La Mordida
Gabriel Junod
Quintana Roo is located in the Southeast of Mexico, on the Yucatan peninsula, to the right of Yucatan. Twenty hours from Mexico City, Quintana Roo boasts a large tourist economy, with tourism making up 87% of the states’ GDP and with millions coming from around the world, and on my flight, Asians, Australians, and Europeans, contrary to American opinion that Mexico isn’t a travel destination for the rest of the world. My friends and I were staying in Tulum, two hours from Playa del Carmen where Connor and I had ended up that morning with howling stomachs. Every corner taunted us, and we had no money for food. Food was one of the three things I was really looking to be exposed to in Mexico (the other two being people and historical sites, ie. Ruins):tacos, enchiladas, chilaquiles, pozole, whatever my stomach had desired. I had covered the bill at dinner for several of my friends the night before and was waiting for them to pay me back. We walked to the empty Plaza 28 de Julio, wallowing in our self-imposed exile. The morning was dismal, light rain, the streets empty of other tourists.
Connor and I feed off each other in the worst and best ways, always entertaining the most asinine of tangents with complete sincerity. For months at a time we fixate on our self-established goals, rabid and abstruse like addicts, without ever questioning the goal and the purpose before we’d become too immersed. Connor wants a life where results correspond with his actions, or hard work. He wants a successful career to attract a wife and give his children something to be proud of their father for, he wants a group of friends to invite over his house and do all the things one does with friends as an adult, he wants Disneyworld, and all of this to attain his ultimate goal: normalcy; and or the absence of loneliness; of being alone. The smallest thing could impact Connor’s world before he’d realize it. And with a sequence of negative things, he forgoes all reason and concludes the world is closing in on him. In the past few months, Mexico had become our maxim. Our daily bread. Like New Paltz before that. The trip to Mexico was framed from the remnant of a couple’s trip. Aidan had taken special interest in organizing this trip with us because he wanted to bring his girlfriend he had been seeing since the past November. He said there were some organizational issues with New Paltz; that he felt his presence in planning things with Mexico could straighten things up. He acted like he had a genuine interest in order; it wasn’t just her. I loved him for that; it’s endearing when he lied about something he wore on his sleeve, as enamored as he obviously was. Aidan usually tempered our crazes and now we had to slacken his own newly-discovered decadence. Among our friends were two of Aidan’s enlisted from his college, Colin and Justin. Colin’s girlfriend, Jordan, didn’t feel comfortable going out of the country. Brandon’s girlfriend couldn’t go out of the country either, and then Brandon didn’t get his time off approved. Neither could David’s girlfriend and David didn’t want a passport. That left Aidan’s girlfriend. Then Aidan’s relationship collapsed and that was the end of the couples trip.
The past few days Connor and I had adopted a parental dynamic, with, primarily me, reminding each other of our ultimate goal, especially as we had to lead Frank, Zach and Bradie through the airport. When we discovered Beryl was hitting at the exact same time our flight was scheduled, I had assured him there wasn’t a cosmic conspiracy to prevent us from going to Mexico. When our new flight was rescheduled to midnight that night with a layover in San Juan, meaning Aidan’s group would get there a day before us, the extra destination as an appetizer made us giddy. We left the airport and it was so moist that a snap coated our fingers in perspiration. Ashford Avenue is the street to see everything in San Juan. I breathed in the effervescence of this new life: the bar, a drunk middle-aged man possibly hitting on Frank, trying to introduce him to his brother who definitely was not outside. It was 4am or 5am and the life was pullulating: old couples jogging, young couples riding bicycles, a street-wide party. We went to the beach to watch the sun rise; we were on the wrong side of the island. Across the street from the beach was the side of the strip with open clubs. Walking back from the beach, seeing and smelling the aftermath of the night’s excess, San Juan soured. Expunged stomachs; the fetid, emetic smell of beer and cleaning products on tiled floor; like a frat house. When we missed the connecting flight, I had assured him this wasn’t “objectively bad”; now we had a day to explore San Juan. I had learned years before to avoid categorizing these types of things in binaries like “good” and “bad”. Avoid thinking about it while it’s happening, and then you can reflect on it, removed. Things could be both, but ultimately they’re experiences and experiences make stories. We prowled the sultry streets where an iguana, the color of a gibbous pustule and size of a kitten, sizzled, maggot-inhabited apertures for eyes. Swanky hotels and palm trees and yellow beaches.
When we learned there were no flights to Mexico for another week and we had to fly to Miami to get to Mexico, sleeping in the airport, meaning we’d get there two days late, I again assured him. On the plane his spirit picked up a moment and I allowed myself to sulk so I could exhaust the potential of this dynamic to its full extent; one of us needed to be morale at a time. When we were boarding in Miami and Bradie discovered that his passport “license” was only valid for road travel and he wasn’t allowed on board, I said “It’s fine, I don’t really like Bradie anyway”. In San Juan, we were too embarrassed to explain to Aidan how we had missed our flight, and we didn’t fully disclose when we’d arrive.
The story of Zach goes like this: Zach fails out of college, and starts working at a Giants, but is fired, or quits, after he’s accused of stealing from a cash register. The trauma of this experience prevents him from getting a job again for several years, when he crashes on his friend’s couch at his college, for a month or so, until he defects to Frank’s friend, Nick, after a fight. This is how he becomes friends with Frank. Frank offered to pay entirely to bring him to Mexico until he could get a job and pay him back. Zach looks like a 5’5 TJ Miller, or Jim Morrison with facial hair, or Weird Al as Connor says. If, as an outsider, you observed him, you would be impressed with the cavalier way he carried himself in his $15 shades, bought by Frank, and red floral button down, true to his 105-pound weight. Zach was an entire year older than everyone else, which he would occasionally bring up when he felt he wasn’t receiving his entitled respect, and then, in an isolated moment of self-awareness, he would sigh and resign in himself, a lonely clarity in his eyes I would catch when I know he didn’t see me looking.
Zach’s being offended me. If I was asked why I enjoy traveling with other people I would say it’s an expression of love, and I wanted to be in Mexico with people I love, people who had worked for this greater objective, even if their motivation wasn’t the same as mine. People who can be an outlet for something, people who, at the best moments, I can look to and we can share mutual appreciation and we can heighten it together. I love Aidan, and his friends were an extension of him, so maybe I could learn more about Aidan or about myself or whatever. I also wanted to show him that I could seamlessly get along with his friends. They had personalities that I thought maybe would compliment and trademark the novelty of the experience and their work towards Mexico displayed passion, or goodwill or something which I found agreeable. At best I felt nothing towards Zach. When he spoke, my mouth fabricated a perfunctory grin. My eyes avoided his and I spoke to his feet. He had no regard for his own life and now he wandered into mine, completely free where Connor and I had devoted so much time, money, and obsession.
Frank is the product of a large family of religious didactics. In middle school, I’d mock him for his austerity and we’d argue over politics and religion. I became friends with him several years later, and even though we had evolved past arguing over politics and religion, things which he wasn’t really interested in anymore, that dynamic never really went away. Socially, Frank could vary from cripplingly self-consciousness in interpersonal situations to, at the same time, supposedly unabashed, singing in the airport at San Juan even though we’re sitting at a table in a crowd. He lacks self-confidence but can be excruciatingly self-assured; Frank doesn’t like feeling patronized or being commanded so when you would question something he does, he’d respond with a type of certainty that you’d maybe second-guess yourself. Our relationship made it harder for me to get any point across about Zach; he didn’t want to hear it. Telling Frank he was being exploited by Zach meant that I knew more what he knew or wanted to believe and also meant that he was being double-patronized, for everyone to observe; exacerbating his self-loathing.
The day we left I was too radiant to let anyone detract from the trip. I tried sincerely to view Zach with a fresh slate and curb any resentment. He was tolerable at first; I ignored his grating jokes and hypocritical confessions about his relationships which were admissions about himself. I kept silent when Frank got himself doubles of a drink at the airport or convenience stores, water and a soda for example, and Zach would, with no register of guilt or light embarrassment like there would be if you had to rely on your friend to buy you drinks and food for an entire week, do the same. When this repeated, I side barred Connor. Zach was like the no-good, deadbeat boyfriend I didn’t approve of. I told Connor he can’t let me be the “bad” parent here, we both need to put our foot down, and he needs to take my side. At first, he said I cared less about Frank and more about validating what I had said all along. He was right. It was in Puerto Rico where Zach tried to get Connor to buy him a bathing suit, when he already had one which he left at the airport, that finally rubbed him the wrong way. Connor thoughtfully, with restraint I lacked, informed Frank on his feelings towards the bathing suit situation. Frank said we were reading into it too hard; it wasn’t a big deal. The next morning I watched Zach eat breakfast while I fasted to save money. When the four of us, split down the middle, got to Mexico, Connor and I had only several hours of sleep over the course of three days, and we were now weary about making impressions. Connor and I needed to get Aidan alone, to offer him an explanation of the past three days, to explain how Zach had metastasized like a cancer through the remaining group but the harmony was already gone and its restoration was Aidan’s responsibility. Connor and I would laugh at our silence like the funniest inside joke. Zach showed no fatigue and appeared more extroverted towards Justin and Colin and we worried that he had outwitted us, that all along he held the cards, and we grew more reticent. At dinner I tried to sign the check with the wrong side of the pen. Aidan told us, sleep for a few hours, then we wake up and hit the clubs. I worried that, now that Aidan had the right to set the pace, the whole trip would be clubbing, but it was somewhere to start. I lay in bed, too much adrenaline to sleep. I tried crying. I thought of my cat until I was moved enough to cry myself to sleep. Aidan had woken me up a few hours later and Zach was on our living room couch with Colin. My brain was foggier than before. He couldn’t get Connor up, so we went back to bed.
That Monday we had scheduled to go to Cozumel, what would be day three of the original trip, but was day one. We were in a suite with Zach and Frank, with Aidan, Colin and Justin in the suite on the floor above. Connor and I left to make the 10am ferry that we had ordered tickets to the month prior. We had been moving around that morning and Zach was pretending to sleep on the couch in the living room. I had walked to the car when Connor came in the living room to Zach’s host telling him that Zach was upset he hadn’t been woken up. He was doing a frustrated shrug. Connor told him to go up to Aidan’s suite because we had to leave. On our way, Frank called to tell us he and Zach had been left behind. We called Aidan, who had been driving for fifteen minutes, to tell him to turn back and pick them up. We missed the ferry anyway. As Connor showed me a blue drink that wasn’t in America from the money his mom had sent him, I sat on the store’s steps and smiled: We had spent over a thousand dollars to go to a country to be beggars, secluded from our own friends.
The afternoon, when we all reconvened in Cozumel, the sky was a refulgent blue and even as we drank ourselves stupid the pace was innocent, slow like the clouds. I left with him on a separate ferry before the rest of the group’s ferry arrived, mainly so we could reflect on how the day had turned. Bread had been broken, and we ameliorated everything with Aidan, Colin, and Justin. After I wagged my finger at Connor for being a drunk idiot, I thought about how everything was on beat, for the first time this entire trip, what we saw glimpses of in San Juan. We looked at the turquoise swirls in the water outside our window. We talked about how our best group moments have been in water, how maybe that’s where we lost New Paltz. The ferry reached Playa del Carmen, the sky purple as a tongue, the setting sun tucking itself in like a Eucharist on its base, and all was alright with me and me alright with all. I was beatific at this point. It was the night-and-day opposite of that morning, and in the dark were the lit string lamps which gave way to life and secreted the bed of self-pity in which we had lied hours ago. The great communion. We reached the rental and headed off to Cancun for the nightlife, where we passed the rest of the group in the street, who we thought agreed to meet us there.
For the next hour or so the ride was serene, the highest of notes. We marveled at how everything redeemed itself, we reveled at the fact that we were in Mexico, we dissected the timeline of our friendship, we enumerated all the obstacles in getting there; the glorious concatenation of everything. Connor was hungry again and wanted me to pull over at a McDonald’s drive through and I feigned protest but I was secretly curious and humored by the moronic and blasphemous prospect of two Americans going to a Mexican McDonalds. The people at the drive through derided us, for the stupid Americans we are, and refused to only give him one patty, instead insisting “dos carnes y tres carnes?”, snickering.
Deeper in Cancun, he played James Brown’s People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul with the volume at max and the windows rolled down, hands drumming the door. He needed this right now, he said, when I told him he probably shouldn’t. We were off the highway, and I had become more concentrated. I had missed a turn and looped back at a roundabout and turned on the same road. My first thought at the red and blue lights which spawned in my rearview mirror was that it had been intended for the car to my right. It wasn’t. I pulled over on the left shoulder, saying only, “there is no way this is happening to me”. I had reached such a high. From the dark of my sideview coagulated a chubby, small police officer in a white uniform to my window where he informs me that I had ran two red lights at the roundabout. I couldn’t recall seeing any red lights. The cop said when he was walking over he saw me quickly pass something to my friend. Connor was impatient and snappy and invited him to search the car. I did the same, but I was less trying to challenge him and more so trying to exonerate us. I was timid, stammering, both because I was anxious about the cops and concerned about Connor. Him and a marginally taller, thinner, police officer searched the rental for drugs and opened the trunk. Standing outside in my purple, banana bathing suit, I watched and thought about how this’ll amount to a light cocktail anecdote, two kids in Cancun mistakenly accused of possessing drugs by the cops. I sat back behind the wheel and Connor sat at the passenger. Our backpacks were taken to their car. The smaller cop came back and asked through my window if I had had anything to drink. I told him I hadn’t had anything to drink since afternoon, when I was in Cozumel. He went back to his car, Connor was assuring me that there was no alcohol in my system, and he came back with a breathalyzer and told me to blow. I complied. I blew on the device, completely missing the mouthpiece. On the second attempt, he redirected my mouth to the top of the breathalyzer. I blew again. It was a 1.09.
Connor pleaded for another kind of sobriety test, or to retake the breathalyzer. The cop said there were no other tests, and the breathalyzer was never wrong. He said they’ll have to take me to the station, where I’d be booked, and Connor would have to stay by himself. I can get out when we pay the fine. Connor, scared sober, insisted he was drunker than me, he couldn’t be left by himself, and I was the one registered with the car. We asked how much the fine is, and he said it was something around $4,000, oh and the car insurance companies aren’t happy about drunk drivers and I’ll expect a fine from them too. We said we don’t have that kind of money, we’re broke college students. Then I would be in a holding cell until I could be sentenced by a judge in three days. Three days? Our flight is in two. Too bad.
I thought of Chalino Sanchez, pulled over with his brothers, a cousin and several women by badged police officers, telling him the police chief needed to speak with him. My tone was panicked, but assertive, when I said: “Please don’t leave me. I don’t know where they’re going to take me. Please come with me”. I grabbed his arm. “Connor, I’m scared.” Connor says I have the same face when I’m worried/surprised/scared/concerned: my eyes widen and my mouth drops.
I pictured leaving Connor in handcuffs, being shoved in the car, driven to a warehouse. They’d pull me out, hand me to several other men outside, the next sequence being me tied to a chair, head cloaked, being shot from behind. I wouldn’t understand my sentence. I’d scream the same screams, the universal language of fear. Or: they’d parade me in a station of jeering cops, I would sleep alone in a frigid cell with wet, cracked yellow ceramic tiled floor, rocking back and forth trying to find the soft spot for my occiput, the same place a bullet perambulated in the scenario prior.
Connor’s phone had fallen out of his pocket in Cozumel and was now in the possession of Zach. From mine he called Aidan, who was in the car with the rest of the group, and Aidan told him to send them our location, so they could help us, maybe with Colin’s Spanish fluency. Connor and Aidan got into an argument because Aidan was upset that we didn’t call him sooner and he hung up. Listening to me in the third person being referred to as someone going to jail for driving under the influence was both silly and horrifying. I had come to Mexico a no one and transcended to felon, guilty of one of the most egregious crimes of the negligent elite. The Mexican Dream. My life was over now, yet in death I had ascended to the Hereafter, among Justin Timberlake, Ferris Bueler, and Nancy Pelosi’s husband, so really my life had just begun. I vaguely thought of my family, how they would feel, if there would be some vindication about the trip. I thought of Connor’s dad’s reaction when he announced he was going to Mexico- “Don’t expect me to pay your ransom”- and how I wrote that off as ignorant and how it still is. I thought of my future legal counsel. I thought of William S. Borough’s Mexican attorney fleeing the country after he himself stared in the eye of the gun. There would be no mercy for me in the public’s eye, no pardon for drunk drivers like no pardon for animal abusers and child molesters. And in a foreign country too, the gall of it all. You evil fuck, you come to our country and you drink and you think you own it and you drive on our roads and disobey our laws and you say ‘my bad, Mr. Officer, I’m from America, I wasn’t aware I was violating any laws, not that I really cared anyway’. That afternoon at my request Justin drunkenly recited all one hundred and ninety-five countries, something he allegedly did several more times that night, and I couldn’t even correctly take a breathalyzer sober. Connor was cursing out Aidan to me, and, merciful in what could be my final hours, I pardoned him, saying he doesn’t understand, we called him in a panic, and we didn’t properly communicate which was our problem this whole time.
I wasn’t asking him to come with me if they took me; it was out of the question. I told him to do everything in his power to make sure that I didn’t go anywhere alone, but whether his power was enough I wasn’t concerned, because I wouldn’t accept, couldn’t imagine, that there wasn’t a way I wouldn’t be alone; what it would be like alone; what it would be like to have my life upended. They cannot take me. You cannot leave me. I cannot go alone. If they take me, you have to come with me. I am not going alone. If they take me, you need to come with me. The more we tried to argue, the more we realized we could argue. The shorter cop had brought his handcuffs out and I was outside the car, yet he stood there with them by his side. “Sorry, you’ll have to come with us”, but I hadn’t made any motion to allow myself to be handcuffed and neither had he. Connor got out from the passenger and sized them up: They didn’t have guns, and they were smaller than us, and we’re the same height. It was either affirming that they had wanted us to offer something or was a display of the cultural difference that Connor wasn’t greeted with several bullets. Connor asked if we could give them what we had, here. They spoke to each other in Spanish, in what sounded like sincere deliberation. The taller cop spoke no English. The shorter cop could code-switch whenever, while although Connor and I had shared English, it was useless. We were relegated to the universal language of fear, another language where we were disenfranchised. It was the second instance where language or its absence had been weaponized against us, the first being with Zach. It was also the second time, in a day, that Connor and I had been forced to fend each other because we had been antagonized/antagonized ourselves. We showed them our bank accounts. I had maybe $85 left of the money I had begged my parents for that morning. We implored that they would take our offerings and they spoke to each other in Spanish. They let us follow them back to the police car and the pudgy cop gave us a square terminal, which Connor said was the only thing they had in their front seat. It was hanging off their vents over the car’s gear. He took my debit card. For Connor’s, he could see him input various numbers over $100 to make sure he wasn’t lying about how much he had on his card. He gave me my backpack, and without looking at us, told us to go. We walked back to the car and decompressed for a moment before Connor yelled, a laugh sewed in his speech: Dude, we just bribed Mexican cops. “Connor, shut the fuck up”, I barked, hushed. The windows were still down. I checked my backpack to see if its guts were still arranged: Vaseline, toiletries, a change of shorts, Jack Keroauc’s Road Novels 1957-1960, Hertz Rental Record, and our ferry tickets. We stayed in park until the car drove off past us.
The GPS wasn’t adapting to the road closure, and so we circled the same area three times, increasingly terrified. Connor was yelling at me. I was trying to reserve any emotion until we had gotten on the highway and was speaking with a soft, subdued tone, like the cops had neutered any authority I had. We also realized that we were on our last bar of gas, and we believed our bank accounts were completely depleted. I imagined the cops had manipulated the GPS and had been watching somewhere, waiting for me to accidentally break a traffic law or run out of gas so they could pull us over again and arrest me. Or there would be another set of cops unaware and unsympathetic that we had already given up our money. I sped through a yellow light and hastily stopped in the middle of the road when it turned red. Parallel to us was a cop with the right-of-way, our car reverberating with our screams, but he ignored us and drove on. We were in the middle of the road for fifteen seconds, in which the car had shut off, as it did when it was in brake. I meandered through adumbral neighborhoods, on the hunt for gas. A shirtless child sat alone against a gate, whether closer to toddler or preteen I don’t know. We called Aidan and asked for money to get us back to Tulum. He and the rest of the group had already driven to Cancun, so they were going to stay at a bar and play with a broken foosball table for a few hours. Our nightlife appetite had been spoiled. He sent us money and told us to get back safely. We stopped at several gas stations which refused our debit cards. As I tried to change lanes, Connor would point and block the blindside of the sideview. I screamed at him. With enough gas for two bars, we started on the highway, where I’d glance at the ETA every two minutes for what felt like fifteen. The bleak night’s expanse stretched forever and I imagined the warmth of my back in the mattress I had cried on the night before. The only color in the dark my high beams shared the road with were the four police checkpoints, with thick, two feet speedbumps that rattled the car as it undulated over. I went 55km over a speedbump I didn’t see because I was trying to get home as fast as possible, but with each checkpoint I became afraid that I had been going too slow, incentivizing the police to target me. Two cops waylaid a car on the right shoulder. After each speedbump, it was worse the slower we went over, Connor would whimper “I can’t do this anymore” and “I just want to go home”. We entered a black tunnel and nearly drove into a man wearing a dim orange vest doing some dubious construction in the right lane. Cozumel was curated happiness, an entire island designated to siphoning happiness and money from tourists using the polished feet of Mexican culture; the artificial. The reality was like a narcocorrido, pretty and bold on the surface, but inextricable from and entrenched in violence. The entirety of the country had stopped any performative operations now that we were out past the Forbidden Hour, and I was given a special message: We owe you nothing; you sugarcoat it however you wish. Chalino died in darkness like this. Yesterday as we drove to Tulum, I frothed at the highway candy: Rock Map, sculptures, straw watchtowers, statues, palm trees, a rattlesnake wall. Also beside me were trucks with sealed turrets, and armed, masked camouflaged men who sat in the cargo trunk. Now there was no parochial spotlight; no “other”, no nuance; there was one whole, bare and unaffected. The light had blinded me to the fact that somehow truth had become the dark’s most salient quality. I wanted everything Mexico had to give but I had bitten off more than I could chew. The thing about travel is it allows one to delineate things, it distinguishes you from the have-nots: the have-not-seens, the have-not-beens, and shows you truth but the truth is scary and then I saw truth with no insulation as far as I could see. In the night we reattained the same state that we celebrated abandoning to the morning: broke, hungry, and at odds with our friends.
Gabriel Junod is a junior studying Philosophy, English, and History. He loves literature and wants to write for people who love to read.