One Degree of Separation
I went to dinner at my friend Alain’s* [*some names have been changed to protect my ass] last night. His boyfriend Pablo was there as was Pablo’s friend Max. Alain is French but a resident of Australia here in Costa Rica for the winter while Max is Dutch but lives in New York City where he’s a correspondent for Dutch TV and a writer (’Max and the City’). Pablo is a local. This morning Max and his friend Stephen drove by as I was walking up the road and they gave me a ride to the top of the hill. Stephen, as it turned out, used to rent my house from my landlord Karl but left to live in ‘Villa Americana’, someplace ‘much nicer’. He claimed Karl still owed him the damage deposit money. Meanwhile I asked my friend Carlos, who’s Tico (Costa Rican) but lives in New Jersey, if this was the Stephen he briefly had as a roommate. Stephen’s description of his house sounded like the house I had visited with Carlos but I had never met the roommate. Carlos left that house after two weeks after then landlord appeared looking for four months of unpaid back rent from Stephen. Stephen when confronted on it said he was ‘waiting for a check’ and would sort it out shortly. Yeah. So Carlos found an apartment down the street from me, which, it turned out, I had looked at back the beginning of December.
You getting the picture? There’s a tangled minefield of existing relationships and histories to navigate when you meet someone here. Here being Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica. It scarcely matters whether they’re from San José or Sao Paulo, Denver or Kiev, Quebec City or Amsterdam (I have met people here from each of these places in the last few months). Within days, if not hours, they’ll be firmly woven into the web. The fact that many people return here year after year makes the web all that much stronger. Three years out of the last four I’ve ran into John when his annual vacation and my avoidance of winter have overlapped. John is an American living in Berlin, a big strapping muscular black man with a shaved head. He’ll surprise you with his queeniness when he starts talking though. And then he’ll surprise you again with his coarseness by announcing that he’s ‘going to take a dump.’
‘TMI John, too much information,’ I responded.
‘Are all Canadians so squeamish?’ he asked.
I put on my best effete British accent to answer him, ‘Indeed, we don’t discuss such things in the Queen’s English.’
At the center of the web is someone I’ll refer to only as Psycho Ex Boyfriend, or Peb for short. I say ‘ex boyfriend’ with an ironical smirk since we only had 2 and a half dates. But he certainly generated enough drama for it to have been 2 and a half years. Peb is Tico but international too, living here during high season and in the States or Europe for the rest of the year. When my friend Owen visited from Chicago, I didn’t seem him until the afternoon of the day after he arrived, as he had booked a hotel for the first few days. When I found him on the beach the next day, who was he sitting with but Peb? They had already spent the night together. Peb had managed to put two and two together about who Owen was visiting. Peb and I aren’t communicating unless you count the occasional angry glare in my direction so the moment of reunion with Owen was awkward. Peb is everywhere so there are a lot of those moments.
The first few weeks I was here I met many people. I could go to the beach or the bar (notice the use of the definitive article the) and know almost everyone. A few times I was even labeled a social butterfly-something I’ve never been accused of before or since. It was long before this butterfly felt more like a hamster on a wheel and got burned out. In Costa Rica they have a saying ‘pueblito chico, infierno grande’ (small town, big hell). A Tico friend taught me this saying while we were visiting his hometown of Tilaran (population about 5,000). We’d need to stop our walk every 45 seconds to greet another cousin. That saying of course refers to the curse of small towns everywhere: everyone knows everyone else’s business. And so there’s a certain irony in the fact that many of those small town Costa Ricans (along with all of us foreigners from all over the world) have come here to escape their own small towns and have managed to create the smallest town of all.
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Posted by Doug Dosdall on February 14th, 2005 in Articles.
