A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

NAs a happily married man whose wife has spies everywhere, I have never been one to frequent the lurid fleshpots of El Centro where bare-naked women dance on tables and so on. However, due to mitigating circumstances beyond my control, I found myself in an awkward situation for a happily married man whose wife has spies everywhere. A few of my old rock’n’roll drinking buddies from way back when came to Mazatlan for a couple of weeks of R’n’R before going back to their stressful jobs back in the frozen northlands. Like so many of our generation, they were going through the agonies of separation, divorce and solitude, thus giving them a good excuse for frequenting one of the aforementioned dance clubs where my old drinking buddy CB lost his wallet with almost five hundred dollars in it. He was characteristically blase about it. When I saw him a few days later, he just shrugged it off. “No big deal. I called up and canceled all the credit cards. I’ll just put in a couple days of overtime, what the heck…” I asked if he still had his passport. “No, I don’t have a passport, I just got my birth certificate. My driver’s license was in my wallet.” I don’t think they let people on the plane without photo ID. “Whattaya mean? I got my ticket, I got my birth certificate, I’m an American, I own a house up there, they can call my work and ask! They gotta let me back in the country!” That’s what you think. His plane was scheduled to leave the next day. I went home, made some calls, and found out that my fears were accurate. His only unlikely hope was to file an embarrassing police report, then try desperately to obtain an emergency photo ID in a matter of hours, throwing himself on the

tender mercy of various local government agencies which would undoubtedly refer him to other government agencies. A bleak prospect. Since the two-star hotel they were all staying at did not have a telephone, I personally raced back into town to warn him of the impending disaster. I walked around until I found them living dangerously again, eating tacos from a street cart. They sobered up considerably once they realized the extent and gravity of the predicament. Then a brilliant idea occurred to someone, and we decided to go back to the club where the wallet disappeared and see if by some miracle it had resurfaced. Being the only one with any sort of command of the Spanish language, I had no honorable choice but to accompany them on their unholy quest. It was not a glamorous place. The cement floors were littered with cigarette butts. Grim, bug-eyed men were staring through the dim haze at sullen, desperate girls at whom I did not glance twice. After various interviews with various employees who referred me to other employees, I was finally told to write my amigo’s name on a card, and for fifty pesos they would go look in the lost-and-found. If they found it, it would be five hundred more. After a nervous half hour wait, the security guy returned with all of the ID and credit cards. The cash was gone, but my friend was so overjoyed he gladly coughed up the reward and didn’t even ask about the missing money. I love a happy ending. And just in case anybody saw me there, and wondered what a happily married man whose wife has spies everywhere was doing in such a place, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. eg@pacificpearl.com