Next morning Lucy awoke from her usual restless sleep just before sunrise to the rhythmic rising and falling roar of big waves breaking in a steady, swell-driven surge. She knew from the sound that it would be big out there, possibly bigger even than the day before. Like every ocean-lover Lucy got an elemental charge from the sight and sound of big surf, but before she would permit herself the thrill of getting out of bed to throw open her curtains for a look at the wave-crazed bay, she forced herself to lie still and recall as distinctly as she could, through the unpleasantness of a minor tequila hangover, the events of last night. For purposes of X Dames plotting, and also to soothe her soul. It had been a long, strange evening.
After settling into their suite, the three women had chilled out for a short break, then dressed for dinner tres casual, tres chic, short summer dresses and sandals all, and headed out. It took about half an hour to walk from their hotel to La Casa de la Luna Grande, or the House of the Big Fat Moon, as they translated it: first a stroll a few hundred yards down a dirt road that paralleled the curve of Sayulita’s rocky south end beach, then a jog to the right to the town square, where hippie vagabonds sold jeweled tchatchkes, and Mexican kids played soccer between the palm trees while their parents sold tacos, flan, cake, DVDs, toilet brushes, plastic action heroes, and other useful stuff from ramshackle little stands around the plaza’s edges. Clusters of half-drunk, sun-roasted gringos noisily roamed in search of the perfect fish taco, while their downscale surfer and hippie brethren loitered on low walls and benches in the plaza, guzzling Pacifico beer from fat liter bottles or margaritas from plastic cups. Music blared out of radios, bars, cars, and restaurants. Everybody looked slightly buzzed and vacantly pleased with themselves. What could be better than a beach vacation in a foreign town where you could stumble down the street somewhat wasted, with little chance of getting insulted, robbed, arrested, run over, or blown to pieces?
From this festive arena the three women crossed the bridge, and made their way to the beach road. After passing a large soccer pitch and a couple of shabby old two-story hotels, derelict construction sites, and the fenced and gated grounds of the town school, they entered the posh precincts of the North End, where the houses on the beach to the left, and on the hills rising up to the right, took on a more grandiose, even pompous, bearing, and enormous, dusty SUVs rumbled past, bearing gringos downtown. This was monied territory, on both sides of the road. One of the last houses on the beach was La Casa de la Luna Grande. Bobby Schamberg had rented it for two weeks for ten grand. Staying with him in the main house were Judy and Henrietta, with Leslie Williams and her pair of executive producer boys ensconced in the guesthouse by the pool. Excepting the Mexicans surfer girls and Sandra Darwin, who lived in town, everybody else involved with the show had holed up at the Villa Roma. Ruben Dario, who summered in a beachfront manse in Santa Barbara, had his own hacienda, said to be the biggest house in town, on the hill overlooking the north end and the bay.
They made their entrance. The house included a huge verandah overlooking the north end beach, where heavy shorebreak surf pounded on the rocks scarcely fifty feet from where the gang sat down to dinner after killing two bottles of tequila in half a cocktail hour. While the waves rattled the crockery they ate gourmet mex surrounded by waiters, fast-moving cameramen, lighting and sound guys, make-up artists, and assorted stylists, all directed by Leslie Williams’ assistant director, a Mexican-American guy called Hector Valdez. Leslie was nowhere to be seen, having retired early to her guesthouse with her pair of boy EPs in tow and “a horny gleam in her eye,” as Bobby smirkingly put it. Turned out Leslie was a rapacious boy-chaser but that was definitely not part of the X Dames narrative. The crew busily shot videotape from every possible direction, planning to plug footage from this intro dinner into the X Dames Episode One.
Along with the surfer girls Lucy had already met, and Bobby and his posse, there were a couple of local notables on hand: Ruben Dario, of course, for he was a major player in this X Dames game. Also present was Wally Townsend, Dario’s American partner in the realty end of his business interests. Between them they had sold sixteen Sayulita houses over the past winter, and currently had eleven more in escrow. Although they weren’t demonstrably affectionate, judging by what Lucy saw in the course of the well-documented evening, Ruben Dario and the Amazon surf-queen Sandra Darwin possibly had a thing going on.
The other guest was a man called Pantera Macho, short version El Pantero, the panther, a dark-skinned, muscular, and gorgeous Mestizo from Puerto Escondido, famed for surfing Puerto’s heavy, scary tubes with the cunning grace of a large, predatory cat. Hence the name. With his luminous black eyes and his ripped, cat-like body, topped by a ridiculously sexy shock of dyed blonde hair, the panther was hot, and he knew it.
Through the evening, several semi-planned spats erupted among the surfchicks—these babes were quickly learning how to make reality more real for the cameras, and so, urged on by Terry and Hector both, Moki Sue merrily belittled the surfing skills of her competitors, especially Marcia and Henrietta, who retaliated in kind.
Trapped between Dario and Townsend, Lucy missed out on the girly melodrama and instead made useful small talk with the realtors. Dario, who was half-Mexican and half-Californian and possessed dual citizenship, seemingly had married into one of Sayulita’s wealthy families year back. He was rich, arrogant and all-knowing, while Townsend, American salesman type to the rotten core, kissed Dario’s ass. From the two of them Lucy learned how the Ejido system worked. Before the law allowing gringos to buy houses via bank trusts had passed, the only way for gringos to own property in Mexico was with a Mexican partner, called a prestanombre, whose name would go on the deed along with the gringo name. These paper partnerships of convenience, formed under edicts proclaimed by each municipal council, or Ejido, were accompanied by powers of attorney which prevented the Mexican prestanombres from doing anything with the houses, such as buying, selling, renting, occupying or otherwise using them to their own advantage; and if properly written, the powers of attorney allowed the American partners to do what they wanted without the Mexican partner’s permission. Dario served as prestanombre for over fifty houses in Sayulita, he claimed.
With roots in both Sayulita and Southern California, Dario had been a serious surfer a few years back. Since he was also a big shot around town, he had been anointed an X Dames surfing contest judge. The surf champion El Pantero was the second judge, and Judy Leggett, former American womens’ champion, served as the third.
Judy maintained a low profile through the evening, and Lucy wondered what it was—other than Judy’s weird replay of the knife-to-the-nostril scene from Chinatown–that had triggered her suspicions in the first place. Here in Sayulita, off her own turf, Judy seemed a non-player. Terry said she thought the woman was stoned on codeine or barbiturates, easy to come by from a Mexican pharmacy, but who knew?
In any case the show’s mix seemingly was rich with potential strife and conflict. Good material.
As was her habit at large, loud dinners, when not making small talk Lucy watched. And so she watched—Marcia. After she’d downed several shots of tequila and at least five beers, Marcia ended up coming on hot, cheap and heavy to Ruben Dario. Lucy knew why: he’d been sneaking smoldering Latin lover-man glances at Marcia every chance he got. And she fell for it, for at heart, Lucy was certain, Marcia remained an innocent in spite of her surf skills, her Goth hair and surf-goth style, and her possibly evil drug habits. In his late thirties, Dario was handsome, wealthy, once a renowned surfer, now a man of the world. All in all, a major temptation for a girl like Marcia.
The two other serious surfer girls, from San Diego, were due in at midnight. Bobby had trolled the beaches of Sayulita that very day, X Dames checkbook in hand, and found four other hot babes and signed them up to fill in the competitive ranks. However, the two Canadian sisters, the Japanese exchange student, and the Colombian hippie girl were not actually surfing or even paddling out, due to the unusually large waves. Instead they would stand on the beach in their itsy bitsys—they all had great bods, of course, and Bobby would provide the bikini if anyone didn’t have the right one—with surfboards at hand, gazing out wistfully and shaking their heads. Surf’s too much for us. We’ll have to leave it to the pros. This would enhance the already awesome reps of those dames brave enough to paddle out in this once-in-a-decade monster swell. It was shaping up to be a wild, wild scene. Made for TV.
And then as the night wound down, somewhere in the mists of tequila-land El Pantero had made a move on her, Lucy Ripken. After staring at her intermittently with his bad kitty black eyes at the table, and flashing his lovely white-fanged smile her way to further signal his interest, he caught her in an unguarded moment as she emerged from a 600-square foot bathroom designed to mimic a jungle grotto, and there among the lilies and orchids and rustling green leaves he almost convinced her that an amorous tumble in her posh, king-sized hotel bed would be worth the next day’s regrets; but no, at the last possible instant, before her inhibitions simply melted away in the heated urgency of the panther’s desire, she slipped away, back to the table, strewn with tequila bottles, and sat her ass down to draw a deep breath and consider her options; and then a skewed glance across that same table at Teresa, stone cold sober, watching her with concerned eyes, had shut down her libido. And so instead of humping the panther, soon thereafter she slipped out the door with Teresa, and the two of them trudged home side by side, holding hands on a long, pleasantly sobering mile’s walk down the sands of Sayulita’s beach, from the north end to the south, mulling their own less-endangered fates in the shadow of the fate of young Marcia, wasted on tequila and beer. They had left her to fend for herself. Back at the Villa Roma they’d sat up for half an hour taking notes on the evening’s doings, plotting, plotting–and then crashed in their separate bedrooms. Marcia hadn’t shown to claim the third bedroom by the time they went to sleep.
And now another day. Lucy got up and pulled the curtains and the sliding glass doors open, then jumped back into bed, drew the sheet up over her naked self, and gazed out, listening to the loud but strangely soothing roar of the sea. Across the dirt road, through the picture-framing trunks of coconut palms, in the misty morning light, on a glass smooth surface the big waves broke, one after another, six to ten foot faces, clean lines in the sunrise light, surfing perfection on an epic day at Sayulita Beach. At this sleepy hour she could see just three early-bird wave hounds out, scoring right-breaking waves one after another. She watched one drop into an eight-footer, only to blow his bottom turn, lulled by a slow-peeling wave-lip that suddenly collapsed, sending him into a crash and burn under several tons of furious whitewater.
Big surf, half a dozen hot wave-riding girls, and after last night, enough plot potential to drive the X Dames for a season, if need be. Like Leslie had said, just put them all in a room, or in this case an ocean, and let them be themselves. It seemed to Lucy that with so much going on both in front of and behind the cameras, the real challenge for Teresa and her would be writing and editing out the shenanigans of those not actually on the show. Or working them in as the scenario required.
She put on a plush terrycloth robe she found hanging on the bathroom door, then banged on the door to the next bedroom. “Yo, Ter, time to shake it. Showtime, hon.” She heard a murmur, and went in. Zonked out flat on her back in the middle of her kingsizer, Terry was covered by her sheet from head to toe, like a corpse. “Hey, get your booty moving, girl,” Lucy said. “The surf is way up and we have a TV show to invent.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Terry said, pulling the sheet down and sitting up in bed in her sleeping t-shirt. “You know me, Luce. Morning’s not my best time.”
“Did little Miss Marcia make it home?” Lucy said, nodding at the door to the next bedroom.
Teresa shrugged. “I don’t know. I took half an Ambien to make sure I slept.”
“You got any extra? I hear that stuff works and doesn’t mess you up. A good night’s sleep would be a godsend. Jesus, I hope Marcia didn’t chase that Dario home,” Lucy said. “He was throwing bedroom eyes at her all night, right in front of his girlfriend—or I guess the appropriate word would be mistress.”
“I noticed. So did she. Sandra I mean.”
“So did everybody. It’ll be on prime time. Our little Marcia’s none too subtle. Which makes her perfect for reality TV, doesn’t it?”
“Yep. Hey, where’s coffee? I need coffee. The Ambien may not fuck you up but it definitely clogs your head.”
“Everybody’s coming here for breakfast on the verandah in…” Lucy looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes. Then its down to the beach to get the first heat started. They’re thinking about getting the whole contest done today, while the waves are smoking.” Lucy felt totally wired. This was reality TV. With big waves and red-hot girls to ride them, it was sure to be really good fun.
