Finished reading El Principito on the subway. Great book.

It’s incredible, but my Spanish is improving noticeably from one day to the next, just from hitting the books. I turned on Telemundo CNN News tonight and found myself understanding entire sentences. It’s as if studying Spanish for a couple of hours each day has set in motion some mystic process by which I learn the language faster than I’m actually studying it. Like Christine.

Proved to myself I haven’t forgotten what a real day’s work is like. I took an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner (falafel at Mamoun’s, pasta at Lucca’s, strolling in the Village in the glorious weather, looking at the glorious long-legged girls) and spent the rest of the day inside, seated at the computer. Burned through pretty much the whole game design, revising and improving. Wish I had a few more days to keep going. That’s the way it always is. There’s something in me that won’t let me work on this project until I’m down to the wire.

Spoke to Brian and Scott. Miraculously, the Mac version [of Prince 1] has taken a turn for the better. It seems that letter I wrote has (belatedly) lit a fire under everyone at Presage, and now they’ve got Scott working nights and weekends. Maybe we actually will make Christmas.

Brian described the new box to me.

This Prince 2 is going to be great, if it comes out anything like the way I’ve designed it. If only I lived in SF, I could make sure it was done right. But I’ve got to keep my priorities straight. What’s more important – Prince 2, or screenwriting and travelling to foreign countries?

Oh, well. After I send off the Prince 2 bible tomorrow, I’m free!

I’m just beginning to realize that three days is not, in fact, a whole lot of time to pack up my worldly goods.

This is more difficult than a normal packing job because I’ve got to think: What will I need in Central America? In California? I have to ask myself about every item: “Can I live for a year or two without this (book, videotape, whatever)?”

There’s actually a kind of pleasure in the thought of going a year without my journals, photo albums, TV, stereo, music, computer games, car, all that crap. It strips me down to my bare humanity.

Stopped by the Center to see Sandra Levinson. She’d finished Bird of Paradise and liked it so much she couldn’t stop talking about it. I gave her two more copies, one to give to Aléa and one to a New York producer friend of hers who’s looking for a property for Aléa to direct. I encouraged her as much as I could without actually begging.

Two other interesting developments from that meeting. One, she offered me the use of her apartment in Havana after she leaves on the 29th. Two, she advised me that I do qualify to visit Cuba under the Treasury Dept. regulations. All I need to do is book a seat on a charter flight through Marazúl.

Feeling like a fool, I said: “But they denied permission to Sydney Pollack and Francis Coppola…”

“That’s because they’re Sydney Pollack and Francis Coppola! You, my dear, are a documentary filmmaker, and you can prove it.”

[Chappaqua] It’s done. With the help of Kevin Burget, David and Liz, Mom and her new tenant Stanley, and two Israeli movers from Shleppers, what’s left of my worldly goods is now boxed and stacked to the ceiling in what was once my bedroom.

Now I’m alone, doing laundry and rearranging boxes, and periodically getting blindsided by teenage flashbacks. Even writing in this journal – in this house, on a day like this – is a conditioned stimulus. It sweeps me, mentally and emotionally, right back to the summers of ‘85 and ‘86, when I was fresh out of college and Prince of Persia was just an idea.

I have no home now. Just a plane ticket.

[Puerto Cortés, Honduras] Oscar, Robert and Jason are napping while we wait for Oscar’s friend José to come with his car and take us out on the town. I’m tired too, but chances to write have been pretty rare, so I thought I’d take advantage of this one.

My hand is so sweaty it’s making the paper soggy. Still, it’s no worse than New York during a heat wave.

People keep asking me if Honduras is like I expected. The truth is, I didn’t have time to expect anything—I just showed up. Oscar met us at the airport in San Pedro Sula and took us in a taxi to his grandparents’ house for lunch. Robert, Jason and me, the Three Gringos. After lunch he took us across the street to the house where his aunt lives and showed us where we’d be sleeping. Then he whisked us off to the center of town to change money at the best (unofficial) rate. I went through all this in a jet-lagged daze. I hadn’t slept since I woke up at 8:30 am Wednesday morning to rent the truck, except for catnaps on the plane and in the car and on the bus. Actually, I’m still sort of dazed.

We’re in Puerto Cortés now, where Oscar’s parents live. Oscar lived here all his life until he went off to boarding school in the U.S. He’s got two younger sisters and a baby brother. We came here on the train, four hours from Lima, through the holdings of la compañia. I’m going to remember that ride every time I see the Chiquita label from now on.

I came here with two goals—to learn Spanish and not get sick—but the reality of this place is so strong it’s hard to keep that in mind. Everyone here boils their water, because of the cholera epidemic, but we’ve been eating everything they feed us—when you’re guests at someone’s home it’s impossible not to.

The Spanish they speak here is different from the Spanish they spoke in Spanish class. It’s going to take a while to get it into my ear. I feel like I’m semi-deaf. People talk to me and I don’t understand.

This morning Oscar’s abuelo took us to the place in the woods where he likes to get drunk with his friends. It’s a clearing with a sort of shed and a place to string a hammock. They cut us down some coconuts and we drank the water from inside. Then they gave us some guavas. Then they gave us some of the local rum (which was pretty powerful for the middle of the day, even mixed with Coke) and told us stories about various gringos they had known. Most of it went over our heads. Oscar arrived in time to translate. The old guys assured us that they didn’t have anything against gringos in general.

We walked along the train tracks into a completely different and much more upscale neighborhood, to visit Oscar’s childhood classmate José. José and his kid brother Luis were watching cartoons on TV. Handsome, green-eyed and light-skinned, they were wearing baggy pastel shorts and T-shirts in the surfer style of a few years ago and looked like nothing so much as a couple of California kids transplanted to a Central American living room. Their father poked his head in and, after we’d introduced ourselves, proceeded to open the huge white case that was sitting in the living room like a giant cooler and show us his line of health-food products that he was planning to export to the U.S., or import from somewhere else and sell in Honduras—my Spanish wasn’t good enough to catch the details. He made us each try a capsule. Then he went out of the room and came back with some blown-glass oil candles in the shape of pigs, which he’d bought directly from the factory in Colorado or wherever and was going to try to sell in Honduras. Then he went out again and came back with some granola bars, one for each of us, and a book about unexplained phenomena from the Reader’s Digest. He passed it around and we all examined it while he explained something about a church which, when you photograph it, comes out with mysterious ghostly figures. There was a crucifix on the wall and a lot of other Catholic stuff although, as José later said, no one in the house believes. Their mother’s side of the family is Jewish, from Spain.

José had to go to San Pedro with his dad, so Luis drove us to the beach. We rode in the back of his yellow pickup truck. After going around on foot everywhere with Oscar, it was a thrill to speed through the town and feel the wind in our hair. Cortés is like California or Hawaii—you really need a car. All the girls looked as we passed by.

The beach Luis took us to was a private club, the Nautical Club. There was almost no one else there. Luis was there to practice with some of his friends for the upcoming volleyball tournament. We sat at a private deck with a thatched roof (50 lempira for the deck) and swam and hit the volleyball around and ordered lunch (50 lemps a plate). The water was warm, almost hot, and would have been paradise if it hadn’t been so dirty. The new factories they’ve built along the coast have really messed up the beaches. But it was close enough to paradise, especially in contrast to the poverty we’d gotten used to in the past two days, to make for an extremely pleasant afternoon. The bill for lunch came to about 200 lempira, or $35. To put this in perspective, the women who work in the textile factory in San Pedro make 300 lempira a month.

After the beach Luis was coming down with a fever and didn’t want to drive us any more, so we took the bus to an old Spanish castle where we sat on the roof absorbing the sun and admiring the view (including the girl in the red swimsuit and black shorts we’d seen earlier on the playa, who had followed us here), then back to Cortés.

There was a big fiesta that night, the anniversary of someone’s discovery of Puerto Cortés. All of Cortés turned out for it. Streets packed with people. Bands playing, people dancing.

We drank a bottle of Flor de Caña in the park in front of a statue of the Madre Hondurensa. Mixed it with orange juice and drank it out of plastic Pepsi-Cola cups. There’s a war on. Coke and Pepsi are vying for control of Honduras. The Pepsi pavilion is blasting salsa and the Coke truck drives by blaring merengue. I swore eternal friendship with Oscar y Roberto. A long way from the parque industrial.

When we’d finished the bottle we made our way through the packed crowds to the centrifuge, the big ride where the boys and girls all sit in a circle and the engineer demonstrates the principle of centripedal force. You’re supposed to sit next to a girl so you can enjoy getting pressed up against each other when the ride starts. The space to my right was taken the moment I sat down and rapidly replaced by a succession of teenage hondureñas, each one cuter than the last.

Next we all went to Burger Boy’s for a beer. A mistake. Don’t mix cerveza and rum. There was a big photograph of the Manhattan skyline covering one whole wall, about 10 years out of date, and a TV in the corner blasting a salsa band. A friend of Oscar’s who lives in the U.S. dropped by with his gorgeous girlfriend, whom he ignored completely during the ten minutes he was talking to us. “You live in the U.S., man, you can get any girl you want,” Oscar said after they’d left.

Ten minutes before the gondolas were due to leave, Oscar realized he’d forgotten his umbrella. “Shit, man, it’s my parents’ umbrella!” We fought our way back through the crowd to the parque, but the umbrella was long gone. I’ll never forget that fast trip through the crowd. Times Square on New Years’ Eve.

We’d missed the gondolas, so we set off for José’s house to see if he was home yet. On the way we stopped to talk to about ten different people. Everybody knows everybody in Cortés. Also with us was Esteban, who’d been to school with Oscar and José. He’s an Anglophile, with glasses and slicked-back blond hair and a blue polo shirt worn outside the trousers, like a high-school kid on the math team. There were so many girls there, it was unbelievable. Moving in packs of three, four, five, all dressed up with no visible parents or boyfriends or guardians. I wonder where all the guys are. Working, I guess, or in the army.

José drove us to the playa in Luis’s open truck. Same private beach as that afternoon, but at night it was deserted, peaceful. We sat on one of the decks (didn’t have to pay for it, at night) and drank another bottle of rum with orange juice. Steven and José poured out their hearts, fervently told us how horrible it had been to be the only boy in a class of eight girls, for ten years. “People say that must be heaven, man. It’s not. It’s hell.” It turns out Steven has read every book ever written in English. His favorite is Lord of the Rings. He told me how he cried at the scene in Dune where Paul reencounters Gurney Halleck and says “You’ve no need of a blaster with me” and they embrace. He reenacted the scene: “You young pup! You young pup!” The sky was flashing with silent lightning over the sea. Threatening to rain as it had been doing all night. A bird landed in the surf, dramatically silhouetted by the lightning. Oscar jumped up and filled his Pepsi cup with sand and threw it at the bird to drive it away, which was uncharacteristic. José kept filling our glasses and insisting we drink. I was as drunk as I’ve ever been, but I gulped down what he gave me. Robert had the sense to pour his out on the sand when José wasn’t looking.

Riding home, I lay back in the truck and stared up at the stars. The beautiful stars. We went to another playa but the party was already over. José’s truck got stuck in the sand and we needed help getting it out. Then back to the Burger Boy. Oscar put his head down and slept. I did the same. That’s all I remember… Nunca jamás!

It was noon before I felt even remotely human. José came to take us to the beach. Lying in the sand with the sun on me seemed, at the moment, like just about the most strenuous activity I was capable of.

On the way we drove up into the hills and stopped in front of an iron gate. It was the house of Susan, who’d been to school with Oscar and José. An armed guard let us in. A totally different sphere of reality. If José’s house was two cuts above Oscar’s, this one was about fifteen cuts above José’s. Susan invited us up onto the roof where we saw a sweeping panoramic view of all of Cortés. Oscar explained that her family owned all the land around us. Susan said they’d had a big party there the night before, the men who owned the islands had all been there. (Oscar translated: the Bay islands.) Susan goes to school in the U.S., in Ohio. She wants to study performing arts in the States, but her father wants her to come back and run the family business (a chain of hardware stores). She’s a Christian. Her religion gives her strength, enables her to keep pure in the face of the confusing temptations of college in the U.S. She said: “You know, there’s a lot of poverty and injustice here… only a few people are really living, the others are just struggling for survival.”

It was getting late in the afternoon. José was eager to get to the playa. It turned out the door to the roof had locked behind us and the guard was nowhere within earshot. Susan’s mother finally heard her shouts and let us in. Susan showed us the house. It was a nice house. They have others. José and Oscar complimented her on her recent nose job.

Volleyball on the beach. The water was really filthy, felt so slimy that José and I got out almost immediately. I lay on the sand and watched the game and the girls watching the game. High-society teenagers in swimsuits. The games were sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. It was the same beach as yesterday. The bandstand was called “Meson de Conquistadores.” We met a lot of girls who’d been classmates of Oscar and José.

On our way out (riding in the back of the truck) José suddenly pulled over. One of the girls we’d seen at the beach ran up to us, distraught, and told him what had happened. He told her to get in. She got in up front with José and Oscar, and we drove off. At the same time, a skinny guy (who it took us a while to figure out was a complete stranger) climbed up into the back of the truck and sat staring at us for the longest time. Finally he asked us for money. I said no. Jason and Robert had no idea what was happening; they were cracking jokes, the way you do when you’re in your living room watching TV. José’s horn was beeping almost constantly—a short-circuit or something—and he was driving even more aggressively than usual. We let the panhandler off at a bus stop. When we were moving again the horn started acting up again and Robert said he could fix it. I leaned over to José’s window and yelled that to him. He slammed on the brakes and said “Will it take long? Because this girl was in an accident, her friend’s in the hospital and we have to go get the doctor.” Robert removed the fuse—it took about two minutes—and we took off again. Driving in Honduras without a horn is dangerous, because pedestrians and bicyclists assume that if you don’t honk, it means they’re not in your way. We got lost in a strange neighborhood, trying to find the address on the girl’s piece of paper, and had to ask three different people for directions. “This doesn’t look like a hospital kind of neighborhood,” Robert said. It turned out we were there to fetch the neurologist—a white-haired woman who was standing, waiting, out in the muddy street—and bring her back to the hospital so she could examine this girl’s friend, who had a fractured skull. The hospital was close to where we’d picked the girl up. They’d scribbled down the neurologist’s name and address on a piece of paper and sent this girl out into the street to, I guess, flag down a car and go get her and bring her back. It didn’t seem like a very fair thing for the hospital to ask of a girl who’d just been in a bad accident. The two guys who’d been in the car with her were in shock, no help at all. The one who’d been driving was drunk. The girl said he’d been drinking all day at the volleyball on the beach. I only understood all this when we got to the hospital.

The hospital was empty. It was a big multi-story, modern building. Absolutely desolate. There was no one on duty in the lobby, no one in the emergency room, no one in the hallways. And it was falling apart. Missing panels in the ceiling, exposed wiring in the walls. José and Oscar and the girl and the neurologist and I finally found the place where they had the girl. There were a couple of other patients and nurses there. We left the girl and the neurologist and went to find a phone so José could call his family and tell them he’d be late. There was no phone. The only phone that worked was the one the girl was using to try to locate her friend’s grandmother so they could get permission to move her. José didn’t want to interrupt her so we went outside to wait. It was dusk and the parking lot was swarming with mosquitoes. They were eating us alive. We went back inside to wait, but the mosquitoes were there too. As luck would have it, this was the one time I hadn’t brought the insect repellent. The Coke machine was broken. There was a bulletin board with posters about how to prevent cholera. Looking at it, I had the feeling that the entire hospital was being kept going by about five doctors and nurses. José said we had to wait and take the neurologist home afterwards. Then we discussed it and decided it would take the neurologist at least a couple of hours to examine the girl, so we could leave and come back. I told José that in the U.S. not one person in a hundred would do what we were doing. They might give the girl a ride, I said, but they certainly wouldn’t wait around to take the neurologist home afterwards. Not in a port city as big as Cortés. José seemed surprised. He didn’t think it was anything special. Fortunately, some other friends of the girl showed up with a car, so we could leave. The guys who’d been in the wreck had gone. José couldn’t understand that. I said they were probably in shock and weren’t thinking clearly. As we left, I caught a glimpse of the girl’s bare feet stretched out on a table in a dark room. Her toes were twitching in a way that didn’t look right. José said the doctor had told him she might be paralyzed for life.

We spent that night in Cortés—our last—and left Monday afternoon. Monday morning Oscar and his dad took us to the docks where a Russian ship was waiting for a banana shipment to be unloaded that night. The captain took us on a tour of the ship. The ship had been hired by United Fruit—by Chiquita—to come all the way from Russia to carry the bananas from Honduras to Sweden. The captain said they had to make the trip in thirteen and a half days, contractually, no matter what the weather was like. After he’d shown us the ship, the captain asked if we’d heard any news. He’d heard from someone that Gorbachev was no longer president, but hadn’t been able to buy a newspaper. We didn’t know anything more than he did. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the world,” he sighed. Oscar wanted me to see them load the bananas that night—he assured me it was something to see—but we were due back in La Lima, and Oscar wanted to see Hilda before we left for the Islands.

Estamos instalados in two double rooms at the Buccaneer Hotel on Rattan Island, a half-hour’s flight from San Pedro Sula. For the first time since leaving the States, I enjoyed the luxury of a hot shower — an indoor shower, sealed off from outdoors so well that there were no mosquitos flying around or strange insects crawling up the walls, and no bucket to fill, just a knob you turn and out comes the water. A clean towel. A mirror in which to examine my reflection and see for the first time the rashes that have broken out on my chest and back — just heat rash, I’m hoping. A sink at which to brush my teeth and shave. And, oh greatest of luxuries! a double bed to stretch out on and write this entry.

We arrived back in La Lima last night, an hour and a half bus ride from Cortés. A beautiful young woman sat down next to me and I studiously avoided looking at her because she was bouncing a baby on her knee and a tall young man with a military crewcut was bending over, guarding her with both arms while he talked to her. But Oscar switched seats with me and struck up a conversation with her, the young man moved away to talk to another woman in their group, and it turned out the young man was the woman’s brother. She lived in La Lima and hoped Oscar and I would come visit her. Oscar asked if the baby was hers. She didn’t answer.

It was comforting, in an odd way, to return to La Lima. Aunt cooked us dinner in the grandparents’ house and we went back to the other aunt’s (Marta’s) house and sat in the yard and Otto from across the street dropped by and we just hung out. Suddenly we were speaking Spanish again (in Cortés, everybody knew English). I told Otto and Marta the story I’d come up with that morning — Henry James’s Wings of the Dove transplanted to Honduras — and they liked it. What would really make that movie, of course, would be the details. The Tortugas Ninjas placemats. The string lights in the buses. The Coke-Pepsi war. Oscar’s been urging me to take notes.

We went to Otto’s cousin’s house to see his computer. A 12 MHz IBM clone. He had Karateka.

Then it was midnight and I was really tired, but Oscar really wanted to go to the other side of town, to the red-light district where he’d never been. So we went. A friend of Otto’s joined us, a guy with long hair and a psychedelic T-shirt, who’d been in the military and seemed tougher and more street-smart than the others. We went to a club called “Lady Night.” It was empty except for two guys sitting close to the stage and about half a dozen whores sitting around listlessly in the dim light. A bored-looking woman did a strip-tease inside a glass cage to the accompaniment of Mexican music blasting from loudspeakers. When the song ended she stopped and waited for the next song to begin before resuming dancing. It was “Hotel California.” We got out of there fast. Otto and his friend didn’t understand why Oscar and I didn’t like it.

Next stop was a gambling pit. Two dozen drunks asleep on the tables. Chickens roasting. Desperate unemployed worker types betting on a kind of roulette with black and white holes, clutching their lempiras as they watched the ball drop. A big crowd. We got out of there fast too.

“El lado oscuro,” Oscar said. “It’s good for you to see this, too.”

We were silent on the walk back. There was no clean water at Marta’s house so Otto’s cousin brought us home with him and gave us some out of the refrigerator. Everyone boils their water now because of the cholera epidemic. It hasn’t hit Honduras yet and there’s a big public-health campaign to keep it that way. There’s a hit punta song about how to prevent cholera that’s on the radio all the time. The water in La Lima is safer than in Cortés, because it’s so heavily chlorinated. It’s provided by La Compañia, United Fruit. The water tower has the Chiquita label on it. The chlorine is so strong that after the water’s been boiled and refrigerated (which concentrates the chlorine), it’s almost undrinkable. But at least it doesn’t give you cholera.

In the morning I woke up feeling miraculously cheerful. I’d gone to bed convinced I’d never be able to shake the nightmare image of that woman dancing in the cage, but in fact a few hours’ sleep was all it took.

[Buccaneer Hotel, Rattan Island] Spent the day at the beach on nearby Fantasy Island. Snorkeled, swam, talked to a pair of sunbathing girls (one was a local, the other her cousin from New Jersey). We walked back through town. It was good to walk – it gave the place a geographical solidity that I’d missed when we were relying on taxis for our transportation. We stopped at the pizzeria we’d spotted on the way out, but they weren’t serving till 7 pm. About a minute after we entered, there was the sound of a shotgun blast. The security guard who’d been sitting out front with a rifle across his knees had discharged it accidentally and blasted a hole in the balcony above. He was rather sheepish about it. No one else seemed much perturbed.

We’ve been here just 24 hours, but it’s already made all the difference to my sense of well-being. My stomach is settled down, my skin rash is gone, I feel clean and rested. Last night I slept outside, with the breeze and the waves. For the first time in a whole week, I wasn’t hot. It was sublime.

This is pure tourist land. The island is something of a historical oddity in that most of the natives speak English, not Spanish. For about fifteen minutes, walking through town today, I felt like I was in Central America, but the people sharing the beaches and the decks and the restaurants with us are all tourists. I hate that I’m one of them. But I’m still happy to be here, because it is so damn comfortable. The beaches are perfect. Water clear as glass, sand in all the places you want it and none of the places you don’t, not too many people, etc, etc. All the things the guidebooks award stars for. A (relatively) unspoiled tropical beach paradise.

Oscar feels out of place and intimidated in the hotels and restaurants. He’s not used to the tourist life. Also, he can’t shake the habit of thinking of lempira as dollars. To him, 250 lemps for dinner is staggering. To Robert and me, it’s $10 a person.

Anyway, I sure am enjoying the R&R.