Dispatches from the Mayan Riviera 2: The Sun God’s Wrath

When we smack onto the runway at the Cancun International Airport, an apocalyptic sky sags low overhead; black clouds, sun setting with a purplish gasp somewhere over the Pacific. It’s an ominous warning, a reproach from the Sun God Tonatiuh himself for leaving my our 9-month-old baby at home to hop on the earliest flight for some much-needed sun, booze and depravity. Such selfishness and vice cannot go unpunished. Not according to the Good Book and the deranged souls who follow its every word.

But I didn’t care. The Sun God couldn’t stop a bunch of scurvy infested Spaniards from wiping out his loyal subjects, he’s sure as hell not making a special trip to smite an unemployed black man with a Vitamin D deficiency. Besides, I deserved this trip dammit. I was entitled to a little vacation after the ghoulish year I’d suffered.

I had quit my job of four years after the mega-Corporation who bought us out decided they could trim a few bucks if they spat 90% of the staff to the unemployment line. I, however, was installed, along with the rest of the survivors, in the role of bill collector. I guess the irony of paying a black man to hound delinquents for not paying their bills was lost on them. I saw it clearly and felt I wouldn’t be happy sweating deadbeats like a bookie chasing down bad bets in dimly lit pool halls.

So I gave notice and made plans to jet off to Playa del Carmen babyless and without a steady stream of income. I charged the trip to a  heavily burdened Visa the head office will soon dispatch a Mountie to reclaim at gunpoint and cut to ribbons if I don’t make a minimum payment ASAP. But I would deal with that when I got back. Or not.

We cleared customs without trouble, claimed our bags and as I was about to comment on the painlessness of our arrival (I have an instinctive fear that any interaction with authority, whether it be cop, EMT or customs official, will end with me face down on the linoleum, handcuffs cutting into my wrist) the Pauper Mob fell upon us, with desperate entreaties to carry our bags, drive us to our resort, hell, even their old ladies were fair game so long as the transaction ended with the Old Gringo Dollar pressed into the palm of their hands.

Our resort came to us cheaply – suspiciously so. We’d booked through one of those last minute websites who had the resort listed as a 5-star property. By Gods, there it is advertised again on the sign propped up at the resort ground’s entrance. The resorts we’d stopped at before ours were decadent and modern. How could ours be any worse? The bus ascended a paved hill, surrounded by dense foliage before coming to a stop in front of a tiny hatch that served as our resort’s lobby.

This does not portend well. There is a desk, a couple of couches where stray cats lounge luxuriously, a cramped store with a beleaguered lady manning the till and a barely operable frozen margarita machine churning a yellow sludge. Did the machine work? Was it poison? I’d never know because the owlish concierge was forced to give an orientation to nine people at once, all arriving at different times. He became flustered and stopped making sense. But by then it didn’t matter. My brain had turned to jelly somewhere over Denver.

I’d gotten moderately twisted at 8 that morning in the hotel bar but the buzz was a mere memory. Even the sedatives I’d taken mid-flight was of no help. The trip from the airport to the resort nearly killed me. We’d spent two hours on the  bus, puttering past desperate roadsides – broken bottles, rocks, blood, graffiti, dilapidated shanties and stern faced Policia with automatic assault rifles slung low, their hard eyes promising extortion, vicious beatings and a good groping for any girl unlucky enough to require their assistance with an empty purse.

Our rooms came with a stocked bar and the thought of those lonely bottles sitting forlornly on a shelf had me ready to seize the concierge by his collar and threaten him with unholy violence if he didn’t hand me the key at once.

Dispatches from the Mayan Riviera

The first fingers of twilight crawl across the terracotta roof while a horde of unseen, vicious insects croak their invertebrate love songs from surrounding jungle. As I step off a tour bus at our disintegrating resort, dripping wet, sea sick and bleary-eyed after a doomed $200 catamaran trip, I turn to Melissa to say I will use my room key to remove the teeth of the next person who either tries to sell me on an excursion or asks for a tip. Talk perhaps better left unsaid while standing in a lobby full of vacationers of all ages. But who could blame me? We were fucked over savagely by that Godless huckster in the Sunwing polo who’d sold us the trip.

He had promised a trip on a catamaran capable of holding 40 people, leaving Cancun at dawn for an idyllic island about 40 km due east. The catamaran was to be stocked aft to starboard with free booze and we’d be provided with a chance to snorkel, eat ourselves half to death, parasail and swim with, what appeared to be on the brochure, a school of massive and unfriendly sharks.

So, imagine my surprise and annoyance when we arrived at the dock at 8:30 am after a very heavy night of drinking to find that the catamaran had gone missing and been replaced with a moderately used speedboat. Also, we wouldn’t so much as be swimming with the sharks as we would be gently batting around a toothless fish doped up on enough Thorazine and Xanax to kill a bull moose inside a cramped 8×8 enclosure.

I had a feeling the man who sold us on this trip shouldn’t be trusted and should learn to submit to my instincts. He had the cunning look of a Gila Monster and the gift of talking out of both sides of his mouth familiar to anyone who has ever tried to buy a used RV.

He is the sort who promises all the frills, bells and whistles while you are standing on the lot, hands jammed in your windbreaker, kicking tires on a Saturday afternoon. But the moment you drive the junker off the lot, the rear wheels blast off the axis and scalding hot brake fluid shoots from the dash each time you push the brake pedal.  You tow the vehicle back for a refund (and maybe a quick clap up side the salesman’s head if no one is looking) and all you find is a boarded up building with a “For Sale” sign hanging from the rusted doorknob.

It was a very infuriating scene. From start to finish. But I’m not ready to talk about that day yet. The wounds are still raw. When I close my eyes before sleep I can see that Sunwing rep cackling madly as he tears off for downtown Playa del Carmen on a scooter with my money in the pocket of his cargo shorts.

Death Wish

There exists, within an infant, the sort of determination anyone over 18 has had scrubbed from the whites of their eyes after years of public school and thankless employment. There’s something beautiful and inspiring about an infant’s drive. They reach for whatever it is they want and don’t ever, ever, ever stop until they’ve grasped their goal or (more likely) fallen into a heap.

It becomes a problem, however, when the baby – like my eight-month-old Aliyah – turns this stubborn determination on unreasonable feats such as launching themselves headfirst down the basement stairs for no other reason than “hey, I haven’t done this before”.

Aliyah started crawling sometime in February (after pulling herself around like the critically damaged Terminator in T1) and over the last couple weeks has found things to eat and destroy I never knew I owned. If something shiny and extraordinarily dangerous catches her eye, she scurries across the floor, squawking madly, faster than I can give chase.

A couple years ago, in the grips of a suffocating self-hatred, I subjected myself to an M. Night Shamaylan movie where the world’s plants turn against humans and drive them one-by-one to suicide. I have no doubt he came by the unique ways characters try to self terminate by watching an infant for a few hours.

Anything lying on the floor, no matter how microscopic, and my baby will find it and try her damnedest to lodge this piece – teeming with bacteria, dog hair and carpet fibers – into the back of her windpipe.

A butcher’s knife catches the gleam of the setting sun and she’ll squirm out of my arms to see how the blade feels to ram in her nasal cavity. Even her crib, ostensibly a baby’s most safe and benign space, has become a death trap. If she wakes up during the night and my skull is not available for her to bash in with the monitor (her new favorite game) well, she’ll simply vault over the bars to find it.

You can’t baby proof what you can’t see any more than you can baby proof benign household objects. My iPad, in Aliyah’s hands, is now a dangerous weapon. What was once a tiny crack has become, after the accumulation of several hundred excited flat palm strikes from an 8-month old, a series of splintering shards and hazardous jags. She’s cut herself twice on the tablet. And the drool she’s dropped on the screen has seeped through the cracks and rendered it unusable. I miss the days when it was used strictly for porn.

I always said i wanted my kid to play football and I suppose if one were to look at her injuries -scraped chins, bruised legs, cut fingers, a destroyed gag reflex and a tail bone that, after repeatedly crashing on her ass, has been reduced to talcum powder – it’s almost the same thing.

It’s 7 pm on an unseasonably warm Monday in January. The snow has hardened into a slick crust on the street, that insufferable mutt with the personality disorder three doors down yaps incessantly at the wind and I’m ten minutes deep into a conversation comparing the texture and consistency of my infant daughter’s stool.

I don’t know when this happened to me.

Just two days before, I went to a friend’s house to play dominoes and while the Calgary Flames got their skulls kicked in on a television three feet from us, we ignored it to talk about Diaper Genies, sleeping schedules and the sleepless nights of the teething stage. If someone were to have told me at 25 that 80% of my conversations would revolve around diaper absorbency and car seats, I’d have steered into an oncoming 18-wheeler.

When did I change? And why wasn’t I aware I had? One day I’m peeling myself off a dog bed I had pushed into the bathroom and the next I’m testing formula temperature on the inside of my wrist, a vomit-stained receiving blanket draped over my shoulder.

I try to look back and see that person I used to be, or the person I was pretending to be, but I can no longer see him clearly. He’s distorted, like the people Jim Carrey saw while they were erasing his mind at Lacuna in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If you were looking for the one black man to have seen that movie, you’ve found him.

Do babies, and the maturity they (should) force on their parents, bring them closer to the person they truly are – the person they hid beneath the armor most of us must wear to psychically endure the pain of our teenaged years - or farther?

I guess what I’m wondering is, do we change as seismically as it seems or does each life experience (for good or ill) chip ever so slightly at that armour until you’re yourself once again, sitting at a desk in a downtown office building, refreshing your phone every 30 seconds so you can once again see your daughter’s face on the lock screen.

Obama, Media Bias in Presidential Politics and an Interracial Affair in Alaska

It’s the day after the 2012 election and spirits are low here in the Tim Horton’s on 5th avenue. Engineers and corporate types mill about in shirtsleeves and suits, rubbing their eyes, shaking their heads and muttering darkly about that Kenyan terrorist who has yet again managed to subvert the forces of God and reason to keep his presidential chair. It’s struck such a blow to the ignorant, war-mongering cadre of Republicans who believe it’s their sovereign right to run America back to the Stone Age, that the odious Karl Rove has reappeared to charge Obama with voter fraud.

“Well what do you expect?” asks a jowly, red-faced man to his friend in line. “With the media being like it is. They have a hard-on for him.”

Oh dear. That dreadful liberal Zionist media has stuck again. Is there no refuge for a wealthy white man in today’s society? The horror! He’s an endangered species damn it. He’s no more safe than a hunted rat, dogged at all hours by Commies and queers and darkies and Mexicans fouling the air with their Godless quest for “equality”.

“Yeah,” said the man waiting with him. A ferret-like wisp of a man with an ill-fitting suit and impeccable shoes. “I heard they called the election for Obama before he had even won California.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. CNN or something.”

The notable aspect of these gent’s complaints are, on balance, true. The media has shown a stunning bias in favor of Barrack Obama. The bias reached its apex around the time Sarah Palin began making doomed rumblings about running for the seat herself. The media was quick to ram into gear, digging up an irrelevant and fetishistic story that the Alaskan dimwit had once, twenty years prior, slept with a black man. Had this story not broke – whether true or not – I have no doubt she would have taken her backwater gibberish to the Republican primaries and, for reasons I can’t understand, been taken seriously. She is – or was – as big a celebrity as Obama; the only kind of politician who stands a chance against him. I shudder thinking what life would look like in Palin’s America. Mandatory prayer at the beginning of each work day, undercover police officers in black riot gear patrolling abortion clinics, construction of a drawbridge from Alaska to the Russia she sees outside her window and so on. But the media never allowed her to go so far. If a politician’s base consists of people who sincerely believe the world is only 4,000 years old, the only seat fit for a beast who rolls with a black man is one of the electric variety.

The world dodged a bullet when the media killed her career but it doesn’t mean it’s fair.

The media treated Mitt much kinder but he never stood a chance.  The fact Mitt made it this far and took in as much of the vote as he did is scary for reasons I’m too sober to even try to tackle here. He messed up, not from the time he accused half the country of grubbing for government handouts (though it didn’t help) but because he abandoned his spot just to the right of center to take up a wild, prehistoric perch so far to the right we could barely see him.

To get back to my opening point, the media isn’t liberal. If anything, they’re rooted quite firmly in the center. Anything too far to the right or too far to the left while be attacked with equal vehemence.
The same blind eye they turned to Obama’s corporatist streak or his war crimes (the Libyan “intervention”, the “kill or capture” list) was turned to Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the desert bloodbath that followed. Frankly, the media sees nothing wrong with loosing Predator Drones on unsuspecting markets because, well, it’s us doing it to inconsequential human beings. And besides, Obama rides skateboards to press conferences, gives delightful repartee to the Yentas on the View and gives rappers trendy, urban handshakes.

Ah, but there’s no room for any of this talk. In fact, it’s the kind of bent talk that gets one put on an FBI watch-list  One day, I’ll be walking to the bus stop when a burly man with an earpiece puts a black sack over my head and tosses me in the back of a windowless van for some water-boarding in a Washington, DC bunker. Those yentas from the View don’t play around.

Inventory of a Body

Back in August, in the weeks before I turned 30, I tried to convince myself an arbitrary uptick in age would have no affect on my life besides the occasional self-loathing at having been alive for three decades with nothing to show for it other than a handful of published stories and a VIP account at Pizza 73. Not only is the self loathing more intense than I’d anticipated, my body has decided, after years of abuse and neglect, to pack it in for the next forty years. 

Just last week I sprained my ankle and the extensor digitorum brevis muscle in my foot by simply stepping down from a measly six-inch platform. Where I once finished a basketball season on a blown-out knee with nothing more than ice and electrical tape, I can now barely walk after a small misstep.

There’s a saying, doubtlessly attributed to some anonymous mystic burnt out on ayahuasca and frog poison, that goes “to know thyself is to know God.” Well I know myself and my infirmities quite well. And if that’s God, well, people, we’re all deeply fucked.

I have suffered three concussions (one getting into a car, one drunk and one in football); a strained neck; a torn rotator cuff I was too lazy to treat; one hand useless after cutting the tendons on glass shards in a rage; two gummy knees from basketball; both ankles broken, sprained, strained and twisted more than I can count; and a relative blindness after dusk.

I have many other fleeting and phantom aches and pains that are no doubt indicative of organ failure but, hell, leaving it untreated is a little like playing roulette. I just want to see what happens.

Getting older is life’s only guarantee – well, and death. Maybe it’s aging’s inevitability that makes it so loathsome. We’re all trying to hang onto that one version where we were at our best and we feel crushing disappointment  once we realize we are forever past it.

It’s something I must learn to accept. Or, like the aging sports star, the fading model or the graying actress, I can fight it with all I’ve got.

The Delivery Part Three

If I hadn’t been so burned out on adrenaline and the terrifying possibility I would not only be forced to watch, but take part in, a most horrific child-birth, I would have noticed we’d been assigned the one drunk anesthesiologist in the building. He showed all the signs: slurred voice, dopey, bloodshot eyes and the contented expression of a man who knows there’s a bar in Calgary’s industrial quadrant where his credit’s still good.

But anyone who’s gone more than 24 hours without sleep or withstood MDMA withdrawal knows the human brain becomes shockingly incapable of analysis and higher function after a certain point. The brain is a creature of habit and responds to changes in its daily routine with sullen withdrawal. Mine hadn’t quite come to grips with the notion I’d soon be a father – in fact, it was rejecting it with alarming ferocity.

“Listen, bro,” it said. “I know fathers and you aren’t one. A year ago today, you slept on a dog bed with a Cuisinart next to your head in case you threw up. You nearly burned down the house after you passed out with pizza in the oven. Just go home and stop this charade.”

I was so burnt out and preoccupied that I thought nothing of it when the anesthesiologist spent 11 agonizing minutes savaging Melissa’s back with the needle, muttering apologies through pursed lips. He asked me to hold down one of her legs and lend my neck so Melissa would have something to throttle each time he missed the mark. I’ve said this before, I think, but pregnant women can move a Buick during a particularly nasty contraction with the proper straps and braces. Once Harper catches wind of all the unpatriotic and bilious things I say about his crooked administration and deports me to the closest inhospitable island, I will not use oxen to pull my plow but a woman in labor. Their strength is that incredible.

It’s a terrible scene in the delivery room; sharp intakes of breath, crying, wailing - all very primitive. There is nothing modern about any of this. We may as well be in some hut next to a polluted river in the heart of Uganda, circa 1845. He’s a boob. A bungler. I should have taken his medical license on the spot and clapped him upside the head for good measure. He hits Melissa’s nerve – the one that controls knee flexing -  forcing Melissa to savagely kick a chair in front of her. This continues for what seems like forever. It’s interminable. I never thought we’d have a baby like this. A stone cold wino playing Operation, a pregnant woman kicking and howling and very depraved and unpleasant looking black man holding down her legs like they are a demonic lawnmower threatening to launch itself into heavy traffic.

It’s almost too much to ask anyone to endure. For me or Melissa’s mom. “Stand back while we take a few hits off this rubbing alcohol and jam this here ice pick into your girlfriend/daughter’s spine.”

Uh oh, as I’m writing this Aliyah has kicked up the Queen Mother of all Rage Conniptions down here in my office. Gnashing of teeth, piercing screams, wolffish howls, palm strikes to the bridge of my nose, a series of roundhouse kicks aimed precisely at my temple. Aliyah is a baby who takes any attempts to place her in a chair, bassinet or crib as a personal insult. And like a mafia don, she will not tolerate any personal insults without retribution.

OK, enough of a tangent. Back to the delivery room. She seems to be sleeping, or is at least calm and contented enough working her Nuk to let me get in a few more words.