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Slack from Hunger
With the man’s help, we finally found our way to Guapiles, which had a well-appointed clinic—by Costa Rican standards—that served the workers of the town’s banana processing plant (to use the word loosely). I sat with Barney as the clinicians examined Jenks, who winced as they tried to pull histee shirt up over his uninjured arm. When they attempted to lift it over his head, disturbing his busted arm, he yelled, “Cut the damn thing off!” Even after his outburst, they were so frugal they were reluctant to damage the cement-stained shirt. Jenks grabbed the scissors from a nurse and clipped the bottom edge, holding the gashed fabric up to her. She grabbed it from him and finally ripped it from his body. The next insult awaiting him was at the end of a trek to the facility’s interior courtyard, where they splashed the construction muck from his upper body with rainwater from the roof that had collected in a barrel.
I could tell by the grimace on his ashen face that he was feeling beset, understandable given that the level of medical care he was accustomed to receiving was so superior to this, and it must have made him feel all the more uncomfortable in his weakened state of mind that conditions were so unsanitary by our standards. Needless to say, he was over it by the time he’d been given a sedative and had a cast covering most of his arm. The episode really shook me up and I couldn’t sleep that night for reliving the nightmare of seeing his twisted body on the rock-strewn dirt, not knowing until he stirred if he was dead or alive.
The next day, Barney had a grand time telling Jim his rendition of our road trip. The inevitable disclaimer—“I don’t know the word in Spanish” was followed by, “I’ve been here so long, I’ve forgotten my English!”— peppering his repertoire to the point that it was comical. He was a small man—all of about 5’5”—with a protruding stomach that pillowed above the sagging waistband of the same pair of baggy jeans he always wore. The frayed pants were perpetually sliding down what was left of his naturally narrow hips and butt, which had become gaunt from years of inactivity. The only way he managed to keep them up was a continual cinching of a ratty leather belt threaded through the two existing loops on the waistband. The action was repeated so often it was as if he had a tick of sorts or was participating in a bizarre modern dance sequence during which his hand reached for the belt and flung the end of it in the air at waist level. He’d snap his arm straight and then lower it to his side exactly the same way each time, as if the dance’s end required the formality of an Olympic dismount.
He claimed that his body was ravaged not by alcohol but by the “action” he saw in Vietnam, which was unlikely. I knew this because once when he was particularly intoxicated he had admitted to me that his supply ship had never been anywhere near warfare and that he’d been a cook, not a soldier. His face was rugged and pocked with sores, and I’d never seen him when he was clean. His head was covered in a furry pate of hair, which wasn’t long but was never perfectly shaven. His mouth was drawn in from missing teeth—frozen in a sort of perpetual circle—which meant his words came out in mumbles even before they were slurred from drinking.
His eyes were large and hooded, and he would stand with his hands on his thin hips, staring off with his lids closing slowly as if he were dropping into a trance. After a few seconds of swaying, he would jerk back to reality and immediately begin to prattle on about nothing even if someone else had the floor. At first I thought he just talked to hear himself speak but I later realized it must have been the only thing keeping him awake.
He had a filthy mouth and was indignant about almost everything, including race relations. He’d been born in Birmingham and had been in Alabama his entire life until he had “sailed off to war.” The small jungle village he had decided to claim as his new home allowed him to stay backwards by the sheer fact that he could barely communicate with anyone. It was clear that he stayed because he knew he would be left to his own devises as he drank, ranting and raving his way through his waning years.
The environment supported his hostility by fostering the old prejudices because no one there cared what he thought about the ancient state of affairs in a faraway country. Though he was so insultingly verbose, I tried to look beneath his diatribes and I found that he wasn’t a cut-and-dried hater. One of the clues was his relationship with his dog Girl because he cared for as well as anyone I’d ever seen nurture a pet. He was always talking to her as she limped along beside him, wagging her chewed-up tail at the sound of her name.
Another way I recognized heart in him was through his adoration of Jim. He called him Mr. Jim and would go to the ends of the earth and back for him. He was continually asking him questions about things and I watched one day as he queried why we were using the catheads we’d brought from the states on the ends of the protruding rebar. As Jim explained, his gaze followed his pointing finger to the top row of blocks and it was as if he was receiving the equivalent of the ten commandments, so great was the look of hero worship in his eyes. He followed along as closely as his Guaro-addled brain would allow, scratching his head as his puckered lips to mouth some of Jim’s words a few beats behind. “Well, I’ll be,” he said when Jim paused to see if he understood what he’d said. “Did you hear that, Girl? We got fancy stuff here in our little town thanks to Mr. Jim, don’t we?”
I’d seen Jim bring this out in people before but it was exaggerated in Barney, who seemed to have a desperate need to believe in something, and Jim seemed to be that “something” in spades. I think he loved his dog so much because she gave him unconditional love, and I suspected he’d never had anything close to that, which had left him starved for it. The only thing that made sense regarding his oversized Jim adoration was that he saw in him the kind of man he’d longed to be but had given up on when he had sunk into an alcoholic fog. He wasn’t so unlike that beaten-down dog that roamed the Pocoran streets—skin and bones and hungry eyes, all gone slack from hunger—though Barney’s starvation was emotional rather than physical.
I heard M Scott Peck’s words echoing in my head: “We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” I’d not understood this when I’d treated the sick dog’s condition as a problem to be solved rather than letting the mystery of life play itself out at the animal’s expense. Why did this have to be so hard? I wondered. At what point had the mystery gone out of Barney’s life, and how in the world could I get mine back?
I certainly didn’t want to end up carrying around as much pain as Barney did but it sure felt as if that’s where I was heading if I couldn’t get a handle on myself. “Problems do not go away,” Peck wrote. “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
Could it really be that I was experiencing some of the most splendid moments of my life? What a strange concept that seemed given the confusion that reigned inside my head and my heart! I was riddled with unhappiness and was lugging a heavy load of grief from feeling so unfulfilled. The idea that, in hindsight, this discomfort would shine a light on my finest hours seemed far-fetched and foreign to me.
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A Steady View of Heaven
His name was Barney and my take on him was a ne’er-do-well, ex-pat American who had landed in the Costa Rican jungle, tasted the Guaro and decided he had no reason to ever leave. He had signs of a heart but so little patience for connection that he seemed incapable of opening himself to nurturing of any kind, especially with the parishioners in Pocora who were so excited about having their own church they were effusive in their thanksgivings. The Jamaican and West Indian women were especially unrestrained, leaving Barney no choice but to shake his head, grumble and retreat to his hut to protect himself from any goodness that might have accidentally spilled over on him!
He must have been terrified of emoting because he’d freeze when the women approached the clearing where the foundation of the church had been poured. Hesitating like a confused child, he would watch with horror as they made their way around the jobsite hugging everyone. Their voluptuous bodies and strong, meaty arms seemed made for enveloping others and it was a bit shocking to suddenly be wrapped in a mountain of an embrace but Barney seemed to take it especially hard. As they would draw closer to him, he would take a few steps back and pause before breaking into a stumbling run that led him into the jungle and out of empathy’s way before they could embrace him.
The only time he seemed comfortable in his own skin was when he stood around telling Jim bawdy stories about his military days. I watched as he laughed at his own tale one day, wondering why being hugged and touched by these women, which was nourishing to me, would bother him so much. They were so sincere, and the kindness of their attentions knew no racial, cultural, national, or class boundaries. In fact, if I had believed in the pearly gates, I would have wanted the greeting I received when I arrived to feel similar to these great, fleshy arms opening to welcome me. Since I’d never had a steady view of heaven and its master—an outlook that had become even more clouded during my time in the mission field—I celebrated the fact that having these magnificent women enfolding me was reward enough for my desire to live life with integrity.
I wondered if the matriarchs of the little village were aware that I had a battle raging inside me as they wrapped their arms around me. I was craving home so acutely it physically hurt. More often that not I had to talk myself up from moroseness when I awakened each morning by vowing to do one small thing to make things better just to get myself out of bed. On the successful days, I felt relief. During the less than stellar ones, a sinking feeling ruled while the battle consuming my energy wore on. I was actually succeeding when a painful turning point occurred one day and the veneer of bravado I’d managed to wrap myself in was ripped away.
It happened while we were eating lunch in the cantina in Pocora. I saw a sight that sent me into the deepest grief—a dog so starved it trembled, the sagging skin on its body quivering as it hung slack over its bony frame. It was skittering around sniffing for crumbs on the ground as I looked at it in horror. I glanced at Jim and declared I was going to feed it. He frowned at me, though he didn’t argue knowing that I had a stubborn streak about things that touched me so deeply. I rushed to the meat market nearby and bought some raw hamburger, which I place on the ground near the skittish dog. Tears were running down my face as I watched it inhale the meat. I felt better even with everyone sitting in the café laughing at me, but only for a moment because that’s how quickly I realized that unless I was going to feed it regularly I’d only prolonged the agony of its life rather than really helping it. This was a lesson I’d have torture me many times as I ached to make things better in the challenged places I found myself inhabiting.
The poor dog’s comparison to my Lhasa Apso, Samurai, was extreme. Sam was my surrogate child and I pampered him to no end when I was with him. As a dog lover and owner, I knew how helpless they could become once they were made dependent upon human beings. I couldn’t understand a culture that cared nothing for other creatures needing their support. A dark splinter invaded my heart that day and it stayed there festering as I tried make sense of what I was seeing.
Church held no solace for me as the words cascading from the lips of the ordained seemed empty, almost as rote as the Nicene Creed we mouthed every Sunday. There were divine moments but they were always of the mundane variety. The Sunday after I’d tried to help the ailing dog, a half a dozen ladies sat in front of us in church—some petite and shrunken, others ample and buxom. Each one had on a perfectly combed black wig—their heads a rising and falling row of curls framing the napes of chocolaty necks. As I sat there studying their heads, I noticed how they suddenly leaned in the same direction, their heads tilted at exactly the same angle simultaneously. I looked to the front of the church where the lay reader, a tiny black man with glasses turned askew on his small face, was tilting his head sideways in an attempt to read the Epistle. I looked back at the ladies in front of me and had to press my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. It was then I realized I was leaning, too. The lay reader had the entire congregation tilting their heads as they watched him crane his neck into the slant of his lenses.
A visiting priest, Charlie, was preaching that day—his sermon about offering weaknesses up to God so that his power could be made perfect within each one of us leaving me feeling less than inspired. “When you are in a time of weakness, that is when his power is best used,” he proclaimed. If only it were this easy, I thought to myself as I looked down at my hands gripping the prayer book in my lap. Was offering my weaknesses up to some ephemeral deity really the best tack to take as I suffered through my struggles, or was M. Scott Peck right when he wrote, “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization…This means we give away our power to that entity…In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.”
Had I been able to grasp the depth of his meaning, I would have seen that taking my own power would have been the best piece of advice I’d ever received but I wasn’t ready. Maybe if I could go backwards from the end, everything would start to make sense! I thought. If only that were possible!
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