People love justice.
There's a scene in the popular TV series Breaking Bad where Walter White gets even with a rude loudmouth by
sticking a gas station squeegee under the hood of the loudmouth guy's expensive
car, and moments later the car bursts into flames. We cheer!
Yay, the jerk got three thousand dollars' worth of damage to his
car. But what happens when this sort of
thing occurs in real life?
Speaking of rude louthmouths: all-inclusive resorts. I love them and I hate them. I was in Mexico this year on an awesome,
all-inclusive pig fest that included six meals a day, unlimited booze with
poolside service, and an employee who is probably not a licensed physician who
carted around a tequila shot cart and gave ladies by the pool mysterious liquid
that made people gag and cry. Typical
family fun in Mexico.
Once the sun goes down, the party really gets wild. Because I am getting old, my wild partying
consists of sitting in a comfortable lounge chair sipping rum punches and
complaining about the extra three pounds of steak that I shouldn't have
eaten. However, on our next-to-last
night at the resort, things got crazy at the evening sports bar.
Here's the scene: me and my fiancée are sitting at the
bar. There is an older lady at the end
of the bar, and then enters the guy. The
guy is about 6' 2" and in decent shape.
He looks like a young Mr. Spock, if say, Spock had drank some Martian
rum or Jupiter Elixir or whatever the hell Star Trek aliens drink. Anyway, this guy had his arm draped over the
older lady and the older lady didn't look very happy about it.
What to do? I did the
"Ghandi"—meaning, for me, that I sat quietly and chugged my rum. That was my non-violent protest. My fiancée, being a woman, felt what is known
as "sympathy" and gestured for the older lady stranger to leave the
hungry-eyed drunk guy and make her way over to where we were sitting.
It turns out that old lady didn't know drunk guy. She didn't like drunk guy. She wanted nothing to do with drunk guy. Her husband was a little under the weather
and he was back in the hotel room, sleeping.
And so older lady wanted to come downstairs for a drink. Come on, drunk guy! Personal space please! Anyway, we thought that was the end of it. Lady rescued.
Wrong.
Drunk guy shows up again, having successfully negotiated the
twenty-five feet of bar stools and bright 40-watt lights of the Mexican sports
bar. He wrapped his arms around this
older lady and exclaimed that he was "interested".
"Hey," my fiancée spoke up. "That's my mom! We're here for a family reunion!" I nodded, much like Ghandi would have silently
nodded when he was getting beaten up by the police. Are we both heroes? Let's let history decide.
Drunk guy was from Saskatchewan and he claimed that we was
interested in the older lady. Why he
felt the need to mention that he was from Saskatchewan remains a mystery. Anyway, we explained that "mom"
already had a "dad" and that he might appear at any moment. Watch out, Saskatchewan! Saskatchewan, who was about twenty-five years
old, loudly exclaimed that he was ready to be our new daddy. Really?
He wanted to buy the older lady a drink.
A conversation between Saskatchewan and my fiancée wound up with
Saskatchewan bunching up a napkin and throwing it in her face.
Wrong.
So what do we do at this point? Ghandi might have gotten up off the bar stool
and started punching, but I didn't.
Maybe that makes me even more Ghandi-ish. Where's my Nobel Prize? We told Saskatchewan to give us some personal
space and thought that was the end of it.
Saskatchewan noticed two guys sitting at the end of the bar—they looked
about thirty, maybe thirty-five years old and were quietly sipping beers. "What are you guys looking at?"
Saskatchewan yelled. Oh dear.
We pulled the two guys into this by exclaiming that these
were our brothers. They said they were
from Michigan... of course! Our brothers
from Michigan. This was a family
reunion! We tried to make small talk for
a few minutes, but with Saskatchewan hanging out and loudly yelling
"Roughriders!" at random intervals, it was not likely that any of the
world's problems were going to get solved.
Saskatchewan suddenly yelled that it was time to do
shots. He was buying us all shots. Wow, thanks!
At an all-inclusive resort? You
are a hero my friend. He whipped out two
500-peso notes and threw them down at the bartender. We all froze.
I did a double-take and the Michigan guy who was closest to me said
"nope," meaning, don't say a word.
Things were getting good now.
Normally people tip anywhere from 10 to 20 pesos for the whole
evening. He had just dropped about $75
US on the table.
The bartender scooped it up like Penn Jillette pocketing my
watch on a street corner. In one fluid
motion, he set up four shots on the bar—these had some sort of nasty tequila
stuck in a shot glass, upside down, inside of a glass of dark brown beer. Gun to my head, I would rather have drank my
own pee at this point than whatever was in that glass.
A long, drawn-out discussion ensued about who was going to
drink what. Finally, we were all able to
convince Saskatchewan that he had paid for the shots, and we didn't want to rob
him of the chance to prove that he was "the man". He grabbed one and downed it within ten
seconds.
Wrong.
He grabbed another one and it took him about twenty
seconds. I figured that would be the end
of it—his heart would stop and he would be carried away by the grounds crew. However, he kept going. He downed the third. He then, unbelievably, he chugged the fourth
shot with the beer. I couldn't believe
what I was seeing.
Saskatchewan went to put the last glass back on the bar, and
he slipped on an invisible banana peel and disappeared. We heard a "sack of potatoes" thunk
on the marble floor and figured that was it—time for the grounds keeping crew
to finally dig a hole and bury this guy out in the desert. It's was nature's way. No one moved—we just enjoyed the silence for
a couple of seconds. I heard Howard
Cosell's voice in my head yelling "Saskatchewan is down! Saskatchewan is down!" It had been a great run, champ.
Two arms suddenly punched the air above the bar and
Saskatchewan leapt up from the cold, marble floor with such ferocity that it rivalled
a horror movie. Jason with the hockey
mask is dead? No. No, Jason cannot die. Jason is from Saskatchewan.
We started applauding (why, exactly, we are still unsure)
and suddenly Saskatchewan was taking bows and waving at the crowd. He turned to an old man who was sitting in
the corner. The old man had a white
beard and a smart checkered shirt—he reminded me of what Ernest Hemingway
looked like if Hemingway wanted to hang out with an idiot for the evening.
Hemingway's eyes went big when he discovered that
Saskatchewan was slowly walking in his direction. At this point, the eight drinks in two
minutes was starting to kick in. Saskatchewan's
eyes were huge and black, like a cat who spotted a squirrel through the
window. Was Saskatchewan going to play
with Hemingway like a mouse? Was he
going to just vomit on Hemingway?
"Back! BACK!" Was all that Hemingway could muster, holding
out his hand like a pitch forked villager against Frankenstein's monster.
This happened with a few other patrons at the bar—basically
Saskatchewan Frankenstein would approach them, arms outstretched, eyes wide
open with the thousand-yard stare—and people would recoil in horror and either
politely or firmly yell at him to "get away, get away!"
What happened next is still fuzzy—not so much the details,
but why they occurred. At some point
during this whole "drunk zombie" march, Saskatchewan decided that the
best thing to do would be to just take off his pants. So he stumbled to the middle of the bar area,
and with about 80 onlookers he proceeded to undo his belt and shimmy his pants
down around his ankles. I think that
during the whole zombie marching phase, people were beginning to get bored,
because I pointed and shouted "look!" and people seemed genuinely surprised
to be looking at white underwear.
I think we all know where this is going now.
The underwear came down.
Showing the dexterity of a hypothermic stripper, he
awkwardly pulled down his underwear, exposing the hairiest bum I have ever
seen. And I've seen Star Wars. This was like Chewbacca before going to the
barber. I once saw a sign next to a
beauty salon that said "Bikini Wax... $40 and up". I think this guy would have qualified for the
"and up". It was both hideous
and glorious—one person's bold stance against the establishment, a rallying cry
for those of us who have, at one time or another, said "I simply want to
be naked, and you eighty or ninety strangers are just going to have to deal
with it". I was impressed.
I wish with all my heart that this was the end. I really do. But there is a little "DVD extra"
that occurred: before security showed up, Saskatchewan, with his pants off and
his underwear firmly entrenched between his legs, began shuffling to the bar in
an effort to climb up onto the flat surface.
You know... where the bartender prepares drinks? Why go to Las Vegas at all? Why spend good money to the "Thunder
From Down Under" when you have Chewy up on the bar, his prairie flapjack
spinning in the cool Mexico night?
He got about three-quarters of the way up the bar—just far
enough up that his hairy bum got dangerously close to a lady's face and about
three people's martinis. Then security
showed up and escorted him out.
After that, the bar kind of just petered out. People still drank their drink, and made
small talk, but it wasn’t the same.
There was something missing.
Something loud and hairy missing.
Quick epilogue: I saw Saskatchewan the next day. The sun was out, it was scorching hot, and he
was in front of the towel shack, drink in hand, casually discussing CFL football
with another dude. They were casually
making their way to the pool. He was
totally fine. He lived. As far as the rest of us: I'm sure that we
will all be fine as well—they have books and websites about post-traumatic
stress disorder so we’ll all figure it out.
