GRAND THEFT AUTO: NICARAGUA

A fast and furious romance

It started out innocently enough.

Around 3 years ago I put an ad on the Next Door website, saying:

“Hey, I want to pay someone’s kid $17 bucks an hour to teach me how to play Grand Theft Auto.”

I have always maintained that GTA is one of the best pieces of art of the twenty-first century. The rendering is glorious. The lighting is superb and the shadows slant perfectly from dawn to dusk. There is exquisite street styling in the cars and outfits. The amoral ultraviolence doesn’t really mow my lawn, but I was willing to flirt with the dark side, steal sedans and chain-whip hookers just to participate in that magical universe. The only time I’d ever played it was with my friend’s kids on vacation. I wasn’t really playing it; they were teenaged boys and therefore immaculate experts. I was just telling them what to do, giving them monstrous ideas like, “Hey, steal that plane, and then ram it into the blimp!” The ensuing explosion was Hindenburg-worthy. I wanted to drive this filth for myself, it was so post-superego.

I got a response from a guy we’ll call Ian Fernandez, who told me he was 22.

When he came to my door and I saw him for the first time, he made me a little bit nervous, because he was so thugged-out. He was a big Meso-American kid with hands the size of toasters and linebacker shoulders who looked like he should have been assembling pyramids in the jungle in a loincloth, only he was wearing a pair of prescription Ray Bans and tight motorcycle pants belted well below his ass and a huge pair of Air Jordans.

He seemed safe enough, once I let him in the door, so I offered to smoke a joint with him on the patio before we got started. That was when he told me the terrible story of his life under Daniel Ortega, the maniac dictator of Nicaragua, who literally threw journalists to the lions. Ian had been an upper middle-class college student, the grandson of a prominent lawyer. After attending a peaceful protest when Ortega abruptly removed all benefits going toward the elderly, Ian learned from high-school friends that worked in the government that he had been put on a black list. This was tantamount to a death sentence: he had friends who had disappeared into the prisons and been tortured for years, or killed outright. When cops started to come around the house asking for him, he decided to escape, and ran into the jungle. He wandered for eight days without food or water until finally realizing that he had walked into El Salvador. From there, he escaped into the U.S. He was actually 26, he finally confessed, and he showed me a picture of his dog, Bibi — the froufiest, whitest, most purse-like Bichon-Frisé lady dog I have ever seen — like something Reese Witherspoon would carry around in “Legally Blonde.”

I got the vaguest, most impossible impression that he was flirting with me, but dismissed it. His face was so indigenous, he looked like he was part jaguar, and his black hair, shaved on the sides and in back, fell down to his lower back.

Once mildly buzzed, we finally turned on the big screen and sat down with the Playstation to get down to business. I was completely hopeless and kept crashing the car into poles and people and getting shot. Ian took pity on my character and took him to the strip club.

When he stood behind me to help me work my Playstation controller and put his thumbs over mine to make me drive, I knew he was flirting with me but I couldn’t believe it. I kept trying to do the math in my head to figure out if I could be his grandmother, but I am not good at mental math.

“Do you want me to make them fuck?” He asked, of the GTA character and the topless stripper.

“Noo, that’s fine,” I said nervously, even though I totally did want to watch him make them fuck. It was getting kinda hot in there.

I was so bewildered by the sexual tension I ushered him out, after making plans to have another lesson later that week.

As I was pushing him out the door, he kissed me on the cheek.

“We have a wibe,” he said, in his accent, shyly. He wasn’t wrong. There were vibrations throbbing in the air like a trunk full of sub-woofers.

The next time he came over, I noticed that in his thuggish way, he was dressed up. He smelled strongly of some kind of aromatic body spray and was wearing a Gucci belt buckle and gold chains. I was kinda touched.

I can’t remember if we actually played GTA or not. We did smoke on the patio, and drink a little wine.

“Do you ever just want to be bad?” He asked me.

“No,” I said flatly. “I want to be good.”

A few minutes later, there were clothes all over the floor.

“Are you absolutely sure I am not exploiting you?” I asked him.

“Exploit me,” he said.

I am totally ashamed to admit this, because I think men who do the same thing are mostly pedos — but he was no child, and the ego boost was dynamite. For an older white lady, there is no resisting the classic caramel-skinned cabana boy fantasy (and I apologize for the colonialism of the comment). He was a ghost-orchid, endangered and rare.

While running my hands through his thick black hair, I realized his skull was covered in giant, craggy lumps.

“They fuck me up at the border,” he said, when I asked. “Two guys beating me with the ends of rifles, they stole my papers and my wallet, and leave me for dead.” His skull had clearly been fractured and hadn’t set properly. I wondered if that was part of why he was half crazy.

So we banged a couple of times. I say “banged” because, while fun, it was nasty, brutish and short, I had bruises afterwards, and after the second time I was uninterested in doing it again, because he began to cry and begged me to help him fill out various legal documents so he could keep applying for asylum. He didn’t need an older woman, he needed an immigration attorney, so I stayed up late with him translating interminable documents that even I couldn’t understand, wondering how any immigrant was able to wade through this level of bureaucratic obscurantism, if my perfect English couldn’t crack it.

I tried to befriend him, because I’ve always had a soft spot for the rough boys in my social world. Naturally this friendship involved lending him money that he couldn’t pay back, so sometimes he came around and did my dishes or broke down boxes in my back yard.

He was living in what was supposed to be a storage facility — a totally uninsulated room made of corrugated metal, with a concrete floor. I gave him a beautiful rug, which his dog destroyed immediately.

For a while he was working the meat counter at a grocery store, but he got fired. Bibi grew from a teacup sized dog into a completely obnoxious, bouncing midsize poodle made of curls, springs and spittle, but Ian was wildly devoted to him. The animal seemed to humanize him.

I noticed that Ian seemed to be becoming more jumpy and paranoid. There were some drug dealers, he said, living in the storage unit adjacent to his storage unit, and they were getting into fistfights with him — over what, he was never able to explain. The drug dealers kept calling the cops on him, and he kept calling the cops on the drugs dealers. Mutual assault charges were filed. Ian was getting hyper vigilant and morose.

Once when Ian was doing chores around my house, Bibi escaped from my back yard, and Ian had to drive around looking for him for 40 minutes. He finally found Bibi, spazzing around a front yard 3 blocks over.

“That’s why you need a leash,” I told him.

“I know,” he said in a way that let me know he was never buying a leash. “Can you please do me a favor?”

“Maybe,” I said.

From the front pocket of his hoodie he produced a Sig Sauer 9mm and placed it on my coffee table.

Now, this was a real Goodfellas kind of moment - the handing off of the gun. I wasn’t turned on, but I was kind of intrigued. I didn’t believe he had done anything criminal with it. It was for protection from his scumbag neighbors, he said, and since they kept calling the cops on him, he figured he shouldn’t have the gun in case the police tossed his storage shed. He was afraid if he was caught with it, he’d be deported.

So, I did something most smart people wouldn’t do, and I stuck the gun in a hiding place I had under the floorboards and forgot about it.

A couple of weeks later he sent me a horrible photo on my phone of a large, blood red smear across an asphalt street.

“The fuckers kill my dog,” he wrote to me.

Bibi, it seems, had been bounding around unleashed as usual and had been hit by a car. Ian was devastated. “They kill my son, my baby.” I wasn’t sure who “they” was.

I distanced myself a bit from Ian, since his life seemed to be taking a downward turn that he was not preventing. It was obvious to me that he had PTSD. I had tried to get him to take advantage of the fact that he could get mental health care benefits from his grocery job, but he was too macho to be interested.

I didn’t hear from Ian for several weeks, and then one night when I was in the middle of a Zoom movie club, he started blowing up my phone with urgent calls and texts. I tried ignoring him. Then I heard a pounding on my door.

“I’m here,” said his text.

“You can’t be here, I’m busy,” I wrote back.

The pounding on my door got louder. The glass panes were shaking. “Cintraaaaa! Jesus Christ open the fucking door!!” He screamed. Something was clearly amiss.

I opened the door to scold him and noticed that he was covered with blood, streaming from his mouth and nose down his shirt. “Give me the gun, now!” He screamed at me.

“Go in the back yard!” I yelled at him, not wanting the neighbors to witness this psychotic display.

He walked into my yard and was pacing like an animal.

“OK…what happened?” I asked him, hoping to talk him down.

“Just give me the fucking gun Cintra!! Jesus Christ!!”

I didn’t want anything to do with his nightmare, so I got the gun out from its hiding place and handed it to him. He ran out of the house without another word.

And that was the last I saw of young Ian. For about half an hour I considered calling the cops, but I also didn’t want to be implicated in anything he was on the way to do.

I don’t know what happened to Ian next. I never heard from him again.

If he’s alive, I reckon he’s pretty fucked now. He’ll probably get sent back to Nicaragua if ICE finds him.

I just wanted to play Grand Theft Auto, not live in it.

Good luck, Ian. Vaya con dios.

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: The Nicaraguan, drawn on Procreate

AS SOON AS CINTRA FINISHES MOVING BACK TO CALIFORNIA (TOMORROW) SHE WILL BE OFFERING LIVE CLASSES.

CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM. FOR ALL YOUR EDITING AND FINE ART PAINTING NEEDS.