A DJ, a Schizophrenic, and the Worst Hotel in the Universe

I´d be willing to bet that when Robert Earl Keen, Jr. wrote Love´s a Word I Never Throw Around, he didn´t think his song would be the impetus for a Guatemalan´s paranoid fear of dying at the hands of the government. Strange, how our words can have an impact we never would have guessed.

While in Rio Dulce, Bjorn and I managed to get caught up in a long conversation with someone who, as we slowly discovered, believed he was talking to more than just the two of us.

Laura and I had been playing poker, the last two survivors of a game with very high stakes (Snickers bars for the winner) when our friend Jose Guillermo sat down and began to talk to us. We both thought he appeared very sad, and couldn´t figure out why until Bjorn and I talked with him later. As it turned out, he was afraid of dying, a possibility that seemed a great deal nearer to him than it might to anyone else, because he regularly received messages from God.

Among them were the following:
- a firm belief that he would ride into the US on a donkey (given that he was rejected three times by immigration, and that his full name was Jose Guillermo de Jesus);
- a belief that his dreams predicted, among other things, Guatemalan civil wars and the 9/11 attacks;
- a belief that Bjorn and I, because we were US citizens, were somehow part of a new message.

At roughly 7:00 AM the next morning, he was walking around our dorm waking everyone up, holding my Keen lyrics sheet in his hand and crying, and demanding to talk to everyone about the message he´d just received of his own impending death.

(I´d wondered where the lyric sheet had gone.)

At the moment (some four days later), Bjorn, Elliot and I are lodged in a hotel that is most likely the original design for Hell (our God is truly merciful, it seems, and abandoned the original design). It costs a mere three dollars a night, which is apparently the reason the hotel staff has decided to abandon all those pesky rules that other places have adopted as "standards." Among the more conspicuous errors:

- a grave mathematical miscalculation in the backup rolls of toilet paper. One, apparently, isn´t enough for the entire hotel, especially when that one, because it is the last one, isn´t being given out to anybody;
- a false hope that the thin floorboards which serve as the only source of insulation from the competing sounds of other rooms will somehow block out any noise larger than a cricket or, in worse cases, the loud music that the hotel staff has seen fit to play at any and all hours of the night;
- water, or the lack thereof, leaving most residents unable to complete basic acts of hygeine, like flushing the communal toilets. Right now the toilets (which did not come with a top seat) act more like outhouses, but with a much smaller receptacle.

Highly entertaining. The town itself, however, is very clean and very cheap. Last night Bjorn and I had a full plate of eggs, rice, and beans, and tortillas and coffee for a buck fifty. We spent a good half-hour talking to someone who turned out to be a radio DJ for a station that reaches all of Guatemala and parts of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. His Spanish was fast but clean and sharp, and we were able to understand almost everything he said.

Elliot is feeling better. And given the state of the bathrooms this morning, thank god for that.