Iguana Nights 2

“What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we
  are so far from our own country we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive
  desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit
  of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest
  touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of
  light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for
  pleasure.”
                                                                           Albert Camus, The Notebooks



I bid them ‘adios’ next morning, and hitched a ride with David and Luis, to 55 miles north of Tepic. David invited me to stay with his family in Mexico City. I bought some sour milk to finish off my Los Comales tortillas. Two guys with a baby in a pickup drove me south. The sign said La Ciudad Mas Amigable en el Mundo, The Friendliest City in the World, and the three guys on the beach who stole my watch must have read it too, because they gave it right back when I told them to. I was in Puerto Vallarta and, back then, it was drop dead gorgeous. Even earlier, in the 16th century, it was a Manila Galleon trade harbour for smugglers avoiding the nasty tax collectors in San Blas, a hundred miles up the coast. A few 2000 ton Philippine hardwood ships, carrying African ivory, Banda spices, Chinese porcelain and silk, and a thousand passengers, would make the four month run from Manila, once a year. The cargoes were then transported overland to Vera Cruz to be loaded onto vessels heading to Cadiz in Spain. The currency was, as it will always be, ‘plata o plumo,’ silver or lead.
I ate my first meal of tripe in my first taco stand. I followed it immediately with my second meal of tripe in my first taco stand. Nixon was here in Puerto Vallarta in 1970 for treaty negotiations. He likely missed the tacos.
Belly full, I needed a place to stay. It was right across the cobblestone street and it still stands on Basilio Badillo. Serendipity and I waltzed through the iron gate of the Posada Roger, into a large shady courtyard, filled with white noise and cool oxygen from the dripping fountain. There were clay lights and chairs tilted forward on round tablecloths. It smelled of mangos, bananas, frijoles, and marijuana. A girl’s laugh echoed off the terra cotta in soft French. Sunbeams caught the smoke through the subtropical trees. I got a five-dollar room and ventured out again. By the time I found my way through the rocks and thorny bushes, to the market and back, my feet were aching. I prepared some frijoles and plantano with my tortillas, and shared them with Carlos, a student from Guadalajara, and a great grandson of Pancho Villa. I lit up my pipe, and let Carlos tell me the story:
Pancho was a 16 year-old sharecropper supporting his mother and four siblings in San Juan del Rio, when he came home one day in 1894, to find the Hacienda owner trying to rape his younger sister. Pancho shot him dead. He fled into the mountains and became a bandit. He robbed trains and stole cattle to survive. During the Revolution of 1910, he became a General. Pancho redistributed land to the poor, printed his own money, and even attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. The thousand soldiers the Americans sent to hunt him down, spent a year in their saddles. They never found a trace. In the end, Pancho made a bad deal with the government devils in an attempt to retire- but you can’t go from Robin Hood to Al Capone without going through the forty dumdum bullets they put into his Dodge Roadster, on the day he went into town to pick up some gold. His last words were ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them, I said something.’ In 1926 somebody stole the skull from his grave. I told Carlos that his relatives were far more flamboyant than mine. As were the four gay caballeros sitting across from us, listening intently. Two were goliaths. One of the little guys spoke.
“Ju see theeze beeg men?”
It was hard to miss them, sitting entwined in their white cotton pajamas.
“They are lovers.”
I held off on the pink coffin joke.
“Deed you know that Puerto Vallarta ees the ‘San Francisco of Mexico?’
Now I did.
“Are you ACDC?”
“Nope.”
“AC?”
“Si.” Trying to remember Ohm’s Law.
“Que Lastima.” I looked up it quickly in Steve’s dictionary. What a pity.
Don’t let it end like this. Tell them, I said something. I didn’t say it, but it was rolling through the skull I still had.
Carlos and I graciously backed out of the courtyard, and took in the more biodiverse nightlife at Capriccio’s. It was there we met Klaus, a German traveler who had rented a jeep, and invited us to go with him to Mismaloya the following day.
I woke up quickly in the cold shower next morning. Carlos and I met Klaus outside, waiting in an orange and white VW Acapulco. with running boards and a surrey top. We jumped in the back.
Pedestrians began running for cover down El Camino Real, as Klaus hit lightspeed.
There was no road to Mismaloya when John Huston made The Night of the Iguana here, in 1963. He had to barge the cast and crew down the coast for filming. From where I sat there was still no road, but that didn’t seem to bother Klaus, as he played with the chickens along the cliff edges.
“Do you think God drives one of these?” Asked Carlos.
“No, but you can probably ask him from here.” I said.
Iguana was about a man’s weakness for flesh and alcohol. True to the plotline, Richard Burton was drinking large, and having an affair with Elizabeth Taylor on the set. He played the role magnificently. Klaus was clearly an admirer, and in a party mood. Within an hour we had a table with two Peruvian girls, an American dancer named Leslie, two Norwegian girls, and Monica and Patty, wherever they were from. They all had hibuscus flowers behind their ears. You couldn’t see the tablecloth for piña coladas. The swimming was fine, as was the lunch of grilled snapper with salsa, limes and pineapple, under the palm thatch palapas. It was late afternoon when Klaus piled all ten of us into the Acapulco, and drove back to Puerto. The added ballast likely saved my life.