A Tainted Final Day in San Pedro

Update on last entry: I saw the hippies smoking a joint on the terrace. The archetype is complete.

Anyway, our last day in San Pedro started pleasantly enough...we rented a double kayak and went out on Lake Atitlan, getting a closer view of the volcanoes and paddling around the blue waters.

After kayaking we got lunch. On our way back to the hotel, we spotted this adorable puppy. It wasn´t just adorable in the way that all puppies are innately cute because they´re puppies...it was the cutest goddamn thing I´ve ever seen in person, and you could tell just by looking at it it had a heart of pure gold, and had nothing but pure LOVE.

This fact makes the rest of this story all-the harder to tell. A little boy, maybe the puppy´s owner, scooped it up in his arms. The puppy, not wanting to be picked up by this particular boy, struggled to escape (it probably had a bad experience with him in the past, but who knows.) So instead of bending over and letting the precious creature fall softly to the ground, he just let it drop.

If he were standing over grass, it probably would´ve been fine, but he happened to be hovering right over the curb of the street. The puppy landed very awkwardly, sort of half on the curb and half on the street, and right away you could tell something awful had happened. Immediately it tried to run away from the boy, but it was limping and stumbling, trying to walk without its front-left leg, maintaining a high-pitched whimper that could´ve broken Adolf Hitler´s heart.

Now, I don´t really blame the boy for dropping the dog, breaking its leg, and altering the course of its life forever (its leg would never properly heal, and would make this dog lame forever anever.) Any little boy could´ve dropped a dog by accident. What deeply disturbed me was the fact that after dropping the dog, and clearly causing it a severe and life-altering leg injury, was that the kid couldn´t have given less of a shit about it. In fact, he continued dancing around impishly, chasing the dog and watching it stumbling and squealing in pain, tossing bread crumbs at it.

He would´ve acted with more regret if he´d spilled his Coca-Cola, and this seemingly sociopathic non-reaction filled me with such hate and rage I wanted to break the little 7 year-old boy´s legs. I do not think this logically makes me a bad person. Guatemalan or not, it seems to me that any normal seven-year old with any semblance of a conscience would have felt absolutely terrible about dropping this impossibly adorable puppy-dog on the hard curb. The boy was obviously forged by the hammer of lucifer and was sent to the surface of the earth to crush and destroy all things adorable, decent and reasonable. That much became clear.

I decided I wanted a beer after witnessing this atrocity, which Hannah and I were helpless to avert but could only comfort the puppy with a head-rub. You could tell it still trusted humans, thank God, just not this bastard-child, and it still had all the same love in its heart. In any case, one little shop didn´t have beer, so we were directed to a ´yellow house´ up the street. On the front stoop a drunk was collapsed, and more impish children were tossing bread crumbs in his hair and giggling while they scurried away. The man was so completely covered in flies he may as well have been a pile of horse shit (in fact, its worth mentioning that we encountered a pile of horse shit on our way to rent kayaks, and there were significantly fewer flies attracted to it than were surrounding the man.) I wouldn´t have been surprised to discover that he was dead.

We stepped over him and into the house. On a bench against the wall were two filthy homeless drunks slunched over themselves. The middle of the room had a wooden counter, another drunk man leaning against it, with a fridge and bed behind it. The drunk at the counter informed us that he ¨knew the owner,¨ and so he started screaming his name for us so we could buy beer. He screamed it six or seven times before the owner, also buck-ass wasted, came shuffling in and asked us what we wanted. As I negotiated with him for my beer, the drunk counter-man reassured us that the drunks in the corner were loco, indicated by a twirling motion of his finger around his temples. It reassured us none. I paid for my beer and we left the piss-stained walls of the yellow house.

For the homeless drunks, the dank place must have been peaceful compared to the outside (just look at the guy collapsed on the stoop, being taunted by children.) It was a safe place to be drunk and awful, a piss-soaked sanctuary where the dregs can be miserable in peace and it almost seemed acceptable to sell the last crust of your soul to liter-sized bottles of Gallo beer.

So in that 10-minute period, we´d witnessed two of the most stereotypically depressing things in existence--puppy abuse and alcoholic hopelessness.

¡GO AMERICA!


On a lighter note, Antigua is a completely awesome little city.