Gringo, a short story.

Peter Simpson was going out in style, or so he thought walking to the beach at 3AM with his tripod mounted camcorder, a bottle of champagne and assorted pills in his shirt pocket. This short Baja cove, deserted in the daytime, was at night what Peter estimated to be the perfect door to oblivion at sea. He would start the camera at low tide in fifteen minutes, stand in front of it and strip naked, drink half of the champagne bottle while downing in a precise sequence a cocktail of pills that he had patiently researched on the Internet. Then he would declare a short happy statement for his friends and family and a longer more angry one for his insurance company. Soon after he would collapse at the water line and let the rising tide take him into its warm embrace, rolling him like a clump of kelp in full view of the recording instrument. Three hours later, the tide would recede and haul his floating carcass with still enough tape left to capture a pink sunrise on the sea of Cortez. Then some passerby would discover the tripod, steal it, open the carrying pouch and read the message within.

“You can keep the video camcorder, but if you bring the tape inside to Allen Waterhouse at the Gringo Gazette, you will be given $100”

Followed precise instructions on how to get there and MUCHAS GRACIAS with a twenty dollar bill for a taxi ride to San Felipe.

Only, Peter had forgotten that it is difficult to film anything at night without a decent light source, even though his Sony could produce some halfway decent greenish footage at very low levels of illumination. The champagne drinking scene would do fine under his keychain flashlight, but any hope of a crisp looking beach was out of the question. He was hoping for the moon to throw in some light but in his moment of doubt there was only the vast Milky Way above, glittering like a wedding veil but incapable of showing any interest for the illumination of a tired earthling’s last hour. Peter slowly scanned all four horizons for a moon to rise, briefly catching a falling star arcing towards Arizona to the North. The sea was calmer than expected, another source of concern. He did not want to be found dead by an early morning sea shell collector, one of the little old retirees living in the trailers around town. He wanted to be had for breakfast by a one thousand pound male shark one thousand feet away at sea. His other fear was warm champagne. Peter had a horror of warm champagne and all these thoughts were distracting him from the job at hand, going through the stage door of life with adequate panache. So it needs to be said that at precisely 3:15AM the cork slid up and popped towards the stars.

The first speech went flawlessly, included every loved ones plus a few more last minute friends that sprang to his exalted mind surfing on three Qualudes taken earlier. It ended with cheerful thanks, winks and goodbyes for all. He then walked back two feet and gurgled down a good deal of champagne with two more ominous looking pills. Those would give him about ten minutes before “lights out”, time to do the insurance thing. Holding the small flashlight near his chin, he knew that his facial expression would be scary while he slowly towards the lens, filling the viewfinder with nothing but his face.

CAPITAL LIFE AND HEALTH, you bastards, I plan to work very hard on getting each one of you assholes a ticket to hell. I hope you roast there for your duplicity and grand thievery. I have paid you every month for forty years to get protected by you in the event of a bad health break. As you know very well the bad break was just last year with the discovery of my advanced leukemia. And you had the gall to refused me the bone marrow transplant that could have saved my life. You did that because I was supposed to have declared it as a pre-existing family malady when I first applied for insurance. The contrary, you said, disabled my policy, …five hundred fucking payments to you later. When my lawyer said in court that at the time of my subscription my father was still alive, you pulled a fine print on me, you criminal bastards. According to you I was suppose to report to you any meaningful change affecting my original application for insurance coverage. I was to write to you a registered letter stating my father’s death from leukemia when it occurred seven years later. So I lost in court along with the rest of my savings. I lost, and now you LOSE, morons…hopefully along with a lot of your clients. This video will hit YouTube in two days and I hope it gets two million viewers. Let it be remembered that my last words to you are FUCK YOU FUCK YOU fuck you very much!.

Peter’s last words sloshed as he was he started a drunken path to the tide’s edge, showing in a manly way his buns to the feeble light. Peter had started to show his buns at age three and never really stopped, a minor irritant for his friends who still loved him dearly. An agronomist, he felt that nudity was a concept that was as valid for man as for other animals or petunias. No, the moon had not risen yet, but a fisherman was walking to the beach with a wheelbarrow swinging a powerful lantern. The forbidden technique would yield a formidable catch with just a simple net. The last time Lorenzo had fished the cove this way he had counted 73 surf perches, enough proteins to keep his five kids rosy-cheeked for two weeks. This time he had taken a larger net along with a duffle bag. When he saw the artist making a solitary movie of himself running naked, he respectfully put down the wheel barrow to observe. These strange gringos were so crazy yet so rich that it could not be all that bad. Maybe he should observe and learn something. But then his strong catholic upbringing made him run to the road above for now. He sat wondering if maybe he should be fishing the next cove to the south. Time passed, the moon was high and the fisherman had already eaten his sandwich along with a few hot peppers. With the gringo now probably gone , he would go fishing and make himself forget the strange sight.

The water had risen fast towards Peter’s open mouth. He had collapsed in the sand and his beige carcass was already rocked by the pounding surf. The salt water gargle had shocked his senses and made him vomit. The Quaaludes in his bloodstream made him so disoriented that he managed to roll further into the blackest of seas, his body fat keeping him afloat on his back till he was out of sight. The fisherman only saw the camera and was now checking the cliff for other signs of the man. After setting up the lantern on a rock, Lorenzo made a first throw of the net and bagged fifteen wiggly perches. By 5AM his duffle bag was so full he could not push it up the hill, deciding instead to follow the beach to a better path uphill. Walking by the tripod, he thought of taking it home. The gringo forgot his camera, and yes, there is an address there in the bag that mamma will read. I will bring it to him and make him happy, as no doubt. there’s a reward attached, a REGALLO!

Riding atop the fish bag, the tripod and case were on their way when the fisherman saw the beige carcass of the naked man, a few hundred meters to the south. He was alive but strangely moaning and moving as if he had a giant bellyache. He would not respond, even when in desperation Lorenzo twisted a jalapeno pepper into his mouth. Borracho borracho, must be that huge bottle I saw . This is one drunken-sick gringo and I better take him somewhere

The ride up the hill was done in stages as the man’s clothes, his camera, tripod and case went first, the duffle bag second and the man third, coiled in the wheelbarrow like a hermit crab in a tin can. Lorenzo would not go to the authorities, not with his clandestine catch! He would take him to Yolanda who had a way with drunkards that no one could fathom. She provided services of the sexual kind, but only on Saturdays as she was also a devout Christian starting Sunday after an early confession. This was Monday morning and a pink sun was showing over the Baja crests. Lorenzo arranged some clothing over the man and pushed to wheelbarrow to Yolanda’s back door, triggering a salvo of barking doggies. The matron instantly came to the door wearing nothing but her Chihuahua and a kitchen knife. QUE PASA!

Peter came to in a strange bathtub surrounded by shimmering luminaries. He had a giant headache and his mouth was full of foul tasting herbs. Yolanda had tried her medicine on him. She was not there but he could hear spoons and smell coffee brewing. Wearing a purple dress of shiny texture, Yolanda appeared with hot compresses and a coffee pot. Oh the pobre borrocho has woken up. This will do you good mister!. She poured him a cup of black coffee and Peter took it as if it had been a normal morning with Priscilla, his assistant at the Agronomic Institute.

Lorenzo wanted the one hundred dollar really bad but did not know what to think of it. One does not feed one’s family with fish alone. There was a need for rice, cooking oil, shoes for the eldest and mamma need to have a tooth removed. She insisted, after reading the entire message ten, twelve times for her illiterate husband. You must go, Mio, go to the Gringo Gazette. Take the money for the taxi and the cassette and just go. The man wants you to do that very bad very badly.

Allan Waterhouse was always late for work on Mondays as he spent his weekends caballing for all sorts of desperate causes. A failed lawyer but a brilliant reporter, he always latched on with passion to any story with at least one orphan, a beaten dog or a robbed widow. Lorenzo waited till noon in the hall, munching on dried shrimps from a cellophane bag bought with the money left after paying the taxi to San Felipe. He tilted his cap back and felt good, having fished well, saved a life now being about to make real money, over one thousand shiny pesos. Allen showed up, met the man and looked around for a suitable way to view the cassette. Only then did he read read the message. Oh it’s from Peter Simpson, for God’s sake, you should have told me that before senor!

The meeting lasted ten minutes more or less, and when Allen came out of the office he had five crisp twenty dollar bills for the worried fisherman. This is a terrific video, and please stick around as we want to do a story on my friend’s death. But it never occurred to the newsman that Lorenzo spoke no English. When a half-hour later Waterhouse came to the front door, notepad in hand, Lorenzo was nowhere to be found. By that time he had already bought a large bag of apples, ten pounds of rice, several jalapenos, two cakes, a new mop for mamma and rubber boots for himself, pushing all of it in the trunk of a taxi while munching on a new bag of dried shrimps. Abundance.

By Friday, Peter was alive and well and living in Yolanda’s bedroom, spoiled crazy, fed fajitas with sour cream, massaged and hand-washed three times a day. His left side was a bit numb but enough of him had come back from the near dead experience to create for Yolanda a different Saturday opportunity. She adored her mustachioed gringo and had washed his pants, bought for him an embroidered shirt to be worn Saturday night at the ejido party. Just think, she would show off her own caballero, hand-fed all week and white as sheet. Before that first outing, Peter had had time to reflect on his life. This woman treasured him, made him laugh and extracted confessions like peas from a pod. He had told her all of his sorry life, insisting that only a very costly operation could possibly extend it. Yolanda had a way with words. Stay right here with me and I will make you healthy, Peta. He like “Peta” and would not be shy to adopt it as his new name, Peta Anonymous.

The first 1000 viewers came slowly, a one-month trickle at YouTube. But then, banzai!, a health-care scandal story on TV showed the acceptable part of the video. Needless to say the original on YouTube quickly climbed to a viewership of over one million after it was aired. Allen Waterhouse was in great demand, appearing on the CBS morning show as the last friend of that poor mister Simpson on the entire planet Earth. Shares of Capital Life and Health plummeted and various memorial services were held for the victim who committed the colorful suicide on YouTube. Policies were canceled so fast that to handle the paperwork Capital had to get assistance from Girl Friday in Phoenix . The claim adjuster for the Simpson policy was fired noisily and committed suicide by jumping off the steel and glass headquarter building. His boss took an early retirement and died when his brand new Winnebago blew a tire and rolled into a Colorado river. It would seem to the untrained eye that some black magic was in the air, the ghost of Peter Simpson acting out its promise. By then viewers had reached twenty million. A sociologically inclined pollster had opined that 22% of these were interested in the health-care issue, another 31% just wanted to not miss-out on a hot video and 47% accessed the site to see the cute but deceased behind of Peter Simpson, their new posthumous folk-hero. Out of these, plus or minus 3% 19 times out of 20, 26% thought the whole thing was staged.

It was only a matter of time before this brouhaha descended into the sea of Cortez. Ten months later, Yolanda had closed shop to all her married men clientele in San Felipe, not without creating some concealed anger. She had married her own in the Guadelupe church, wearing a shiny white gown, a fiery red smile and a shiny white man at her arm. After burning all those candles, she had her won the heart of a real man, one smart enough to have to have mastered Spanish in six months, started his own Instituto Agronomico in the village, and be voted as the best dancer of pasodobles at the Ejido. Peta helped in getting new drought-resistant seeds to the local farmers and thanks to an Arizona irrigation technique boosted the output of all three local greenhouses. Slowly the married men forgave and oriented their libidos to newer ladies of the night arrived from the poor southern provinces. Simpson was determined to have the bone marrow transplant and precious few months were left for him to do so. He had shaved the mustache and grown a mop of hair that he died blond, pulling it into a ponytail that Yolanda favored very much, especially when she adorned it with her amulets on Saturday mornings. This ritual followed the spirited and dog bark punctuated love-making that filled Peter with benevolent endorphins than all the Quaaludes in the world could not match. Yolanda had bought a fresh batch of candles, this time for the quadruple purposes of imploring the madona to keep Peter healthy, keep him undiscovered, keep him happy, and…keep him her own! This is about the time when Peta, out of plain curiosity, googled his name on the Internet, finding twenty-two thousand odd links to his name and to Capital Life and Health. He also on that same morning discovered betting web sites that were making a brisk business with his name, proposing that the death was faked and that the truth about his death would come out at one point in time. Only 3 out of 10 registered betters waged that this would come out before the end of the present year, either with a body found or a real live person. Interestingly, 6 out of 10 were of the opinion that the truth would not come out in the same period, a secret wish, perhaps based on the popularity of the man. At the bottom of one such table, Peter scratched his scalp itchy from all that peroxide and read: The real Peter Simpson to come out alive before the end of the current year, 0.1 One better out of ten, those were good odds thought Peter with a giant smile on his face.

In order to feed his waning popularity with the talk shows, Allen Waterhouse had further pushed his investigation into Peter Simpson’s death. His coverage of the case had already made the Gringo Gazette famous and help promote him to editor-in-chief. After covering in Phoenix the debacle of a hated insurance company, he needed to milk that story further from a historical standpoint that only Lorenzo could provide. A taxi driver came to the rescue when he read Allen’s note in the front page of the Gazette: We are looking for anyone who on February the 26^th saw a short man with a green cap and a funny nose. He was seen munching on dried shrimps around the Gringo Gazette office on Avenida Juarez. The tadi driver had had a passenger like that and remembered quite exactly the location of the dilapidated casita where he had taken him. Always quixotic and with a flair for trailing story sources, the newsman had sleuthed his way to Lorenzo, his wife, and then to Yolanda and her still new and very blond husband. Preceded by an embarrassed Yolanda and trailing Lorenzo with several barking dogs at his ankles, he walked into the kitchen where his friend Peter was dieing his hair by the kitchen sink. Allen ate up the Peter Simpson story like taffy, laughing hysterically and then, standing up like the president of a republic, proposed himself as the honored donor of bone marrow. This, needless to say, was accepted wholeheartedly by a nervous and relieved Peter who had fully recovered his zest for life. He had a plan to get the money for the operation. Insider trading, a practice neither practiced much nor terribly frowned upon in Mexico. Besides, the betting web site was in America. With the economies of Yolanda and several of the farmers of the Ejido, he registered and placed several anonymous contracts on the probability that Peter Simpson would come out of hiding before the end of the year.

It took another six months to find out that the leukemia had receded, that the operation had been successful beyond any expectation. Concurrently with the operation, Yolanda had liposuction, all her moles removed and a complete facelift. Lorenzo now has traded his wheelbarrow for a pickup truck hauling a fishing boat with an outboard engine. Mamma has had new molars implanted and shoned five crowns in front part of her mouth. All the kids now have shoes, a somewhat ironic reality since they now live in a house with soft grass all around it. Playing barefoot in their previous junkyard was indeed a real hazard. As for Waterhouse who was also in with the anonymous bets, he bought a new printing press made in Switzerland. The Instituto has a new wing for farmer education and Peter imported Priscilla from America because of her encyclopedic knowledge of seeds, seed-related people and good American coffee percolation. All the dogs now have each month a flea treatment and a grooming in Ensenada. No one, absolutely no one seems to have wondered why a new tree-lined street in San Felipe was named Calle Simpson. Right behind the new wing of the Instituto Agronomico, that short street was full of shiny new trucks when their farmer owners were inside learning about fertilizing techniques, their hats aligned near the door on a series of brass hooks.

Not that they did not try. Several of the millions of viewers of the new YouTube video had researched the location of that beach. Posts were alive with heated debate sprinkled with names like Coco Beach in Costa Rica, Nha Trang beach in central Vietnam, Omaha beach in Normandy. The same pollster had concluded that 22% of these were interested in the man Peter Simpson’s agenda, another 31% just wanted to not miss-out on a hot video and 47% accessed the site to see the disturbingly amusing full frontal view of Peter Simpson’s naked body, their resuscitated folk-hero. Out of these, plus or minus 3% 19 times out of 20, 26% thought the whole thing was staged.

And they were right, in a perverse way. Lorenzo was now so familiar with the video camera that he had been named Director of the new video. It must be said that strangely he did not feel sinful seeing a naked man through a viewfinder, as if so many layers of glass protected his faith. Of course no YouTubers could read any of these credits. Posted anonymously, it showed a man walking out of the water naked, shaking his grey hair and wiping his brow just a few feet away from the camcorder lens. While slowly drying himself with a towel, he announces to all : “Hi folks, I am Peter Simpson and I am cured of Leukemia, no thanks to Capital Life and Health. I just want to thank from the bottom of my heart the millions of friends out there that made this possible. And also the thousands of others who help enlighten the owners of policies that stood naked like me, having no protection whatsoever in spite of their faithful premium payments. Yes my death was faked, but only accidentally. I owe my life to sheer luck and to the help of a country that has universal health care”. This threw off the few viewers who were hinting at Baja California. Google noted a huge traffic to universal health care and countries like France and Burundi were now suspected of harboring Peter Simpson. Americans were truly bewildered by the large number of these socialist countries, as their hunt for Simpson slowly faded into the background. That was good. Secretive farmers in Baja are more secretive than secretive farmers anywhere else. And they all needed new tractors to service their enlarged lands. That was good too. No one was to mention the other operations to anyone. Peter had always dreamed of an improvement for his recessive chin and aquiline nose. And Yolanda was yearning for purple contact lenses and a higher bust. Lorenzo wanted a second boat and his own fish hatchery. Allen wanted to acquire the Gringo Times. It had to happen.

On the familiar betting web site, Peta read:

Peter Simpson to be discovered and identified before the end of the current year, 0.7 Seven out of ten betters …..Jiminez cricket!, those are good odds thought Peter to himself putting the rest of his money on the opposite option.