A Salty Piece of Land Read online

  “It didn’t look like this, did it?” I asked.

  “Oh, hell, no. That’s my own damn fault,” Bucky said with a laugh. “The guy I leased this from was a country-and-western star from Nashville who planned to move here and raise horses and start an offshore religion. It didn’t work out for him. To my recollection, this is the first time a horse has ever been in that corral, but that is the beauty of bamboo. It lasts forever.”

  “Unlike country pop stars,” I said.

  “Ever heard of Shawn Spurl?” Bucky asked.

  “Not really,” I said, fishing for recognition.

  “How about Tex Sex?”

  “Tex Sex. Of course. I saw him once at Frontier Days down in Cheyenne. That guy can draw the women. I have never seen as many good-looking chicks anywhere. They were stacked up like spawning salmon in front of the stage.”

  “Shawn Spurl is Tex Sex’s real name.”

  “No shit. Tex Sex lived in Punta Margarita?”

  “Well, I would say he more like visited for a spell . . . but that is another whole story.”

  “I got nowhere to go,” I said.

  6

  How Nightmares Turn into Dreams

  Like everything and everybody in the tropics, the Lost Boys Fishing Lodge had a history of its own, and Tex Sex was certainly a big part of it. It had been another gringo folly, an alcohol-soaked, sunstroke vision of paradise driven by ego and lack of any geographical knowledge whatsoever of the region.

  Several years back, Tex Sex had shocked the music world by announcing his early retirement at the peak of his short but very successful singing career—which was like dropping a hydrogen bomb on the millions of thirty-five to forty-five-year-old female devotees who comprised his very lucrative fan base.

  Tex Sex had skyrocketed from obscurity to being voted the Country Music Entertainer of the Year. He claimed Lubbock, Texas, as his home, though his parents had moved two weeks after his birth to Chicago, where Shawn’s father had gone to work for Kraft Foods, the inventors of his favorite source of nutrition, Velveeta processed cheese.

  Shawn was much more of a “cheese head” than a “longhorn.” He dropped out of high school his sophomore year and moved to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where he went to work in a video arcade and did what any oversexed American male child of the entitled generation did—he started a band.

  The Rectal Thermometers never made it out of the garage that the bass player’s grandmother had let them use. They broke up a week before their first gig when the lead guitarist discovered his girlfriend and Shawn fucking in the hedges.

  The Marshall amps were repossessed, and Shawn went to work delivering pizza for Domino’s. Then one night, he rediscovered his Texas roots at a local shit-kicker karaoke bar, when, after several shots of tequila and Jägermeister and the urgings of his coworkers, he drooled the words on the screen to Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” into the handheld microphone. His performance not only won the evening’s competition and a bottle of cheap champagne but was also witnessed by a local funeral parlor/limo service operator from Milwaukee named Aaron Segal. When he introduced himself to Shawn that first evening and handed him a card, Aaron said, “I have contacts in the music business.”

  The funeral business, as dreary as one might imagine, did have one useful asset—a supply of long black limousines, which also filled the bill for celebrities who passed through town on concert tours. Aaron Segal wanted to get into show business almost as much as Shawn Spurl did, and the limos were his “contacts.”

  It didn’t matter to Aaron that Shawn couldn’t carry a tune or play the guitar very well. He didn’t have to, due to his amazing resemblance to the film star Brad Pitt, which Aaron Segal planned to exploit to the max. Shawn’s journey down the road to success started behind the wheel of a stretch limo, which paid the bills while Aaron devised his plan. He signed him to a long-term contract, got his teeth capped, paid him a weekly salary, and got him laid on a regular basis.

  Then one night, the magic that is show business smiled on Shawn Spurl. He was driving a middle-aged woman named Darcy Trumbo to a country concert that had been booked to follow the Brewers game in Milwaukee. Darcy Trumbo was from the Jersey Shore and had graduated from Princeton with a degree in journalism, but she opted for a job offer to follow the Eagles around the country on tour. After a show in Nashville, she somehow got separated from the caravan, which moved on, and when she came to, she liked what she saw and decided to stay in Nashville. She went from cocktail waitress to Music Row secretary to becoming the host of a country line-dance show on the Nashville Network. She too was just waiting for the right thing to come along at the right time, and somehow she recognized it in her limo driver in Milwaukee.

  Darcy Trumbo sat in the back of the long stretch limo, stealing glimpses of Shawn in the rearview mirror and asking her driver polite questions that did not require complicated answers. When Shawn opened the door for her at the press gate of the ballpark, she paused, took one full-body look at him, and said, “Care to join me?” Well, their relationship bloomed, and so did Shawn’s new career. It was Darcy who bought out Aaron Segal and became Shawn’s manager, signing him to Rhinestone Records. Then she went to work on making him a star.

  It didn’t take long. She groomed him, dressed him, fucked him, and got him voice and guitar lessons. She changed his name to Tex Sex. Then she made a country video that combined the highlights of Roman orgies with a Las Vegas rodeo championship, and it brought out the Christian coalition in droves across America to protest the sexually charged video at record stores and the offices of Rhinestone in Nashville.

  It was like throwing gasoline on a fire. The first Tex Sex album sold 4 million copies. They were off to the races, and Darcy Trumbo was driving the lead car.

  In less than a year, Tex Sex was it in the country field. He skipped along atop a kaleidoscopic existence filled with beautiful women, fast cars, jet planes, and Hollywood mansions, and just when everything was going gangbusters, Shawn Spurl, aka Tex Sex, made that amazing but often repeated mistake that so many shallow performers do. He went looking for depth in his life and his career. Frustrated to discover that there was none, he called a news conference in Nashville and announced his retirement. Darcy was in London, setting up his first European tour, when Tex Sex got on his private jet and told the pilot to head south to Machu Picchu. He had seen a program on a National Geographic TV special about the lost city of the Incas, and he was heading there to find the answers to his questions.

  The plane had a pressurization problem over the Gulf of Mexico, and the pilot made an emergency landing in Cancún. While the plane waited for parts, Tex Sex went to the bar. There he was recognized by a Jet Ski dealer from Houston who told him that they had lost cities in Mexico as well, and pointed to Tulum on the tourist guide map. Tex Sex bought a case of Dos Equis, rented a Jeep, and headed south on Mexico Route 403, following the signs to Tulum. He was trying to read a road map when he went right past the turn to Tulum. Lost on the Yucatán Peninsula, he drove until he ran out of beer and gas about a half mile from the Punta Margarita ferry dock, where he was directed to the only pay phone in the area. He accidentally stumbled onto the ferryboat and landed at the Fat Iguana a short while later.

  Tex Sex never made it to the pay phone, but he did find a bar stool at the Fat Iguana. There, after ordering a variety of local rum drinks, he fell over backward off the bar stool, carving an eight-inch gash in the shape of a half-moon around his left ear. Shawn Spurl, aka Tex Sex, proclaimed his immediate infatuation with Machu Picchu and his revelation that he was a reincarnated child of the sun.

  “You are a drunk gringo in a beach bar in Mexico,” one of the locals told him.

  “What’s your name, amigo?” Tex Sex asked the man.

  “Ix-Nay is my given name. What’s yours?” asked the small Indian at the end of the bar.

  Tex Sex was receiving no input from his liquor-logged brain. All he heard was the sound of his own voice. “My Inc
an brothers and sisters, you have found me, and for this I plan to reward you. It is my desire to live among you on this beach forever,” he announced.

  “I’ll alert the media,” Ix-Nay replied dryly as he tended to Tex Sex’s bleeding scalp.

  Tex Sex’s proclamation of self-discovery was not met with much enthusiasm by the fishermen in the bar who were watching the Cubs game, but they broke into a dance of their own when Sammy Sosa knocked a ball over the center-field bleachers, beating the Mets in the bottom of the ninth. At that point, Captain Kirk happened to walk in, and he recognized the bloody figure leaning on Ix-Nay’s shoulders.

  While Sammy circled the bases, Ix-Nay and Captain Kirk carried Tex Sex back to the boat, stitched up his head, and deposited him in a bunk to sleep off his hangover. Captain Kirk had his crew keep an eye on their guest while he went fishing.

  When he returned, he was greeted by a contingency of Mexican and U.S. military and immigration officals who stood in front of an unmarked Huey helicopter that had landed in the tiny square in the center of the village. A man in plain clothes, sporting a crew cut and telltale sunglasses, spoke to Captain Kirk. “We are here to investigate a possible kidnapping of a very prominent American.”

  “You mean Tex Sex?” Kirk asked.

  “If you have any information about the abduction of Shawn Spurl, then I’d suggest you share that with us right now.” The Mexican police moved forward.

  “I don’t know anything about a kidnapping, but I do know that a drunk asshole who claims to be Tex Sex fell off a bar stool at the Fat Iguana and sliced his head open. I stitched him up and put him on my boat. I figured someone would come looking for him, but I didn’t figure it would be this fast.”

  Kirk led the assault team to the shrimp boat. Tex Sex was still out, snoring loudly in the bunk.

  Tex Sex’s identity was verified by a bartender from the Fat Iguana who appeared with a pile of CD jewel-box covers with the singer’s picture on all of them, and the assembled entourage agreed that the barfly in the bunk was the balladeer on the CD covers.

  In a matter of hours, film crews from Fox affiliates in Mexico City, Dallas, and Hollywood were on the scene to film the “rescue and evacuation of Tex Sex from the snake-infested jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula” as the uninformed reporters described it. The Caribbean Soul was encircled with a defense line of Mexican Navy personnel.

  While Darcy Trumbo was winging her way south of the border on her quarter-share jet, she received updates from her office as the wire services lit up with several different versions of the story. They were all blown totally out of proportion. Darcy smiled and asked the flight attendant for a margarita.

  Tex Sex slept through the whole clusterfuck in the air-conditioned crew quarters on the Caribbean Soul. When he finally came to, he saw a soldier standing over him. The man rushed from the room, and then Tex Sex suddenly found himself staring into the stern eyes of Darcy Trumbo. “Read this,” she said as she handed him a one-page script.

  With the help of a Special Forces squad that had been training in the nearby jungle, Tex Sex was carried past a row of cameras, microphones, and popping flashbulbs to a waiting medevac helicopter. At the entrance to the chopper, Tex Sex struggled to sit up. With Darcy at his side, he read his statement of thanks to the people of Punta Margarita and plugged his upcoming TV special on Fox.

  “I will return,” he said, and from the door of the chopper he screamed, “Mi casa es su casa, amigos!” The helicopter engines spooled up, the whirling blades created an instant sandstorm on the beach, and then the chopper rose vertically and headed north out over the water. Moments later, silence returned to Punta Margarita.

  Tex Sex never did return, but to everyone’s surprise, a month later an architect from Santa Fe arrived on the mailboat, laden with a dozen containers filled with the pieces of a prefab wooden beach house—Tex Sex’s dream come true. The land for the house had been purchased from an art dealer in Mexico City by Far Horizon Limited, an offshore real estate holding company. In reality, it was Darcy Trumbo who had bought the property and had built the house to keep Tex Sex happy and simply dreaming of his return. She knew full well that Shawn Spurl would never set foot on the Yucatán Peninsula again.

  Six months after his fall from the bar stool, things were back to normal. Tex Sex came out of retirement and announced his comeback tour. He also wrote a song based on his short stay in Punta Margarita entitled “I Have the Scars to Prove It,” which was his biggest-selling single to date. Neither his voice nor his guitar playing had gotten any better as a result of his inward search, but he sported a new, short hairdo that accentuated the scar around his left ear, and he began to refer to himself onstage as being one-third Native American. This surprised the hell out of Darcy Trumbo, but she could care less, as long as the money kept rolling in.

  Construction was stopped on the compound, and the pieces were left for the jungle to reclaim. It damn near did until Bucky Norman floated ashore with his dream of running a fishing camp and picked up the bamboo baton. By then Tex Sex had discovered Cabo San Lucas, which suited Darcy’s idea of an island much better than Punta Margarita. Bucky leased the property from Darcy with an option to buy at a later date, and island history repeated itself for the millionth time as one man attempted to build his dreams out of another man’s nightmare.

  7

  Pancakes Make the World Go Round

  I could have stayed up in the tree house listening to Bucky for the entire evening, and I probably should have, but the gods of ocean crossings and celebrations would have no part of it.

  We were ordered out of the tree by Captain Kirk, and after checking on Mr. Twain, who could have cared less about our concern as he snoozed on his side, we all jumped into Bucky’s Jeep and headed to town and the Fat Iguana.

  With salsa and rock ’n’ roll blaring from the weather-worn speakers lashed to palm trees, I was introduced to the good citizens of Punta Margarita by Captain Kirk and Bucky. One drink led to another, and then came the multiple toasts and tequila shots. The story of our encounter with the storm was told and retold, the size of the waves growing with each rendition, until the wee hours of the morning.

  I have a dim recollection of making my way back to the Caribbean Soul, but in the morning I woke up in pain. I carefully climbed out of my bunk on the boat with the visible signs of a penitent sweat streaming from my pores, and I tried to focus on the hands of my watch, with no luck. I opened the crew quarters door to a bright, hot sun that sent me scurrying back inside in seach of sunglasses. The boat was deserted, but the waterfront was humming with morning activity.

  “Great party last night,” a short man with a smile called out as he passed the boat.

  “Thanks,” I said, having no idea who he was.

  Several fishing Pangas moved down the channel to the Gulf in seach of lobster and grouper. I certainly hadn’t seen those guys at the party. They were on their way to work, which reminded me that I had no intention of making a repeat performance of the night before. I walked down the waterfront toward the beach with the foggy remnants of blue agave still in my bloodstream and a line from a John Hiatt song looped in my cerebral jukebox as I tried to sing my pain away.

  Oh it breaks my heart to see those stars

  Smashing a perfectly good guitar.

  I walked the shoreline to Lost Boys and found Mr. Twain munching away happily on his oats. One of the workmen thankfully stopped hammering on an unfinished cottage and told me that Bucky had fed my horse and had gone to the town for breakfast and had asked me to join him.

  The breeze blew in from the water, and I suddenly caught a whiff of myself. I needed an immediate and total immersion in salt water to wash away the smell of cigarettes from my clothes, the dead brain cells from my head, and the sins from my soul. I took off my shirt, tossed it up into the shallow waves, and then I walked out into the clear, calm water up to my knees. I just fell face-first, like some villainous victim of a gunfight with Clint Eastwood, and I st
ayed submerged for as long as I could hold my breath. While under the water, I once again vowed never to get that drunk.

  It is probably safe to say that in these parts, liquor in a never-ending stream has probably killed more expatriates than have hostile encounters with pirates, Indians, or disease-carrying insects. If I were actually going to stay here for a while, I would want to act more like the fishermen I had seen that morning than the barfly I had been the previous night. I had not come all this way to wind up as just another pickled gringo.

  I swam away to the deep, cool water. Half an hour later, my heart was pounding, the blood was flowing, and I sensed that though I had a few more payments to make to the bank of bad habits for last night’s fun tickets, I would survive the self-inflicted assault.

  I floated on my back with my arms stretched out and stared up at the morning sky. Silently I made my second resolution. There weren’t a lot of cattle to herd or fences to mend in these parts, and if I were going to stay and be productive and live a contented life in the tropics, I would have to find some new kind of work. I waded out of the shallow water, walked back to the boat, showered, and got into a fresh T-shirt and a pair of shorts. I was going job hunting, but first I needed pancakes.

  Captain Kirk and Bucky sat eating breakfast at a plastic table under a faded green awning in front of the Fisherman’s Café, which was across the street from the Fat Iguana. The tranquil little hacienda was alive with activity and the smell of hot coffee. I recognized a few refugees from the bacchanal and started my Spanish lessons with an “Hola” to them. Captain Kirk finished his eggs, grabbed his coffee mug, and then went to talk to a tableful of folks on the porch. Bucky and I sat in the shade of a giant Norfolk pine that was an oasis from the already rising temperature.