Bohemian Beach Chiropractor in Mexico Saves a Kayaker's Day
Introducing Dr. Johnny Tequila
Hola Amigos! Those of you who’ve traveled to Mexico’s beautiful shores know there’s gold in them thar hills. Mexico is a potpourri of unexpected pleasures and surprises as you will soon find out by reading this little gem.
If you've ever traveled to Mexico, you know with a little initiative and luck, you can find anything you need there. And by the same token, anything can happen. NPR host Ira Glass brought that point home in an episode of “This American Life,” which I’ll relate here. The topic was “A Day at the Beach,” 1 and Shane DuBow shared a hilarious memory about a beach episode in Mexico with producer Alex Blumberg. You’ll love it.
Shane recalled an experience that took place while on a kayaking trip in Baja California. He and his friends were on a month-long vacation to kayak in the Gulf of California. They were smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
Shane painted a picture of early Baja before the tourists arrived like this: "There's the desolate road, little beach communities and a handful of small tourist centers with palapas and cold drinks. But mostly what we were doing was finding deserted open beaches for camping. Most of the time there was nobody else around.
"There were six or seven in our party. Some wanted to fish, others wanted to hang out and play cards. Some snorkeled. We slept outside a lot and it felt like we were 12-years old again, pretending to be Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. We carried all our own water and food, camping supplies, tents, sleeping bags and cooking equipment.
"We're in Baja, a week or so into the trip, and we're on a layover which means we're just camping and not trying to kayak. We'd been clamming all day, and out of the blue, my neck locks up. I can't turn my head to one side. This is bad for lots of reasons, but when you're kayaking, you have to use both arms and turn your head side to side.
"I'd had this occasionally over the years—it just happened periodically, maybe six times a year. It'd last for three or four days. We'd run into a little expat community on a beach close to where we were camping. These folks lived in campers and had set up cantinas made from a tarp staked up by poles where they'd serve beers, and in our case, showed us how to clam. Afterwards they made us a clam feast.
"So we went back to the guy that had taught us clamming, stopped by his camper. I asked him if there were any chiropractors nearby. What a ridiculous question, because there was absolutely nothing nearby. He gets this look in his eye, sort of wistful, and says no, there's no chiropractor, but there is a guy who's considered an amateur chiropractor who helps some of the locals. He lives on a boat two coves over. And if you go to this man, the guy tells me, he may help you. He calls himself Dr. Johnny Tequila.”
Empowered by the possibility, Shane asks, "How do I get there? I don't want to miss it." The guy tells Shane he won't miss it. He grabs a bar napkin and a pen and sketches a rough outline of the coast and puts an X, as in X marks the spot.
"That's where to find Johnny Tequila, just two coves over," he says.
“None of my friends wanted to go with me. They're all chilling out, playing cards. With my neck ache getting worse by the minute I realize I'll have to kayak by myself if I want to see this guy.
My friends had started to tease me about my paddle stroke which by this time was one-armed and half-crippled and they're calling me "chicken wing," because of my neck.
"So I chicken wing for two coves worth, maybe a mile paddle, right close to shore, with the beach on my right and the open ocean to the left. While I'm chicken winging, I look down at my napkin and it's all wet. My map is destroyed. But I keep paddling, and at the second cove, there’s a boat in the middle of this otherwise empty cove. It's not a harbor of any kind, no dock or anything man-made. Nothing around. The boat’s docked in the water about 30 yards from shore.
"As I paddle closer I see it has a cabin. The mast is up, but not any sails. As I get closer and closer I can see around the mast and lined up are empty Cuervo Gold tequila bottles, but kind of orderly. That was the weird thing," Shane said. "You don't usually associate empty tequila bottles with order but these had been meticulously lined up, ringing the mast.
"Weird, I think. And here I am paddling up on a boat in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. I don't even know how to start. But from some place deep within, the word ahoy comes to me. Which I've never used before in normal conversation.
"Ahoy, ahoy!" I say. And from out of the cabin comes a completely naked woman. She looks American, blond hair, tanned so deeply, it's like the tan that goes to your liver. Tan all the way through. Real muscley— her shoulders looked like she was probably a rafting guide in Colorado.
"She's completely naked and totally unfazed about being naked and just greets me and talks as if she were wearing clothes. And she's above me holding onto the side of the boat, so I'm looking up at her being naked from my kayak.
"From my kayak I say, 'Is Johnny Tequila here?' She's very nice and she says that he went into town for supplies but should be back shortly and why don't I just wait until he comes back. Eventually we see him, Johnny Tequila, on the beach near us. He's got a little row boat and he rows over. He looks exactly like her. He's got on shorts and he's got that tan. He's kind of muscley in his shoulders and chest and they both have kind of wild, bleached-out blond hair and real scruffy, maybe 30s, but the sun can make people look older.
"I tell him my story and he's like, yeah, of course I'll help you. He says to follow him to shore. I chicken wing over and we both pull up to the beach.
"Follow me," he says. And now we're going into the jungle, but it's not real jungle—it's dense scrub with bushes all around. Baja has lots of cacti that grows in the middle of nowhere with nothing else for miles. I follow him down a path and we come to a clearing.
"There in the clearing is a table exactly like a massage table you'd see in a chiropractor's office, where you put your face in that open center part, the face rest. The real deal. And a life-sized human skeleton is hanging from a tree, which I assume is a replica, but it looks like a skeleton. I'm checking this all out and thinking—a table in a clearing in the middle of the desert in Mexico, with a skeleton.
"He asks me to lie on my back, and I'm looking up at his face and his crazy hair. He's shirtless. So my shirtless chiropractor puts his hands around my neck in the middle of Mexico in a clearing with a skeleton. The amateur chiropractor now has my neck in his hands. And then he proceeds to give me a chiropractic exam that resembles every other chiropractic exam I've ever had.
"He does an adjustment that passes for any other chiro adjustment. So I tell Johnny Tequila thank you for adjusting my neck. Can I pay you. And he says, No, I just do this to help people. There'll be no payment but if you ever see me in a bar, you can buy me a shot of tequila."
The show’s producer, Alex, asks Shane if his neck was better. Shane says it's possible, but initially he has to chicken wing it back, but then over the next few hours he starts to feel much, much better. And the neck is okay.
"So," Alex asks, "when you think back on Johnny Tequila, is he an argument for chucking it all and moving to some quiet beach in a distant land, or is he an argument against it?"
“I can’t believe you asked me that! He's one hundred percent an argument for. A simpler life—just crack people's necks, drink tequila, sing in the cantina and go home to my naked lady? Did I not tell the story to make it seem good? To me it seemed great!"
An aside: Thirty years after turning to Dr. Tequila on a remote Mexican beach for chiropractic help, Shane tracked the man down in a remote part of southwest Utah in 2020 where he lives with the naked lady Cindy, who first introduced herself to Shane way back then.
Johnny was close to 80 by that time. He told Shane his nickname came from when he was playing music at open air parties in his twenties out near the hidden hot springs in Death Valley. And he sent him a photo.
So the message here is: You really can find anything you need in Mexico. You just have to look for it, and have a smidge of luck.
Ira Glass and Shane DuBow. “A Day at the Beach” on “This American Life." NPR Broadcasting. (Jan 31, 2014).
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MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
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