My Nightmare in Paradise
Spring Break felt like something I always missed out on for many years of my life. After Spring Break when classes resumed, my friends would come to me with stories about how they had the time of their lives while away from home. During my senior year, however, I finally got to experience what I had been missing out on. Unfortunately for me, the “time of my life” led to an interrogation in a foreign language, and being forced to walk back home on the streets barefoot.
One of my good friends, Louie Souza, had invited me to stay in a Cancun resort with his family over Spring Break. I wasn’t very close with his family yet, so it was important for me to make a good first-impression on them. Also staying at the resort was a large group of close friends that Louie and I shared. Our two friends, Q (short for Quintin) and Rachel, were in Cancun as well, but they were staying at different resorts than us - miles down the beach. Q was the furthest away and we had planned to meet up, but the likelihood of us finding each other seemed slim.
On the first twenty-four-hour day in Cancun I had just returned from parasailing with Rachel near her resort. As we were walking back I saw Q climbing up the staircase to my resort. “Q!” I shouted, “What are you doing here?” I walked over towards him and saw his body and face covered in sweat. That day was an absolute scorcher. It was one of those days where you had to wear shoes on the beach, or suffer from blisters on your feet from the sizzling-hot sand. Q told me he made the three-mile jog to my resort as part of his training for the track season. “How did you find my resort though?” I asked. “I just looked up pictures of the resort and started jogging until I found it,” he explained. Without any access to cell phones to communicate with, it felt like destiny (or dumb-luck) for us to meet up near the crowded ocean shore.
Q and I had been hanging out for a couple hours when he told me he needed to check-in with his parents. Without cell phone service Q could not call his parents three miles down the beach, so he invited me to go to his resort to tell them that he would be hanging out with us for awhile. I went back to find Louie, who said it was okay as long as I came right back. I was without a shirt, shoes, wallet, or phone, yet without any hesitation, Q and I began jogging back to his all-inclusive resort.
When we finally arrived I stared ahead in awe, overwhelmed by the atmosphere. People were ordering food and drinks free of charge, while relaxing alongside some of the most exotic pools I had ever seen. I remember thinking I was in paradise as the heavy bass from the DJ’s speakers rattled the rock floor below me. I looked around and saw monstrous bars with straw roofs around the pools. The bartenders were mixing up drinks and preparing food. The scent of the chicken grilling at the bar for quesadillas made my mouth water. Part of the all-inclusive resort meant that they did not have to pay any additional fees for food and drinks, and the residents took advantage of that luxury.
Q and I weaved through a crowd full of sweaty drunk people as we made our way to the poolside bar. Q and I were both eighteen, which is the legal drinking age in Mexico; so of course we decided to exercise our new rights as adults in Mexico. We finally arrived at the bar and sat down to order some drinks that we could enjoy on our walk back to the Souza’s resort. Q ordered a strawberry daiquiri and a piña colada for the two of us to share. I only had a sip of the two drinks at the bar because I knew I was not technically supposed to order drinks without having the all-inclusive wristbands.
We sat at the bar for fifteen minutes relaxing, still tired from our jog to the resort. Although I only had a few sips, the chilled drinks were immensely refreshing. The sips of the chilled drinks made my blood turn cold. It felt like the sweat beads on my forehead froze up, and I felt euphoria of the perfect, cool sensation. It was certainly the perfect way to cool off on such a hot day.
We each grabbed a drink and started walking towards Q’s parents to say good-bye, when I heard the bartender and security guard speaking behind me. I had always been one of the strongest students in my fifth level Spanish class at, so I had developed decent listening skills. The two men were talking about me, the moreno (meaning dark skinned), and my “bare wrists”. I told Q the drinks were for his parents; implying that we could get caught and that would be our story. Then, sure enough, I felt a hand grasp my arm. “Hey!” he said.
My heart stopped. The moment I felt him grab me, it was as if he had snatched the life out of me. It truly felt like the Grim Reaper had just grabbed me. Once the security guard caught my attention, I was absolutely terrified as to what may happen. I did not know at the time if I had done much wrong other than taste the drinks, but his tone suggested there was more.
He asked me where my wristband was and I explained to him that I was not a guest of the resort. I told him we were checking-in with Q’s parents, who told us to bring them back the two drinks on our way out. The guard clearly did not speak English very well, because he was not able to understand what I was telling him. After explaining the story to him several times, he finally understood that I was not actually a guest of the resort and he told me to follow him.
The guard led us to a lady at the front-counter who spoke much better English. I began explaining my story to her, when the guard cut me off. He was speaking to her in Spanish and began telling her that I had been coming in the resort trying to steal drinks for a party. I stopped the guard mid-sentence and told the lady at the counter that I had only gone to the bar to take the drinks to Q’s parents as asked.
I was certain I was going to need Louie’s parents to bail me out of jail. What were they going to think? I had not even been under their supervision for forty-eight hours and I was on my way to jail. What would my parents think? They have always preached discipline to other adults to me. I began thinking about my future; would I ever get a job? Who wants to hire an adult that is an international criminal? Millions of thoughts were racing through my head and I had to sit down just to avoid passing out.
I waited in the chair as the two of them spoke about me. Finally after a fifteen-minute talk, I was simply given a slap on the wrist. I explained to her that I was unaware that I could not visit the resort, and I assured her it would never be a problem again. The lady informed me on the policies of the resort, so I would know what to do next time. Q and I were released to head back to the Souza’s, but Q said he first needed to run upstairs to his room to grab some things.
To this day I still don’t know what exactly Q went to do, but whatever it was, he certainly took his sweet time. As I was standing half-naked in the stylish lobby, a chauffer approached me and said, “Hablas español?”
“Sí,” I said, “I speak a little bit of Spanish.”
The man made me follow him outside the front entrance. When the man told me he did not speak any English at all, I knew this was going to be my ultimate Spanish exam. The man questioned me in Spanish about where I came from, whom I was with, why I came, etc. After ten minutes of talking, I told him my friend was most likely looking for me in the main lobby, and would not know to look for me in the front. The man told me that I could not go back inside and that I would just have to hope Q would see me outside. I began asking a lot of questions again, but in a less dramatic way. Did he decide he didn’t want to walk back with me? Did we decide to walk back together? What is taking him so long, did he get in trouble? Most importantly, where the hell is he!?
After twenty minutes – which felt like an hour, Q finally came down into the lobby. I yelled for him through the glass doors and he came outside to get me. Q and I began to walk back inside, but the man told us we could not go back in. We told him we were just going to walk straight through the resort to get back to the beach so we could walk back . . . That was the day I learned that people could by parts of the beach.
Q and I had no choice but to walk barefoot on the blistering black streets of Mexico in the middle of the day. We walked down the long driveway towards the roads with nothing but our swim trunks and Q’s banana. The street route took twice as long with no way to get directly on the beach – other than going through another private resort. I remember feeling as if I were on the beach again, in the sense that my feet were burning from the hot street. The only difference: there was no water around to cool off in, there were no chairs laying around to relax in, and there were no hot girls walking around to show interest in. So finally after twenty minutes of contemplating, Q and I finally decided to take a chance and run through a random resort to make it back onto the familiar beach.
We decided to walk through one of the larger resorts, hoping to be able to blend in with the other residents. We had no clue where we were going when we entered the building; we just began turning corners until we saw a back door. Any time we would an employee of the resort, we put our heads down and walked the opposite direction. After two minutes of power walking through the labyrinth, we saw the poolside doors. We headed towards the doors that led us to the back corner of the pool deck. We made it outside and saw the staircase to the beach, which was on the opposite side of the massive pool deck. We did not want to take any chances with being questioned about residency, so we had to avoid walking all the way across the pool deck. We looked ahead and saw that the pool deck we were on was on a tall ledge to keep outsiders off the deck. We glanced at each other for a splint second. Without any form of communication we had just made an important agreement. We both started sprinting towards the ledge of the pool deck. We jumped off the 6-foot wall and hit the unforgiving sand, which was covered with sharp pieces of broken shells. We looked to our right where there was soft sand and laughed, because we knew that if we had made the jump two more feet over we would not have cuts on our palms and knees.
We sprinted back down to the water and walked alongside the ocean. The crashing of waves felt like a massage on my feet. I looked back to the resort we left and saw the mass of people moving around. The ocean and crowd seemed to represent two extremes of my adventure. The chaotic crowd reminded me of my entrapment at the resorts. The ocean beneath my feet, however, symbolized the freedom that I had now that I was on the shore headed back home.
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