That Guy

San José, Costa Rica

By this point I've stayed at 50+ hostels around the world. Mostly in a hostel you find backpackers, vacationing Europeans, and yoga enthusiasts. But occasionally there will be one old white American guy. I pretty much always get into it with that guy.

In San José that guy was Steve. Let me tell you a little bit about Steve.

Steve was a stocky white guy with curly hair who claimed to have done drugs with Joe Montana in the 80s. So I guess that would put him probably in his 50s.

My first interaction with Steve was in the living room at our hostel, where he struck up a conversation with me about Trump. He said that everybody under 30 had something against Trump, and he didn't get it. I said well I'm over 30 and I hate Trump. And then I proceeded to ignore him.

I overheard him talking to Victor, one of the hostel owners, about how baseball was his favorite sport because it's still 90% white. Victor was not white. That kind of solidified my opinion that I hated this guy.

Then I left for 5 days to visit Jacó and Montezuma, and when I returned Steve was still there. I tried ignoring him, but he wouldn't shut the hell up.

*

It was a Sunday and I was watching football in the common area on the big-screen television. Steve was sitting in the dining room complaining about the NFL. He would occasionally ask me questions and I either gave 1-word answers or did not respond. This went on for maybe an hour.

Steve's major beefs with the NFL were:

• It was too PC because of taunting and conduct penalties. Which he elaborated meant that racial slurs were no longer allowed.

• It was a pussy sport because of too much dancing by the players

• Too many black people

A black Dutch woman in her 20s arrived and Steve struck up a political conversation with her. He claimed that Obama had caused the last American recession, at which point I invaded their conversation and blew my top.

How in the hell did Obama cause a recession that started during the Bush administration? If you don't like the NFL then don't watch it! Nobody cares if you like it or not! Your big problem with football is that there should be more racial slurs and less dancing?

That was how the debate started. But it rapidly spiraled into stranger arenas. We argued for about an hour, with him saying I was too young and didn't know what I was talking about, and me calling him an idiot who got all his news from bullshit websites.

Some of his more outrageous claims were:

• The USA is a corporation

• The American Civil War was not about slavery

• America was going to shit because Obama had allowed a town in Michigan to be "Muslim-only." He kept returning to this.

• He supported the Confederacy in the Civil War because the federal government had murdered Native Americans

• Hitler had offered to relocate Jews to Israel before he killed the rest of them, which I guess he was supposed to be lauded for

• He asked me if I believed 6 million Jews had died in WWII I think because he wanted to refute it, but we never got there because I was shouting about what the fuck does that have to do with the Civil War you crazy fuck

• He and his associates would be meeting with the President of Costa Rica in a couple weeks to "solve some real problems" and "make everybody money"

When the afternoon football games ended I collected my laptop and retreated into another common space, ending the conversation. Steve seemed mildly upset that I didn't agree with him on his many batshit ideas and thanked me for showing the football games.

*

There had been some mixup where Steve had wanted to extend his stay in his private room but hadn't done it in advance and somebody else had booked the room online. So Steve had to stay one night in the dorms before he could move back to his private room.

Victor offered to switch me to a different dorm so I wouldn't have to share a room with Steve, but I told him it was no problem. I didn't expect any trouble during the night.

Steve never made it to the dorm room. The next morning the staff found him passed out on a couch that was soaked in piss. Lying next to the couch were empty bottles of tequila and a local rum.

After this incident, Victor told Steve that he would have to leave the hostel. Steve was apologetic and hung his head meekly about it. On a stranger note, Victor called Steve's friend who had recommended the hostel to Steve. Steve's friend apparently expressed surprise that it had taken Victor that long to evict him.

*

For me, several mysteries remain about Steve. First, some rumors I heard about claims he had made:

• That he had a permanent residence in Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica

• That he was a cocaine user, which would have explained why he couldn't shut the hell up even when sitting by himself at a table

• That he needed a private room because he conducted business in the Phillipines that due to time zones had to be done at night

• That he had on two occasions been a millionaire but gone broke both times, and that he was now receiving money in the $200-$400 range periodically from a girlfriend somewhere

I'm left to wonder, if he loathed black people so much, why was he living in the black part of Costa Rica? Or was that a lie?

Did he suffer from crippling anxiety? Thus the drugs and alcohol? Was he too anxious about sharing a dorm room with me and that's why he got so drunk and pissed the couch?

Was he really doing business in the Phillipines? Had he really been fabulously rich and done drugs with Joe Montana? And now carried all his possessions in black plastic Hefty bags?

And was he about to meet with the President of Costa Rica?

Did he really have a girlfriend? Who would want to date that guy?