They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Well, I waited years for my little venganza, and it was sweet. Since most of the part-timers have left, I think I can speak frankly. Sure, we all know this town is wonderful, paradisiacal, etc, for the most part and we’re not supposed to talk about the rest lest we scare off potential investors, but there are certain little things that have always bugged me, and finally, last Semana Santa, I got even with a sizable segment of them. No, I didn’t stand on the shoulder of the Avenida with a couple of suitcases, gazing around with a lost look on my face just to see how many pulmonias I could get lined up in front of me, waving, shouting and honking their horns while I ignore them. I’m saving that one. What I did do, I confess, was act as an accomplice to one of the myriad of beach pests who make it their job not to allow a vacationer five uninterrupted minutes of relaxation without somebody coming up and demanding attention. Worst of all, I enjoyed it! When it comes to high pressure solicitation, ‘tis nobler to dish it out than to receive! OK, sure, maybe I feel a little bit guilty, but then it was Easter, when everybody is supposed to feel at least a little bit guilty. As fate would have it, I rather fortuitously ran into my old jamming buddy Pancho, the grizzled musical veteran who taught me my first Mexican songs back in the nineties. We’re talking timeless classics like Corrido de Mazatlán, Cielito Lindo, Besame Mucho and El Reloj, so I owe him big time. He has a gifted voice and makes a living, sort of, singing on the buses and making the rounds of the various taco joints, hot dog carts and so forth that welcome or at least tolerate professional meandering minstrels. He suggested that, for old times’ sake, we wear matching straw hats & wayfarer knockoffs and patrol the beaches brandishing guitars and scooping up loose change from the pilgrims. As is usual during Easter week in Mazatlán, there

were about a million Mexican revelers from the interior regions basking in the sun, drinking beer and blasting different radio stations together. Boy did we have fun! We started at the Monos Bichis, that is, the Fisherman’s Monument, and made our way through miles of jam packed beaches, all the way up to Playa Bruja and back, ruthlessly getting in everybody’s face along the way. Wherever we went, I tactfully let Pancho handle the initial approach. Usually, he would employ the frontal assault strategy, just walking right up to a likely looking cluster of people trying to eat, drink, sunbathe, neck, whatever and, without a word of preamble, he would start flailing away on his sun baked tonally challenged guitarra while singing in a powerful tenor that carried over the drone of a dozen boom boxes. I couldn’t keep the evil grin off of my face as I stood beside and a bit behind him, picking along on my hopelessly out of tune gitbox as best I could while simultaneously performing the mental exercise of trying to decide with which bikini clad beauties it would be least unpleasant to be marooned on Goat Island for the next few years. After a minute or two of rousing abbreviated versions of once popular songs such as Tiburon Tiburon, Suavecito Suavecito and Sugar Sugar, topped by his own personal masterpiece El Corrido de Pedro Infante, he would mumble some spiel about amiability and cooperation, then thrust his callused hand under the noses of our captive audience. You’d be amazed at how fast they would dig a small coin or two out of their pockets and bid that we go with God! Just to give you an idea, we made well over a hundred pesos in less than seven hours. Being the good soul that he is, Pancho wanted to split the haul, but since my immigration documentation does not designate public begging as an approved lucrative activity, I insisted we compromise and spend the money on tax deductible beer, which we did, and then some. And to think I used to dread Semana Santa!