gringo in a beach bar in Mexico,” one of the locals told him.
“What’s your name, amigo?” Tex Sex asked the man.
“Ix-Nay is my given name. What’s yours?” asked the small Indian at the end of the bar.
Tex Sex was receiving no input from his liquor-logged brain. All he heard was the sound of his own voice. “My Incan brothers and sisters, you have found me, and for this I plan to reward you. It is my desire to live among you on this beach forever,” he announced.
“I’ll alert the media,” Ix-Nay replied dryly as he tended to Tex Sex’s bleeding scalp.
Tex Sex’s proclamation of self-discovery was not met with much enthusiasm by the fishermen in the bar who were watching the Cubs game, but they broke into a dance of their own when Sammy Sosa knocked a ball over the center-field bleachers, beating the Mets in the bottom of the ninth. At that point, Captain Kirk happened to walk in, and he recognized the bloody figure leaning on Ix-Nay’s shoulders.
While Sammy circled the bases, Ix-Nay and Captain Kirk carried Tex Sex back to the boat, stitched up his head, and deposited him in a bunk to sleep off his hangover. Captain Kirk had his crew keep an eye on their guest while he went fishing.
When he returned, he was greeted by a contingency of Mexican and U.S. military and immigration officals who stood in front of an unmarked Huey helicopter that had landed in the tiny square in the center of the village. A man in plain clothes, sporting a crew cut and telltale sunglasses, spoke to Captain Kirk. “We are here to investigate a possible kidnapping of a very prominent American.”
“You mean Tex Sex?” Kirk asked.
“If you have any information about the abduction of Shawn Spurl, then I’d suggest you share that with us right now.” The Mexican police moved forward.
“I don’t know anything about a kidnapping, but I do know that a drunk asshole who claims to be Tex Sex fell off a bar stool at the Fat Iguana and sliced his head open. I stitched him up and put him on my boat. I figured someone would come looking for him, but I didn’t figure it would be this fast.”
Kirk led the assault team to the shrimp boat. Tex Sex was still out, snoring loudly in the bunk.
Tex Sex’s identity was verified by a bartender from the Fat Iguana who appeared with a pile of CD jewel-box covers with the singer’s picture on all of them, and the assembled entourage agreed that the barfly in the bunk was the balladeer on the CD covers.
In a matter of hours, film crews from Fox affiliates in Mexico City, Dallas, and Hollywood were on the scene to film the “rescue and evacuation of Tex Sex from the snake-infested jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula” as the uninformed reporters described it. The Caribbean Soul was encircled with a defense line of Mexican Navy personnel.
While Darcy Trumbo was winging her way south of the border on her quarter-share jet, she received updates from her office as the wire services lit up with several different versions of the story. They were all blown totally out of proportion. Darcy smiled and asked the flight attendant for a margarita.
Tex Sex slept through the whole clusterfuck in the air-conditioned crew quarters on the Caribbean Soul. When he finally came to, he saw a soldier standing over him. The man rushed from the room, and then Tex Sex suddenly found himself staring into the stern eyes of Darcy Trumbo. “Read this,” she said as she handed him a one-page script.
With the help of a Special Forces squad that had been training in the nearby jungle, Tex Sex was carried past a row of cameras, microphones, and popping flashbulbs to a waiting medevac helicopter. At the entrance to the chopper, Tex Sex struggled to sit up. With Darcy at his side, he read his statement of thanks to the people of Punta Margarita and plugged his upcoming TV special on Fox.
“I will return,” he said, and from the door of the chopper he screamed, “Mi casa es su casa, amigos!” The helicopter engines spooled up, the whirling blades created an instant sandstorm on the beach, and then the chopper rose vertically and headed north out over the water. Moments later, silence returned to Punta Margarita.
Tex Sex never did return, but to everyone’s surprise, a month later an architect from Santa Fe arrived on the mailboat, laden with a dozen