People You Meet Along the Way: Blackhead Bob & Baby Huey

After the riot in my kids's high school, I decided to take them out for a year and travel. Mark and Dorsey anyway . . .Kurt was working. In 1967 we had found Pie de la Cuesta just north of Acapulco, and didn’t have enough time to investigate. So, in June of 1970 we headed out and for the next four months we became total beach bums! It was insanely wonderful. Act after act passed though the hotel where we had a cabana. Three guys who played bongos all night while they stripped a VW Bug and loaded the panels, spare tire, boot, under the fenders and dash board with drugs. We heard they got caught before they got out of The Pie. Then there was a group shooting adult movies in one of the cabanas.

So, this is about Baby Huey and Black Head Bob. Bob is first. Bob and his ex marine buddy had rented a cabana for a full year. The owner of the hotel, Don Manuel, told me no one was allowed to enter. Several nights, late at night, I woke to a truck pulling in and lots of grunting and muted cursing. Then one day the ex-jar head ran out onto the beach and started firing at a school of porpoises with a Colt .45. That drew some attention. I tried to tell him what he was shooting at weren’t sharks, but he seemed in another world. He was. He fired two full clips, 14 rounds and almost as soon as he unloaded the last round, the cops pulled into the drive.

Of course they handcuffed him and shoved him in the cabaña, where Black Head Bob was napping surrounded by piles and piles of stolen appliances from Sears Roebuck’s. ‘Seems they were fencing for a gang of Sears employees. Black Head and The Sarge were hauled off, and the cops took all the goods. Don Manuel told me that they sold everything in the market the next day for really good prices. So goes Mexican Justice.

Now, Baby Huey. He was six feet five, about 250 pounds, had a gut that hung six or so inches over his faded tattered swim trunks. His hair was long, unwashed and making a vain effort to become Dread Locks. You didn’t want to touch his hair. The other outstanding charming point about the Babe was his glasses. They were thicker than Coke bottle bottoms. Even then he had to hold a paper less than two inches from his eyes to read! When anyone spoke to him, he nodded and usually looked in the wrong direction. It was sort of pathetic he was so impaired, but since his vocabulary consisted of a series of grunts and muttering.

The beach crowd managed to ignore him. That is, until this one morning when I looked up and he was heading for the beach. Right then the waves were about twelve feet high and the rip tide could tow you out to China in a heart beat. No one was body surfing. Gerry asked what he was going to do and Huey told him he was going for a swim. I suggested he leave his glasses unless he had extra pairs and also that he should wait. I got a grunt. He said this was his only pair, he couldn’t see without them, so he was wearing them in. I told him he’d lose them in the first wave. He grunted and told me he could take care of himself. Five minutes later he was back. Soaked and glasses gone. He called out my name and asked me if I could help him up the stairs, but before I could get up off the couch, he ran face first into a three feet square pillar and knocked himself out. Gerry and Bruce got some ice, but it still took a couple minutes to bring him around. We helped him up to his room. About an hour later he was dressed, packed and heading for his beat up sedan parked under a palm and splattered with dove do. Mark yelled ‘ What are you doing Huey?’ and he waved, found the car after reaching around with both hands until he made contact and got in. He hit two of his fenders on the stone wall before he reached the street. Mark and Bruce ran after him, but once he felt the asphalt under his wheels, he screeched off. He disappeared at the intersection. So it goes.