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.