Mexico Two

Mexico Two

 

That cabin of the Steinbeck’s became almost a haven for me for a while. There were no phones, no lights, no motorcars, not a single luxury (well, they did have a series of cisterns for running water).  When I needed to escape the grind of Phoenix, it was a refuge, a place to go and think, a place to go and remember, which is why I suppose I am writing this .

Once, when I lived in Oklahoma, where the fucking wind really did come sweeping down the plains, I remembered the time spent down in the Sea of Cortez.  Remember that girl I mentioned earlier? Yeah well, I woke up next to her one day, but she didn’t really seem to care to remember me much, and no, nothing had happened.

I call myself a slut. Hey, I like having sex, sorry if that bothers you.  Anywho, other than a bit of necking, nothing really transpired, and even that was pretty lame, as we had been enjoying Herr Steinbeck’s libations to quite the 9^th degree. Boy, that Mexican mescal will come back to bite you in the ass…literally.  I really didn’t get much action in Mexico. Maybe because I cared too much for these people to just let them only interact with me for a short while. I am not kidding when I say that I loved, and still love, each and every damned one of them.  They are the best of the best, and my life is so much richer because of them, So, here I was surrounded by a bunch of people that I really didn’t know, and guess what? I felt completely at home instantly.

We danced until the sun came up, or slept until it went down on that hot concrete, and we were content.  Yeah, we had our moments. Someone put cinnamon on N’s face one day and the poor girl had red eyes for the rest of the week, and I helped place an entire tube of toothpaste on John while he was dozing in the afternoon heat. (Sorry Papa J )

The flies flew about as we drank our drinks, the chess pieces moved as Jorge steadily ate through everyone’s defenses except for Jimbo’s. I never could stay awake long enough to watch the two of them finish a game. Jorge’s loquacity is only met by his intelligence, and the two seem to meet at a whirlpool that would make Hedley Lamarr (that’s Hedley) blush…listening to him and Jimbo yap is the equivalent of pure sleeping potion. It’s all in monotone, with the occasional “hehehehehe” from Jim, and the rest of the rhetoric is housed by the spirit of cigar smoke and the clink of glasses.

I know it sounds boring. I loved every minute.

Most of us kept on coming back to the Casa every year, or even more often, as we grew older. There was a certain quietness that floated about there, it made you feel like you were doing  o.k., and the universe really wasn’t out to really get you.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds nice.

Of course, you sort of had to be quiet in the summer, as there was no air conditioning at all. Shit, there was no electricity!  A blow dryer was something that was done by consensual adults on the back porch, typically after an early morning fiasco at JJ’s Bar and Cantina. (if you are ever down there, apologize to them for knowing me)  A fan was something imported from China that you had to wave about or made out of a used Sport’s Illustrated mag from underneath the table.  Hell, a cup of cold water could get you a kiss from the girls in the house.  I always ended up making the coffee.  I’m not stupid.

I think the only skill that I did perfect, and I still will put my mitts up against anyone’s on the planet, is that of shucking shrimp. I can de-shell a shrimp faster than anyone I know, and yes, that includes the vein.  I couldn’t afford the bloody things, so in trade, I would skin those little bastards in blinding speed. Spanky came close to me in how many per minute, but with a  bit of Steinbeck Go Juice, I became a master of the shrimp scalping!

On a side note:  Spanky, who I have not seen in a number of years, and do miss horribly, made the best toasted cheese sandwiches I have ever tasted. Mayonnaise. Yep. He puts it on prior to placing the pieces of bread in the skillet, with just a little bit of oil to brown the bread, then toasts them to perfection. He can actually do this even after suffering a head injury, as he did while trying to get to a “naval war” game too fast while we were in Ensenada, Mexico. The stairs were obviously not meant for someone that is 6’2”, and boy, did he clip the hell out of his forehead!  We have a photo of him cooking with a big bloody rag on his head for proof.

Bandage and all, he continued to make sandwiches for all of us, and there were a lot of us, all night long, as we watched yet another game of something (I don’t remember) go terribly awry.

When I play “liar’s dice”, I play to lose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yucatan One

 Yucatan

   Yes, the Yucatan peninsula is indeed in Mexico, though parts of it are also owned by other countries that change their names a lot. The British Honduras became Belize in the space of a week once, then back again, and then back again.  Rebel troops from southern Mexico are always troubling those fun and friendly federale’s with their lovely M-16’s and Ingram’s.  Some hotels will warn to “not venture out at night”, and I don’t think it is just because of the mosquitoes.

   Speaking of mosquitoes, those little blood sucking bastards, I did manage to contract one of the world’s most popular parasitic infections from them in the Yucatan.  Ignoring the signs that I could not read, I plunged into a swamp in search of Belonosox belizianus, the live-bearing pike minnow. We had a new exhibit opening at the zoo, and I wanted a pair, at least.  Mosquitoes rarely bite me, in fact, my roommate slept with nothing but her nose and fingers above the sheets during our stay, whilst I slept on top of the covers, in my birthday suit, with nary a bite! She, however, had dozens of raised lumps on her fingers every dawn. I think that the bugs figured I was some sort of a trap?

Anyway, I did end up contracting some sort of malaria, though the species has, to this date, never been properly identified. I kept on getting blood drawn from different doctors, to the point that I felt like some sort of a Danish pincushion, all with no firm results. Suffice to say, when those little flying vampyres are about, most of the people who know me tend to stay far, far away.

Enough about those pests, though, and onto the lovely Yucatan!  I had the best French Onion Soup at a resort’s restaurant there, near Akumal, staggering distance down the beach from our condo, as well as some fantastic sort of ‘monte cristo’ sandwiches that were trundled by every day by a very quaint lady who also tried to sell me blankets. Blankets? It was about 99 fucking degrees at this point in the year. I guess if you came out of the surf at midnight, you might be able to use the blanket to lay down so you wouldn’t crunch all of the hermit crabs on the beach as you made your way to the sliding glass door that let you into the blessed coolness of artificial air conditioning. The same electricity that powered that unit also gave us the ability to crush ice for margaritas, which led to the staggering, which led to the stumbling…well, you see, it was indeed a vicious cycle.

I don’t mean there were a few hermit crabs. Not at all. There were hundreds of thousands of them, clicking and clacking as they ate whatever had passed out or drifted up on the beach. I know for a fact that one German girl only talked to me once, and I never saw her again. Of course, it could be that I was talking to her topless figure, though. My roommate smacked me in the back of the skull for that incident. It was that smack that made me look up ( “I see stars!”) and notice the incredibly huge spider that had made a nest way up in the Palapa hut. It must have been at least an inch wide at the rear, and in a good three foot wide web, about 3 meters up off of the bar at the apex of the hut. I asked the bartender if it ever came down from there.  “ not yet, senor.”    They are very phlegmatic in the south.

The snorkeling near Akumal, which is about 60 or so kilometers to the south of Cancun  (forgive me for the latitude of my mileage, I didn’t drive) is absolutely phenomenal. Phenomenal !!!  There are fish there that would scare a normal person straight out of their trunks and onto the beach.  The cute little damsels will try to eat away at your ankles if you have painted nails, as my roommate and her friend found out, and they are fascinated with people who have had too much of that great French Onion Soup and perhaps a plate or two of Garlic Shrimp, as I found out.  O.K. Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

   The first night at the condo, I had two platters of garlic shrimp done on the local barbeque side-of-the-road-stand.  I woke at about four in the morning with that strange feeling in the lower stomach that usually precludes something that is certainly promising to not be so pleasant. It wasn’t. I could have bought stock in the local “toiletpaper-eria”, except I think they were using all of the excess sandpaper to polish the yachts that occasionally drifted up to the southern pier, and disgorged a slew of people who did not eat at road side stands.

After a day of the squirts, I became fed up with sitting in the bathroom while my roomies played around the playa outside. Racing past the large iguana who had taken a liking to my beach towel, I did make it down the white sand beach and manage to plunge into the crystal clear water before leaving a chili surprise.

Now, even my mother will tell you, animals actually do like me. Some of them want to kill me, but that is just because I look tasty. Ask Archimedes.  The fish in the cauldron of the Akumal reef were no different, they greeted me with open fins!

I swam about with a cloud of thousands of my new, bestest friends in a lovely arrow positioned in a huge delta just three feet or so from my rear end, which, since it was no longer on the porcelain, was free to just sphincter away as it willed. It had been anyway for at least two days by this point. In a school of blue, red, yellow, and purple I meandered above the verdant corals and live rock structures, without a care in the world, and had many of my new accompanying feasters swim up by my face, as if to ask, “Have you tried the French Onion Soup yet?”

(I really should add, at this point, that an extremely good man that I know, in fact, the minister at my wedding , is staying near Playa d. Carmen as I type this…Jorge, if you have the Onion Soup, don’t wear your wetsuit and stay near the beach!)

Yes, the soup was fantastic, and day after day the little fish would come out to greet me. I was the fucking St. Paul of the Ocean !!!!  I could envision little fountains all over southern Mexico with little sculptures of me and the clouds of little fish coming to feast from my buttocks!  I was a fish God !

Normally, when you are snorkeling, you tend to look down unless:

A: you have a fancy floaty bubble-thing that blocks water from coming in, or

B: you can breathe salt water.

I can’t do/didn’t have either. I can however, hold my breath for up to four minutes at a stretch sometimes, and still talk or whistle. I’m still working on the harmonica thing.

I actually can do the entire “got no satisfaction” Devo version without having to breath at all, though I am purple and sometimes swerve a bit in traffic.  Anyway, so here I am, chumming away  placidly in my little cove, when my escort suddenly just disappears. “What the hell?” I know that there was still a bunch of brown goodness that was flowing from my parasitic-ridden arse to keep the little bastards happy, but they lit out on me!

Bump.

I looked up, saw an eye about two inches in diameter, and yes, breathed in through my snorkel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who missed it:

http://www.azfamily.com/video/gmaz-index.html?nvid=350392

Mexico Adventures: Part One

   In college, I was invited to attend a spring-break gathering by a close friend of mine, Jimbo. We called him Jimbo since his name was Jim, and the “bo” part just seemed to fit rather well. I had only been out of the continental United States a few times prior, and this was to our friends north of Minnesota, the French Canadians. Personally, I have never been much impressed with the bits of Canada that I have seen, but I haven’t seen very much, mostly rest-stops and blue plate diners that always have chicken fried steak as the special.  My father always insisted that the Canadians were rude and unsociable, and none of us would ever point out that as a former Marine Commando type, perhaps it wasn’t just them?

    I typically get along with everyone, except for a select group of southern baptists who did not care for my changing of the verses in some hymns to reflect my love and adoration of the sea god Cthulhu in 1983. I was politely invited to not attend the church again (I was only there at a friend’s request anyway).

   Anyway, I found myself in the back of a dark brown pickup truck driven by a friend of  Jimbo’s, actually his roommate, named “Trey”. He was named Trey because his legal name was Steinbeck, and yes, the parents had given him the John treatment. That sort of thing can scar you for life, I wonder what  mothers and fathers are thinking sometimes? In my youth, I often complained about being named Greg. Greg the egg. Greg the egg, and Dede Dorfmann sitting in a tree…”k,i,s,s,y and g !” I made a promise once, that if I ever had children, I would come up with a name that no one could make fun of. Good luck, the closest I have come to is “Severian”, which my wife insists sounds like a gay broadway dance producer.

   No one made much fun of J. Steinbeck, as he was much larger and stronger than any of  us, and after all, it was his parent’s house we were goin to be staying at. This house, or cabin if you will, was located on the Sea of Cortex in beautiful Mexico. At least, that is what the brochures said.

   Trey’s father ran a summer outreach program for students interested in zoology and oceanography, and the little two bedroom cottage would hold as many as 30 people in a pinch, due to several massive cement porches. Mexican cement porches are different from most cement porches, as they have shells and whatnot embedded within them. Workers show up with bags of cement and a mixer, and then use the beach sand to mix it with. Once, I tried explaining that the salt content in the sand would hurt the integrity of the lime based concrete, but my Spanish is poor, and I mostly just caused a lot of delays. Sometimes I think they thought I was trying to tell them to bury their dog in the cement.  After ten minutes or so of gesturing, they would just get back to work, and leave me a little red faced in the sun, with my arms waving about like a drunk heron.

  So, sitting in the back of a dark brown pickup truck in southern Arizona, heading towards the border for the first time, I was somewhat uneasy. Uneasy as well as extremely over-heated. The hydration mostly came in the form of beer, which led to some seriously bizarre conversations. I do remember one girl leaning out of the cab (the women folk got to ride up front) to get a couple of cold ones, and letting me see heaven for a moment, more on that later.  It turns out that most of the people headed down to the beach resort were of the military bend, air force, navy, even a marine!  All of them were quite genial, and since they were all in ROTC (reserve officers training), were extremely well educated. By the time we hit the border, most of that education had worn off due to a fair amount of inebriation, I am not casting stones at glass houses, I am proud to say I was right in the trenches of combat with them. We had met the beer, and we had prevailed.

   I was of a positive bend until it came time to hit the liquor hut. These people were buying a serious amount of stuff, and I had come down with some top ramen and maybe fifteen bucks, holy cow, I was completely unprepared for what was to follow.

Rats in the Refrigerator

 

   Most people, when they say that they do have a rodent population in their refrigerator, are troubled by them gnawing at cables and getting stuck in the cooling fans and such. I’ve heard it creates quite a smell.  A friend of mine had a series of chest freezers go offline once in the summer, unfortunately, they were full of dead emus being stored for “further use”. He didn’t find out that the freezers had blown the circuit breaker for a few days, after all, how often do you check on frozen emus?  The  odor was indeed astounding, I am sure that he had vultures circling his house for a long time after opening the first one.

  In our house, our cold rodents are much more of even temper, since they are all dead, and stored in little Ziploc freezer bags, nicely arranged in even rows, like German troops in the Great War.

    When one takes care of exotic animals, such as Archimedes the owl and my wife’s python, Princess, you just get used to having the little things next to the leftovers.  The rats, of course, are kept in plain brown bags also, and most people know not to ask what is in the packages. My Great Aunt Kay, and I do mean “Great”, was the only one to open one without knowing  the contents. Great Aunt Kay sort of billowed about a house, in her bright red and yellow muumuu’s, often commenting about the lack of any spirits of decent sort in her current highball glass. She was a very high-minded lady, and used to discuss the 1920’s with a curious aplomb that often left me quite winded by just imagining the high-jinks she got into.  She was brazen and extremely honest about life, wonderful qualities in a Great Aunt, but was horrified to see, at a  modern motion picture, that the actress had “shown her knees!” Thank god she never saw any of Kubrick’s films, she would have become catatonic.  In her house in California, she had a marvelous pool with an octopus tile mural at the bottom, I keep on trying to find a photo of it, but am stuck with only the memory so far.

 Once while out visiting, she volunteered to get some chicken that needed to be thawed out for a future dinner out of the freezer in the garage, and no one thought to mention that the brown paper sacks marked “chicken” were in fact baby chicks, pullets, destined for the gullet of my Reticulated Python. My parents knew, I knew, even my girlfriend knew, that it was best to avoid opening up the bag and seeing those little faces staring straight up at you. I think she expected a fryer or something. To this day, I still think she fainted not because of the sight of baby chicks, but the thought that those were the chickens we were going to really have for dinner.  Sort of a “poor mans” game hen.

Vapid Confessions of an Aquarist

 

Greg Ewald 2009

 

   There is something about depression that is, well, incredibly depressing, isn’t there?   Dealing with the daily squabble to make ends meet, trying to keep a smile on your face when someone walks through the door, it can be very difficult. I guess that is why they call it life.

   Take the  Hawaiian Lionfish for example.  Here you are, floating about the lovely coral reefs and snacking on some shrimp when some pus bag with a net scoops you up and sticks you into a meter long aquarium. There are probably some of those dodgy toys in there too, though you might like the one with the pirate skeleton and chest that bubbles. Now, how does that fish cope with depression?  He may nip about the tank and harass the other inmates that he hasn’t swallowed yet, and make the occasional attempt to spear the aquarium keeper with his poisonous dorsal spines, but other than that, he seems content to float about the coral and rock and stare off into the distance. 

   The reputedly intelligent octopus from the same bay may well sulk for a month or two, coming out from a shelter to nab an occasional passing crab. When you see them in their little grottos, they glare at you magnificently, and thrash around their arms while turning different colours. If you rip one of these out of the wild, they rarely last long, many dying trying to get back to the mother ocean and drying out on your carpet while you are out picking up a new filter.

  Piglet, my bichir, I have had for, jeez, I guess 20 years so far, and she seems quite content to gulp down her pellets in the morning and attempt to bite the cat that likes to sun herself on top of the tank.  The light from the western window shines in perfectly on top of the tank, filtered by one of the largest Pothos plants ever grown in an aquarium, I think it is about nine feet long now, with foot wide leaves, and goes in and out of the tank as it wills. That plant is not depressed, and neither is Piglet. She gets very excited when I come in through the door with a bag of goldfish for her (the fish kind, not the snack) and races back and forth across the tank just waiting to get her sharp teeth onto them. I’ve never eaten one, as I refused to be part of a fraternal organization in college, but they must taste pretty darn good.

  If my wife or a friend came through the front door with a bag of goldfish, I don’t think I could summon the same enthusiasm.  Even if they were the cracker sort.

   The snakes I have known do get quite happy when they smell mice. Note: if you have recently handled mice, do not attempt to pick up your juvenile Reticulated Python unless you have a large supply of cotton tissue and duct tape nearby.

   Some people insist that animals can not feel joy or happiness. I think this is a pile of rubbish. You can not tell me that my Collie is not extremely happy rolling around in a dead mouse, and probably eating it in preparation to vomit it up at around two in the morning on one of the carpeted sections of the house we live in.  Puking on the tile would be too easy to clean up, and therefore, not as much fun.

  My owl, on the other hand, does seem to suffer from the same sort of depression as I do, and looks very dour most of the time, unless there is a cat nearby. He becomes quite animated around the cats, why, I don’t know, as they are completely indifferent to him, as if he was one of those plastic ones seem people mount on top of their houses for the pigeons to crap on.  Now and again he will hoot at me, but for the most part, just glares a lot, typically at the back of my neck. It is like writing in the studio with an accountant who never will believe that you misplaced one of the documents needed prior to the 15^th of April.  That dead silent glare.

   The freshest of dead mice ( I will not torture even mice, but buy them frozen and thaw them out on my desk, much to the chagrin of my wife at times) fails to even arouse the slightest bit of happiness from him. In fact, he looks at you such dripping contempt that you feel obligated to go shower, though that is probably not a bad idea after handling the dead mice anyway, and come back cleansed with a big smile on your face. 

Maybe if I brought him some goldfish?

   I myself find that now and again I succumb to depression, and tend to look to the animals to see how they handle it so well.  Of course, my bichir doesn’t have a house payment due in three days, or has to talk to the credit card company for hours on end to find out why my bill is so ridiculously high (all of the goldfish) and why they persist on sending out bills two days after they are listed as “past due”.   I do believe the owl understands a bit, he could probably be quite a good therapist for someone who likes to talk at three in the morning.

   The fish seem placid no matter what, except for the goldfish , and swim merrily about their tanks, and reproducing much more than they should.  They even seem to like the sunken ship ornament, and the little “no fishing” signs placed there. If the lights come on, they are happy, if they get fed, they are happy, and if nothing happens, they still just bang about the tank looking at whatnot and seeming to be quite content, I envy them so much.  I suppose that is why so many dentists put them in their parlors, to give a sense of calm contentment to the people who are willing to have a complete stranger bore holes in their jaw with a fancy Dremel tool. I think the dental practices use the aquaria to cover up the sounds of screams and bone dust flying via the loud filtration too.  If you have a large external filter running, it sounds somewhat like you are about fifty yards from Niagra Falls, and even the sound of people running in abject terror can be covered up.