Home Run

by Paul Kropp

  Our room had the “executives,” as we called ourselves: Scrooge, Kirk, Fuji, and me. Fuji got the floor, and was wise enough not to complain.

  At this point, all of us—except Kirk, of course—had Mexican beers in our hands and smiles on our faces. Outside, the Pacific surf was crashing on the beach. Inside, the Killers were blasting out of a CD player that someone had brought along.

  “Okay, listen up,” Scrooge said, turning down the music. “Now that everybody’s here, it’s time to figure out what we’re doing this week.”

  “Yes, suh!” shouted Biff.

  “I am not your drill instructor, Biff, merely the organizer of this Spring Break excursion. Now, is anyone here seriously interested in Mexican art and culture?”

  Silence. Not even Kirk raised his hand.

  “How about Mexican music, traditional or contemporary or whatever?”

  This time Kirk did raise his hand.

  “That’s what I figured,” Scrooge sighed. “And what about the rest of you? I know that Alan here really wants to get laid.”

  I turned red in the face. Was it that obvious?

  “Yeah, getting laid is, like, real good,” Biff said, suddenly on my side.

  “And getting stoned,” added Goofball, who already was.

  Fuji looked up from his computer. “I like to dance,” he said.

  “And I wouldn’t mind getting drunk,” Aiden threw in.

  There was considerable agreement with this suggestion. As some philosopher must have said: If Spring Break isn’t about getting drunk, then what’s it all about?

  Scrooge shook his head. “Okay, it looks like Kirk and I will be doing the cultural excursions on our own. The rest of you can spend the week as you see fit. We are open-minded, if nothing else,” he said. Then he took a pause to swig on his beer.

  “But there are a few rules, gentlemen. We’re really packed into these hotel rooms, so don’t trash up the place. And if you end up vomiting in the room, you clean it up. The maids shouldn’t have to deal with your junk or your spew. Fair is fair.”

  There was general nodding from the group.

  “Now, Alan,” Scrooge went on, “this is for you just in case you manage to get lucky. We need a signal system for a little privacy in the rooms.”

  I had never realized just how organized Scrooge was. Still, I rather doubted that I’d be the one needing privacy.

  “So, if you see a shirt hanging on the room doorknob, that means privacy for the couple inside. But privacy doesn’t last forever. A gentle knock on the door, like this—tap-tap-tippity-tap—tells the couple inside that they have twenty minutes to finish up. Got that?”

  “Hey, I need more than twenty minutes,” Aiden whined.

  Scrooge sneered at him. “Dream on, Aiden. From what I hear, twenty seconds would be about right.”

  “Hey—” Aiden began, but his words were drowned out by our collective laughter.

  With the next round of beer, we decided to spread out over the various hotels on the Nuevo Vallarta strip to check out the bars and the girls. We’d reconvene back at our hotel—El Paradiso—just before the dinner buffet.

  So Kirk and I slathered on sunscreen and ambled down the beach, heading south. Kirk was in his anthropological mode, taking note of the girls and guys at the various bars and hotels we passed. I was into a survey of the quality of the various one-dollar beers that were being served, though I’m really not that much of a beer drinker. It must have been the bargain factor. Regardless, I had decided to have a cerveza at each of the hotels we stopped at, so I was feeling quite cheerful—if a bit bloated—by the time we hit the El Paradiso. Kirk finally decided to join me in drinking, and ordered up the first margarita of his oh-so-sheltered life.

  While we were sipping our drinks, I came to the realization that I was catholic. This was not in terms of religion, but in terms of the girls. While Kirk kept on favouring the traditional fashion-model look, I found myself more catholic in my tastes. There were thin girls, like Maggie, with small breasts and virtually no shape, whom I still found wonderfully attractive. Then there were traditionally perfect girls, the flawless swimsuit models whom Kirk preferred, who also appealed to me. Then there were the girls with fabulous style—blonde bimbo, or red-headed vamp, or dark-haired temptress, or bespectacled intellectual—and all of those girls appealed to me, too.

  “I think they’re all beautiful,” I said to Kirk, looking around with my eyes hidden by dark sunglasses.

  “You have catholic tastes,” he replied.

  “It really has to do with how you define beauty,” I went on. “As Aristotle once said…actually, I can’t remember what Aristotle said, because that was first term, but surely there are many kinds of beauty.”

  Kirk nodded, and we began one of our many long, and ongoing, philosophical conversations. I found that I could even keep up my end of the conversation while eyeballing the various bikini-clad girls who were running around the pool deck and up to the bar.

  I was looking at a particularly curvaceous blonde and explaining to Kirk why her revealing bikini was really not as attractive as a more demure suit might have been. Kirk was responding with some quite reasoned discussion of the expression on the girl’s face, and how hard it was to really appreciate a girl when her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. I thought our discussion was at a very high level, given the general subject matter…and the seven beers I had had already that afternoon.

  That’s when I heard voices above and behind us.

  “They’re scoping,” said one.

  “What’s that?” said another.

  “Scoping the girls,” explained the first. “It’s like being a voyeur, only more adolescent.”

  “Oh,” replied the second voice, obviously not understanding a word of the explanation.

  I turned and looked up.

  Staring into the sun, it was hard to see very much. There seemed to be two girls just above us, one somewhat taller and somewhat blonder than the other.

  “Hello there,” I yelled, smiling broadly. Seven beers do have an effect.

  “Hello down below,” called the shorter girl. “My friend says you’re adolescent.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m aspiring to be childish.”

  I thought that was a terrifically funny line. After seven beers, anything even vaguely amusing can seem terrifically funny. I even began to laugh at my own wit, then decided this would not do. It would not be seemly. I’m amazed how, when I’m half inebriated, words like seemly pop into my brain.

  The shorter girl giggled; the taller one snorted in derision.

  “I suspect you’ll get your wish soon enough,” she said.

  This exchange had garnered Kirk’s attention, and he now craned his neck to match mine.

  “Who’s your hunky friend?” the shorter one asked me.

  “His name is Kirk,” I told her. “He’s very serious, whereas I’m very funny. Take your pick.” This was not entirely true since both Kirk and I can be serious or funny, depending on the timing and subject matter. Nonetheless, I thought it was impressive that I could still use the word whereas in conversation.

  “I’m not picky,” said the shorter one.

  “And that’s your entire problem,” hissed the taller one. Then she turned to us. “Ciao, bambini. Enjoy your drinks.”

  “Are we going to see you girls later?” I asked. This sudden boldness surprised even me. Then again, on Spring Break a guy can’t waste any time.

  “Depends,” said the tall one. Her voice was bored.

  “Depends on what?”

  “On the Mayan gods of chance.” Then she turned to the shorter one and sighed, “Freshmen,” before the two of them walked off.

  I brought my gaze back down to the pool level, but saw that Kirk still had his neck craned to follow the disappearing girls.

  “I think we’re in Paradise,” Kirk said to me.

  “That is the name of our hotel.”

  “No, did you get a look at the
tall one? She’s perfect. I mean, she’s perfection itself. She’s an angel.” He sighed.

  Given my previous experience with angels, I said nothing.

  19

  A Brief Cultural Excursion

  THE MAYAN GODS OF CHANCE did not bring those two girls back into our lives that night. Instead, the gods left us at our hotel bar with a fair sprinkling of attractive girls now dressed for dinner in party clothes. These party clothes (sometimes with bikinis underneath, sometimes not) revealed a great deal of shoulder, a fair amount of midriff, and an enormous amount of leg. They were, I concluded, almost as revealing as bikinis. What they mostly revealed was a fair amount of sunburned skin. Even the girls who had dutifully gone to the tanning salon to get ready for their Spring Break trip were now reddening from the Mexican sun.

  So, in fact, were we. Big Biff seemed the most burned. His light skin was now a painful pink. Kirk, for whatever reason, seemed to tan rather than burn. And I fell somewhere in between with a red nose, a painful set of shoulders, and—of all things—sunburned feet.

  We were comparing burns and tans when an exceptionally good-looking blonde came walking into the bar. She was, quite literally, breathtaking.

  “Mine, gentlemen,” Scrooge declared.

  In a flash, our leader was on his feet moving in the direction of the girl. Seconds later, he was busy chatting her up. Minutes after that, he was running his finger lovingly down the pale skin of her arm.

  “How does he do that?” Kirk asked me. Some loud rock music was blaring at us, so he had to shout.

  “Do what?”

  “Just walk up and talk to a girl like that?”

  “Alcohol helps,” I said.

  “So what does a guy talk about?” Kirk asked.

  “You mean, you’ve never picked up a girl?”

  “Alan, I’m going to be a minister, remember? I’ve only been involved with one girl in my life and I met her at school.”

  I nodded. “Right. Well, from my vast experience—”

  “Vast?”

  “Okay, my limited experience, the procedure goes like this: approach, smile, say hi or hello or buenos noches, ask where she’s from, make a little joke about something, then tell her that something about her is particularly wonderful.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything—her eyes or hair or nose ring or whatever. Just don’t compliment her boobs, her butt, or her tattoos. That’s considered poor form.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “You have your eye on somebody?” I asked.

  “No, just wondering,” Kirk replied. “This is anthropology for me, that’s all.”

  It was not anthropology for the rest of us. Scrooge disappeared very quickly with the blonde, perhaps the first of us to use the signal system back at our room. Biff actually found two girls to feel the muscles on his arms, though their interest in the muscle that was his brain seemed limited. Aiden was trying to make moves on a pretty girl with curly hair and a bad case of shoulder sunburn. Matt was trying to hook up with a spectacularly tall girl, a girl who so towered over him that he had to crane his neck to avoid looking right at her boobs. Goofball was up dancing and had found a half dozen girls who were willing to hit the dance floor with him. Fuji was doing his robotic DDR dance, much to the delight of many girls who seemed to find it interesting.

  And I wasn’t doing so well. My first foray was aimed at a gorgeous streaked-blonde girl wearing an off-one-shoulder top and a short flouncy skirt. I followed my own instructions to Kirk, but the results weren’t good. It’s always a bad sign when you’re trying to chat a girl up if she keeps scanning the room looking for some guy who might be hotter. After ten minutes I gave up and went off for another beer.

  “Shot down?” Kirk asked. He actually had a notebook out and was writing in it.

  “No response,” I told him. “Looking for the man of her dreams, I guess.”

  “Going to try again?”

  “Have to repair my ego first. I’d go get a beer but I’m a little wobbly on my feet.” Actually, I was a lot wobbly, or staggering, as the case may be.

  “I’ll grab one for you,” Kirk replied. “I need a refill of my Coke anyway.”

  I watched Kirk make his way to the bar. He was dressed, as I was, in the college-student-on-Spring-Break style: an oversized print shirt, khaki cargo pants, sandals. On Kirk, this outfit seemed to emphasize his big shoulders and muscular legs. On me, I realized, this outfit made me look gawky and skinny. Of course, Kirk worked out every day and I merely thought about working out, and rarely even thought about it more than once a week. That difference leads to some differences in the way bodies develop and clothes hang.

  It also leads to variations in attractiveness. Three different girls came up to Kirk as he moved through the crowd and stood at the bar. Each of them made their flirtatious girl moves, and each of them was politely received and dismissed by my roommate. In the five minutes it took Kirk to get me a drink, he received more female attention than I’d gotten in the last five hours.

  What is it about some guys? Kirk was not that handsome. Admittedly, he did have this general resemblance to Hugh Grant or Brad Pitt, but he didn’t have killer dimples or an especially engaging smile. Nor did he have Scrooge’s aggressive, outgoing personality. In truth, Kirk was quite shy around most people and often preferred reading a book to going out to a bar. So how could such a guy be such a chick magnet?

  Irony, I said to myself. It’s the principle of irony. Because Kirk wasn’t interested and didn’t want sex, girls naturally threw themselves at him. He had a careless attitude towards women—in contrast to my bumbling and continuing efforts at getting laid—which must have been irresistible. By not wanting them, he made the girls want him.

  That, and he was better looking.

  “Cheer up, Al,” Kirk said, plunking down my beer. “It’s only day one. In another day or two, you’ll have found the girl of your dreams. There must be five thousand girls on this stretch of beach.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. By this time of night, the many one-dollar cervezas of the day were taking their toll on me. I was simply amazed at the way guys like Biff and Aiden could down beer after beer, interspersed with margaritas and topped off with tequila shooters, and still remain standing—if not particularly lucid. As for me, I simply felt exhausted and soon fell into a dreamless sleep.

  We spent the next day nursing vicious hangovers, except for Kirk, who actually ran two miles down the beach and worked out in the hotel gym for half an hour. There are times when I’m ready to strangle him out of sheer envy.

  That evening, Scrooge suggested that he and Kirk head downtown for an excursion—something about Mexican art, music, and culture.

  “Hey, what about me?” I asked.

  “There may or may not be girls, Al,” Scrooge replied. “And the Mexican señoritas are off limits. You’ll probably do better here at the bar.”

  “Yeah, but I’m interested in culture, too,” I whined. “I’m an English lit major. I know about Shakespeare and Milton and Keats and Shelley. Besides, I don’t feel like hanging around here and getting hungover again.”

  “And what about me?” Aiden piped up. “Culture is, like, my middle name.”

  Scrooge rolled his eyes, but the matter was decided. The four of us squeezed into a tiny Volkswagen Beetle that had had its passenger seat removed to make extra room for human cargo. Scrooge, Aiden, and Kirk crammed together on the back seat and I sat down, facing backwards, on the floor pan. Judging by the erratic acceleration and braking, dizzying turns, and the expressions on my friends’ faces, it was probably just as well that I couldn’t see out the front window.

  We poured out of the taxi at the north end of El Centro, paid the driver a handful of pesos, and set out down the road. Shortly we were on a broad boardwalk that hugged the Pacific Ocean beach on one side and was dotted with shops, bars, and clubs on the other. Out on the water, a handful of tour boats lent their lights to the purple glow of the hor
izon. A few stars dotted the dark sky and a sliver of a moon had risen just over the water, its reflection rippling with the waves.

  Scrooge was our tour guide. “Gentlemen, this is a cultural tour, so we begin at the Malecon, which is Spanish for boardwalk or something like that. In Mexican society, families walk the Malecon so eligible señoritas get a chance to eyeball the eligible young men of the town, and vice versa.”

  “Kind of like cruising,” Matt volunteered.

  “But with chaperones,” Scrooge said, “always with the intention of marriage, and all under the watchful eyes of the Virgin of Guadalupe.” He gestured towards a large church at the end of the Malecon.

  “How’d you get to know so much about this?” I asked him.

  “Deep study and much reading in cultural anthropology,” Scrooge replied.

  I shook my head. “No, really.”

  “My parents,” Scrooge admitted. “If you go on a family vacation with two schoolteachers, you pick up a few things.”

  So we strolled down the Malecon, eyeballing the sunburned tourists who, like us, were in town for Spring Break, and admiring the beautiful Mexican girls—so demurely dressed—with their shy eyes and innocent smiles. It seemed like the whole city was out for a stroll—families with young children in white shirts and white dresses, groups of young teens in out-of-date T-shirts, old people with canes, and beggars wrapped in shawls and blankets.

  “Are you taking notes?” I asked Kirk.

  “Just mentally. Quite a difference in mating rituals.”

  “The Mexicans versus us?”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “Makes me wonder how we lost our innocence.”

  This conversation was getting way too profound for my hungover brain, so I went back to gazing at the ocean to our right and the sea of people to our left. We could have strolled down the entire Malecon in this way, but Kirk came to a sudden halt.