Day 65

For a brief second a pulse of anxiety shot through my sternum. I was gathering dirty laundry from the truck. A Spanish version of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous peeked out of Diego’s backpack. I took a deep breath, reminding myself not to have “boyfriend in recovery PTSD”. I brushed it off, hoping it was just something from his past.

Diego didn’t like to speak to me in English, which left me guessing a lot. It also put him in a position of power. He knew the area, the roads, the locals, the places to sleep, the places to find food…without him I would have traveled only to the spots in my travel guide book or those I found from Google reviews. With him, I was on the adventure of a lifetime! I was surfing unknown breaks and venturing places other California surfers would pay thousands to see.

But he wouldn’t ever give me any details. Possibly that was because he didn’t have any to give. I never knew where we were going, why we were going there, how long we would stay, how we would eat or where we would sleep. I don’t think he did either. Sometimes he would wait until 11:00 pm before answering my questions about where we would find a place to sleep. He didn’t have a care in the world, and since I wanted to continue scoring epic waves and epic hammock time, I was forced to release control and go with the flow.

It was the rainy season and the bugs were awful. My body was covered with infected insect bites. Some nights we got a room with screens, out of the rain and away from the bugs, but other days we got wet. I was surrendering control for the sake of surfing, adventure and romance. Surrender was new and exciting, and it was giving me a high.

One day, when we were running low on gas, I mentioned to Diego that I wanted to drive a few miles in the wrong direction to fill up before heading out to seek the day’s waves. My personal rule was never to let the gas dip below half a tank. He told me no, that we had plenty, and said there was another gas station in the correct direction. I asked how far but he didn’t answer me.

When we arrived at the service station, almost on empty, we were told, “No hay,” or “There is no gas today.” Diego fired a couple questions I didn’t understand at the gas station attendant. Then he looked at me and commanded, “Lets go, fast!” I had learned to do as I was told. I drove, and I drove fast. After a few minutes, we caught up to a pickup truck with large racks extending from the bed. There was a huge tank in the back, maybe five hundred gallons of liquid sloshing around inside. Diego ordered me to flash my lights and honk. I obeyed. He took off his sunglasses and hat and stuck his head out the window to be recognized. The truck pulled over and three men jumped out, all wearing bandanas over their faces. Diego told me to stay put and I didn’t argue. He got out of my truck, casually strolled over to the men and greeted each of them with a hand slap and a fist bump. My heart was racing. He returned to me and stuck his head in the driver’s side window.

“Dame quinientos pesos.” He asked for 25 bucks. I gave it to him. One of the bandana guys sucked on a hose, spit gas from his mouth and filled a small container. He brought the container to my car and told me to unlock the gas tank. I obeyed. A full-service fill up, from the cartel, which had just robbed the gas station ten minutes before. I wondered if I should leave a tip.

“How did you know those guys?” I asked Diego as they drove away.

“I know them.” He responded.

A few nights later, in a tiny fishing village of about a thousand people, I decided to treat us to a decent dinner. There was a pizza parlor in the village, and I was sick of fresh fish tacos. Diego, who just last week seemed to have an unlimited supply of money, was now out, completely out. He told me there would be more money soon, and would I just pay for the food and the cabana rentals this week, and that he would pay me back. I was running out of money too, but what was I supposed to do, leave a man to starve? My “out of money” and his “out of money” were very different. I still had a few grand in a savings account, credit cards and parents. Diego literally did not have a dime to his name, but he didn’t seem to be too worried about it. I was finding so much value leaving worry, stress and control behind that I decided to just go with it.

I stuffed my mouth with pizza, enjoying the grease running down my chin, and heard a commotion outside the restaurant. Several loud trucks had rolled in, and I heard Diego’s nickname being called out. Diego told me to stay inside. I obeyed. Although I could hear the conversation outside, I couldn’t understand it. Too many voices were speaking at once and I couldn’t make sense of the Spanish. But the other people inside the restaurant did understand, and all were staring at the empty chair next to me where Diego had been sitting. The conversation got loud and heated. Eventually the trucks fired back up and peeled out. Gravel sprayed audibly against the side of the building as the trucks spun their tires.

Diego returned, looking sad. “I need to get out of this state. I don’t want to kill the people.” And that would be all he would say of the incident.  He ordered another beer, his fifth, or maybe seventh, I had lost track. Then he ordered a shot of mezcal, “for his nerves”, finished it and ordered another. I would have no explanation, but I would have a large bar tab to pay.

A Close Call

Day 72

It had been a few weeks since Diego had run out of money. I was annoyed, but I also had compassion. Diego had shown no signs of wanting to earn money to help pay for anything. When I expressed my concerns about his finances, he got upset with me. He was also drinking more every week we were together. After a while, he was drinking every day. A lot. He was drunk most afternoons by three or four. As the drinking continued throughout each day, his personality changed. He started verbally abusing me by seven or eight in the evenings: I smelled bad, I needed to shave, I was a slut, he just knew I was off with other men while he surfed, I didn’t love him, I only cared about money, I was racist, I thought I was better than him. On and on it went; the more drunk he became, the more hurtful his comments. But the next morning, it would be all, “Princesa, te quiero.” (I love you, Princess). That, or his favorite, “Let’s make a cappuccino baby, you bring the milk, I’ll bring the coffee.” Every morning, I would tell him it was over if he ever spoke to me that way again. He would cry and say he didn’t remember it and he was so sorry. He probably didn’t remember, and he probably was sorry, but within two or three days the story would repeat itself.

A month into my relationship with Diego, I had to make a quick trip back to California to take care of some business with my yoga studio, which I was still trying to sell. I’d leave my truck and my puppy with Diego for the week I would be gone. I gave him $80 to buy dog food and put gas in the truck. I left specific instructions to wash the dog every other day with a special soap, because the ticks were awful and normal tick treatments were not strong enough. I repeated the instructions for the dog in both Spanish and English. He promised he would take good care of her, and that she would be very happy on his parent’s ranch for the week.

After the week, Diego came to pick me up at the airport. We stopped at a gas station so I could pay to fill up the tank, because it was nearly empty. I wondered how he had burned through enough money for two tanks of gas in a week, but I knew it wasn’t worth asking because I wouldn’t get an answer. I asked where my dog was, and he said she had been acting strange and wouldn’t come to him. When we returned to his parents’ house, where he had been staying, my dog approached me shyly, ears down and tail between her legs. Patches of fur were missing all over her body, and before I even touched her I could see bugs crawling all over her coat.

“Your dog has a lotta fuckin ticks,” he said, in English.

“How many times did you give her a bath?” I asked.

He pretended he didn’t understand.

“Cuantas veces la banaste?” I repeated the question in Spanish, but I wasn’t sure I got it right and once again he didn’t respond. So I let it go. I went looking for her shampoo to give her an immediate bath and found it in the same spot I had left it.

The trip to California had been stressful. It was nearly evening by the time I had arrived back in Mexico. I had spent a miserable night the previous day, stuck in the Mexico City airport with a hoodie for a blanket and a backpack for a pillow. I was exhausted. I had rented an apartment from a friend of Diego’s. The apartment was back in Puerto Escondido, a couple of hours away from the airport. All I wanted to do was to get back to the apartment, fall into my bed and sleep. There was no question as to whether or not Diego was going to stay on the ranch with his family or come with me to stay in the apartment. He assumed he would come with me.

I wanted to break it off and tell him he couldn’t come. I got a choking feeling in my chest, and couldn’t say what I really wanted to say. It was so hard to say anything politely in my basic Spanish and I didn’t have the courage to bluntly assert, “You are an alcoholic and are using me and I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.” I tried in Spanish to say something, like he was a wonderful person and I enjoyed spending time with him but I would prefer to be on my own from here on out. But even if my Spanish was good, it had no effect on him. He promised, like he had done four or five times already, that there would be no more drinking (after tomorrow) and that he would be able to find work back in Puerto Escondido. The good little girl inside me, who never wanted to upset anyone, quit arguing and hoped for the best.

We got in the truck to make the drive to my apartment, but he directed me to drive in the opposite direction. He needed to run a quick errand in the next village over. Then we could be on our way. I was annoyed, but I obeyed. We arrived in the village–which was twenty miles out of the way–only to learn that the man he was looking for wasn’t home, but would be home “soon.” In Mexico, soon can mean anything from a couple of minutes to several hours from now. We waited, and waited, and waited. I felt simultaneously impatient and guilty for getting impatient. After all, wasn’t I in Mexico to learn to slow down, stress less, give up control and be more present? So I played soccer with little kids in the street while he drank beer. The sun set and still, we waited. Finally, I told him we had to go, that I was going with or without him. He told me not to worry, that he would drive and I could sleep and that it was better to drive at night anyway. Then he bought another beer from the corner store, and two more for his friends, and turned his conversation back to them.

Principles from my Al-Anon program started to play in my head. You agreed to take him here, you can’t blame anyone but yourself. And, No one has the power to make you angry except yourself.

We continued to wait well past dark, and finally I said what I had been wanting to say for hours, in the tone of voice I had been wanting to say it.

“I am exhausted. I am starving. I’ve done all that you asked, and you are sitting here getting drunk while I feel like crap. Let’s go, now! Do you need me to repeat that in Spanish for all your friends to hear?”

I turned my back to him and walked to the truck. I fired it up and put it in reverse. He was quickly in the passenger seat. By that time, it was long past dark and my eyes were beginning to feel heavy. Diego kept begging me to let him drive. Even though he was twenty-nine years old, I had reason to believe he had probably not driven more than a dozen times in his life. On top of that, he had been drinking all day. I was clearly frustrated with him, and the more I complained of being tired, the more he insisted that I let him drive. The roads seemed to be getting narrower and narrower as we wound along a mountain road, hugging the coastline. A huge storm the day before had washed rocks down the steep mountain, rocks that now filled the already narrow shoulder to my right.

As we rounded a sharp bend, I had to slam the breaks when a truck appeared in my lane less than thirty feet ahead, coming straight at me. The rain had washed huge piles of rock and dirt into the truck’s proper lane, so the driver had swerved into my lane to avoid them. Thirty minutes later, I was the one swerving into oncoming traffic when my headlights swept around a curve to reveal that the road was completely gone in front of me, washed out, leaving in its place a gaping hole and a sixty foot drop down the sheer side of a cliff.

“You are going to kill us, mommie!” Diego shouted at me. “Let me drive, I’m from here. I know these roads!”

“FINE!” I caved in, wanting to trust him.

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*some names have been changed to protect privacy

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