Take my old friend Pancho. Like me, he came here from the states in pre-internet days and immersed himself in the Tico culture. He Hispanicized his first name, learned passable Spanish, got married to a Tica, had a kid, built a house, got religion, got divorced and came out of it a wholly different person from the innocent young man who had arrived here years earlier. If on the surface he had not changed much, psychically he was a beaten and bruised hombre.
The religion he had ‘gotten’ was not the staid, sombre Catholic one; no, his wife had taken him to her Evangelical church where they banged on guitars and drums and proclaimed their beliefs at full volume. I would occasionally run into him after he had attended one of the services and he always looked dazed. I could not tell if he was at one with the holy spirit, or just gobsmacked after having it shoved at him at total, Spinal tap, these-go-to-11 volume.
A few years after the split up he was back in town, behind the wheel of a battered Range Rover, bound for a 'tour' of Costa Rica. The 'tour' he had planned revolved around the dented left rear hubcap of the Range Rover that he swore, when the angle and lighting was right, bore an image of the Virgin Mary. "People will pay good money to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary on a dented hubcap," he assured me. "God-fearing Latinos are always on the lookout for the latest Our Lady of Fatima. This hubcap is gold’’
I had studied the hubcap at length, from all angles and at various hours of the day, straight and sober, unstraight and unsober, but the alleged vision never materialized. There was one occasion when I caught a fleeting glimpse of an image that strikingly resembled Moe of the Three Stooges, but it turned out I was staring at the hubcap of a different Range Rover. My last sighting of Pancho was of him behind the wheel of the Virgin Mary Express, heading north on the highway toward San Jose, plumes of dark diesel smoke streaming from the tailpipe.
Fast forward to a year ago. After much time away, Pancho reappeared on the scene. When I asked him how his 'tour' had gone, all he said was that it had lasted as far as the San Jose area, where within an hour of his arrival the sacred hubcap had disappeared, along with the rest of his car, when he left it parked with the engine running while he went in search of prospective hubcap believers. But that was all in the distant past. Pancho was a man of the present. He wanted to talk of his new interest, which was the YouTube channel he was in the process of creating. "That website is a bank vault, you know," he told me. I wasn't so sure. If anything, YouTube seemed to be the validation of Andy Warhol's long ago pronouncement that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. Ephemeral fame was the norm. Anyone could post a video about anything there, regardless of content, meaning or quality. It was more like a huge internet video flea market than a bank vault.
Pancho assured me that there was money to be made once a viewing base was built up. He invited me to come visit him in the following week to show me first hand how his idea would become golden reality.
The next week, I spotted Pancho riding a tricked out mountain bike down the main street of Quepos. On his head was an elaborate helmet with a go pro mounted above the visor. As he passed I heard him talking into an unseen microphone. "I am now approaching the mercado central and bus station of Quepos," he intoned. I walked quickly toward the bus station where I watched from a distance as Pancho attempted to interview locals. He had removed the helmet-cam from his head and was aiming it at himself as he spoke. Then he rotated it and pointed it toward the people milling about. People mugged at the camera or stared or laughed or moved quickly away any time Pancho approached. Eventually he got back on his bike and rode away.
A few days later I caught up with Pancho in his 7000 colones per night hotbox of a cabina. He paced the floor and spoke of hits and subscribers and the limitlessness of cyberspace and the endless stream of money that would be flowing his way once his videos began circulating. "I'm calling it Costa Rica Bikecam," he said. "I've already got it trademarked."
He invited me to see some of his videos. For the next hour, I strained to keep an interested look on my face as I watched a series of shaky, nausea-inducing mini cam shots, overlaid with Pancho's incomprehensible monologue. It was like watching The Blair Witch Project minus the fright. There were shots taken in town, on the beach, in the palm fields. The lighting and sound quality varied wildly from shot to shot and Pancho had an annoying habit of trying to instantly translate every word spoken by his various Tico subjects. He shouted over them, mistranslating words and phrases.
Pancho finally, mercifully switched it off and looked at me expectantly. "One word," he urged, "Give me your best one word summary of what you just watched." A lot of words came quickly to mind: Unwatchable. Incomprehensible. Lousy. Sucks. Really. Bad. I racked my brain for something positive to say. "One word wouldn't do it justice," I said.
At that moment I was thinking of the time my son, then in junior high school in the US, informed me that he and some friends had formed a rock band. When I asked him what songs they did he told me they couldn't yet play any songs, but they had a really good name for the band. "Trademark," I finally said. "Costa Rica Bikecam. Great name. Good thing you got that trademarked."
]]>Hamburgers and illegal smiles were cheap. Although Crockett was reportedly a fiddle player all long haired guys had guitars for this revolution. They lived in dorms that could best be described as upscale institutional. Hippie girls sunbathed on the lawn outside these dorms which decades later would be paved over for townhouse style student accommodations and the ugly but necessary parking garages. Fifteen bucks got a keg of Schlitz Malt Liquor and enough ice to keep it cool while the word spread of a gathering miles outside of town called a woodsie. During this time U.S. Tico met the Man.
It was school so they had to study a bit and U.S. Tico did get a degree of some sort. It was kind of vague, like his ancestry which he claimed was Norwegian. Maybe U.S. Norwegitico, knowing what is known now. The Man, majoring in music did not finish a course of study but did finish a useful degree 30 years later. As to the music thing about 45 years later a respected conductor told The Man that, "I see you are coming from a different place." Indeed, what we know now.
Again back to the old days though when Pabst's Blue Ribbon was $2.39 for a 12 pack at the gas station on North. and the old Hole in the Wall Bar on Wettermark hosted great Texas Outlaw Country bands and songwriting troubadours like Rusty Weir Steve Fromholz and Ray Wylie Hubard backed by Jerry Jeff Walker's Lost Gonzo Band on most weekends. Those Lost Gonzos could burst ear drums with their version of "Communication Breakdown" U. S. Tico and The Man played guitars also. Cover songs were pretty rudimentary at the time but some heartfelt blues was belted out at the woodsies to the tune of brutally fingered E chord progressions with improvised lyrics bemoaning all sadness, trials and tribulations of student life.
Just like the price of beer always going up, students move on. The day U.S. Tico left he was traveling light. He presented The Man with a set of of maroon dinner plates, more square than they were round and their surfaces scared by the sawing of cheap steak knives against cheaper, tougher meats. A gift? Maybe. The Man would eat off them for most of the next decade.
In fact it was about 10 years before they saw each other again and took a fishing trip together. Big trout cruised between the sea grass beds of Copano Bay and reds tailed on the spoil banks of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. They cooked this delicious seafood sautéed in butter or blackened with Cajun spices and of course better beer than PBR or Bull.
Like the late songwriter Billy Joe Shaver says "the years rolled by, like a mighty rush of eagles..." U.S. Tico and The Man might have met at a rugby club reunion one more time but after that it would be awhile.
There would be wives, kids, careers, happy times, sad times, proud times, grandkids, music, better guitars, many concerts, New Orleans Jazz Fests, hobbies, distractions, the tossing out ceremony of the maroon plates and all the things that happen for men as they wind through the fishing trip of life. One day, it had been maybe 30 years since The Man had seen U. S. Tico, a cryptic message arrived.
"I'm in Costa Rica. It's like college, but you don't go to classes. I have lots of time and am working on something big but need help. I want to venture the adventure! Tell our stories! Talk about music! Play music! The free thoughts are flowing!"
The Man wished he still had those maroon plates. He wondered how much a keg of Bull was these days. It occurred to him that U.S. Tico was not Norwegian. He picked up a guitar and strummed an E chord. It was a good venture to begin an adventure.
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