Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter (14 page)

As for me, until someone produces a four-foot feather or a bird dropping on my car that’s the size of my car, I’m staying on the sidelines. Despite passionate testimony to the contrary and having seen a few anomalies myself, I consider the existence of large flying creatures the least probable of all cryptids.

Take that, Big Bird.

11: Worst. Vacation. Ever.

Cabo San Lucas, 2007

It began, like most disastrous enterprises, innocently enough. My best friend Jon and I decided to take a road trip. After spending nearly every waking moment of our summers together as children, our careers had carried us to opposite coasts. Jon, a medical student on his way to becoming a doctor, was living in New York, and I, a burgeoning monster hunter, was in Los Angeles. Jon had a week off, and I was looking for a little R&R after a season of
Destination Truth
.

I can’t remember which of us decided on Mexico, and for the sake of our friendship, it’s probably better that way. What I do remember is that we planned for Jon to fly to Los Angeles and that we’d drive to Cabo San Lucas at the terminal end of the Baja California Peninsula. What followed remains the absolute worst trip in a storied career as a professional traveler. But, like I said, it began innocently enough. . . .

Jon flies to LA, and we spend the night at my loft in Hollywood before setting off the next morning. Though we have a full night at our disposal, the extent of our vacation planning consists of a Google search that reveals the distance from my front door to Cabo San Lucas as roughly 1,200 miles. No problem, we think. Should be able to knock that out in a long day.

Day one. We start bright and early, and the drive to the border proves easy enough. The freeway winds down the coast and past the sunny skyline of San Diego. Within three hours we’re nearing Mexico. It’s around this time that I make the only sensible decision of the entire trip. After hearing horror stories of carjackings, I decide to park on the California side of the border and rent a car on the other side. I call Hertz on my cell phone and get a quote for a rental at the Tijuana airport. The rate is reasonable enough: thirty dollars a day. Mind you, I don’t actually book the car. I just check the price.

After parking in an anonymous lot amidst a million other vehicles, we sling backpacks over our shoulders and walk through customs, over the footbridge, and into Mexico. As two gringos crossing the border, we must look appetizing to the horde of loitering locals, who perk up at our approach.

“Tequila?”

“Señoritas?”

“Drogas?”

We wave off their efforts at temptation and head straight for a taxi driver leaning against the hood of his car. “Tijuana airport,
por favor
,” I say.

“
Sí, señor.
Forty dollars,” he says, opening the door.

“What? The airport is ten minutes from here,” I protest.

“Forty dollars, señor.”

It takes half an hour of haggling in the morning heat with a dozen different drivers before we get someone to take us to the airport for the lower but still outrageous price of twenty dollars. It’s a rocky start.

Inside the terminal, I speed-walk to the Hertz counter, checking my watch and shaking my head. It’s already past one in the afternoon, and we’re not even out of Tijuana. “Welcome to Hertz, señor. How can I help you?” a fat little man with a gigantic mustache and drooping eyes, inquires.

“
Hola. Necesito
. . . um . . . rent . . .
un auto para seis dias
.”

“Okay. Car for six days.
Sí.
Six hundred dollars,” he says.

“What?!” I balk.

Jon turns on his heels, walks away, and sits on a bench behind me. We’re clearly going to be here for a while.

“I called the 800 number for Hertz, and I was quoted thirty dollars a day.”

He is expressionless. “Is a different number, señor.”

“What the hell does that mean? It’s the same company.”

“Is a different number, señor. Price is six hundred dollars.”

“Fine,” I exclaim, jamming my credit card and license back into my wallet. “Forget it. I’ll rent from another company.”

I walk five feet to my right to the Avis car rental counter. The mustached man slides over. “Welcome to Avis, señor. How can I help you?”

I glare at him. I walk on to the Budget counter, and he follows me, step for step. We stop and face each other. “Okay. Look,” I say, defeated. “I need a car. I can’t pay a hundred dollars a day. You must have something I can rent. A compact?”

He looks at me from under his eyelids and ponders for a moment. Finally he says there’s one car available for $400. It’s a terrible rip-off, but my cell phone isn’t working; I can’t get a better quote. Mostly, I really just want to get the hell out of this awful border town. “Fine. Great,” I agree.

We’re led outside, and another employee brings our car around. Jon and I both pull off our sunglasses to take it in, mouths agape. A VW Beetle (original) with a cheap matte-white paint job. Inside, the car has been burned out and rebuilt. Other than the two aftermarket front seats, there isn’t a stitch of upholstery anywhere in the vehicle. Just exposed, rusting metal panels. It’s like an ad for tetanus shots. Manual transmission, of course, and no air-conditioning. Intestinal wires spill out of a cavity in the dash where a radio once lived. “It’s perfect,” Jon says, grinning. And, in a way, it
is
perfect. Other than the rental price, this does seem like an appropriately ridiculous car for such an impromptu south-of-the-border adventure.

Jon jumps in the driver’s side; I throw my backpack on what’s left of the backseat and slip my sandals off. We’re in high spirits as we sputter out of the parking lot, headed to the only slightly less shitty town of Rosarito. It’s nearly three in the afternoon.

An hour and a half later, we’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic no more than a mile from the airport. We’ve made little progress, thanks to a Tijuana road construction project that’s about as organized as a street riot. Without a radio, we’re sitting in silence, Jon with his head against the steering wheel, me with my bare feet hanging out the window. By the time the congestion finally lets up, we’re both tired and irritable.

The sun sets somewhere just past Rosarito, and we’re both feeling famished. We see a few fires burning on the side of the road, illuminating a makeshift taco stand. We pull over and order up a few plates of grub. It tastes delicious, although it’s hard to enjoy on account of the five shady Mexican guys giving us the stink eye from the next table. They’re dressed like the gang from
Grease
, and even though my Spanish is elementary, I know enough to understand that they’re talking about mugging us. Mexican Danny Zuko smiles at me, and I muster a smile back. We quietly retreat to the car, taking our tacos to go.

The next town looks like it’s had a rough couple of centuries, and we check directly into the first motel we see. The room smells like mold, and the only lamp in the room isn’t working; at least I can park around back in case the Guacamole Gang from the taco stand drives this way.

In bed, I look over the map by flashlight, working things out in my head. Baja California tears away from the west coast of Mexico like a thousand-mile-long splinter. But the map doesn’t tell the whole story. The orderly looking pink line that flows down the paper is, in reality, a writhing two-lane road, unnervingly narrow and badly damaged. It’s also clogged with everything from industrial trucks to donkey carts. Our average speed has been maybe forty miles per hour so far. Factoring in these conditions, which I can only assume will get progressively worse, I realize our trip is going to take significantly longer than we anticipated. We’re not even a quarter of the way to Cabo.

“Jon, I’m starting to think this might not be the best idea.”

“Are you saying you want to quit?” he taunts back from the darkness.

It’s exactly what I want to do. “No. I guess not,” I say. I click off the flashlight and close my eyes. I have a bad feeling about our predicament and toss and turn all night in the sticky heat.

Day two. Things look better in the morning. Not the town, mind you, but our general confidence. I get behind the wheel cheerily and we set off, bolstered by the promise of a new day.

This lasts about an hour.

By ten a.m. we’re about a hundred miles south of the city of Ensenada, and the road, which hugged the Pacific Ocean all morning, has now turned sharply inland, where it will trap us for the remainder of the journey. We are now hemmed in by desert. As the ocean breeze slips away, it is replaced by torturously hot air. Vast, featureless hills of scalding dirt seem to redirect the sun’s heat back into our tiny car like a magnifying glass. The temperature climbs to well over a hundred degrees. By noon I’ve unbuttoned my shirt and am coated with a sheen of sweat; my lips are starting to crack.

The road is awful. Huge swaths of it are unpaved, and our car kicks up torrents of dust as we swerve around potentially fatal potholes and apparently suicidal Mexican children. Our progress is further hampered by an hour-long stop at a gas station, waiting for the attendant to show up. I’ve had a Dwight Yoakam song stuck in my head all day and hum softly as we sit on the hood of the car, baking in the sun.
I’m a thousand miles from nowhere / Time don’t matter to me . . .

We finally arrive at the border between north and south Baja, where a shotgun-wielding guard at a checkpoint instructs us to shut off the engine. He motions to roll up the windows. I look over as a man in a full hazmat suit wearing an aluminum pesticide backpack from 1938 approaches the vehicle. He looks like the Rocketeer. Jon and I quickly crank up the windows as he starts pumping a lever and spraying the entire car down with a noxious chemical that’s either designed to kill insects, Americans, or both. We cough and futilely wave at the air. The guard motions us on. The liquid cooks on the hood of the Beetle, creating a permanent stink inside the car.

Jon takes over driving in the afternoon. Once the sun sets, it becomes intensely dark. There are no arc lights over the road and fewer and fewer towns along the way. My head is resting against the passenger window, and I’m just starting to nod off when I hear Jon whisper, “Shit.”

I look up to see red and blue lights reflecting off the dashboard. We’re being pulled over. “Stay calm,” I say. “Just pull over.”

I watch as two police officers armed with machine guns exit the SUV behind us and saunter up to the driver’s-side window.
“Buenos noches, señores,”
one of them says. “You make illegal turn.”

“We haven’t made a turn all night,” Jon objects.

It’s a shakedown. Plain and simple.

“Step out of the car, señores.”

We’re asked to stand next to the vehicle, and I gaze out at the infinitely gloomy desert with my arms crossed, trying to guess exactly where we’re going to be dismembered and buried.

“You want to go to prison?” the cop asks me.

“No, Officer,” I say. “I want to go to Cabo.”

“You make illegal turn,” he says again.

“We certainly didn’t mean to. We don’t have much money on us, either,” I add meekly. “I’m sorry.”

He walks away and talks with his partner.

“What are they saying?” Jon asks.

“Something about money. I think they believe us.”

We stand outside for more than half an hour. Eventually the cops realize that we are what we appear to be: two morons with very little cash. They return to their car and simply drive off, leaving us standing alone on the side of the road.

“Let’s just find somewhere to sleep,” Jon says.

In the next town we come to, houses are in various states of disintegration, and the few roadside restaurants have all been boarded up. There’s one hotel sign, and we follow it down a dingy side road. The hotel turns out to be a motel—or at least most of a motel. We drive into the dirt courtyard of a two-floor U-shaped building. The entire right side of the complex has collapsed, taking with it a third of the rooms. Chickens and a goat dawdle out of the way as we pull in and shut off the motor. I get out of the car and promptly set my shoe down into at least two inches of sloppy, wet mud and animal feces. “Son of a bitch,” I whisper.

We step up onto the cement porch, wipe our shoes, and follow the fluorescent light of the manager’s office to the far end of the building. The door is locked, and I rap on the frame a few times while Jon cups his hands against the glass. Finally, a half-stoned guy whose face is mostly obscured by a scorpion tattoo shuffles in from an adjoining room. He unbolts the door without opening it and just walks over to the desk. We ask for his best room and exchange five dollars for a key.

We head back past about five identical doors to a room situated about twenty feet away from our car. We tiptoe down into the mud and wearily retrieve our bags from the backseat. The only modern convenience on the Beetle is an aftermarket alarm, which I engage before locking the car.

I have to throw my shoulder into our room’s metal storm door to get it open. It bursts into what smells like a condemned slaughterhouse, and a few flies desperately escape to freedom. In place of beds are two poured concrete slabs, each with a quarter-inch mattress on top. There are no sheets in sight, just a few ratty pillows, and one pathetic window looks out through metal bars onto a brick wall. I hear a creak and look up at the slowly turning blades of a slumped ceiling fan. Exposed wiring is stapled loosely along the ceiling and leads to a switch by the door.

We throw our bags down. I walk into the bathroom, which seems to be the source of the terrible smell. The mirror above the vanity is smashed into a spiderweb pattern and reflects my face a thousand times. The faucet coughs out chalky water that dumps down through an open hole in the sink and spills onto my feet. The stink of sewage wafts up from the toilet, which is little more than a hole in the corner.