Johnny be good?

by leaffin at 07:24 PM on October 06, 2005

When I was living and working in Nicaragua, there was this kid who started coming around the beach. He was a skinny guy but pretty muscular and had hair that kinda hung over his eyes. He said he was 14. One of the first nights I met him, he was getting drunk at the bar and started talking to me. He told me that he was an orphan. Well, not exactly. He said that he was adopted, and he told stories of abuse by his adoptive family, which he'd fled. He lived on the street (or at that point in time, on the beach). He nearly started crying when he started talking about his birthmother, who he thought was somewhere in northern Nicaragua. He'd never met her. He said that he lived for the day he could meet her.

Now, when he was telling me all this, I thought it was really special that he'd opened up to me and told me his heart-breaking story. Then he started to hit on me, despite our 10+ year age difference, and he started talking about how "age doesn't matter"...

Well, he was easy enough to brush off, and I saw him around the beach. He never tried to hit on me again, probably because I was a bit of a permanent tourist. It was pretty amusing to watch this scrawny guy try to pick up all of the hot chicks who floated through. He was learning the tricks pretty quickly from the other locals and started to offer girls surf lessons, despite his lack of surfing knowledge. He'd try to teach them Spanish and claimed an intense desire to learn English.

Ya had to hand it to him, though... he had no fear. He would just walk up to a group of people and start talking to them. He spoke no English, and the tourists around there sometimes spoke no Spanish, but he made it work. I noticed his priorities with time: girls, beer, weed, things.

My boss gave him work for a little while helping out with some construction types of things, paying him with food and accomodation and maybe a tiny bit extra. His eyes lit up when he told me that he had a job. He was so excited to not have to worry about where to sleep for the night.

At first, I admired him for being able to make do with no money or anything. Then he started walking up to tables and asking the folks around them if he could have some of their beer, or if they wanted to buy him a hamburger. Eventually, I noticed that he would tell his sob story, then ask for something from the tourists-- cd player, surfboard, tent. All of which he got.

After a while, my boss told him that he couldn't work there any more because the tourists had started to complain that he just mooched off of everyone and got drunk all of the time. I realized with time that he lied all of the time. About which girls he'd slept with, what drugs he'd done, who was his girlfriend. I really didn't know how to feel about the situation. If his story about his family (or lack thereof) was true, he'd had a really rough life. And he still had an ok attitude about everything, still had some spunk. Who can blame him for telling a made up story for handouts? Doesn't have money or a home, so at least he's creative with his story.