Barracuda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda

Me and my "Irish Twin" couldn't wait for our big Mexican vacation in Cozumel, because we love the ocean. We'd spend every summer swimming in as many pools, ponds, lakes, rivers and oceans as we could possibly convince adults to do with us. We love the sea; the pounding surf, the oceans' salt spray, the sandy beaches, so much so that my bro is a Jersey resident. Me and my bro spent hours in the water growing up, and it didn't go unnoticed by the adults around us. We swam expertly like fish; first as toddlers, and then as kids earning Scouting swim badges. We loved it, even when it was rainy and cold during summer trips to Maine and Nova Scotia.

Like any Acadian, our father dared us to go into the cold oceans of his youth. No problem! We couldn't wait to cool off from the summer sun, wading into the frigid waters like we were born to it, and we are. We giggled and shivered as we splashed each other into goosebumps, egging each other on to go all the way in, which we did. It was a contest that proved our sea-worthiness to ourselves; a necessary rite of passage that any self-respecting Acadian should be able to do, like fishing and canoeing. We'd learned swamping out a canoe to breath the air trapped beneath well enough to earn colorful Scout badges that we sewed on ourselves to earn that badge, too.

Bernie and I avidly checked out snorkeling gear from the hotel our first day at the beach, running back and forth quickly, keen in our desire to hit the waves. So blue! Cozumel's water is some of the most gorgeous we have here on Earth: a crystal clear, bright turquoise blue that took our breath away. With those first tentative mask views done treading water near the shore, we were instantly hooked. We dove for angelfish and coral and anything else our pre-teen brains could soak up with the clarity of our deep abiding passion for life and the sea. We "pruned" our fingers every single day, just like our baby bath-times together, taking gradually deeper and deeper dives, like we did with all those public pool trips that astonished our parents with our steadfastly devout longevity in the water. So much fun!

We pool-hopped occasionally, but it was filled with ugly pale American tourists sitting on pool stools under a giant beach cabana. Blech! They're just the people we wanted to ditch! So boring, sitting around doing nothing but drink stupid fruity drinks and babbling on and on and on, just like they did at home. Yuck! Who cares? There's so much else to do! The last day we hit the beach hard was indeed memorable to us. We'd be going further and further into the ocean, and that day was no different. We wet our masks like we'd been taught, to create a seal around our eyes that was airtight. So far so good. 

Then, Bernie made his first mask check under the water to beat me to it (of course: boys!), with disastrously different results. He came up gasping and panicked: "I just saw something!" I took my mask to look, and one quick peek at two rows of razor sharp teeth inches from me was more than enough to send me packing, running for the sand quickly. Ahh! What the...?! What was that? We'd just seen our very first barracuda, and it is one scary looking fish. There'd been a whole school of them, too. We ran to our parents sitting on beach chairs under the palm trees, scared and shaken up. For the rest of the trip, we stuck to the pool. That ocean isn't just for us. It's for the predators who live there with every other life form in the sea. Understood, and very clearly so. We have our home, and they have theirs. It's nature.

Montezuma's Revenge

Around this time of year, people go "stir crazy" from winter, apparently, because it's so brutal and difficult as an annual event, Northern European white folk just HAVE TO escape all this horrid, bone-chillingly cold weather for an expensive tropical vacation manned cheaply by slaves, er, Mexicans. Mexico is such a bargain! Just yesterday, I saw a young couple on a court t.v. show bitch about having three slaves, er, employees and a wedding planner do everything but grovel at their feet for a mere $500 wedding reception, but you know, Cabo is sooo expensive this time of year. Like, it totally isn't their fault and stuff, right?

Wrong! Judge Judy hung 'em out to dry, like the stupidly spoiled shits they really are, even predicting the end of what will surely be a very brief marriage between what looked like a gay couple acting straight and sublimating their rage onto some older wedding coordinator and her husband (both straight-looking and therefore, hated), because if the worst complaint you have in this world is the cost of cheap labor south of the border, then you have no real problems. It's like fat people ranting about how much cheap food they have to eat that's readily available whenever they want it, because it's just too much! We should outsource it to a third world country, to places where hunger is truly cost effective.

It was in this spirit of discontent that my family had its last vacation together in Cozumel before my parents split, and what better place to separate from women and children than a luxury hotel resort staffed by people so poor, they probably have to steal from the leftover bread in the baskets just to live, which means I hated it on site. It was totally fake, and utterly full of crap. I could feel myself depressing downward on the way there from the airport, trucked around in this garish tourist vehicle from the airport that was overly gay, just so the locals could blatantly see a bunch of rich "white" Americans fly past them, living as they did in hovels. Honestly, I was much more interested in them and their lives than being carted around by a bunch of paid-for patsies, but I had long learned since to hide my quiet observations behind silence, drinking in the real in as much detail as I could before hitting the mise-en-scène.

The resort was exactly what I thought it would be, and as such, was completely unsuitable for children. It was more like a honeymoon / vacation spot for dumb Texans with money to burn. Everything tasted weird, and before we could pour the first glass of something cool to drink in all that oppressive heat, my mom readily unpacked her hysterical fears about the water to great effect. She had the entire floor to herself in their hotel room, while she carefully outlined the plan about water consumption this far south: don't drink from the tap, drink only from the bottled water provided (boohoo), and don't eat the ice cubes that are made from "their" bad tap water, either. Ask for drinks without ice. Oh, and don't eat the fruit in the drinks, either. That has "bad" water in them, too. The umbrellas decorating the drinks were okay, but don't pick your teeth with them. Residual germs.

One day we noticed a filthy stream of raw sewage that was suspiciously yellow-colored, and upon closer inspection by me and my middle bro that's exactly what it was, because the "lily pads" floating on the service of our collective urine from the hotel deliberately funneled directly into that gorgeous turquoise ocean of theirs were all made from plastic (you could see the seams from the molds that made them), bought and installed to simply pass as a healthy stream of water to the drunk turistas in passing, such was their desperate hope that we were all as stupid as we looked, sounded, dressed, and ate, with the exception of one very smart little native New York girl. After we told our parents about it, they tersely told us to "just stick to the pool", because we knew the jig was up.

After that, the cons were on like wildfire. My oldest brother was chasing some southern tail, in the form of an easily-had blond Texan teenager busily experimenting with boys and alcohol. I actually felt kind of sorry for her, because her fat red-faced dad was the very definition of an ugly American tourist (loud drunk twang, garish Hawaiian shirt, and the standard socks-with-sandals that mark the true amateur), so by the time we were halfway through the vacation and having our own adventures, my parents rightly pulled the dramatic focus back onto themselves by openly booking separate hotel rooms, so my mom could dramatically bathe her sunburned legs in white hotel towels, carefully leaning on me for emotional support during what she announced to me as "The Divorce" (with handy printed playbills soon to follow). We all went our separate ways after that, as was also part of the plan, and I was only thirteen years old.

At first, I was drunk from the freedom of being loosened upon a new foreign environment to explore without doing constant chronic care for the always-sick home crowd, which was quickly followed by the recognition that my parents were ceding their joint hands in parenting forever, preferring instead to put us into a feral "sink or swim" mode that signaled their cutting us loose from them, while they dug at each other in little snipes for the rest of the trip, to simulate the stimulating "highs and lows" of their exceedingly dull and highly co-dependent match, punctuated by huge public sighs at dinner, followed by long glances directed at the meaningfully empty chair of the missing parent "in grief", designed to show just how genuine their parting must, in truth, be. It wasn't exactly Shakespeare, is what I'm saying to you.

But, I made do. I looked around the hotel grounds for other signs of bullshit, and when I got bored with that (it was typically faux and overly manicured, ho hum), I stumped for a trip to the local Mayan ruins, so I could at least see something genuine and original in this sea of badly done off-Broadway theater. The drama queens pressed the heat issue and full sun poorly, er, I mean really really well and I totally believed it, while I chalked this trip up to another disaster funded by my parents with poor decision-making abilities, and began waiting for the day when I could actually visit countries on the real. That time is now, amigos. Not so for my brothers. Jim jumped ship with his dumb Texan so he could check out over beers had on the sly and not-so-cleverly hidden teenage sex (which he proclaimed loudly like an obvious douche, because he's no lady-killer), and my other brother simply disappeared.

I figured he wanted time alone to manage his feelings, which I've been told all my life he needs an especially long time to do, because he has "difficulties processing his emotions", which meant people treat him with kid gloves, as much unlike my experience as you could get. But, much like the native Mexicanas working at the resort, I'm sure I wasn't the only teenage single mother in residence, times being what they were back then. I was bored with it all, so I just said I was "going exploring", but just when I felt I couldn't wander around aimlessly anymore, my middle brother swooped in to save the day with a new show now appearing near you, called "Monetzuma's Revenge". 

You see, I "checked out" by hiking and walking and swimming and admiring the truly local flora and fauna I could find on my own, but not my family. No, my brother took our oldest brother's early Spanish-language primer solemnly given to us as young teens to heart, and that was to order beer as minors and put it on our parent's tabs, as the price of their admission to our group show. I hated beer because I had normal teenage taste buds as a young girl, but I found that for the first time in my life, I actually loved the taste of coffee. It was a revelation to me, so delicious was it to drink, that I felt like I was truly tasting coffee for the first time, and in a real sense that was true, because it was one of the few actual locally-grown foods I had while I was there.

Not so for my bros. Bernie got drunk and blamed it all on the water, an excuse that was as handily tied and packaged for him as the colorfully bowed gift baskets in our hotel rooms, as a "thank you" to los gringos for checking into their tourist trap. My mom and dad actually had to parent, by overcoming huge hurdles like speaking Spanish, a language so familiar to New Yorkers that most of our signs are bi-lingual (thank you, Nuyoricans!), and navigating the healthcare system of a country so under-deprived and obviously corrupt, my parents fretted nervously over it for days, retelling the story over and over again, with drinks in hand and jauntily smoked cigarettes, making for a delightfully fretful time towards the end of our trip that gave them the necessary conversation to spill, over actual conversation that neither of my parents can do. They talked about their "mad dash" to that Mexican E.R. for years!

Years later, my brother finally admitted that he made up food poisoning and a case of "Montezuma's Revenge" because he was scared to tell anyone around him in authority the truth, which was often beat out of us for our daring, and that he was simply hungover from ordering all the beer he could drink as an obviously young minor that the locals freely gave to him, citing later on at the hotel that "we all looked alike" with a careless "no habla espanol" shrug, mugging their parts as effectively as the key players around us did, in an almost real attempt at mimicking the human condition. We all bought into his act so much, in part because of all the other distractions happening at the same time, that my brother successfully hid his alcoholism from me for years and years and years on end, cutting me off quickly when I told him the truth about living with his condition.

For almost as long, he had bartered around the charming hangover story at family holiday parties (haha, those crazy kids!), praised for his masterful deception, patted on the shoulder for being a secret drunk, while I was cut off, cast off, cut out, and brutalized again for daring to speak up when it was inconvenient for me to do so, conveniently timed just as my freelance gigs and unemployment benefits that I'd earned since childhood were running dry, because I didn't give my Irish Twin the pity party he felt he was rightfully owned, instead of the stern and sage advice I gave him. Before long, I was homeless and agitated, because this happened just a few short years ago, in some sort of organized manner that doesn't seek justice, but rather revenge. A revenge against reality at all costs, no matter the price I paid for it. Vive México!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozumel

Travel: Poetry in Motion

Wait. What the heck does that say?

It's about ripping off tourists. Neat!

On a recent trip to and from the city, I found myself sitting behind a gentlemen with a language book. I couldn't help but read over his shoulder because it was printed in very large print, a book designed for the elderly, which he clearly is. 

The funniest parts were the language lessons themselves, translations of certain key phrases from English to Spanish, like "Does the tourist need a map?", or "I just sold a watch to that tourist." and "Does the tourist need a watch?" Definitely not a native New Yorker. Now I know the next time I visit Old Mexico, just what phrases I need to brush up on....and not to wear a watch. You know, just a case a tourist needs one, too.

South of the Border, yo.

http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/travel/