Day 22

When Rifiel gave me the idea to quit my life to surf, all I knew was that surfing made me happy. So I made a plan and went for it. The plan was to remain safely at a resort where money wouldn’t be an issue, since room and meals were provided in exchange for my working there. That plan didn’t work out. Now in Mexico, I still knew only that surfing made me happy. So I made simpler plan. I continued south, my only plan being to stop at each surf spot listed in my book, “The Guide to Surfing Mainland Mexico.” If the waves were good, I would stay. When the swell dropped, I would go looking for more.

As the sun set on my first day of solo driving, I located a tiny town in which my book indicated there were surfing waves. I found a small hotel–really, just a large house with extra rooms. I negotiated a price of $20 for the night, parked the truck behind the gate and set out on foot in search of food and waves. I found a beach, but the ocean was flat. A man emerged from a beachfront home to inquire what the strange, big white girl was doing there. He spoke a little English and was happy to practice with me. I told him I wanted to go surfing. He laughed. He said the surfing season wasn’t for three more months. I asked him if there was any place to eat. He said there were no restaurants in town, but there was a store where I could buy food.

Panic rose at the thought of having to go to bed without a hot dinner. Control…I had none. I pushed down the fear and searched for the store. When I found the store, my panic only increased. It was your typical Mexican corner store, filled with cookies and soda but not much else. I bought a package of crackers, a Diet Coke and some brownies that appeared to be homemade. No workout for the day, chocolate for dinner, I felt my butt getting bigger before I even walked out the door. Luckily, I found some children playing soccer in the street. They let me join them for long enough to work up a sweat, whereby I regained a bit of control. I felt at least a bit more justified in polishing off the last of my processed food.

The next surf spot in my book was a suburb, just outside Acapulco. I’d probably make it there by lunch time. Entering the city limits, I noticed my car driving a little funny. It wasn’t shifting very easily into drive from park, and it was struggling to climb the hills. The speedometer didn’t budge when I stepped on the gas, but the RPM’s jumped instead. OH CRAP.

I pulled over once again to do the only two things I knew how to do: check the fluids and call my Dad.

“It sounds like the transmission, hon. You better get to a mechanic.” My Dad didn’t have any better news for me.

Once again, The Voice began to scold me. I was an idiot for ever leaving California. I was going to run out of money. Why hadn’t I stayed in Troncones, where I had a good job and okay waves?

“No WAY. I’m in this! There is nothing I can’t handle.” I spoke out loud, and to my surprise it worked. The Voice shut up, supplanted by a second, more helpful voice.

“You are so badass! You totally got this! Who cares what happens? It’s all part of the adventure. BOOM POW YEAH!” This new voice sounded like a fat African American woman. I liked her voice a lot.

Strategically, I chose a mechanic on the same street as the surfing beach. After a challenging bit of communication, I learned that my transmission would need to be rebuilt, and that the repairs would take five days. The mechanic had a sort of mother-in-law house, and said he would rent it to me while I waited for the car to be fixed.

My room was $5 per night. There was no AC and only one window. The room was built of concrete. It resembled a prison cell. The cell housed two sets of bunk beds and two queen beds, all equipped with bare, brown-and-green striped mattresses. I knew exactly where the dingy, piss-stained mattresses had come from, because I’d previously seen Mexican men cruising the allies in San Diego neighborhoods, reclaiming them from spots alongside dumpsters. I saw trucks full of these beds, objects that homeless people and feral dogs used to call home. I saw them stacked in the back of trucks, cruising down Interstate 5, heading toward the Tijuana border. And now, I was paying to sleep on one of them, rusty springs jabbing my back all night long. Electricity was supplied to my prison cell via an extension cable running from the landlord’s house into mine. I could plug in a light, a fan and my phone charger. The toilet had no seat, but it flushed. The shower had no hot water, but it had water. With no control over my car, my living situation or my length of stay, somehow I was totally content.

I had been staying in the suburb, Playa Bonfil, waiting on my car’s repairs for three days. I had spent two terrifying surf sessions in overhead waves that broke with the force of freeway collisions. I was just learning to shortboard, and was taking some heavy wipeouts. I hadn’t seen another girl in the line up yet, and I wouldn’t see another girl for ten more days. I never saw another white person, and I never heard a word of English spoken on the water. My sun-and-salt-bleached-blond hair and female body parts were an instant sensation. Which, of course, I loved.

I met Raul the evening of my third day in town. I was eating at a streetside cafe when one of the largest Mexicans I’d ever seen started dodging cars, sprinting across the highway, making a beeline for me. Raul spoke English.

“You were surfing this morning, right?” He must have spotted me in the lineup. I didn’t recognize him. I always loved when that happened.

“Yeah…” I responded hesitantly. What did this six-foot-two, two hundred pound guy want from me?

“I wanted to give you something.”

He had with him a copy of Surfer Magazine from last year and two bars of wax, one pink and one green. The magazine had obviously changed hands many times, and I would not be the final owner either. Raul pulled up a chair and asked if he was bothering me. I told him no, and we chatted for a while. I asked him how he found me eating dinner that night.

“Amiga, you are blond, you are white, you are big. Have you seen anyone else like you? Be careful, amiga. A lot guys will do a lotta things to be around you.”

His words were meant to caution me, but instead they excited me. I was starving for male attention. I knew it, and I hated that about myself. I felt guilty every time I enjoyed the stares of men as I walked into a room. Yet I craved it. Suddenly, my starving ego found itself feasting at the buffett of attention.

Something about Latin men! Latin men love all female body types, skinny, fat and anything in between. And, even better, they are unabashedly vocal about how much they love the female body.

He was right. I stood out, and the boys loved it. So did I. I’m not sure what I liked more, catching waves or watching guys try to catch me after surfing. The local surfers at Playa Bonfil called themselves the Bonfil Boys and Team Radical. They could shred, for sure, some of the best surfing I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The waves lent themselves to both barrel riding and aerial maneuvers. As I walked the beach to paddle out, someone would hoot at me from a palapa. As I paddled for a wave, someone would hoot at me, “Da’le Güara! Da’le!” (Go white girl, go!). Post-surf sessions were the best. The boys would gather at a beachside restaurant with a perfect view of the waves to have breakfast, beers and share stories. Although my Spanish sucked and I struggled to say anything meaningful, I was always hooted at to join them. Post-surf beers would turn into photo shoots, where each and every boy wanted a picture with me, wanted to put his arm around my hips (which met the height of his ribs), or wanted to tag me in a Facebook photo. I was invited to party in town. I was invited to go wake surfing. I was invited to the movies. I was invited out for micheladas. If I walked through town, each time I crossed an intersection someone down the road would yell, “Melaniiiii”.  I was popular.

One evening, I sat in my jail cell of an apartment, the door cracked so my puppy could go in and out. The dog was teething and had a bad habit of chewing everything. I was a new dog owner and had a bad habit of never watching her. While I played a language game on my phone, Mika found the extension cable that ran power to my unit. It must have tasted good, because I heard a blood curdling yelp from outside the door–and the lights went out. I ran outside to pull the poor little thing off of the cord, the current so strong that she couldn’t remove herself. It zapped me pretty good through her limp body. I screamed, scooped up my baby and started crying.

A female scream in a run-down Mexican neighborhood is a call to action. The twenty-two-year-old boy who lived next door leapt over my locked gate in about 7.3 seconds. Within thirty seconds, several more young men had found their way into my gated and locked yard. I tried to explain, through sign language and awful Spanish, what had happened. One of the guys figured out that I was without power, and he sprang to address the problem. Without unplugging the cable, he proceeded to fix the exposed wire, using a rock to shave back the insulation. With some plastic ripped from his baggy of weed, he insulated his hand while he spliced the wires back together. Borrowing a piece of used electrical tape from another spot on the cable, he sealed up the whole job. Good as new. I had light, and new friends.

The guys wanted to show me around the city. I didn’t know them, and these fence jumpers didn’t exactly seem like stand up guys. I could hardly communicate with them. The Voice told me what the good girl should do. But the good girl also should never have left San Diego, should never have gotten a divorce,  and shouldn’t eat bad food. She most definitely shouldn’t go out with young, strange men in the middle of the night in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Screw it!  

We swam in the ocean under the moonlight, jumped a fence to a private beach and ate tacos at two in the morning. I was slightly disappointed in the morning, when I realized I’d lost the shirt I bought the day before from the local surf shop, and instead was wearing a man’s extra large tank top. Disappointed, but I was definitely not guilty.

I told my journal the next day, I think I just had the best night of my life.

My car took eight days to fix, not the five I was originally quoted. But I stayed a full two weeks. I had fallen in love with the area, the far-too-challenging surfing and the attention from the Bonfil Boys.

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*some names have been changed to protect privacy

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