The road to the beach in Salina Cruz and you know who.
This was prophetic, the rescue of the book, as the next day I began the ‘rescue’ of Sanita from her ‘Hell’. But an even stranger portent followed in the dream I had that night. This is my journal entry the next morning:
“I had an extremely strange, vivid time of it in this dingy, hot, noisy-fanned hotel room, often broken sleep before dawn. First, I awoke throwing my hand on my chest thinking I was brushing off some huge, black insect on me. But I doubted it then, a little shook, peering around in the gloom a few moments then back to sleep. I should note that the evening before I enjoyed a large, European-style dinner with copious servings of wine, the first in the last five days and then a cappuccino to top it off, then here, directly to sleep, still ‘vinolentus.' (dull with wine).
“Anyways, sleeping now more fitfully and with the dread of exotic insects approaching I had a brief, half-awake nightmare of some Mexican witch lurking in the bathroom, 10 feet away, out of view, behind a half open door.
“This perturbed me still more to the point of sitting up and glancing several times across the dim lit room in that direction. Now, with my thoughts even more uncomfortably troubled, I settled to sleep again, thinking up arguments against the possibility of witchery. But just as I dozed off, I immediately felt pounced upon by the whole tribe of supernatural forces, beings electrically charged and pulling me into their own domain. I woke up in shock, sweating and tingling in every limb, as if electrically charged. Then I quickly fell asleep again and proceeded to have, for its vividness, one of the strangest dreams I ever had.
“First, my imagination conjured up a long story of an Italian singer being feted at a high point in his career, an opera singer in high society, falling in love with a young woman at a party, brightly scenic but telling all this as a middle-aged, dulled man married now to a drab housewife, a different woman by far, telling the story to his young daughter.
“Then I became the protagonist of the dream, with a large tinge of his Italian dandy-like character. I was walking across the campus of Berkeley in fine clothes, to a test, darting under the spray of a fountain. Then water was dripping from steps (like at Cocoyoc). I was wet enough to shake off a few rainbows of drops wet through. Other people were about and watching, especially two old ladies, dressed for church. But I didn’t care. Then I rubbed myself up against a wall, thick with purple flowers, to get some of their fragrance on me, still closely watched for my strange behavior. I was on my way to a test and happily confident."
The reason I copy this at such boring length is that it was probably the most vivid dream of my entire life and, strangely enough, the morning before I was to meet Sanita, which changed my entire life.
If there’s any prophecy in dreams, this was the one to study with a magnifying glass. And I did just that, recording it in detail, before I even met her.
One curious note, when I went to the bathroom that morning to take a shower, I did see the largest cockroach ever, crawling across the floor. It was three inches long and one inch wide, so big it didn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) scramble like most do. It was taking its leisurely time. But it didn’t live to get any bigger.
On the morning of Dec. 24th, 1985, Louie and Robin rose late out of bed, and I had time to write all those pages of dreams and notes in the nearby bed. We each took long showers, packed our bags and solemnly walked to the post office in town to deliver Larry’s letter to the right P.O. box, where Joel would find it and read the many-paged apology. But Joel had contacted him already, knew he wasn’t coming, and that we’d be dropping off the letter just around Christmas. This was 10 a.m. We returned to the cheap motel in town to pack the car and get on our way. We had no idea where Joel lived. His brother didn’t either, so we couldn’t go looking for him. Dropping off that letter was the end of our mission there. Salina Cruz was a dirty little town a few miles away from the beach where Joel lived in a house with no address, thus the P.O. box.
We had the car loaded and we’re just about to leave when I told Louie and Robin, sitting on the edge of their bed in the motel room, that I just had to get a coffee before we left, that I’d be back in an instant when I found one. I had a slight hangover, and they, sitting arm in arm, I could see they wanted a few minutes of privacy together.
So, not in any rush, I started wandering the streets looking for any little shop or restaurant that served coffee. But to my surprise I covered block after block and couldn’t find one. I began to have an eerie sensation as I kept walking and oddly finding no venue that sold coffee, (one of the most common staples in Mexican life), that something was amiss. Finally, I did find a shop and returned to the motel with my treasure in hand a half hour later, and who was there, standing in the open doorway of our motel room? Joel.
Now if I didn’t insist on getting that coffee that morning and if I hadn’t taken so long, none of the following would ever had happened and my whole life would have taken a widely different path. We would have left before Joel showed up and found us, and the name ‘Sanita’, a strange name, would never have entered my cranium, unknown to me forever. This is the ‘butterfly effect’ in full regalia.
What happened was that Joel had been walking into town everyday to get the expected letter as he had nothing better to do. He found it that morning a few minutes after we’d dropped it off and checked the small town’s one motel where Louie and Robin were sitting inside the open door. Louie had met him once before in S.F. being best friends with his brother.
Right then and there our plans re-adjusted and we decided to spend a few days with Joel as our guide to the area. Joel was just our age, friendly and extremely glad to have some American company after ten months in this long-forgotten corner of Mexico, though he did mention there was one American girl here, in another motel near the beach, with her Argentinian boyfriend. Other than those two, he told us, you were trying to speak Spanish to a totally different mindset who rarely caught your meaning beyond the simplest civilities. So we were welcome arrivals.
