half a can of beer

and I tilted it toward the button eye

 and the sinewy mouth, which snapped open.

“That was good,” she said. “Hey, wait! Where are you going?”

“Five blocks this way, and two that way.”

“Oh, bye,” she said and waved her fin

sadly like a fan.

I put my hands on my hips
and turned toward the street.

The light was baking the shade,

just beating it up.

I saw legs moving from the bottoms of trellised porches.

The cats were starting to move.

“Good luck Mary,” I said. 

Cabbies

Two white gulls appear from the perfect blue and startle the water. It is 8:00 a.m., the start of a new day. The cab drivers’ voices rise and fall in time. They come to this parking lot every morning. There is a Dunkin Donuts, which opens early, and Value Pricing, an Arab store that sells dates, olives, and tea. On a good day there are twenty of them, with ten drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, watching the sun rise over the canal from foldout chairs around an ornate rug that’s stored in Horiya’s trunk. Four other men sit cross-legged on stools. The older men wear well-ironed gray trousers and pastel shirts that puff nicely near the waist. One has a tweed jacket neatly folded over one knee. They have striking mustaches and black hair that’s combed over dignified patches bare scalp. The others recline in their cars and close their eyes and do not talk except out their windows. They come to see men that look like their grandfathers talk to men that look like their fathers, letting the language drift in the open window...

“He received the...ah... Peace Prize in 1964 to make the world a better place. Then there was 1967, and ah...”

“—Whole new ball game?”

“Right,” the first one says. “Exactly.”

There’s a rumble in the distance that scares away the gulls. (What does Horiya, whose father’s business was destroyed three times by airstrikes, hear in the summer when the sky is dark and booming with rain?)

“I could drive cab for 30 years with no raise,” a young driver says. “Already I speak better English than Jerome, and he is the boss.”

“He speaks black,” another says. “‘Yo Yo.’ Right?”

 “It’s an outrage.”

An older man with the folded tweed jacket raises his hand. “Outrage?” he says. “You not realize how bad it could be.” “Look where we are. The air is good. You are not questioned by the guards. You may go anywhere you like. It is a blessing.” His palm is flat, held from a bent elbow, like a frozen snake ready to strike.

 “Yes, but we still must work,” – the other old man adds– “very hard.” The last two words carry the full weight of his breath, as if it were too early for them to be spoken, and they remind the men to be a little afraid. Two men roll up Horiya’s rug and carry it to his trunk. They finish their coffee, crush half-smoked cigarettes on the pavement, start their engines and drive away. Then the parking lot is empty. They hear it on their radios. The first plane hits at 8:14. The second at 8:22. If you hadn’t been there an hour before, you’d never know they were there.