Bimbo Club

Clouds of white mists swirl around the giant dark green trees, rain pours down from the grey sky, and I finally see the dirt path appear. The entrance disappears and reappears in different parts of the land. It leads deep into untouched parts of the rain forest. It feels familiar, I've been here before but cannot recall any of the details. I enter and am instantly over come by thousands of insects, birds, and monkeys whizzing pass my face, all going in the same direction. Following their lead, I find myself at the bottom of a high hill. Taking one step up the hill makes my leg feel as though 50 pound weights are securing me to the ground. It's not just me that is moving slowly though, I can watch the colibri birds' wings move up and down. The butterflies are moving so slowly it's as if they are frozen. We're all stuck moving slowly in the same direction. The trees are unlike anything I've ever interacted with. Instead of green, the trees leaves are purple, blue and black. Balls of glass hang off of the trees like fruit and some even fall, creating piles of glass shards on the ground around them. Some trees have nests of flames resting on their branches but nothing burns. All the weird that grows up the hill seems to be indestructible. Shooting stars burst in the sky and turn into puddles of rain before my very slow moving feet. Looking down, I see apples growing from the ground up, various squashes line the road like stones, and a stream is flowing up the hill. No moon or sun is stationed in the timeless sky. I feel as though I've entered god's personal playground.

I feel a cold hand take my own. My eyes follow the hand, up the arm, to the neck, but every time I get to the face to try and figure out whose hand it is...the entire face disappears. The faceless entity can walk at a normal speed and pulls me up the hill. Looking behind me, I watch the few people, animals, and insects that are left behind. The figure pulls me into a dark mossy cave filled with spiders but I feel so at ease. The spiders weave their webs into intricate patterns that all intertwine with each other, creating a large blanket at the end of the cave. We sit on a few logs and watch the thousands of different species of spiders inventing new shapes. The figure starts quickly moving and I work to catch up with it. It slides underneath the webs and through a hole without disturbing any of the creations. The other side of the cave is the top of a volcano. Snakes slither all around the crater and sides of the volcano...somehow fanning the flames to make the fire larger. Suddenly the concept of time returns to my mind and I gasp for air. If I don't find a way out then I'll be stuck forever, won't I? The figure grabs my hand and pulls me down into the throat of the volcano and we end up floating around the magma reservoir. The comfortable magma river floats us under the volcano and from the bottom it looks like glass. I can see through it and watch the liquid pumping its way to the top. The river drops us off at a huge bed of clouds, I follow you through the cloud forest until we end up at the ocean. Jelly fish are floating in the air around. First you sit, then me, and from the vantage point we can see beautiful deer swimming in the water.

The faceless person takes a drink of the ocean and I instantly know who it is.

"But you're not alive."
"No, I'm not."
Buried words begin pouring out of the deepest parts of me. "Why'd do it? You didn't even say goodbye."
"I can't tell you why, just that I'm not coming back."
"I'm sorry I left you alone. I thought you'd out grow the sadness. We were supposed to get better as we got older. Come back, please. We all miss you and love you. I'm begging you. Their are so many things that no one but you understands about me."
"You can meet me here whenever you'd like."
"Dude, this is just my mind isn't it? You mean to tell me that you only live in my mind now?!
"..."
"When they said they went to your funeral, I knew you killed yourself before anyone told me. I'm sorry I left you there. We should have stayed together. Living with you was so much fun, I miss it...we always had fun. You should have told me.. I would have been there. Remember all the concerts we went to, the birthday parties, the strip club the night I was mad?"
"You'll have to go now. You're going to wake up in another country, in another time, and I won't be there. But I'll always be here."

And so I did wake up. I always do, no matter how tightly I try and hold on to you...when your face is clear, blurred, when you don't say a word, and when you talk to me through my dreams. I always wake up without you.

Looking out over the balcony and into the valley below - everything looks so small beneath waves of the sun. A sweet yellow bird clenches tight onto the branches of a tree as the wind sways his tiny body violently up and down until he finally can't take anymore, flying down and disappearing into the valley of miniatures. I too can relate to the rough feeling of the volatile swaying of a mysterious force that one cannot readily understand the mechanics of...

I wonder what I'll find down there today... During the corona virus quarantine and without any connections, I'm on a mission to find weed.¹

While walking down the hill I map out where I'll start and what streets I should try before sunset. I'm surprised at how well I know this town and how much it feels like home. I've lived in other cities, other countries for longer, but no other people exist like the Costa Ricans.

Picking up the pace, I pass by the man who spends his time sitting on a recliner outside of his house. The recliner rests half in his garage and half on the sidewalk under a bright street lamp that makes him glow at night (giving me the visual image of poor film noir). I wave hello to couch man and he shouts back with the usual, "Cómo estás?" We exchange todo biens. He's a NPC of the city and reliably in his correct spot.

Turning the corner, I pass by the guy who makes clay pots in his garage. Often we exchange waves with one of his hands covered in clay and the other working the potter's wheel. His store is stacked with bowls, cups, and piggy banks of all sizes. (If I have to re-spawn then it better be here so that I can replace my lost items.) The street is lined with the brightest flowers, fruit (both on the vine and in the road), and the entire place has a pulse to it. I run past the plant nursery, because the old woman who runs it waters the plants by spraying the hose onto the sidewalk and in every direction. Pick up trucks pass me with their beds filled to the top with fig gourds and only stop when kids with wheelbarrows run over to pick up the supply. Any direction you turn is something different to look at and its much more entertaining than a TV could be. ²

I figure that one of the better places to scare up some weed would be down the street from an empty park and the rehabilitation center. I pass by two dudes, one of which is sitting on a bucket and they're passing a joint back and forth. (Kinda low effort hiding it and turning around when people come - making themselves look even more suspicious.) I ask if either of them speak English. They don't, but the kid on the bucket hops up and hands me his phone on translation while he moves to a car that's now stopped in front of us. Its clear that I choose the right road. The kid runs inside the house, leaving me with his phone, and his friend. Begrudgingly, I use his phone to get the conversation started and ask if I can hit his joint. He gives it to me, signals to finish it, confesses that he speaks a little English, and then gestures for me to sit on his bucket. Ditching the phone I take a bucket seat and use this opportunity to practice a second language. We negotiate the deal in broken Spanish and are interrupted often as his operation seems to be thriving during corona. Each time a car pulls up: he takes the order, runs inside to get it, and makes another trip inside to get change. I can't tell if there is a boss inside the house or if he's trying to keep absolutely nothing on him. Either would make sense...seeing as all of this is happening on a narrow sidewalk between the front door of his house and the street (barely room for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder). I get the stash, shake hands, say goodbye, and start walking away when I hear his friend say, "ingles importante" - I agree laughing, and tell him "muy importante"... The entire interaction took about fifteen minutes. Have I just made contact with the dangerous Costa Rican gang that everyone keeps warning me about? If so, these are the nicest and most defenseless gangsters I've ever met. While walking home I stop at the Mini-Super³ to buy rolling papers. Get this, the girl working the counter explains to me that you can buy the entire pack (like normal) or one paper at a time. A couple of high school age girls agree that that is how they purchase papers. I buy an entire pack and offer them each a few.

Let's see who else I can meet on this journey. I take the main road home so that I can people watch, but by doing so I pass by a man who was watching me. He starts shouting my name, and I remember that this was the guy I met at the buss stop the other day.⁴ Emanuel and I say hello and he asks me if I'm from Romania or Germany. The Romania reference freaks me out because as far as I know we haven't made the news here yet. I'm not from either country I tell him and then say goodbye. He jumps up to talk more but realizing that I'm leaving repeats okay while staring sadly at the ground. I walk home wondering what tragic story is behind this guy's life.

One of the better parts of coming home is climbing the giant hill that leads to the house. You can't climb like this in Indiana and the road is coated in interesting insects and flowers. A long line of ants are marching up hill and I stop to check out what each of them are carrying.⁵ I like to itemize the items that the ants carry and try to figure out who got the best stuff. One guy is off by himself with a huge curled up leaf on his back. It seems like he is trying to impress the colony because the item is so large that he is making a drunk zig zag pattern. The timing was perfect and as he crawls to check out the gutter, a huge rush of water comes from the top of the hill, and the current takes him away until all that's left is his floating leaf. Another part of wild life that I can relate to, the not-always human condition... but I doubt tomorrow will be anything like today.

1. He clenched my chin and forced my head up so that our eyes met. I tried to repress my grin -- I love these moments of feeling so small and inconsequential in his hands. "If you could have anything you want right now, what would it be?" For most people this question will only be a theoretical game but with him its divine. [↩]
2. Maybe where you live is like this too. I doubt it but would you actually know? [↩]
3. Mini-super being the Costa Rican version of a 711. [↩]
4. Costa Rica is so beautiful that even the buss stops are enjoyable to sit and think at. A great spot is this bench that sits outside of a small Catholic church. The bench is always empty and has a view to a plantation and the hills. The last time I stopped there a short, old man, with a huge smile (his entire face was basically just a smile), and wide eyes was walking down the street with this kid and his dog. I thought they were together until the man broke off and sat next to me on the bench. The man was clearly not in the best of ways and really wanted someone to talk to. I practiced my Spanish with him by doing some basic greetings and left. [↩]
5. Ants in the midwest are also very tiny so I've never seen anything like these big juicy guys. The things that they can haul is seriously impressive -- also its weird when you're walking to randomly see leaves keeping up with you. [↩]

This probably won't make sense to you. That's fine, because I need to brush death off of my shoulders for a while.

I've been grieving the loss of my grandmother and best friend for almost a month now. For a month I've been trying to write this post which has left me destroying text, crying, walking,¹ and falling to the ground. I fell off of the grief wagon and into the pits of depressive obsessive despair. Do not be fooled,² grief needs its space to move through your body, being felt by every part of you, sharpening the edges of your life through confrontation...until eventually whatever is left at the end can claim the victory. Its a harrowing experience that if avoided, will slowly kill you. I'm stuck and don't know what to do about it. After 24 years, I have nothing but living amends to offer to those that I lost. A week before I found out about my grandmother's passing I got the word that my best friend from childhood killed herself. It's hard not to make the connection between the death of the grandma who raised me after my mom died and my best friend killing herself while leaving behind a three year old child.

I've been living the last month in a fog of sadness without wanting to really do anything. It's true that bad news never has good timing. Some days are great and some I have to give myself a pep talk to breathe in the morning. I'm not very good at death, nor is their a way to measure grief but that is no reason to hide the lives of these two people. I hope you enjoy these stories about my grandmother and if you don't - she wouldn't have cared anyways.

My grandma, Dorothy, died in October and you would have loved her. Dorothy³ was born in 1929 and became the eldest of eight children. She raised eight children, my dad and his three brothers, and then my two older brothers, and myself when our mother died. I consider myself the lucky last girl of 14 children. My grandmother was the perfect grandmother - sweet and cold in the perfect combination. She taught me to read (One of our earliest books being Amelia Bedelia, of which I can still hear her laugh at drawing the drapes and dressing of the turkey.) by reading a page and then making me read the next until the book was finished. The two of us went through so many books that my teachers accused me of lying when I returned them to class. As a part of her mandatory grandmother responsibilities she also taught me how to play cards: war, solitaire, rummy, goldfish..etc. She let me cheat by claiming that two of a kind counted and I called her out on cheating after she expertly put down an entire hand of sets and suits when I had nothing. This was also the woman who did not have a favorite color and refused to listen to any music besides Elvis and my boy, Dean Martin. My grandmother raised 14 kids and never once went to a lecture circuit, read a buzzfeed article, or a self help book; however, she did raise her hands up and go 'all well' when she was wrong. By not giving a shit about pretense, feelings, or what is right by the standards of anyone but herself, I now have a great deal of lessons and stories I'd like to generously⁴ pass on to you.

Grandma Dorothy grew up as a second generation immigrant in Indiana. Her mothers and Aunts all spoke Polish in the house and especially when they didn't want any of the kids to understand what they were saying. My grandma took this as a reason to learn Polish and spent the next few years of high school secretly taking Polish language classes. This worked out well, as she understood all of gossip about their husbands, her siblings and cousins, and the neighborhood...except for the one day when she made the mistake of laughing out loud at one of her aunt's comments. After that, they stared her down and then never spoke Polish in her presence again.⁵

Apparently, it was a huge deal to go to the movie theater in the 1930s and my grandma invited her youngest brother along to a show with her. For some reason the kid cried the entire time, until my grandmother dragged him out and beat him all the way home.⁶

After she got married, she moved into a house in Hammond, Indiana and lived there from her marriage until she died. On any given day, I could bust into her front door and find her sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, eating jellybeans, smoking a cigarette, and reading a book.⁷ My grandmother loved to smoke Pall Malls and I'm sure they lost a fortunate with her death.⁸ The tiny three bedroom grey house had yellow walls that were stained thick with smoke and you could see it piping out of the chimney. My brother, Shane, would try and match her with smoking the same number of cigarettes and he'd pass out with us dragging him out -arm on each shoulder- by the end of the night. When she lived with us at my dad's house, he'd often give her ultimatums to entice her to stop smoking - they went something like, "its the cigarettes or the grand kids" to which she grabbed my hand and took me on a walk to buy more cigarettes.

If she wasn't reading then she was playing pogo word games. At 80 my grandma could spell better than anyone in our family and she loved to learn the basic functions of computers. We set her up with an AOL account in early 2000 and I have memories of us chatting over AIM⁹. Every time something went wrong and she couldn't "play her games" she'd call me with this sheepish tone and see if I could come over to fix her computer.¹⁰ As I got older, she'd call me and I'd find out that nothing was actually wrong but she just wanted to see me.

Like most kids in Hammond, we went to the community center to play in the public pool. For the first time ever, I got the nerve to stand in the long line for the high diving boards and when it was finally my turn, I took the long walk to the very top... stair after stair I climbed and after taking one look down at the lifeguard in the deep pool below, I turned back around pushing my way back through all of the kids in tears. I was so embarrassed and ran to my grandma for a hug. My grandma, who was not a fan of crying (huge fan of hugs though) enrolled me in swimming classes the very next day and bought a pool for her backyard. In twenty seven years, she is the family member whom I've never seen cry.

A lot of lessons I learned from my grandma were to not live in fear or make the same mistakes she did¹¹ - she pushed me to drive, graduate college, not depend on people, have my own bank account¹² and visit Chicago as often as possible. I opened my college scholarship letter at her house, drove to see her to announce that I got my first job, and she bought me my first mattress for my first apartment. The day before my first day at my new career, I came to her nervous and anxious (often staring off) about how the first day would go -- she pulled up the arms of her bathrobe, lit a cigarette, and said "awe Nicoley, everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time - you can't be afraid of anyone."¹³

There also existed the somewhat dubious advice, like 'if you show that you are good at something then people will just make you do it all of the time' and 'if you ever bowl a gutter ball just laugh and say you meant to do that.'

I'd often drive the hour and a half from the city to see her in Indiana. Leaving her house was hard and I attached a lot of emotion to her walking me out the door and telling me that she'd lock the door behind me. Her humility came through when she expressed that I didn't have to drive out here just for her and to get some sleep. No matter the time she'd offer to cook me whatever she had, last meal and all.¹⁴ Sometimes I turned the car around to come back inside and give her one more hug.¹⁵

My dad is an anxious guy and we would often fight at her house about whatever things dads and daughters fight about. One of few people able to calm him down, she'd look at him and tell him to knock it off and then look at me and say 'he came out of the womb like that'. Of course, she also wouldn't let me take her to church because, "the building would crumble" if she entered.

One of my favorite traits of her was her ability to laugh at herself like no one else I've ever met. Like her, I hope I can make mistakes and then laugh seriously at them. As she aged, she laughed at herself about shrinking, made jokes about the various ways in which she would haunt me¹⁶, and never stopped reading new books. I'll never forget the kind of happiness she showed when I came back to tell her about a new place I had been or someone I was in love with.¹⁷ That's rare in a person and if you find someone like that then hold on to them.

My dad told me she would live forever because she was too stubborn to die and my grandmother promised that she'd live until I got married. Now, I have a bone to pick with both of them. Its true that you would have loved the chain smoking, jelly bean eating, astute, and stubborn grandmother that I had. I consider myself lucky if all of my fortunate left with her.

1. lots of walking -- how many times can you walk down the same road to ask yourself the same question? [↩]
2. and grief will try and fool you with fear. It'll tell you that your sadness is coming from a different place, nothing is as important as it seems, and you wouldn't feel this way if you did more living. [↩]
3. Dorothy though, I mean can you come up with more of a classic name? [↩]
4. and I mean generously - she became in a shut in for a reason. [↩]
5. My favorite part of hearing this story was that my grandma never imparted any of her feelings - she always told it like it happened and not how she felt about it. [↩]
6. "I was so so mad," as she told it. [↩]
7. I should also mention for science that she lived until 92 and I never saw her drink a glass of water or alcohol. Only coffee with powdered creamer for her. [↩]
8. The experts say she never inhaled but I'm not so sure. [↩]
9. This is where the 'Gma' nickname began [↩]
10. She made me write it down and go slow so she could do it herself. [↩]
11. This was the woman who told another mother on the block to hit her first and cursed out a teacher who took away my brothers magazine. He got his magazine back. [↩]
12. Never sparing a dime when I was low on funds in college to do laundry. [↩]
13. A favorite story of hers was when she got a job at the elementary school that my dad went to. The women all got a new coworker and one them went door to door to tell the others about what trash the new one was. The new woman turned out to be pleasant and the door to door weirdo was not be trusted. [↩]
14. That's my family though. All of them would give the shirt of their back if you need it more. [↩]
15. She also did not want to be photographed but I still sent my brothers secret pictures of her smoking cigs to let them know that she was breathing. [↩]
16. I spend most nights praying she'll haunt me or that I'll at least be able to say hello to her in my dreams [↩]
17. This includes MP to which she said in stubborn fashion that "he would be handsome without the beard". [↩]

Alyssa and Caitlin were my best friends from second grade until freshman year. Having a threesome is difficult but we made it work through relentless teasing and laughter. They both were hilarious and we all came from varying degrees of a dysfunctional household; however, Caitlin was gorgeous (she developed Ds before anyone in school, had blonde hair, and a great laugh) and she knew it.¹ Therefore, we watched her go through so many shitty dudes. The guys don't vary much in a small town and she seemed to only date clones. I'll never forget the toughest break up she went through... the three of us were hanging out at her place (low supervision and her mom had a hoarding problem which included thousands of CDs to choose from) and listening to album after album. None of us had drank, smoked weed, or done any drugs at this point. The only way we got by was through laughter, tears, and good music. This time it was seven in the morning and we had done another all nighter by watching MTV music videos and cybering on AOL chat rooms (A/S/L). I'll never forget what she told me as rays of the sun cast themselves into rainbows on the plastic CD covers. She said that the only way to get over someone is to teach yourself to hate them.² At the time, I didn't have the worlds to tell her how fucked up that sounded but I never forgot it.

The last time I spoke to Caitlin³ was when her brother, Kevin, committed suicide. Kevin and my oldest brother were best friends when Caitlin and I were best friends. Eventually, Kevin stopped leaving his room and refused to see anyone. Whenever their family came up between my Dad and I, he told me that something bad was going to happen and someone needed to do something about Kevin. I came when Caitlin called to tell me about her brother. We hung out in her townhouse in Highland(IN) and I smoked weed in the garage while she drank wine. We hadn't spoken for years so it was somewhat of a surprise to me when she called me for support. Apparently her cop boyfriend had proposed to her behind the high school - on the bike trail and now they lived together in this townhouse. Her mother felt like she was settling but according to her, she welcomed comfort after her unstable childhood. In short, her mother was a hoarder and her father faked his own death to escape his family and she also walked into him holding a gun to her mom's head. At twenty she asked me a lot of questions about death that I couldn't directly answer. How do you make someones life meaningful, what do you do with this anger, how do I stop being angry at my mom, why him, and why now? I realized then that she called me because I had the most experience with death out of anyone she knew. I smiled because I remembered that time when we were seven at a sleep over and she told me that she always wished that I could see my mom one last time. The answers I gave her questions don't bare repeating as they weren't very good or conclusive but they were honest.

In truth, no one is granted the chance to have illusions about life. Life is short, temporary, and meaningless by nature. The length and depth are completely up to you.

1. None of us fit in with the families whose parents made them homemade lunches and picked them up from school. We avoided our homes and hated everyone. [↩]
2. An approach I have used to pry myself from a few relationships. I prefer looking for the best in people but let's be honest in that it is much easier to find faults. [↩]
3. Alyssa and I continued our friendship for years after us and Caitlin fell apart. We lived together when I was in college, I broke up her first fight, and saw all of her boyfriends up until the birth of her daughter. I miss her everyday. She was such a good friend that I thought that all of my friends would be like her - that's both a compliment to her and an insult to me. This would have made her laugh. [↩]