Cancun on $400 a day

I've got to tell you. I like the new President.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Cancun, Mexico the day CNN announced who the Supreme Court picked for President of the United States. And that night I had the first of several recurring dreams where George W. Bush gets assassinated by some lunatic. It's not because he's necessarily a bad man or because of the strange way he got elected. It just seems in step with the wanton disregard of semantics in our society. Think about it. Bush chooses Dick as his running mate. Now he's entertaining thoughts of Colin for his cabinet. So it only makes sense that I would see the same headline, over and over in my mind's eye:

Bush Whacked

After I woke up from this bizarre dream, I crawled out of bed and headed to the patio, which overlooked the amazingly crystal blue ocean of Cancun. How did I wind up here? I thought. I didn't deserve it. But most of the good things in my life come undeserved. If I work, slave and strive toward a goal, you can bet it'll never happen.

Same goes with things I say. If I say offhandedly, "Yeah, I think I might do that," it'll get done. But if I say it with conviction, and if I say it with passion and determination - you can be sure it's a lie.

"I swear, I'll quit drinking after the holidays."

"That's it. No more cigarettes for me."

"Fine. I'll get a job then."

Knock, knock, knock. "Housekeeping." Shit. It's the same woman from the Net Wits convention. She's everywhere.

After the maid kicked us out of our suite, my girlfriend and I went down to get lunch at the hotel restaurant on the beach. Since it was11:30, the staff was in the middle of the changeover from breakfast to lunch.

The sign on the restaurant marquee read, "We'll be black with you at noon." Damn. Can't wait to see that.

Another notice read, "Please throw paper at the wasted basket." That's only fair. Odds are the thrower is wasted as well.

But the funniest note came from the maid, who wrote, "Please no pee off balcony, Haspeer." Haspeer. What a hoot.

Besides drinking margaritas at the beach, my girlfriend forced me to go downtown to the little shops, called "mercados" in Spanish. Everything in Mexico is designed to separate Americans from their money. It's like Vegas with an ocean. The exchange rate is 9 pesos to the dollar, but the Mexicans make up for that by charging nine times the normal price, then adding a few pesos. They also don't care for browsers, so as soon as you walk into a store, they shopkeeper assigns someone to tail you. I felt like a black man in a Korean-owned convenience store.

The girlfriend wanted to spend more time at the mercados, but I just wanted to hang around the beach and drink margaritas. True, I would not have had anything to write about if I had gotten my way, except for one incident. As I was coming back to my room from the beach, I took a crowded elevator up to my sixth floor suite. As I got out, a tall blond woman was getting in. I heard a guy say, "We're going up." The blond said, "Well, I'll go up, then I'll go down." Just as the elevator doors were about to close, I called back, "My kind of girl."

I figure if I didn't get a laugh, then at least I created an uncomfortable silence. Either one's fine with me.

That same night, after I learned that Bush had become President, I went into a small bar at the hotel, called Club All Inclusive. You can drink there 24 hours a day and the setup's sweet. There's no bartender, just several bottles of booze and some mixers sitting on a counter. You go up, grab a glass, pour yourself a drink, and take a seat at a table. I went up to the bar and grabbed a bottle. Why should I hide behind some pretense of manners when I could save myself several inconvenient trips to the bar?

I sat at the table drinking Jack Daniels and watching CNN. Hmmm. So the Supreme Court got to pick the President, huh? Wonder who they like in the Super Bowl.

In the middle of my drunken reverie, a Jewish couple came in and struck up a conversation with me. That is, I thought they were Jewish. Turns out they had just moved to South Carolina from Long Island and had converted to Christianity. I don't know what's stranger. That they moved from New York to South Carolina and changed religions. Or that they chose to sit with me in a Cancun bar.

We immediately got into an argument about politics, but that soon escalated to an argument about religion. I was in my element -- watching CNN, drinking Jack Daniels, and arguing with Christian Fundamentalists in Mexico. Is life too surreal or what?

By the way, is there a new Calvinism in America? Cause I don't remember seeing the memo. One tenant of Calvinism says there are just a few reservations available in heaven, but you could tell the ones who were going to sit at the big table by the amount of money they made on Earth. I think that concept's been changed. I think it's now measured by the amount of food you put away.

Ren and Stimpy, as I came to call them, tried to escape my table twice, but I convinced them to stay. "Come on, we're just Americans talking here. I'm harmless." They bought it.

The first time they tried to leave came after I tried out the "Bush Whacked" line on them. The second time came during an abortion argument, when I quoted some Bill Hicks material for them. "Pro-lifers, murdering doctors. You people crack me up. It's irony on a base level, but it's a hoot. Why don't you guys protest cemeteries?"

But I finally came up with a line that cleared the table for good. Stimpy leaned over to me, looked me ever-so-sincerely in the eye and said, "Jesus is my personal savior."

I said, "What a fuckin' coincidence. He was my waiter at lunch."

Ren and Stimpy realized I was an evil, bitter little man and stormed out of the bar. Now the bar was empty, except for Jose who came to clear my ashtray.

"You know, Jose, I really like the new President."

"Bush?"

"No," I said. "Fox. President of Mexico."

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This column aims to be funny. If you can read anything else into it, you're on your own. Copyright 2000 by Mike Jasper.