20 December

A case for keeping your WhatsApp contacts

Incoming Call: AJ Hostel Nicaragua. I thought it might be an accident. Then I remembered a similar call a couple years earlier. I was in Paris and he was in Paris. Except I was in Paris with my then almost girlfriend at her parent’s posh apartment in the 6th, and he was in Paris with a buddy of his from college with no place to stay. I let it ring a couple times. I thought he might be in a similar situation– in New York and needing a place to stay. I hadn’t seen him in 5 years. I hadn’t heard from him in 4. I picked up the phone.

“Hey”

“Hey”

“It’s AJ”

“I know”

“From Nicaragua”

“Yeah”

“Cool… so like what’s up? Where are you right now?”

AJ and I met in Nicaragua. I was 20. AJ was 17. I was working at a hostel, and he was on his first trip far from home. I was mostly washing sheets and opening beers— “volunteering” to earn my keep. The agreement was work in exchange for room and board but there was rarely any food in the fridge and on weekends my bunk would be given to a higher bidder.

AJ was looking for a similar gig. He liked the town, and he had a school girl crush on me, so he decided he’d stay. I think he’d run out of money, or maybe he liked the idea of the barter economy. He offered to bartend, but he was better suited for painting. There was a blank wall in the courtyard, and it was begging for Cubist toucans or something whimsical.

I liked AJ for many reasons. The first being that he looked funny. He looked so American in that gangly awkward way that tall boys look before they grow into their height. The second being that he experienced a can’t be killed rubber band reality that he was similar to that of a cartoon character.

He had a youngest cousin quality about him. A persistent if sometimes annoying underdog spirit and a urge to be liked by the big kids. The French boys liked him because they suggested he do horrible things, and he was glad to do them. Like drink a terrible cocktail of rum, flat coke and other drugs and hang helmetless off the back of the motorcycle piled high with everyone else’s backpacks. The others referred to him as my little brother because I was American and he was American, and, for some reason, I was the only one who winced when he got hurt.

In the time that I knew him (8 days) he had gotten into a motorcycle accident, been eaten alive by mosquitos while on a particularly aggressive mushroom trip, and had been lured into a dark corner where he was beat up and mugged while trying to buy weed. I think they even broke his glasses. Or maybe it just feels like they should have. Each time he underwent extreme bodily harm, he bounced right back. He was like a Looney Tune, peeled off the pavement, covered in tire marks and suffering the effects of a fallen anvil. He was always fine. Acts of violence be damned, within a couple hours AJ was ready for another adventure.

The mural was never finished due to the inhospitable climate– the unshaded courtyard and unbearable humidity, that it made it impossible to do anything other than drink and do psychedelics– and the frequency with which AJ was getting injured. Plus, we were all leaving for Ometepe. “We” being myself and the guy I was seeing from the hostel around the corner. We’d been sleeping on the same twin cot with dirty sheets. We’d been waking up together in the back room of a hostel bar. We’d been holding hands and sitting in the same hammock and not talking about it. We decided we’d leave for the island along with a couple stragglers from the friend group we’d formed on the basis of common interest– dancing, party drugs and long walks on the beach.

AJ left the hostel with the mural undone and his debts unpaid. We all rented motorcycles. AJ rented a scooter with treadless tires. He’d wiped out within the hour. We’d gone up into the hills to see the waterfall, but it was summer and everything was dry. We went back to the beach to have a beer. AJ was covered in blood, but the rest of us took nice photos by the water.

“I’m in New York… and I’m writing. What about you?”

“Oh I just graduated. I should go to grad school, but I don’t really want to. I’d rather learn about the world. I’m about to go to Congo Brazzaville for a year”

Nicaragua popped his travel cherry and ever since then AJ had been on a tear to discover the world. Every school holiday, I’d seen something on his social media that pointed towards real travel. Last I saw, he was on a white boy trip to Afghanistan. He’d gone to discover what more there was beyond what the West had wanted him to see. Beyond the propaganda force-fed to him through the screen. He had gone from being a sympathizer to an apologist. By the end of his short stay he had been radicalized in the way of posting Pro-Taliban content to his main grid.

“Congo. That’s intense. What are you going to do there?”

“I don’t know. Something real. Something with my hands… Hey, what do you think of Claudia Sheinbaum?”

“I don’t have a definitive answer, but I know some people aren’t a huge fan because of the party she represents”

“Establishment?”

“No, populist”

“Yeah. I was just in Mexico and I went with some anarchist girls to the mountains. They were talking about her”

“Cool”

“Cool… anyway, good talking to you”

“You too”

“What do you write about?”

“Oh… everything kind of”

“Cool”