#4. Coco Bongo (Friday, December 25, 2015)

What was your best day…of doing something totally epic?

Part 1

“Music. Dancing. Alcohol. The best night of your life.”

That was the tag-line posted all throughout our resort in Cancun, promoting the exclusive, world-famous nightclubs that could be found in the city’s downtown – just a short bus ride away.

Didn’t make the best of the best for me, but came pretty close.

Through the first four days of my trip, no one in our group of twenty or so family friends really got up to anything – and there was no intention for any one of us to get up to anything. We were here on vacation, and so we were here to relax and stay out of trouble. Nothing else.

Well, I unfortunately had some unresolved issues to deal with. Namely, the fact that I had squandered almost all of my college years by being some anti-social anti-drinking prude (#13), and had missed out on countless experiences that could have defined the best years of my life. And now I was getting older, feeling my carefree youth slip away while living in a place that deep down was also creating a growing insecurity (#12). Was I actually living any kind of life at all?

Thanks to that, plus more tension that had been building in the first four days of my vacation (most notably from losing my glasses in a cenote¹), a strong feeling came onto me that that I needed to get that unfiltered Cancun experience. Like it was something that had to happen.

So on Thursday night, Christmas Eve, I took the short bus ride to downtown to check it out. I walked the lively streets. Visited one of the bars (Senor Frog’s) where some Mexican guy there bought me a few Coronas and I got briefly roped into this strange activity (with a large group of college-aged kids, it seemed) where they poured blue liquor down my mouth. And bought a ticket for tomorrow’s Christmas Day Coco Bongo show.

Now Coco Bongo, for those that don’t know, is the premier nightclub in Cancun. It’s world-renowned for the opulence and the acrobatics and the wild mix of drunken insanity they have going on down there. So, in my state of mind, I was in.

After getting my ticket, I come back to the resort at around midnight. My parents warn me to not go to Coco Bongo tomorrow, since I don’t know what kind of crazy shit goes down in these places (which to them is a bad, bad thing). At this point, though, my mind is fully made up; so I shrug it off and then join my brother and the guys for one a.m. burgers on the grill.

Side Note: We’ve got a group of six guys there; the rest are all my brother’s age or slightly older. And most of the trip was just us six hanging out – playing cards, watching movies², eating plates upon plates of tacos, and drinking sketchy beer from the fountains – which itself was enjoyable enough. None of the other guys joined me in the whole venturing-to-a-nightclub-alone-in-a-foreign-country thing, though, since they weren’t old enough to either: (1) be in the same crippling mid-life crisis situation I was in; or (2) be able to just say “screw it” to their parents’ warnings.

Christmas Day comes. And throughout the daytime, everything just feels so oddly relaxed and low-key. First, the six of us watch this free (lame) dancing show that takes place on a pirate ship. Then, we go swimming and play catch in the ocean and get some drinks at the wet bar. All the while, the burning excitement for the ten p.m. Coco Bongo event is building inside of me.

At dinner that night, we’re all gathered in our separate groups at one of the all-you-can-eat buffets, as usual. I’m with my brother and the guys, when I see just my mom and dad sitting alone. They’re talking about something…and seem to be getting along really well for some time, laughing about something or other. In the last fifteen years, I have never seen anything like that (maybe once or twice, at most). It makes me feel really guilty about the whole Coco Bongo thing and almost reconsider going.

Almost.

Part 2

But of course I go. So after an hour of my customary teaching the other guys how to play Japanese Napoleon (#29) while catching the first half of Real Steel³; I grab my Duke Basketball T-shirt, put on my shorts, and take off for a wild night. (My douchebag prescription sunglasses are already on…since I lost my normal glasses in the cenote two days earlier.)

I arrive at downtown, and the place is booming. The first thing I notice is this cow-themed club – the Vaqueria – with a bunch of black and white dressed dancers standing on their platforms out front dancing, like that itself is a big fancy show. I just stare over there for a few minutes, and it gives me this strange incredible feeling – that I’m awesome because I’m an economist by myself in Cancun on vacation and I can just sit back and enjoy all of this like I’m supposed to.

I get in the line for Coco Bongo, which ends up extending very, very long – past where I can see. They hand us drinks in the line, which I consume right away.

Then they let us in. I walk in past a long string of stairs and hallways, then some bouncer guy asks me where I’m from. I start to say Canada, but then realize it’s cooler if I say U.S., so I say that. He’s like: What the fuck? He says: “You say you’re from Canada. Then you say you’re from U.S. And you look like Japanese. And what’s up with those sunglasses?” He makes me take them off, and I have a feeling I’m going to be kicked out right then and there.

But instead he introduces himself as Alex, and promises to show me a good time. He takes me in, and the place is insane. It’s like a concert hall, with a huge stage in the middle (for performances) and a giant jumbotron right above it. A giant bar surrounds the bottom side of the stage, and there are raised platforms all around for people to sit, drink, and dance. There’s just an unrestrained grandness to the whole thing that I hadn’t seen anywhere before (or since).

Suddenly, a flashing video appears at the front, “Get Ready for This” starts blaring over the entire venue, and it’s go time.

Over the noise, I chat with a group sitting right next to me. And then Alex comes with some drinks and shots (note that this is all open bar). This goes on for a while, I watch the acrobatics, get into the loud music that’s playing, and then jump into the crowd with my trademark wild dancing.

I keep dancing and throwing my arms in the air, all the way down to the bar area below. There, I hear masses of people ordering tequila shots and Jameson’s Irish whiskey⁴, so I call for a few of those as well.

I keep at it on the lower stage, surrounded by a chaotic crowd of revelers. Also all around me in this humongous space is the deafening blast of all my favorite pop songs, which brings my excitement up several notches. And soon enough, the guys around me start high-fiving me and joining in my incoherent singing/screaming, and that just brings it up even more notches. I am in full party mode now, and there is no stopping me.

But this isn’t just any party. I am at a Christmas Day party, by myself, dancing front and center in the most hype, most grandiose nightclub in one of the greatest nightlife spots in the entire world.

And for the next however many hours that this lasts, I am sure of only one thing in my mind.

I needed this.

Basically, this underground cave with a large pool of groundwater that we stopped by on our way to Chichen Itza. A bunch of us went to swim in it, where I kept my glasses on (despite warnings not to); then, when I took them off to get a cleaner look at the scenery…they slipped out of my hands and into the deep water, never to be seen again. I was thus forced to wear my prescription sunglasses for the rest of the trip.
SPOILER. One of which was Toy Story 3, where we just couldn’t get over the most overlooked hilariously idiotic moment in a classic movie ever; the part where one of the unimportant green aliens stupidly gets its foot stuck in the dumpster hatch (despite it being physically impossible), causing a chain of events that results in all the toys being stuck in the junkyard where they come within an inch of getting incinerated. (Side, side question: Why, after all of those years, did Andy keep those dime-a-dozen Pizza Planet aliens, while throwing out Bo Peep and almost all of his other toys?)
It should be noted that because of their association with this day, both Real Steel and the Bruno Mars song “Uptown Funk” (which was being played repeatedly through the pirate ship show, and I hated up to that point) instantly become my favorites.
Which instantly brings to mind that awesome experience at the derivatives conference two months ago (#25).