Yelapa

I met Mel my first night in Yelapa. Gringos living I’n Mexico in those days didn’t have to be crazy, but in most cases, it helped.

All the other cases are either dead or on the lam. With his boyish charms and his quick smile, Mel looked normal to the Mexicans and the expatriates living peacefully among the Macaws, Jaguars, Vampire Bats and Scorpions in this small fishing village hidden among the banana groves and coco nut trees somewhere along the coast of Jalisco in 72.

He was sitting at a table in a restaurant called The Yacht Club playing poker with another American and a couple of Canadians. They accepted my offer to join them. Each bet involved an international money exchange between greenbacks, pesos, and beaver bucks.

After winning about five hundred pesos from my new friends, the game closed down and Mel invited me up to his house for a little one on one poker. Mel was an honest card player. After losing another five hundred pesos more of his own money, into those wee hours of the morning, he sure wasn’t cheating.

Mel informed me about the Yelapa tradition where the winner buys the loser breakfast.

Since I was buying with a huge hunk of his money, I was happy to pick up the tab of my new friend and gambling buddy. I spent the rest of my winnings on a kilo of pot. I started selling pot and having poker games at my house three nights a week.

After a month, I moved into a much larger and nicer house overlooking the bay. Mel accepted my invitation to share the rent. Mel was a poet and an artist living quietly in Mexico. He had a way with the ladies.
“You must stop by for tea,” Mel would extend this invitation to some of the better looking ladies living alone here and most responded. “I don’t know what came over me,” they would explain later. I was walking by the path to your house and I got this irresistible urge to stop in for tea. I only knew Mel of a few months that winter before I headed north again.

The guy I knew was in his prime, easy to laugh, comfortable with himself and the world. Many years later, Mel would die penniless and alone on the beach.

That Mel was someone I never knew, desperate and angry, mad at anyone and everyone, a scowl on his much older and thinner face and his fist always wrapped around the handle of his ever present machete.

The ladies no longer stopped by for tea and one by one, his friends began to drift away.

He was kicked out of his house after another fight with Christina, his last girlfriend. The fight ended with Mel vainly chasing her through the pre-dawn jungle, screaming curses as he waved his machete at the terrified girl, both of them were naked.

The next morning, his landlord walked in and pointed a pistol at a half awake Mel. “You have one hour to get your things and get out of this house.

I will tolerate the drinking, the drugs, the fighting into the night, but I will not tolerate nudity! “Mel gathered what few belongings he owned and left. His checks from the states stopped coming and soon he was homeless and broke.

Christine found a new and much saner boyfriend. Mel was a hemophiliac. His main source of income was a small disability check he got from the states. I have a theory that Mel contracted aids from a blood transfusion.

This would help to explain the homeless and hostile man that was dying on the beach in Yelapa.

Angry from a death sentence he didn’t deserve, sick from a relentless disease that was ravaging his emaciated body, Mel gave up.

He stopped eating. Soon he was dead. Someone called his sister in Ohio. She thanked them for the call. When they inquired about where to send the body, she replied that wasn’t her problem and hung up.

The gringos in Yelapa passed the hat around and sent someone to Puerto Vallarta to buy a coffin.

Since there wasn’t much money raised, they had to settle for the cheapest box in the funeral home.

By the time they got back to Yelapa, Mel was getting pretty ripe. He was too long to fit into the the box properly and his toes stuck out.

On the way up the hill to the cemetery the bottom of the cheap box broke open, Mel fell out and began rolling back down the hill. Finally the repaired coffin and Mel made it to the cemetery.

The burial party had only managed to dig a hole about four feet eel before the hit hard rock. “ That’s deep enough!” someone declared.

Mel had a leather bound journal he had kept for years. Rumor had it that he had written down all the dirt on the Gringo families who had lived in Yelapa the longest.

They wrapped Mel’s arms over whatever was written and buried him with it. When they began lowering Mel into his final resting place, a waterspout suddenly appeared on the bay.

There are Mexicans and some Gringos who swear today they believe Mel was a witch.

Thirty years later, he still doesn’t have a headstone, but the regulars - those Gringos who have made this small fishing village their home- still tell their favorite stories of my friend and gambling buddy.

Robert McLane

In 2007, my book, STOP WAR AMERICA, won Honorable Mention at the New York Book Festival