There is something inherently frightening about being sober in a third world country. The party is not about drinking per se, and it’s not that you need booze to be happy, but life is so fucking beautiful and fun and sad and warm and violent all at the same time that it’s like you’re diminishing the celebration if you don’t keep up. Take care of your buzz and it will take care of you. No one makes you drink, but abstaining would be like staying in alone and eating Hagen Dazs in your dirty sweatpants while watching Dick Clark on New Years Eve 1999. I am not that fat girl who can’t get a date.
I rarely drank beer, or did so just to cool down on a hot day (which was every day) or to sober up when my equilibrium got way out of whack. My favorite was Tona, a light almost minty Nicaraguan beer, but most of the time we pounded Imperial, the Costa Rican equivalent of Budweiser. When it was cold it was pretty damn good, but it got warm very quickly. I actually liked the cans better because they were easier to keep cold on the beach in a plastic bag filled with ice. When we pulled over at a little local market in the middle of East Egypt it would be my job to get out of the car and buy a twelve pack. It seemed like no matter what quantity you bought it was the same price.
One of my favorite parts of drinking in Costa Rica is that you can drink anywhere. Well technically I don’t know if this was legal but in practice we carried around our beers or mixed drinks on the street, on the beach, while driving in the car, at the grocery store, into stores, in the hotels, or even while walking into other bars or clubs. If you were drinking a beer bottle and started walking out of a bar the bouncers would run over to you and start yelling like a bomb was strapped to your chest, but instead of chastising you for taking your drink on the road they would run and get you a plastic To Go cup with ice so they could get the bottle back. It’s my understanding that the returns on the bottle deposits make them more money than actually selling the beers.
As far as I could tell there were only four categories of inebriation on my trip:
Level 1. Hydrate/Sober-Up/Nurse the hangover status:
Beers: Tona, Imperial, Imperial Light, Corona (yuck), and Bahamia.
Level 2. Throttle-up status:
Mai Thais, Pina Coladas, Bloody Mary, Vodka/Red Bulls, Vodka Lemonades, Vodka soda, Vodka with Gatorade, Vodka with fresh squeezed orange juice or grapefruit juice, Baileys with coffee or iced coffee or straight shots when you are straight plowed at 4am and there’s nothing else in the house, red wine (usually a chilled Cabarnet from the Italians),
Level 3. Window-licker status:
Tequila shots (they had a NASTY local tequila), Jager shots, Jager bombs, Flor de Cane rum with ginger ale, Mohitos, Margaritas, Guaro (a local sugar cane liquor), Sambuka shots (pushed on us from the Italians). Uggghhhhh Sambuka. Hold on please….I think I just puked in mouth a little bit.
Level 99: Pinta the Dog talking to me status:
Absynthe, any of the following with a Roofie (unfortunately the Roofies were not optional).
Yes, Pistol Pete got roofied one day. He awoke at 4am in his car parked on the beach at Playa Grande. Pete never loses his cool, nor blacks out like that, nor leaves us stranded at Que Tuanis in the middle of the jungle without a ride into town so we have to beg a burly American expat who specializes in “collections” and has mob connections in Detriot for a ride home. I had to endure five people packed into a miniscule Samurai Suzuki bumping around dirt roads with Tom Jones blaring from the stereo. But back to Pistol. He was OK, just in a fog for 48 hours. We retraced every bar he went, drink he had, and person we were hanging out with and came to the conclusion that it was….Doc that roofied him! The sketchy ass fat American Doctor (I’d like to verify his medical transcripts), the same one who gave Reilly a steroid injection for food poisoning, must have been the one who slipped a roofie into Pete’s Red Bull while he was watching it as Pete headed over to smoke with Marlon at sunset time at the Daria. Either that or it was Colonel Mustard in the Observatory with the candle stick, but definitely one of the two.
Some days it was just time to get the hell out of town to let things lay low. Uri and I woke up on New Years Day after a grand total of two hours sleep. Since I got home at 6am the sun had already come up and was blasting me through my East-facing bedroom window. It was about 110 degrees and I was sweating profusely in the same clothes I went out in the night before. When I awoke I felt a warm body next to me. I thought for sure I’d discover a twenty-five year old nymphomaniac Brazillian supermodel that I took home. Of course she would inevitably fall madly in love with me after my Herculean sexual performance. Oh this could get messy – I would have to kick her out of the apartment, duck behind trees to hide from her in town, and shut down my Facebook account so she wouldn’t obsessively profess her dying love to me. Poor girl, she never even knew what hit her. Well I guess they say that love is a battlefield. She would get over me some day, way down the road, by taking on the whole Bolivian rugby team as surrogate lovers to replicate our night of passion, and engaged in a decade of psychotherapy. But damn she had bad breath. I looked over saw it was only Pinta the Dog, not a Brazilian supermodel, who had jumped up on my bed during the middle of the night and was snoring blissfully. Dammit!
Uri was hurting – about as hungover as I’ve ever seen someone. It took him an hour just to sit up. He held his head between his hands and looked at me through dazed, blood-red eyes.
“Ughhh I feel like shit.” He proclaimed. “I think that shit I smoked last night was laced with something”
“Yeah Uri – it was laced with six tequila shots.” I answered. Considering our decrepit states there was only one thing to do – road trip. I threw 14 pairs of underwear, one t-shirt, and Pinta’s dog collar in a backpack and we immediately grabbed a cab all the way to the border and into Nicaragua. The partying continued, this time with Fast Eddy at Igaunas on the beach at San Juan Del Sur. We still drank rum but also always had a bottle of beer with us, just in case someone jumped us we’d be able to crack it on the ground and use it as a knife, like Eddy instructed us.
For some reason I didn’t feel hungover in Costa Rica on a regular basis. In the States I feel like a hot mess even after a night of moderate boozing. But in the tropics? Hell, when you’re best outfit and your worst outfit consist of shorts, flip flops, and V-neck white undershirt, and you have nothing to do all day but soak up the sun and waves and start drinking again, being hungover is an obsolete notion. It was a matter of mind over liver.
My tolerance bordered on ridiculous – there were days and nights I drank for 14 hours straight and then came home from the bars and sat down in my big comfy chair, headphones on to Dawn Penn sadly signing “No, No, No,” and continued to write while the party raged on around me, completely unaffected. And sometimes, for a few brief moments, I just felt it. When the buzz was at a perfect balance, when Voodoo lounge was playing my favorite reggae song, and the drum beat hit me like a new heart beat, and I was dancing completely uninhibited and free by myself, but with all of my homies around me, and I was completely free of ego or desire or human worries and just letting the universe channel it’s energy through me - sweating and flowing and laughing as I shined on the whole world – it was perfect. I guess you would call it happy. Who feels it knows it. A collection of those moments could make this life worth living.
Was my alcohol consumption and party syllabus unhealthy? Yes, extremely so, especially since I’m pushing 40 and not in my fraternity days any more. I was friggin amazed at my own constitution. I estimate that I averaged 15-20 drinks a day – no bullshit, and my day off, when I rested and got sweet sober relief, was about 8-10 drinks. I only started breaking down in the last 3 nights, where I only clocked 3 hours sleep, because I stopped drinking as much. The way down was painful. My left elbow wouldn’t stop twitching. I caught a nasty lung-rattling cough that was going around. I could only sleep in two hour increments, and when I did I immediately sweated out the bed like someone had turned on a faucet. People in the states thought I was joking and told me to “twitch on” and only call a doctor if it spread up to my left eye, because that would look creepy like I was winking at everyone.
Now it’s a Friday night in the States and I’m completely sober. I stayed in tonight and cleaned my house - thank God boring Norm is back. I miss Tamarindo. But I miss Pistol and Uri and Reilly and Junior Gong and especially Pinta. But at least I’m still writing and planning my return to my blissful Third World playground. But when I go back to Tamarindo next time I’m going to do it different. Next time I vow to not drink as much, to stay out of the bars and stay as sober as a third grader. Ok make that as sober as a first grader. I promise not to dance with sexy sweating brown women until the break of dawn amongst coke dealers and smoked-up surfers every night. Gay shopkeepers on the street aren’t gonna yell “Papa Noel es chico malo!” as I walk into town. I'm not going to single handedly put every stripper in Central America through college. No way Jose; next time I vow to only eat fresh fruits and vegetables, to work out more, to take a day trip to the volcano, to kayak at least once, to write a 10,000 page novel that tops the New York Times Best Seller’s List for a year straight, to sing Tenor in the church choir in perfect Spanish, to milk a cow every morning for a blind old lady, to solve the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border dispute, and to memorize the Latin names of every indigenous flaura and fauna in Guanacaste Province. But that’s next time, and looking back through my trip, through the haze of another perfect sunset and a thousand drinks, I’d say I did OK for myself. Am I proud of this? Of course not; I consider my behavior sophomoric, despicable, a complete mockery of all the laws of man and nature. But yeah, sort of.
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