The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  The manager coughed up a brittle laugh. "The Cabañas? No, Señor Playboy. The Cozumeleno is very different from the Cabañas."

  "Yeah," I said. "I can see that right off." The Mayan bellboy had already disappeared with my bags.

  "We saved a Junior suite for you," said the manager. "I think you'll be satisfied." His English was very precise, his smile was unnaturally thick. . . and it was clear, from a glance at my high-powered welcoming committee, that I was going to be their guest for at least one night. . . And as soon as they forgot about me, I would flee this huge concrete morgue and sneak off to the comfortable run-down palm-shaded peace of the Cabañas, where I felt more at home.

  On the drive out from the airport, the PR man, who was wearing a blue baseball cap and a stylish blue-and-white T-shirt, both emblazoned with the lightning-flash STRIKER logo, had told me that the owner of this new, huge Cozumeleno hotel was a member of the island's ruling family. "They own about half of it," he said with a grin, "and what they don't own they control absolutely, with their fuel license."

  "Fuel license?"

  "Yeah," said the PR man. "They control every gallon of fuel that's sold here -- from the gasoline we're driving on right now in this jeep to the gas in every stove in all the hotel restaurants and even the goddamn jet fuel at the airport.

  I didn't pay much attention to that talk, at the time. It seemed like the same kind of sleazy, power-worshiping bullshit you'd expect to hear from any PR man, anywhere, on any subject in any situation. . .

  My problem was clear from the start. I had come down to Cozumel -- officially, at least -- to cover not just a fishing tournament but a scene: I'd explained to the editor that big-time sport fishing attracts a certain kind of people and it was the behavior of these people -- not the fishing -- that interested me. On my first visit to Cozumel, I'd discovered the fishing harbor completely by accident one night when Sandy and I were driving around the island more or less naked, finely twisted on MDA, and the only reason we located the yacht basin was that I took a wrong turn around midnight and tried -- without realizing where I was going -- to run a roadblock manned by three Mexican soldiers with submachine guns at the entrance to the island's only airport.

  It was a hard scene to cope with, as I recall, and now that I look back on it, I suspect that moldy white powder we'd eaten was probably some kind of animal tranquilizer instead of true MDA. There is a lot of PCP on the drug market these days; anybody who wants to put a horse into a coma can buy it pretty easily from. . . well. . . why blow that, eh?

  In any case, we were bent -- and after being driven away from the airport by armed guards, I took the next available open road and we would up in the yacht basin, where there was a party going on. I could hear it about a half mile off, so I homed in on the music and drove across the highway and about 200 yards down a steep grassy embankment to get to the dock. Sandy refused to get out of the jeep, saying that these weren't the kind of people she felt ready to mix with, under the circumstances. . . so I left her huddled under a blanket on the front seat and walked out onto the dock by myself. It was exactly the kind of scene I'd been looking for -- about 35 stone-drunk rich honkies from places like Jacksonville and Pompano Beach, reeling around in this midnight Mexican port on their $200,000 power cruisers and cursing the natives for not providing enough teenage whores to go with the mariachi music. It was a scene of total decadence and I felt right at home in it. I began mixing with the crowd and trying to hire a boat for the next morning -- which proved to be very difficult, because nobody could understand what I was saying.

  What's wrong here? I wondered. Is there speed in this drug? Why can't these people understand me?

  One of the people I was talking to was the owner of a 60-foot Chris-Craft from Milwaukee. He'd just arrived from Key West that afternoon, he said, and all he seemed to have any real interest in at the moment was the "Argentine maid" he was grappling with in the cockpit of his boat. She was about 15 years old, had dark-blonde hair and red eyes, but it was hard to get a good look at her, because "Cap'n Tom" -- as he introduced himself -- was bending her over a Styrofoam bait box full of dolphin heads and trying to suck on her collarbone while he talked to me.

  Finally I gave up on him and found a local fishing merchant called Fernando Murphy, whose drunkenness was so crude and extreme that we were able to communicate perfectly, even though he spoke little English. "No fishing at night," he said. "Come to my shop downtown by the plaza tomorrow and I rent you a nice boat."

  "Wonderful," I said. "How much?"

  He laughed and fell against a pasty blonde woman from New Orleans who was too drunk to talk. "For you," he said, "a hundred and forty dollars a day -- and I guarantee fish."

  "Why not?" I said. "I'll be there at dawn. Have the boat ready."

  "¡Chingado!" he screamed. He dropped his drink on the dock and began grappling with his own shoulder blades. I was taken aback at his outburst, not understanding for a moment. . . until I saw that a laughing 300-pound man wearing Levis and a red baseball hat in the cockpit of a nearby boat called Black Snapper had hooked the back of Murphy's shirt with a 30-pound marlin rod and was trying to reel him in.

  Murphy staggered backward, screaming "¡Chingado!" once again as he fell sideways on the dock and ripped his shirt open. Well, I thought, no point trying to do business with this crowd tonight and, in fact, I never fished on that trip. But the general low tone of that party had stayed with me -- a living caricature of white trash run amuck on foreign shores; an appalling kind of story, but not without a certain human-interest quotient.

  On the first day of the tournament, I spent eight hours at sea aboard the eventual winner -- a 54-foot Striker called Sun Dancer, owned by a wealthy middle-aged industrialist named Frank Oliver from Palatka, Florida.

  Oliver ran a fleet of barges on the Inland Waterway out of Jacksonville, he said, and Sun Dancer was the only boat in the Cozumel Harbor flying a Confederate flag. He had "about three hundred and twenty-five thousand in it" -- including a network of built-in vacuum-cleaner wall plugs for the deep-pile carpets -- and although he said he spent "maybe five weeks out of the year" on the boat, he was a very serious angler and he meant to win this tournament.

  To this end, he had hired one of the world's top fishing captains -- a speedy little cracker named Cliff North -- and turned Sun Dancer over to him on a year-round basis. North is a living legend in the sport-fishing world and the idea that Oliver would hire him as his personal captain was not entirely acceptable to the other anglers. One of them explained that it was like some rich weekend duffer hiring Arnold Palmer to shoot the final round of the Greater Cleveland Elks golf tourney for him. North lives on the boat, with his wife and two young "mates," who do all the menial work, and during the ten months of the year when Oliver's not around, he charters Sun Dancer out to anybody who can pay the rate. All Cuff has to do -- in return for this sinecure -- is make sure Oliver wins the three or four fishing tournaments he finds time to enter each year.

  Thanks to North and his expert boat handling, Frank Oliver is now listed in the sport-fishing record books as one of the world's top anglers. Whether or not Oliver would win any tournaments without North and Sun Dancer is a subject of widespread disagreement and occasional rude opinion among sport-fishing pros. Not even the most egotistical anglers will deny that a good boat and a hot-rod captain to handle it are crucial factors in ocean fishing -- but there is a definite division of opinion between anglers (who are mainly rich amateurs) and pros (the boat captain and the crews) about the relative value of skills.

  Most of the pros I talked to in Cozumel were reluctant, at first, to speak on this subject -- at least for the record -- but after the third or fourth drink, they would invariably come around to suggesting that anglers were more of a hazard than a help and, as a general rule of thumb, you could catch more fish by just jamming the rod into a holder on the rear end of the boat and letting the fish do the work. After two or three days on the boats, th
e most generous consensus I could get from the pros was that even the best angler is worth about a ten percent advantage in a tournament, and that most are seen as handicaps.

  "Jesus God Almighty," said a veteran captain from Fort Lauderdale one night in a local hotel bar, "you wouldn't believe the things I've seen these fools do!" He laughed, but the sound was nervous and his body seemed to shudder as the memories came back on him. "One of the people I work for," he said, "has a wife who's just flat-out crazy." He shook his head wearily. "I don't want you to get me wrong, now -- I love her dearly, as a person -- but when it comes to fishing, goddamn it, I'd like to chop her up and toss her out for the sharks." He took a long hit on his rum and Coke. "Yeah, I hate to say it, but that's all she's good for -- shark bait and nothin else. Jesus, the other day she almost killed herself! We hooked a big sailfish, and when that happens, you have to move pretty fast, you know -- but all of a sudden, I heard her screaming like crazy, and when I looked down from the bridge, she had her hair all tangled up in the reel!" He laughed. "Goddamn! Can you believe that? She almost got scalped! I had to jump down, about fifteen feet onto a wet deck in a bad sea, we were wallowing all around -- and cut the whole line loose with my knife. She came within about ten seconds of having all her hair pulled out!"

  Few anglers -- and especially winners like Frank Oliver -- agree with the pros' 90-10 split. "It's basically a teamwork situation," says Oliver, "like a chain with no weak links. The angler, the captain, the mates, the boat -- they're all critical, they work like gears with each other."

  Well. . . maybe so. Oliver won the tournament with 28 sailfish in the three days that counted. But he was fishing alone on Sun Dancer -- a boat so lavishly outfitted it could have passed for the nautical den in Nelson Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue apartment -- and with the Arnold Palmer of sport fishing up on the bridge. Most of his competition was fishing in twos and threes on charter boats they were assigned to at random, with wild-tempered, contemptuous captains they'd never even met before yesterday morning.

  "Fishing against Cliff North is bad enough," said Jerry Haugen, captain of a stripped-down hulk of a boat called Lucky Striker, "but when you have to go against North and only one angler, with everything set up exactly the way he wants it, that's just about impossible."

  Which is neither here nor there, in the rules of big-time sport fishing. If Bebe Rebozo decided to borrow a half-million dollars from the Pentagon at no interest and enter the Cozumel tournament with the best boat he could buy and a crew of specially trained U.S. Marines, he would compete on the same basis with me, if I entered the thing with a 110 year-old Colorado Riverboat and a crew of drug-crazed politicos from the Meat Possum Athletic Club. According to the rules, we'd be equal. . . And while Bebe could fish alone on his boat, the tournament directors could assign me a nightmarish trio of anglers like Sam Brown, John Mitchell and Baby Huey.

  Could we win? Never in hell. But nobody connected with that tournament would ever forget the experience. . . which is almost what happened anyway, for different reasons. By the third day of the tournament, or maybe it was the fourth, I had lost all control of my coverage. At one point, when Bloor ran amuck and disappeared for 30 hours, I was forced to jerk a dope addict out of the island's only night club and press him into service as a "special observer" for Playboy. He spent the final day of the tournament aboard Sun Dancer, snorting coke in the head and jabbering wildly at North while poor Oliver struggled desperately to maintain his one-fish lead over Haugen's manic crew on Lucky Striker.

  Thursday night was definitely the turning point. Whatever rapport Bloor and I had developed with the Striker people was wearing very thin after three days of increasingly strange behavior and the antisocial attitude we apparently manifested at the big Striker cocktail party at the Punta Morena beach bar was clearly unacceptable. Almost everybody there was staggering drunk by nightfall and the ugliness threshold was low. Here were all these heavy anglers -- prosperous Florida businessmen, for the most part -- snarling and snapping at one another like East Harlem street fighters on the eve of a long-awaited rumble:

  "You potbellied asshole! You couldn't catch a fish in a goddamn barrel!"

  "Watch your stupid lip, fella: That's my wife you just stepped on!"

  "Whose wife, fatface? Keep your fuckin' hands to yourself."

  "Where's the goddamn waiter? Boy! Boy! Over here! Get me another drink, will ya?"

  "Let me just put it to you this way, my friend. How 'bout a goddamn fish-off? Just you and me -- for a thousand bucks, eh? Yeah, how 'bout it?"

  People were lurching around in the sand with plates full of cold macaroni and shrimp sauce. Every now and then, somebody would jerk one of the giant turtles out of the tank on the patio and thrust it in the face of some bleary-eyed bystander, laughing wildly and struggling to hang on to the thing, big green flippers clawing frantically at the air and lashing a spray of stale turtle water on everybody within a radius of ten feet. . . "Here: I wantcha to meet my friend! She'll do a real job on yer pecker. How horny are ya?"

  It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart. Bloor became obsessed with the notion that we'd stumbled into a gathering of drunken greedheads who were planning to turn Cozumel into "a Mexican Miami Beach" -- which was true, to a certain extent, but he pursued it with a zeal that churned up angry resentment in every conversation he wandered into. At one point, I found him shouting at the manager of the hotel he was staying in: "You're just a bunch of goddamn moneygrubbing creeps! All this bullshit about tourism and development -- what the hell do you want here, another Aspen?"

  The hotel man was baffled. "What is Aspen?" he asked. "What are you talking about?"

  "You know goddamn well what I'm talking about, you sleazy bastard!" Bloor shouted. "These dirty concrete hotels you're building all over the beach, these dirty little hot-dog stands and --"

  I hurried across the patio and grabbed him by the shoulder. "Never mind Yail," I said, trying to focus at least one of my eyes on whoever he was talking to. "He's still not adjusted to this altitude." I tried to smile at them, but I could sense it wasn't working. . . a drugged grimace, wild eyes and very jerky movements. I could hear myself talking, but the words made no sense: "These goddamned iguanas all over the road. . . we did a one-eighty back there at the U turn. . . Yail grabbed the emergency brake when he saw all those lizards, jerked it right out by the root. . . Thank Christ we had those snow tires. We live at five thousand feet, you know, damn little air pressure up there, but down here at sea level you feel it squeezing your brain like a vise. . . No way to escape it, you can't even think straight. . ."

  Nobody smiled; I was babbling out of control and Bloor was still yelling about "land rapers." I left him and went to the bar. "We're leaving," I said, "but I want some ice for the road."

  The bartender gave me a Pepsi-Cola cup full of melting shavings. "We'll need more than that," I said -- so he filled up another cup. He spoke no English, but I could grasp what he was trying to tell me: There was no container available for the amount of ice I wanted and they were almost out of ice anyway.

  My head was beginning to pulsate violently at this point I could barely keep a focus on his face. Rather than argue, I went out to the parking lot and drove the Safari through a screen of small beach trees and up onto the patio, parking it right in front of the bar and indicating to the stunned bartender that I wanted the back seat filled with ice.

  The Striker crowd was appalled. "You crazy son of a bitch!" someone yelled. "You mashed about fifteen trees!" I nodded, but the words didn't register. All I could think about was ice -- throwing one cupload after another into the back seat. The acid, by this time, had fucked up my vision to the point where I was seeing square out of one eye and round out of the other. It was impossible to focus on anything; I seemed to have four hands. . .

  The bartender had not been lying: The Punta Moreña ice vat was virtually empt
y. I scraped a few more cuploads out of the bottom -- hearing Bloor's angry cursing somewhere above and behind me -- then I jumped over the counter and into the front seat of the jeep.

  Nobody seemed to notice, so I gunned the engine violently and leaned on the horn as I crept very slowly in first gear through the mashed trees and shrubbery. Loud voices seemed to be looming down on me from the rear and suddenly Bloor was climbing over the back, yelling, "Get moving, goddamn it, get moving!" I stomped on the accelerator and we fish-tailed out of the deep-sand parking lot.

  Thirty minutes later, after a top-speed, bug-spattered run all the way to the other side of the island, we rolled into the parking lot of what appeared to be a night club. Bloor had calmed down a bit, but he was still in a high, wild condition as we lurched to a stop about five feet from the front door. I could hear loud music inside.

  "We need a few drinks," I muttered. "My tongue feels like an iguana's been chewing on it."

  Bloor stepped out, "Keep the engine running," he said. "I'll check the place out."

  He disappeared inside and I leaned back on the seat to stare straight up at the star-crazed sky. It seemed about six feet above my eyes. Or maybe 60 feet, or 600. I couldn't be sure, and it didn't matter, anyway, because by that time I was convinced I was in the cockpit of a 727 coming into L.A. at midnight. Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast -- but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?

  Who gives a fuck? I thought. It's a fine thing to just lie back and stare up or down at. My eyeballs felt cool, my body felt rested. . .