The Great Shark Hunt, page 62
I had managed another zombielike day at sea, with massive aid from Frank’s can, but our relationship with the Striker people was apparently beyond redemption. Nobody connected with the tournament would have anything to do with us. We were treated like lepers. The only people we felt easy with, at that point, were a motley collection of local freaks, boozers, hustlers and black-coral divers who seemed to collect each afternoon on the porch of the Bal-Hai, the town’s main bar.
They quickly befriended us—a sudden shift in old relationships with the island that caused me to begin signing all the tabs, splitting them about half and half between Striker and PLAYBOY. Nobody seemed to care, especially the ever-growing crowd of new friends who came to drink with us. These people understood and were vaguely amused at the idea that we’d fallen into serious disfavor with the Strikers and the local power structure. For the past three sleepless days, we’d been gathering at the Bal-Hai to brood publicly on the likelihood of massive retaliation by local jefes, incensed by our rotten behavior.
It was sometime around dusk on Saturday, hunkered down at a big round table on the Bal-Hai porch, that I noticed the pea-green Mustang making its second pass in less than ten minutes. There is only one pea-green Mustang on the island, and one of the divers had told me it belonged to the “mayor”—a heavy-set young pol and an appointed, not elected, official who looked like a beer-bellied lifeguard on some beach at Acapulco. We had seen him often in the past few days, usually in the late afternoon and always cruising up and down the seaside frontera.
“That son of a bitch is beginning to make me nervous,” Bloor muttered.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They won’t shoot—not as long as we’re here in a crowd.”
“What?” A gray-haired woman from Miami sitting next to us had caught the word shoot.
“It’s the Striker crowd,” I explained. “We hear they’ve decided to get heavy with us.”
“Jesus Christ!” said a retired airline pilot who’d been living off his boat and the Bal-Hai porch for the past few months. “You don’t think they’ll start shooting, do you? Not on a peaceful island like this!”
I shrugged. “Not here. They wouldn’t shoot into a crowd. But we can’t let them catch us alone.”
The woman from Miami started to say something, but Bloor cut her off with an outburst that spun heads the length of the porch:
“They’re in for the shock of their goddamn lives, tomorrow,” he snarled. “Wait till they see what gets off that goddamn ferry from Play a del Carmen in the morning.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the ex-pilot asked.
Bloor said nothing, staring blankly out to sea. I hesitated a moment, then instinctively picked up the thread: “Heavies,” I said. “We made some calls last night. Tomorrow morning they’ll come off that boat like a pack of goddamn wolverines.”
Our friends at the table were glancing nervously at one another. Violent crime is almost unheard of on Cozumel; the native oligarchy is into far more subtle varieties… and the idea that the Bal-Hai might be the scene of a Chicago-style shoot-out was a hard thing to grasp, even for me.
Bloor cut in again, still staring off toward the mainland. “You can hire just about anything you want in Mérida,” he said. “We got these thugs for ten bucks a head, plus expenses. They’ll crack every skull on the island if they have to—then burn every one of those goddamn red-neck boats right down to the waterline.”
Nobody spoke for a moment, then the woman from Miami and the retired airline pilot got up to leave. “See you later,” the man said stiffly. “We have to get back to the boat and check things out.”
Moments later, the two divers who’d been sitting with us also left, saying they’d probably see us tomorrow at the Striker party.
“Don’t count on it,” Bloor muttered. They grinned nervously and sped off down the frontera on their tiny Hondas. We were left alone at the big round table, sipping margaritas and staring out at the sunset over the Yucatán Peninsula, 12 miles across the channel. After a few long moments of silence, Bloor reached into his pocket and came up with a hollowed-out glass eye he had bought from one of the street peddlers. There was a silver cap on the back and he flipped it up, then jammed the straw from his margarita into the hole and snorted heavily before handing it over to me. “Here,” he said. “Try some of Frank’s best.”
The waiter was hovering over us, but I ignored him—until I realized I was having problems, then I looked up from the eyeball in my hand and asked for two more drinks and a dry straw. “¿Como no?” he hissed, moving quickly away from the table.
“This thing’s all jammed up from the moisture,” I said to Bloor, showing him the powder-packed straw. “We’ll have to slice it open.”
“Never mind,” he said. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
I nodded, accepting a fresh drink and about six dry straws from the waiter. “You notice how fast our friends left,” I said, bearing down on the eyeball again. “I suspect they believed all that gibberish.”
He sipped his own new drink and stared at the glass eye in my hand. “Why shouldn’t they?” he mumbled. “I’m beginning to believe it myself.”
I felt a great numbness in the back of my mouth and my throat as I snapped the cap shut and handed the eyeball back to him. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re professionals—keep that in mind.”
“I am,” he said. “But I’m afraid they might figure that out.”
* * *
It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank Oliver had officially won the tournament—by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on Lucky Striker. I wrote this down in my notebook as we roamed round the dock where the boats were tied up. Nobody urged us to come aboard for “a friendly drink”—as I heard some of the anglers put it to others on the dock—and, in fact, there were only a few people who spoke to us at all. Frank and his friend were sipping beers at the open-air bar nearby, but his kind of hospitality was not in tune with this scene. Jack Daniel’s and heavy petting on the foredeck is about as heavy as the Striker crowd gets… and after a week of mounting isolation from this scene I was supposed to be “covering,” I was hung on the dark and ugly truth that “my story” was fucked. Not only did the boat people view me with gross disapproval but most of them no longer even believed I was working for PLAYBOY. All they knew, for sure, was that there was something very strange and off-center, to say the least, about me and all my “assistants.”
Which was true, in a sense, and this feeling of alienation on both sides was compounded, on ours, by a galloping drug-induced paranoia that honed each small incident, with every passing day, to a grim and fearful edge. The paranoid sense of isolation was bad enough—along with trying to live in two entirely different worlds at the same time—but the worst problem of all was the fact that I’d spent a week on this goddamn wretched story and I still didn’t have the flimsiest notion of what deep-sea fishing felt like. I had no idea what it was like to actually catch a big fish. All I’d seen was a gang of frantic red-neck businessmen occasionally hauling dark shadows up to the side of various boats, just close enough to where some dollar-an-hour mate could cut the leader and score a point for “the angler.” During the whole week, I’d never seen a fish out of the water—except on the rare occasions when a hooked sailfish had jumped for an instant, 100 or so yards from the boat, before going under again for the long reeling-in trip that usually took ten or fifteen minutes of silent struggle and always ended with the fish either slipping the hook or being dragged close enough to the boat to be “tagged” and then cut loose.
The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn’t believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.
All the rest seemed like dilettante bullshit—like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint, from the safety of a pickup truck… and it was this half-crazed sense of frustration that led me finally to start wandering around the docks and trying to hire somebody to take me and Bloor out at night to fish for man-eating sharks. It seemed like the only way to get a real feel for this sport—to fish (or hunt) for something genuinely dangerous, a beast that would tear your leg off in an instant if you made the slightest mistake.
This concept was not widely understood on the dock in Cozumel. The businessmen-anglers saw no point in getting the cockpits of their expensive tubs messed up with real blood, and especially not theirs… but I finally found two takers: Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker and a local Mayan captain who worked for Fernando Murphy.
Both of these efforts ended in disaster—for entirely different reasons and also at different times; but for the record, I feel a powerful obligation to record at least a brief observation about our shark-hunting expeditions off the coast of Cozumel: The first is that I saw more sharks by accident while scuba-diving during the daylight hours than I did during either of our elaborate, big-money nighttime “hunts” off the fishing boats; and the second is that anybody who buys anything more complex or expensive than a bottle of beer on the waterfront of Cozumel is opting for serious trouble.
Cerveza Superior, at 75 cents a bottle on the porch of the Bal-Hai, is a genuine bargain—if only because you know what you’re getting—compared with the insanely and even fatally inept “deep-sea-fishing and scuba-diving tours” offered at dockside shacks like El Timon or Fernando Murphy’s. These people rent boats to dumb gringos for $140 a day (or night) and then take you out to sea and dump you over the side with faulty diving gear in shark-filled waters during the day, or run you around in circles during the night—a Fernando Murphy specialty—while allegedly trolling for sharks about 500 yards offshore. There are plenty of bologna sandwiches while you wait for a strike, unable to communicate verbally with the guilt-stricken Mayan mate or the Mayan captain up top, who both understand what kind of a shuck they are running but who are only following Fernando Murphy’s orders. Meanwhile Murphy is back in town playing maitre de at his Tijuana-style night club, La Piñata.
We found Murphy at his night club after spending six useless hours “at sea” on one of his boats, and came close to getting beaten and jailed when we noisily ruined the atmosphere of the place by accusing him of “outright thievery” on the grounds of what his hired fisherman had already admitted he’d done to us—and the only thing that kept us from getting stomped by Murphy’s heavies was the timely popping-off of flashbulbs by an American photographer. There is nothing quite like the sudden white flash of a professional gringo camera to paralyze the brain of a Mexican punk long enough for the potential victims to make a quick, nonviolent exit.
We were counting on this, and it worked; a sorry end to the only attempt we ever made to hire local fishermen for a shark hunt. Murphy had his $140 cash in advance, we had our harsh object lesson in commercial dealings on the Cozumel dock—and with the photos in the can, we understood the wisdom of leaving the island at once.
* * *
Our other nighttime shark hunt—with Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker—was a totally different kind of experience. It was at least an honest value. Haugen and his two-man crew were the “hippies” of the Striker fleet, and they took me and Bloor out one night for a serious shark hunt—a strange adventure that nearly sunk their boat when they hooked a reef in pitch-darkness about a mile out at sea and which ended with all of us up on the bridge while a four-foot nurse shark flopped crazily around in the cockpit, even after Haugen had shot it four times in the head with a .45 automatic.
Looking back on all that, my only feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion. Hemingway had the right idea when he decided that a .45-caliber submachine gun was the proper tool for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes who call themselves “sport fishermen”?
Our departure from the island was not placid. The rough skeleton of the plan—as I conceived it with a head full of MDA on the night before—was to wait until about an hour before the first early-morning flight to Mérida on Aeromexico, then jump both our hotel bills by checking out in a raving frenzy at dawn, at the end of the night clerk’s shift—and signing “PLAYBOY/Striker Aluminum Yachts” on both bills. I felt this bogus dual imprimatur would be heavy enough to confuse both desk clerks long enough for us to reach the airport and make the escape.
Our only other problem—except for connecting with the black-coral wizard who was expecting at least $300 cash for the work we’d assigned him—was dumping the Avis rental jeep at the airport no more than three minutes before boarding time. I knew that the local Avis people would have me under observation by the same shadowy observer who’d nailed me on the broken-windshield charge, but I also knew he’d been watching us long enough to know we were both late risers. He would set his psychic work clock. I felt, to coincide with our traditional noon-to-dawn working hours. I also knew that the hours he’d been keeping for the past week were so far off his normal wake-sleep schedule that by now he was probably a nervous, jabbering mess from trying to keep up with a gang of wild gringos fueled from an apparently bottomless satchel full of speed, acid, MDA and cocaine.
It boiled down to a question of armaments—or lack of them—and their long-term effects in the crunch. Looking back on my experience over the years, I was confident of being able to function at peak-performance level, at least briefly, after 80 or 90 hours without sleep. There were negative factors, of course: 80 or 90 hours of continuous boozing, along with sporadic energy/adrenaline sappers like frantic, rock-dodging swims in the high surf at night and sudden, potentially disastrous confrontations with hotel managers—but on balance, I felt, the drug factor gave us a clear-cut advantage. In any 24-hour period, a determined private eye can muster the energy to keep pace with veteran drug users… but after 48 straight hours, and especially after 72, fatigue symptoms begin manifesting drastically—hallucinations, hysteria, massive nerve failure. After 72 hours, both the body and the brain are so badly depleted that only sleep will make the nut… while your habitual drug user, long accustomed to this weird and frenzied pace, is still hoarding at least three hours of high-speed reserve.
There was no question in my mind—once the plane was finally airborne out of Cozumel—about what to do with the drugs. I had eaten three of the remaining five caps of MDA during the night and Bloor had given our hash and all but six of his purple pills to the black-coral wizard as a bonus for his all-night efforts. As we zoomed over the Yucatán Channel at 8000 feet, we took stock of what we had left:
Two hits of MDA, six tabs of acid, about a gram and a half of raw cocaine, four reds and a random handful of speed. That—plus $44 and a desperate hope that Sandy had made and paid for our reservations beyond Monterrey, Mexico—was all we had between Cozumel and our refuge/destination at Sam Brown’s house in Denver. We were airborne out of Cozumel at 8:13 A.M., Mountain Daylight Time—and if everything went right, we would arrive at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport before seven.
We’d been airborne for about eight minutes when I looked over at Bloor and told him what I’d been thinking: “We don’t have enough drugs here to risk carrying them through Customs,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully: “Well… we’re pretty well fixed, for poor boys.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “But I have my professional reputation to uphold. And there’s only two things I’ve never done with drugs: sell them or take them through Customs—especially when we can replace everything we’re holding for about ninety-nine dollars just as soon as we get off the plane.”
He hunkered down in his seat, saying nothing. Then he stared across at me. “What are you saying? That we should just throw all this shit away?”
I thought for a moment. “No. I think we should eat it.”
“What?”
“Yeah, why not? They can’t bust you for what’s already dissolved in your belly—no matter how weird you’re acting.”
“Jesus Christ!” he muttered. “We’ll go stark raving nuts if we eat all this shit!”
I shrugged. “Keep in mind where we’ll be when we hit Customs,” I said. “San Antonio, Texas. Are you ready to get busted in Texas?”
He stared down at his fingernails.
“Remember Tim Leary?” I said. “Ten years for three ounces of grass in his daughter’s panties.…”
He nodded. “Jesus… Texas! I’d forgotten about that.”
“Not me,” I said. “When Sandy went through Customs in San Antonio about three weeks ago, they tore everything she was carrying apart. It took her two hours to put it back together.”
I could see him thinking. “Well…” he said finally, “what if we eat this stuff and go crazy—and they nail us?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We’ll drink heavily. If we’re seized, the stewardesses will testify we were drunk.”
He thought for a moment, then laughed. “Yeah… just a couple of good ole boys O.D.’d on booze. Nasty drunks, staggering back into the country after a shameful vacation in Mexico—totally fucked up.”
“Right,” I said. “They can strip us down to the skin. It’s no crime to enter the country helplessly drunk.”
He laughed. “You’re right. What do we start with? We shouldn’t eat it all at once—that’s too heavy.”
I nodded, reaching into my pocket for the MDA and offering him one as I tossed the other into my mouth. “Let’s eat some of the acid now, too,” I said. “That way, we’ll be adjusted to it by the time we have to eat the rest—and we can save the coke for emergencies.”
