Coming Back/A Rapidly Expanding Porsha Problem/Pi Finds Himself In A Change Of Circumstances/Minnow Grows Hair/Heckled

Coming Back

For the first time since I got sick I go out. Go for dinner and see a movie at a friend’s restaurant a few blocks up from my house. We go in a big group - Rita, Mae, Kathy who is in town for a few days prior to leaving for Mexico, Ivan from Cuba, a bunch of other people including some Nica women, friends of Mae and Rita, who find me hysterical - they keep tickling me and grabbing my arms to look. I adore them even though we can’t communicate in any sort of meaningful fashion.

It’s all Granada and I’m horrified to discover that everyone knows I was sick. People I don’t know well are coming up to me to see how I’m doing. This reeks of college, of being the sick kid, of coming back after Hodgkins to find the entire fucking city knew my business. Granada is a small town. My fever has become the thing of legend - the fact that I’m out and about and not brain damaged from it is commendable, I guess. I see Donna for the first time since she brought me to the hospital. I tell her I don’t remember most of that day. She tells me it’s not worth remembering.

Rita and Mae both volunteer with Building New Hope projects - in the schools. I know this isn’t what happened but I have this mental picture of Donna assigning me to them as their first project. I know she didn’t but it’s funny mental picture “don’t let the vet nurse die, we’re going to need her in a few weeks when we go to Corn Island”. But a Dutch woman from another project tells me there were daily updates about me on the circuit. There are comments about how tiny I’ve gotten - how much weight I lost in that one week. How odd.

It seems there are two camps - the ones that saw me or got the daily updates and are amazed to see me walking around - and the ones that only heard about it and are blasé about seeing me. Either way it’s overwhelming.

Our group is big and we take over the place. There is a spattering of activity, rearranging of tables, Thalia is busy as hell. I give Julio another of my dwindling American cigarette collection. I have one of the Nica woman’s toddler on my lap and she tickles me, too. I am infinitely tickle-able, apparently.

I duck out early and walk home. I’ve walked home from Thalia’s a million times - it’s a short walk. Tonight it seems to take forever. La Doctora was over last night and said I looked good, I haven’t had a fever in days, I have my ultrasounds and lab work tomorrow. But so much activity after such an enforced period of inactivity drains me.

A Rapidly Expanding Porsha Issue.

I’d like to pretend I’m back at work, I really would. In reality Katherine is at work and I am sitting on my ass on a stool watching Katherine work. Thank god for Katherine who found the clinic about a week before I went traveling, signed on for a week to cover some clinic shifts and found herself married to the clinic for weeks on end while I got better.

And thank God for Katherine in that I mentioned that she had just been through her own butt-shot odyssey in my last blog entry and now I’m posting a photo of her. Because I know she’ll take it in good humor that I get so many Canadian hits*, specifically BC hits, and her country people, should they recognize her from my blog, will know she got the old IM in the cheek, too. And that I once threatened to stab her in the thigh with a fork under the table in a restaraunt but that's another story altogether.

Not that the cheek injection is anything revolutionary - if you’ve ever got sick in Nicaragua and been treated here you’ve gotten the needle, I think. At least if you’ve been treated by Nicaraguans. As an interesting side note la doctora is supposed to stop by tonight. I’m really hoping she shows up sans needles.

We’ll start with Porsha. Here’s the good news: Porsha has a home, methinks. With like the best person ever. And not only does Porsha have such a good home, she has a good home with an hour away from me in Colorado. So I kind of hope that I’ll be able to see her again, maybe bring one of my dogs up to chew on her. I love that dog.

So now that we’re over the Find-Porsha-A-Home-Problem what is the new Porsha problem?

She’s fat. Like seriously fat. Like beyond chunky, into the realm of the if-she-was-a-person-she-might-need-to-buy-more-than-one-plane-ticket fat. None of us can figure out her metabolism and none of us can deny her food. Porsha loves food like pageant girls love Vaseline on their teeth. And in theory it’s very easy to say ‘well then feed her less’ but a lot less easy when confronted with Porsha’s ability to inhale an entire cup and a half of kibble in ten seconds and then look at you with her one eye full of don’t-you-remember-what-I-looked-like-at-the-Masaya-bus-terminal. You fly over here and cut her food you heartless bastards. And please don’t suggest some walks. Toni and Nick took her home for a few days and the walk over to the house was painful. Getting her on a leash and out the gate was a chore in and of itself. Porsha is no dope. She has seen life outside the clinic gates and really doesn’t feel the need to be gallivanting around the city. She gets some exercise as a chew toy for the Minnow but it doesn’t match up with her amazing food-vacuum skills.

But the problem is Porsha needs to be on a plane next month. Which means she needs to be able to fit in a crate, let alone on a plane. And if she doesn’t leave soon we’re going to have to butter her up with margarine or something to smoosh her fat ass into any sort of acceptable size dog kennel. Either that or see if the municipal zoo has something that they use to ship wild boar or something of that size that they’d be willing to donate to the cause.

Minnow Grows Hair

Again, I can take no credit for this. I was gallivanting around the country and then I was enjoying my tour of bloodstained third world hospitals and contemplating my ceiling for a week while Toni and Nick were dutifully injecting her daily. But the Minnow, who showed up completely bald, is beginning to have hair. Lots and lots of hair. I was actually shocked when I saw her for the first time yesterday. Nick had been saying for weeks she was getting fuzzy but I lacked perspective - she still looked bald to me.

But now she is blond. Patchy and blonde, yes. But blonde. As in the sort of blonde you have to have hair for others to realize you are blonde-blonde.

And while Ramon moved on to his new home, as did Sherman, she continues to chew on Porsha. In the absence of Ramon she’s even charmed Freda and she and Freda will chase each other around and chew on each other.

I don’t get the Minnow Ju-Ju when it comes to the other dogs. She has broken down even the hardest of hard cases. And while I always thought she was cute, she had a sweet face, I have to admit that now that she is hairy she is adorable. Adorable enough that she gets away with yanking off my flip-flop and running amuck with it. When we go back to the Corn Islands in June, Minnow will come too. She will be restored to her owner, back to her bed and her meals and the life to which she was accustomed. A little older, a little wiser, a lot hairier.

And Then There Was Pi

Who I have to assume Toni named after the Life of Pi, because she was reading it at the Laguna a few weeks back.

I don’t know anything about Pi, except I got an email that there was a nice older, homeless dog hanging around Nick and Toni’s with a touch of sarna and since we had room, they were considering bringing him in. Today Nick called and told me they brought him in.

Thus this older black street dog, with his scarred face, finds himself in a total change of circumstances. He seems dazed, a little stunned. Like most new street dogs (Porsha excluded) he doesn’t know what to make of the kibble. He is sweet and quiet and unassuming and prone to putting himself in a kennel and staying there. He seems relieved and a bit tired, like he’s happy for the safe place to sleep even if the food isn’t what he hoped it would be.

Aside from some patchiness in his fur and some scars on his face he seems to be in decent shape. A little itchy, a little thin. But now we have two that need homes - Freda remains unclaimed, quietly waiting as she has since before I got to Nicaragua. And Pi sleeps it off, brand new, still settling in.

A Word On Power, Heckling And My Ability To Cut Loose With Strings of Profanity

The heckling thing has come up a lot lately. Mae, who is staying at the house, is having a horrible time with it. My friend Kathy came back and she noted that Granada is the worst for it - the constant hissing and kissing noises, the endless comments. I have an advantage in that I am tattooed and that intimidates the hell out of Nica men. They make comments and hiss all the time but it’s over the minute I turn around. I don’t even need a ‘que vas?’ to make it stop.
I admit that I don’t notice it anymore. I notice when I walk around with my roommates or other men it doesn’t happen - there’s a blissful silence - but I’m so used to it that most of it bounces off of me anyways.

And most of it is innocuous to begin with anyways - almost more polite than anything else. I very rarely get the super aggressive noises, the intimidation tactics.

The street the clinic is on is lined with hecklers. They sit on the corner and play card games and hiss and make their little noises but for the most part they leave me alone. There is one prick, however, who obviously plays it like a little power game. He wasn’t bad before I left but in my absence he got horrible with Katherine - saying all sorts of crap. It made me angry that he honed in on her.

Tonight we are leaving the clinic on our bikes when he hisses at me “hey sweetheart can I come for a ride?’.

I don’t know why but I just turned around and unleashed a stream of obscenity on him the likes of which I haven’t for a while. I won’t even try to recreate it. It was completely thoughtless - my friend told me this little piece of shit had been scaring her and when he tried it with the two of us my inner Boston Irish came out. I was talking to Katherine at the time and just stopped, mid-sentence, unleashed on him and turned back to her without realizing I had done it.

Did you just….she asked me.

Oh my god, I think I did. We laugh about it for a second. I’ve busted out the ‘que vas?’ once or twice and on one occasion the ‘no me hodas’. I even once got into a pointless yelling match with a bunch of fourteen year old boys that my name was not ‘Taaaatttttuuuuuu’ or ‘Bicicleta’ or ‘Sweetheart’. That actually ended well with them apologizing and introducing themselves. But I’ve never just double barrel unloaded on anyone before like I did on that cretin.**

A few friends of mine as of late have had cretin issues that have driven them to finally say something. I’ve said it a million times - I really don’t believe there’s any harm meant by 99% of the heckling - I think it’s just cultural and that’s why I ignore it or even smile at the old men. But there are the idiots that use it to try to insult or play little power games with women. And they deserve comments like “You bet your ass that cigarette is rica” or whatever it was that my friend Corissa said to one of them that made me laugh and undoubtedly left the idiot stumbling over his own tongue and wondering what sort of tiny little blonde maelstromm just ran roughshod over his dumb ass.

We’ll see what happens with The Cretin tomorrow when we go back. He so much as opens his mouth and I’m going to start insulting his mother - the nuclear insult in Latin America.

Postscript: I go to the clinic alone tonight for the first time. The Cretin is sitting outside when I go to unlock my bike and leave. He opens his mouth and I whip my head around, glare at him. He looks at the ground. ‘Hola, senora’ he says politely.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.



*Sheena is a goddess. A really damn mean one, but that’s the best kind. We adore Sheena. I’m speaking of myself as the collective ‘we’ but it’s true. I love Sheena and if you don’t that’s your problem and she probably hates your ass, too. And will tell you that straight to your face, too. For those of you that read her blog but have never met her: yes, she really is just like that. Wicked, ain’t it? And yes, she does have tattoos and yes, she was a punk rocker.

** ‘Que vas?’ roughly a not nice way of asking what someone is looking at. ‘No me hodas’ - don’t fuck with me.