It’s a crazy life.  One day I’m subjecting myself to abject desiccation by running out in the sparsely inhabited interior of Panama under the tropical midday sun for two hours.  The next day, I’m bopping around the capital city of Panama in a lent car in the early morning seeking out the cool air-conditioning of a hotel bar so as to enjoy a cold beer and the ultimate creature comfort of writing while sitting  and sipping Coronas. 

*sipping and writing*…

While the people of Panama are among the most friendly in the world, in public, very few will make eye contact, except for the tougher, macho  hombres who will try to stare into you as if to discern the source of one’s life force itself.  Women, especially, almost always keep their eyes downcast in passing unless you grab their attention by beeping your horn or cat-whistling or saying something like “Hey, baby, you’re the most happening thing since the invention of sex.”  

Beeping one’s horn in passing a pretty girl seems almost mandatory if you feel you’re a man who could fulfill her (well, actually, more probably your projected) needs.  Horns are forever tooting on the congested main streets of most Panamanian cities and larger towns and I’d estimate that about 10% of those toots are actually hoots for attractively-endowed, actualizing females.  My impression is that if you’re a ‘real man’ in Panama, and both your brakes and horn are broken, that you fix your horn first.   

Cat-whistling, while a lost art due to sensitivity issues in the U.S., is ardently practiced by nearly every male capable of sucking air here in Panama.  Personally, I feel quite disadvantaged, for I’m neither equipped with a good whistle nor normally emboldened in this customary practice.  So I’m more likely to blurt “Hey, baby, you’re the most happening thing since the re-invention of sex at your place tonight” or some such  romantic deliverance.  But the men who can whistle well often do catch a response, albeit only a smile or a giggle from a girl who enjoys the wild energy of such attention. 

The truth is, however, if a gorgeous Panamanian girl, reagradless of how she responds, doesn’t induce such attention from a capable man, she’ll assume that he is either gay, sexually repressed, sick, or standing next to his wife—in that order.  Even married men, when away from their wives, become horn-tooting, cat-whistling boys in an eye-blink.  And, make no mistake, the wives are well-aware of this duplicitous behavior on the part of their husbands.  In fact, though married women frown upon spousal infidelity, oftentimes the total lack of such can lead some wives to wonder if their husbands aren’t, perhaps, closet gays with a convenient heterosexual cover of a wife.   It’s almost…’almost’…as if a married man of urgent potency needs at least one girlfriend to socially affirm his otherwise questionable masculinity.  Strangely non-monogamous, no? Or perhaps it is rather a matter of needing a ‘wife’ in order to qualify for a draw from the ever youth-infused harem pool of ‘girlfriends’?!  ...

 I'm so lost!  Save me, Mr. Wizard, save me!!!