Bus Fare to Somewhere Else (working manuscript)

“Cabrón! Cabrón! Levantate! Hijo de gran puta, maing!”
The knocks came hard and fast. I snapped out of bed disoriented. At first I thought I had been shot. My heart rate pumped up so fast, I started sweating.
“Vámonos, you lazy fack. Let’s go.”
I looked at my wristwatch. Seven. I had been asleep three hours.
“Who is it?”
“Eh, who is it is. Is no time to be they facking comedian. You want to come see this. And now!”
Manolito was my contact at Radio Venceremos, part-time translator, and full-time social director the entire time I’d been in El Salvador. He was a scrawny, feisty ferret of a man who chain smoked Kent cigarettes and ate salted crackers with sardines.
“Hold up, let me get my shit on,” I yelled at the door. He kept pounding. I jumped into my pants, put on a white shirt, and knocked over the opened bottle of tequila that had been stinking, and collecting gnats in the sweltering night.
“What do I need to bring?”
“Only your eyes, Cabrón. Let’s go!”
I opened the door and the morning light exploded into the room. I squinted like a helpless mole. Manolito gripped my elbow hard, and we began running down the small, dusty streets of San Salvador. I was trying to tuck in my shirt with one hand.
“The hell’s going on, Manolo? Where we going?”
“They Sheraton Hotel.”
“The Sheraton?”
“Yea, yea, maing. Vámos, Cabrón. Muevete. Run with me.”
I was hung over and my entire body ached like it had been pummeled mercilessly by some heavyweight with a serious agenda.
“What the fuck is at the Sheraton, for Chrissakes. . .”
“The FMLN, maing. They goh-vernment and FMLN is shooting up floor by floor, putito.”
“At the Sheraton Hotel?”
“Yes, maing. They are shooting and fighting on every floor. And they goh-vernment has some officers and colonels in the courtyard, from the Farabundo, and they going to execute them.”
“Holy shit.”
“Is right.”
We ran the streets now at a crazed, disconnected, flailing pace, trying to get to the besieged hotel. Manolito swung his free arm around and adjusted the falling strap to an open, leather messenger bag draping off his shoulder. I noticed he was carrying a Nagra recorder tucked inside. In all the commotion, I had forgotten to bring anything to jot down what I was about to see.

Lunch: Liquid and Smoke

In Toronto, in Dundas Square, I decided to take a metal chair at a metal table and settle for some overpriced, toxic street meat in a bun, while the giant screens in the plaza force fed me: Sony ads, make-up ads, lingerie ads, other ads, and a prodigious, Big-Brother like version of Salma Hayek’s face pushing something. A new movie? I had thirteen dollars allocated for a cup of coffee and a small something for the stomach…and five hours to kill. I got the java from a nearby news stand. I had run out of cigarettes, so I tacked on a pack of fake Marlboro Reds. The entire endeavour cost almost twelve bucks, so lunch was going to be caffeine and nicotine. The city eats up every resource like that. All right then. A group of Romanian shopkeepers was gesticulating wildly, insulting one another–sometimes in gypsy dialect, other times in Turkish. I thought about joining in, but I was on vacation from all the wars and battles. I had eleven more days away from the machines and blades and rotors waiting to eviscerate the flesh. A homeless Pakistani walked with much conviction in between the tables, reciting from a small, green notebook. To me he looked like a man who knew his way through the maze; who knew the answers to the Minotaur’s riddles and was disseminating them in a combined fit of altruistic rage and kindness to people who did not choose to listen. Tourists were visibly tense at the man’s intentions. Nothing materialized, and he eventually disappeared down Victoria Street, his nose buried in his handwritten notes. I smoked eight cigarettes straight in order to kill my appetite. Hunger is good discipline. And then I got up and walked north on Yonge, swung a right on Gerrard, by the Delta Chelsea, and hit the LCBO on Parliament for a 3-liter jug of red table wine. It was Friday afternoon. I had eleven days left to cram in a life long deserved before I was going to wash down a family size bottle of Advil PM with two liters of Wild Turkey.