Getting permanently disabled is good for a monthly SSDI payment of $2,350—for life. That’s not a lot of dough up in San Diego County, but down here in Sabanita it’s enough to make the fishermen jealous. But losing an eye isn’t great. And I really miss being able to sling it like I used to. “Dude, you could sell dry stems to a Maui dope dealer,” my surf buds used to tell me.
It’s hard out there for a bullshitter when that silver tongue gets all tied up. I also have this pretty jagged bald spot on the back of my head from the exit wound. It’s about the size of a quarter. And I don’t like that I can’t remember what happened in junior high, or anybody’s phone number—or if there was ever anything good about being married.
I stopped the Suburban in front of Alberto’s Tequila Bar, and Winsor got out. He grabbed his board and slammed the tailgate closed, and then stomped off without saying a word or even grunting thank you. Obsidian threw him the finger.
“Adios, fart breath.”
His stepbrother laughed.
“You guys want me to drop you at the plaza?” I asked.
“Sure,” Jade said for both of them.
I pulled up across from the plaza, and I could see Meagan dozing in one of those red plastic Coca-Cola chairs that probably outnumber all the asses in Mexico. I honked, and Meagan jerked awake. The boys jumped out and grabbed their boards. They didn’t say thank you, but Obsidian sort of waved.
“Are you having a good day?” I called out.
“Any day I can feed my kids is a good day, Nick.” She half smiled back.
I wasn’t crazy about Meagan’s always playing the survivor card, but for some reason I really liked this lady.
Not that it mattered.
Meagan was living with Winsor, who wasn’t exactly a best pal, but he was someone I surfed with. If pushed, I could shove him off the list—I had known him for only four years—but for now I had his back, which, when applying the buddy rule at its most basic, meant that I shouldn’t try to bang his girl.
The summer before last, Winsor had brought Meagan back from San Blas, a little city a few hundred miles north that’s famous for boat builders and drug smugglers and for its access to Bahía de Matanchén—home of the longest wave in North America. The name literally means “kill Chinese.”
No shit.
Matanchén is a wave that only works on a south swell, and its tactless designation comes from back when local laborers were striking for higher wages at the silver mines in Guanajuato. Management tried to break the strike with scabs from China, but the Mexican miners stormed the junks moored in the bay, killed the Chinese interlopers, and dumped their bodies into the home of what has become one of the world’s tastiest rights—which is a fun fact you won’t find in a surf guide.
I’d been planning to make the trip to San Blas with Winsor, but we had waves here in Sabanita, so I passed.
“Never leave good waves for better waves,” I told him—my go-to mantra about appreciating the good that I’ve got.
The waves in Sabanita were awesome that weekend, but what went off at Matanchén Bay will be remembered as all-time. Winsor said he’d had a career weekend. “The longest waves of my life.” And some of the best sex he’d ever had.
“Thanks for being so nice to my boys, Nick,” Meagan said, snapping me out of it. She never called me Pirata. She probably figured my eye patch was a prop.
Jade and Obsidian had just crossed the plaza and huddled under the golf umbrella. They were drinking fresh orange juice out of a single plastic bag with a couple of straws. Meagan grabbed two handfuls of dreads and took a deep whiff of the saltwatered locks. She made a face, and Jade stuck his tongue out at her as his stepbrother tried to juke out of reach. It was the fun kind of messing around that was hard for me to watch.
“No worries,” I said. “They’re good kids.”
“With lice,” she said, flicking off the bicho that was hiding out on Jade’s head. “But I’ll take ’em any way they come.”
My throat tightened.
“Don’t miss this, Nick,” she said. “Don’t miss having kids.”
I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. I nodded and drove off.
3
I didn’t make it back to my casa until about seven o’clock the next evening, which was about a day and a half later than I had planned. Not that I ever really had a plan in Mexico. And even if I did, they’re pretty hard to stick to down here. You can plan to have the plumber come on Tuesday, but don’t plan on being shocked if he doesn’t show up to fix your toilet until after dinner on Sunday. One time, I got a refrigerator delivered to my door at two in the morning.
After I’d dropped off the boys, I turned toward the beach—instead of making a left on the street behind the plaza and driving the three short blocks home.
I had made this mistake before. This time, I told myself it was because I wanted to watch the sunset session here in town at Sabanita’s right break. But I was lying. What I really wanted to do was drink to get a buzz going—and then score some dope.
I yanked the Suburban between the ruts of the dirt road that gets you to the beach by the panga boats, and then parked on the sand. I could see that both the right and left breaks were firing. But the left was on the side of town closer to my casa, and I didn’t want reason or responsibility to tempt me to head home.
Nothing makes me feel guiltier than not surfing when the waves are good. It hounds me in an ugly way, like I’m wasting daylight on my last day on earth. So I grabbed my Red Fin and paddled out. I figured I had about a half hour before the sun dunked below the horizon and then maybe another twenty minutes of dusk—there’d still be plenty of time left for self-medication.
Not many guys were out. Mid-August is heavy tormenta and really hot, so only the cheapest of tourists visit Sabanita then, and they’re generally not surfers. They’re generally Canadians. When I reached the lineup, I could see Adan and Ticho. Sergio was paddling in, and I waved to him. There were a couple of other guys I didn’t know. And Lola and Resa were on longboards, as elegant as always.
A set came through, and I watched Adan effortlessly make the first wave. He stalled at the top of the drop but then let gravity take over, arcing into the bowl and leaning against its hollow blue face as the wave walled up.
It was a nothing-special wave but a very special surfer, and no matter how many times I see the good guys up close, I’m always stunned at how fast they can rip. By the time Adan cranked off a finishing three-sixty, he must have been going thirty miles per hour.
“Pirata! Out the back!” Ticho yelled, in English in deference to my Spanglish, and pointed to some sweet lines hulking up farther offshore.
I paddled hard to make the set wave and then pivoted just under its peak—my board began to rise and I charged down the face to make my get-up—and then, like it was nothing, I carved a lazy bottom turn and claimed the wave with a nod.
“¡Animo!” Ticho cheered, flattering me more than he needed to.
“Gracias,” I said.
I trimmed the board and settled her down the line. The Red Fin was as stable as a picnic table. I didn’t have to move much. I occasionally raised an arm or tilted my head. Old-school.
I paddled in after making only two more waves, but I still felt privileged in the way that I do when I get to surf my home break—like I’d just shared a favorite sandwich with a good friend.
4
I put my Red Fin in the surfboard rack in front of El Gecko and took the corner seat on the far side, just behind a concrete half wall that was all chipped and cracked. I put my feet up on it and watched Ticho make his last wave of the day—a head-high nugget that he killed and then belly-rode to shore. I threw him a casual shaka, as if he was my protégé, for the benefit of these two loos sitting behind me, but I don’t think they were impressed.
“Is surfing hard?” one of them asked.
Or maybe they were.
“For some people,” I said, paying tribute to the kook in me.
“Are you a local?”
“No. I just live here.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Only for the very poor,” I said.
The two loos paid their check and left, and then this vintage gringa wrapped in a slightly too-tight beach sarong sashayed over and sneezed on me. Her name was Sarah. I’d met her my first day in Sabanita, six years ago this coming Christmas morning.
“It’s just allergies,” Sarah said, wiping her nose on the end of a red bandanna she had tied around one wrist. “I’m not healthy enough for the flu. I’m a bad viral host.”
Sarah waited tables for tips, and she dealt a little, but her real specialty was over-sharing.
“You’re the hostess with the mostest,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“Who’s been on her feet all day,” Sarah said. “I need to get better shoes.”
She was wearing beautifully embroidered sandals, but the leather soles were worn down and lopsided.
“I saw you make a few waves out there,” Sarah said, sticking her tongue through the space where a front tooth should have been. “Step back on your board and you’ll be able to wheel it into a better cutback.”
Sarah claimed she had been the ISP longboard champ back in the seventies, and she couldn’t resist giving surfing advice—whether it made sense or not.
“That’s how Hynson designed the Red Fin,” Sarah continued.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll work on it.”
No one believed her, but most of us were polite. Part of the deal with expats in Mexico is that we get to be whoever we want to be—as long as we don’t cause too much trouble.
“But you’re not bad for a middle-ager.” Sarah smiled.
“I’m not middle-aged.”
“Are you fifty yet?”
“How can you ask me that?”
“Because in a few days it’s sixty for me,” Sarah said, suddenly a little sad. “Which means middle age is over, unless I live to be a hundred and twenty.”
“Anything is possible,” I said. “I’ll be forty in March.”
Sarah’s eyes began to fill up.
“And unless I get lucky and come across a blind man who digs zaftig women, I’ll have gone my whole fifties without having had sex once. An entire decade. Not once.”
“Where’s Zaftig?”
“Nowhere,” Sarah said. “It’s a polite word for fat.”
“You’re not fat,” I said.
“We’re all fat,” she said.
It was easy to miss how smart Sarah was. She had the mujer excéntrica thing working, and her flaws were obvious. But under that dealer pushback and exaggeration, there was a sensitive and self-aware woman.
“And I’m all about someone who set records up into my forties,” she carried on. “I love men. I loved being touched. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“There isn’t,” I said.
I wasn’t up for hearing about how Sarah was wounded in action during the sexual revolution. I was on my own mission at the moment.
“I’d like a Pacífico and a shot . . . Please?”
But she gave me this weird look, because she knew I didn’t booze that much anymore.
“The ceviche is fresh,” she said, meaning that she didn’t think I should drink on an empty stomach.
“I’m not going to eat, actually,” I said. “And I’m going to want some blow, too.”
Sarah stared at me. “No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
“It’s off-season.”
“This is year-round, Sarah,” I said, pointing to my eye patch. “And it’s medicinal. In the States, I even had a prescription.”
Sarah smirked at me. “For coke?”
“A synthetic version,” I said.
“That’s how people can get into trouble,” Sarah said. “My products are for recreational purposes only.”
Way back on our first day together, Santa’s little helper had stuffed a couple of eight balls into our stockings, not to mention our noses. I could see that Sarah hadn’t forgotten what one particularly ugly Ghost of Christmas Past looked like. I think it was the day she lost her tooth.
“Does it ever feel like you’re looking out from way too far back in your head?” I asked.
Tunnel vision was a classic TBI pre-fit phenomenon, but I wasn’t sure she was getting it.
“Not exactly,” Sarah said. “But it sounds interesting.”
“It’s terrifying,” I said.
It’s hard to explain exactly what Post–Traumatic Brain Injury Syndrome feels like, except to another TBI victim, and even then it’s almost impossible to find the words, not to mention keep their attention. It’s like this growing out-of-body buzz where everything feels like it’s out of proportion—like when Alice shrinks and the Mad Hatter gets supersized.
The feeling starts coming from far away, and it can take days to get here. Like today at Gagger’s, I could feel it getting closer. I knew that it was out there—not in any real place, exactly, but in my future. I know that doesn’t make much sense, and that’s part of it, too. But I did know I had to try to knock it back. I hated the feeling. I lived in fear of it. And that’s what I was doing here.
“It’s extradimensional,” I said, in the exact way I used to say it to my TBI counselor at Sharp Rehab up in San Diego. “Like a real-life Wonderland.”
“Maybe you should meditate more,” Sarah said.
“Just get me the bindle,” I said.
Like a lot of survivors of penetrating head trauma, I suffer epileptic seizures—those big guys they call tonic-clonics, the grand mals—and there’s some leftover aphasia, too. These are the commissions I still collect from my car salesman days, and the main reason I left the US.
California revoked my driver’s license a few months after I got out of Sharp because I had a major fit behind the wheel of my company demonstrator and ran into a tree. My seven-year-old son was sitting in the passenger seat.
My caseworker at Sharp said I’d lost control because I’d gone off my seizure meds. I really didn’t have a better excuse. But it wouldn’t have mattered. Marshall broke his neck and spent the next year strapped to a Stryker frame.
My wife split. I lost my house. I lost my job. How the hell can you sell cars if you’re not allowed to drive one? Which was the question I had preoccupied myself with as I begged for sympathy and forgiveness—a one-eyed kook riding the bus to Nicky Lutz’s used-car lot.
But nothing is worse than knowing you’ll probably never see your son again.
So I left the Golden State. I didn’t leave a note. I didn’t say good-bye.
Down here in Mexico, anyone can drive. Nobody needs a license, and it doesn’t matter if you have TBI and PTSD or whichever PC word soup is being used to mean “brain damaged.”
The first thing they do after you start having fits is to load you up on drugs like Dilantin that make your body feel like it’s filled with cement—like in those dreams where your legs are so heavy, you can’t run.
But when they stop working, you get moved up to what are called the psychotropics. Which sounds like where you’d send your brain for a vacation. And that’s exactly what those drugs do—until they made me start to twitch, which was as bad as the fits.
So I just stopped taking them altogether—except for the recreationals.
It’s not an exact science, but the occasional binge with a little bit of blow turns down my recurring crazies better than what the head doctors had me on.
5
I did a couple of bumps and then had two more shots and three more beers—and it finally began to feel like the size and shape of things to come were going to stay more normally sized. This was what I called the window moments—those fleeting moments of being high when you are at exactly the right height. They never last, but they are sweet. I never have a hole in my head up there, and I can see for miles and miles.
But the trouble with doing blow in Mexico during off-season is that there’s no one to coke-ta
lk to. And you can’t just call up Norman Fackler from the second grade—Hey, Norman, remember when we got into a fight over that lightsaber—because that’s going to eat up too many of your Telcel minutes.
So if it’s a weeknight in August and you don’t speak a lot of Spanish, you can find yourself high as shit with nowhere to go. For about an hour, I cruised Sabanita Plaza and tried to corner some of the cabdrivers into a conversation. But none of them was into American politics, and if a gringo starts talking about Mexican pussy, it’s a great way for him to get his ass kicked. These guys are all married with children, and they only get loaded on Sundays.
Which might explain why I headed up toward Puerto Vallarta instead of just moonwalking back to my casa.
PV is an hour’s drive north on Mexico 200, which winds along the coast just like Highway 101 up in the States. But down here, it’s mostly two lanes of potholed blacktop—fifteen hundred miles of acquired taste sluicing through cartel country and the poverty-stricken pueblos of old Mexico.
I figured I’d go to a strip bar. A lap dance sounded like the perfect nightcap—even if I wasn’t exactly dressed for professional-level debauchery. I still had on my board shorts, and I was wearing a Rip Curl T-shirt.
But then it started to rain in sheets. Big, wet squares of peso-sized drops ricocheting off the pavement. I slowed way down. It was nearly impossible to see, and I had only one working windshield wiper to go with my one working eye.
I was just a mile or two out of Sabanita when I saw Sarah, soaking wet and standing at the bus stop on Highway 200. She was trying to hitchhike. I turned around and drove back to her.
“What are you doing?” I asked, rolling down the Suburban’s window and pulling up next to her.
“I was waiting for the bus,” Sarah said. “But it’s late.”
“It’s a monsoon. They’ll all be late,” I said. “Where are you going?”
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