I was surviving living pay check to paycheck but I was stilling getting by in what was supposed to be a new life and paradise, but was quickly becoming a living nightmare, with not much living involved. My college degree was not needed for the jobs available without a work permit and that paid a decent salary.
However, with the fact that I needed to use about ¼ of my brain (might be overstating the brain use), I was able to drink and party every night. My life was continuing in its downward spiral and I was unable to see it myself, or truth be told I did not want to see it.
The next stop on the remedial job list in Costa Rica, which took me about a week to find and get hired, was selling AT&T service to businesses in the USA. Yep I was working for “The Man.” At this job as it is with most jobs both in Costa Rica and the world you start in a grunt position and learn and then advance to a position with more pay and more responsibility. I was turning a bit Costa Rican at this time, all I wanted to do was do enough work to keep my job and collect my base salary.
What this employment in Costa Rica consisted of was calling businesses in the USA and going through the following:
“Hi, this is Dan from xxxxxxxxxx (no need to say who I was working for), if I could keep all if your numbers the same would you want to save 20% per month on your phone bill?” If the answer was yes I would get them a quote by asking number of phone lines etc… Usually the answer though was do not ever call me again AT&T is the devil, but not in those words. So 100 plus calls per day, 3 to 5 quotes per day, and no brain power required. I however always did about 5 to 10 calls a day with different accents and screwed with people just for shits and giggles.
I felt like my life was pretty much worthless subconsciously I began to really let myself go and did not much care about my appearance. It happens when you lose your feeling of self-worth. All that was going through my mind was I am a college graduate doing the work of someone that finished maybe 6th grade. I think the worst part was the fact that the people around me I knew had the brain power of a wet fart and yet were telling me what to do. So I pretty much became a bum. I would go out and party every night, I would shower about every other day, and would even wear the same clothes, shoes and socks from one day to the next. I just did not care anymore. As long as I had enough money to gamble, drink and do drugs that was all I needed. Those hours at night when I was high were the only ones I could deal with how far my life had fallen.
I was a person that no one really wanted to be around, not even myself. I truly believe at that point and for about 
another year or so I was trying to kill myself like the movie “”Leaving Las Vegas”. I would get my paycheck or commissions and go gamble until I had zero money in my pocket and then walk the about 6 miles through dangerous downtown San Jose to Escazu. I had no fear and honestly was probably never harmed because I know the criminals in San Jose knew I had no money. Throw in the fact I most likely looked homeless probably saved my life.
Kristy and I’s “relationship” was nothing. It consisted of us partying together and sleeping together about 3 nights a week. The other nights we would not see each other or were at each other’s throats because of the withdrawal symptoms not having alcohol or drugs. We also both had our terrible quirks when we did coke. She was a talker about past experiences, gymnastic career when she was a teen and other past experiences. You may be thinking that this does not sound that bad, it is when you are also high and it is the same stories repeated every single night. Then there was me, I put my finger in my nose and think people are looking at me. Looking back everything about us being together and our lives was toxic and unhealthy, but through her cheating on me and my destroying myself we still stayed together, co-dependent on each other.
During this period in my life we were put in contact with a couple of guys from Colorado that lived in a house up in the mountains outside of Escazu. This house is where we would go almost every weekend and was forever deemed “The Crazy House.” It is a time in our lives that everyone hopes to forget and I know that everyone there would like to block it out for their memories. The house was located in in a place where after about 10 pm taxis would not come because of the incline of the road leading to the property. This made it a place from which it felt like there was no escape, but the memories are burned in all of our minds.
I will not go into the details but the weekends at “The Crazy House” were just that…..crazy. We would usually head up there on Friday’s and start partying that night. I will not go into too many details but there were multiple drugs there every weekend. Friday night’s about 2 am you would want to leave but being that no taxis would come you were there 
until the next delivery of drugs arrived and before you knew it 2 am on Saturday night had arrived. More than once the phone calls to call in sick to work Monday would be a necessity as we would finally be going to sleep at noon on Monday after being awake 3 days straight.
The characters that would come to party there were pretty much bottom of the barrel. There was a local Costa Rica that would get high and start singing the Billy Joel song “Honesty” and just the chorus over and over and over again. We had the 2 guys from Colorado that were probably the most mentally damaged people I have ever had the displeasure to be around. We had Kristy and I and our quirks. I do not think I could take another one of Kristy’s gymnastics stories again. We had a guy that said he was an Auburn baseball player and pitched in the college world series, but even though we researched it online in front of him he kept with his lie. Every weekend it was the same and I do not want to write every much about it but will give you a few morsels from the nights.
A few of the incidents that are burned into our minds is the fact that one of the guests one weekend upper decked the toilet in one of the houses and then wiped poop on the walls of the other house. We also had the naked guy with a knife night when one of the people there was so paranoid he was running around naked with a knife. After being up for multiple days you also start to hallucinate and the most vivid one was since Escazu has a reputation of having witches, we truly believed there were witches in the bamboo next to the house.
All of these weekends and the fact that I was living with very little hygiene made it so about 2 months into the AT&T job I was fired. The reason I was fired was not because I was not doing my job. It was not because I had called in sick too many times. It was because I smelled. I was literally fired because a couple of the people around me said they could not work because of the stench that was me. This was about as close to rock bottom as I thought I could travel, but it ends up that it could get worse.
Even with all the things that were going on with my life and everything going wrong I could not see that I needed to change and do it now. I truly believed I could continue the life I was living and all the problems would magically disappear. In a matter of 2 months I had become a shell of who I used to be and had no desire to try to get better.
I again was in need of another job and began my search which landed me at what turned out to be a scam. This was one of many scams that are going on here in Costa Rica. In this next part I will mention real people’s names as the SEC in the USA did nothing about this scam and these guys have still not had to face the consequences of their actions.
Next Up –Costa Rica Fraud – The Valcor Investment Scam
