In his younger days, the Oldie used to souse an awful lot, but these days he doesn't drink alcohol at all except when he's in Costa Rica. The rest of the time he's stone cold sober, and that can be quite a trial for him.
So there we were Saturday morning, sitting at the West Point Bar ("the southernmost tavern in Canada") up on Pelee Island, where we had come to help Skippy close up his cottage for the Winter. We were returning from an early morning run to the dump, and noticing that the West Point was open, we wheeled in for a snort.
The television was on a Toledo station and intersperced among the cartoon shows they were already selling plastic Christmas toys, even though Halloween would not come for three more weeks.
The Oldie sat with a plain glass of plain coke, while the rest of us drank a hard liquor breakfast, and you could tell that he was having trouble watching us. So to keep his mind off the alcohol, he was telling Bryan, the bartender, stories about Costa Rica.
Evidently, he had told the bartender that the name Costa Rica literally means "Rich Coast", because here's how Bryan asked the question- "How come it's called Costa Rica if the people are so poor?"
Skippy jumped in- "because they don't have any oil like Kuwait", which seemed like a good answer at the time and one that everyone understood, and Bryan - for a fact - was satisfied with it. .
But not the Oldie. He sat back for a few moments in thought and then he told Bryan the story of Hawaiian Rick's heart attack.
Last Winter in Costa Rica, when we camped by the Pacific shore on the Nicoya Peninsula, we put the Oldie up in a very nice room at the Hotel Liz for about $4 US per night. The only drawback to the room was the fact that it had only one small window, and that window was in the shade until about 11 in the morning. This meant that the Oldie was almost never up and about before noon.
So Denley and Skippy and I - camping in tents - would be up around daybreak, taking showers and performing daily ablutions in the baño that Allison's mother so graciously let us use, then sitting around and waiting until the restaurant opened and having a cup of café con leche and later a plate of fruits, including papaya and pineapple and melon and star fruit, and then even later having a true breakfast of the omnipresent gallopinto - black beans and rice - with eggs or fish or meat.
And two meals into the day - the Oldie would still not be awake.
Generally, we would plan the day so that around noon we would meet the Oldie at one of the two bars in town. And that's where we first met Hawaiian Rick, sitting at a table with the Oldie, who was drinking rum for breakfast.
Hawaiian Rick always had a bottle of beer and two or three packs of cigarettes on the table with him. He always had a cigarette burning and sometimes had two. He smoked incessantly.
"Buelling," Skippy called it. "He's buelling."
And the only places that Rick buelled was in the bar or in his hotel room upstairs. We never saw him on the beach or on the road or even at the other bar just up the street. He had smokes and he had booze and he was happy.
Retired now, Rick had sold his electrical contracting business in Hawaii for a very tidy sum of money indeed, and after extracting a portion for his son and one for his daughter and putting some away for later, he had embarked on a series of travels around the world.
He was much more travelled than any of us and regaled us with stories from around the globe. Rick and the English Chap who lives each Winter up on Playa Grande had a long talk, and although neither had ever been to any of the London pubs that the other talked about, they described their favorites with great gusto.
Rick - completely ignorant of Spanish - had adopted that common habit of gesturing and repeating single words ... as though addressing a senile uncle ... when trying to communicate with the locals. This is a method of survival that is adopted by people travelling in foreign lands who have not been forewarned of the differences of language. In Rick's case, it seemed an effective means of communication, but that was probably because Maria was willing to put up with it.
Maria, the waitress at the bar, served Rick all of the meals he ate while staying at the shore. She was a matronly woman who worked from opening in the morning until late in the night, but she always had a smile and a pleasant attitude. Even when we would clog up the access way at the bar where she was wont to order drinks, she wouldn't get upset ... she'd just wait until she could get through.
But she was upset the one day.
The Oldie and I were sitting at the corner table, both drinking rum, if my memory serves me, when Maria came up obviously distressed.
"Señor Rick," she said in Spanish. "He is very sick. His heart."
The Oldie and I both took alarm at this. "Donde esta?" I asked, and Maria understood and pointed upstairs, "arriba". So I told the Oldie to stay put and ran to the stairs and took them up two at a time. At the landing the Larson Bird was coming down, but I made her get out of my way. And upstairs - sure enough - here was Hawaiian Rick looking like death warmed over - more being carried than walking with the Young Caballerro at one arm and Señor Scuba at the other.
Seeing that they didn't need any help, I turned and went back down, telling folks to keep the stairs clear. Geovanny had run down the street to get transportation and as they carried Hawaiian Rick out, Roberto's pickup truck wheeled around the corner and stopped in front of the bar. They planted Rick in the passenger seat. And the Larson Bird, thinking more clearly than any of us, gave him the glass of ice water that she had meanwhile gotten from the bartender. Then a bunch of people loaded up in the bed of the truck and it was off up the hill and gone.
There wasn't any news of Hawaiian Rick that night and the next day Denley and Skippy and I were pulling out for business in San Jose, leaving the Oldie obstinantly parked by himself on the Pacific beach for another week or two.
We took the taxi to Paquero where we would pick up the ferry. When the ferry finally arrived from Puntarenas, we queued up to buy tickets, and as we stood there, watching the disembarking passengers, I saw Maria. As I opened my mouth to call to her to see if she knew anything of Rick's condition, I saw Rick himself right behind her.
"Señor Rick, " I said, "Are you okay?" And Rick and Maria and Roberto, the driver of the pickup truck, saw us and came over.
Rick had indeed suffered a heart attack. They had checked him over at the hospital and he couldn't drink anymore because alcohol would interfere with the medicine they had given him. But he felt fine and Maria and Roberto had dropped their normal daily activities to take the long, dusty journey to catch the early morning ferry to Puntarenas in order to bring Rick back home from the hospital. Just as everyone else, including that Larson Bird, had dropped everything to load the poor bugger travelling by himself 5000 miles from home - who didn't even speak the lingo - in the pickup and then the airplane at Cóbano to get him to proper medical attention.
"In the United States when I was a youngster," sipping the last of his Coke at the West Point Bar ("the southernmost tavern in Canada"), the Oldie wrapped up his story, "all the kids used to go from house to house on Halloween - something called trick-or-treat. At each house, if the people didn't want their windows soaped or similar pranks played upon them, they would hand out candy or apples or pennies to the children."
"But we Americans don't do that any more, because we can no longer trust our neighbors not to put poison or glass or razor blades into the goodies. We're all rich now. That's the difference."
And so the Oldie, beneath the droning television sales pitch, summed up the story to Bryan, the bartender, "Rick the Hawaiian? that's one guy who I know will be back to Costa. When I see him, I'll ask him your question - 'How come it's called Costa Rica if the people are so poor?'"
"I'll bet he knows the answer."
c 1997 Air Cooled Volkswagen Junkyard of Richfield, Ohio http://www.acvwjyro.com "Where Advice Is Always Free"(216)659-3638 This story may be distributed only if it is not altered in any way and is distributed freely without charge.