Sailust

I’ve had more experience at gringo bars in Mexico than the average spring breaker, time-share-er or weekender.  My first independent visit to Mexico was when I was 17. My older friend, Mike, finished his first year at UCSB after 2 years of junior college. He strang yarns about the streets of keg parties and freshman skanks. I couldn’t wait till I graduated high school. After our seasonal job at the fireworks distribution warehouse, our friends and I planned a road trip down the coast. Our intention was to go to Santa Barabara first, then on to Rosarito. I told my parents that I was only going to Santa Barabara. To suburban parents, Mexico is a land of sin where if you’re not careful, you’ll be swindled, arrested or, even worse, kidnapped. Our aliby was that we were camping in San Deigo, which accounted for the impossibility of telephone communication. I was still a sweet, strapping young boy and my mom didn’t want me be corrupted. My friends joked that leaving her was like the Three Dog Night song, Mama Told Me Not to Come. The lure of foreign lands of fun was too great and I went anyways. Boys have to grow up eventually.

Too inexperienced to drive in Mexico, which really isn’t dangerous if you know what you’re doing, we parked at the border and the 4 of us taxied to Rosarito. Mike was our guide, being that he went there for spring break already. We crammed into one room at the Hotel California to make it affordable. I looked out the window of the taxi into another world. Everything was dusty. Signs were painted on plaster instead of illuminated plastic and the words I could vaguely recall from my Spanish classes. The cars seemed like they obeyed no man’s law except their own. We drank Sol in our room until the night revelry was ripe. I used my brother’s old ID to gain entrance into Papas & Beer. I didn’t look much like him, but if you’re spending dollars, the bouncers don’t care.

The club was dead. I would have been bored were it not my first club experience. Papas & Beer was like an adult Frontierland. Wooden posts, thick ropes and plank platforms surrounded a sand volleyball course. Multi-colored lights danced around each surface. American gangsta rap as old as five years pulsed from gigantic speakers. The few girls there provocatively stuck Papas & Beer bumper stickers across their chests and asses. There was even a mechanical bull, a legal liability in the States, but it was unoperationable because of the low attendance. In the bathroom there as an attendant too eager to turn on the faucet, hand you a paper towel and sell you chicle. Being my first bar or club experience ever, I didn’t have anything with which to compare. To me, it was Disneyland.

The winter before my first visit to Rosarito, my dad took his family, my sibilings and me to Cancun for family vacation. It was an all-inclusive resort–including drinks, if you had the right colored wristband. I didn’t. I managed to finagle a few drinks from lackluster bartenders, but never enough to walk crooked. We ate dinner at Senor Frogs one night, which was on schedule to transform into somthing like Papas & Beer after the dinner crowd cleared out. Sawdust coverd the floor; I wouldn’t know till I was older that it was for spilt drinks and vomit. I innocently joined a conga line for fun, not knowing at the end that there was a waiter on a barstool blowing a whistle and pouring cheap tequila down each participants’ throat. My family didn’t believe me when I told them I didn’t know that was going to happen.

A year later, I went to college myself at UCSD. In San Diego, there were buses that transported innocent freshmen and sophmores from their campuses to Calle Revolucion in Tijuana (TJ for short). If you were under 21, TJ was your only legal opportunity to go clubbing (not that it was like any club north of the big fence). If you were over 21, you didn’t hassle with customs and went to PB or Gaslamp. It only takes a year or two to mature out of TJ. To further frighten mothers, the clubs in TJ were all-you-can drink*. Guys paid a cover; girls got in for free. Mix inexperienced drinkers, free from their parents’ control, with a fully condoned open bar and you get a bona-fide shitshow. Sweat-soaked coeds gryrated and grinded on each other sometimes sucking each others’ faces. Some long-gone dudes sat alone with their heads between their hands and barfed between their legs. Looking at the poor fellow, you were just glad it wasn’t you. When cellphone cameras came on the scene, perverted guys would snap a photo up some girls skirt when she was too drunk to notice or care. You almost had to be drunk to witness the debauchery. At 3 or 4 at night, the busses carried the survivors home with stories to last the whole semester.

The other Mexican party city I’ve been to is Cabo. Cabo is more like Cancun in that you have to fly to get there. TJ usually draws San Diego kids for one night. Rosarito gets weekenders from Southern California and other Southwestern states. Cabo and Cancun get vacationers from all the States. Mike’s parents had a timeshare at Pueblo Bonita Blanco in Cabo. The suite slept about 10, counting the pull-out couch. Mike’s parents gave him the go-ahead to invite some friends for their timeshare week. After our annual labor at the fireworks warehouse, the same friends from Rosarito and I planned a much farther road trip to the end of the Baja peninsula. His family flew and met us there. I was glad to experience the real Baja that exists between the gringo hubs: San Quintin, San Ignacio, Mulege, La Paz, etc. You won’t find a poster for these pueblas on your travel agent’s wall. After seeing the in-between, I realized how biased my Mexican experience had been and how, after all my time in Mexico, I didn’t really know the country.

I might as well had been to Cabo before. Beside the tropical, desert Pacific climate, it was the same Frontierland I first experienced in Rosarito. Vendors sold the same offensive T-shirts, cheap curios and stale brand-name knock-offs, only, in Cabo, they were more expensive. The resorts had the same corny MCs and waitresses hawking jello shots. The DJs spun the same trite dance hits from last 3 decades. Because of the necesarry plane ticket, the crowd was middle-aged, unless there were children traveling with their parents. I was still young and drunk enough to be amused by the production. We spent every night in El Squid Row (which is somehow related to Senor Frogs) only because it was the most happening place in town. It’s a narrow two-level outside bar. The walls were covered in neon signs with phrases like, “One woman said to her married friend, ‘You have your wedding ring on the wrong finger.’ She said, ‘I know, I married the wrong man!’.”

I’m now my second time in Cabo, years the wiser, and I can’t help but scrutinze it from the outside. What makes this fun? Why do people burn their hard-earned cash on these cheap thrills? Why aren’t there bars like this back home? Vegas is similar but still too native. How can this pass for culture? Who thinks they are soaking up a different culture when their experience is sequestered to a small, pre-defined, tourist district that’s repeatedly trodden by frequent flyers? Who gets their photo taken in an oversized sombrero next to a donkey that’s been painted to look like a zebra? What is it about Mexico that gives US citizens carte blache to behave like obnoxious swine? To proverbably wear their wedding ring on the wrong finger? Is it the warm weather? We get away with it because we pay for it, but from where does the demand sprout? Whole communities throughout Mexico thrive on our tourism. Cabo or Cancun wouldn’t exist without it.

I think it’s because, in Mexico, the priveleged tourists can do what’s prohibited elsewhere and they do it simply because they can. They can blow up M80s on the beach. They can stay out past 2. They can drink before they’re 21. Gorging on tacos becomes merely sampling local cuisine. They can watch a donkey show. They can buy Viagra. They can dance to Bon Jovi. She can let a random guy drink tequila from her navel and it’s a-okay because, “what happens in Mexico, stays in Mexico.”

Photo credit

*You still have to tip the server if you want any kind of service.