Fall

Kids, don’t try this at home.

Walking down the stairs with my guitar in hand, I fall. It was the kind of fall you remember, not because of the resulting giant hump on your left ass cheek, now turning ghastly shades of purple, once your favorite color. Not even because witnesses called it “the worst fall I’ve ever seen -- your head whipped back like a slingshot.”

No. You remember it because of the sickening crack that is the sound of your guitar slamming into hardwood, even though you instinctively broke most of the fall on your left butt cheek. You remember, because the first thing you do after you are capable of movement is raise the guitar, still clutched in your hand, and see the cracks in the wood, ugly splits along the beautiful grain, raised up like faults in the ground after an earthquake. You remember screaming, “Noooooooooooooo!” and being inconsolable, impatient with the well-meaning but asinine concerns of others for the state of your ass when your guitar is cracked, damaged, hurting.

You lie awake all night, wondering if your clumsiness has cost you one of the only possessions you truly love. The keeper of your sanity. Your companion through the Grand Canyon and all its rapids, to be destroyed by a stupid digger down the stairs, for real?

You can think of nothing else.

In the morning, you take your poor guitar to the brothers Guzmán, makers and (you pray) repairers of guitars. The blessed brothers tell you it’s fixable, you’re lucky it cracked along the grain and not against it. It will be ready on Friday.

A wave of relief the likes of which you have seldom experienced washes over you. You can feel again. And in that moment, you become aware of the fact that your ass feels like it’s been run over by a Mack truck, and is swollen horribly on one side.

Clarisse, you beautiful instrument, I'm sorry. Come back to me whole, and ready to sing.

Taco Time

My friend Jill and I went to visit our other friend Kristin over the weekend. Kristin is a raft guide and works for an outfitter in Turrialba, a couple hours east of San José. She's a giant, 6'4" and strapping. Jill is a midget, not quite 5' and maybe 100 pounds on a fat day.

I was outrageously overworked and ready to play hard. The three of us went boating on this beautiful little river called the Pejibaye. Kristin kayaked and Jill and I paddled a Shredder down the river. It was a ghetto craft with two pontoons on either side, a fabric floor and two thwarts connecting the pontoons. The front thwart leaked like a mo fo; we pumped that shit up every few minutes but it deflated just as fast, so every time we hit anything, the limp thwart would fold and the boat would taco, sending the two of us flying. It was so fun.

We floated past a group of locals and left them gaping at what must have been a strange sight to a bunch of macho Ticos in rural Costa Rica: three women paddling alone down the river, one bigger than a man, one the size of a 10-year-old and one with decidedly slanty eyes.

Were we representing our sex in a good, strong way? Or were we cementing the already widespread notion that Gringas are f'n crazy? Food for thought.