wild surmise (not wild surprise)

For Dave, the winter's only bright moments had been the postcards from his friend Kirk, who was traveling in Mexico. Each brought bright pictures of sun-drenched beaches or Mexican children wearing hand-crafted ponchos, and each had brief notes describing another fling, another night spent on the beach dancing with Israeli travelers, another day spent diving into waterfalls in Chiapas.

After three icy-cold days in a row when he didn't leave his house, Dave decided that March in Pittsburgh needed a serious counter-measure, so he bought a round-trip ticket to Acapulco leaving the next week. He e-mailed Kirk, arranged to meet at the airport, and spent the week reading guidebooks to Mexico's Pacific Coast.

Whether the main thrust of their coverage was Five-Star Resort Hotels or Indigenous Crafts and Weavings, Dave ended up fixating on their asides—tales of bandits, rogue police, dysentery, malaria, pox, plague, and rabid bats. When he did a computer search for press stories from the region, he heard more of the same, plus tales of kidnappings, drug-cartels, insurgencies, not to mention madmen, ghosts, monsters, and alien abductions.

His mother e-mailed him a list of phone numbers for American Consulates throughout Mexico and Central America "just in case," and then phoned and said that she was sending him the money belt his father had bought for their vacation in France.

"I'm just going down to do a little partying, hang out in the sun, and see what Kirk's up to," he told Melissa, his co-worker at the library, as she pressed a bar of anti-bacterial soap into his hand.

"Just wash your hands as often as possible, and you should be OK," she said softly and sadly, like it wasn't true.

The night before he left, he tried to calm his nervousness about visiting the world without Wal-Mart by placing his travel documents and travelers checks in a complicated cocoon of zip-lock bags. He was not going to be refused re-entry to the United States because of a mutilated, sandy, or waterlogged passport.

By the time he changed planes in Houston and was on the way to Mexico, he had decided that the trip had been a decision of dangerous stupidity. He was in a state of high nervousness—peanuts and bloody Mary sloshing around his stomach like a turbo driven washing machine, sent into overdrive by the hooting and hollering of a group of tattooed Texas frat-boys sitting behind him. When had college students evolved into a separate species? They looked like refugees from a beach party but sounded like GIs using a 48-hour pass to visit every brothel in Saigon, and were particularly proud of the fact that they had scored a prescription for Rohypnol from a friend working in a hospital. The other passengers seemed calm and relaxed around them, which Dave took as a sign of advanced narcotics addiction.

Kirk was not waiting for him in the arrivals lobby which worried Dave, although the fall back plan was to meet at the Hotel.

The cab (which cost him, he later calculated, $50—at least twice the price listed in the guidebooks), took him past gray hotel after gray hotel, their shabby concrete walls looking like the skin of diseased elephants. It was hot and the air carried a mixture of odors—cumin and car exhaust, the ocean and the faint smell of sewage. By the time Dave checked in, two facts had become evident. Kirk had not only lied about Acapulco being an earthly paradise—he wasn't even going to bother showing up to talk about it. There was no reservation in Kirk's name, and the beautiful, if chilly, receptionist seemed uninterested in Dave's concerns.

"Your friend isn't here. Maybe he met a girl. People come here to fall in love; maybe he fell in Love. Enjoy yourself, sir, fall in love with Acapulco."

"Could you look again for a message," Dave asked.

"There are no messages, sir," she replied firmly, handing him a key to his room. "When there is a message, a light will blink on your telephone. You must not ask me about messages, just look for the blinking light."

His room was not on the beach side. Instead, he looked out over a busy street and saw a Wal-Mart opposite, a sight he found surprising and vaguely comforting. Where the fuck was Kirk? In jail, in the hands of a guerrilla group, in the hospital with a dreaded tropical disease, or just busily falling in love with somewhere other than Acapulco?

Kirk was usually pretty reliable, despite eccentricities like a flirtation with Satanism senior year of college. "Do what you wilt shall be all of the law," he was fond of quoting usually in hopes of impressing a female audience, before deciding that that function was better served by proclaiming his vision for the future of American film.

Dave clicked through the television's dozen or so stations before rejecting the siren call of CNN, MTV, and Spanish language variety shows and deciding to go to the beach.

He barely made it. In the blazing sun, he edged his way down the crowded beach to the water in time to see a wave wash ashore a flotilla of turds.

In disgust, Dave retreated to the Wal-Mart. He ate at the in-store Taco Bell and then spent much of the rest of the afternoon wandering through its air-conditioned aisles. He bought two gallons of spring water, suntan lotion with an SPF of 40, insect repellent, and a twelve-pack of toilet paper. The hundred-yard walk back to the Hotel drenched him in sweat, which his air-conditioned room turned cold and clammy on his back. The light on the phone was resolutely not blinking. Dave wondered if it was broken, but when he phoned to ask the receptionist for a new bulb, she hung up on him.

For supper, Dave ate at the hotel coffee shop in the Lobby. Called La Palapa, its bilingual menu boasted of having snacks and sandwiches from favorite tourist destinations around the world. Dave ordered a Phukhet Beach Burrito with Kuta Coconut-Sambal dipping sauce, which tasted, perversely, like a Big Mac.

Around him the hotel bustled with the hormonal frenzy of spring break. College kids swarmed and loitered. Maybe they were just getting up, or maybe returning from a day at the beach. Girls whom Dave estimated had not seen each other in upwards of a half-hour screamed in delight when they saw each other. Two guys, both wearing red green and yellow Acapulco Gold T-shirts, caught sight of each other across the lobby, bellowed, ran at each other and started wrestling, knocking ferns and hotel staff to the ground.

Dave returned to his room and watched MTV. They said they were broadcasting from Acapulco, but he couldn't figure out where. It looked suspiciously neat and tidy. There was no sign of the raw sewage frothing in the surf, and no pictures of the four Texan frat boys who sat behind him on the plane, drooling tobacco juice into empty Dr. Pepper cans, and chortling about their Rohypnol dreams. On the screen, the crowd cleared and a troop of dancers started performing an elaborate Chinese Ballet, but instead of being dressed in Mao suits they were wearing Prada; the men all had neat little goatees and the woman wore pastel pasmina and had nicely bouncing blonde hair.

He turned off the TV, went to the bathroom to wash his hands with Melissa's soap, and went to sleep.

He slept without dreaming, and didn't wake until the late afternoon. After a Goa Breakfast Burrito (a luxurious wrap of Chicken Vindaloo and Farm Fresh Eggs, which tasted surprisingly like his supper the night before), he left the hotel, determined, despite his nervousness, to see something of the town.

He walked along the Costera Miguel Aleman, the street that ran along the waterfront. The sidewalks were crowded with throbbing youth, which made him feel old and depressed, while the street was full of speeding VW Bugs. Occasionally a pick-up truck carrying blue-uniformed policemen, armed with compact sub-machine guns, drove past. He passed a Planet Hollywood and dozens of US fast food restaurants, and their Mexican imitators.

After a mile or two the spring-break crowds began to thin out. He crossed the street and entered a small square.

Around him Mexican families were having dinner in outdoor cafes. Teenagers sat on steps of a bandshell in the middle of the square—boys on one side and girls on the other like a Junior high school dance. Occasionally one of the boys would call out something, and the girls would giggle or look annoyed. He noticed people about his own age, some with backpacks.

An incredibly dirty toddler started tugging at his trouser leg. He looked for the kid's parents, but instead a girl of about seven approached him with a small box filled with tiny packets of Chiclets and began speaking to him in rapid Spanish.

"She would like you to buy some gum."

He turned around. A woman in her twenties wearing a purple cheesecloth shirt, a long black skirt with ribbons of bright colors woven into it, and Teva sandals sat at a café. Next to her was an older man with a high, skinny forehead, and white hair in a ponytail.

"Huh?"

"The girl—she's telling you that, unless you buy some gum, her brother won't have any supper. She also says that it is the best gum in Acapulco, but I think that’s a bit of salesmanship." The woman had an Irish accent.

Dave took a dollar out of his pocket, and the little girl grabbed it from his hands and dragged her little brother across the square, not looking back.

"I think you just got ripped off," said the woman, smiling.

Dave wanted to sit down and chat with them but couldn't think what to talk about. Their next destination was probably a hammock-making collective in the rain forest of Guatemala; he was going back to Pittsburgh.

"It was only a dollar," he said. It appeared to be the wrong thing to say.

"Grown men have to work hard all day to earn 'Only a dollar' here you know," said the guy. Dave decided he didn't like him.

"Sounds like my job," he joked, but he'd obviously lost his audience. He imagined them tut-tutting about rich insensitive Americans. "Thanks anyway," he said lamely, and walked away, embarrassed.

That, he realized, was the first conversation he'd had with anyone other than the hotel staff in two days, and he contemplated going back and asking them what there was to do in Acapulco which did not involve dancing in a disco full of foam, or getting prescriptions filled for the date-rape drug, or wet T-shirt contests.

He decided, though, that their answer would probably involve weaving or endangered sea turtles, or possibly weaving endangered turtles, and so kept walking. He was in a street behind the plaza now, which was climbing, gradually. It was a neighborhood of small shops and restaurants with menus written on the wall. It felt foreign in a way the international hotels and the sea front had not, and he expected his own foreignness to stick out and cause comment, but he was resolutely ignored. Only a beaten-looking yellow dog with a rat's face seemed to notice him, following him discreetly a few yards away. When he stopped and turned to look at the dog, it loped a couple of feet further away, looking at Dave out of the corner of its eye, as if to make believe that it real interests lay elsewhere.

It was getting dark, and the dog made Dave nervous, although it seemed harmless enough. He decided to go back to the hotel at exactly the same moment that he realized that he was lost. Kirk always said it was good to get lost because that's when life got interesting (which was one of things that annoyed Dave about Kirk, not least because he took his own advice literally). He wondered what Kirk would do now.

As he was outside a building that looked like a bar, he decided that Kirk would probably get a drink, and decided, screw the consequences, he'd do the same. If he was going to get murdered for his wallet, his kidneys, or just for being a stinking gringo, he might as well be drunk. With some trepidation, he opened the door and brushed past a hanging screen of beads. The room was dark, and about the size of tennis court. To his left was a bar. There were four or five men leaning against it wearing jeans and denim shirts and white straw cowboy hats. They looked at him disinterestedly and continued their conversation. In the center of the room was large boxy contraption, surrounded by mattresses.

Dave used half of his Spanish vocabulary ordering a beer and a shot of tequila, and other half asking the bartender if he spoke English.

"No, Senor," he said, but he smirked, leaving Dave thinking that perhaps he just didn't want to talk. The bar started filling up, with more men, and some women. All were wearing denim and cowboy hats. Music was turned on, a sort of Country and Western crossed with polka Dave thought. People were singing along with the music. It was a Polka and Western Karaoke Bar. Dave drank more.

After a while a teenage boy with a ponytail under his hat clambered onto the box in the center of the room. It started rocking, backwards and forwards gradually at first and then more rapidly. A mechanical bull. Dave had never seen one in real-life before. The other patrons became excited as the bull rocked faster and faster; people were shouting and encouraging the rider. Then the bull began to buck violently and erratically with the rider barely hanging on until, at last, the rider was thrown head over heels onto the mattressed floor. A great cheer went up. Dave clapped loudly, and a few people smiled at him. Another rider got on the machine, and the process started again.

After four more tequilas, and as many beers, Dave decided that he, too, would enjoy riding the mechanical bull. He slipped off his seat at the bar, and walked over to the temporarily riderless contraption. Putting his hands on the center of the mechanical animal he attempted to swing himself into a sitting position upon it. Instead, he managed to swing himself entirely over the bull, landing in a heap on the floor, hitting his head, hard. He got up slowly, a little dizzy from the fall, and quite drunk, and walked back to the bar grinning shamefacedly. A few people laughed, and one or two clapped him on the back. Embarrassment was sobering him up quickly. The bartender shook his finger and said "muy peligroso—very dangerous" and pointed to a sign in Spanish which Dave couldn't read, but he nodded and smiled trying to retain a modicum of dignity. I'm the drunken gringo who came in and got bucked by the stationary bull, he thought, and decided it was important to stay for a final drink. Around him, he felt, people were already telling the story of his encounter with the bull, and the occasional hoot of laughter proved what a good story it was.

Over his last beer, using a mixture of sign language and Spanglish, he got the bartender to order him a cab. He was back in the hotel in five minutes. He hurried through the lobby, where some spring-breakers were attempting, drunkenly, to form a human pyramid. Others, passed out, were lying on the floor, giving the room an air of a triage station.

In his room, the light on the phone was blinking.

Kirk sounded like he was in the next room.

"Dude are you there yet? Where are you? Sorry about Acapulco. I kind of forgot about Spring Break. Well, you know, it’s a total drag right? There was no point in both of us having to go through that hell. Anyway, you've got to come down and meet me. I'm in Puerto Angel. Well down the road from Angel in Zipolite. It's fantastic here. We're living right on the beach. It’s a party." People where shouting in the background and a woman kept calling Kirk's name. "Hold on Marguerite, I'm talking to my buddy. From America. Look, David, I've got to go. But check this out. I'm naked. We're all fucking naked. Later. I'll see you down here. Just take the bus."

Dave was tired. He knew he didn't want to go. Although he was disgusted with himself for barely being able to poke his head out of the tourist safe-zone, and for not being willing get down the road to Zipolite, or wherever the sunsets were pinker, the mescal stronger, the people naked and loving and the experience more authentically hand-crafted by generations of artisans, the thought of having to learn a new set of rules filled him with fatigue.

Ah, fuck Kirk anyway: had Kirk faced the iron-bull of Acapulco? And fuck sleeping on the beach with naked people. It wasn't going to happen. He was going to go home. He'd call the airline and change his tickets in the morning, as soon as he woke up. <

text © copyright 2000 nicholas noyes, used with permission
Top Photo: "Cliff Diver," La Quebrade, Acapulco, copyright 1998, 1999 Sadnesa, Inc.

Nicholas Noyes is a contributor to The Amok Fifth Dispatch, and is a member of team Gonzaga. Check the archive for more stories by Nicholas Noyes.

Contact e-mail NickNoyes@earthlink.net