Our Mexican companion giggled happily like a toddler let loose in a toy store, entirely engrossed in the effects of smoking a joint roughly the size of Texas. He seemed blissfully unaware that the three of us were seconds away from being either gunned down on the spot or beaten to death by an enthusiastic troop of drug enforcement agents—and, believe it or not, those were the good options.
Somewhere near Tulum, Mexico, 1995.
As usual in my tumultuous life, an otherwise mundane chain of events had somehow snowballed into a scene straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I now found myself staring down the barrel of an unlocked and loaded Uzi machine gun wielded by a grinning, trigger-happy operator. For a moment, I tried to console myself with the knowledge that the Uzi is notoriously unreliable and requires an expert marksman to hit anything smaller than a barn door at more than five feet. Unfortunately, we were much closer than five feet and, unlike barn doors, entirely incapable of moving at the moment. Our rental car was so ridiculously tiny that squeezing into a coffin with an NBA team would have felt downright spacious.
How did I end up here, you ask? Barely 24 hours earlier, I’d been enjoying a peaceful and undemanding day on the beach in Playa del Carmen. My biggest concerns had been avoiding a nasty sunburn and ensuring a steady flow of cocktails. Then, as if scripted by fate—or bad luck—someone had stepped between me and my sunshine.
“Marcelino!”
Angelo, my self-appointed companion and professional small-time mafioso from Italy, loomed over me. His face bore the kind of urgency I instinctively knew to avoid.
“Angelo, for Christ’s sake, you’re blocking the sun. What do you want?”
“I need your help,” he said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone that somehow made everything worse.
“Angelo, you always need help. Why is this my problem?”
“Marcelino, listen! We have to go to San Cristóbal!”
“San Cristóbal? Who is that? And why?”
“It’s not a who, it’s a where. A town near the Guatemalan border.”
“Great. What’s it got to do with me? That sounds dangerously far away, and I’m busy.”
“Busy doing what?! Burning yourself alive on this beach?”
“Exactly. And I happen to enjoy it.”
“Dios mío, Marcelino, we leave tomorrow! I need you!”
“For what, exactly?”
“I’ll give you $1,000 upfront. All you have to do is watch my back—be my bodyguard.”
The words “bodyguard” and “me” were about as compatible as tequila and a toddlers birthday , but I was intrigued. A thousand bucks was a tempting offer, and Angelo wasn’t exactly brimming with options. Sadly, curiosity has always been my Achilles' heel. Besides, the money would bankroll another four months on this beach, complete with an endless supply of drinks decorated with those ridiculous little straw hats.
“Fine,” I sighed. “But if I get shot, I’m sending you the bill.”
“Thanks, Marcelino, see you here tomorrow at 8 a.m. at the bar—Mexican time!”
I showed up the next morning at 10 a.m. Angelo hurried in at 11. Right on time.
“Angelo, I didn’t realize you had a car... Who’s that guy snoring in the back seat?”
It turned out Angelo, with the generous assistance of a lost and found American Express card—likely unbeknownst to its rightful owner—had procured a small rental car for the journey. The snoring Mexican in the back, one of Angelo’s many questionable associates, hadn’t quite emerged from his chemically enhanced coma after last night’s exploits.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. Angelo handed me my cash, I shrugged, and climbed into the cramped little car.
The first three hours of driving passed uneventfully. We stopped here and there for food and drinks, nothing unusual.
Eventually, our backseat passenger—Juan (because of course his name was Juan)—roused himself from his slumber, said absolutely nothing, and proceeded to light up a joint the size of a traffic cone. The resulting smoke cloud transformed our tiny car into something resembling a Rastafarian sauna.
Being the only vaguely responsible adult in the vicinity, I felt compelled to point out that blazing through the Mexican countryside in a haze of weed might not be the wisest life choice.
“This could end badly,” I offered, clearly the voice of reason. “For one, marijuana is highly illegal here. Two, this car was rented using a stolen credit card, which might, you know, complicate things further.”
A swift democratic vote nullified my concerns—two to one. Democracy in action.
In hindsight, the weed was destined to be the least of our problems. But at the time, I had no way of knowing just how much worse things would get.
Another tedious hour with Angelo at the wheel had passed when, without warning, everything went south in a hurry, and the famous shit hit the fan.
We were leisurely cruising along the road, carefree and blissfully ignorant, the marvellous white beach stretching out to our left. Then we rounded a bend—and slammed headfirst into reality: a military roadblock.
Heavily armed soldiers stood left, right, and centre, their scowls framed by the flickering light of burning barrels strategically placed to deter any would-be escapees. The message was clear: stop, or regret it.
What followed was a rapid sequence of events so ridiculous it could’ve been a Monty Python sketch—if it weren’t happening to me.
First, Juan, our giggling, smoke-filled mascot, instantly abandoned his stoner serenity. In sheer panic, he attempted to squeeze himself out of the rear window and make a break for it into the bushes. His escape plan left behind one shoe, a sweaty shirt, and a smouldering joint rolling around on the floor.
Predictably, his bid for freedom didn’t pan out. Three soldiers grabbed him mid-air, wrestled him to the ground, threw in a bonus kick to the ribs, cuffed him, and dragged him off to a nearby hut that looked suspiciously like the kind of place where they ask questions you don’t want to answer.
Next, Angelo. Within seconds, the man began sweating like a sinner in church, his face taking on the pallor of a ghost on vacation. By the time Juan was being “escorted,” Angelo had plunged headfirst into a full-blown state of shock.
And then there was me.
I remained utterly unmoved—not because I was cool under pressure, but because, in my blissful ignorance, I hadn’t yet grasped the seriousness of the situation. To me, this was still just a scenic journey to San Cristobal, complete with picturesque beaches and minor inconveniences.
That delusion, unfortunately, was about to shatter spectacularly.
The soldier on the driver’s side barked at Angelo: “Get out of the car, now! Hands where I can see them! What’s that smell? Drogas?!”
“Oh dear,” I thought. “This doesn’t look too promising anymore... This looks like we’re in for a change of address for the next few years.”
Angelo, ever the picture of composure, began sweating even more profusely. He opened the door and, moving like a man marching toward his own execution, climbed out of the car. His legs wobbled so much he had to cling to the hood to avoid collapsing in a heap.
Meanwhile, the grunt pointing his rifle at me motioned with the barrel for me to follow suit, hands raised, and slowly.
As we were marched toward the hut, the other soldiers descended on our poor car like kids tearing into Christmas presents. They dismantled it piece by piece, meticulously searching for drugs, guns, money, or whatever else was en vogue for smuggling back then.
I was fairly certain we had nothing to hide.
Boy, was I mistaken.
Angelo and I were shoved into a holding cell that could generously be described as the size of a glove compartment—if said glove compartment were infested with fleas and layered in decades-old grime. It looked like something straight out of a low-budget gangster flick. If there had been hooks or chains hanging from the walls, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.
Clearly, this wasn’t Club Med. The only "amenities" consisted of a rusty bucket posing as a toilet, a filthy, flea-ridden cot, and the cold, unforgiving concrete floor.
Angelo, having apparently run out of bodily fluids, finally stopped sweating. He slumped to the floor beside me, staring blankly at nothing. After what felt like an eternity, our Mexican compadre was dragged in, fresh from a thorough beating courtesy of the guards.
He sported a shiny new black eye and several bruises, but considering he hadn’t exactly been mistaken for Antonio Banderas before, his new look wasn’t all that dramatic. Pain didn’t seem to bother him anyway; the lingering effects of his earlier weed session had him grinning faintly as he slouched into a corner.
For the next hour, we shared our cell with nothing but a thriving colony of cockroaches, who seemed oddly unimpressed by our dire straits. I made myself as comfortable as one can on a cold concrete floor.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, a pair of guards stomped in. They had faces like the Orcs from Mordor, only less friendly.
“Undress,” one of them growled.
Apparently, the soldiers intended to search every crack and crevice for contraband, so we braced ourselves for an intimate introduction to the fine art of rectal examinations.
After an excessively thorough inspection—during which nothing illegal was discovered, save for a particularly aggressive case of hemorrhoids afflicting our Mexican companion—I was hauled off to face the commanding officer.
The interrogation began. I confidently explained that I was just a hapless German tourist from Cancun, enjoying a carefree road trip through southern Mexico. Along the way, we had taken pity on a destitute Mexican chap, who, unbeknownst to us, had clearly been smoking enough weed to tranquilize a herd of elephants.
Feigning utter ignorance, I assured the officer that I wouldn’t know a marijuana joint from a stick of dynamite wrapped in fertiliser. “We’re simple travellers,” I insisted, with all the innocence of a kindergarten teacher.
This tale, of course, was the carefully coordinated fabrication that Angelo, Juan, and I had agreed upon during our brief but productive time in the holding cell. So it was no surprise when Angelo and Juan echoed the same nonsense, word for word.
What was surprising—at least to me—was what the soldiers unearthed during their dissection of our ill-fated rental car.
Hidden behind the heater console, tucked neatly under the steering wheel, they found a whopping 65,000 pesos in cash.
I stared at the discovery, dumbfounded. Not because it implicated us further—at this point, that felt like a given—but because I was absolutely livid.
If I’d known that kind of cash was along for the ride, I’d have negotiated a far more lucrative deal for my participation in this disastrous escapade.
“Damn you, Angelo!” I muttered under my breath.
Angelo, sweating like a penguin in the Sahara, fed the officer a blatant lie about how he didn’t have a credit card—which, technically, was true. Apart from the stolen one, of course, which he wisely chose not to mention. He explained that, fearing robbery, he’d hidden the cash behind the steering wheel, an idea he smugly described as “ingenious.”
I silently begged to differ. It wasn’t exactly Fort Knox-level thinking, but then again, Angelo wasn’t exactly college material. On this point, we were all in agreement.
And then, the real entertainment began.
The officer, with a slow, deliberate flair that bordered on theatrical, started counting the money in front of us.
“How much did you say it was?” he asked, looking up.
“65,000 pesos,” Angelo replied, with the confidence of a man who’d never heard of a corrupt official.
“Hmm,” the officer murmured. “Amigo, I’m only counting 60,000 so far... but let me count again.”
He started over, his fingers moving methodically through the bills. “1,000... 2,000... 3,000...” A single 1,000-peso note fluttered silently to the floor, almost unnoticed.
“4,000... 5,000... 6,000...” Another note followed suit, like a leaf falling in autumn.
This continued until, surprise surprise, only 60,000 pesos remained on the table.
“How much was it again, you said?” the officer repeated, his tone polite but with a hint of amusement.
The plot, as they say, was thickening. At least, it was obvious to me. Unfortunately, sharing my realisation with my dimwitted Italian companion wasn’t an option.
Angelo, still failing to grasp the concept, stammered, “Sir, I believe it was 65,000 pesos we had with us... Sir... 5,000 pesos seem to be missing...”
I could have kicked him. Hard.
The officer, maintaining an air of exaggerated seriousness, said, “Hmm, I suppose I’d better count it again, then.”
It was almost impressive how he kept a straight face while effectively robbing us in plain sight. Apparently, even he couldn’t believe just how spectacularly stupid this Italian tourist was.
After the next round of counting, our "travel expense fund" had mysteriously slimmed further, now down to a paltry 55,000 pesos.
“Amigo, how much did you say it was?” the officer asked again, his tone dripping with faux innocence.
At this point, a few long-lost neurons finally connected in Angelo’s brain. Realising the futility of arguing against this blatant theft, he straightened up (as much as his sweaty frame allowed) and replied:
“Sir, you are absolutely right. It was my mistake entirely, and I must apologize. We had 55,000 pesos on us when your fine gentlemen stopped us. My sincerest apologies, sir.”
The officer’s disappointment was palpable; it seemed Angelo’s dim bulb had shone a little brighter than anticipated. “Aaaahhh, there you go,” the officer said, waving dismissively. “I knew we’d get to the bottom of this eventually.”
And then, with a barely concealed smirk: “Now, put what’s left of your miserable car back together and F*** off!”
That’s exactly what we did—or at least tried to.
The parking lot was a war zone of car parts, scattered across what must have been three zip codes. Spark plugs, seat cushions, the radio, the floor mats—even the back seat—all strewn about like the aftermath of a particularly vindictive yard sale. For reasons I still can’t fathom, they’d even removed the spark plugs. I mean, really, what could one possibly hide inside the combustion chamber of an engine?
We did our best to reassemble the vehicle, scavenging as many essential pieces as we could find, and eventually hit the road again.
Barely five minutes in, Juan—ever the intellectual dwarf—lit up a fresh joint and crouched on the floor where the back seat used to be. As the familiar haze of smoke filled the cabin, I found myself pondering the logistics of where exactly he’d stashed that joint during the search. Meanwhile, Juan giggled like a toddler discovering candy, completely oblivious to the fact that we’d just narrowly avoided spending the next decade in a Mexican prison.
Dumbass.
Marcel Romdane
Juan ( on the left) still no clue what was going on and Angelo, to the right trying to prepare dinner by the fire. Me? Hidden behind the lens...
