Denis Johnson: The Stars at Noon

But I’m saying that I was in the habit of walking the midnights after work, barefoot, dangling a high-heeled shoe from either hand, in the only hour when the temperature was bearable. Morning’s an oven; noon is a star; dusk is a furnace; but the middle of the night, at its worst, is only a hot bath . . I always took a meandering route between the front door of the Inter-Continental, or the Tico, another place I trolled nearer the capital’s outskirts, and the dead-end dirt lane where I lived. I usually got in about four a.m. and sat listening to Radio Tempo in the sort of lobby of La Whatsis, the sort of motel I stayed in. I forget the name of this wonderful motel. I only know it wasn’t the Inter-Continental. In the lobby there was a desk, a padlocked telephone, a ratty couch oftentimes draped with somebody’s wildly snoring cousin or uncle, and a hi-fi of which the radio, at least, worked. Six rooms, all in a row; and at the end of the hall, a door beyond which lay a vast roofed area where half of Managua, it seemed, resided in casual squalor. They washed the towels and sheets back there, brewed up for themselves simmering meals of slop, raised their degenerate offspring, chased away dogs the whites of whose eyes were forever showing. It was going on all over this section of Managua, in a series of dirt yards pocked by lives.

And me? I was much better off than most, living in a room with a concave double bed, a desk that aspired to become an orange crate, a broken air-conditioner, a cloying damp that seemed to originate in the shower stall. . There was a toilet, too, and a single faucet overlooking a big white bowl.

On one wall was an unframed inspirational poster, a close-up view of one of the wounded, bleeding hands of Jesus, actually, with clouds and saints and mourners drifting in colorful dolor all around it. And I was supplied with one other picture also, next to that one, of bulldogs in human dress smoking cigars and shooting pool.

As soon as the first drop of dawn dilutes the blackness, the neighbors begin their unbelievable racket, first the roosters, then the radios, then the live accompaniment to the radios — and then it's time to wind up the little children and start their screams and tears — and finally with the pots and pans. . The yard’s enclosed by a rusty corrugated fence, but the fence has, in addition to countless bullet-holes, many long ragged gashes in it, and anytime after daylight you’ll find crazed dogs, dust-covered urchins, old crones draped in black, or people who’ve slipped their chains — this morning it’s an auburnhaired little girl in a dress, also auburn; and her tiny nude brother — maneuvering among the puddles that soak the grass under the only tree, hoping for something they can try their teeth on, perhaps clots of dirt. Their perseverance is astonishing. Naturally, as an observer-tormentee, I have to watch. It’s one of the refinements of my punishment here that I’m forced to appreciate the little boy’s pinched buttocks, and the rivulets of dust where the pee is drying down the left thigh beneath his uncircumcised carroty little penis, and the nature of his older sister’s ankles, which seemed designed expressly for flat-footed squatting in unconscious misery on the earth.

I keep the good word close to hand like a ticket. / I feed the wounded lights in their cages, says William Something Merwin somewhere. It’s a miracle, another miracle, that the wounded maintain their appetites at all living in an odor of rotten grass and a smell I’ve always associated with things canine, yet one more miracle in the supurating glue of miracles hereabouts, oh and the monkey-man who chums the vat of it appreciates, I’m sure, that the voltage of slight hunger in my own stomach turns maximum because I know that unlike these dirty, awful children, I’ll get breakfast.

Understandably I hated this neighborhood . . But I would never get into a place like the Inter-Continental or the Tico on my own steam — and I couldn’t hop a plane and disappear, either. Because I didn’t have dollars.

The truth is, I’d suddenly, in a panic of avarice, turned all my dollars into an airline bag full of black-market cordobas at one-twentieth the official rate in La Cruz, Costa Rica, the last town before the Nicaraguan border; and had crossed over with tens of thousands of them in my underwear — hidden and smuggled like that because the Sandinistas know those Contra families are out there selling their exiled worthless cash at whatever price they can get: there’s a limit on the number of cordobas you can bring in. A limit that I ignored, as I say, and so I came over rich — but even the Nicaraguans themselves don’t want their internationally laughed-at currency coming across the counters at them when they suspect there’s a U.S. dollar to be had. Therefore the rule is that if you carry Caesar’s passport, you pay with Caesar’s coin: the greenback. I didn’t have any.

Up in the northern provinces, they hadn’t cared so much that I had only cordobas, but down here in the capital they wanted what they said they wanted — U.S., U.S. — and I didn't have it. I was black market.

What’s why I was cornered in a room at the Whatsis Motel, with the breakfast-hour floor show of naked children starving . .

That's why no photographer would take me north where the stories were, not even the French photographers who didn’t care about anything but bang-bang, a phrase that does not refer to sex but the noises of war: they didn’t want me continually impeding their hustle with my bagful of jive money . .

That’s why Sub-tenente Whoever had me in a hammer-lock, so that he or any bureaucrat of his acquaintance could lift my press card, or my skirts, pretty much whenever the mood clouted him, and chinga me . .

Instead of the descent of sleep I now felt a familiar panic . . A visitation of tropical claustrophobia. . Sailing rudderless into the day just made everything so much worse, but it wasn’t rare for me to run as if on fire into the streets in the morning, it was getting, in fact, to be a cyclical thing, like a searing comet — best combatted by a little squeeze, a few drops of rum.

Two fingers of the stuff, all I had, didn’t work. I let the bottle roll away and jumped up and dressed, raving out loud at everybody keeping me down, and headed through the lobby convinced I had to get out of this toilet today . . Knowing I was fated never to get out — not in this life, not in this death . .

WITH ITS loud diesel engines and unmuffled motorcycles, its choking fumes and loud cries, Managua is like New York City in summer — Manhattan, in a sense, is a Third World nation — although the only Managuan building fat as a New York one is TELCOR.

TELCOR is where I was going. TELCOR meant words with the world above.

Here and there in this country there were telephones, but if one wanted to call Planet Earth, one put the call through at TELCOR, the small, timeless, dead center of Hell, where souls were being branded with the shapes of their hope. . As soon as you enter you go deaf — there can be no voice to these cries. . If you bring a camera, the film exposes itself on entering. . The minutes stop, but the ticking gets louder. . People blow their noses and cough . . The green fire of boredom streaks the air. . The children on their mothers’ laps seem to drip with pain. . Nothing happens, you never get out, and it all just gets worse and worse forever . . Imagine a bus station presided over by demons, some of them hateful and some of them helpful, where the buses never come. . A doctor’s anteroom but the doctor is dead . . Eventually they call a name that sounds like yours and shout the number of the booth they expect you to enter, and either you get one without a door, so that everybody waiting to make whatever calls the burning circumstances are forcing them to make can now memorize the names of your contacts and trace the character of your desires, or you close yourself up behind the Plexiglas while the chamber fills with your used breath until you really can just no longer speak.