Panama // Alana
PARTYDOLL ALMANAC
Alana runs through the jungle in tattered layers of handmade fairy skirts and something beige resembling a vest or cardigan that was once a full shirt made of wide-net crochet but has caught and ripped so many times it's now an amorphous scrap and hilarious to watch her discern the armholes from the rest when she puts herself inside it. There's a My Little Pony doll stuck to the side of her head, a My Little Pony or a plastic banana, depending on the day, on how long since she's been back to her tent, seemingly floating on a hidden headband swallowed by her blonde-pink-blue long dreadlocks or woven into a mixed-metal crown. Her sunglasses are cheetah-print and the frames curl up over her eyes like cat ears. She has the same frames in solid black, too.
She's a British-born professional boxer and boxing instructor living in Thailand who just about a month ago got her visa un-renewed and was given 28 days to clear out of the country after building her life there. Now here she is, at a psytrance festival in Panama, a little more homeless than most of the other people here, because she doesn't have a home anywhere in the world other than her tent, and isn't an intentionally itinerant tech consultant, and was anyway homeless in Thailand, having been evicted shortly before her deportation, but she didn't go back to Britain, she went to Panama, with her glitter and her tent.
She always shares her cigarettes, and she pauses to think before laughing her eager laugh, and sometimes she makes an annoying baby voice when she's nervous. She showed me the best places to pee in secrecy, and the thickness of trees that marks the edge of the reach of the neighboring estate's unleashed guard dogs.
It's hard to describe where I was so let me start by saying it was where Alana was.
Alana, standing next to shirtless sunburned David, beside the elevated stage built from tree branches and driftwood, facing a slow-moving crowd of passive dancers turned in all directions. It's nighttime and Alana is backlit, standing on a grassy precipice above the Caribbean Sea. The waves are crashing behind her. The dance floor is a clearing encircled by trees, deep jungle trees knotted in vines that grow up-and-down, up-and-down, like if you took a picture of a regular forest and scribbled over it with a vine-colored crayon.
There are three hammocks, exhausting all suitable hammock tree sets, you can just go and sit on one if you want. Some people are sitting on blankets on the ground and some blankets are sitting by themselves. Trees make three walls, and the fourth wall is the stage with the sea and sky behind it. There's a DJ on the stage. There's always a DJ on the stage, night and day, spinning psytrance. One spotlight points backward, off the driftwood stage and into the Caribbean, spotlighting the people dancing knee-deep in the water, making the sea an extension of the grassy dance floor, down below the stage and speakers, the loudest endless sound from anywhere around.
David and Alana are nestled next to the stage's knotted branches, facing the crowd, because they are working at the bar. The bar is a big plastic bin. Inside the plastic bin is melted ice and cans of Atlas beer they maneuvered through the jungle path each taking turns in the wheelbarrow, supplies borrowed from the Driftwood Bar. Stuck to the front of the plastic bin is a cardboard sign that says DRINK ME in black marker. It's a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and it's funny because the beer is the only thing around that isn't hallucinogenic. It must have taken them hours to find a marker.
David and Alana are standing on opposite sides of the plastic bin. David is picking up the machete next to the stage and holding it out in front of his body, parallel to the ground. He's reaching it up to his face, then extending it to reach Alana's face. She's sniffing methamphetamine off the tip of the machete, her eyes periscopic and tearing through the universe.