I was the meat in a Guatemalan sandwich on the packed chicken bus, in one seat, one small bench like “seat”. Back sweating like a fat kid eating cheese, shoulder to shoulder, flying around cliffed out corners, closing my eyes to get rid of the terrible hot sense of clausterphobia and thinking of happy places, like untouched powder fields, on mountains, in lakes, whatever. I now know how to turn off my brain, it’s actually not to hard if you have to. Sometimes it does it when I don’t have to.
We had one bus change in Chimal and we sat there for about twenty minutes. Buses would fly in and the door guys would see us gringos and yell, “Xela Xela Xela”, which sounds like, “Shayla Shayla Shayla!” or “Antigua Antigua!” because those are basically the only two places in Guatemala that gringos go, and when they would find out we were goint to Comalapa they wore this facial expression that was either respect, befuddlement or mockery, sometimes all three at the same time.
Pedro, me compadre, ran across the street to get a couple cups of coffe and as soon as he got back the bus we were looking for rolled up, so I took a swig, burnt my tongue, set it down on the trash strewn street and began to run after the bus, which barely slowed to a sprinting speed.
We jumped on the two vertical ladders on the back of the bus, chocking on black smoke and thin air, huge bags on our back and opened the back door to the bus with one hand, the other hand the only thing keeping us from becming gringo roadkill, or some sort of pseudo human-asphalt-burnt-pancake.
So there I was, in the very back of this cluster-packed chicken bus, standing in the isle, back against the hopefully sturdy locked back door, three people in the seat to my right and three in the one to the left, completely squashed and surrounded by people and sweating and laughing at the general absurdity of the situation, which is completely an everyday sort of melt-into-the-back-of-your-mind kind of thing for the locals. Not this gringo.
Then the dude to my left needed to get out. I told my buddy to hold my bag, opened the back door, the bus still flying, skirted out the door and onto the ladder on the back of the bus, one hand on the ladder, the other holding the door open for the Guatemalan getting off, pavement blurring beneath my soles barely visible in my lower peripherals and really not the thing I was trying to acknowledge. The guy was impressed and said “Woa,” and jumped off the moving bus and I jumped back in and shut the door.
Dat-dada-da, dat-dada.
P.S. on the way to Xela nobody wanted to sit next to the gringos
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