My hungry sneakers ribboned over pavement and hopped curbs, catapulting off thick stone labyrinths as if leaping tectonic plates, my toes pressed and then ascending to synthesized organ swells off my radio headset from a song called “Dreamlover” and a singer, Mariah Carey, who I’d never heard of. I had been waiting for Casey Kasem’s Saturday Top 40 Countdown all morning, the only place I’d found American music in the Western Guatemalan city of Quetzaltenango, most often referred to as Xela, a word originating from the K’iche’ Mayan xelaju, or “under ten mountains.” I jogged in yellow sweatpants and a turquoise beanie. I was there in 1993 for an eight-week Spanish immersion course at the Pop Wuj language school, named after the sacred text of the K’iche’ Mayans, which chronicled K’iche’ traditions in a written form after the threatening arrival of the Spanish and the diseases they’d brought with them.
I’d been sick my first few weeks, a sandwich of sinus and respiratory troubles from the damp cold and 7,500-foot elevation. I was on a “homestay” in a painted green cinderblock house with no insulation. A space heater belched warnings from my study desk below the window in my freezing bedroom. Hot water dribbled from the bathroom showerhead. I was sick within a few days.
In time, my sinus pressure decreased and the rasp in my lungs subsided. My host family became my friends, including their two young boys, Hans and Billi. I dug latrines and folded tamales into corn husks for a nearby orphanage, two of Pop Wuj’s social care projects. I’d begun conjugating Spanish verbs in two different tenses, and I could order a coffee and a pastry in both Spanish and local K’iche’. I’d met a German named Estéban, whose long bangs and perfect smile turned my green eyes tender.
And if all that wasn’t enough, La Canicula had emerged—a Latin phrase for “little dog,” where the dog star Sirius raises alongside the sun and ushers in warm and dry weather. My steps lightened along with the air, and my tongue continued to loosen, joking in Spanish with Hans and Billi as if I were a part of the family, suspending six-year-old Billi over my shoulders on our march to his school play.
My healing body compelled me to run that day; my healing soul didn’t care where. The glossed yellow sun beaded off buildings, the evangelical church white as bone, Celia-the tortilla-maker unclasping her hands as if they’d sparked fire, the tamp of snare drums and kick drums from Mariah’s song ricochetting me through crooked alleys stuffed with motorbikes. I could lick the world. To my right, the Santa Maria Volcano, my head rotating as if being summoned, the periphery now folded into a single vision, a request: Dreamlover come rescue me/Take me up, take me down/Take me anywhere you want to baby, now.
I was ecstatic in English, frolicking and floating just like the song, yet knowing nothing of Mariah’s powerful vocal range. Who was this woman, and why did she make me feel so good? Mariah, too, sounded euphoric and effortless, a toned-down use of her upper registers so back vocals layered like the landscape beyond Xela, where the thrusty Cerro Baúl fronted rocky sister Almolonga or the giant erupting Volcán Santiguito. Mariah was 24, and I was 21—the semester would start in a few weeks, but I felt a murmur beneath my bones that I wasn’t done yet. When I heard, “To take me away, babe,” I knew Mariah was talking about me and the adventure I was on. That dreamlover, well, I hoped he might make an appearance someday, but I’d happily keep running under these ten mountains until he did.
* * *
Along the high roll of the northern Peruvian desert to the ocean—somewhere near Chiclayo—I’d been left at a rest stop bathroom with holes for toilets and concrete shoe indentations so a person would know where to squat. I’d vomited out the bus window and held my diarrhea until we stopped. The bald and stout bus driver waited as long as he could before depositing my backpack on the other side of the swinging stall door and getting on south to Trujillo, my chunky yellow Walkman still hanging off the front pocket of my bus seat.
I’d been learning about the vicissitudes of travel ever since my university froze my scholarship and my dad reluctantly agreed to keep paying his $333 monthly room & board contribution for me to stay in Guatemala for a few more months. I’d never told Estéban how I felt, but I admitted it to myself in my journal, musing about his “angular beauty” or how his “bangs caressed his forehead the way I’d like to do.” I was still innocent, yes, but he’d cracked the limestone shell in which I’d so assiduously buried myself. I’d honor him by reversing his route south through Central America and onward to Peru, not sure where I might travel next. My host parents marched with me to the bus station that final foggy morning in Xela, the mother Chiqui pressing hot tortillas and chocolate cake into my side. I offered her two scarfs and colorful tablecloth; I handed her husband Luis a plastic bag with my two favorite shirts inside and my radio headset. A smile spung from his lips in a thousand different ways—I remember it uniquely each time.
A border guard in El Salvador tossed my passport on the ground. An improbable Honduran hike led me and a Swiss septuagenarian toward the ruins of Copan. In San José, I listened to a girl who was probably a boy tell me about her faux life in Egypt as a princess. I left my room door unlocked one night in Tegucigalpa so a little girl would have somewhere to sleep. The world and its citizenry were fractured and frail and lush and strange and held more than I could fathom.
I saw much of Central America through the bus window: the thick pine trees out of Guatemala to the Salvadoran plateau, descending further through the Nicaraguan lowlands and a winding ascent through the cloudy Costa Rican rainforest. High rise condominiums guarded the sea in Panama City. Without my radio headset, I read books instead. Something else was beginning to happen on those bus rides. Men sandwiched their thighs next to mine, not in a competition for masculine supremacy and space but an inclination for comfort. Thick upper arms landed against mine, a physical intimacy I hadn’t felt before. I rested back-to-back and butt-to-butt—my head against the window, his leaning into the aisle—with a thick Mayan farmer on our departure from Lake Atitlán. And all the while, “Dreamlover” kept diddling through my head in a continuous loop. What might I do with all this stored-up passion?
Soon I’d buy a thick yellow Walkman from an American bus mate out of cash in a San José bus station. In a mall in Panama City, before flying off to Cartagena, I’d find Mariah’s Music Box cassette with its opening “Dreamlover” track. It’s as if I’d made a promise to myself, to the rising Salvadoran pupusa dough, to see and taste and hear how my potential might play out.
South America is large. The lull and length between destinations is formidable. In town I’d spend hours in line behind rowdy Caleños in Cali or quiet indigenous Limeños in downtown Lima, withdrawing American dollars on my credit card, the only way in which I could access money. Then I’d venture into the abyss of currency exchange houses, frantically computing numbers in my head and recounting my money at least three times. I was anxious and lonely and broke on a continent I knew nothing about. Had I made a mistake?
And that’s where Mariah would make her second act.
I discovered on a long bus trip to Bogota that Music Box was a softer album than I’d expected, perfect for overnight bus rides, and curated by a woman who had gone through much as an adolescent and found her way out of it with music.
While appreciating the traveling experience, I was relatively broke and relied on $5 hotel rooms and street food to get by. I didn’t know yet about hostels and the travelers who relied on them. I was often sick and lost in a language and a culture I was just learning how to navigate: a bus will leave without you, expect to share a table in fast-food restaurants, avoid wearing shorts, “el stúpido” is a dirty phrase.
When I am lost
When I am low
I hear you Mariah.
You take me through
The loneliness and emptiness
And I feel alright
‘Cause you’re by my side
Through it all
The soft guitar and nostalgic tinkling of a music box. My direct address to her, thanking her —the “you” in the previous “Music Box” lyric—for accompanying me on the long bus rides amidst the loneliness. The truth is that I’d been lonely for years. The soundtrack of my early adolescence: paternal barks and motherly wails.
And then the yearning. The album is built on and for longing. For much of the trip I sustained myself on crushes: Davíd on horseback swigging a bottle of Panamanian rum; in Arequipa, the dark and brawny Peruvian whose brown eyes leapt through me; in Lima, outside the club bathroom, a muscular and drunk Limeño whispering into my ear, his early 90s hair feathering my face. An itch turned eagerness turned ardor. Mariah’s words are from me to them, the “you” at each time a specific man, but now remembered as a collection, an assemblage of men turned placeholders for the affection I desired. From Iquique to Santiago, Florianopolis to Rio De Janeiro, I sang to them in Mariah’s words:
It’s so hard
To believe
I don’t have you right beside me
As I long to touch you
But you’re out of my reach
Eventually, the “you” became me, Mariah singing as if she’d penned the album for this specific trip, her advice becoming inspirational: It’s a long road. You can find love. You don’t have to be afraid of what you are. In time you’ll find the way. A hero lies in you. I sat on the bus writing, remembering . . . little indigenous girls in pigtails with nowhere to sleep. At the Ejercicio motel in Cochabomba, I left the light on for the “shy, indigenous youth, about my age but so perfectly thick, talking tender to me, passionate eyes and soft voice.” To myself: “The problem is that I cannot smile at all, and a smile says so much.” My journals memorialize and help me to remember. I partly romanticized, sometimes catastrophized. I traced anticipation and loneliness with equal fervor.
I returned to the album as if it were my favorite stuffed bear, a talisman upon which my anxiety and emotion might settle. It felt like Mariah had curated the experience especially for me:
Don’t you ever be lonely
It’s alright, it’s alright
By the end of the trip, I’d found my dreamlover, never suspecting that I’d imagined him into being. I’d acknowledged my own sexual attraction, tracing potent public intimacies—on buses, in taxi cabs, whispered outside a bathroom into my ear—as conduits of burgeoning desire. I was a simmering volcano by the time I’d left Guatemala, my lusty ambitions overlaid with larger expectations of justice: for the children, for the indigenous of the land, for the tired mothers rolling tamales, for the men no one knew loved other men.
My yellow Walkman reappeared at the bus station south of Chiclayo. The Mariah cassette was gone. I bought a bootlegged copy a week later in Arequipa. As for the original, I hope it became, as it did for me, a soundtrack to all the world’s beauty and the people in it. Or that someone at least sold it for a few bucks.
Chris Girman is an American author, academic, and immigration attorney. He is the author of several books, and his recent creative work has appeared in Hobart, Eclectica Magazine, Bull, Jet Fuel Review, and other venues. He is an associate professor of English at Point Park University, which includes his role as director of the university’s summer youth creative writing camp. He is currently raising his nephew and his two cats. You can find more of his work at chrisgirman.com