RATATATA-tatatata
It kept on going.
Nothing ever prepares you for this. I was having a crash course.
Page 2
I thought at first fireworks but soon dismissed the thought. When fear real y grabs you the adrenaline pumps through the body to a level where al your senses are awakened. You hear more clearly than you ever heard before and survival instincts kick right in.
Why was I here?
Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and I show up here on the roof of a cantina in Mexico with a tent minding my own business.
Free camping…
I was there talking with these guys in the bar. We were drinking and working between our two languages. Looking back, I saw nothing abnormal. Being in my low twenties, maybe I was naïve and not aware of the things to fol ow. I had no choice as it played out. It was about one in the morning when I heard the gunfire - that is nothing you want to wake up to, believe me. Crawling out of the tent and seeing the dead bodies on the beach doesn’t make you want to go back to sleep.
They laid there, just these people, with these red spots. I’ve seen movies but nothing prepares you for a real life incident like this. I went back into the tent, laying low, not knowing who would come and rifle the tent.
The whole episode was strange. Why this night?
A Mexican massacre.
I was beginning to feel like a shit magnet. Clarence was confused but worried al the same.
“Devin, what do you think that was al about?”
“Clarence, I don’t have a clue! Gang members or drug dealers, hard to say, but I would lay low and leave when we think it is safe.”
We crept out at 4am and split. You know? I didn’t think about the dead bodies. I just wanted to get out of there; a fight-or-flight scenario. I was paranoid that somebody was fol owing me. As they say, “Plug the witness.” I got away and headed for a hotel with Clarence. He talked a few times but I wasn’t real y listening. I doubted if the gunmen thought a couple of guys were sleeping on the roof. I was just a foreigner in a foreign land with no place to go. The paranoia began to dissipate as time went by and we took up a guesthouse in Puerto Val arta. Clarence gave up the fight and flew home.
For somebody that grew up on a farm he understood chickens more than most people, and I didn’t blame him a bit. My theory on life was quite different. What are the chances of this happening again? There’s no way this could be repeated.
The deck was stacked against me but I was determined to have a good outcome in the end in this search for life.
Page 3
WHEN DOCTOR
S don’t know what the problem is they normal y prescribe something to make you think they know what they’re doing. You know something is terribly wrong with your physical and mental health but nobody can pinpoint it. That’s when I began to distrust doctors. You thought they were gods, especial y at ten years old, but they weren’t.
They were only people trained to treat what they thought was wrong, and then pray that they were right. My life was in their hands, and I think if I were in their shoes I would have been a little shaky and lost a lot of sleep.
During the summer of ’73 I saw a doctor for migraine headaches. But the headaches were getting progressively worse. I would go to sleep with them and wake up at 5 AM. It got to be such a routine that if I woke up at 5 AM out of habit, I would wonder what was wrong. Mom, Dad and my brother were always asleep at that early hour, and I could tel they were getting a little tired of me always waking them up. So I would go into my little laboratory and work.
The lab was a storage room. It held al the junk and gadgets. I could rebuild anything from a radio to a set of power tools. Here I passed the time. Deep in work that I felt was important. Not important enough to change the world perhaps, but to me, it seemed that way.
But my mother began to worry about my headaches and my obsession with work. My mind was a whirlwind, never stopping to do anything but think. She had to come into the room and interrupt me in my own little world to eat or go to school.
I was burning the candle at both ends: her way of helping was to take me to a doctor. He was only a general practitioner, but it was a start. He checked me over and gave me a clean bil of health. He said my headaches were due to nerves, and prescribed medicine for hyperactivity and gave me some advice – slow down.
Obviously this didn’t work. The headaches got worse and my enterprising obsession got worse. The hyperactivity medicine had no effect, except for possibly slowing my body down so I had to work half- stoned. There had to be an answer, so we decided to look elsewhere for answers.
Dr. Bauer was our next choice. He examined me, and set me up for that battery of al ergy tests.