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?