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Jack worked as a photojournalist for 20 years with his stories featured
on all of the major networks and he saw way too much. “Man’s
inhumanity to man is just a nursery rhyme until you witness it 1,000’s
of times!” as he did. He decided he needed a change in his life so he
ran away to join the circus. Literally.
After joining the circus for the 1988 summer season and feeling better
about his new perspective on life, Jack then ran away from the circus
and fled to the Caribbean for the winter and now, Jack's job is to look
for pirate booty as an “official” treasure hunter for the government.
But it is what happens to him at night and his “days off” from being a
treasure hunter and on his travels to Africa to "accidentally" become a
diamond smuggler and on to Amsterdam to be "bribed to be an official
judge" at the 20th Anniversary of High Times Cannabis Cup, then on
to Geneva, London, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, The Virgins and beyond in
his pursuit of the ever elusive pirates of his dreams and loose women
is what he writes about most.
Written in a series of dispatches from 1988 to 2010 the humor of it
all, from an obviously skewed sense of humor, may just leave you in
hysterics while you try to decide whether or not you would want to
trade places with him.
Everything is based on fact and luckily when Jack exaggerates, he
does so with so much gusto, you know when he is.
You can believe almost every word of it!
TILT!
Dispatch One
©1988-2010
By Jack L. Rea
This Issue’s Working Titles:
Stuck in Mid-Air
or
Drowning on the Tarmac
or
Mirage: Spanish for Airport Terminal
Someone once said, “Be careful of what you ask for…” Who asked them to say that?
I finally landed on Saint Uranus in the Caribbean!
Actually, not so much landed on as rappelled into. It turns out “landing” is a fairly loose term to the local airline, Uranus Arriba, which roughly translates to: Uranus in the Air.
As we came in on our final approach we encountered the humidity and the plane slurped to a stop about 20 feet above the ground so they lowered ropes down for us to disembark. We weren’t sure at first why we had to wear life jackets for this particular maneuver until we hit the molten Tarmac and had to swim for it.
Luckily it was only 450.9 degrees Fahrenheit so everything hadn’t spontaneously combusted yet. That came later. Usually when the sun came up.
We headed for the Terminal, or was it away from the Tarmac, I can’t remember now.
We traveled mostly at night. Some nights it would rain and we would build shelters out of the abandoned luggage left by the previous passengers on earlier flights. It warmed our hearts that somewhere behind us other tourists were sheltering under our abandoned luggage.
We didn’t mind the mosquitoes at night because it is amazing how light on your feet you feel when you lose a quart of blood each night! Besides, when one is sitting on your chest and pinning your arms to the ground, how much choice do you really have? Many of us were carried away into the night…lucky them.
We decided we should elect a leader. We held conventions and primaries, took votes and then the newly elected leader promptly shot himself. We tried this over and over until unfortunately, we ran out of bullets.
The rest of us then resigned ourselves to the fact that we had to continue on towards the Terminal and away from the bubbling Tarmac.
We passed some passengers going the other way. We tried bartering with them for bullets but apparently they had leaders left to elect yet and needed them.
We reminded them about the Tarmac and traded them our life jackets in exchange for intelligence on what lie ahead. Most of them told stories of reaching the Terminal and being turned back because their passports had expired along the way. I checked my passport. I had only three years left to make it so I stepped up my pace.
The Terminal came and went a few times. I blacked out, proving the adage that it is always the darkest just before everything goes pitch black.
I awoke lying on a conveyor belt efficiently passing by uniformed individuals who methodically took everything I had ever owned and at the end was unceremoniously dumped out onto a large pile of other bewildered nude tourists surrounded by screaming Taxi drivers. We had made it!
(Up until this point I had never associated “bewildered” with “nude” before, but ever since, I have actually grown accustomed to it and even look forward to it. I’m enjoying it right now as a matter of fact!)
Taxi. Now there is a funny word. Until now, that word had evoked a long and proud tradition of transferring passengers from where they were to where they weren’t, all in a safe and contemptuous manner.
Taxi in Spanish is still Taxi but I think something was lost in the non-translation.
Forget the days of air conditioning, working brakes, headlights and turn signals.
However, the horn is from a semi and strategically placed under the front seat for the best over-all effect and works perfectly and continuously! The back seat is actually a large speaker cabinet I’m sitting on which is at full volume and blasting out Merengue, the National Cacophony. That was when my ears learned the nifty trick of sucking inside my head.
Merengue: To those who understand, no explanation is necessary,
to those that don’t, no explanation is possible.
They don’t have intersections here; they have round-abouts, which greatly facilitates getting hit on all sides at the same time.
Why had I come here? What was I thinking? Oh, yeah, to live and work in Paradise! Everyone’s dream, right? Right along with being shot out of a cannon and then being run over by a steamroller driven by your ex. (That last one is my usual one, where in the hell did this “live and work in Paradise” come from?)
Finally, my new most favorite words in the world: “Checking in Sir?”
Tune in for the next issue of: Dispatches from Paradise - Next issue’s titles:
Frying Bacon on Your Tongue and 101 Other Recipes for Cooking an Entire Meal on Your Body in Less Than 3 Minutes in the Sun!
Or
Good Places to Hide Your Kidneys
Well, that is the intro and first chapter. I have a hell of a story to tell and, I must admit, I am obviously influenced by Douglas Adams. The chapters go back and forth between fact & exaggeration but it is all based in fact... I just get rather loose with my descriptions of events.
I hope I don't test everyone's patience by posting Chapter 2 so you can get a feel of the going back and forth between fact and gross exaggeration and my post is too long. I am actually hoping you are enjoying yourselves. I have been lurking around this forum for awhile and have only made one critique so far and that is just because I was/am familiar with the subject matter and I hope to be a part of this forum in the coming months/years.
I don't even know what my style is and obviously this is my first book. I have the first seven chapters done covering the first four years of this 22 year-long adventure so far.
Thank you for your time and any comments or suggestions you may have.
TILT!
Dispatch (2)
1988-2010
By Jack L. Rea
This Issue’s Working Titles:
My First Full Day in Paradise or
The Last Thing I Remember or
I Ran Away From the Circus to be a Treasure Hunter?
“Tell me about the rabbits again.” Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
I am here. My plan is in motion. I am committed. This is now my life. I had a pocket full of money I earned with the circus and money is usually a good part of any plan.
My plan was still a little vague. I had money and wanted to live and work in Paradise, which was as far as I had gotten until this point. Now it was time to reconnoiter and make it a reality.
I started in the main tourist area fortuitously called Main Tourist Area on the map. I soon realized that one of the most visited areas was the beach! Go figure. I began my fact-finding mission by seeing what the tourists were spending money on:
1. I had to eliminate number one since I didn’t have one of those since I am a male.
2. I also had to eliminate number two because I don’t have a clue on how to convert fairly stable nitroglycerine into completely unstable rum. (Always aim the bottle away from you when opening one!)
3. See number one.
4. See number two. Repeat.
(If you buy enough of number two, number one sometimes is thrown in for free…but it rarely works the other way around.)
Then I noticed there were no water sport activities! No jet skis, no snorkel gear or Scuba gear to rent, no catamarans…nothing except copious amounts of numbers one and two!
I decided to concentrate on Scuba first since I already knew how to do that having been certified in 1977 in Monterey, CA.
I did some research on where I could purchase said gear and found an importer that could help me. He told me that a group of Gringos had recently purchased a large amount of Scuba gear and he had helped them. He also confided in me that Gringos were beyond his comprehension. He went on to say that if you already have that much money, why not just buy number one and number two and skip all the part about getting more money. He said they spent enough money to buy a lifetime supply of both so what were they trying to prove? How much of each does anyone really need in a day he said as he shook his head at me? He was still expounding when I walked away.
I couldn’t comprehend what he meant but I sensed I might have some looming competition so I decided to check out these so-called Gringos.
I rented a motorcycle and was ecstatic to find out they had no helmet laws, speed limits or other silly things AND that you could drink from a bottle of rum while driving here with no repercussions from the police! Matter of fact, if they pull you over and you don’t have a bottle of rum, they will share theirs!
The first one that pulled me over handed me a bottle of rum and then held his gun on me and ordered me to drink. So, I did. Then he took the bottle back, handed me his gun and told me to order him to drink. So, I did. We did this for hours then we poured into his patrol car and pulled someone else over and started in on them. Great fun turning on the siren and flashing lights and pulling over folks and forcing them to drink with you at gunpoint! It also makes for a great excuse: “Honey, I’m being held at gunpoint by the police again so I’ll be late, don’t wait up.”
I headed out towards the town where the importer told me the Gringos hung out. I didn’t realize until too late that the town was two and half-hours away. Far too far away to be any serious competition, but I decided to press on as the scenery and the locals were far more appealing the further I traveled away from the Main Tourist Area.
(This simple lesson served me well in all my later travels to Africa twice, Amsterdam twice, Geneva, England, Jamaica, the Virgins, Canada and elsewhere. Land and get at least two hours away from the airport…then you can see the locals as they really are and prices drop dramatically. More about these trips later as they are directly related to this story.)
I finally arrived at my destination and immediately succumbed to a heat stroke that kept me bed-ridden for two days. After recovery and a meal I finally met the Gringos. (I found out I was a Gringo too!)
They had a contract with the government to salvage shipwrecks looking for treasure! They showed me around their little 4-room bed and breakfast they had leased as a headquarters and the boat they had and took me diving on some of the sites they were working. Poking up from the sand were cannons, pottery, muskets, swords and all kinds of amazing stuff.
I then realized they were broke!
I took the owner, Rick, aside and told him, “You have Disneyland here, already built and waiting for tourists to give you their money to play here!” He listened attentively but he had his doubts. He is not a marketer and I am. He is a former cop and doubts everything I guess.
I asked him to give me a couple of days and I would return with a busload of tourists paying a hundred dollars a head to be a part of a treasure hunt! I bought an 1800 silver coin from his son and headed back.
That night I walked into the tourist hotel bar and tossed that solid-silver coin up on the bar and proclaimed to the bartender, “Look what I found today!” The sound of that coin clinking and spinning on the bar had everyone’s attention! I passed it around and told everyone that we had a treasure operation and that I could arrange for them to come and join it for a day for only $100 all inclusive.
It was like fishing, I would toss that lure out and then reel them in!
The next morning I arrived with the van I had rented full of tourists! Afterwards they all proclaimed it was one of the best adventures of their lifetime and I continued this operation 3 to 5 days a week for almost a year until we were cashed up.
(Funny thing, when I first started I would have a flat either going or coming on the bad roads and I decided after about two months of this that sooner or later I would have one both ways so I bought another spare so I would have two. I never, ever had another flat!)
One night I was heading to one of the tourist hotels to do a little “fishing” for tourists when suddenly I couldn’t see the road in front of me any more! This was immediately followed by a huge crash and flying shards of glass. I had hit a black cow! They have a saying down here that if suddenly you can’t see anything, it is a black cow.
After I got 13 stitches in my face I went back to survey the scene. The van was totaled and I realized why I had gotten cut up so badly. These are the same vehicles sold all over the world and to the US also, but to make the price lower for Third World Countries, they leave out some of the neat safety features like safety glass, seat belts, air-bags and anti-lock brakes! If this had been a car from the US, I would have walked away. This is so not right and totally unfair to these poor folks!
I meet so many colorful characters living down here. They are usually referred to as ex-pats, short for ex-patriots, for leaving their home country. There were enclaves of ex Brits, ex Germans, ex French, ex Dutch but not very many ex Americans. Americans generally fail to see the humor in it all. I befriended a few of each and have some lovely stories about some of them.
One was a Brit named Binx. He was a former Merchant Seaman and he told me he had spent most of his money on women and rum…and the rest…he had just wasted. He was about 50 at the time I guess and we were talking one day and he said he thought he was going through a mid-life crisis. I was hysterical! I told Binx that normally for that to happen you needed to be in a dead-end job, a bad marriage and your kids hate you and you flee to the Caribbean and that he had it all backwards!
Binx was always trying to come up with plans to make money. He decided one day to take some of the shells he had collected and made a lamp out of them. He showed it to me and it was very nice and colorful. He hoped to sell a few at the Ramada Inn the next day.
I saw him at the bar the next afternoon and he was so depressed! I asked what could of possibly have gone wrong, did they not like the lamp? He said they loved it and wanted to order them for all the Ramada Inns that are near beaches worldwide…over 120,000 lamps they wanted. He smashed the lamp and said, “I wasn’t looking for a job, I just wanted to make a few bucks!” “Making that many lamps would be just like a job, I would have to set up a frigging factory and have employees and taxes and, and…” He broke down crying asking why life was so hard. Poor Binx.
The next time I saw Binx, about a year later, he was carrying two beach chairs balanced on his head like they carry everything down here. He was heading for the beach and I saw him hand them over to two tourists and they gave him some money. I approached him and said what a great idea! How many chairs you rent out a day? He says two. I asked him then, being the way I am, why didn’t he get more to rent out since there were hundreds of tourists there and he just looked at me, shook his head and walked away towards the Tiki bar for his daily ration of number one and number two. I knew then that Binx was finally happy as owner, manager and sole employee of his very own micro business.
Binx had ceased to resist. Binx had gone native! (I later introduced Binx to the importer and they became best of friends. Binx understood the man much better than I did. Or ever will.)
Being typical Americans, Rick and I decided to expand our operation and we leased a beach hotel with 22 beds in 11 cabañas, more than quadrupling our capacity. We started importing our guests straight from the US and even started holding field schools with students from several universities. With all these activities, we still managed to keep the main thing the main thing…look for treasure!
Tune in for the next issue of: Dispatches from Paradise - Next issue’s title:
If You Have Fun and No One Sees You, Did You Really Have Fun?
Thank you for your time again and yes, I know, I should probably be shot!
If anyone is still reading at this point I might as well put in a snippet from chapters 3-7, that way everyone can hate me even more!
Snippet Chapter 3:
Of course we have our standard issue Nuisance Thingys (NT's) of Paradise like swarms of mosquitoes and the no-see-ums. The no-see-ums the locals call something that sounds like "hey-hen-knees" and they are apparently oblivious to the fact that we are superior beings. (the no-see-ums, not the locals) One day we are heading out to look for treasure and it is 6 am, the best time to start but the worst for no-see-ums. Everyone is running around trying to get the boat ready to go, loading gear and tossing off lines, screaming obscenities and swatting at themselves like deranged monkeys or Pentecostals in full fervor. I'm running down the dock praying for lightning to strike me and contemplating diving into the ocean and drowning myself along with the no-see-ums attached to me. It is not until we finally get underway and leave the little bloodsuckers behind that I realize I had had it good compared to Rick. (I didn't change his name to protect the innocent, as he is not all that innocent) He was on the fly bridge trying to get the engines started and had been stuck in one spot for the duration. All around him on the deck, which is white, are thousands of dead no-see-ums he had swatted and killed. It looked as though someone had turned a peppershaker up side down and spilled the entire contents! Rick had this maniacal look like Jack Nicholson in the movie The Shining after he hacks through the door and sticks his head through and says, "Here's Johnny!” He hasn't been the same since.
Snippet Chapter 4:
However, I have some incredibly fond memories of the ports of calls we made and how sailboat after sailboat, with the most interesting cast of characters, joined our flotilla along the journey.
We started as one and ended as a force to be reckoned with 14 ships from as many countries! We took over ports of call and revelried in our freedom! Pirates and families, young and old, bold, shy, rich and broke. Drunk and giddy, mad and madly in love, lonely, bored and ecstatic. I was never, ever before so miserable yet so totally amused.
(Midnight dingy drills! I must remember to tell you of these! This is where number ones traded ships searching for their counterparts that had respectable amounts of number two! What a concept!)
Snippet Chapter 5:
So using a bowl, a wooden spatula, some medical supplies and a cow’s liver he demonstrated the two schools of thought. Both ended with the bottom of the boat being blown out and sinking in less than thirty seconds blender full of Piña Coladas and all! (Actually, Ahab had ruined the Piña Coladas by putting the cow’s liver in the blender and setting it on Purée to demonstrate the sinking of a boat in thirty seconds. I know I called him Captain Bligh earlier, but tonight he had on his fake peg leg so I assumed it was Captain Ahab night. Damn this rum!)
Which brings me to marriage…
Well, after this part…
Snippet Chapter 6:
Then one night as usual, tomorrow morning comes and the STEWARDESSES FROM HELL begin showing up on my doorstep…
I’m in my room at the Ramada Yacht Haven in St. Thomas when a knock comes at my door. I open it to see two American Airline stewardesses and two from KLM and they ask; “Are you Jack?” as they push by me into the room.
Holy hell, my room is soon strewn with nylons, uniforms, and little airplane-shaped pins as they all immediately strip for the pool as if I’m not there. I nervously advise them that I have only one bed and in unison, as if rehearsed or this is a recurring event for them say, “You prefer the edge or the middle?” as they smile that great customer-service smile they are renown for.
Each night my room is crawling with stewardesses from all the major airlines! Obviously the stewardess from KLM was only an advance scout for this current swarm of NT’s.
I changed rooms so I could have my own bed and the next morning I am in the lobby and this little old man with wire-rimmed glasses was checking in and I suggested he take room 151 as the accouterments of this particular room are unparalleled anywhere in the universe. He thanks me profusely for the suggestion and asks for the key to my old room. I always wonder how his first night went?
Does some guy out there owe me a huge favor or did I accidentally kill off an innocent bystander? I must be more careful of collateral damages from my goings on.
Snippet Chapter 7:
At the last bloody second he jerks back on the wheel, stalling the plane completely out and we jump the goats and slam into the dirt strip, spin in a 360 and sputter to a stop in a cloud of dust! He didn’t spill a drop of his rum though and that is when I knew he was an excellent pilot!
Well we have surprised the shit out of the military stationed there and they come roaring out in an ox cart with a 50-caliber machine gun duct taped on the back and are screaming at us to get our hands up as they will be there in a little while…
…We continued standing for a while with our hands in the air but soon grew tired of that and started holding the gun on each other again instead and ordering each other to drink.
I bet I am the only one left reading this post... huh? However, if anyone is still left and wants to read the rest of what I have so far, let me know!
