A serious guild feeling.

San Petro Sula, 25 marzo 1990.
I watch this arid central-american world go by from the closed environment of an old and crappy honduran bus, on the way to San Petro Sula. I'm the only gringo aboard and I'm probably just as smelly as the local indios and latinos I travel with.
My jeans, my shirt, my face and hair, covered in a light brown residue of sand caused by the dust of the unpaved road that blows in through the glassless windows, my bum is sore after nearly three hours of sitting on this wooden bench. Outside is tropical jungle interspersed with dusty patches of arid open land, every so often we pass through small hamlets, a collection of wooden huts really where indio women try to sell bananas that come out of reed baskets they carry on their heads, snotnosed youngsters dressed in dusty rags watch my gringo face with big dark and curious eyes from the side of the road.
Slowly my mind wanders inward wondering about Mister AA member Micheal who I left in the fat arms of that female montrosity back in Tegucigalpa. I never heard him coming back to the hotel that night, never saw him in the morning when I checked out and changed my hotel...at first I felt happy about that...finally got rid of him.... back to my backpack and solitary lifestyle, the life I picked up again after putting my travel partner James on the plane to Costa Rica with Nora and Peter.
Didn't expect to meet a confirmed AA member called Micheal to follow me around Central-America like a puppy dog that had lost his mummy, trying to "glue" himself to me as though I was his gran amigo.
Still I feel like a bit of a guilt feeling would be in place after leaving him in the sex hungry company of that enormous honduran putaza, in that macho bar, in the worst part of town where half the clientêle was armed to the teeth.
Not that he was in any real danger, what is the point of beating up and robbing a stupid brittish gringo with no brains to speak of and no dough...the worst that could have happened to him was having that black-toothed mammasan sitting on top of him most of the night in one of these cockroach invested back rooms where the rats fornicate under the hard cot while he gets "raped" by that hump of female human flesh.
The worst that can have happened to him is staggering home to our middle class hotel with the clap after his ordeal.....hehehehe. Shit, what did he come out here for anyway with no spanish in his head and no currency in his pockets?
My mind slowly comes back to the here and now while yet another gale of red dust
enters the bus going up my already tormented nostrils and throat causing me to cough.
My neighbor, a young indio woman dressed in the tradional indio garb with heavy colorful embroidery and nursing a small baby boy that looks at me with big curious baby eyes while suckling a dark brown female indio breast, quickly lowers her eye lashes like she feels betrayed observing me.

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