X Marks the Spot

My neighborhood is called Chão de Papel, which in Portuguese means paper floor, but in Kriol it is pronounced Tchon di Pepel, which means the land of the Pepel tribe. The house faces out onto a green plaza, which is surrounded by low barbed-wire fence and is maintained by young men cutting the grass by hand with machetes. It’s a Sisyphean task, much like the shoveling of mud from the street. During the rainy season the grass seems to spring back into place with the dawn. Every time it rains, the mud accumulates and clogs the gutter, which is a foot-deep channel that is filled with strange floating items and oily water and probably enough cholera to kill an elephant.

I have also had the dubious honor of living for a month in close vicinity with the infamous X Club. After undergoing a recent renovation, the X Club is newly painted, with large guards in black manning the door. The X Club, shockingly, is not a strip club, it is in fact an expat hangout complete with snooker tables and cheesy candelabras on the bar. The most fabulous aspect of the X Club, which somehow I failed to notice until my second visit, is the DJ booth. The DJ Booth is somewhat unusual. It is a bus. Somehow, an old bus was installed inside the Club, for what reason I cannot say. All that it lacks is windshield wipers flipping from side to side, and a petulant brown goat meandering in its path.

To make matter worse, the DJ put on a most ironic record right at the moment I was gaping at the bus. “You can check in, but you can never leave.” Hotel California is my boss’s way of describing life in Bissau. Now that she has been finagled into signing another six-month contract, the song once again reveals its frightening truth…