Recently I saw a photo on a Facebook page dedicated to residents of Quepos. Below his photo was his name and QDEP (Que Decansa en Paz). I knew he had died a few years back, but I had not thought about him in years. At one time he had been someone I dealt with on a regular basis. At the turn of this century, I ran a popular sports bar and restaurant in Quepos. It was located only steps from the malecon and had large open windows that faced the sidewalk.
There were tables that sat just inside the open windows. Though not in the usual job description of a bartender/manager, one of my responsibilities was making sure that the various street people that wandered by throughout the evening did not linger at the windows and bother the paying customers.
I learned from locals that most of the addicts and alcoholics I dealt with were natives of the area, wayward members of large extended families. There were certain families you did not want issues with, so I treated all of the street derelicts as if they were members of those families. I handled them politely and with respect and patience and most figured out with time that lingering at the window or the entrance was not going to get them any handouts.
There was one major exception– the guy in the Facebook photo. I called him the Walking Man. He could be found most hours of the day or night, walking the streets of town barefoot with no real purpose, clad only in a pair of knee-length gym shorts. The blistering sun seemed not to bother him. He would sometimes walk about with a large towel wrapped around his head and body like a burnoose.
At one point he was seen around town wearing a domed plastic garbage can lid for a hat. Unlike some of the street people he was neither loud nor threatening. Yet he was my most bothersome passerby. One of his favorite things to do was to grab unattended drinks from the window tables and quickly guzzle them down. Or simply stand and stare at the customers while they ate and drank. He was a local and there were various versions of how he had ended up on the street.
Long time residents remembered him as a healthy young man, owner of a fishing boat, gainfully employed and something of a ladies man. He had once been athletic– and still had a wiry athletic frame despite years of abuse. I heard a story from multiple sources of the beat down he put on an expat twice his size in an altercation.
I was very careful in my dealings with him, keeping in mind an old saying: “If you fight with a crazy person, an onlooker cannot tell the difference”. He would eventually move along as his affliction, whatever it was, meant he always had the need to keep walking.
There were a few stories circulating as to how he went from health to madness. One was that he lost it when a woman he loved left him. Another was that he drank some type of contrabando liquor that damaged his brain. A prevalent story was that he had gotten very heavily into psilocybin mushrooms and did such massive doses for so long that his brain was rearranged into a permanent state of benign lunacy. Whatever the cause, he was just one of thousands in Costa Rica and millions worldwide for whom there is no safety net.
They slide through the cracks and their descent is an endless freefall, and the streets become their home. In the case of the Walking Man, as he aged, you saw him pacing the streets less and less, until the day arrived when he walked no more..
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Don Mateo
