July 2006, San Jose, Costa Rica

By Melissa Garvey

I live on Market Street in San Francisco. I’m not talking about the Market Street that runs past Union Square with the seven-story Nordstrom’s and the sterile-looking Macy’s department store. My Market Street is further west. It’s the one littered with heroin addicts, chicken bones, unidentifiable odors, and other things not worth mentioning.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to keep a running tally of the number of men I see urinating on curbs and scrawny tree trunks. Once I even saw a woman squatting in the alcove of an abandoned shop.

On Market Street, the bizarre is to be expected. Last week I came across a mid-size box with a man inside. He had cut out a flap in the cardboard wall, and was using it as a mouth to heckle pedestrians. But that wasn’t as strange as the woman who seized me by the arm outside Starbucks. “I created you,” she told me in the sincerest of tones. People are weird here.

I can see it on their faces. Some of them have faces so scrunched and distressed that it hurts just to look at them. Others portray an air of disorientation, like a patient with advanced Alzheimer’s. I remember one little man with a protruding gut and bronzed skin leaning on a trashcan. He was brandishing an empty beer bottle over his head and belting out a crazy tune in Spanish. Probably thought he was back in Costa Rica, or wherever he’s from.

I used to live in Costa Rica, only for about seven months. I planned on staying for one or two years, but plans change.

Maybe it was my own fault, but it only took two days in the country to get held up at gunpoint on the side of the road. They were in a red car. Red is the color of taxis; it easily blends with a pack of afternoon traffic. I hear they pick their targets by looking for people who are off-guard. Rental cars with flat tires, baggage left unattended. My husband and I were waiting at the bus stop by La Sabana Parque.

I have sun-bleached hair and my husband wears polo shirts. We stood out. Newcomers are always easy to spot with their camera bags and delirious expressions of enchantment. Locals walk with straight mouths and hanging heads.

My husband and I were sitting one bench over from another couple. We were laughing about something that never had a chance to settle into my memory. Not suddenly, but like a cloud blocking the sun, I sensed someone’s presence. I turned to the right, my legs still crossed, and locked eyes with my attacker. He pointed a shiny barrel at my chest, motioning toward my bag. Then I understood what was happening.

There was nothing calm or heroic about my actions from that point forward. I let out a horrified scream as if I had already been shot. I sobbed, lost control of my breath. I contracted myself into a ball on the bench as my husband threw obscenities in English at his assailant. I don’t remember anything but grunts from the other two men, but I think they were Spanish grunts.

My husband chased the men across two lanes of traffic in pursuit of my bag. They were still waving guns in my husband’s direction, and I watched as his life and the life of our future children flashed before my eyes.

“Come back right now!” My voice came out in an amplified gurgle, sort of like the Wicked Witch of the West. I anchored an arm around one of the poles of the bus stop and held the other out toward my husband. He came back unscathed. We took a taxi back to our temporary accommodations.

The police are good for nothing. That’s what the locals say. Instead, the security guard at my husband’s work drove us to the OIJ later that afternoon. He said the OIJ is Costa Rica’s version of the FBI.

My husband and I went together to report our incident. We took a number and sat in a waiting room. It looked like an American DMV.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” My husband and I shot looks of uncertainty at each other. There were maybe four people ahead of us and more coming in. None of them appeared distraught enough to be reporting a crime. One by one, people would disappear behind a shabby door, then exit a few minutes later through a swinging wooden gate that led back to the waiting room and into the hall.

“Numero dieciséis.” A man called our number from the shabby door, which was cracked just enough to see his scowl of boredom. We entered a long, empty hallway that stopped at a dimly lit office. A plump woman peered from behind the desk that was against the back wall, her lips pursed like she had just been sucking the juice from lemons. A humorous display of Spanglish, followed by an awkward silence, led us to the next logical step in the reporting process: We would have to act it out.

As long as we were at it, we thought we may as well have fun. I sat in the wobbly plastic chair in front of the lemon lady’s desk, put on a frown, and gripped my imaginary steering wheel. My husband stood to the side and pretended to be horribly panicked as I held him up with my menacing finger gun. I then swiped his make-believe bag (we were too scared to bring real bags out of the house by that point), darted to the opposite side of the office, and left my husband standing with his hands on his cheeks, looking like a very convincing victim of a crime.

“Gracias,” the lemon lady said. We exited through the swinging wooden gate feeling fairly certain that we would not be getting our digital camera back.

Over the next few days we learned that most people living in Costa Rica have their own story or three to tell. Betty from Brooklyn, who owned the café, had two men try to break into her house during the day. Fortunately her Rottweiler startled the thieves while her gardener, an ex-Marine, defended himself with his machete. The week before, an American was shot in La Sabana Parque when he refused to give up his laptop computer. At the pizza place on the corner, an armed security guard was attacked and robbed, again by two men.

The travel books say Costa Rica is the safest place in Central America for women travelers and Americans. But my husband and I soon realized we had failed to distinguish between safest and safe, two very different notions.

In Costa Rica, houses are surrounded by concrete walls with barbed wires on top. Windows and doors are covered with metal bars. On my first day in the country, I thought these were peculiar, exaggerated precautions. On my second day in the country, I was in the market for one of those impenetrable houses. Forget banana trees, tropical birds, and local neighbors, I thought. My husband and I would be quite content next to that big American-type mall where we could blend in with the rest of the gringos.

I found my fortress, and for a few weeks I rarely ventured outside. I stopped saying “buenos dias” and watched my feet instead. To get to the grocery store and back, I imagined I was Laura Croft from Tomb Raider or Trinity from The Matrix. I would put on a hat to hide my hair and wear long jeans and a T-shirt. Sunglasses hid the fear in my eyes. When I would finally return to my house and close the gate, my muscles would relax and I’d let out a sigh. It was like I had been holding my breath for the entire duration of my errand.

That wasn’t how I had pictured life in Costa Rica. The vegetable markets, city streets, and soda stands were ripe for exploration, as far as I was concerned. I envisioned making interesting friends and learning all about a new culture. And, of course, I saw myself basking in the abundant supply of sun and warmth that Central America has to offer. Maybe it was good luck that my husband and I were mugged on our second day in the country. On the third day I might have traipsed out on my own in a tank top and shorts to some place gringos don’t belong.

Eventually my anxiety got out of hand. Rent was due. I needed $400 in cash, plus another $400 for the security deposit. The landlord wouldn’t accept an American check. In full heroine character, I marched down to Scotia Bank, peeping from beneath the brim of my khaki-colored hat. I still refused to carry a bag and compensated by stowing my debit card in the safest place I could think of: my bra.

I entered through the glass doors of the bank and passed the armed security guard. The ATH (ATM) processed my request for $700, which was close enough. It spit out a wad of $20s, 35 to be exact. I glanced behind each shoulder, stuffed the bundle in my bra, and left as quickly as I had come.

By this time my heart was beating hard enough on the left side of my chest to keep up with the size of my inflated right breast. I made a bee-line across the road of a bustling three-way intersection, intending to dodge a string of traffic. What happened next was possibly the most humiliating moment of my life. All 35 bills spilled out of my bra and onto the pavement. I knew underwires existed for a reason.

The bills got caught up in the wind, swirling like candy clouds. People came running from sidewalks and stores, grabbing at fistfuls of money. I gathered what I could. Surely I was about to look up into the barrel of another gun, I thought, and braced for the worst.

Instead, everybody started handing me the money they had collected, and a sympathetic woman ushered me into a nearby carpet store. She handed me a paper bag for my cash, hailed me a taxi, and stood wide-eyed on the curb, probably thinking that what people say about blondes is true after all.

Back at my house, when I no longer had to gasp for breaths of air, I emptied the contents of the paper bag onto the kitchen counter: $300, $320. What would my husband say? $480. $500. How could I have possibly been so stupid? $660, $680 … $700? I counted again. It was all there.

After that I understood that not all locals were out to get me, not very many in fact. Ultimately, my husband and I came to enjoy the farmers’ markets and beaches, although with an air of alertness and caution. I learned to read people’s faces; I associated the woman from the carpet shop outside Scotia Bank with soft lines and pleasant eyes; I remembered the men in the red car with stiff jaws and angled brows. Maybe that’s why the faces on Market Street can evoke such vivid emotions in me today.

I suppose crime happens on Market Street, too. But somehow I feel safer with the heroin addicts and chicken bones than the pineapples and sunshine. On Market Street I can dress how I like and get nothing more than a “hey baby” in English. Perhaps I have a false sense of security, or maybe not. Whatever the case, my seven months in Costa Rica gave me a new appreciation for the feeling of safety. I much prefer my paradise on Market Street to a Costa Rica adventure any day.

Melissa Garvey is a staff writer for Dynasty Education and an aspiring novelist. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two dogs.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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