I intended to send a short anecdote to WebKittyn about my trip to Mexico. It was supposed to be funny and make her laugh. It was going to be my attempt to win her contest on WebKittyn Wednesdays. I don't really care about the prize. She had a bad month and I wanted to help her feel better. However, I started writing and I kept writing. It kept going and going. And while slightly amusing, it didn't turn out at all the way I intended. So instead I am posting it here to amuse my readers ... or at least try. It's long, but I'm not going to put it in extended entry. I don't think people actually read them when I do or else I'd have more comments about goat testicle transplants.

---

Mexico.

I’ve only been to Mexico once. By Mexico, I mean real Mexico, not border town Mexico. That doesn’t count. If you have ever been to border town Mexico it is something akin to the brackish mire you get when salt water and fresh water meet. Border Mexico isn’t real Mexico, it’s where 18 year old college student go to drink, fornicate and find cheap ass weed. (A one pound brick of weed is like $60. No, seriously, it is. It’s not even skanky weed.)

I digress.

I’ve only been to Mexico once. It was during spring break one year in Junior high. My best friend at the time had a sail boat that was in one of the port down there. We went down with her dad and little sister.

The drive down left something to be desired. We drove down in a Gremlin. Yes, people actually drove those after they stopped making them in the 70's. It was a miserable little car that was older than me. On the way back, the rear view mirror fell off. Just BAM, fell off. It was hot and the glue melted it off and it fell off of the windshield. Fucking Awesome.

But that’s not the point.

We drove down in a Gremlin. On the way down, I did everything in my worldly power to sleep the entire trip rather than listen to the family sing, chat and point out cacti on the side of the road. So, I grabbed my pillow with all my might and willed myself into sleep. You’d be surprised how easy this is when everything around you is so dull that your brain just shuts itself off rather than have its meager brain cells disappear into the ether.

We get down there and the weather is awful. The boat is way the fuck out in the dock and we have to ride over in a dingy. By dingy I mean row boat, and by row boat, I mean a few planks of wood strapped together with a sad excuse for a motor barely gripping onto the back. Or, perhaps my memory fails me of the dingy. So, the four of us pile into the dingy with all of our crap and food for the week. By this point, we’re dangerously close to taking on water. We start out into the bay where the boat is.

There are some inconsiderate fuck-nuggets riding about in high powered motor boats despite the bad weather. Every time the buzz past us, the dingy nearly capsizes because of the wake they leave. You can see the glitter of the gold and diamond jewelry as the yuppies pass us by. You can hear the highball on their breath and smell the deep tans on their skin.

¡Joder! (Fuck!) ¡Vete a la Meirde! (Go to Hell!) ¡Pandejo! (Asshole!) ¡Puta madre! (Motherfucker!)

It take every ounce of my restraint not to shout profanity at them in Spanglish because I’m sitting there with my friend’s father and younger sister and I don’t want them to hate me any more than they already do. I later learned that Pandejo can literally be translated not as asshole, but rather as anal hair, which in some ways is an even better insult. I do wish I had shouted it.

Luckily, we didn’t capsize and we make it to the boat. And I didn’t shout profanity in Spanish.

We unpack and we sleep.

The next day we decided to go to the beach. Fuck, we’re in a beautiful, clean coast city what else should we do?

We take the dingy out to the shore and drive down to the beach. We stop at a shop and pick up some lunch. We decide to take lunch under a grove of palm trees.

I should rephrase that. They decide to picnic under a grove of blooming palm trees while I hide within the oven-like gremlin hiding from the palm pollen and sap so that I may continue to breath and not die in a foreign country of asphyxiation. I eat my lunch, cowering within the scalding Gremlin as they sit outside in the pleasant perfectly 75°, breezy, beach watching the dolphins swim in the distance. Eventually they finish and I have turned into a puddle within the car.

It didn’t help.

An hour later my friend looks at me as we walked along the beach picking up shells and says,

“¡Meirde! What happened to your face?”

I itch everywhere by this point. I can see the hives all over my body and I suspect that my face is also covered with them. Luckily, I can still breath and my throat hasn’t swollen closed or much at all. I shrug it off.

I trudge as we make out way back to the car and then the boat. I’m miserable. My feet hurt from having all the calluses worn off the bottoms by the sandy beach, my face itches, by back itches, my fucking crotch itches from the hives that have begun to plague me.

“¡Meirde! Máteme, máteme, máteme…. Kill me, just put me out of my misery and kill me.”

Everyone else is jovial. I am curled up in a corner, reading, hiding and twitching all over trying to not scratch. I wait for the benedryl to kick in so at least I can sleep. Anything to make it stop. I have a book: short horror stories by Stephen King – I think it was Skeleton Crew. I was reading the story about a man trapped on a desert island who eventually ate his foot, then leg, then hand. Mmmm… lady fingers.

They make “gloop”. Apparently “gloop” is a bunch of canned shit all thrown into a pot and heated up. There was something white (either cream corn or cream of mushroom, I’m not certain), peas, cream chicken soup, corn, green beans and some other unidentifiable nasty shit that had probably been sitting there since the last time they had been down to their boat. Needless to say, by that point, I wasn’t very hungry, though I had a hanckerin’ for chicken strips.

Eventually I did manage to sleep… though I did have this nagging fear that a strange oily monster was going to jump out of the water and dissolve my flesh from my bones. At least I wouldn’t fucking itch anymore.

The next day, we go into town. Did you know ports in Mexico all have public showers? Well, they do… and they’re cleaner than the gym shower at school were. It was amazing. After the shower and the benedryl, I felt much better, but, I was definitely in the realm of freakish with my red and bumpy, swollen skin. It was like I was the Toxic Avenger… or his red-headed step sister.

Anyway, after being clean, I felt rejuvenated. My friend and I decide to go get some fresh cracked coconuts for a few pesos. We wander down to the dealer and get a coconut. The take a machete and hack off the top and hand us straws. We add some lemon juice and Tabasco and go to town drinking the coconut milk out of the shell. We finish the milk and hand it back to them, then chop it in half and scoop the meat for us. We eat and enjoy.

It was about this time that a rather suave looking Mexican man comes up to us and offers to buy us another. We were like 13 and this man had to be at least 30. You must also understand that my friend was like a double D cup. She had to get specially made bras. I, on the other hand, was a skinny, muscular freak from my sport lovin’ behavior. I didn’t even need a bra. Still, we couldn’t figure out which one of us had actually made him decide to buy us a coconut. And that was rather frightening and so we didn’t refuse it.

My friend was a spaz. She was full and so we sat there sucking the juice form the coconut and she kept mumbling something about this one having so much milk in it. She wasn’t actually drinking any; she just kept the straw in her mouth. The man was there watching over us and we were smiling and nodding, speaking politely with him in Spanglish. In my head I pictured him lunging at the chaps selling coconuts, stealing their machetes and hacking me and my friend to bits then doing perverse things with our adolescent bloody stumps.

Eventually we finished the coconut and he walked off. Crisis Averted!

But this left me questioning. Who was this man? Why did he want to buy young girls a coconut? Was there some strange innuendo there I had missed? Did he get off on young girls sucking juice from a straw? Was he just being nice?

The questions rolled over and over in my head as we headed about town.

We had taco that could have been rat or possibly pigeon. We got mangos from the grocer. We bought a few woven baskets. We walked through the bamboo brush in the mire. I got bitten by some crazy spider. I ate the best Tortilla Soup I have ever had the pleasure to put near my mouth and ingest. That, was a good day.

The next day we left.

On returning home, I looked at my shells, my rash and my woven baskets.

Even now I would like to go back down there, but I don’t think it will be the same now. Will I be able to get that Tortilla Soup again? Is that evil Palm Tree grove still there? Can I still get tacos of questionable meat? Is there some 50 year old suave Mexican buying 13 year old girls coconuts?

I don’t know.

Honestly, I don’t think I want to find out.

Posted by Utopia at March 10, 2006 11:12 AM

Comments

---

Posted by: Seraphim at March 10, 2006 01:40 PM

---

---

Posted by: Helen at March 10, 2006 07:51 PM

---

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)