The Shell of a Person
“Welcome to beautiful Costa Rica! Come and experience our diverse wildlife. Exhume nests of dead baby turtles and stay up all night while mosquitoes elicit blood from your very soul! Indulge in the local cuisine. Eat rice and beans until the malnutrition engenders hallucinations! Travel west to Guanacaste, to the peninsula that pokes into the Pacific like a fang. Visit the remote, cocoa-dust beaches where rare sea turtles crawl from the seething ocean to nest. Here, masochists will enjoy camping beside the water to leave civilization and all its conveniences behind. Burn bucketfuls of used toilet paper, shiver in an infested bed, and wade crocodile-filled rivers…every single day!”
Lance Pototschnik and his friends must have booked their trip with that agency. Their incredibly affordable “vacation” was meant to be a relaxing time to meditate on the direction of their languid, aimless lives. Instead, they are introduced to hell and the insane diversity of its tortures.
Marooned on a remote sea turtle conservancy with a handful of fellow unanchored souls, Pototschnik, in his hilarious debut memoir, ponders who he essentially is, and what he is likely to become. In Pototschnik, those who have fallen prey to the desolation of broken dreams, the young and the listless, finally find a voice with the talent to cast out demons and turn them into laughs.
Beneath its shell, this rollicking, episodic story is also a treatise about finding your purpose, realizing your full potential and learning to love your own life. Pototschnik’s very personal book happens to be the story we have all been hoping for.
Excerpt
Pura Vida
The way was just dust, and it wound through the Costa Rican jungle like a stream. It would surely become a stream when the rains came. The view from the bed of the truck, where I was riding with Ivy and the bags, was a smokescreen, a roiling dust devil that we dragged along by the toe. The road emptied out of the forest like a spill and frittered away on the bank of a river, which was evidently being pumped by an ocean tide, surging up somewhere behind the opposite bank.
Ivy and I stepped on the tires to climb out of the bed. Wade got out of the cab with the driver. We all unloaded the luggage onto the sand, careful to set the suitcases on their wheels so that they would not get soiled.
“Cuanto cuesta?” I asked the driver—how much. My Spanish was still weak. I had been rehearsing this conversation.
“Tres mil.” Three thousand Colones, equivalent to six bucks. I made it with a red bill and a blue bill, and as I handed them over, I noticed a driftwood sign tacked to a nearby tree trunk. It read, Cuidado Cocodrillos! in ragged red hand. Caution crocodiles.
Praise for The Shell of a Person
“Never have disgusting, miserable living conditions been so funny. When someone finally finds a way to send back a report from hell, I hope it will be Lance Pototschnik. Except this guy is going to heaven, for the way he writes.”
–Mark Myers
The Kindle Book Review
“Memorable passages that will yank at your heart, and even more that will make you laugh. I loved this book.”
–Laura Friedkin
San Francisco Book Review