The Gringo: A Memoir

by J. Grigsby Crawford

  When she wasn’t extorting me, she was tearing my wet laundry down from the clothesline and piling it on the ground or telling me I kept the light on in my room too late or sneaking up on me while I was in the kitchen and telling me I was making toast wrong.

  BESIDES CONSUELA, GRACIELA HAD ANOTHER daughter living at the house whose name I never learned. She was mentally handicapped. Graciela restricted her to the confines of their property in the same way—and I truly wince at making this analogy, but it happens to be spot-on—they did with that ogre-looking guy in the movie The Goonies. The daughter never said a word to me, or even looked at me, but spent her days wandering around in their yard collecting rocks and muttering violently to herself. I always said hello to her, but she never acknowledged me.

  The one time I witnessed this daughter make a move beyond the property and out to the sidewalk, Consuela and Graciela lurched after her yelling, “You don’t want us to have to call the police if you wander off, do you? Then we’d have to bring you back and lock you up.”

  The days and weeks passed and I became somewhat immune to the daily fighting between Graciela and Consuela and the fact that they were both becoming unhinged. They fought about money. They fought about who should discipline Consuela’s brat teenagers for not helping around the house. And they fought about the fact that Consuela used Graciela for free babysitting while she went out and partied. (She partied a lot, with lots of men, and the whole town talked about it.) Graciela was upset about the partying in particular; she thought it was no way for a woman in her midthirties—with three kids by three different men, all out of wedlock—to be acting.

  While Graciela dealt with me somewhere in between the way she treated her dogs and her handicapped daughter, Consuela was always really nice to me—perhaps even too nice.

  Sometime in those first couple of months, I learned that Consuela had a gringo fetish. Before running for city council, she had worked with another Peace Corps volunteer in my province. When the volunteer took her to a meeting in Quito, Consuela got drunk and slept with another young volunteer.

  None of this surprised me, but it explained why Winkler came back from his site inspection in Zumbi and told me that the family was eager to have a gringo in the house. He described Consuela as especially “delighted.”

  Now she would traipse by my bedroom at night wearing nothing but a bath towel, revealing a figure that three births had not been kind to. She’d smile seductively, exposing some missing bicuspids, and ask why I never invited her up to my room.

  I smiled and said I liked my privacy.

  CHAPTER 25

  And then something happened. It was at the time when there was no work for me and Graciela was giving me the stink eye.

  During those hot days, I began experiencing a certain pain. It originated in my testicles and ripped through my torso and down my thighs like a lightning bolt. It also shot out from my prostate, reaching deep inside me and clenching every organ and tissue and vessel.

  It was true pain.

  I felt the first jolt while sitting at a computer in the municipal building and immediately became light-headed and confused. Continuing every hour, then every half hour, the pain pierced and throbbed and ebbed in and out. It came on in surges like a cattle prod had been injected into my veins. When the lightning bolts blasted out from my testicles and prostate (I began calling this my “man plumbing”), I got so nauseated I had to lie down.

  After three days of this pain, I put my pride on the back burner and called the Peace Corps doctor in Quito. He asked me all sorts of questions that included words like “shape,” “size,” “tenderness,” and, finally, “discharge.” He quickly ruled out the clap because that requires sex, which I wasn’t having. (However, this didn’t stop people in town from consistently floating rumors that every new baby in town belonged to me. Explaining that I’d been in town just a few months, not nine, did little to convince them otherwise. It got to the point that I was beginning to think that they believed I had some sort of gringo superpower that enabled me to impregnate woman by merely looking at them.)

  The doctor told me I had to travel to a nearby town the following day to give a urine sample. That night the air was cool and the town was silent. Too dizzy to read, I lay in bed sweating, my balls throbbing, waiting for the morning to come.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I TRAVELED twenty minutes by bus to Yantzaza for the urine test. It was strange for two reasons. First, I didn’t get to pee into a cup. Instead, I needed pinpoint accuracy to fill a tiny test tube about 1.5 cm in diameter. After I filled it, I had to wash my hands.

  Second, the lab technician—a smiling woman in her thirties—had a swastika tattooed on her inner wrist.

  This wasn’t my first swastika encounter in Ecuador. I’d spotted them carved into chairs, written on the backs of bus seats, and graffitied in alleyways. When I asked people if they knew what the symbol meant, they had no clue, which I guess is slightly less dangerous than knowing and still using it anyway. I attributed the swastika ignorance to the fact that no one around there read books, let alone twentieth-century world-history texts. If most people there couldn’t name their previous president, it would be unfair, perhaps, to expect them to know who the Axis was in World War II. Nonetheless, I would have at least Googled the thing before I permanently dyed my skin with it. I decided that the lab technician likely wasn’t a Third Reich enthusiast, but if she were, it might explain why—ha, ha—there were no books around.

  The lab results said the following: Somewhere deep in my man plumbing was some sort of micro bacteria wreaking havoc. I called the Peace Corps doctor with the results, and he said I should go into the free public health clinic in Zumbi and get a physical exam. The next several days included many calls back and forth between the doctors at my site, me, and the doctor in Quito. Because of Peace Corps policies, I couldn’t see a doctor at site, or anywhere, without permission from the Peace Corps.

  All the doctor visits were stressful. I mostly waited around in pain and brushed up on my Spanish medical vocabulary. When it came to dealing with Ecuadorian doctors and my man plumbing, I didn’t want anything lost in translation. On the phone with a friend of mine, I said, “Man, I can’t believe this dictionary doesn’t have the Spanish translation for ‘vas deferens.’”

  The first local doctor I saw was a beautiful Ecuadorian woman about my age. My conversation with her was brief because she said I had to come back after the weekend and see a specialist who wouldn’t be in until Monday. She sent me on my way with some ibuprofen and instructed me to take 1,200 milligrams a day for relief.

  It didn’t help. Over the weekend, I writhed in pain and boredom. The only times I left my bedroom were to briefly go downstairs to the kitchen and bring some food back to my room, where I lay in bed sweating and moaning. On Sunday, I lay there late into the day until I heard violent noises down on the patio. I rolled out of bed and hobbled to the window to find Jack and Benji snarling in an intense dogfight. Jack was about to rip Benji’s head off. Blood was spurting from Benji and covering Jack’s muzzle.

  Just then Graciela stormed out of the kitchen wielding a broomstick. She began beating Jack so hard that the broomstick snapped in half. She picked up the broken end and kept beating him with it. When the fight finally broke up, she dragged Jack over to his usual post and tied him up, then beat him some more and started filling the washbasin with water. It looked like she might be getting ready to drown Jack to death. I’d seen some grisly mammalian slaughters in my half year there, but I never imagined I’d see an old lady finish off a snarling dog with her bare hands.

  Instead, she threw buckets of water at Jack and began beating him again. Later, I suggested to Consuela—for about the tenth time—that they should just train Jack to be a little nicer. She just laughed, as usual, and said, “No, he’s just bad,” which, ironically, is the same thing she’d told me earlier about her five-year-old son who’d had problems acting out.

  ON MONDAY THE SPECIALIST GAVE m
e a checkup with what might have been the only pair of latex gloves in the building. Before the exam, he left the room to look for them and returned minutes later wiggling his fingers in the air in triumph. The doctors here, I decided, weren’t all that bad. It was just the facilities that made you want to shower immediately.

  The specialist prescribed some antibiotics in pill form as well as more ibuprofen and a heavy medicine that would be injected. Also, he said, I needed to go to Loja for a more thorough exam.

  “What kind of exam will it be?” I said.

  “An ultrasound.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “An ultrasound,” he said. “Like they do on pregnant women—”

  “Ah, yes, I know what it is—”

  “—except on your testicles.”

  He stood up and told me there was one last thing I could do to ease the pain. He said I should fill a bowl with hot water and soak my testicles in it—yes, just like a teabag. In an up and down motion, flexing his knees, he stood in front of me and demonstrated exactly how I could go about dipping my testicles in the bowl.

  I let this sink in, then got on the phone to run it all by the Peace Corps doctor.

  “Ummm, yeah, Grigs, this is all good. Take the antibiotics for ten days. You can buy it at a local pharmacy,” said the Peace Corps doctor.

  “Okay. And this one that’s supposed to be injected? What’s that all about?” I said.

  “Oh, right. To buy that one, go to the next town over—for political purposes.”

  “Political purposes?” I said.

  “Right, well, it’s like this: Even though you don’t have an STD, that medicine is sometimes also used for patients who do. Therefore . . . just so you don’t have any gossip swirling around your town, go and buy that medicine somewhere else.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good idea.”

  Before going in for the shot, I went back to my house to rest. Not only was I sapped of energy, but I also had to mentally psyche myself up for what was looking like a large injection.

  While taking my temperature (I was also battling a terrible fever), I dropped my thermometer on the floor, emitting a mercury spill upon impact. This sent me into a small panic until I realized I was already getting a healthy dose of mercury in the tuna I bought there, which probably wasn’t dolphin safe in the first place. I cleaned up the Hg the best I could and returned to the doctor’s office.

  When I arrived, word had already spread that the gringo was going to receive a shot. As three doctors and several nurses crowded into a room, I lay on a cot, pale-faced and drenched in sweat. There was no translation in my dictionary for “vasovagal.”

  Into the room came the beautiful young doctor from the week before.

  “You don’t look too good,” she said, smiling.

  “I don’t do well with injections,” I said.

  A few of the nurses turned around; they all asked what I was talking about.

  “You know,” I said. “I get dizzy when I receive injections. I lose color in my face.” (This last sentence almost certainly didn’t translate the way that I’d hoped.)

  “That’s weird.”

  “You’ve never seen anybody who didn’t do well with injections?” I said.

  “Tons of ladies come in here from the campo and they’re just fine,” they all said.

  “Well,” I said, “this is something that happens with gringos.”

  “Aha,” they all said, nodding to one another like they’d finally gotten to the bottom of this mystery.

  The young doctor leaned over to my left arm to administer the shot.

  Before she pricked me, I said, “You guys use brand-new needles, right? Totally clean and everything?” By now even my limbs had lost all color and I could barely keep my eyes open. My heart was pounding in my ears and I felt like I was going to faint.

  “Oh yes,” they all said. The doctor showed me the package that had contained the needle.

  After a few minutes of the hot doctor slowly injecting me, she uttered that she’d “lost the vein” because I was “too nervous.” She said maybe someone else should do it.

  Another nurse took over and the medicine was finally injected. Some color returned to my arms and hands. I got a free Band-Aid. I staggered out and went home. For the next couple of days, I continued to live in seclusion in my bedroom, only telling people that I “wasn’t feeling great.”

  I SPENT THE REST OF that week not working—or even leaving the house—and secretly bringing pots of stove-heated water from the kitchen outside and up to my room for the scrotum soakings. Graciela spotted me carrying the water once or twice and looked at me suspiciously, but never asked for details.

  Three days later, I went to Loja for the nut ultrasound. With the lightning bolts of pain still striking out from my testicles and prostate, it was one of the longest three-hour bus rides of my life.

  This time, as I lay on an exam table with my shorts pulled down below my thighs, I actually began laughing. Even as the pain continued with me lying there, I laughed maniacally at what I’d gone through. The doctor covered my scrotum with the same clear gel that normally gets smeared onto pregnant bellies. I held a towel in place to keep my penis out of the way of the ultrasound wand.

  The first thing the doctor did on the computer was derive all my testicles’ statistics, including mass, density, circumference, diameter, and volume. During the course of the ultrasound, the doctor took several sonogram portraits of my testicular topography. A few of them looked like black-and-white Doppler shots you might see on the Weather Channel—a Category Four storm brewing somewhere between Bermuda and Nassau. After the exam, he printed out the results—the images and nut stats—on a giant sheet of x-ray paper. I’m not much of a collector, but I quickly decided it was by far my best travel souvenir.

  It turned out that some pesky jungle bacteria had worked its way through my man plumbing and lodged in the spermatic cord. In the sonogram I could actually see the bacteria clogging up the thin cord attaching my left testicle to the rest of my body. Just the picture of that replaces all adequate descriptions I could give for the pain originating in this part of my body. The doctor said the infection was small enough that instead of surgery, I could continue blasting it with antibiotics like Cipro, which I began taking every day. Beyond that, he said, there was nothing to be alarmed about.

  I left Loja while the sun was setting. By the time we got close to Zumbi, it was dark out and I could see the lights from town as we wound down the road. The bus was packed; I was crammed in a window seat, with my face nearly squished against the glass, clutching the x-ray paper in my hand. The combination of the lights of Zumbi shining on the other side of the river and the pictures of my balls in the manila envelope seemed to highlight my loneliness. Tired and pissed off, I felt a tear roll down my cheek. Aha, my first Peace Corps tear, I thought. There in the bus—manila envelope, lights of Zumbi, clenched prostate, throbbing balls—I felt the tear crawl down my face nice and slow. I let it hang there as I looked out the window into the night. And then I wiped it away and said to myself—actually said it aloud—“Stop being a pussy.”

  In the week that followed, the pain receded. The Peace Corps doctor said in addition to the spermatic cord infection, it might have also developed into a prostatitis, which explained the sphincter-clenching agony that resulted when the lightning bolts of pain seemed to originate not just from my testicles, but also from the deepest recesses of my man plumbing.

  The diagnosis came toward the end of an eight-week period in which I was dangerously depressed.

  CHAPTER 26

  While the pain continued and I was in Zumbi alone with no work to do, I would lie in bed and become infuriated with everything around me. I hated Ecuador—this disgusting, pitiful country that had put me in so much pain. I hated it for what it had done to me in such a short time. It had nearly crushed me. Everything from my old site boiled up and ruined me inside. When I’d first shared the story with friends, an abduction at
tempt in the desert wastelands had seemed thrilling. But now the hideous nature of it all got to me. It gave me nightmares and crept up on me while I was awake and left me cursing the assholes I’d met there who treated my well-being as carelessly as they treated everything else in their pathetic lives.

  Those motherfuckers, I would think, as I clenched my teeth and my fists. I fantasized about someday telling those people what I really thought of them after I’d stayed quiet like an abused child, bottling it up day after day because I was scared of the consequences. I pictured going to La Segua on my last day in the country and doing something fantastically violent to each and every one of them.

  Now, months after leaving that place, I would receive vaguely threatening phone calls on a weekly basis from the coastal scumbags. I thought about changing my number, but there was something exciting and menacing about answering the calls and holding my palm over the receiver as Juan’s friends and relatives shouted obscenities and also truisms like “I know you’re there.”

  Some of the numbers I resaved in my phone as “xxx” instead of a name so I’d know not to answer it anymore. Sometimes they called rapid fire, twenty times in a minute, as I struggled to press end as quickly as they came in. Or they’d call from a number I had made the mistake of deleting, so I’d pick up and say hello in my gringo accent only to hear “Aha, motherfucker! We know it’s you. Motherfucking son of a bitch!” on the other end. I used to stay on the line listening in silence to the threats with the same arousal kids get by ringing a doorbell and hiding in the bushes to observe the neighbor yell in anger from his porch. With my silence, I tried to drag the calls on as long as possible. I wanted to burn away the precious minutes they were always so scant on that they begged to borrow my phone. Take that!