By Friday night, it was clear that the story was not only a dry hole but maybe even a dry socket. Our most serious problem had to do with the rat-bastard tedium of spending eight hours a day out at sea in the boiling sun, being tossed around on the bridge of a high-powered motorboat and watching middle-aged businessmen reeling sailfish up to the side of the boat every once in a while. Both Bloor and I had spent a full day at sea -- on the only boats in the tournament getting any real action, Sun Dancer and Lucky Striker -- and by dusk on Friday, we had pretty well come to the conclusion that deep-sea fishing is not one of your king-hell spectator sports. I have watched a lot of bad acts in my time, from tag-team pro wrestling in Flomaton, Alabama, to the Roller Derby on Oakland TV and intramural softball tournaments at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois -- but I'm damned if I can remember anything as insanely fucking dull as that Third Annual International Cozumel Fishing Tournament. The only thing that comes close to it, in recent memory, is an afternoon I spent last March in a traffic jam on the San Diego freeway. . . but even that had a certain adrenaline factor; by the end of the second hour, I was so crazy with rage that I cracked the top half of the steering wheel off my rented Mustang, then exploded the water pump by racing the engine at top speed and finally abandoned the mess altogether in the outside lane about two miles north of the Newport Beach exit.

It was Saturday afternoon, I think, when the brain fog had cleared enough for a long, clean focus on our situation -- which had been drastically altered, at that point, by three nights of no sleep and a handful of spastic confrontations with the Striker crowd. I had been thrown out of one hotel and moved to another and Bloor had been threatened with jail or deportation by the manager of his hotel on the midtown square.

I had managed another zombielike day at sea, with massive aid from Frank's can, but our relationship with the Striker people was apparently beyond redemption. Nobody connected with the tournament would have anything to do with us. We were treated like lepers. The only people we felt easy with, at that point, were a motley collection of local freaks, boozers, hustlers and black-coral divers who seemed to collect each afternoon on the porch of the Bal-Hai, the town's main bar.

They quickly befriended us -- a sudden shift in old relationships with the island that caused me to begin signing all the tabs, splitting them about half and half between Striker and Playboy . Nobody seemed to care, especially the ever-growing crowd of new friends who came to drink with us. These people understood and were vaguely amused at the idea that we'd fallen into serious disfavor with the Strikers and the local power structure. For the past three sleepless days, we'd been gathering at the Bal-Hai to brood publicly on the likelihood of massive retaliation by local jefes, incensed by our rotten behavior.