Escape to Mexico
Overseas Radio Network
In the villages along the beaches of south-eastern Mexico, local people are bracing themselves for the Easter influx of young Americans known, with a shudder, as the “spring breakers”. My friend Clementino, who shines shoes in Cancún, swaps horror stories about it all day long and says even his mother back in Xcalak (population 375) has heard tales about “crazy people on the streets”. On the weekly show Escape to Mexico (Wednesdays, 4pm), the fiftysomething expat presenter, Henry Altman, retired from selling luxury golf course homes in Texas, ostensibly defends the hordes. “They’re nice kids, ya know! OK, some of them do get a little buzzed, get too loud and . . . stuff happens.”
Then he tells a long story – complex, meandering and quite possibly furious – about a bachelor party from New York that came to stay a few doors down from him in his gated community and invited him for a T-bone but got too drunk to spark up the barbecue until 1am, just as Henry was preparing to go to bed. “That was a pretty funny incident,” says Henry, sadly.
It’s the classic fiftysomething American-in-Mexico conundrum. Ah, to be Willem Dafoe in Born on the Fourth of July, staring adventure squarely in the eye, with a tequila worm between the teeth and a dusky chica unzipping one’s combats – instead of helplessly referring to fellow expats as “the private sector” and ordering room service to the condo where you enjoy jazz records and work on a painting that is provisionally entitled Moon Over the Dance Floor.
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So the show goes on, turning every thought to the whys and wherefores of Colorado teenagers speeding along the Yucatán sands in ATVs at the tail end of a six-day bender, off their heads on coco locos and industrial solvents, with their feet hooked in the steering wheel and some blondes on the back peeling off their boob tubes.
Eventually, over an hour into the show, Henry changes the subject, turning to another of his favourite themes: guns, which he’s all for in theory, but then again . . . “Ya know, I ask myself sometimes, does a person actually need 10,000 rounds of ammunition in banana clips, just sitting around? They do not! Hey – here’s Ron, calling from Durable Goods in Tulum . . .”
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