Return To Costa Rica And The End Of Hostel Management

January was half over and so was my holiday.  There were still fresh memories of Missouri red wine, snow-covered hills and holiday parties in my mind, but it was time to leave that and return to work in the sweltering 'winter' heat of Costa Rica.  I wondered how the owner, Jon, had taken our fight over the robbery and if there would be any repercussions.  He hadn't answered any of my emails.  While I was in the United States, I continued to check my Castle Tam Hostel work account to keep track of guests that were arriving and leaving.

One day before returning, I opened the work email up.  I typed in the shared password.  The email didn't open.  I tried again.  Again it didn't open.  I've been typing it in daily for the past year, so I didn't see any reason why I would forget it.  Still I checked my notebook where it was written.  I typed it in letter for letter, and still no success.  Dammit, Jon.  That sonofabitch had changed the password.  Rather than telling me to my face how he wanted me gone, he was simply going to squeeze me out of the hostel business...

I returned to Castle Tam in the late sunny morning.  January is high tourist season in Costa Rica, and I fully expected to find guests hanging outdoors on the porch or in the lobby.  To my surprise, the place was completely empty.  I walked through the garage bar and found it empty as well.  I called both Jon and Manual.  There was no answer.  I shouted their names.  Silence.  Not even a guest was around to see me.  The bright, tropical sun shined in through the glass door of the porch, but the eerie silence inside made the place feel lifeless. 

I was inside, so at least I knew Jon hadn't changed the locks yet.  I checked my room for any things I may have forgotten, then unlocked the secure office door behind the reception.  My other suitcase was already packed in there, and I had a few important documents in the safe.  The safe code I also had committed to memory.  Would he have changed it?

I spun the lock to the right and left and the small steel door opened quietly.  I grabbed my documents then stared inside the safe.  All our profits in large bills were taken from the reception cash register at the end of the day and guarded here in envelopes marked with the bills' denominations: twenties, fifties and hundreds for American dollars; ten thousands and twenty thousands for Costa Rica colones.  Once or twice a week, Jon would take the envelopes to deposit in his Costa Rica bank account.  He had not taken the money out yet this week.

For a moment, I stared inside the envelopes.  There was a security camera directly on me, but no one was around in the hostel.  Although it fit Jon's military style, I highly doubted he was hiding in a room watching me on video at that moment.  Normally he would be in the garage.  Besides I knew where the videos cables were connected and could disconnect them if I wanted to.

I was sitting there with at least five-hundred dollars in my hands.  I thought back to the past few months when Jon had stopped talking to me, his indifference to me being robbed and the following morning when he had raised a fist as if to hit me.  As if being robbed was my fault.

Before the hostel, we had hooked up with sexy European girls, happily terrorized other hostel guests and staff in Nicaragua and partied at Rocking J's Hostel epic birthday party.  During the hostel's beginning we had crafted a mad revenge plot on a scam artist who robbed us that eventually landed him in jail; changed the property from a creepy dump for transient, gringo whore-mongers into a proper, lively youth backpacker hostel; held live concerts for guests and planned for an eventual European sister hostel.  Through it all we had developed a private, sick politically-incorrect sense of humor (the worst of the political left and right) that no one else understood.

This video was from the good times.  What had gone wrong in the last 6 months?

The easy answer would be marijuana.  Jon came from a conservative family, and had been in the military until just before he left for Costa Rica so - to the best of my knowledge - at 26 years of age he had never smoked weed before we started traveling together.  Certainly he behaved as if he had never smoked; to this day he still can't roll a joint.  In the past year he had gone from gingerly inhaling small blunts we shared to hitting 3 or 4 bong loads everyday by himself.  I have no objection to marijuana (indeed, I support legalization), but this was far too much even for me.  He already had a guarded, structured military personality and this only grew into full-blown paranoia when he was high.

...But I'm lying to myself.  As with most men who think too highly of themselves, our greatest downfall is women.  It was a guest.

While Jon made sure guests were paying for their stay, I made sure they were enjoying their stay.  He has a great mind for numbers, which is why he kept track of the finances; but his people skills are lacking, which is why I always handled marketing and publicity.  This entailed taking guests out to tour the city, seeing cultural activities, eating at restaurants and drinking at bars (a lot) in hopes they would recommend us later by word or in writing.  Naturally, many of these guests were single women.

She arrived from the Netherlands for a semester abroad in Costa Rica.  Her plan was to stay at the hostel for a week or two until she found an apartment to share with other students.  Jon was determined to get every penny (Colon?) out of her possible.  She had barely unpacked her bags when he started spitting out his long-term stay options: student pricing, long-term monthly rates, privates with hot water blah blah blah...  I saw it from a more human perspective.  At some point while he was rapping, I got his attention and whispered, very business-as-usual, "If you really want her to stay longer, just fuck her right."

And that is what I did...the asshole that I am.  While Jon stayed in drinking and smoking, I took her out and we hooked up that same night.  She said she had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and had no desire to start anything serious.  Like a fool, I believed her.  We had our fun, and as predicted within two weeks she forgot about moving to a student apartment.  By then I had moved on to another girl.

...no fury like a women scorned.  She couldn't accept it.  She went after Jon, and he was willing.  Initially, I was happy for him.  When we started the hostel, we shared fantasies of young, horny university girls on vacation in Costa Rica showing up at our door and looking to behave badly...preferably with us.  I was perfectly OK with "hostel groupies."  I did not expect him to fall for one girl so bad; and I did not expect her to change him so much.

She had her revenge.  They locked themselves in the garage bar for hours some days.  Whatever she said and did to him in there was worse than any drug.  Within a few weeks Jon's conversation with me dried up to pure business talk: no politics, no sports, no sick, politically-incorrect jokes.  All of my faults (I have many) became magnified through her: any error I made in calculating profits or construction, any inappropriate comment, or any woman I brought back became another problem.  Just to make a point she cooked meals for Jon, the employee Manual and other hostel guests, but never for me.  Her hatred for me turned into his hatred.  I ignored it to the best of my ability and kept working, but this invisible wall continued growing between us.  I was getting irritated, tense and less motivated to work.  One of the cardinal hostel rules we agreed on was, "No free rooms for sex," and the day when she whispered to me with a smirk that she hadn't been paying for the past month, I knew I had to leave.  The business was finished...

I sat in front of the open safe and thought of these past bitter months.  The money envelopes were in my hands.  I could just rob this damn hostel, disappear, and never be heard from again.  Even if I were caught, criminal justice is slow in Latin America, I have connections and my clean record would work in my favor.  But I couldn't.  Revenge doesn't motivate my life.  I left the money in the safe.

With my bags in hand, I walked out the front gate, dropped my keys in the mailbox and left to figure what I would do with the rest of my life in Costa Rica.  I haven't returned to Castle Tam since.