cabo story

Incredibly, unbelievably, this is the painting in the room where they match prospective marks up with a sales person who attempts to pressure you into buying a time-share.

It depicts, as far as we were able to decode, the arrival of the conquistadorés on the shores of Mexico, where the indigenous people greeted them as gods, presented them with gifts, and marvelled at their riches and technology.

Oddly, the second pane of this presumptive diptych is missing — the one where the foreigners rape everyone, give them diseases to which they have no immunity, and establish a two-hundred-year reign of terror and butchery.

I think this painting might have been chosen to set the mood as the repressed people exact a subtle modern day revenge on their germ-infested overlords by attempting to sell them overpriced real estate in an undesirable shithole corner of the continent.

Let me back up a step. Everyone knows they’re going to try to sell you a time-share, right? We heard about it on the bus ride from the airport. “You just have to hold out,” the old Cabo hands said, “until the stuff they offer becomes worth your time.” So we did — although I admit I was surprised that the full-court press began immediately after checking in to the hotel — and the agent began piling on credit in the hotel restaurants, credit in the spa, drink tickets… but ultimately the promised carrot which lured us to the presentation, despite every fiber of Jen’s and my being saying, Admiral Akbar style, “IT’S A TRAP!”, was… free breakfast.

The breakfast, when we eventually got it, was undeniably good but far from free. After meeting up with our agent, touring the grounds — conquistador style was much in evidence; perhaps, I thought, as a subliminal ego boost for the bourgeois golf- and cigar-obsessed habitués of the place — and eventually ending up in a dining room where other couples in situations similar to ours were having their own earnest conversations with their sales guys.

Apparently it’s a big thing, if you are a scammer in Mexico, to write things down on paper. This makes the offer more real somehow, more tangible, and the mark can take the paper with him to remember how good it sounded when you described it. They did it at the airport, the hotel rep did it to get us in the presentation, and the sales rep had that shit down to an exact motherfucking science. He went through about 6 or 7 pieces of paper describing the finances, the benefits, the savings, the property, the calendar, the alternative places, until finally, a note of desperation in his voice, he asked, “Wouldn’t you like to take MORE VACATION, Eric?”

“OF COURSE I WOULD!” I said, all-caps even more clearly enunciated than his were. “WHO WOULDN’T? HELL, I’D LIKE TO TAKE NOTHING BUT VACATION. DON’T YOU LIKE TO HAVE FUN!?!? HOW ABOUT YOU, JEN? DO YOU LIKE TO HAVE FUN??” Jen looked at me, a little fear in her eyes, and smoothed it over with the guy.

“I think what he’s saying is, we’re not really going to buy anything here, and we should probably go.”

“OK—-OK.” The fight went out of him and he ushered us to the imposing wooden door. We fought our way out through the throngs of people with golf clubs and too much luggage, a wild-eyed feeling of incredulity in our hearts. Had we really gotten away with it? They were just going to let us go? Who were all these stupid bastards who had bought into the thing? It seemed like they had just given up and let themselves get talked into signing in order to get it over with and showed up for their two weeks a year in order to convince themselves they’d made the right decision. Or maybe they just really liked golfing exactly that much.

We made good on our meal tickets, that much was sure, and I think we left with a deeper understanding of the place.

DON’T YOU LIKE TO HAVE FUN?