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Marooned in the Desert

I first met Allen on the steps of a whorehouse bar in Costa Rica called the “Blue Marlin”. Like so many North American sexual refuges, Allen had gone to Costa Rica fishing for a place where even fat gringos would be loved, fucked and adored.

But of course, there is no Heaven on earth. The love and the party lasted only as long as his money. But it was one Hell of a run and even imitation love was better than none, especially in large quantities. But about a year after Allen arrived in Costa Rica he spent his last dime on either a drink, a whore or cocaine.

But he stubbornly refused to return to the brutal reality of hard work and no sex in America. So he took his deep dark knowledge of the gutter and traded it with the fresh fish who stumbled into the Blue Marlin on their first “fishing expedition”. That was about the time I stumbled into him.

Allen had become the unofficial “Mayor of Gringo Gulch” – a several block strip of bars, dance clubs, casinos, whorehouses and heart attack producing restaurants. Allen was the mayor not just for the powers that be – the casino and saloon owners – but for the street beggars, the whores, the hustlers, the Johns, and the old men with dead peckers who could only drink and whine.

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Allen out of control on the mechanical bull.jpg

Mayor treated like dignitary by bar mgr..jpg

But I digress. To tell the story of Allen’s adventures and misadventures in Costa Rica would be a massive project, which I will some day under take.

But for now, my point is that despite every effort to hang on, Allen reluctantly succumbed to “life” in America. When I caught up with him recently he was living in an upscale neighborhood North of Phoenix and eking out a living flipping burgers. He was a long way from partying in the gulch and on the beaches. But to me he was still “the Mayor”, just as X Presidents are still addressed as “Mr. President”.

It was always his outlook and good humor that I enjoyed most and that was the same anywhere. We headed out into the desert and camped by lake Jackson in the middle of nowhere and howled at the moon and reminisced about the obscenely good times in Costa Rica.

Coming some day – a link to all the insanity and crazy wild life in Costa Rica.

But for now, click here, to view the “Mayor’s Rules for Living“.

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Next Stop – Panama Jimmy and the Desert Vortex

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 am and is filed under Arizona, Costa Rica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.