DECEMBER 2008

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Tulum
By Tim Hall, Nov 19, 2008

Listen

The old diesel bus rattled and fumed out of the station and into the blinding sunlight of Cancun city. After a series of turns we were on the desolate two-lane highway to Tulum.

I’d learned of the place from an acquaintance, who I had run into a few months earlier. I had complimented her on her tan and she said she had just gotten back from a magical place a couple of hours south of Cancun, where you could rent a hut on the beach for a few dollars a night, the Presidente was always on ice, and every afternoon they pulled the fish off the little boats that came up onto the beach and threw them, whole, onto the grill.

On the bus ride I practiced a number of questions using my old Langenscheidt phrase book, teaching Brenda a few basics along the way. I had studied Spanish for many years and had spent a summer in Madrid, but was always nervous about speaking it. The bus dropped us on a dry and dusty stretch of town near the water purification plant. We had no reservations or maps, just a destination and our return bus tickets. If the place turned out to be a bust then we would go back up to Playa Del Carmen and stay there instead.

We found a nice tourist shop that sold Oaxacan crafts, mostly clay masks and figures and Day of the Dead nichos made from thin hammered aluminum and painted brilliant colors. The lady told me that it would be hard to find a place to stay, as a big religious festival was beginning that weekend, but she knew the place with the hammocks and said it would be necessary to take a taxi there, as it was a few miles down to the water through some dense jungle. We thanked the lady and found a taxi, and for a few American dollars he took us to the place.

We got the last hut. As I was paying the man, fifty dollars for a week in advance, including hammocks, several English tourists came lumbering up behind and the man waved them off.

“We got lucky,” I said to Brenda.

“I saw those guys on the ride down,” she said. “We passed them in the taxi.”

“They hiked all the way down here?”

“Yes.”

“Then it serves them right.”

The huts were made from bamboo poles, the roof was a thick layer of palm fronds that were tied to the supporting beams. There was no floor, just the sand of the beach, and after I had tied the two hammocks side by side there was still enough room to move around pretty well. Brenda and I got our bathing suits and went to the modest bathing cottage, with a single cold pull-shower and co-ed toilet. Brenda went in to change first. She came out wearing a black bikini. I changed into my trunks and then we walked the hundred feet or so to the water.

I had only been to the Caribbean once, with Ruby. It was a fluke. A friend had been asked by her wealthy boss to look after the cats while he was away. He owned several houses, including one in St. Thomas, on a high hill overlooking Red Hook. The villa had a huge tiled pool sticking out over the cliff, and we watched the sailboats and ferries while the little weather station by the pool house read ninety degrees, moderate humidity, high pressure, wind 10-15 mph. Our friend, Vera, was a daring and lusty young advertising executive, and she smuggled in some cocaine to liven things up. Ruby later told me that she thought Vera wanted to get something going with the three of us. I had sensed it too, but coke will do that to anybody, and I was still so in love with Ruby that it rolled off me. Ruby spent the week in bed, complaining, while Vera and I explored St. Thomas. One day we took the ferry to St. John and went up to the beaches along the northwest corridor. The water wasn’t just blue, or blue-green like the advertisements I had seen in the subways: it was purple and teal, lemon and lime. It was alive, so clean and clear that the reflection of the sun on the sand five, ten feet below was strong enough to blind you.

Vera and I started laughing the moment we saw it. We laughed so hard we fell on the sand and it was several minutes before we could even go into the water, and if I hadn’t been so foolish I would have taken her right there, in Cinnamon Bay, but if I weren’t a fool then I wouldn’t be telling this story in the first place. I’d be off in one of the places where people who are not fools go, doing the things that unfoolish people do.

Ever since that day in St. John, not a day had gone by that I hadn’t dreamed of getting back to the Caribbean. It was such a constant obsession that I began to wonder if I wasn’t making it all up. Tulum proved that it hadn’t been a dream. The beach was long and wide and empty, with perfect white sand. The water was like I had remembered it, the trade winds constant and cleansing, the few clouds on the horizon high and puffed and minding their own business.

We swam, dried ourselves in the sun, then took a long walk up the beach for a closer look at the nearby ruins that stood high on a rocky cliff. We had dinner at the makeshift cantina and then went back to the hut for the night. Brenda and I stretched out in our hammocks and listened to the waves, the breeze, and the muted sounds of the other guests, talking and clinking glasses in the cantina until late.

There was a beautiful woman lying an arm’s length from me, in the most unspoiled and romantic place I’d ever been. I wanted to reach out and touch Brenda, get in the hammock beside her and hold her tight, gently pull back the nylon fabric of the bikini and coax her thighs apart just enough to rub myself inside of her as I whispered wild and filthy things into her ear. Then I thought of Jack, and wondered if it would be a good thing, a healing experience, or if it would ruin everything. Would she later say I had taken advantage of her at a vulnerable time?

She would probably just laugh at me and tell me to get back into my own hammock. That was fine. But what if she didn’t? It wasn’t being rejected, but the possibility of not being rejected that worried me. We were both exhausted and depressed about Jack and the drama. Would that make sleeping together a bonding ritual, a welcome relief from the pain and stress, or something that would only tear us apart sooner? I had never thought so much when I was drinking. Back then I would have just grabbed her, made my case in the most forceful and unambiguous way possible. Of course, during my years of drinking I had never found myself on a hammock in Mexico swinging next to a sexy brunette in a black bikini and running a newspaper, either. I was confused about everything. It was torture. I thought as hard as I could about it, listening to the soft sound of Brenda breathing while my heart raced and my groin ached from the pressure. Before I could figure out the answer I was sound asleep.

The next day we took a taxi to the ruins we had seen from the beach, to take the tour. They were ruins, all right. On the way back we stopped in town for supplies. We got water, sunscreen and toothpaste, and any food that wouldn’t spoil too quickly in the heat. We spent one more night together and then Brenda said that she wanted to see Playa Del Carmen, get a hotel room and enjoy the nightlife there. As I watched her pull away in a taxi it dawned on me how foolish I had been. We were already running a business together, which was quite a risky and intimate undertaking, so maybe consummating our relationship in a hammock on a remote Mexican beach wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. It might have even brought us closer.

I ran up to the little dirt road at the edge of the compound, to see if I could stop the car, tell Brenda to wait another day, but they were already gone.

Randy and Jason were staying in the hut next door. They were from Tennessee, driving around Mexico in an old VW bug with a black lab named Doc. They worked in construction, they said, and only worked enough during the year until they saved up their money for another trip. They had explored every part of Mexico, sometimes they stayed for months at a time. The current plan was to stay in Mexico until the start of hurricane season, at which point they would go back to Tennessee and catch the summer construction season there, then plan next winter’s trip.

Randy and Jason supplemented their travel money by selling coke and weed, which they bought wholesale off the locals who walked quietly through the camp at night, saying cocaína and marijuana in high, soft, sing-song voices. The dealers were very gentle and polite about it. It was all very decent and civilized.

“They pick up the kilo bundles that wash up on the shore,” Randy explained. “This is a big smuggling route along here. When the speedboats are being chased they dump the bricks overboard. You’ll see, in the mornings there are these big army trucks that roll by, down to the beach, with armed soldiers who look for new bundles. The locals usually get to them first, so we’ve got an endless supply of the highest-quality blow you can find anywhere, for only pennies on the dollar.”

“What’ll twenty bucks get me?”

“More than you could possibly do. Give me ten.”

I handed him a ten. Randy cut off an obscene chunk from the brick.

“You got something to put this in?”

“Tell you what: why don’t you just carve up some lines and we’ll all do them. You hold onto it. I’ll take some weed, though.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’m not crazy. I’d just prefer it that way.”

Randy and Jason were very happy with my suggestion, and we did the lines off a shaving mirror one of them had. Then we smoked a joint and they gave me some rolling papers and a ball of weed the size of a fist, that I wrapped in some toilet paper, and I thanked them and went back to my hut. I rolled another joint for later and found a plastic baggie, then buried the rest of the weed in the sand. My numbed sinuses and lips began to throb with new life. I lit a cigarette and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever tasted.

The cantina was alive with lights and music. About two dozen tourists, mostly Germans, sat around drinking beer and staring into the empty dance floor. I found a table and drank some water while tapping my foot, wondering why nobody was dancing. The DJ sounded very bad at first, but it turned out he was only testing the crowd, trying to see what the mood was, because finally he seemed to come alive—I think the first good song he played was “Romie” by Beenie Man—and a few people jumped out on the floor, then more and more until there was nobody left at the tables, and everybody looked relieved and happy that all that polite sitting around was over with. The night was filled with the smells of the jungle and the sea was black, with little white cuts showing when the waves broke, and through the open section in the middle of the cantina roof the stars shone thick and bright. Strings of colored lights blinked, and a lone, stuttering mirror ball reflected the beam of a flashlight on a shelf, as it spun arrhythmically in that crazy Mexican beach shack.

Soon there was a pretty blonde dancing across from me. She was wearing a sarong and a bikini top. I changed my position a few times to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, but she shifted too and made eye contact and soon we were bumping and grinding with the rest. It was nice to be chosen, it made it so much easier for me. Suddenly I was a ghetto pimp, the mack daddy, the world’s greatest dancer and Orson Welles rolled into one. I was high as a kite. This little blonde fox had obviously connected with the totality of the spiritual vibe that I was putting down, oh yes oh yes, acknowledging the funky essence of everything that I was about and would heretofore be as well in addition and on top of that too, and before we got too tired from the dancing I took her hand and asked her back to my groovy hut and she said ja.

It was too hard to make it in the hammock so we went down to the sandy floor, floor made of sand, just sand, no floor, the funky essence of sandness, oh yes, and I laid out my beach towel and we rocked and she groaned and I remembered the Clash song so I pulled out in time to leave it on her belly, thinking: Oh, Brenda. The young lady was very grateful for that and thanked me in both German and English, before cleaning herself off and wrapping herself up in the sarong and kissing me good-night. I climbed into the hammock, and as I drifted off to sleep to the sound of the wind and waves I hoped Brenda was having as much fun as I was.