CHAPTER FIVE
A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must know that dung heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
Anton Chekov

Although my two remaining genuinely dark moments were to come, I had a semi-dark moment after my conversation with Cathy (wherein Cathy said that Lisa has been “fucking everyone in sight”), which was less than a week into my return. That Lisa had been running amok at Big Turkeys in my absence was no surprise, but hearing about her uncommitted dick exploits from another person resulted in my reflecting on an incident from early July, just before my one-month visit to my home and its concomitant El Presidente collision.

Lisa had been in San Jose on business (plus running amok with uncommitted dick, I assume) and was on her way back to Pavones by bus. From Montauk I spoke to her on our cell phone at about mid way on her bus ride. Since she had to see a carpenter the next day near Paso Canoas, which was where the bus was bound, she’d overnight there and return home by taxi the next day. This was a spontaneous plan, not made before the trip. Then she named the hotel in Paso where she’d stay.

After we hung up I wondered how she knew the name of a Paso Canoas hotel; we’d never stayed there overnight (I couldn’t have named that hotel or any other). We — and she, in her many solo trips — had only made daylight runs to the place. It’s as sleazy a border town as you can imagine, even for Central America. You go in, do your shopping, and get the fuck back out before dark. (It’s mainly good for duty free goods and cut-rate assassins.)

I talked to her that night while she was at the hotel, the Interamericano, and Lisa got breezy as all get out, describing how she was getting up from sitting on the bed and now she was walking from her room, room number two, to the outside, because the cell reception was only one bar in the room, she’s walking down the hall now, blah blah. With all the breezy details I sensed something was up down south.

The next day I called Al, who was in Panama, to ask a favor. Al. Background. I’ve known Al since 1997 when I was living the events described in Zero; he’s in the book as “Allan from Maui,” one of the Salsa Brava surf crew. Al is unique in my friendships in paradise in that he’s never fucked my girlfriend in my bed or elsewhere, never come up to my house to deny he’s fucked my girlfriend (meanwhile telling me my girlfriend is no good), never lied to me to buttress my girlfriend’s lies, never stolen my money or tried to steal my money (or “forgotten about” a $150 debt), never inspired me to go out looking for him with a shotgun or to slap him upside the head, never made me nauseous with new age crap, never swiped my car to use when I wasn’t around, never bulldozed my property while I was in the states thinking I was dying, never tried to run me out of town, never extorted money from me via gaslighting about hit men… there are and-so-forths here with all these nevers but since I haven’t previously spouted them, let’s move on. (Al has snaked me a wave or two, once on a major barrel at Salsa Brava: nobody’s perfect.)

Al has been living the down south expat life forever, his Spanish is fluent, and he doesn’t suffer fools and liars and shitball motherfuckers well. A Vietnam vet, a few years ago he used a shotgun to blow a hole in the baddest Tico on the Caribbean coast, a scumbag named Gordo Malo (Bad Fat Man), who had aggravated him. A good guy to have at your back.

Also: Although Al had been gaslit plenty by Lisa, when I emailed him my Marc letter as explanation for the favor I needed to ask, he immediately saw her for what she is; he didn’t come up with a fart as the reason Lisa had recorded over the HI tape or berate me for emitting negative energy. “Looks like Lisa is bad news,” was his understated summation of my life with Lisa.

A peripheral and symmetrical reason for my liking and trusting Al is that Logan hates him. Logan in fact had threatened to “run him out of town.” This is mentioned in my long-lost, useless letter to the U.S. consul, Robin Morritz. In the letter I imply that Al left Pavones because of Logan’s threat. Not the case; I pulled this little nonfiction deceit to bolster my point about Logan being feared. Al left because he just flat got disgusted with the place, and there’s still more symmetry here. The last straw for Al was his having gotten into a bar fight with Clay, which Clay drunkenly provoked, and during which Al broke Clay’s arm. Al, by the way, is almost literally half Clay’s size; there’s nearly a foot in height and a 60-pound heft differential. I love that, and only wish I was there that night. Still more symmetry: The bar fight was at La Pina, where Lisa sang “Wild Thing” to Clay, plus whatever else happened between them.

On the phone from Montauk, I asked that Al go the Interamericano hotel in Paso to see what he could find out about Lisa’s supposed overnight stay there, which had been only a couple days before. He called me from a restaurant across the street from the joint with this bulletin: Lisa did not stay there that night, July 2nd, but…

“…get this,” Al says. “They know her there.”

“What?…” I’m thinking about the implications….”Are you sure?”

No question, Al says. He’d described Lisa and the woman had said, “Si, Lisa de Pavones.” Flaca, slim, pretty, with all the curly black hair. They knew her at the Interamericano because she’d stayed there before, but not the night in question.
Lisa being a known figure at a hotel in the sleazy border town of Paso Canoas – a short walk from my favorite Panamanian whorehouse – of course had dark implications in and of itself, but my semi-dark moment came through a rush of insight about an incident from many months back, nearly a year:

Lisa and I are at Paso together, at an Internet place. I have to pick up a package being held at customs. Lisa says she’ll finish up her last email and then wants to go shopping so why don’t we meet at our usual restaurant at noon, in about a half hour. Okay. I do my customs business and now I’m waiting at the restaurant. Noon comes and goes. A half hour more goes by. I wait. I’m getting edgy. At 1 PM I’m really edgy. Imagine your girlfriend missing in action in a mini-Tijuana. I get so edgy that I hoof it back to the Internet place. Lisa is not there and the clerk says she left a long time ago, over an hour. I trot back to the restaurant, hoping Lisa is there. No. I wait.

More time goes by. At 1:20 I’m panicky. I trot across the plaza – through the hordes of street hustlers, dopers, “coyotes,” and sundry sleazebags — over to the police station on the CR side, next to customs, and tell them my girlfriend is missing. I’m scared. I exaggerate and say Lisa has been missing for six hours. They ask for a description but they’re not going to do anything.

I run back to the restaurant. No Lisa. It’s now about 1:40.
Here she comes, sauntering up the street.

Are you all right?!

Sure.

Where the fuck were you? I’m out of breath with fright and relief.

Shopping.

You’re an hour and forty minutes late, Lisa!

I’m sorry.

You’re sorry? I just put in a missing person’s report!

I’m sorry, baby. I was clothes shopping and lost track of the time.

Lisa holds up a scarf she’d bought. That was it. A scarf she could have picked up in ten seconds at one of the stalls that lines the main drag. As she breezily starts naming the stores she’d gone to, I’m thinking that Lisa has never spent that much time clothes shopping, not ever, not even in San Jose, where they have real clothes stores, not the border town crapola of Paso.

Lisa doesn’t shop like a woman. She goes into a store, she’s in and out in ten minutes, tops. In fact, here are Lisa’s own words, in her reply to my Marc letter, wherein she defends her “perceiving sex the way a man does” (the Yeses and Noes going off in her head and so forth):

…Not just sex but lots of things, I’ve been told, like business and playtime things like climbing and fishing, and how I handle my money and how I don’t like to shop for clothes or get manicures or get my hair all done up 2

After finding out that Lisa is a known figure at the Interamericano, my semi-dark moment was the realization that those many months ago while I was panic-stricken about her safety at the sleazy border town of Paso Canoas, Lisa was fucking someone in that fleabag hotel. 3

At the time this did briefly occur to me, but I’d dismissed it as being too far out there, too unbelievable.

Thing was, I hadn’t yet realized that with Lisa, there are no limits.

My point being: Lisa and Kim (and Lisa and who-knows-who-else) used the Interamericano as their little hideaway.

Not that you should need it at this point, but here’s still more evidence that my description of the events in San Jose is true. From my original epilog:

9

My ex-home in paradise, my return in order to sell it.

I’d see my pups again! But how I missed them, and whom Lisa said I had abandoned.

She will rot in hell for that one, no?

I arranged for only two days there (with the buyer) and no one would know I was coming; I’d be in and out quick and clean. Although I doubted that the Moras were out to kill me, I wasn’t sure, and I suspected that a shootout with them would have a negative effect on the house-selling: It would not be a good impression of the paradise my potential buyer sought.

So I wanted to avoid a shootout with the Moras.

On a humorous note: On the second day Marcos told me that Lisa was over at Barry’s next door; obviously, she didn’t know I was back. So I walked over, my .38 tucked in my belt and under my shirt (I was surreptitiously armed most of the time), and looked up to see the two in intimate conversation on Barry’s roof, where construction was on-going. Barry saw me first, quickly stepped away from Lisa and yelled out in a squeaky, near panicky voice, “Hi stranger!”

Lisa’s reaction at my unexpected appearance — staring at her and Barry together on his roof — was nothing short of dumbfounded, stricken alarm. Her eyes went wide as sand dollars, her mouth fell open, wide open, and I could see her vibrating from twenty yards. It was an exact replay of the last time I saw her, which was in San Jose the day after her fuckfest with Kim at the Balmoral four months previously. This is worth a few words:

The afternoon following their fuckfest and my concurrent dark moment I’m at the internet place Lisa and I used to frequent, half a block from the Barmoral (yes, it’s our internet place). I’m at the desk paying, my back to the door. There’s a big mirror on the wall in front of me, and I happen to look up as I’m sorting my money. In the mirror Lisa, obviously having just entered the place, is standing behind me, stock still about 15 feet away, staring at the back of my head. I turn and face her and her eyes and mouth do their dumbfounded, stricken alarm number, along with the bodily vibration. She stands frozen for several seconds, at a complete loss as to her next move. Eventually, her next move is to bolt out of there on a dead run. I get my change and walk to the door and look up and down the block. Lisa is nowhere to be seen. The world’s fastest human got nothin’ on her. I mean she is gone.

A question: Since Lisa knew I had been in San Jose two days before, why the utter shock at seeing me in a place she knew I’d frequent while in the city? In fact, she should have expected to see me there. And anyway, why the over-the-top dismay?

If you’re really paying attention you should be ahead of me here, but if not, no worries about your smarts; there’s a piece of information you lack, gradual disclosure-wise. After my dark moment at the Balmoral and after I brought the whore from the Del Rey bar to my room but before she told me about her life and before I fucked her, I made a phone call.

I called Lisa’s room at the Balmoral, 322. It rang and rang and rang and the hotel operator wasn’t paying attention and didn’t cut in. Just kept ringing and I pictured the scene in Lisa’s room. First: I’m quite sure Lisa hadn’t told anyone where she was staying; this so I couldn’t find out. She hadn’t even told Francisco, our lawyer, whom she had to see, where she was. So imagine this. You’re at a hotel no one knows you’re staying at and you’re fucking your best friend’s husband and the phone rings. You don’t want to answer it: The call might mean someone does know you’re there and what you’re doing, plus there’s that instinctive guilt when a phone rings in the midst of surreptitious bad behavior. So you don’t answer. You and your best friend’s husband just sit there, naked, staring at the phone, wishing it would stop ringing. But it won’t stop ringing.

After a dozen rings Lisa finally picks up and says in a nervous and tentative little voice, “Hello?”

I don’t say anything. I just listen to her short breaths, short from nervousness or from fucking or a combination. Lisa doesn’t say “Hello” again. She’s listening to me listening to her. There is a suspended moment. She hangs up.

Now do you get the picture?

Lisa’s surprise at my being at the internet place was based on her two calls to the Del Rey, the first to find out I was there and then the second the next day, when they said I wasn’t a guest there. This misled her into thinking I had left San Jose.

Her dismay at the internet place was based on the upsetting phone call from the night before. She was now thinking maybe it was me. And the implication: Did I know about her and Kim?

This was what was going on with Lisa as she stood there staring at me wide-eyed, open-mouthed and vibrating at the internet place.

But my point being: Yes, Lisa, dear: I know everything. Even what you’re thinking.

God help me.

Finally: Here’s an email I sent to my friends Lesley, Win, and John, and please notice the date:
> On Oct 26, 2005, at 7:44 AM, Allan Weisbecker wrote:
>
> > darlin lesley, plus win and john,
> >
> > last night spotted lisa in san jose with the
> husband
> > of her best friend in pavones. followed them to
> her
> > hotel, they went up, i followed them, put my ear
> to
> > the door to hear the familiar sound of pre
> orgasmic
> > lisa.
> >
> > what a fucking pig i was in love with, aside from
> a
> > sociopath.
> >
> > gotta go, more to come.
> >
> > DON’T READ ANYTHING UNTIL I FUTZ WITH IT!
> >
> > allan

> > __________________________________
> > Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in
> one click.
> > http://farechase.yahoo.com

This dated email (a journalist’s “contemporary notes”) is added proof that I didn’t concoct the story later.

Okay. My sledgehammered point being: I told the truth about and Lisa and Kim that night in San Jose. (By the way: my admonition in the above email that they don’t read anything until I futz with it refers to the text of the book-in-progress. I knew it needed work: I only sent early versions in case something happened to me.)

2 Lisa’s explanation/clarification of her attitude about sex is another example of PM Commandment 4, misdirection: Her blah blah-ing is supposed to distract you from the fact that a Yes or No immediately goes off in her head whenever she meets a guy, i.e., her thinking to herself, “Boy, I’d like to fuck this guy.” (Or maybe not fuck him.) But this astounding admission is not significant since she “doesn’t like to clothes shop” either. 2a.

^2a. That Lisa’s own words in defense of her sexual antics help bust her on those antics is yet another example of Lisa hoisting herself by her own petard. (If WFD ever sees fit to list the expression they ought to consider including a little photo of Lisa, like they sometimes do with animals and such that are distinctive-looking yet hard to describe, or important historical characters like Isaac Newton and Adolph Hitler.)

3 The woman at the hotel showed me the registry for that night. Room 2 was vacant. I also went to room 2 and checked cell phone reception (I had the same phone Lisa had). It was a full five bars – Lisa, in her details, said the reception in the room was one bar. Down south, like anywhere else, cell phone reception tends to be the same over time for any given location, maybe varying a bar or two, but rarely four. (In the long view it doesn’t much matter where in Paso Lisa actually spent that night (or even if she was in Paso at all): the real revelation was that she had stayed at that hotel before.)