At the entrance to Módulo C there is a sort of choke point. The stairs up from Módulo D let out into Módulo C through an iron gated cage facing the bathroom door on the far wall 3 mts. ahead to the west.

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Just inside the gate there is a little wall-counter where the morning and afternoon beverage thermos is placed. Beyond that there is a table with 3 stools and a little bench, the domino table. To continue on into the module one has to make the 45° left-hand turn that leads down the corridor of bunks toward the TV to the south.

There’s always lots of people stuck there because the entrance/exit, the bathroom and the domino table are all there. It’s the interface between the business downstairs and upstairs. Business over bags of sweet bread and cartons of cigarettes; selling items of clothing and jewelry, watches; chances in the numbers racket, etc.

On one side people waiting in line for the head. At the wall across the module, people arrive from the downstairs and shout out their offers, “ROPA! CAMISETA MIL COLONES MIL COLONES!” People gather buying a piece of cake or a cigarette, gossiping, spying.

One day I was at the entrance when I heard someone say, with a heavy Chicago accent, “son of a bitch!” I walked past a small group of compañeros balled up around a senior citizen gringo who was doing his best to mix it up with the crowd with his limited español. He kept saying “SON of a BItch!!!” and everyone would laugh so he would say it again. It was such a stereotypical scene.

The Spanglish, the hand-gesturing, the backslapping, the spasmodic grinning and the nervous laughing. I was really glad that he was so occupied with other people, I didn’t have any intention of being co-star gringo in a new Jail Novela. As I passed through the crowd into the corridor they started “HEY! Tu aMIgo esta! grINgo!

I heard other people greeting this man as though he was someone they knew. I figured that this must be the gringo Arcilla had talked about, the vulgar pot-smoking sonofabitch English teacher gringo.

Arcilla had a kind of refined taste in people, he didn’t approve of vices or vulgar speech. He himself made it a point to never use the universal pachuco greeting for almost anyone “mae” (kind of like how in English people use “man, like, you know, man”). Arcilla’s description of the antecedent gringo fit this guy to a ‘T’.

His name is Davis and he is an adopted son. He was raised in Chicago and used to live in Florida. His adopted family have long since stopped communicating with him. He is a 68 year old Vietnam Vet.

In the war, he was exposed to Agent Orange and then began years of strange and disfiguring physical consequences. He had traumatic combat experiences as well.

After coming home in 1972, he spent years having nightmares and other mental/emotional challenges, which had cost him his wife, kids and his adopted family. He had left the USA almost 30 years ago and moved to Costa Rica permanently more than 15.

His español was very limited. His Spanglish was elaborate and delivered with such childlike sincerity that it compelled understanding while simultaneously confounding being understood.

I was nervous about the addition of a second gringo to the mix in here. I didn’t want to get automatically joined at the hip with this guy just because he was from North America too. People kept asking me if I had known him when we were back in our home country. I did a daily geography/social studies lesson in there explaining that California is more than 5.000 kms from Florida and that in general most gringos don’t know each other personally.

I had to do some PR work on this so that people quit the tendency to just make us into the Gringo Twins and have all kinds of fun with that. I made it a point to ignore Davis in public. I didn’t speak English with him unless I had to make him understand something. He earned my respect by treating me the same.

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I had a lot of sympathy for the guy watching him hold his own in the schoolyard pissing matches, more impressive for being done with such limited language resources. I could remember real well how I felt in my first three or more years in the country, and still do to some extent, which is to say, lost.

Tico culture is oral and vocal and verbal and colloquial and vernacular and improvisational and lackadaisical and picante and ironic and… all of this is happening at the speed of life… and I have no expectation that I will ever understand it all.

Ticos tell me they don’t understand all of it, and I have seen them confuse each other as confused as they confuse me sometimes. It’s actually part of my personality en español to always act a little confused just to mask the amount of actual confusion I am experiencing. Anyway, sympathy for the head trips that dealing with a whole world in a language which you are always still learning puts a person through.

Sympathy also for the indignation Davis expressed. He was righteously indignant. Stripped of his dignity by a whole cast of characters that appeared to him as a Lewis Carroll-like montage of gratuitously phony punks, a shamelessly ruthless pair of greedy secret lovers, shady lawyers, pompous ass judges, moronic bureaucrats. All of them doing a double-talk opus magnum while slapping on some very real cold steel handcuffs.

Davis had a hernia and something else wrong, maybe prostate. He had had a massive heart attack and his heart had a stent. He was on all kinds of meds, most of which he didn’t have. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and at night he sounded like he was going to suffocate from the coughing he did. He talked in his sleep too.

I talked in my sleep also for that matter, lots of us did. In the dark, each of us is experiencing the closest thing to privacy that we’ll have for 6 months, in our dreams we finally come to terms with the horror of being locked in a cage like a criminal, which is to say, deprived of the dignity normally afforded by society to a human being.

This was Davis’ second time inside. He had been in last December for three weeks. The way he told the story at first, he got out in only three weeks because the prison Director demanded that he be freed for medical reasons. Davis said the Director didn’t want anyone dying in here. I doubt that he does, but the reason Davis got out was that he signed a deal to make payments to his “wife.” There is no escape from the law.

He got out at the end of December and made two payments. Then his indignation took over and he decided he wouldn’t pay anymore to the woman who had lied to him, made a fool of him, wiped out his bank account and stripped his (rented) house of everything and had now gotten herself a pensión award equal to more than half of his $1000 a month US veteran’s pension. They have no children between them, and they were married for 4 years.

There is a really sick twist to the story of Davis’ defrauding. No wonder this guy says son of a bitch so much.

Davis lived in Cartago where he had known an old guy for 8 years. OK guy, Davis occasionally had him over for breakfast or whatever. About 5 years ago, someone introduces Davis to his future bride and she and the old guy tell Davis the the old guy is her father. Everyone is all smiles for the happy new couple, Davis and His Princess. They get married and soon, the old guy is practically living with them, one big little gringo-tico family. The bride with her two 8-12 year old boys from some unknown previous partner, her dear old Dad and Davis, the happiest guy on earth, gringo generous to a fault and loved by all.

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At some point Davis is informed by his wife of a grave threat to their security resulting as a consequence of Davis’ marijuana habit. It was true that Davis smoked pot. Many people from the US smoke pot, especially Vietnam Vets. It isn’t like it is a scandal that there is a gringo married to a Tica somewhere in Costa Rica who is smoking pot.

But the lady was convincing and put Davis in a panic. The story was that the OIJ (the Costa Rican FBI) had identified Davis as a major drug dealer and they were coming to get him. She urged him to leave the country immediately, go lay low in Miami, go to the Veterans Hospital and have operations and do a little cooling off while she worked on making the thing with the OIJ go away. Wait for her instructions. So he did.

On his way out, the lady made sure that she got him to sign a power of attorney so that she could deposit and cash his still arriving US military pension checks. You know, so that she could pay the bills, that’s all.

Next thing he knows, he’s in Miami and he gets a phone call from a friend in Cartago. His wife has ransacked the house and disappeared with the furniture, appliances, everything of value. Emptied the bank account. But that’s not all.

The thing is, the man who she claimed was her father was actually the father of her CHILDREN. In other words, he was her lover, not her father. So Davis had a heart attack and was admitted to the Veterans Hospital and had a stent put in.

Davis recovers and gets back to Costa Rica in time to find out that his wife has gotten a judge to award her a pensión and in the course of human events it comes to pass that one day Mr. Davis is visited at his (rented) home by several officers of the court.

The next thing you know he IS in court, completely disoriented and unprepared for what he is now deeply embroiled in which is the tribunal, called an “Audiencia,” that will define his economic obligations here and the penalties for not meeting them under the Ley de Pensiones Alimentarias for the rest of his life. But too bad for Davis, he really doesn’t speak español that well and he hardly understands what is going on at all.

Davis protests. He is objecting to his lawyer’s presentation of his case, he demands a translator and a chance to offer evidence and contest his wife’s demand. Davis wants to talk about the double-crossing, manipulating, lying and thieving of his wife and her lover but he is told that a translator costs $250 which he does not have. His lawyer tells him to sit down and keep quiet.

The judge, who Davis believes is some kind of relation to his wife, deliberates and decides that the gringo has to pay the lady. But since he has no cash, he’ll have to go to jail. As far as Davis is concerned, he is being railroaded in a kangaroo court and set up like a rack of pool balls.

Davis is not a well man in the first place, he has Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and several chronic conditions resulting from exposure to highly toxic military ordnance. It is difficult to imagine a healthy person taking all of this calmly, but not reasonable to expect Davis to be anything less than really angry and frustrated, emotional states not famous for producing the most rational behavior.

Davis did three weeks and then signed an agreement to pay a percentage of the original claim and ongoing payments of $500 a month for the woman. He was released and went home. After a couple of missed payments, he was once again visited at his (rented) home by officers of the court.

The Fuerza Pública, accompanied by the judge himself were there to present Davis with an Orden de Captura which he could avoid by making an immediate deposit of one thousand dollars in his wife’s account. Davis is not wealthy and actually does not have savings, so he was not able to avail himself of that option and was therefore arrested and taken to La Reforma. But not before he let the Judge know what he thought of him, which must have been a real riot to watch, because Davis’ español is terrible, and being enraged must have made the whole thing really unintelligible. I’m sure the Judge was impressed.

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Written by Terrence who is a 53 year old Gringo living in Costa Rica.

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