Well I promised myself I would never go back to Puerto Rico after my visit a couple years ago. 24 hours after arriving back to the dirty jerz from a 5 day trip to Puerto Rico, I remember why I never wanted to return. It is crazy how you can travel with people on the same trip and those people can all come away with different experiences. For me this time, it was literally staring a crackhead in the face of death. Oh yeah and there was surfing, too!

The waves were about head high the entire trip, but it wasn’t the waves I travelled for as much as it was hopping back into the water with only some sun screen and trunks. I went down there with fellow contributor Kevin Richards and some buddies from Ocean City. They had a place for a week down there and decided to skip a couple classes and turn it into a quick vacation. (I just had to lather up on the sun screen to make sure I didn’t get a tan to so I could play off my lie to my professors of being sick). Weather was good the first couple of days, and we surfed Marias, Dogmans, and Middles. The last couple days of my trip were filled with rain from sunrise to sunset.

The ultimate goal of any surfer’s last day is to try and surf as much as possible. The rest of the crew was hurting from the night of partying before, so it was only fellow Ocean City ripper, Warley, and me trying to get wet. We hop in the car and turn the key…no start. Battery’s dead. Sweet. Now, being the grom of the trip (at 20), I have to try and find some jumper cables. So, I began walking to the local supermarket parking lot to find a friendly Puerto Rican. I even offered 10 bucks for any help, but no one had the time. I started walking back to our place when I saw someone on their porch and asked if they had jumpers. He came up to the fence, which I was standing on the opposite side, and give me the bro hand shake. He said no problemo my papi (dad) has some just down the street. When he got close, I realized I should probably just walk away, because he was riddled with tattoos and had some crazy shaved eyebrows. By the time I could say never mind, he was already on his phone calling for the jumpers. With 4 years of practically useless high school spanish classes, I was able to roughly translate his phone call. He was calling his papi, but at the end of the call he said to his dad that he’s an American and probably has some cash. At this point, I was like great!

So he let me inside his fence to wait for the jumpers. As he’s walking me in his front yard, he mentions to me that he has schizophrenia and that he is crazy, which started to make more sense the longer I got to know him. After sitting there for 5 minutes, I broke it down to him that all I had was 5 bucks. He was very happy with the 5 bucks and insisted that we go to the supermarket to go get some cigarettes. It was about a 2 minute walk and as we got closer to it he started walking faster. Once he gained about 10 feet on me, he whipped out his phone and made another call. The only part I heard was “gringo.” My ears went up, and I was kinda on alert mode now. I stood outside the supermarket when he went in. As we’re walking back, I wanted to make sure we weren’t gonna have any problemas. I’m not sure if he was truly confused or trying to play dumb, but he insisted that he didn’t know what I was talking about. About 30 seconds after our convo, we walked by a run down bar. He then told me that one of his amigos killed 2 people there and 1 at the supermarket we we’re at. Quickly, I was thinking well his amigos are about to come with the “jumpers” (that probably wasn’t the main reason for the trip over to the house). Maybe I was being paranoid, but I think the 2nd phone call was to his amigos to try and jump me. I had to make an escape before his amigos arrived. As we arrived back to his house, I put my pointer finger up and said un minuto and slowly jogged off. He didn’t seem to make much of it and simply said ok.

Like I said, maybe I was being paranoid and thought too much of it, but I was convinced that if I stayed there I was getting jumped (at the very least)! Either way, I was not taking a chance for stupid jumper cables.

But hey, we got the car jumped finally!