There are only 2 ways to fall sleep in Third World countries and probably 157 things that can keep you awake. The first method is to pass out cold due to ingestion of alcohol or narcotics. The second method is to lie down and close your eyes and fall asleep naturally. People have told me that the natural method sometimes works. I wouldn’t know.
Back in 1999 I lived in Costa Rica for a couple months, the first stop on a year long trip around the world, my indoctrination to the chaotic beauty of the Third World. I found an apartment to rent in San Pedro, a chill college town outside of San Jose. Apartmentos Williams didn’t have an actually address but directions for cab drivers and mailmen alike; “Tres cientos metres sur y cincuente oeste de Iglesia San Pedro,” or “Three hundred meters south and fifty meters west of the church in San Pedro.” Easy enough.
From the outside it looked more like a bunker than an apartment building; a square two story structure with a halo of barbed wire, concrete block walls, and metal bars over all of the windows. Everyone had to be buzzed in by the attendant, Sergio. I can’t be 100% sure but I think Sergio was a little bit touched in the head. He was a chubby Tico in his late 20’s with an overbite who always wore a white sailor cap like Gilligan. The zipper on his tight jeans was never closed. He was in charge of security and property management, though from what I can see he did nothing all day but whistle while simulating intercourse with his forefinger and two fingers in a circle when I walked by. I washed my hands immediately after greeting Sergio.
The apartment was a fashion explosion, like Liberace dropped acid at Ikea. The red velvet couches were hermetically sealed in plastic protective covers, as was every chair, table, and lamp, all adorned with frilly lace dollies and crystal bead curtains. On the walls were framed photographs of fruit in a bowl – not paintings of fruit in a bowl, but photographs.
No matter where you lay your head in a Third World country, whether it be an apartment, a cheap hotel, or a hostel, it’s impossible to sleep. The combination of noise and discomfort creates an opus of insomnia that would be hilarious if you weren’t too tired to laugh. Only during siesta time in the heat of the afternoon or during the rainy season do you get any sleep.
The television blares from your neighbor watching a football match. The cheating lovers in the room upstairs fuck so loudly that plaster dust hits you in the face and you think their bed is going to fall through the ceiling. The maids try to get in your room, hoping you aren’t home so they can boost your watch. The parakeet at the front desk that is guarding a bowl of condoms won’t shut up. Coils and metal bars stick out of your bed and poke you in the back. Children selling mangos on the street yell “mango mango mango, mangito, buenas y frescas.” Someone is puking. Someone is crying. Bed bugs, sand fleas, and mosquitoes turn you into a lump of itchy red welts. The drip drip drip from the broken bathroom sink is like Chinese water torture. The air conditioner doesn’t seem to be working but hums on and off all night. The electricity buzzes and clicks. The misaligned ceiling fan wobbles and whirrs. Of course there are nonstop car horns, police sirens, the hourly whistles of security guards on bicycles. Dogs bark and cats fight in the alleys. A wife screams at her drunk husband returning home. When she starts throwing pots and pans at him he slams the door and goes back to the bar. Somewhere there is the screech and smash of a car accident. A motorcycle fires up. Towards the morning, when you are so exhausted that you doze off for a few minutes, the construction crew starts jack-hammering concrete at 6am.
So you see why it is essential to get properly faded before you try to go to sleep and Apartmentos Williams was no exception. My cocktail of choice was 10 or 12 Imperial beers and a few hits of dirt weed from a Saturday Night Special – an empty beer can with holes poked in it. Under special emergency circumstances I might add a Vicadin to that. The combination usually numbed me enough to get a few hours of shut-eye. But there was one thing that kept me up at night that was extraordinary, even for a Third World country, and I’ve never told a soul. Here’s how it went down:
I was hanging out with my friend Luis Diego and his gringa girlfriend, Wendy, at our favorite little college bar in San Pedro. One of the girls at the bar, a really cute Tica named Alejandra, was sweating me so we all started hanging out. She was celebrating her 21st birthday so her girlfriends kept ordering her shots and throwing colorful confetti around. I couldn’t believe how many shots she was doing, especially for a girl that probably weighed 100 lbs. After the tequila shots came out even I was officially window-licker drunk, but she hung in there like a champ. When the bar closed and they kicked us out she wanted to come home with me. Her friends dropped us off at Apartmento Williams.
We started kissing and she wanted to fool around but she was way too drunk and was close to passing out or puking, so I just gave her aspirin and a bottle of water and put a trash can next to her side of the bed. Around 4am I half woke up to her stumbling around the room and mumbling incoherently. She asked something about the bathroom and I pointed and went back to sleep. In the morning she looked confused and embarrassed, but I assured her she didn’t puke or cause any trouble. She called a cab to go celebrate her birthday with her family and a vicious hangover. I never saw her again, but that’s when it starts getting really interesting.
My memories of my last week in Costa Rica are hazy at best. The days were spent playing basketball and trying my hardest to smoke up the huge bag of dirt weed I bought from the rasta in Puerto Viejo, nights celebrating at the bars in San Pedro with Luis Diego, his girlfriend Wendy, and our crew. I was probably averaging 3-4 hours sleep a night and had completely surrendered to the fact that I wouldn’t get a good night’s rest in Costa Rica. So every time I went to bed it was after a night drinking and partying and I mercilessly passed out before I even hit the mattress.
I started noticing that something smelled funny in my room. At first it was no big deal – the smell of garbage in the midday sun often came wafting up from the street below, but every day it got a little worse. But I was too drunk and tired to give it any thought so I just passed out. I actually questioned myself whether I was just tripping and imagining it. A few days later and the smell was getting worse. I did my laundry in case that’s what it was. Still bad. I checked the trash can for evidence of an abandoned late-night burrito, but nothing was in there. I drank more Imperial so I could pass out. Two days later and it smelled like a decomposing baboon in there. What could it be? I closed the window, thinking it was sewage from the street or a neighbor’s unit, but the smell got worse and now it was 100 degrees with no wind. I lit candles. I smoked more weed to confuse my brain so I could get some sleep. It didn’t work. The funk was getting so bad that it was almost intolerable even with the narcotic anesthesia I was giving myself every night. By the 5th day I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I had an idea – I grabbed my Old Spice deodorant and wiped a liberal dose of it on my upper lip. The pungent smell of chemical cinnamon pleasantly consumed my nostrils, blocking out the nasty funk in the room. I lathered more on. Ahhhh sweet relief – I couldn’t smell a thing except for Old Spice and slept like a baby that night, waking up in the morning with a big blue streak caked to my upper lip. After that every night I had to put on my Old Spice mustache to tolerate the smell, but it worked, and I got through the last days in Costa Rica without dying an inglorious olfactory death.
My last morning in town was spent cleaning the apartment so I would get my deposit back. I borrowed an old vacuum cleaner from Sergio, who first pretended to fellate it for some unknown reason. I was tidying up my room and noticed a dark object on the floor on the other side of the bed, half hidden by the filly lace duvet. Thinking it was a wrapper or something; I picked it up and went to throw it in the trash. What the fuck?!!! I looked closer, then dropped it and ran to the bathroom to vomit. It was a little two-week old semi-petrified piece of feces, surrounded by a few pieces of confetti. Cute birthday girl was so drunk that she couldn’t find the bathroom in the middle of the night and shit right on my bedroom floor.
I grabbed my luggage and walked out, leaving the apartment half cleaned and the front door wide open, inviting anyone to steal the plastic couch and the photographs of fruit if they wished. I passed Sergio without saying a word, throwing a huge bag of weed at him as I walked out onto the street to hail a taxi. It hit him squarely in his stained t-shirt, stopping his demonstration of doggy style mid-whistle.
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