Mar Y Arena, Capitulo Uno

Tristan was sitting at the corner booth staring indifferently at the karaoke singer belting out her version of “My Humps” by Fergilicious. A woman so sexy her name rhymes with delicious.
But what he was watching here was just a bunch of sweating and gyrating with giggles and pauses as the poor girl tries to remember the lyrics and shake what her Mama gave her. In the end, its just one more homicide of an alright song.

His shift had just ended and he was nursing an Irish Coffee, waiting for that one special moment when someone would really take a song and run with it.

His heart was too heavy to just head home and stare at the four walls in his bedroom.

All night long he’d borne witness to the misery and loneliness of the soul. It was too much to witness night after night. And to think there was a time when he enjoyed all of this.

He’d had his fair share of one-night stands and secret rendezvous. The husbands banging on his door looking for their wives. The slashed tires and broken windshields after he’d get out of work.

Then there were the innocents he’d corrupted or misused. The ones who’d learned the hard lessons of life at his hands. They haunted his mind to this very day.

Now, 10 years later and 35 years old, he was the dayshift bartender in a ½ star Hotel on the beach of Puerto Vallarta. It had been buried and battered by the hurricanes of 2002, but was now carving out a unique niche with the tourists of the cruise ships.

Tristan had convinced the hotel owner to make a place of rest for the Huichol Indians and be allowed to serve Peyote tea to the guests as a religious ceremony.

They were pushing the limits of the law, but so far no one had complained and everyone was rushing to get on the bandwagon, offering everything from mushroom tea to an extract of the poisonous frogs of South America.

Yet something was missing from his soul. He felt despair all the time. The people around him had begun to change. They now resembled animalistic versions of themselves;

The gold-diggers on their last legs, running everyday to try and keep age and gravity at bay, then using plastic surgery to hide their “flaws”. Feathers seemed to sprout from their hair and their eyes took on the predatory look of a hawk. They seemed to not just move through a crowd, but to observe and perch and flock. Then they’d find a more interesting branch and move on, but their eyes constantly on the look out for the next best thing.

The desperate men looking to fulfill some type of fantasy in a foreign land, so it wouldn’t count. They resembled dirty piglets, turning in unison when the feeding trough is filled with slop. The audacity they showed never failed to amaze Tristan. It bordered on ludicrous, but there was a weird dance going on here.

A pattern existed, a never ending parade of waves crashing over and over with the same results. The cruise ships arrive and then everyone heads to the beach to shed their inhibitions with liquid courage.

Here at Mar Y Arena Hotel the beach is semi-private since they are the very last hotel on the beach and around a bend in the shore. It really was a mini-paradise, run very efficiently by the Argentinean couple who’d bought it cold-cash to do something during retirement. They’d recognized the need for a youthful theme and hired Tristan straight out of a nightclub in San Antonio he’d been managing.

That was 2 years ago and the place was booming enough to have renovations going non-stop. The beach was made more hospitable by placing huge slabs of stones around a fire-pit to make benches and guests were kept from falling in the fire by a ringed stone wall.

And believe me they needed that after a religious ceremony with Peyote tea. People would forget their surroundings and experience transcendence, led by an elder shaman, to another realm. It was not uncommon for mass nudity to erupt for no reason and then they’d have to make sure that no one was having sex in public. If they were, the staff would kindly ask them to go to their room.

But it was all getting old for Tristan. The joy had left him.

And the most ridiculous thought of all was that he was constantly giving advice on Love. He’d hear women cry out all their anguish over a couple of shots (on the house of course). Men would complain that their mistresses were getting too demanding.

Everyone went around with too much enthusiasm and too forced laughter. Yet inside they felt rotten to the core. Like a dark cancer that he could see only through the corner of his eye. Masks would slip and true emotions would show and they were terrible to behold.

This was too much for tonight. Pushing himself out of the chair he decided it was time to visit El Viejo. Perhaps a Peyote tea and a hammock on the beach would clear his head. It was a full moon and it would be setting soon, there was no better time to lie out on the beach with the fire crackling and the salty air coming in from the Ocean. And besides, this would be the fifth time he’d be hearing “Margaritaville” in the last 4 hours, and that was too much.

As he turned the corner in the path that led to the front door of El Viejo’s Cabana he heard a laughter that tickled his ear. It was infectious and genuine.

Coming up the path was El Viejo, carrying his medicine bag and guiding by the hand a woman that made Tristan feel as though he had to go to the restroom. His palms were sweaty and his skin felt tight on him.

She was about his height but had a body that he’d often fantasized about. The kind of body that makes you wonder why God could be so cruel to the rest of us and yet so good to her. Yet there was a slight flaw, he just couldn’t place it.

Perhaps it was her Egyptian cat eyes over strong cheekbones. A full mouth, yet miniature, not overdone.

“Ah, Tristan, I was just going to look for you, this is Montserrat de la Vega,” said El Viejo, indicating the beauty on his arm. “We are about to perform a private ceremony and I thought you’d like to join us, since you’ve shown such a great interest in our ways.”

“My friends call me Monsi, short for Monsoon, they say,” she said as her left hand extended itself. Her right stayed firmly clasped in El Viejo’s grasp. Her face lit up in a smile that caused an involuntary reaction to Tristan’s face and he smiled too.

All that had been bothering him was gone as he sensed the beginning of another adventure…

To be continued;...