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 \u201cDreamlover\u201d and a singer, Mariah Carey, who I\u2019d never heard of. I had been waiting for Casey Kasem\u2019s Saturday Top 40 Countdown all morning, the only place I\u2019d found American music in the Western Guatemalan city of Quetzaltenango, most often referred to as Xela, a word originating from the K\u2019iche\u2019 Mayan xelaju, or \u201cunder ten mountains.\u201d 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\u2019iche\u2019 Mayans, which chronicled K\u2019iche\u2019 traditions in a written form after the threatening arrival of the Spanish and the diseases they\u2019d brought with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d 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 \u201chomestay\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s social care projects. I\u2019d begun conjugating Spanish verbs in two different tenses, and I could order a coffee and a pastry in both Spanish and local K\u2019iche\u2019. I\u2019d met a German named Est\u00e9ban, whose long bangs and perfect smile turned my green eyes tender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And if all that wasn\u2019t enough, La Canicula had emerged\u2014a Latin phrase for \u201clittle dog,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My healing body compelled me to run that day; my healing soul didn\u2019t 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\u2019d sparked fire, the tamp of snare drums and kick drums from Mariah\u2019s 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<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I was ecstatic in English, frolicking and floating just like the song, yet knowing nothing of Mariah\u2019s 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 Ba\u00fal fronted rocky sister Almolonga or the giant erupting Volc\u00e1n Santiguito. Mariah was 24, and I was 21\u2014the semester would start in a few weeks, but I felt a murmur beneath my bones that I wasn\u2019t done yet. When I heard, \u201cTo take me away, babe,\u201d 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\u2019d happily keep running under these ten mountains until he did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along the high roll of the northern Peruvian desert to the ocean\u2014somewhere near Chiclayo\u2014I\u2019d been left at a rest stop bathroom with holes for toilets and concrete shoe indentations so a person would know where to squat. I\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d 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\u2019d never told Est\u00e9ban how I felt, but I admitted it to myself in my journal, musing about his \u201cangular beauty\u201d or how his \u201cbangs caressed his forehead the way I\u2019d like to do.\u201d I was still innocent, yes, but he\u2019d cracked the limestone shell in which I\u2019d so assiduously buried myself. I\u2019d 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\u2014I remember it uniquely each time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Jos\u00e9, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t felt before. I rested back-to-back and butt-to-butt\u2014my head against the window, his leaning into the aisle\u2014with a thick Mayan farmer on our departure from Lake Atitl\u00e1n. And all the while, \u201cDreamlover\u201d kept diddling through my head in a continuous loop. What might I do with all this stored-up passion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soon I\u2019d buy a thick yellow Walkman from an American bus mate out of cash in a San Jos\u00e9 bus station. In a mall in Panama City, before flying off to Cartagena, I\u2019d find Mariah\u2019s Music Box<\/em> cassette with its opening \u201cDreamlover\u201d track. It\u2019s as if I\u2019d made a promise to myself, to the rising Salvadoran pupusa dough, to see and taste and hear how my potential might play out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n South America is large. The lull and length between destinations is formidable. In town I\u2019d spend hours in line behind rowdy Cale\u00f1os in Cali or quiet indigenous Lime\u00f1os in downtown Lima, withdrawing American dollars on my credit card, the only way in which I could access money. Then I\u2019d 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? <\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s where Mariah would make her second act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I discovered on a long bus trip to Bogota that Music Box<\/em> was a softer album than I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While appreciating the traveling experience, I was relatively broke and relied on $5 hotel rooms and street food to get by. I didn\u2019t 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, \u201cel st\u00fapido\u201d is a dirty phrase.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I am lost<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I am low<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I hear you Mariah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You take me through<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The loneliness and emptiness<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And I feel alright<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Cause you\u2019re by my side<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Through it all<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The soft guitar and nostalgic tinkling of a music box. My direct address to her, thanking her \u2014the \u201cyou\u201d in the previous \u201cMusic Box\u201d lyric\u2014for accompanying me on the long bus rides amidst the loneliness. The truth is that I\u2019d been lonely for years. The soundtrack of my early adolescence: paternal barks and motherly wails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the yearning. The album is built on and for longing. For much of the trip I sustained myself on crushes: Dav\u00edd 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 Lime\u00f1o whispering into my ear, his early 90s hair feathering my face. An itch turned eagerness turned ardor. Mariah\u2019s words are from me to them, the \u201cyou\u201d 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\u2019s words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s so hard<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To believe<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t have you right beside me<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As I long to touch you<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But you’re out of my reach <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, the \u201cyou\u201d became me, Mariah singing as if she\u2019d penned the album for this specific trip, her advice becoming inspirational: It\u2019s a long road. You can find love. You don\u2019t have to be afraid of what you are. In time you\u2019ll find the way. A hero lies in you<\/em>. 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 \u201cshy, indigenous youth, about my age but so perfectly thick, talking tender to me, passionate eyes and soft voice.\u201d To myself: \u201cThe problem is that I cannot smile at all, and a smile says so much.\u201d My journals memorialize and help me to remember. I partly romanticized, sometimes catastrophized. I traced anticipation and loneliness with equal fervor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t you ever be lonely<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s alright, it\u2019s alright<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n By the end of the trip, I\u2019d found my dreamlover, never suspecting that I\u2019d imagined him into being. I\u2019d acknowledged my own sexual attraction, tracing potent public intimacies\u2014on buses, in taxi cabs, whispered outside a bathroom into my ear\u2014as conduits of burgeoning desire. I was a simmering volcano by the time I\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s beauty and the people in it. Or that someone at least sold it for a few bucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Girman<\/em><\/strong> is an American author, academic, and immigration attorney. He is the author of several books, and his recent creative work has appeared in <\/em>Hobart, <\/em>Eclectica Magazine, <\/em>Bull, <\/em>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\u2019s summer youth creative writing camp. He is currently raising his nephew and his two cats. You can find more of his work at <\/em>chrisgirman.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cDreamlover\u201d and a singer, Mariah Carey, who I\u2019d never heard of. I had been waiting for Casey Kasem\u2019s … <\/p>\n
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