Dead Guy on the Beach

For the last seven or eight years, I’ve been working as a tour guide and, as you can imagine, I meet a lot of strange people. I also meet a lot of wonderful people who change me forever and make me a better person. But it is a grueling job, and I do look forward to a quiet glass of wine at night. Rarely do I indulge in the hotel bar, because there I am vulnerable to assault of forty-some-odd passengers who may not like their bed, their view, their hamburger, or me. Best to just squirrel away in the room, catching up on work and staying hidden. I’m very glad though that on one particular night, I did venture out into view. I must have looked like Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog, when I did. My mother came to meet me for dinner on a night when my bus was quite nearby the town where she lives. You can’t very well entertain your mother by ordering room service and busting open a bottle of wine using paper cups for glasses and pillows for seatbacks, so we ventured into the bar area. Sure enough, it was a hornet’s nest of my people. I threw myself into our private conversation and hoped that no one would join us—unless it was in passing to say to my mother that I am a living saint or a font of wisdom, or something of that nature. That’s more my mom’s alley than mine. But then I noticed one of the single guys from my bus sitting behind us at the bar. He’d been so sweet and shy all week, it bothered me to see him all alone. And so I broke my own rule and went to fetch him. It turned out to be a piece of very good luck that I did, because he ended up telling some of the funniest stories I’d ever heard in my life. Funny how drinks can lubricate conversation. This cocktail is inspired COMPLETELY by one of the stories he told that night.

Before I relay it, you’ve got to know that he was, is, an extremely shy person, who seemed at first to be painfully quiet and withdrawn. The best part of this story was the desert dry manner in which he told it. You’ll have to try to imagine him in your own way, so here goes…

As a single guy he often vacationed alone, but usually not on the sort of bus tours I do. In fact, the quietish pace I try to maintain, and the historical bend I work into every stop is not the sort of thing he thought he’d like. At all. But he’d just taken another trip—more of an adventure trip—that went so terribly wrong that he was content to be funneled around for a week on my bus.

“Well, what happened on your last tour that was so terrible?” I had to know. Meaning I had to pry. He was obviously averse to telling me his story. In my mind, just taking one of these adventure tours where they’re always leading you, practically to your death, in the middle of nowhere and leaving you for hours to do things like walk and look at nature. That in itself sounded like a legitimate reason to boycott that whole genre of tours. But I could see it was something more than that. It was something more terrible than walking. Half a Heineken later, he spilled it.

“Well, I was traveling with this group in Mexico,” he frowned, “and we had the morning off. So I wandered away up the beach. I was walking for over an hour…”

I had to stop him here, “You were walking for over an hour? And you were on vacation?”

He admitted he had been crazy enough to do such a thing. He wandered so far that he got to a place where the shoreline veered off onto what looked like the kind if island Christopher Crusoe would have loved. He crossed over on the little ribbon of sand and started a circuit of this island. He was, again, walking for an eternity, and starting to have the pioneering feeling that no one but him had ever been there—at least not for a very long time. Just when he was enjoying the rapture of that though, he saw a man up ahead, sitting against a flatiron rock. He hurried toward the man, feeling a wave of camaraderie, but the man didn’t seem to notice him. The closer he got, the stranger it got; the man really didn’t notice him. Finally, when he was right beside the man, he saw quite clearly that he was dead. He throat was cut and the wound was still fresh.

“The guy’s eyes were black!” he told me several times. “Really black. Not just the pupil, but the whole eyeball – black”. It was something I didn’t need to know and something that kept me awake through the upcoming nights.

Tripping over his own feet he ran, filled with images of the (had to be) nearby murder (or murderers plural) watching him. He ran until he thought he’d die of exhaustion, and finally crossed back over to the main beach. Dragging himself now, but no less filled with panic and horror, he spotted a tiki hut, a cabana-type thing on the beach. There was a long line of people waiting to order cocktails. You’d have to know my friend who told me this story to know how out of character it was for him to elbow his way through the crowd and belly up to the bar.

“There’s a dead man on the beach!” he shouted, winded, but dutiful.

“You wait for it’s your turn!” The bartender said in broken English.

“But there’s a dead man on the beach!” He hollered.

The thing escalated until it seemed the bartender might make him into a dead man. So he shut his mouth and waited his turn. Once the daiquiris and the marguerites and the white Russians were handed over to girls in bikinis, the bartender leaned over. “What can I make you?”

“There’s a dead man on the beach!” he shouted again.

“I don’t know that one. What’s in it?” the bartender asked.

Dead Guy on the  Beach
2 ounces white rum
1 ounce extra dry vermouth
Shake with ice
Two black olives for garnish (the eyeballs)
A dash of brine from the olive jar