Hostel People

Johnny had raw tattoos on his knuckles, noticeably swollen. He was tall and husky, with stringy bleached hair and broad shoulders. He was built like a linebacker who retired as a stoner. When I looked at what he was reading, I had to hide my smirk. Good Vibes, Good Lives, the pink cover read. It was February, and we were at a pool bar in Miami after all.

“I really miss my best friends,” he said, sitting down next to me. He told me they had stayed up all night on South Beach and “shared our deepest darkest secrets,” before watching the sunrise.

I licked the salt from my margarita glass and deliberated. “How long have you all been friends?”

“Four days,” he said flatly. He didn’t seem to register this as delusional. “But we had a real deep spiritual connection. All my homies are vibrating on a high frequency.”

When I finally took a sip, I let myself wince. He smelled like rotten fish. Sand and dirt tucked into his nail beds. I wondered if time or space holds more weight in an intangible bond. Space over time, I decided, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

He slid an elastic off his wrist. “They left me,” he said glumly. “They flew back to the Midwest this afternoon.” He clawed his greasy strands into a ponytail. I stared at his sunburnt neck and the half-finished yin and yang tattoo behind his ear for too long. 

“You’ll see them soon,” I replied with unwarranted authority. I had nothing better to say.

I wore a blue bikini, a pink and blue ombre mesh wrap around my waist and Old Navy flip-flops my mom had bought me. I looked as cheap and approachable as this hostel. I was 20. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care. My phone buzzed. When I looked down to reply to Gabe, who I’d meet up with tomorrow, we broke eye contact.

This was when Johnny told me I had kind eyes. Men always know when there’s someone else.

“Thanks,” I said. “You have an openness about you.”

Johnny placed one hand in front of his face, like a salute at 180 degrees, his other hand over his heart. “Up here, you can’t always have conversations, up here,” he said, gesturing to his head.

“What do you mean?” I asked, my eyebrows scrunched.

“There’s a difference between small talk and big talk.”

“Big talk can make me feel small,” I said. “In a good way. I become aware of my own finite existence.”

“That’s what I’m gettin at!” Johnny said, giddy now.

“I can’t always have ‘big talk’ though.” It has an unbearable heaviness when it’s spoken too soon.

Johnny shifted his bar stool closer to mine. He said he couldn’t hear me well. But it was almost like an attempt to absorb some of my youth if he got near enough.

I examined his leather skin. “How old are you?”

He told me he was 33. The same age as Jesus when he died.

***

The pool area hummed with young people who smoked more than swam. Tibetan prayer flags without text hung limply and one palm tree tried to convince us of a sense of vacation. From our stools, Johnny and I listened and swayed to the new Bad Bunny album, emanating from a speaker that appeared to be a rock. I stared at the sign above the liquor wall and ‘Beach, please’ stared back at me in a fluorescent green glow.

“You ever read Marcus Aurelius?” Johnny leaned over to ask me.

“Who?”

“Marcus Aurelius, the stoic philosopher.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, rinsing the last of my drink. I smiled at the bartender for another margarita. “Doesn’t get enough attention these days. Jordan Peterson steals his thunder.”

Johnny didn’t laugh. “Huh?” I didn’t mind his strain of autism. I wasn’t sure if I meant Peterson or Jeffrey Bezos anyway.

“Go on,” I said, encouragingly.

“He’s just so good,” he gushed. “Aurelius says you have power over your mind, not outside events, and when you realise this, you will find strength.” I repeated this to myself but found no strength to leave my chair.

Johnny’s voice drifted from Aurelius to Carl Jung to Alan Watts. Ideas and names tumbled over each other. It was a relief to hear about the shadow self and the polarity of life and forget about my own. “They come from different angles but all teach us about being in the moment,” he said.

I nodded but it dawned on me that Johnny still hadn’t asked me my name. I looked down at my neglected tacos. Deep-fried cod soaked my paper plate. I was about to crumble it all up and throw it away when he intervened.

“I’m starving, man,” he said and reached over. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Here, take them,” I said. My voice felt like it belonged to someone else. The waiter came over with my margarita and looked concerned; the two of us were a suspicious pair. But Johnny didn’t seem like a pervert, he wasn’t harassing me. I liked having someone to talk to. He was just a misunderstood pigeon.

Johnny, miserably unaware, looked at me, then my tacos. He chomped down. “Appreciate you,” he said, grinning. “Sometimes you gotta just trust the moment.”

I didn’t know if Johnny was recruiting me into his way of thinking or stuck in his own world. I looked into his droopy eyes and started thinking about Gabe. It had been three years since I’d seen him. Why did it take him so long to call me? I was too lonely to ask. In Johnny I saw a version of myself where trust felt impulsive, reckless.

“Well, sometimes you gotta care about tomorrow,” I said. “The future is near.”

“Yeah, dude. But I need someone on the same vibe as me.”

I nodded in defeat. My eyes started to shut. I had taken a five-hour flight from New York that morning but emotional labor to Johnny was the path of least resistance. So I looked him in the eyes. “I’m here,” I said.

“I know man, you know, we’re on this wavelength.”

The bartender called last orders. We both shook our heads no, and Johnny kept on talking. He told me that his best friend Dave had shot himself in Ohio two weeks ago.

“Christ, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, it’s life,” he said solemnly. “I even gave him my apartment, let him stay with my momma.” The details of this living situation were entirely lost on me.

“But these books man, are saving me.”

Johnny showed me his knuckles. The gothic cursive spelled his friend’s name. “To Dave,” he said.

“To Dave,” I said, holding up my glass.

“I was scared to leave but I had to quit my job as a waiter.” He came to Miami on a one-way plane ticket. “My life had to begin again.”

“Yeah, you have to keep living, for him,” I said. For some reason, I placed my hand on his forearm. I felt a compulsion to comfort this stranger.

“Exactly,” he said. “I came here to find myself.”

“I don’t think we ever get found,” I said. “Or fill a void. Maybe we just get better at talking about it, dealing with it.”

“Appreciate you darling,” he said again. The pool lights started to flicker.

Sheridan Wilbur is a writer from New England living in London.