For more about Gay Haubner’s life in the North Country, read the other chapters in her serialized memoir.
Within a week James had shanghaied me out of the Canadian girls’ place and into his. I had left more roommates in the lurch, but at least I had already given them 30 dollars, my share of the month’s rent.
Was I in love with James? No, but I was enthralled. James scooped me up at a time when I was the most malleable, when I had wandered into this glittering new world and desperately needed a guide. I fell under James’ spell, bedeviled by his advanced age, his sophistication, his dark eyes, and his bottomless pockets, seduced by the red Jeep and James’ fancy beachfront condo, which he rented for the whole season.
His eighth-floor apartment was sleekly modern, simply furnished, and huge. A dark curtained bedroom lurked in the back. In the living room, where we never sat, floor to ceiling windows on three sides looked out over the bay. Across the front of the apartment, facing the sea, stretched a wide, deep balcony with no neighboring buildings to interrupt the view. I loved to sunbathe nude out there, tanning my few remaining white bits. James watched me and I watched the parasailers, who occasionally soared by close enough for a look themselves. The parasail took off and landed right on the beach, towed by a small powerboat whose driver had a Corona in his hand at all times. Once I saw a guy coming in for a landing get slammed against the side of a hotel; more often, the poor tourists would get face planted on the sand and pinwheeled off their feet while the boat sped on, steered by a drunken captain who never looked back.
If I leaned way over the balcony railing, I could see the pool below, anemic blue and always totally empty, even though every lounge chair and umbrella table was occupied from morning till sunset. James refused to set foot in this pool. I realized years later during a trip to Florida that the residents in James’ building could have been swapped with those of any condo in Boca Raton. Even in glamorous Acapulco, that pool was where old guys drank and played cards while their wives boasted about the grandkids and complained about the help.
These retiree snowbirds living in his building acted on James like garlic on Dracula; every time we rode the elevator with one of them, James backed himself as far away as possible, doing everything short of throwing up his arms across his face in horror. James had an irrational fear of growing old; he wanted to look young, feel young, and hang out with people half his age. James didn’t have a wife who would call him away from his gin game because she couldn’t remember if little Aaron was eight or nine. He didn’t even play cards—that was for old men!—he preferred backgammon (which I had never seen before). James taught me my first Yiddish word: alte kaker, an old shitter. He did not want to hang around with the alte kakers, and forbade me from ever swimming in that pool. He acted as though old age were a contagious disease he was determined not to catch.
There was one alte kaker in the building who James could not avoid, as they were from the same town (although James always claimed he was from Chicago, he actually lived in Des Plaines), and James had once sold him a Cadillac. One day when I was sunbathing on the balcony, I heard the front door open and close and looked up to see James, accompanied by a pop-eyed Mr. Des Plaines, unfortunately wearing his usual Speedo, which was not quite covered up enough by his sagging gut. I grabbed a towel, James burst out laughing, and Mr. Des Plaines turned and ran out the door without a word.
I glared at James, who didn’t apologize but said, “Ever since I told him that you sit out here naked he’s been begging to come up. I hope he doesn’t have a heart attack. Now they’ll have something to talk about besides those damn grandkids.” I had yet to hear the word trophy used to describe a person, but that was what I was, clearly on display.
My time with James was an indulgent hedonistic dream, days that were not counted out by the teaspoons of Spring Break but seemed to stretch out forever. We spent the mornings water-skiing at the Pie de la Cuesta, a quiet lagoon north of Acapulco, that seemed another country away from throbbing discos and Arabian Nights beach clubs. Hammocks hung between palms, and fishermen grilled their catches over driftwood. There were no pushy beach vendors, no ragged kids selling Chiclets, and only a few tourists and Mexicans enjoying the calm, reportedly shark-free water. James loved giving me instruction in anything, from backgammon to tipping; under his tutelage I went from desperately hanging on to the triangle handle of the taut towrope, steeling myself for a head-first plunge off my skis and into the water, to being able to clumsily drop one ski and slalom, while still clinging to the rope like death. James, of course, was an elegant water-skier; he probably could have smoked a cigarette while effortlessly curving back and forth behind the boat.
In the afternoons we would head to Le Club or the Villa Vera. The Villa Vera, hidden away in the hills, was a once famous spot that had steadily been losing ground to the modern beachfront hotels. But it managed to hold on to its ’50s glamour, with small but luxurious villas and never-ending, high-stakes backgammon games. One of the main appeals of the Villa Vera for James was playing backgammon with two minor celebrities who had set up there for the winter. James preened as he introduced us; he got to show
off both his blonde 20-year-old girlfriend and his famous friends. Don Adams, Agent Smart from Get Smart!, was a complete jerk, always leering at me and anything else in a bikini, always rude to the staff, and always on the prowl for unaccompanied women who might be impressed by his minor stardom. James’ other backgammon opponent was the actor who played Superboy in the TV show The Adventures of Superboy, a claim to fame that he always had to repeat at least twice: “No, I wasn’t Superman…no, not the movie, no not Superman the TV show, it was a different show…” Of course I have forgotten his name. (But I looked it up! He was Johnny Rockwell, who went on to marry the heiress to the Mexico City Coca-Cola franchise.)
The Villa Vera also had a pool with that most brilliant of inventions, the swim up bar. I loved that bar, where I spent many hours with my butt perched on an underwater cement stool drinking bullshots while James took on all comers in backgammon.
A bullshot is vodka and beef consommé. It’s like a bloody Mary minus the tomatoes but with a lot more Worcestershire. I learned to drink bullshots at the Villa Vera because James did not believe in regular meals. He was as obsessed with getting fat as he was of getting old. He put off eating as long as possible, a whole day if he could. He had no problem having drinks from noon on though, without ever showing the least sign of drunkenness. A bullshot was as much a cup of soup as a cocktail, and for James, a couple of bullshots was a meal.
I, on the other hand, was always hungry.
At 20, I did not have enough confidence in myself to tell James I was going to order a club sandwich. I was so aware of the revulsion James felt for fat people that I constantly worried about my own weight. Minnesotans back then always carried a layer of extra fat, in case winter got so bad we had to go into hibernation. James worriedly pulled and prodded at his own taut stomach; if he believed he saw a centimeter of pudge he announced he was fasting that day. I surreptitiously pinched my own belly and compared myself to the endless array of perfect, bikini-clad bodies that constantly surrounded us.
When James, after several viewings of himself in the mirror, front, sides and back, did decide that it was safe for him to eat a meal, we always ate very well.
Sometimes James woke up hungry after a day of fasting, and we went to breakfast at the majestic Sheraton, one of the original Acapulco hotels and the only place where you could buy American papers (papers that had been published the day before). James studied the financial pages, lecturing me on PE ratios, margins, short sales, and many other topics, which unfortunately did not stick in my brain. I was too busy washing down my cheese omelet and bollitos (tiny fresh rolls, brown and toasty on the outside, fluffy and white on the inside, that begged to be smeared with butter and jam) with fresh squeezed orange juice and strong coffee that was constantly refilled by a waiter standing ready with a silver coffee pot and a small pitcher of warmed milk.
If James decided to break his fast at lunchtime, we went down to Paradise, a beachside restaurant, and had whole fried snapper and Coronas while we watched the parade of vendors haranguing the pale or sun burned tourists, tourists who then staggered off the beach over-burdened with silver jewelry, piñatas, marionettes, gaudily embroidered shirts, glittery sombreros, and ridiculously often, an entire onyx chess set.
Fortunately, even if James insisted that we skip breakfast and lunch, there was usually dinner, as like the rest of the beau monde of Acapulco, James had to make regular appearances at Carlos‘N Charlie’s, to see and be seen. Fito and I had perfected our ability to ignore each other, although Jorge smiled and waved as if he had forgiven me for everything; once he plaintively asked me if Mindy was coming back to Acapulco too.
James never took me back to the fancy spot with the towering arches; I guess that was a first date place. Instead we drove up into the hills to a funky little Mexican restaurant that had almost as good of a view, where every meal started with sangritas, a shot of tequila with a chaser of hot sauce cut with tomato and orange juices.
But my favorite place to eat was the bowling alley hidden away on a back street of rundown, downtown Acapulco, where we were the only non-Mexicans devouring blackened spit-roasted chicken and homemade tortillas. I don’t think I had ever before had a chicken that actually tasted like something; this was chicken-y chicken, juicy and smoky and crisp-skinned. We sat at one of the four oilcloth topped tables and tore the chicken apart with our hands, wrapped the meat in tortillas, and laced every other bite with a spoonful of spicy homemade pico de gallo.
Whether we had eaten breakfast, lunch or dinner, or none of the above, our days were well punctuated with cocktails and beers. And every single night you would find us at Armando’s, drinking and dancing and drinking. I don’t know how I wasn’t drunk all the time. James did not seem affected by alcohol. He liked Quaaludes, which he bought legally at a regular old farmacia, thanks to a prescription from his Mexican doctor. James also liked pot and coke but not in Mexico. He had seen a Mexican jail first hand, visiting a friend who had been arrested for marijuana. The Acapulco jail did not provide food for the inmates so James brought him ribs from Carlos‘N Charlie’s. From the way James described the jail, I would have been surprised if his friend had gotten to eat a single rib before being shanked for his meal, by a prisoner or a guard. After that experience James determined to never risk doing anything that had a chance of landing him in the Mexican casa grande. He stuck with vodka and ludes. Despite my fondness for most drugs, I could not see the appeal of Quaaludes nor could I handle them. After a few incidents of me falling asleep with my head on the table at Armando’s, James stopped offering me pills.
I would like to say that James and shared our life stories, but mine was barely 20 years of mostly wholesome living in Minnesota. That took about five minutes to cover. James was 42. He had been coming to Acapulco for years, staying from December till May (he was very vain about his year round tan). He was originally from Winnipeg (finally, we had something in common: we both came from small cold towns) but had moved to Chicago twenty-two years earlier escaping a shotgun wedding and the responsibilities of a family. (Wait, let me do the math.) He took as much pride in staying single as if he had escaped barehanded from a lion’s den.
James did not want to be the father of a 20-year-old girl, he wanted to go to bed with 20-year-olds. He had made such a successful getaway from Winnipeg and marriage that he had never heard from his abandoned daughter or her jilted mother. He had never even met his daughter. You would think that having a deadbeat dad myself that this tidbit would have curdled our relationship, but I was young and callow and about as introspective as a rock. He shrugged off his lost family, so I did too. Marriage, kids—who wanted those when there was disco and drugs, backgammon and beach?
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Comments
Still enjoying this!!
David, those were stinging remarks Gay made about Don Adams—for sure. I don’t know if you know this, but he was on the cover of the June 4, 1966 issue of the Post; up in the corner. Ronald Reagan was on the lower, main part. (In those days both the Post and LOOK magazine looked almost the same, and wasted a lot of space of the entire upper half.)
Anyhow, the picture is a drawing of Don’s face with a real ‘dick nose’. I’m surprised it got past the censors. My mom noticed it at the time and said things like “I think something strange is going on with The Saturday Evening Post” and “Thank God LIFE and LOOK aren’t changing like this!” We had subscriptions to all three.
Gay, if you’re reading this, just know the Post kind of had him pegged as a, you know, several years earlier; although the inside feature was flattering. In this chapter, paragraph 3 is my favorite. I can’t get over that drunken powerboat captain getting away with that kind of recklessness! As the son of an attorney, my mind’s screaming ‘lawsuits’.
Now you’ve ruined “get Smart”……..