I Lied

Yeah, I said I was going to spare you for a few days, but I changed my mind. Sue me. And I feel like writing some more about Tela. I know that Tela doesn’t, strictly speaking, have a whole hell of a lot to do with ADD, but, what the hell, as Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein once said, it’s my party, and I’ll fry if I want to. I also know what I’m writing about has nothing to do with frying anything, either. But, hey, as I said, this is my party. And, as I also said, sue me.

Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein

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Some random & variegated thoughts about living in Tela, Atlántida, Honduras, C.A.

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I once came home after a night out drinking beer with friends, stopped in the bathroom to tap a kidney, and was greeted by what I thought was a rat in the toilet. When I got a better look, it turned out it was a bat. Flailing, flopping, struggling fruitlessly, it looked like it was in pretty bad shape. So I went to the closet next to the bathroom, in which we kept tools and random junk, grabbed a ceiling fan blade, scooped the bat out, and laid it outside on the grass. I leaned in to see how it was doing, and it hissed at me. So I thought it was doing all right, and I left it. The next morning it was gone. So, either it was all right and flew off, or something came by and ate it. Either way, I like to think I did my part. I later went on to patent the Bat Extricator 4000™.

The Bat Extricator 4000: It Might Look Like an Old Ceiling Fan Blade, But It Does So Much More!®

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Once a month, we had to get our passports stamped at the migración office in town. It was an upstairs office on a side street. I don’t think it was over the coffin shop, but I think it was on the same street. Anyway, the immigration guy must have worked out some kind of deal with the mayor, because I think he lived there. More than once I showed up when the office, went in, and had to knock on the guy’s private room door to wake him so he could stamp my passport.

Well, one afternoon, another teacher and I were reading in the front room in the teacher house, when another teacher came in. He had an odd, bewildered look on his face, like he’d seen something, and was still trying to work out what it was. We asked him what was going on, and he told us he’d been to get his passport stamped, and then said, “I’ve been to a lot of government offices in a lot of countries, but this is the first time I ever went into one on official business, and been served by a guy in his underwear!”

And it wasn’t until a long time later, years later, that I was telling somebody about this, and something I’d never thought of before popped into my head, and I said, “You know, now that I think of it, that guy stamped my passport more than once while he was in his underwear, but I never thought anything of it.” I guess it was just so typically Teleño that it never even registered. I mean, hey, if you wake up a guy from his nap to stamp your passport, why wouldn’t he be in his underwear?

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One time I was riding the train, and a drunk guy fell right out of the mail car, the car right ahead of ours. A friend was riding with me, and I said, “Shit, did you see that guy fall off the train?” he didn’t believe me, but we were going slowly, since we were coming to a stop, so I just pointed out the door as we went by, and there he was, lying in the weeds on his back, looking dazed. When the train stopped, we jumped off and ran to the back to see what was going on, and the conductor and another guy who was riding the train were helping the drunk guy up onto the back platform. And he went up the stairs, and kept right on going across the platform and started down the stairs to the other side. The conductor grabbed him and steered him into the last car, and that’s the last we saw of him, since we weren’t going any farther.

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One time I accidentally boiled a rat to death. I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen before bed, as I always did, since that’s where the jug of clean water was, and something ran over my foot. I jumped, and I saw a rat run under the refrigerator, which, for some reason, sat on a wooden pallet. The pallet had beams along each edge, so the only way in was between the slats on the top. I knew the rat wasn’t going to come out willingly, so I thought that if I boiled some water while I brushed my teeth, and then poured a little into the pallet, it would scare the rat, and it would come back out and I could shoo it out the door with a broom.

So I put a pot of water on, and by the time I was done brushing my teeth, it was boiling. I poured just a little under there, and nothing happened. So I poured a little more, and still nothing happened. I began to wonder if the rat had somehow snuck out, even though I’d been trying to keep an eye on the pallet, so I thought, what the hell, and poured the whole pot in. Still nothing happened, so I figured the rat must have indeed gotten out, and I gave up and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, the other teachers who lived in the house were milling around the refrigerator, which seemed to have somehow defrosted in the night. I though it would be wisest to just hang back and keep my mouth shut, so that’s what I did, as two of the others lifted the refrigerator off the pallet and lifted the pallet off the floor, revealing a stewed rat. While they were recoiling and swearing, I thought it best to be off, since I was taking a trip that day to El Salvador anyway. I never did tell them anything about the rat...

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I guess that’s about enough for today. Sweet dreams.