So here's what I spent most of my day doing. After my interview in the morning (which resulted in an immediate offer. Which only ever happens w/bullshit jobs. Plus/I temped there before.)/I came home & worked on my script. And this is what I wrote. (It's in screenplay format/which may not even post properly/so try not to get too bored by the lack of narrative in spots). Oh yeah/pictue the following cast members: Aja -- Halle Berry Jill -- a blonde, English beauty/yet to be cast (I'm actually hoping for Tracy Lords/if she can pull off an English accent. DeNiro originally wanted her for Ginger in 'Casino'/& I think she wd've been better in the part than Sharon Stone/who gave a good performance/but was too old to be convincing in the role/IMHO. Jim Winson -- A Kevin Costner type/but blond & not so A-list. Tony -- Robert DeNiro Sophia -- Lena Olin CUT TO: INT. BEDROOM OF HOTEL SUITE - SAME NIGHT Several large candles are scattered about the luxurious suite, bathing the room in soft, golden light. A beautiful floral arrangement sits on a table next to a chaise lounge occupied by JIM WINSTON - late forties, blond, with a light tan. His body is reasonably trim and naked beneath a hotel bathrobe. Several large rocks of freebase and some cocaine powder cover a mirror on the table next to him. An open bottle of Cristal rests on the floor next. JIM holds a glass pipe in one hand and a small propane torch in the other. We hear SEXUAL SOUNDS coming from the opposite side of the room, where AJA and JILL are entangled On the BED. Various articles of their clothing are scattered on the floor and a chair near the bed. JIM's face is expressionless but his pupils are hugely dilated as he stares intensely at the women. He gnites the torch and heats the bowl and neck of the pipe for few seconds, then takes a rock from the mirror and drops it nto the pipe. It sizzles loudly as he applies the flame to the bowl and begins inhaling the thick white smoke. MOANS and WHISPERS drift from the bed. We see AJA and JILL, naked. JILL is on her back. AJA is between her legs, kissing her inner thigh. JILL moans and tosses her head slowly from side to side. AJA (whispering) Look, it's time for the finale. Pretend you're coming and let's get this over with. JILL increases the pitch and frequency of her moans as AJA pretends to go down on her. We see JILL's honey-colored nails as she runs her hands through AJA's dark hair. AJA's golden- brown skin and black hair contrast sharply with JILL's creamy thighs. JIM extinguishes the torch and puts it aside, exhaling a cloud of smoke. He reaches beneath the robe and begins stroking himself languidly. JILL arches her body upward as her voice crescendos into a wail of fake ecstasy. ANGLE ON: AJA as a mischievous grin spreads across her face. She buries her mouth in JILL's thigh to stifle a laugh as JILL feigns a noisy climax. After a few moments, AJA rolls off of her and crawls up to the night table to retrieve a glass of champagne. JILL Oh baby, you were won-der-ful! I love the way you do me. AJA smiles conspiratorially and kisses her lightly on the mouth, then hands her the champagne glass. JILL polishes off the rest. JILL (continuing) Did you enjoy that, Jim? JIM WINSTON Very much indeed. You two are gorgeous together. Come over here and take a blast with me. JILL Just let us freshen up a bit, darling. CUT TO: AJA and JILL IN the large, elegant BATHROOM. AJA turns on the water in the sink. They each begin touching up their make- up. JILL (mock anger) You got lipstick all over me, bitch! AJA (giggling) Couldn't be helped. Hazards of the business. AJA reaches for bathcloth to wipe away the lipstick on JILL's thighs. She begins singing to the tune of 'Stormy Weather'. AJA (continuing) There's lipstick on his fly, he can't remember whhyyy... AJA & JILL (in unison) Slop-py blooow job! JIM enters the bathroom, pipe and torch in hand. JIM You girls up for a bath? DISSOLVE TO: A few candles light the bathroom softly as we see AJA, JILL and JIM in a BATHTUB FULL OF SUDS. A champagne bottle, glasses and a small mirror covered with rocks are scattered around the ledge of the tub. JIM holds the torch as AJA kneels to take a hit from the pipe. JILL reaches over to tickle her, making her cough out a cloud of white smoke. She swings at JILL, splashing her with suds. The three of them laugh and play together like happy children. CUT TO: EXT. ENTRANCE TO AJA'S BUILDING - JUST BEFORE DAWN AJA exits the limousine, pausing to hand HECTOR a tip. A different doorman smiles at her this time as he opens the door for her. She looks like a beautiful debutante returning home from the best party of the season. She smiles wanly, her eyes glassy from the drugs. CUT TO: AJA enters her apartment. She removes her shoes, unzips her dress and lets it fall to the floor near the couch. In underwear and stockings, she heads for the bathroom and begins removing her make-up. As she bends over the sink, she briefly loses her balance and braces herself against a the wall. Shaking her head to clear it, she grabs her toothbrush, dips it into a bottle of mouthwash and begins brushing her teeth. She stops to stare at her reflection in the mirror. AJA Girl, you are way too high... But you still look good! She opens her medicine cabinet and begins rummaging through several bottles, searching for a sedative. She finds the right bottle, pops two of the pills, washes them down with water. Returning to he bedroom, she climbs into bed and pulls on a sleep mask. CUT TO: EXT. TONY'S HOUSE - MONTAUK - SAME MORNING The sky is beginning to lighten as TONY enters a modest, shingle-style house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. He drops a plastic grocery bag on the kitchen table, lights a cigarette, then sits down. Reaching into the bag, he pulls out some onions, a few heads of garlic, a bunch of fresh basil, a bottle of olive oil, then several stacks of money. TONY proceeds to count the cash into bundles of $2000 each, binding them with a rubber band. Moving to the pantry, he stashes one packet inside the wall behind a loose board, replaces the board, then puts the vegetables on various shelves. Opening the refrigerator, he deposits the basil inside and grabs a beer. He puts the remaining stacks of money into a ziplock bag, then back into the plastic bag, and carries the bag and the beer outside. There is a sailboat attached to a hitch not far from the house. It is a beautiful, old, wooden boat, the kind they don't make anymore. The hull shows signs of repairs begun but never completed. Tony climbs aboard the boat, then ducks down into the cabin below. He hides the rest of the money inside a small refrigerator in the galley then returns to the deck to sip his beer and watch the sun rise. DISSOLVE TO: INT. SOPHIA'S TOWNHOUSE - NEXT AFTERNOON AJA and JILL, dressed in elegant daywear, enter the sitting room in SOPHIA'S townhouse. BACH PLAYS from hidden speakers. The room is exquisitely furnished with first-rate antiques. Expensive rugs cover parquet floors. We see flowers on nearly every table and fine art on every wall. SOPHIA is seated on a couch near the window. There is a silver tea service on the table in front of her, along with several envelopes. A striking young Asian girl sits on one side of SOPHIA, a beautiful Black girl on the other. Several other stunning young women are scattered about the room, talking and drinking tea in small groups. SOPHIA Ah, there they are. Lisa, meet Jill and Aja. Two of my best girls. They'll be taking you out this afternoon to do some shopping. As they shake hands and exchange greetings with LISA, SOPHIA hands JILL and AJA each one of the envelopes from the table. SOPHIA (continuing) Friday is payday. I serve tea at 3:00 -- it gives everyone a chance to catch up. But if you need your money earlier, you can pick it up any time after 12:00. I'm here all day on Fridays. If you're going to be out of town, I can hold onto your money or deposit it for you, if you like. And you're going to be earning quite a lot of money from now on. Will you excuse me for a moment? SOPHIA rises from the couch and leads AJA out of the sitting room and into her office across the hall. AJA She's exquisite. Where'd you find her? SOPHIA Tanise referred her. She's a classmate of hers at the ballet school. A bright girl from a poor family, the usual story... AJA How did you get her to agree to those implants? SOPHIA takes a seat behind he desk and motions for AJA to sit down opposite her. SOPHIA She asked for them. She said she doesn't want to be a dancer, her mother made her accept the ballet scholarship so she could come to New York. She claims she's been wanting breast implants since she was thirteen. One of the best plastic surgeons in the city is married to one of my former girls, so Lisa got them done at a very good price. I'll let her repay over the next six months. But Lisa said she knew she could command top dollar as a Chinese girl with a C-cup. Imagine, a perfectly beautiful girl like that wanting implants... AJA Well, every woman has her insecurities... SOPHIA Yes, quite true. AJA So what are you insecure about, Sophia? What scares you? SOPHIA The only thing I fear is poverty. As a child in Czechoslovakia, my family lived a very comfortable life. Until one day I returned home from school and found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, crying over a letter. It was a note from my father, telling her that he had left her for another woman. A very rich and beautiful woman, as it turned out. But heartless, as only the rich can be heartless. She kept him as a lover for not even a year, then dropped him cold. He never divorced my mother, but he was too ashamed to come back... He left Prague and I never heard from him again. But while he was lying between that rich woman's thighs, my mother went from being the wife of a respected violinist to washing other people's soiled laundry and taking in borders. But there was never enough money... Eventually, she contracted t.b. We could not afford medicine, so she died. AJA And you went to Paris... SOPHIA To live with relatives. And I swore to myself that I would never be poor and never depend on a man to take care of me... Women crucify themselves for love. They sacrifice everything for a man, for babies... But babies grow up. And men leave. She retrieves a large stack of bills from her desk drawer and hands them to AJA. SOPHIA (continuing) In the end, money is the only thing that saves you.

oooo i like.... RC why dont you write books instead of screenplays??

Thanks Moon. But you sound like my mother! She's forever asking me why I don't write a great American novel. So I'll ask you the same question I ask her -- How many Black novelists can you name in the next 60 seconds? And how many of their books do you actually own? Americans don't read like we used to. And for every Toni Morrison & Ernest Gaines that makes it into print/there are a dozen Terry McMillian's cranking out crap. Esp. when even Oprah doesn't feature exceptional Black writers like Gayl Jones /who is apparently not mainstream enuf for her. I do still hope to strike it rich someday. And movies are the quickest/most enjoyable way I know to do that. All it takes is 1 hit (w/a few gross points going in yr pocket/of course). Even if it's a low-budget critical hit/it'll lead to other, more lucrative offers. Also/I don't write novels becuz I won't get to direct a novel. Movies are the most powerful communications medium humankind has invented to date/IMO. No other art form provides you w/such an array of tools for telling a story -- light, sound, costume design, set design, cinematography, music. And actors to bring yr story to life... What cd be cooler than getting paid to make movies?

Nothing could be cooler than making movies! But.... I gotta say that I don't read a book based on what colour the author is... I could not care less. I read for the pleasure of the words.. to be transported to where the author wants to take me... and it doesn't matter what country you're from or what race you are to get me to read if you are a good writer... It doesnt matter to me if Oprah is promoting some 'hip' writer of the moment, if I don't like that person's work I won't be reading any of their books... Movies are great, but if a movie is based on a novel nine times out of ten that book is gonna be a zillion times better... I love to read... and I love what I read of yours... I'd even like to see more, cause RC if you ain't gonna write me a book let me imagine your movies.

Walter Mosely. Zora Neale Hurston. Does Claude McKay count? Langston Hughes? Jean Toomer. What's wrong with Terri McMillan? I like genre fiction. Richard Wright. Nzotake Shange (sp.?). That's it for my bookshelves. I'd rather write movies than books, though I read way more books than I see movies. It's a money thing, and an immediacy thing. I want my name to be a household thing overnight, not something make freshmen in college read. Or something featured on Oprah (who, though I like her, has sucky and pedestrian literary taste).

MoonUnit: Margret's got a pretty good collection of work by Black authors. She can tell you in her own words what the difference is btwn their work & the writing of Whitefolks. For me/I like reading stories abt people that look like me. We have 400 yrs. of unique perspective on every period of American history/but our stories rarely get told. That's why I buy fiction by Black authors. But the fact that it's Black & in print doesn't make it good. Terry McMillian is a hack/IMO. She writes superficial stories abt characters w/very little depth. The strength of her appeal is name-dropping -- the Sisters in her novels are all bourgeois status-conscious Black consumers. Whose lives appeal to designer-obsessed, status-conscious Sisters/who happen to be hungry for ANY images of contemporary Black women in literature that they can find. But the clothes on a character's back don't make her compelling to me. Even being left by yr husband for a White woman isn't that compelling. McMIllian uses a kind of cultural shorthand -- she tosses out experiences familiar to most Black women & uses them to prop up her stories/rather than developing her characters as people (vs. symbols) & exploring what is unique abt what they're going thru. And since Hollywood has turned 2 of her books into movies/she's gotten rich off mediocre writing. Which makes me sad when there are so many seriously talented Black writers not getting any play from the film industry.

Yeah, ok abt. Terry. But, see, I read books roughly the same by mrs. uncle charlie. I actually like reading brain candy; I read a lot of heavy shit and I find that a supericial cultural shorthand will flush it right out. I didn't mention Jamaica Kingston, my bad. If you like detective novels, then I can't recommend anyone in the genre more highly than Walter Mosely. Other than James Ellroy, he's the only oldschool style hardboiled detective fiction I read -- the rest is all contemporary setting, accidental hero stuff. Monique Wittig once compared using the trope of the universal point of view as a literary Trojan horse. People are pulled in by what they expect to be reading, because the language and the outlines are roughly similar to what they've been conditioned to expect. But once they're in, it begins to dawn on them that they're looking through a different pair of eyes, and the world they're seeing (which is being assumed as universal, which makes a power statement of its own, rock the fucking house) is not exactly what they think they should be seeing. Walter Mosely is one of the best writers alive today, IMHO. He uses your expectations of a particular genre to explode that genre and to shift your attention to a history and culture which grows up right alongside that which is, in this country at least, the assumed "universal." His language is beautiful, his characters 4 dimensional, his history solid, his sex sexy. Oh my god I could go on and on and on but I won't. If you must start somewhere, I say start with Mosely. Oh shit and I totally blew off Toni Morrison. Fuck. Well, Beloved is a humdinger of a novel. But seriously start with Mosely. Mosely is where to start. Mosely will tell you in 10 pages if having his badass hero get beat up by white cops because to fight back is to guarantee death what I could not explain in 8 million pages. And he'll do it without telling you his hero has to take the beating because the cops'll kill him otherwise. He'll do it by showing you a world in which a strong, proud, brave, smart, loving man lives with the knowledge that he has to be smarter and stronger just to get by tomorrow, much yet live to next week. I am getting weepy. Mosely makes me weepy. And Mosely does this all in the development of a plot that is fast-paced, full of sweat and adrenaline. He has my vote for writer of the century. No shit.

Oh my god I am going to be drummed out of the ubergeek culture and thrown to the weasels. Mosely is tied for writer of the century, with Samuel R. "Chip" Delany. Oh fuck am I ever going to take a beating. The only thing I can say in my defense is I'm not reading as much SF these days and it's all back of mind. No, no, I take it back. Delany is an utter ass kicker, but he's just a tinch too literary for my tastes...as SF goes he is, frankly, unparalleled though occasionally Harlan Ellison does compete. But he's not as approachable as Mosely. Delany does the same thing with SF in terms of blowing your mind by playing to your expectations, but he is frankly less visceral. Still, he is running a really close second to Mosely and might genuinely be tied if I wasn't so pretentiously anti-intellectual. Octavia Butler is also one of the super heavy weights of SF and she is, dig, also black. I like her, I like her a lot, but unlikely Delany and Mosely she wouldn't be in top 10 I'd take to a desert island. I have a boner against SF serieses longer than a tight little trilogy, though, another failing in me, not in her. She is righteous. Any of you people out there who read SF and have not read Delany are poseurs. Check your taped up glasses at the door, bitch.

ever heard of James Earl Hardy?

Who? (And Margret/I totally get the need for brain candy. But -- & maybe this is putting politics before The Art/or whatever -- when there are so few Black writers being published/& there's so much brain candy in the marketplace already by other authors/seems to me that work by Black authors w/real talent & something worthwhile to say shd be finding it's way into print before the work of the hacks gets published. And I got hip to Delaney from a thread here. (I'm not much of SF fan. I've read/like 4 SF novels in my entire life.) I'm still waiting for one of the 2 novels my library has by Delaney to be returned/so I can check it out.

RC, I work for a publishing company, we are an exclusive gay/lesb publisher, JAmes Earl Hardy is our bestselling authors, he writes fiction from the gay black man's perspective. FYI, never forget that publishers are a business, they are out to make money, bottom line.... they are not in the game of politics, if a publisher thought he could make money from publishing black literature, he/she would hands down. Ther are alot of small publishers who publish with 40% politics and 60% money in mind, but they learn real quick that publishing is not cheap and unless they have the money to turn around the next book and the next book and so on and so forth, they will publish what the market wants, our market society demands that. ps , if you like poetry, i highly recommend a new book we recently published from a San Fran poet named Marvin White, the book is called "Last Rights" his poetry is not necessarily gay per se, though it may come in the words, however he is more of a slam poet than anything. I highly recommend it, besides he is a really swell guy and it's shame poetry doesn't sell well

RC summed up Terry McMillan far better than I could have put it, though I was thinking the same things. And I'm not going to get into the SF thing because I'm at the library and only have a half hour slot on the timesuck machine. Also, my right index finger is bandaged up like a mummy from a broken glass incident at the bar Friday night, so my typing is more rudimentary than usual.

Markus, please believe that I don't mean that you have to worship Delany to qualify as an SF geek. I'm just saying you have to have essayed it. Dig this: I love Faulkner, but though I have tried my ass off (like 8 times) I can't get past like 10 pages into the 2nd 4th of S&F. But I've tried and tried and tried. NM, I'm pretentious. Maybe other people when they love something don't feel an obligation to research it and then destroy it solely for the purpose of resurrecting it in their own image. I read Delany because all the lit. crit. types who sneered at SF recommended it because it blew genre wide open. Oh my god this is the best pizza I've ever eaten cold. Meatballs...who woulda fucking thought?

I've read a Teri Williams book and I wondered at the time if she'd heard of exclamation marks and full stops and commas and semi colons and question marks and i ended up reading each page about three times because i couldn't follow where the train of thought thing was going and it drove me nuts, and the only reason I picked it up is because I was going to hire the movie out but still havent because I am useless I didnt realise she was a black writer at all and it was the book where that woman who played Tina Turner (was it Angela Basset? thats who I keep thinking of but my brain has turned to mush) goes to Jamacia and meets a guy half her age and I thought that it would be interesting but as you see without punctuation things get quite confusing.. dont they... now I want to go home and check my bookcase... I will get back to you and this time I will use punctuation

hehe i meant terry mcmillian i tell you i work too much and i am trying to eat health and i can feel the 'lack of sugar' headache coming on. damn i hate 2.30pm

Margret, I couldn't agree with you more about Delaney and Ellison but I've never heard of Mosely. I went through an enjoyable Ellison addiction years ago. I had everything except for a couple rare british titles. Then it was Delaney and then PK Dick. I sometimes wish I had the brainpower to not just enjoy studying or "ripping apart" a novel but to need to do so. I don't know if I get it or if I really get it and it doesn't really matter that much to me. As long as I enjoy it. I also don't really care for series but, and I don't know if this the same thing, I do like novels that are not necessarily about the same people but that take place in the same "world" I like a well developed world. Iain Banks did, for me, some very satisfying stuff with his "Culture" novels. Not on a level with Delaney but very interesting. (to me)

Waffleboy said: <... never forget that publishers are a business, they are out to make money, bottom line.... they are not in the game of politics, if a publisher thought he could make money from publishing black literature, he/she would hands down.> Umm, so are you telling me that Blackfolks don't buy books by Black authors? We proved w/Terri McMillian's 1st novel ("Disappearing Acts" -- which didn't cross over -- Black buyers made that title a success) that we do buy books. In droves. We buy books/records/movie tkts./ cars/soda/cigarettes/booze -- all the same stuff Whitefolks buy. IF you put it out there & advertise it where we can see it. How many Black eds.-in-cheif are there in the pub. biz? Less than 6/I'll bet. And how many of them have the clout to take a manuscript by a Black author & get it into print? Fewer than 6/I'll bet. I'm SO sick of that old saw that 'Black authors don't sell' except for the 5 or 6 big names who've won all the awards! If books by serious, talented Black fiction writers were published & promoted properly (i.e. the same way publishers promote Stephen King & Frank McCort & Wally Lamb) Black people wdn't have to hunt high & low ferret out Black authors to read. If Gayl Jones' last book had 100 copies beaming out from the front window of Barnes & Noble/& big-ass banners w/her title at Amazon.com/millions of Blackfolks wd be reading her work today. But publishers suddenly lose all their marketing know-how when a Black writer dealing w/Black people hands them a manuscript. Why do you think that is? We all wanna get paid. And I know that book publishing is a very capital-intensive biz. But if they get their Black authors reviewed by the NY Times/publish excerpts in the New Yorker & Essence/send the writer to talk w/Tavis Smiley on BET & Charlie Rose on PBS -- in short/if the publishers decided to spend the $$ & PROMOTE Black authors as seriously as they promote White fiction writers/there wd be enough public awareness to create a demand for their work. Among Whites/Blacks & anyone else who enjoys good fiction. Promoting books is no different than promoting records. You craft an image for the artist/you put their image & their product out there by spending $$ in the right places/& voila! People buy it.

RC, you took that the way I guessed you might have taken it. NO, I AM NOT saying there aren't balck book buyers and black book sellers and black book publishers, believe they are out there....but for the moment I am going to go dig up some statistcs to aid my point, and I will respond further.............

R.C.,I liked your work and hope you can pull it off.I,m usually disapointed if I read a book first and then see the movie.Then you need $$ and it remined me of another thread,you posted once about needing to help a friend find her ex-husband.Go there and hook up with the links from I thought it was you or Swine.I,m sill surfing for that one I e-mailed you about,but am dead on serious,Bermuda,Costa Rica,as long as there are margaritas,and some sassy salsa.

MMMMMmmmm. Margaritas.

if you're looking for margaritas and good salsa, you're much better off going to mexico than anywhere in central america. the cuisine of the central american countries is much milder (i.e. more bland and boring) than that of meixco. and most mexican restaurants in mexico don't serve margaritas, but the gringo joints do. or you can always get a lime agua fresca (if you're not afraid of contracting a bacterial infection from the tap water, which is sometimes ok in the larger cities) and add your own tequila.

OK RC, here goes...... First, I looked for buying statistics when it comes to book buying and book publishing. In the half hour I spent on the web, I couldn't find any. I did go to the census website. FYI, over the last 5 years blacks have made up 12.6-12.8% of the American population. Keep this in mind at all times and I will answer all of your points. Again, I am not saying there isn't a market for black authors. It would be foolish to think publishers would deliberatly overlook this market. "But publishers suddenly lose all their marketing know-how when a Black writer dealing w/Black people hands them a manuscript. Why do you think that is?" Frankly, this is bullshit. I have a database of almost all the bookstores in America, do you know how many out of 3925 records are "black bookstores"? 68, we have this type of specific information because we DO market to the black market when we have a related book coming out. Again out best selling author is a black gay writer, figure it out. From a marketing standpoint, we want to be as accurate as possible. In the 1999 American Book Trade Directory of all of the they only list 59 "African/Black Studies Booksellers" I also acknowledge that "black" books also sell in the mainstream bookstores as well. All I merely stated was publishers are out to MAKE MONEY and they all think they can do it by taking on books that appeal to the widest range of people. "But if they get their Black authors reviewed by the NY Times/publish excerpts in the New Yorker & Essence/send the writer to talk w/Tavis Smiley on BET & Charlie Rose on PBS -- in short/if the publishers decided to spend the $$ & PROMOTE Black authors as seriously as they promote White fiction writers/there wd be enough public awareness to create a demand for their work.Among Whites/Blacks & anyone else who enjoys good fiction." Since I assist with the marketing & publicity for my company I can address this directly. Money doesn't always equal reviews and interviews. Believe it or not, if the book is good, reviews will come, regardless of how much money is spent. Bottom line, again it's not so black & white (no pun intended) publishers will publish what will make money and booksellers will promote what will sell and reviewers will review what people want to hear about. It's not so political, it's not so racial as you might think. I had a co-worker who felt we were being racists in not publishing more black authors, unfortunately there aren't many truely talented black authors writing about the gay experience, be it lesbian, gay, bisex what have you. She had the perspective, that if it was black, we should publish it, period. From a business stand point thats insane. Do you sincerely believe general fiction publishers are intentionally overlooking black authors? If so I think you are misguided.

"Go there and hook up with the links from I thought it was you or Swine." ????huh? I'm serious too! Bermuda's too close/to small & too willing to extradite. S'gotta be a country w/ no extradition treaty w/the U.S. Which I'll have to research. But I think there are a few So. American countries that qualify. A banker here quietly embezzled a large sum (the bank won't fess up how much) & disappeared last March. When he 1st went missing/it barely made the papers. The real story just broke a week ago/when they found the $$ gone. Seems he was the guy handling all the internal accounting & moving the $$ around to cover various deals for the bank. Just a mild- -mannered middle-class (I was surprised at how modestly he lived) schmoe. He left behind a wife & kids/which sucks. But I ain't got no wife & kids. (Six will definitely come w/me.) I wanna be THAT guy!

which is not to say that all central american countries have the same sort of food (although, ultimately, it all revolves around corn, beans and bananas). belize has some creole-type food, great riceandbeans. honduran restaurants serve fried bananas with everything. they also have a nice banana milkshake and yummy baleadas (flour torillas topped with beans and sour cream). but none of those countries has food as spicy as in mexico. I know you have your heart set on costa rica, although I'm not sure some of your reasons (like they only let moneyed people in? I don't recall what exactly you said earlier) are necessarily true or desirable, but I haven't actually been there anyway. the posters make it look beautiful. and from my experience, it is true that the richer tourists tend to go there instead of its neighbors. but if you haven't traveled deeply into mexico, I cannot recommend it highly enough. flights are cheap as fuck. the food is better than anywhere else on the continent. it's got jungles, beaches, booze and a great exchange rate. the people were nice to me. I've been to most cities in central mexico, the west coast, the southern part and yucatan. and the veracruz area. skipped taxco and cuernavaca for lack of money and northern mexico for lack of interest. but if you want any recommendations on how to have a great time on $10 a day there, just ask.

met a guy in a little beach town on the west coast, halfway between mazatlan and puerto vallarta, and he said he had embezzled funds from a bank and was just hanging out, waiting for the statute of limitations to expire. he was living in a cabana next to a strip bar and he body surfed and ate a lot of banana bread and seafood stew. we ate ice cream together and talked about a portland bar called the alibi.

R.C.,go to mangle and look under the post I want,scroll down to your needing a cyber wizard.I have been to Matzalon,I know I did,t spell that right it,s about 800 miles into Mexico.The time I posted about Costa Rica,I meant if you are planning to move there and live(not just visting)they just make it so you can,t just move there and get on welfare forever.

mazatlan sucks. I don't like the resort cities, though they are good entry points (cheap airfare and good bus links) to the country. they just built a highway from mazatlan to san blas, so you no longer have to connect through tepic (the inland and uninteresting state capital) anymore. so if you ever find yourself in mazatlan, tell the tip-hungry driver from the airport to take you to the bus station (he'll drop you off last every time), and catch a bus (two hours?) to san blas. when you get there, you don't need to look for casa maria -- she will find you first. that's if you want to spend $10 a night for a room with your own bathroom. if you want to go seriously cheap, ask where carla lives. she'll rent you a room for $40-50 a month. the bar right off the main square serves up margaritas. you'll want to hang out there after dark, not on the beach, where the jejune bugs will eat you alive. but they don't come up to the plaza. you'll find the banana bread and mcdonald's drag show on your own. for a share of a bottle of tequila, one of the local guys will take you out shark fishing on his boat. there is also a fresh-water spring nearby, where they filmed la cabeza de la vaca, some film that is supposedly famous. take a motorboat (the earlier in the day you go, the more rare birds you see) up to the source, where you can get a sandwich, swing off a rope into the pond, and take a swim with the crocodiles (let the kids swim out farther and hope they'll eat them first). don't let the wire fence in the water calm you into inattention -- please notice the big hole that the crocodiles seem to enjoy swimming through. I didn't get eaten but I lead a charmed life. god, I love san blas. I want to go back to mexico right now.

Your right Cyst, Matzatlan did suck in so many ways that I will post under What is Hell one day,but I won,t go there now.I like going to Rocky Point wich is just a small fishing village by the Sea.

Your right Cyst, Matzatlan did suck in so many ways that I will post under What is Hell one day,but I won,t go there now.I like going to Rocky Point wich is just a small fishing village by the Sea.

Sorry

J -- Pls. post a link for where you want me to go. I can't find any "I want..." board on the Mangle topics. Mexico has all the right amenities/but it's too close to home. I'd feel safer in Brazil of some little siland chain like the Seychelles. I'm up for any place w/a good for.ex.rate/lots of fresh shellfish/access to good tequila/& natives that look like me. And the temp. cannot rise above 85 degrees during the day/or drop below 70 degrees at nite. And no tornados or monsoons or crazy shit like that.