What the Fuck Prayers

I just prayed a holy prayer. I think I can transcribe it. It went like this. “What the fuck, God????” There was screaming involved. Also, snot. And sobbing. And a lot of other “s” words that stand for unpretty things people ooze when they are throwing tantrums.

You wanna know the weird thing? It got answered. My what the fuck prayers always get answered. The meltdown prayers that sound nothing like a page from a holy book and everything like the way I sound when I mean what I say, when I am too freaked out to put a pretty face on my acne ridden soul. God, it seems, is not so into cover-up. Or expensive shoes. God wants to see the cracks in your varnish, not the precious pot of flowers you slapped on top to cover the broken places up. At least that’s the way I would feel if I were God. Which I am not. (And I am too. We all are. But I digress.)

The fact that God seems to answer what the fuck prayers makes me think that God may be more into truth than fiction, reality than perfection. Of course, I am fully aware that every human creature must find his or her own path to truth. But maybe the quest for truth doesn't even begin until you actually tell the truth. Everything before that is rehearsal for the quest for truth. You aren’t even playing the game ‘til you get real. Maybe God is more into What the Fucks than Hail Mary’s. Maybe God digs the kids that plop themselves in his/her big fat lap and say, “You know what. I don’t fucking get it. You have some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.” Maybe, even though God is six jillion times bigger than us, and sees things way more clearly than we could ever hope to, he/she indulges our little whims. Maybe she smiles and says:

Ok, sweet child of mine. (Maybe he sings the sweet child of mine part, like a rock star.) Take a deep breath. Calm down. Now, here is a piece of candy, just to let you know I am thinking of you, I’ve got this covered. I’m not unrolling the whole plan for you all at once. I’m not ruining the surprise. But here’s a little something to say thank you for being real. Cause you know, every time one of those other kids crawls in here on her knees begging me not to smite her, I start to get a little down on myself. It can make a guy/girl a little insecure, all your children trembling every time you step into the room. “Hey, guys, I got you a surprise!” you shout, and they all start screaming, and not in a good way. What am I, freaking Frankenstein? (God runs his/her fingers through her fiery hair. ) I like you kids who aren’t afraid of me.

Maybe God gives the unafraid kids kisses on their angst ridden, wrinkled foreheads. Maybe those are the kids that remind her of herself. Maybe God wasn’t sure how this whole universe thing would pan out, but he did it anyway, cause he likes a good adventure from time to time. What if God doesn’t know the end of the story either, cause we are helping him write it? But what if, when you plop yourself in her lap and say what the fuck and kick and scream until you fall asleep, she can finally pick you up and carry you off to a safe place, the place you were supposed to be all along. Maybe God is into what the fuck prayers because they lead her children, eventually, to a place of rest, and she can finally help them out. Which is the thing he has always been trying to do. But when the kids say, “No, go away, I do it myself,” God lets them. Like any good parent would.

The what the fuck moments are coming home moments. That’s why God likes them so much.

Failed Feminist Moments (Or Hot Tub Drainage Goes Terribly Awry)

Ok, I just experienced what well intentioned but deeply misguided women like me call a Failed Feminist Moment.

To understand said moment, you have to bear with me on a little life history. I got divorced about three years ago and, in a fit of suddenly single insanity, sold my goreous, perfectly furnished and finished home, and put my winnings down on a pretty l’il fixer upper in the woods. Sure it needed work, but I had cash, and frankly, this house was freaking amazing. Latilla ceilings in some places. Glass ceilings in others. Giant shaved trees for support in the middle of the living room. A spiral staircase. And a pit roughly the size of a football field in the middle of the house that intended to become, but never really got around to becoming, an indoor pool. No problem, I would finish the pool. And refloor the entire place. Slap on a new roof. Replace all the fixtures. Finish the two unfinished bathrooms. NO PROBLEM.

After the guy I hired to fix up the house took fifteen thousand dollars and disappeared, and after I found out that the one thing the sellers never told me was that my well was dry, I had a whole lot less cash left on hand to finish said home. My plans scaled down considerably. After I finished half the work, and the house flooded, and I had to start all over again, they scaled down a little more. Indoor pools were hardly an option.

One of the great questions I had to ask myself is what to do with the failed indoor pool. I tossed around ideas. Giant planter? Fish pond? Giant cat box (which is pretty much what the old owners were using it for)? I finally settled on installing a hot tub in the pit and surrounding it with a water proof decking. I pictured myself, clad in a skin tight bikini, boasting Cindy Crawford’s body and a margarita, mobbed by adoring friends saying, “I can’t believe you have a HOT TUB in your LIVING ROOM!” and toasting me fondly. What I did not picture was the trauma of trying to drain said hot tub after said inebriated friends make their stumbling exits, having left all of their body oils gathering in greasy little clumps around the hot tub jets. So I didn’t ask the hot tub guy about drainage. So yeah, I didn’t get any.

So, how to solve this dilemma? (I am nothing if not resourceful.) I know! I will get me a young, buff boyfriend who will move in and drain the hot tub for me. Ok, that’s not why I got the boyfriend, but that’s one of the things he did while he lived with me. Without ever disclosing his super secret methods, he silently drained and refilled the hot tub on a regular basis, leaving me and my margarita drinking friends with scads of crystal clear hot tub water memories. Ok, but a few months ago, the boyfriend and I called it quits. He is still my friend, but I feel like a jerk calling him every two weeks to say, “Hey, how’s it goin? Wanna drain my hot tub?”

So the hot tub has gone very unloved for a very long time. I ignored its cries for drainage and added scads of germ killing chemicals, but really, it started to feel like every time I stepped in, I was going for a dip in the Dead Sea. It literally burned my skin. Also, it was starting to grow green stuff. It looked like a scene from Shrek. So today, in a fit of feminist frenzy, I decided, “I can drain the hot tub. Anything boys can do, I can do better.” How does a booty short clad girl go about trying to drain a hot tub with no drainage capacity? I tried to remember everything I could about fifth grade science. My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. That’s all I got.

So then, I tried to remember what I had seen my boyfriend do when he was draining. It had something to do with a hose. A siphon? I asked my fourteen year old son how to create a siphon. He said, “You just have to make sure the end that isn’t the water is at a lower pressure than the end that is.” Eureeka! I dug up a garden hose, stuck one end of the hose into the water and draped the other through a window. Then I went outside and pulled the hose through said window and lugged it down the side of the hill outside my house. Which incidentally is covered in trees and cactus and scrub oak. So that process in and of itself took me a good fifteen minutes and resulted in several minor traumas to my skin and one possible concussion. But I did it.

Finally, the end of the hose that wasn’t in the water was at the bottom of the hill. Lower pressure, right? I picked up the hose. Nothing happened. I looked inside. Nada. So, ok, I decided I needed to create suction right, to get things started? So, the crazy lady in her booty shorts and a tank top, standing in the middle of a cactus patch at the bottom of a hill, starts sucking on a garden hose with great gusto. Sucking. Sucking. Sucking. Nothing happens. Until something does. Crazy lady gets a mouth full of chemical laced pond water that is probably infested with black plague. Patooee! Patooeee! But then the water stops. So crazy lady starts sucking again. Again, the mouthful of pond water. Again, the water stops. And it occurs to the crazy lady, who has green scum dripping from the corners of her mouth, that it is really good she doesn’t have neighbors because if she did, they might call the cops her. It also occurs to her that this isn’t working. So, she throws the hose on the ground and stomps on it. It doesn’t respond to the stomping. She swears at it. It doesn’t respond to the swearing. She sucks on it again, and it gives her another mouthful of green scum, and she is starting to feel like she is in a Shrek porno now. But in addition to being resourceful, she is also determined. She starts sucking again.

About this time, the crazy lady’s daughter gets home from school and walks over and says, in that scornful voice only a teenager who thinks her mother has finally lost it can boast, “Mom, what THE HELL are you doing?”

“I am trying to drain the hot tub,” crazy lady says, as if this were self explanatory. What else would she be doing standing at the bottom of a cactus covered hill in booty shorts sucking on a garden hose? So the daughter laughs, and the mom cries, and dashes off to the house in a fit of despair. And calls her ex-boyfriend and tells him about her dilemma. This is a moment of great defeat, having to ask for siphoning advice from an ex like this. But he only mocks her a little bit and says something about using the black hose in the garage and hooking it up to the jets and turning them on.

So she finds the freaking black hose and hooks it up to the jets and turns them on, only the jets are lower than the water line, because a lot of evaporation has gone on during the unloved hot tub months, so the jets that aren't hooked up to the hose start spraying bursts of green water all over the living room. And it doesn’t freaking work. Water doesn’t siphon. No drainage happens. None. Green scum is dripping off the couches, but the hot tub is not draining.

I am now in the process of emptying my hot tub with a saucepan, ferrying little panfuls of green, fetid water from the living room to kitchen and dumping them in the sink. It has taken an hour so far. And the hot tub is still mostly full. It is times like this I think I might wanna give up on my scruples and start sleeping around indiscriminately so I can have a host of strapping young men to call upon in just such emergencies.

Trade Secrets

This story just won the Editor's Award for Fiction from Ellipses Magazine, which made me think it was better than I had originally thought, which made me decide to post it here.



This ain’t the story I want to tell. I want to tell you the one about the shiny armored knight and the princess with eyes the color of robin’s eggs. She waits for him by the river, crying tears of blood. You know the one. There’s dragons and witches and a few close calls, but in the end, everything turns out alright. They all live happily ever after in that story. They always do.
The story I got to tell you ain’t like that. He wasn’t exactly a knight, because of the fingers he lost in the factory accident, and the way his nose was shaped like a blob of dough. He had yellow-brown, bulgy eyes that popped out like a frog, and a freckly bald spot on his head.
And me? Well, my eyes are smaller than pennies and just as round. The same color too. The rest of me is blue-white, my skin so thin and pale the veins peeks out behind it. My body is shaped like one of those party balloons the clowns twist up, round and lumpy. I got nice lips though. No one can fault me for my lips. That was why he asked me to marry him, on account of when he saw my lips all puckered up like a cherry and whistling, he had himself notions about kissing me right there on the spot. But Clement was the good kind of boy who doesn’t kiss without a contract, so instead of smooching me, he proposed. I was twenty-two by then, and hadn’t got any offers to speak of. I didn’t have room to be picky. Still, I was put off by the fingers and the mushy nose.
I was holding out for Marty Robbins. That’s who I wanted to marry. That voice! Ain’t you ever heard someone talk, and the sound sends shivers into your toes, like you’re on one of those electric shaking honeymoon beds? That was what it was like for me when I first heard Marty Robbins sing about, out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl. That’s the only part of the song I know, I ain’t much for remembering. But I know the girl in the song is named Felina, and she holds him in her arms while he bleeds all over her and dies. Ain’t that romantic? Go ahead and laugh if you want, but I liked that song, and I set my sights on marrying Marty. We were on a first name basis, me and Marty, at least inside my head. But turns out he died two days after Clement proposed, which left me with no other option but to go ahead and say, “I do.”
We live in a trailer on the east end of River’s Edge, the end where all the trailers are, where the grass only grows in ugly clumps and the flowers always die because the soil ain’t no good. I decorated it real nice though, with ceramic angels I painted myself and checkered curtains I got at the Dollar Store. Clement still works in the cement factory. Has ever since he can remember. Me, I work in the grocery down the road.
We’ve tried for a hundred years, it seems like, to have us a baby, but something in my belly ain’t right for that. Five times, I’ve got a baby inside me, and five times, I’ve bled it out just about the day I bought the first pair of footy pajamas. That’s enough to break your heart. An unborn baby dying ain’t like when Gramma died, because you don’t get no nice grave to visit and put flowers on. Instead, you get an empty graveyard belly that aches and blood in your panties. Nobody will cry with you.
“You wasn’t even showing for mercy’s sake,” they say when you tear up. Well, they don’t say it, but you know they think it. And right away, after the doctors suck what’s left of the baby from you with a vacuum, people wants to take you out for steak and potatoes, like the whole thing is something to celebrate. You get to the point where you go around sobbing deep in your belly, but smiling on your face. Even Clement won’t cry with me no more. He says, “Don’t tell me until you’re sure next time.”
So I ain’t told him about this baby in my belly yet. She’s been sleeping in there for two and a half months now, but I ain’t gone to the doctor on account of if I think of myself as pregnant and get excited about it, it will jinx the baby, and she’ll come bleeding down my legs. Like Groucho Marx used to say, I done kept this one under my hat, or under my baggy old sweat shirt, if you wanna get literal about it, which you shouldn’t, ‘cause it’s just an expression, but I know some people are picky about things like that, all crazy scared of telling lies, for fear of burning in hell. So call it what you will. Under my hat or under my sweater, this baby is hid clean away. I ain’t bought any footy pajamas either. I think the footy pajamas are what curses the babies and makes them come out. I swear, every time I buy a pair, the next day, the baby dies inside me. Still, I can’t help but get somewhat excited deep down where no one can see it. This baby is a girl, like I told you, and I’m guessing she’s gonna have long piano playing fingers like Clement’s daddy. I can already hear her little voice, saying, “Momma, would you pour me some apple cider?” “Momma, read me a storybook.”
Momma. Can you imagine that? Me, a momma? It gives me shivers up and down my spine to think about it. I’ll go ahead and tell you I’ve named this one. Shashana. I found that in a book. Doesn’t it have a nice ring? And I done made up my mind that when Shashana makes it three months, I’m gonna go to the doctor, and I’m gonna tell Clement. Maybe he’ll buy nonalcoholic cider for us to celebrate with like he did that first time I had a young ‘un in me.
“No champagne for you,” he said. “Not while you’re carrying my rug rat.”
Maybe I’ll take up knitting when Shashana has been alive in my belly three months. See, all the other’s has died before three months, so if this one makes it three months, it’s home free. But I shouldn’t talk no more about that. I’ll jinx it.
You’re probably wondering things like, what are my hobbies. So I’ll tell you. My hobbies are collecting magazines and dancing the jitterbug. I know what you’re saying. No one dances the jitterbug these days. But I do, just the same. One time, I entered a contest the radio station put on, and I won me a hundred dollars. I dance like a dream. And like I said, I collect magazines. Not for those banana nut brownie recipes or the stories about how to catch yourself a right nice man, on account of I already got one, but for the pictures of the girls.
Man, those girls. You look at the covers of those magazines, and you think, they can’t be real, with their big old bosoms and spidery little legs, and those faces. God above! Their faces are so pretty, they almost make you cry to look at them, staring out at you with those wide eyes, looking all lost and confused. They always look kinda dazed, don’t they, like someone just walked by with a gun and stole their money and their coat, which is why they’re standing there in half a dress with their peachy skin hanging out. Those pictures are so far away from my life, I can’t even imagine that there are people out there who really look like that. But they do, because once and while, one of those girls will come on the television and do an interview, and she looks just the same. Perfect.
There’s this girl that comes by the store some days, always to buy raspberry donuts, and she looks almost that pretty. Not though, because her thighs are a little lumpy under her jeans, and she gets a zit on her forehead every now and then. Plus, in the place where her pinky should be, she’s got a scarred nub that makes me wanna vomit every time I look at it. Still, my heart just pounds when she saunters right in through the front doors, and I watch her good, trying to find little signs that she ain’t as perfect as she seems. That’s how come I noticed about the cellulite on her thighs. It made me feel better when I seen that. I call her Medusa inside my head. That’s from that story about the ugly witch lady with snakes for hair, and calling the girl that is my way of getting back at her for being so pretty. When she comes to my register and puts the donuts on the scanner, I think, “Oh, way to go Medusa. You’ll be even uglier and fatter when you wake up tomorrow, you eat all of these.” She always smiles at me with those pearly teeth, never mind what I’m thinking. I don’t smile back though. Just ring up her stupid donuts and send her packing. Serves her right.
You want cellulite though, you oughta take a look at me. Man, I look like the cellulite fairy went after me with a baseball bat. I tried wrapping my legs in cellophane like they said in the magazines. But I just got hot and sweated a lot. Clement said I looked like cottage cheese in a baggie and laughed real hard. So that was the end of that.
I’m thinking about all this because right now, I’m stacking oranges high and mighty to the ceiling, and their bumpy skin reminds me of my thighs. I gotta say, I get some satisfaction from piling the oranges. You may think that it’s a mindless job, but really, it’s quite a bit of work, getting them to fit together just right. One false move, and the whole lot of them come tumbling down and go rolling away across the tile, tripping customers and making old ladies cry out with terror.
Once, when I was new at working in the supermarket, I mispiled the oranges, and down they fell. This old blue haired woman with bald patches saw one of the fruits coming for her, and she put up such a fuss, nearly popped my eardrums, screaming about oh, my god, I’m allergic to cats, someone get this animal away from me. I learned my lesson right then and there, and ever since that day, I done taken a certain pride and care in stacking the oranges perfect, knowing that I’m doing my part to keep the shopping public safe from terror.
See, I take my job at the grocery real serious. I know that in the big scheme of things, maybe I’m not making a huge splash, like, say, Jackie O. or one of those magazine glamour girls. But I’m doing my part to make sure that society has its belly filled, and when you think about it, that’s the most important thing in the whole world. Food. None of us could do much of anything else if we couldn’t eat. I’m one of the basic building blocks in the American system. Like that fancy food pyramid the government puts out to let us know how not to get fat and die of heart attacks. You know the one, and bread and cereal is at the bottom? It’s the most important thing, and it holds up everything else. Well, I’m the bread and cereal of our nation. Without me, the whole rest of the country would come tumbling down like a stack of mispiled oranges. So when I tie on my blue apron in the morning, I feel just as much pride as a policeman putting on his badge, or a schoolteacher sliding on her glasses. Because my job is maybe the most important job of all.
The people here in River’s Edge can count on me, and they know it. When they need their deli meat sliced perfect for a wedding shower, or they need to know if aspirin is on aisle ten or eleven, they come looking for me. They don’t waste their time with the other cashiers. They see I’m the one who knows my stuff. Also, I’m the one they ask if they need private stuff, like cream for hemorrhoids or birth control products. They know I won’t go blabbing about it to the other customers. I give them service with a smile, but I don’t waste their time with no chit-chat. I cut to the chase, grin friendly-like, but not over eager, say aspirin is in aisle ten. They appreciate my willingness to help and my respectfulness of their time. Time is money, people say, and I know that. I ain’t one to waste people’s precious minutes directing them to the wrong aisle, or asking them how their son’s soccer season is or isn’t going. That ain’t my business, far as I’m concerned.
Not all the cashiers are that way. Back in December, Ronny, one of them high school kids Mac hired, told some lady the aspirin was in aisle eleven. Boy, was that a big to-do. That’s what caused the grief and questioning about which aisle the aspirin might be in. Ever since Ronny done that, no one in River’s Edge has had any luck in finding the aspirin aisle without my help. I don’t mind though, ‘cause that’s what I’m here for anyways. I get paid over five dollars an hour to do this job, and I intend to do it to the best of my ability.
The only girl I cannot give service with a smile is the one I told you about, the big old green eyed, perfect girl that comes trouncing in here with her battered cowboy hat perched on head, flouncing around, looking all pretty for everyone to gape at. Medusa. Her I cannot stand.
Which ain’t a good thing at this moment, because she just walked through the door, and she’s sashaying for me now, right when I’m finishing the orange pile. I turn my back a little so she can’t see my face too good. Still, I watch her out of the corners of my eyes, to notice if she’s growing a zit today or not. She must have an oil gland problem in her forehead, because pretty often, she’ll get a pimple there. She pulls the cowboy hat low those days, but I still see it. Today, she does not have a pimple, which chaffs my hide.
“Excuse me,” she says. She is standing right behind me. I can feel her hot breath on my neck, and it smells like onion rings. I can hear her smiling. Have you ever heard someone smile? You know, their voice is all lilty and perky, and you just get a notion to ring their necks, it’s so irritating. That’s how I feel with little miss perfect smiling and panting her reeky onion breath down my neck.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Can you tell me where the granola bars are?” she asks. Right away, I get to wondering. Is she going on a diet now, no more donuts, granola bars instead? Is that it? But I don’t ask her those questions, because like I said, it ain’t my way to waste people’s time with chit chat, plus I just plain to don’t like Medusa, nor do I want to spend one more second smelling her bad breath.
“Aisle three,” I say, “right next to fruit roll ups.” I myself have a particular liking for fruit rollups, especially the kind with rainbow colors in them. But she don’t need to know that.
“Thanks,” she says, and off she goes. I can hear her flouncing the same way I heard her smiling before. Geez, she gets on my nerves. I keep pretending to stack the oranges, because I don’t want to go elsewhere while she’s in the store. If I do, chances are, I’ll see her again. I’ve got my fill of Medusa for one day, thank you very much. So I just jostle the oranges around a bit to look like I’m still working, not the ones on bottom, because that would send the whole stack rolling, but the two or three on top, because it’s pretty safe to mess with those ones without creating havoc. I’m just about to call it safe and go off and find some shelves to stock when she flounces up behind me again, only this time I don’t hear her flouncing. The first thing I hear is “EXCUSE ME!” loud like a sonic boom. I jump so high, I topple my whole stack of oranges, and down they go, rolling and dancing across the floor.
“Oh, that’s a pisser!” I say, wheeling around to face her. “See what you made me do!” She looks all wide-eyed and shocked, and I’m pretty rankled that she can look so forlorn and pretty at the same time. When I’m forlorn, my forehead wrinkles up like a deflated balloon, and my eyes just disappear, but her, she looks like she’s at some modeling shoot, and they camera guy is saying, “Ok, Medusa, now look forlorn and shocked for me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she bends over to help me pick the oranges up, only when she does, her cowboy hat goes flying, and a-ha, I see it, she does have a zit after all, right up there along her hairline. So that’s why she wears that old Stetson. She reaches for the hat. But while she’s reaching, an orange rolls right up under her high heeled boot, and down she falls, flat on her butt. I gotta laugh at that.
“Serves you right,” I say.
And you may think that’s mean-spirited, or even downright nasty, for me to kick someone when they’re down like that. But that ain’t usually my nature. Just a while ago, I told this guy exactly where to find fresh honey, even though we don’t carry none in our store. I gave him directions to the Foster’s bee farm and everything. That’s the kind of person I usually am. But Medusa gets under my skin
“I didn’t mean to mess you up,” she’s saying now, and she’s got a little tear in her eye.
I feel like a first class heel when I see that. “It’s just I take some amount of pride in my orange stacking,” I say by way of explaining myself.
“Yeah, well, I’ll help you restack them,” she says, and she’s reaching for my hand.
I got no choice but to yank her to her feet. Her fingers are all soft and sweaty in mine, the way my goldfish feels when I catch him so I can wash his bowl. I try to discourage her from helping me with the oranges. I tells her its kinda an art form, and I’d just as soon do it myself as have an amateur help me out, but she don’t pay me any mind. Before I can tell her the part about me being sorta like that guy who painted the Sistine Chapel, and her being sorta like the pope who kept sticking his nose into the business and messing up the painting, she’s stacking one orange on top of the other. She’s stacking them crooked, but she’s quick. I gotta give her credit for her quickness.
And pretty soon, like it or not, me and Medusa are a team, chasing oranges around together and piling them up. I show her all my trade secrets, how to stack the fruits perfect so they won’t slip and ruin the whole project, how you got move slow, not fast. She asks questions that most new grocery store workers don’t think to ask, and I’m starting to suspect she has a natural talent.
She says, “What if there’s an extra big navel, which way should you face it, up or down?” And, “Should you wipe off the fly spots before you put the orange in the stack?”
When the stack is halfway done, I go on and ask her about the granola bars, if she’s gone and given up donuts for good, or if this is just a fluke. She says no it’s not a fluke, she’s put on ten pounds in six months, isn’t that unbelievable?
I say, “I put on ten pounds in a week once. That’s when I quit weighing myself.”
I haven’t had a conversation like this with a real grown up in years. After Daddy died, Momma moved off to a retirement resort in Arizona, without so much as a goodbye to her shameful, fatty daughter. Since then, Clement is mostly the only person I do any kind of talking with, besides, apples are over in the produce aisle, and feminine hygiene’s aisle twelve. And come to think of it, even Clement don’t like to talk much when he gets home from the factory, he’s so dead dog tired. Weekends, he goes out with the boys for beers. So that leaves me having conversations with our beagle Frosty, but Frosty don’t talk back, except to say, yip-yip, yap-yap, bark-bark-bark when he’s hungry.
So talking to Medusa, whose real name turns out to be Melina, is like going out to the ice cream parlor and getting a whole mountain of ice cream. It’s that big of a treat. I mean you should see us, stacking the oranges real precise, but laughing some too while we’re going. She tells me a joke that goes like this.
“What do you call a fish without eyes? Fsh.”
I laugh pretty hard at that, isn’t that a good one?
So I tell her this one, since we’re on the subject of critters missing important body parts. “What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.”
She giggles something awful, shrieks more to point, like a fire engine or something. She’s got a laugh so sharp, it cuts right into your brain. She snorts a lot too, like a big fat hog. Still, it feels nice having a good laugh with another human being.
I’m so busy having fun, I don’t even notice the pain in my belly until it gets deep and strong. Feels like my guts are twisting together.
“Oh God,” I sorta whisper.
I don’t have to check my panties. I know there’s blood in there without looking. I know that baby died right there inside me while I was laughing. I know that I’ll spend the afternoon in the hospital knocked out while they suck out my baby with that vacuum. When the first baby died, the doctor didn’t give me no anesthetic while he vacuumed me. I screamed like hellfire. One nurse I met says I shoulda sued him, it’s common practice to give anesthetic for the vacuuming, but I didn’t know that then. Anyways, every time since, they’ve given me some knock out medicine, so I know they will this time too.
When Melina sees that I stopped laughing, her peachy face gets all confused, and she says, “Something wrong?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m bleeding out my baby now. I gotta go to the hospital.”
She does something funny then, something that I think wraps chains around our hearts and ties us together forever. She starts to cry. Not big, you understand, just a few tears. But enough to make me feel like maybe someone else in this world thinks this baby inside me is worth crying over.
We walk out through the store hand in hand, both of us blubbering like little children. I don’t even stop to tell Mac where I’m going. When we get outside, tiny puffs of snow are flurrying all around us, and the sun is invisible behind a swirl of gray storm clouds. Semis are honking down on the freeway, and someone’s listening to heavy metal music in the apartments next door. But I only halfway notice all of that. Mostly, I’m seeing the face of this baby girl in my belly, maybe all wrapped around with pretty blond white curls, smiling up on some cloud in heaven with the angels, playing a harp with her piano fingers.
“I’m sick and tired of my babies running off to heaven,” I tell Melina. “I wanna hold one of them sometime. Change their diaper once. You know, everyone gripes about the mustardy smell of fresh baby poop, but I’d give my heart and soul to smell it just one time.”
Melina laughs and cries all at once. Her eyes are red and puffy, but those perfect teeth are wet with spit and smiling. As she walks along the slick pavement in those high heels of hers, I’m thinking she’s gonna fall, but she never does. And I’m saying inside my head, gosh darn, she’s prettier now than ever. I bet she’d dance a mean jitterbug.
Suddenly, I’m hot way down deep into the middle of my heart. This must be what love feels like, I think. I don’t suppose I ever knew ‘til just now what love was. I thought in my own way, I loved Clement, maybe in a quiet way, not like the Marty Robbins song, but still real. But this thing I feel for Melina right now is like nothing I ever knew. I want to reach out and grab her, hold her head to my chest, tell her all my secrets. I wanna study the wrinkles on her hands. I wanna know what are her hobbies, what makes her tick. It’s just pure and true what I’m feeling, looking at the way Melina’s soft brown curls falls down over her eyes. It’s like rainwater on a summer day. It takes away some of the pain of the baby dying inside me. My guts are all bunched up and twisted from Sashana dying, but they’re all twisted up with love too.
Melina leads me an old caramel colored Buick and helps me into the back seat. “His name is Pedro,” she says. “Lay down.”
“Whose name is Pedro?” I ask, clutching at my belly.
“The car. I just thought you might want to know his name.” She puts a checkered coat under my head for a pillow.
When she slides into the front seat, she reaches back and holds my dry, old, fat hand in one of her pretty ones, tells me it will all work out. She believes in fate, she says while we’re driving. She believes she was brought to the grocery today for a reason. She believes we were meant to meet, maybe so we could just say goodbye to this baby together. But maybe so we could save it too. Don’t give up just yet. She honks the horn real hard then, to make other cars get out of the way.
“Her name’s Shashana,” I say.
“Hang on, Shashana,” whispers Melina.
Outside, cars are whizzing by us on the freeway, and I’m thinking, what in the world is happening to me? This baby inside me is dying.
But, God forgive me, even with the pain in my gut and the sadness of losing Sashana, I feel more alive right now than I ever thought I could.

Holy Week Without You (Wholly Weak Without You)

The night is blue and cool in Mexico. Outside,
a naranja moon looms, sliced by the slats of my
shutters. It is Mary’s night. Ave Maria’s rang
in the stone streets just hours ago. Purple shrines
grew in dirty crannies like scabs over wounds.

This morning, I found myself
in a crooked church, staring
at a smiling statue. The candle
flame of my gaze licked at the light
in her eyes. I asked her for you.

She seemed like the kind of girl who would
understand this love, this hungry fire that will
not die, that feeds on everything, on stones
and steeples and candlesticks. Always, its blue
flames lick at the edges of the shrine of my mind.

The bells are ringing, even now, and there, a confused rooster
calls out the hour, a cackling town crier. Tonight, children laughed
late, slurping helados and blowing bubbles with orange wands. But
at last, they are asleep. I swing open my shutters, look down into
the window below me. I can see brown boys coiled in their beds.

Coiled white in my bed, a smooth
snake with a licking flame tongue,
I think of you, burning the blue night
with my Ave Maria’s. Her name
on my lips tastes like fire.

Sacrament

The Mexican rain rides bolts of blue lightning

dismounting on the hot, cracked ground that is so

like the sound of your voice. I am here,



in the land of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

riding bolts of this love, so thick it can only

be rendered in paint or blood. She said



painters paint, weavers weave, and Frida

Diegos, making him into The Verb. For me,

you are The Verb, my reason to breathe. Today,



in the jardin, when the swelling sun and the scent

of gardenias left me dizzy, the only thing I could think

was, I wish I could give this moment to you, wrap it up



in corn husks like a tamale and deliver

it to you on a silver plate. Here,

churches swallow saint's bones.



They tuck skulls away in their dark mouths, in the walls,

in the floors. Mary Magdalene's pitted tibia soaks up

the colors of the stained glass glinting in the setting sun.



My bones are buried in the church of you.


I wrote this poem. I have been thinking about love, about what I want. What I want is a man who is bigger than me. I want a man who walks into a room and takes up all the air. I want a man who walks into a damp, dank cave and sets it on fire. I want a man with wings who laughs while he is cart wheeling through the clouds. I want a man with the courage to cry. I want a man who will teach me. I want a man who is so smart, I have to whip open a dictionary and an encyclopedia and maybe keep my laptop handy so I can Google the things he says. I want a man who understands art, not necessarily because he has studied it, but because he is it.

I want a man brimming with fire, a fire that burn into his eyes and fingers and lips and scorches my skin, my soul. I am tired of settling. I want a big love. They kind they write about in all the books that matter. The kind of love great men sing about on their deathbeds. I want a great man who will sing my name on his deathbed. I have decided this world has more to offer than what they say. They say things, write bulleted lists of rules. Find your man here. He will look like this. He will do these things, and you must put up with them. He will not see you. That is the way these men creatures are. He will not want to discourse on the possibilities of the human soul, the possibilities of the infinite universe. He will be too busy with his thirteen fantasy football teams and the Spice Channel for such nonsense.

Nonsense, I say. Nonsense. I refuse to believe that all men are Neanderthals. This one man taught me that. He walked like he was walking on water, always, even over concrete and brick, he water walked. He made miracle into a verb, just by being. He miracled. I want a man who miracles. At this point, anything less than that is nonsense. Nonsense I say to these boys who saunter up to me with their panties throbbing and say silly things, looking for an angle, as if I am a fish they can lure onto their lines. To touch me, you do not need bait. You need truth.

I want a man who carries truth in his eyes. I want to look there and see that, though he may be a complicated knot I will never untie, he is not lying. I want a man who is satin soft and diamond hard. Who knows when to bend and when to break and when to stand his ground. I want a man who can say: sometimes, I am weak. When he is broken, I want him to bury his broken body in mine, rest his face on my breasts, burn me with his tears. I want a man who knows how to laugh when things are funny. I want a man who is prone to falling in love, not just with me, but with everything. I want a man who can thrill at the sight of the sun falling into the sea, or smile because a grass blade is so very green.

I want a man who knows how to dream. I want a man who still believes in possibilities. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of this life, this planet, this universe. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of his own soul. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of mine.

I want a man who sees me and says, “Holy shit. That’s it.” I want him to know. I don’t want him to always be looking over his shoulder, wondering if there is something better, something younger, something thinner, something more boobalicious, out there. I want him to look into my eyes and see the sea that crashes behind them. I want him to strip naked and dive into my ocean and never come up for air again. I want him to drown in me. I want to drown in him. I want a man who has a propensity for drowning in passion. I want big love.

I wrote this once, in a book. These paragraphs came to me the day I found out the thing that made me leave my husband. It was a life changing time. Hours before my life changed forever, I was riding along, and these words came so strong, I pulled over at the first coffee shop I saw and let them pour out of my fingertips. They felt like they came from somewhere else. They were the last words of a book called "Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones," which took me three years to write. They were, looking back, a perfect description of what I want from love:

This is how modern love stories end. Happily ever after with no bruises is a fairy tale. There is no happily ever after. But there is this. There is love. Love that stretches on and on into forever, beyond the boundaries of time and space and society and religion and rules. Love that winds itself around two people like a python, like a living noose, and squeezes them together until they cannot ever be whole alone again. Modern love stories end this way, with two broken people who can never be whole again.

But they are still our favorite stories, these love stories. Because we know that when the days and nights and dawns and dusks bleed together into black, when the noise of expressways and supermarkets and laugh tracks blur together until they become an endless deafening hum, there is a deep magic, a deep music, that keeps its color, that beats in time to the pounding of our most sacred and ancient hearts, that no self-help guru, no talk show host, no priest, will ever be able to define or explain. This magic, this music has a name. That name is love. And it breaks and batters and binds and bleeds and bridges and burns. It conquers all. And leaves the conquered broken. And human in their brokenness.

This is the gift love leaves in its wake. It leaves us shattered, to be molded into something better more beautiful longer and stronger. Love breaks us, and in the end, if we could look that far forward and backward into forever, makes us pieces of something vast and whole, makes us pieces of the rocky, watery planets spinning in their orbits, and the infant stars exploding into fiery life and melting back down into nothing, and the asteroid belts and the atoms and the first breaths and the big bangs and the Genesises and the Revelations. Love breaks us and makes us part of forever.

That is the gift love leaves when it is gone.

Fear Not for Their Faces

This is the thing about me, tonight, at least. There will be other things about me tomorrow. There were other things about me yesterday. But the thing about me, tonight, I realized as I was cutting, strutting my way through a San Miguel night, alone, sipping the sky, sporting a bottle of wine and a sneer, is that I am tired of being afraid. Who told us life is about fear? Who said:

This is the way you will live. You will be afraid. Of loss. Of love. Of hate. Of pain. Of joy. Of spiders. Of snakes. Of mice. Of elephants. Of tall buildings. Of caves. Of cities. Of country sides. Of germs. Of cleaning agents. Of laughter. Of tears. Of celibacy. Of sex. Of poverty. Of wealth. Of failure. Of success. Of marriage. Of divorce. Of heaven. Of hell. Of God. Of Satan. Of life. Of death. You will be afraid of everything, and when you are done being afraid, you will die. Who made that rule anyway?

Tonight, I have to brag, I rocked a stage surrounded on all sides by three hundred year old stone walls. The audience was small, but they were there, and I loved them, and I rocked them. I would be modest, but why? Why are we afraid to celebrate our successes? Come on! Live a little! Cry when you fail! Sing when you succeed! High kick and go all Singin’-in-the-Rain on the world’s ass. Be true. Be you. That blue thing in the middle of your belly that whispers your truth. Be that, and don’t apologize. My blue thing whispers I rocked the stage. Well, it shrieks that, actually, and does jazz hands. My blue thing tosses its hair and high fives God and throws back three shots of tequila to toast my success.

Because this is about more than acting. It is about life. It is about choosing to live without fear. In any given situation, you always have two choices. Fear or courage. And the spoils go to the strong. (So do the bruises, but hey, who cares about a little soul contusion now and again? Your soul is more resilient than you know. It looks like silk, but if you dig deeper, it is made of cast iron.)

Tonight, when the moment came for me to be afraid, to be afraid that the audience wouldn’t get it, or they would think I was fat, or my director would yell, or I would forget my lines, I decided not to be afraid. I said, “I am tired of being afraid.” So I pulled out all the stops, and I let my soul loose on that stage, and frankly, I made those three hundred year old stone walls stand up a little taller and take notice. They’ve lived so long, seen so much, but I think, tonight, they saw me and thought, now this we’ve never seen.

All the while, I heard inside my head the voice of my beautiful co-actress, Nancy. Nancy who toured with Henry Fonda and played Jeff Bridge’s wife and produced the inaugural production of a Pulitzer Prize winning play, Nancy who traveled the world over and loved and lost and loved and won, Nancy whose strength astounds me—that Nancy. Her voice echoed inside my head saying, “You’ve got it, kid. You are one of the best actresses I’ve worked with. All you need to learn is that you know what to do. Now do it.”

She was right. I knew what to do, and I did it. And I walked home with the beautiful, lively Nancy, back to our gorgeously tiled San Miguel casa. And it occurred to us at ten o’clock at night, lounging on those old world leather sofas in our bare feet and PJ’s, that we needed some wine. I volunteered to fetch it, and dressed again, and walked out the wooden door to wander the San Miguel streets, strut them, more like, thinking I should be afraid. I should be afraid of that catcalling man and that barking dog and that looming darkness. But I am not. And I refuse to be. I am tired of being afraid.

All the shops were closed, save one, but my wandering, crimson tipped toes found it, and I returned triumphant, with a bottle of bad red wine, and we drank it down like it was the nectar of the gods. Because it was.

All of this is the nectar of the gods. Do you see that lilac bush pushing heaven out into the air, making the sky smell like honey? That is a miracle. Let it be what it is, for you, for just one second. Smell it. Taste it. Touch it. Let your blue thing get to know the miracles. (I am fully aware that sounds like a sexual innuendo. So be it. Maybe it should. Sex is the only thing that we let ourselves feel anymore on this planet, so if that makes you feel something, go with it. Although even saying we feel sex is probably an exaggeration. Do we really let ourselves feel when we shut down our hearts and make our skin cold, when we forget to breathe as we thrust forward, toward that six second high, then walk away sweating and clammy and cold and alone?)

We are just too determined to be afraid to notice the miracles taking place every second of every day. If we notice the miracles, they will evaporate, right? Of course they will. And other miracles will flow into the gaps and fill the emptiness. Trust. Don’t fear. Live your life in fear, and you will waste it. And a mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but wasting a life is a catastrophe of epic proportions. Waste milk. Waste money. Waste most things. But, for God’s sake, do not waste your life. Cowardice is the devil’s oldest and best weapon. The ugliest forces in this world have spent centuries, millennia, weaving lies into the tapestry of our lives. Give those lying forces the finger. That’s what your fingers are for, you know. Among other things.

Use your fingers. Strip fear from your heart, the way a painter strips old paint from the walls. Take away the yellowed gray and replace it with vibrant red. Who cares if they don’t love you? Who cares what they dare say? The worst that can happen is you die. And you will. Until then, walk in the sun, barefoot, and hold your head high. When the universe gives you cause to speak, do it. When the time comes for you to say your line, “The incredible shrinking mother fucker,” imagine the back of that one man who told you to be afraid. Imagine that back disappearing into the night, and say that line. Scream it. Grow big while you say it. Grow big while the bully grows small. “The incredible shrinking mother fucker.” Let those words echo off three hundred year old stone walls.

Know who you are. Know the depth and breadth of your soul. Honor it, and say your lines like you mean them. Do everything like you mean it. Because, truth be told: You do. Everything you say, dream, do, is life or death, you know. With every action, every word, you are writing your story in indelible ink. Do you want your story to be: She played it safe, and she looked back, lying in a sanitized hospital bed, wrinkled and bored and unloved, and her last words were, “I wish I would have.” And she died anyway. You wont’ get out of this thing alive. Make it count. Make it mean something. When you go down, go down in flames, screaming a kiss to the sky.

And fuck all if they hate you for it. The world is full of fat, balding crows. So what? Let them do their cawing and their stinking. Hawks are hard to come by. But you, you with those shining eyes and wandering toes and glistening wings, you are a hawk. You do the thing you were born for. You soar. As a book once said, “Fear not for their faces.”

You.

Soar.

This, my child, is the thing beautiful you were born to do.

Serial Killers, Scalpels, and Saints in San Miguel

I am sitting in a Starbucks in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, but frankly, the only things here to remind me that I am not in America are:

A. The fact that I just had a very hard time ordering my latte.
B. The fact that I just paid a pretty, wide-eyed child ten dollars for five Chiclets.
C. The fact that a man just came over and asked me to put a peso in his can, and when I did, he slapped a Whinny the Pooh sticker directly on my right boob.

I am here because:

A. Starbucks is the only place in town with electrical outlets that jive with my computer cord.
B. I am scared shitless and need to be reminded that the whole wide world is not made up of serial killers bent on raping me for sport and harvesting my kidneys for profit.

Say what you will about Starbucks. Say that it is the face on the greedy corporate American monster that is gobbling up the whole world. Say that it is the equivalent of the Roman bread and circuses, hosted by evil emperors to ply the masses into complacency so they can, with impunity, turn the planet into a shit hole. Say that every time you arrive in Bangladesh or Madrid or Tel Aviv and see a Starbucks staring out at you from its place beside ancient ruins, it makes you want to fall to your knees and weep.

And I get you, I do. Theoretically. But honestly, for my part, today, Starbucks makes me feel safe. In fact, whenever I arrive in Bangladesh, or Madrid, or Tel Aviv, Starbucks always makes my disoriented, hapless American ass feel safe. So I hobble in and order a latte in broken sentences, to make me feel somehow connected to the continent that spawned me. This makes me part of the problem, I suppose, a cell in the great monster. If Starbucks is the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, color me plied. Throw stones, if you must, at me and my Starbucks frequenting ways, but today, I need to feel safe. As I mentioned earlier, I am quite convinced the world is peopled with serial killers intent upon raping me and harvesting my kidneys.

Why in the hell, you ask, would you be in San Miguel de Allende assuming the whole wide world is made up of kidney harvesting rapists? (Or maybe you don’t ask that, but you should, because it provides a perfect segway into the rest of this blather.)

Ok, it all started in Starbucks infested America. I was leaving for San Miguel the next day, and I spoke to my Mommy, who loves me very much and demonstrates her love in a variety of ways, but most often, by warning me of danger. Usually, the danger is nonexistent, but she still warns me. Last week, she warned me that I was going to get Hepatitis B because I got fake fingernails. (I don’t get the connection. When pressed, neither did she. But she was still quite adamant in her warning.) The reason I got fake fingernails is that, in addition to being a wanna-be-travel-writer, I am also an actress, and as such, I am in a production in which I play a Marilyn Monroe-esqe diva of sorts. We are doing five shows in San Miguel. So my reasons for getting fake fingernails and coming to San Miguel are one in the same. Which brings me back to my mother’s warning. (Not really, but we are going to pretend it does, because frankly, I am too run-over-rat-tired and freaked-out to compose eloquent prose just now.)

So, back in Starbucks-ville, I called my Mommy to say goodbye, and her final words to me were something along these lines: “Don’t forget the American women that are being raped and dismembered in Mexico.” My Mommy’s version of “Safe travels, Via con Dios, etc.” I didn’t think much of it at the time. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll remember,” I said. And packed my blond wig and stilettos and headed out to play a diva on some San Miguel stage.

All went beautifully the morning of my travels. From Albuquerque, I flew, hassle free, into Houston and connected to a plane that was to take me to Leon, where my director was going to meet me with a car to drive me to our lodgings in nearby San Miguel. Easy cheesy, right? Even if I had never been to San Miguel before, it would have been a fool proof travel plan. And I had been to San Miguel. I had spent a beautiful month here, wandering these cobblestone streets, basking in the morning sun in the jardin, buying handmade dolls and Chiclets and flowers from beautiful women in Kool-Aid colored shawls. I knew these streets. They were mine. As I said, a fool proof plan.

Whoever made up the phrase “fool proof plan” did not take me into account. No plan is proofed enough for this fool. This fool somehow managed to get on the wrong freaking plane, undetected. And landed in a completely unfamiliar locale and thought only this: “Wow, they must have redone the airport.” And sat there outside customs blithely reading a book, waiting for her director, while a cluster of Mexican airport officials ogled her. This fool tried to act tough, so as to dissuade the Mexican men from their ogling, only this fool is kinda crappy at acting tough, as she is usually bumbling around, bumping into large, valuable pottery artifacts and repeating, ad nauseum, her mantra, which is, “Habla da English?” (Just like that.) ‘Cause even though this fool has a few years of Spanish classes under her belt, she has retained a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words and a few useful phrases. (“Donde esta el bano? Un tequila por favor? Yo quiero un botella de agau frio. Tu gato es muy bonita. Cuanto es?)

It was only after my director failed to arrive that I began to suspect something was desperately wrong. I looked out the window and saw lots of palm trees. I didn’t remember seeing lots of palm trees in Leon. I noticed that the airport restaurant was much, much larger than it had once been, and was on the opposite side of the building. They had added wireless internet since my last visit, if the signs were to be believed, though I couldn’t access it because I had no adaptor for my computer plug. They had moved the bank machine. Also, the bathrooms were much cleaner.

Oh fuck. A snake of terror coiled around my heart and squeezed. I was in the wrong city.
When a girl realizes she is in a foreign country alone and does not speak the language and does not know where the hell she is, she gathers her wits. Well, first, she hunkers down behind a potted fern and weeps. Then, she gathers her wits. Which are easy to gather, because there aren’t really many of those wit things running around in said girl’s head. (Obviously. She got on the wrong plane to a foreign country.) The girl whispers things to herself, bits of wisdom. “What would Jesus do? One two three four, I declare a thumb war. I before E except after C, and when sounded like AY as in NEIGHBOR and WEIGH.”

Then she takes stock of her resources. What do I have that can help me in this situation? Language skills are not on that list. Nor are navigational skills. Money? Not much. Friends? Nada. Cell phone? No signal. Internet? No plug. A girl goes down here list of assets, and finally, she concludes, I have boobs. This is so un-feminist of her, she knows, but her mother’s warning is ringing in her ears, and it is already three in the afternoon, and she has to get to her lodgings before nightfall, or she will be raped and hacked apart. Also, she has a show to do tomorrow, and if she doesn’t get there, even if the serial killers don’t harvest her kidneys, her director will.

So the girl goes into the bathroom and plumps up her boobs and applies some lipstick and sashays back out of the restroom, on over to the Mexican airport officials who have been ogling her. She whispers, sultrily, using all of the Marilyn Monroe-esque know-how she has garnered during her acting career, “Habla da English?” Then she trips over a pottery artifact.

The officials are all over it. They help her up and restore the artifact to its rightful place. They say, “No, no, no English,” but they take the girl by the hand and across the airport to a corpulent airport official who does, in fact, habla da English. She looks like a movies star with a bunch of body guards until she trips over another artifact. Then she just looks like a witless fool. Which, we have already established, she is.

She explains her plight to the English speaking official, and he explains it to the non-English speaking entourage, and they all nod knowingly and chatter amongst themselves, after which take the girl back into their office. Oh crap, now they are going to rape me and dismember me, she thinks. But they don’t. Instead, they spend the next half hour finding the girl the quickest route from Ixtapa (which is where she is, it turns out) to San Miguel. This involves a cab ride to a bus depot, a four hour bus ride to a city called Morelia, and then another two hour bus ride to San Miguel. Airport officials beg the witless girl to spend the night. Girl pictures being hacked apart by said airport officials, panics, apologizes, thanks them profusely (“Gracias, lo siento,” is one of her phrases), and runs to a waiting cab, which befuddled airport officials order to take girl to bus depot.

This boob thing is working out, so girl thinks she will use it again at bus depot. But bus depot holds no ogling officials, only flies, Fanta dealers, and females. The females are not amused by the girl’s antics. No, they are not, but somehow, she manages to convey she wants to go to Morelio. “Un boleta a Morelio por favor.” She says this with a terrible accent and great gusto, only her request is greeted with inquiries, rapidly phrased Spanish questions which the girl doesn’t understand. The ticket selling females do not habla da English. Worse, they recognize the witless girl for what she is. Suddenly, boobs are useless weapons. The witless girl has been disarmed. Still, even though the ticket selling females mock the girl in angry Spanish, they sell her a ticket.

She slumps into the waiting room, which smells slightly of urine and boasts a small television, playing Mexican soap operas. Girl struggles to understand the dialogue, trying to hone her language skills for the bus ride ahead. She pictures boarding a rattle trap van held together with bailing wire. She pictures being approached by a serial killer with a scalpel in his holster. (Mexican serial killers wear holsters.) She pictures pleading for her life. What would she say? She watches the soap opera intently. “No, senior! No, no!” That’s it. She has her line. Any actress knows that getting your lines down is just the beginning. After that, it’s all in the delivery. Should she say, “No, senior!” or “No, senior!” Probably the second one. It will emphasize the killer’s humanity. Make him think twice before her takes her kidneys. It will remind the girl’s killer she is more than a host for organs. She is a human being, damn it! He will fall to his knees, weeping. “Lo siento!” he will scream. “Lo siento!”

Luckily, when the witless girl boards two wrong buses, the ticket takers are men, who do not habla da English but are clearly moved by her witlessness and her boobs. They look at her with pity, like she is a brain damaged child, and help her off the wrong buses, and finally, onto the right one. The bus is not what the girl expected. It is air conditioned and comfortable, and she gets a whole row to herself. And a free Fanta. Score!

As the bus lurches off for Morelia, girl drinks her delicious Fanta and starts to think of this whole thing as adventure. She listens to “Born to Run” on her I-Pod while watching Mexico slither by outside her window like a gorgeous green snake. She sees thick climbing vines and pink flowers with faces as big as her own. She watches soldiers sipping Coca Colas under thatched roofs and goats eating tires inside brightly painted yards. She smiles at a raisin faced old woman leading a plump, grape faced girl by the hand along a dusty path. She waves at taco vendors dancing to their radios. One of them waves back at her, and she laughs, listening now to Roger Clyne’s song, “I Speak Your Language.” These people may not understand a word she says, but they understand her. At least the men do. They speak the universal language of boobs.

All is going well. At this rate, the girl will be in Morelio in no time. When she gets there, she will buy another ticket and board another air conditioned bus to San Miguel. It’s all so easy. She should do this more often, and look, there is a red bridge over glassy water with the sun setting behind it. How glorious! Look at the orange peel colored sunset being reflected back to the sky. The girl starts to scribble in her notepad, which she carries in her pocket for just such moments of inspiration. “The sky is looking in a mirror,” she writes. “The sky—“

Screech. The bus lurches to a halt. As her mother instructed, the girl remembers the American women that are being raped and dismembered. The girl imagines bandits boarding the bus and zips up her coat. The girl wipes off her lipstick and pulls her hair into a tight ponytail. The girl slumps over, puffs out her stomach, and tries to look as un-boobalicious as humanly possible. She can’t speak to the bandits with words, but she can speak to them with her eyes. “I do not want to be raped and harvested!” she wills her eyes to scream. “I am a mother, for God’s sake!” Yo means I. Madre is mother. She can even say this in Spanish. “No, senior. Yo madre!” Which may be taken to mean something like, “Your momma!” which could further enrage the killer, but she will have to take her chances.

The bus driver comes back and fires off something, very quickly, in Spanish. The girl picks up a few words. Buenos dias. Lo siento. Bus. Luggage. Then a passenger starts yelling. He says something about mi familia. Barely able to breathe, the trembling girl tries to use these clues to understand the content of the conversation. She comes up with this.

BUS DRIVER: Buenos dias. I am sorry to inform you that the bus has been taken by serial killing bandits who are now rifling through your luggage, looking for valuables. Soon, they will board the bus, rape all the American women, dismember them, and harvest their organs.

PASSENGER: That boobalicious woman is obviously an American! Take her and leave my family!

The girl begins to weep. She wants to ask if any of the other passengers habla da English and can translate the bus driver’s announcement, but she knows the killers are targeting Americans and doesn’t want to give herself away. The bus sits for an hour. The passenger gets off the bus, ostensibly to beg the bandits for mercy for his wife and children. He comes back smelling like smoke. So they must be setting the luggage on fire now. It’s only a matter of time. “Born to Run” is little comfort. “I Speak Your Language” is even less. Girl listens to another Clyne song. “Mercy, mercy, mercy may I be,” he says. She thinks she will focus on the lines of this song as her organs are harvested. Maybe it is a parting gift from God, like that scene in Braveheart when Mel Gibson is being disemboweled and looks into the eyes of the smiling little boy for comfort. The girl looks out the window and whispers a prayer. To God or her dead daddy. Maybe to both of them. “Daddy, get me to San Miguel in one piece.”

The bus lurches, then moves forward. The passengers make cheering noises. The girl weeps again, with relief this time. It is dark now. The air conditioning on the bus works, but the lights do not. Girl sits in her seat and prays in the blackness, fervently. The other passengers fall asleep, but she will not be lulled into a false sense of security. She will not rest.

It turns out the ogling men in the Ixtapa airport were wrong. With the bandit debacle, the bus ride takes six hours, give or take. By the time the bus pulls into Morelia, a lemon wedge moon is hanging in the sky, and the girl wishes she had toothpicks with which to prop her eyelids open. She is weary, but she cannot sleep, not until she is safely tucked away in her director approved bed in San Miguel, protected from the probing scalpels of organ harvesters. She hobbles off the bus, retrieves her luggage (which is mercifully unburned), and staggers into the Morelia bus depot. It is peopled by female ticket sellers, which doesn’t make much of a difference at this point, because the girl is slightly stinky and anything but boobalicious. She manages to ask for a ticket to San Miguel de Allende, and the woman behind the counter rattles off a bunch of words, one of which the girl understands. Manana. Tomorrow.

The girl chokes back a sob. She cannot, cannot sleep here alone in this strange city. She pictures all those CSI episodes where people are hacked apart in hotel rooms. Her mother’s warning merges with the images.

Crying again, she stumbles to a taxi stand. “Cuanto es un taxi a San Miguel de Allende?” she manages, wiping tears and snot away with the backs of her knuckles. The man behind the taxi stand laughs, but another man, a driver, doesn’t. He is old and stooped and he reminds the girl of her father, of what he might look like now had he lived into old age. The driver looks at the girl, not unkindly, and says, “You safe?” She shrugs. “Si.”

“Eight hundred pesos,” he says, which is eighty dollars for a two hour ride. The girl knows the man is saving her ass, and she wants to kiss him. “Gracias,” she whispers, in a voice completely unsultry, no trace of Marilyn Monroe. “Gracias, senior. Gracias.” She climbs into the cab, and as the driver pulls into the street, the girl sees on a cinderblock wall the word “angel” scrawled in red ink. And it may the unfamiliar Mexico air and exhaustion going to her head, but the girl wonders if God is trying to tell her something.

Her angel tries to talk to her as he drives, though between the two of them, the only word they seem to have in common is “agua.” Once the angel realizes this, every time he sees water, he points to it and kindly says, “Agua! Bonita!”

“Si,” says the girl. “Agua es muy bonita.” And the angel smiles.

And so they go on like that, commenting enthusiastically on the beauty of the water. The girl notices that the air smells like smoke, and in the distance, she notices the orange eyes of fires burning holes in the night. She wants to ask her angel what these fires are for, but she can’t find the words. The girl finally sleeps, and three hours later, she wakes up to the sound of her angel’s voice.

“See, lady? San Miguel de Allende.”

When she opens her eyes, she sees the cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted doors, and she warms at the thought that she knows what is behind some of those doors. Some of the men and women sleeping behind those doors would recognize her face if they saw it. They might even say her name. Tawni.

Though her terror still lingers like a coiled snake in her belly, she understands the proverbial impulse to kiss the ground, because this is the safest she has felt in many hours. These streets are hers, at least compared to the streets she has been bumping along all day. The angel finds another cabbie and pays him to lead the way to Tawni’s casa, the address for which she has scrawled on a bit of paper. The angel carries her luggage to the door and when she offers to tip him, he runs his fingers through his thinning gray hair and shakes his head, smiling.
“Gracias, senior,” Tawni calls to his retreating back. “Tu es un angel.” Which she knows is wrong. But suddenly, it doesn’t matter if her Spanish is bad or good. It just matters that she says what she needs to say.

“De nada,” calls the angel.

He looks over his shoulder, winks, and disappears into the smoky night.

Ashes of San Miguel

There’s bones on the beach. There’s ashes in the jar.
Ghosts in the air laughing at fools in the bar.
But somewhere inside, this river don’t run to the sea no more.
Give me a sign, amigo, can you tell me,
Did you go down laughing when you finally fell?

--“Ashes of San Miguel,” by Roger Clyne

Let us begin with death. That is the place that, for me, everything seems to begin in Mexico, or at least the place where everything eventually winds up. In San Miguel de Allende, behind every elaborately carved wooden door, the specter of death lurks in one if its guises, which are many. Sometimes death menaces. Sometimes it mourns. Mostly, in Mexico, it laughs.

To understand why this matters, it is necessary to rewind, lets say two years, to the onset of my mid-life crisis, which is not, it turns out, the variety that induces one to acquire German sports cars and sculpted 25 year-old Adonis husbands, but is instead, the true-blue, perhaps distinctly American, variety that induces a crippling fear of death. There I was, sequestered in my sanitized home, diligently fondling my breasts for ominous lumps, making friends with my freckles and moles, watching them for oozing or weeping or creeping, jolting awake in the middle of the night certain the pain in my right arm was a sign of a heart attack even though I could distinctly remember slamming it against a rock during a volley ball game, eating my veggies, riding my bike, slathering on sun screen like a mad woman, when the universe, that mother with an elegant appreciation for beauty but a sense of humor that can only be described as sadistic, decided to plop me in the middle of Death-Ville for a month long writers workshop.

I first dubbed San Miguel Death-Ville when I dropped my suitcases in my hotel room, which was strangely elongated and sparsely decorated, but made up for these defects by boasting a gorgeously tiled bath tub. Also, it featured a heater that resembled an archaic toaster, with an article posted beside it titled, “Carbon Monoxide: Secret Killer That Takes Sleepers before They Awake.”

In addition to this melodramatically worded literature (though I’d be damned if I dared try to turn on the heater, even if artic winter hit), I saw a painting. I say “saw a painting” as if I had the option of missing it. I didn’t. It was an oil original the size of, let’s say, a sofa, hung over my narrow bed, painted by some authentic Mexican named Smith in 1994, according to the signature. It boasted five figures, four disturbingly happy clowns and a cackling skeleton (at least I think she cackled—she seemed to do so mostly at night) wearing a crown of flagrant orange flowers. If you want to get your blood going, try waking up in a bitterly cold room, shivering in a narrow bed, to the sound of church bells clanging and strange birds squawking and the sight of four clowns and a hippie grim reaper leering down at you in the moonlight. It’s a page right out of Stephen King.

Which brings me back to death (not that we ever left). Death has a long and honored tradition in San Miguel. Well, death has a long and honored tradition in all places, whether we like it or not, but in San Miguel, they like it. They celebrate it. Little laughing skeletons are everywhere, dressed up like whores and window washers and Elvis, reading and dancing and laughing. Mostly laughing. Why are Mexico’s dead so happy? It could be because they are never forgotten.

Over margaritas, a Mexican painter told me that death, for the Mexican, is not an ushering out of the land of the living. Rather, it is a change in form, the way a river, say, might turn into steam on a hot summer day. The Mexican dead are still citizens of their communities. On Dia de los Muertos, the living wander up into the hills where the dead are buried. There, they offer them gifts, sing with them, laugh with them, dance with them.

In the next town over, Guanojato, they celebrate Dia de Los Muertos as well. But there, every day is death day, for every day, their museums display gape-mouthed mummies and their churches flaunt the yellowed bones of saints. In Diego Rivera’s house, the guides will tell you that Diego ate human flesh for inspiration, that he went to cemeteries at night and filched meat from corpses. He did this because he wanted to get in touch with his Aztec history, which is featured a few hours away in Teotihuacán, in the form of crumbling pyramids.

There, you can climb the narrow stairs to sit in the place where priests cut out the hearts of human sacrifices, offering the still beating organs to the gods in hopes of warding off apocalypse. Macabre, yes, undeniably so, but history tells us that many of these sacrifices were volunteers. According to Aztec religion, the honored dead--warriors who died in battle, women who died in childbirth, and those who died as sacrifices--became gods and goddesses. These honored dead visited the living again and again, in the forms of butterflies, hummingbirds, bright things with wings. The dead still visit the living in Mexico. In fact, it seems they never left. Mexicans maintain an intimate relationship with death.

I am old enough now to have acquired a mid-life crisis, which means I am also old enough to have made a certain personal acquaintance with death. I wouldn’t say that I know it exactly. It mystifies me, haunts me, the way that men did when my skin was smoother, my limbs leaner, my body making an ascent into full bloom instead of gradual descent to dust. I saw death first when I was twelve. I think, perhaps that acquaintance with death was the most positive I have had, for I was not afraid, only fascinated, as I stood over my grandmother’s embalmed body, poking her skin, entranced by the waxiness of her skin, the way her face had morphed in death into that of a stranger.

Later, at the age of 21, I stood over another body, my beloved father’s this time, minutes after his heart attack, horrified at the bolts of purple that had crept along his skin, at the stillness of his cold chest pressed against my cheek, at the cuts on his fingers that would never heal. We had planned a trip to the zoo that day.

Five years later, I encountered death again as I stood beside the tiny grave of my favorite kindergarten student, two days after a horse’s wayward hoof stopped his heart. I was enraged as I watched his mother scream, “My baby, my baby,” while they lowered his pint sized casket into the ground. I wanted to kill death.

I have met death, and though our first acquaintance was cordial, I have come to view him as a thief, a plunderer of lives, in short, a killer. Never have I stood at the bedside of an ailing loved one, watching him suffer, begging for the mercy of death. For me, death has shown no mercy. He has always crept in on jaguar’s feet and stolen suddenly what, in my mind, was not his to take. And I have hated him for his work.

If I could, I would pull that leering skeleton from the painting over my bed and slap him.

“Who do you think you are?” I would ask.

And I suppose, he would laugh, maybe adjusting his flowery crown with knobby, skeletal fingers.

“I am death,” he would say, offering no more explanation than that. He would only laugh, the way he does in the little figurines that stare out at from the carts of street vendors in San Miguel. In a fit of peevishness, I yanked the painting off my wall and thrust it behind my dresser.

But death is persistent. He appeared to me again and again in many forms, in the face of the Aztec god Quexocoatl, whose macabre visage was carved on the walls of the pyramids in Teotihuacán. In the skulls of sacrificed humans displayed in Teotihuacán’s museum. In the final tortured works of Frida Kahlo displayed at the Heart of Frida Museum in San Miguel.

The site of this museum is lovely, holding at its core a peaceful courtyard in which one can sit and peruse one of the many featured Frida texts. Around this courtyard, various rooms flaunt a collection of Frida’s letters and a handful of her drawings, scrawled on the backs of losing lottery tickets. As a self-proclaimed Frida enthusiast, I had placed a visit to this exhibit at the top of my “San Miguel to-do List.”

My first exposure to Frida was in my mid-twenties, when I was more than open to being impressed by wanton displays of fetuses and feminine sacrifice. As a college sophomore, my teacher, an avid feminist, showed slides of Frida’s paintings, and I wept quietly in my desk as vision after gory vision flashed in front of my eyes, each painting doused in blood and buckled with pain. Later that semester, I gave Frida a mental standing ovation and wrote a fiery paper dedicated to the power of her work, the rhetorical equivalent of a resounding, “You go girl.”

So years later, when I, now a tenured Frida acolyte, wandered the halls of the Heart of Frida exhibit, I was surprised by my reaction to her childish love/ hate letters and scrawled Crayola protests. I was surprised, most of all, however, by the fact that I would label anything created by St. Frida as such. And yet, the only thing with which I walked away from The Heart of Frida exhibit was a resounding sense of pity. No. Pity is too kind. Disgust. I am ashamed to say, I was disgusted with Frida Kahlo, that celebrated painter of indelible images, for her abominable lack of vision, her crippling lack of imagination, her ignoble inability to see anything in life but pain.

And as I walked down the narrow cobblestone streets that led back to my hotel room, with its resident manifestation of oil paint death, I wondered if death had not, in fact, already shown me some small mercy. Breathing the gardenia perfumed air, listening to the laughter of children dressed in red, watching the slow progress of a mongrel dog contentedly sniffing its way past Kool-Aid colored buildings, I wondered if my current obsession with death had, in fact, endowed me with an unprecedented ability to appreciate life.

Of all of Frida’s paintings, the one that is most applicable to my current state of mind is the oil painting entitled Thinking about Death. I have been thinking about death incessantly, whether I like it or not. And yet. And yet. Something about the way Frida thought about death, the way that she exulted in the macabre and doused her metaphorical body in pools of blood while her physical body was still working, more or less, made me want to slap her.

“Frida,” I want to say to the painting, “you are still alive. Why all the death talk?”

She only stares, frozen in agonized thought, with a little skeletal manifestation of death sneering from the center of her skull.

“Frida, your eyes still see. There are butterflies and bananas and blazingly blue beetles to be admired, and all you do is ruminate on the sewage in the street. Your ears still hear, and yet, you drown out the sounds of the wind flutes, craning for echoing screams. Your skin still feels, and you ignore the cool rain trickling over your shoulders, the wind licking your throat, the sun slipping its fingers up under the hem of your gorgeously colored skirt. I know what you think. Life is pain. Life is ultimately pointless, ending, as it inevitably does, in death. And I know what you mean. I get you, Frida. I am almost as old as you were when you wrote those tortured letters. I am old enough to have made an acquaintance with death. I am old enough to know that life is not all butterflies and wind flutes and cool rain. And yet. And yet. Along with the sewage and the screaming, those things are here too.”

My most recent acquaintance with death came only two years ago. It was perhaps, the most brutal encounter I have had thus far. I could argue, probably accurately, that it induced my aforementioned mid-life crisis. My last encounter with death began with a phone call.

“Hello,” I said, and the on the other end, “Tawni, Dea is dead.” Just like that.

Dea was dead, you see, and I threw the phone. Dea, the beautiful one I remember best hip-hop dancing during a lightning storm, wearing a gauzy yellow dress and flowers in her hair. My Dea, the one with the Grumpy Dwarf tattooed on her calf, the Dea who sang like Macy Gray and did a dead-on pterodactyl impression. Laughing Dea, the girl stood beside me in blue at my wedding, the girl who gave me the honor or standing beside her while she gave birth to her son. That Dea. She was dead.

I had seen her the day before, and she had laughed, like always. I had seen her the day before, and hours later, she had hung herself from a porch, at night, watching, I imagine, as she died, the dancing of Van Gogh stars. Thirty years of life reduced to a can of ashes, and at the funeral, I saw my own bewildered rage mirrored in the eyes of her nine year old son, who found her hanging. Dea was dead. Dead from impetuousness and impulsiveness and unadulterated self-pity. Dead from exactly the kind of self-indulgence Frida Kahlo displayed in those letters at the Heart of Frida exhibit. Dead from a lack, perhaps, of ever having bothered to live.

The day after Dea’s death, I awoke to see a jade colored hummingbird flitting outside my window, and I wept, because it occurred to me how lucky I was to be there to see it. A hummingbird, the Aztec symbol of everlasting life hovered outside my window, and I knew that because Dea had never bothered to live, I would live for both of us, sucking up, along the way, enough color and song and sun and love for two.

It turns out that Dea’s death has given me, along with a fear of death, an irrepressible love for life. Every breath is a miracle. Every morning I wake to hear the whir of hummingbird wings, I am keenly aware that this day could be my last. And I am thankful all day, for the blazing of the morning sun, for the banging of the lunch time boom boxes, for the meandering of the evening traffic jams. Yes, even for the traffic jams, I am grateful.

And yet. And yet. During my last week in san Miguel, I woke up in the middle of a black night ripped by gashes of moonlight. I woke up, and my liver hurt. I woke up, and even though death no longer stared down at me from that painting over my bed, I felt him in the room. I felt him, and I worried about the way I had been drinking while in San Miguel, about night after wild night of margarita after margarita after tequila shot after margarita. I wondered if one could acquire cirrhosis in a month.

Staring into the darkness, spinning and dizzy, I held onto my pillow like a drowning woman clutching a floating bit of wood. I held on and wondered if one could fall off the edge of the world. And I knew one could. I knew Dea had.

What scares me most about death is this. Some nights, I am standing on the edge of that dizzy ledge where Dea stood that one night when all of this—the pain and the pretty—became too much. I am standing, looking down, into an abyss that goes on and on into forever, and I am remembering the Sunday school stories about hell, and even now, even after all of these years, I am still that little girl kneeling by her bed, praying to a god that never hears, begging him not to throw his little girl into hell.

I wonder about my Dea. I wonder where she is now, if that night, when she was standing on the edge, and her foot slipped, if she just kept falling and falling, with no one to catch her. I wonder what will happen to me if my foot slips. I wonder if the god that judges after we die was even more cruel, to Dea, to Frida, than I have been, if he judged them more mercilessly, if he cared less about their pain.

I wonder if Frida is in hell. I pray that she is not, because for all of my pretty words, on those nights, after I wake up and research cirrhosis on the internet, after I wake up and stand, hands against the tile, crying in the shower of my little San Miguel cubicle, letting the hot water shatter my skin, after I stand there like that, the pain of my life, the pain of my impending death, washing over me like the water--in that moment, I am Frida. And I pray there is a god who is kinder than I.

The Aztecs, for all of their bloody sacrifices, believed, a tour guide told me, in a kind afterlife. There was no concept of punishment after death. Only heaven. Heaven for everyone, regardless of the lengths to which they were driven when the pain became too much. That kind of death is a death I want to believe.

The week before she died, Frida painted a different kind of picture, a lush montage of watermelons too beautiful to eat, and she called her final masterpiece Viva la Vida. And I wonder if Frida, in those last moments, looking back over her pain, knew something I didn’t know. Did death, standing there, staring over her shoulder as she painted those last strokes, whisper something in her ear, something sweet and warm that erased those years of agony and made her life, in retrospect, beautiful?

I wonder if Dea, while dangling and looking out over those Van Gogh stars, saw things that I had never seen, beauty unimaginable. I wonder if in that moment, life became bigger for her, if it was like all the stories say, if a tunnel of light stretched out in front of her, out and into forever, and she danced away, through that tunnel, into something too big and beautiful for words. That is the way I want to see it.

Those laughing skeletons, a museum curator said to me, do not represent death. They represent the life of one who has lived. On Dia de los Muertos, people build altars for their dead, altars laden with gifts that symbolize the lives of the dead ones.

For Dea, I would build an altar, an altar decorated with Grumpy Dwarfs and pterodactyls, an altar with a silver milagro of nine year old child’s hand, an altar to hold that yellow dress she wore that night she danced, laughing, flowers in her hair, under a night sliced by jagged lightning. I would build that altar, and I would sit by and wait for her to fly over, the way the Mexicans say she would, fly over and sweep down, maybe to touch me, maybe to sweep my face with a gentle kiss, a breeze or a raindrop. I would ask her questions.

I would say, “Dea, beautiful laughing Dea, broken bleeding Dea, how did you go down? Did you go down laughing? Are you laughing now? Was that laughing skeleton hanging over my bed a picture of your face?”

(Dea's name in this piece has been changed, as have been details of her life. Her beautiful spirit remains intact, here and always. )

London, As Soon Through the Bleary Eyes of an Intrepid World Traveler

I am nestled in a quasi-cozy coffee shop, sipping a latte, looking at London through a frosted window. (At least for the moment, I am. Watch me, though. I am tricky. Soon, I will wander all over London in the space of a story. Watch me move. Watch me move. Watch me watch me watch me move.) Outside the glass, purple flowers whose names I don’t know are dancing in a gale of wet wind. No snow freckle mars the brick red face of the sidewalk, but it is cold. Step outside without a coat and die cold. Drop an egg on the cobblestone street and watch it freeze into a hard yellow eye cold. So cold the sky has turned into a sheet of gray ice.

Posh men and women in cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarves bustle by, and I watch them, wanting, I suppose, for them to believe I am one of them. If I don’t speak, they will never know what I am. Which is this. A person who watches through the glass. An imposter who does not own a scarf, much less know how to tie one with cleverness. An over-pronouncer of r’s. An American who will have to ask the waiter to repeat the soup of the day three times because I cannot understand a damn word these people say. I am fresh off the plane, more or less. The jetlag is still kicking my ass.

Intrepid world traveler. Someone called me that. I can't say I know what intrepid means, but I'm fairly certain I'm not it. Still, I have visited around 15 countries now, give or take, which isn't a lot, but isn't a few either, so I suppose I should be gathering some know-how by now. What I know how to do, mostly, is run from buses.

I was raised on a mountain. My father, my mother, my brother, two cats, and a gaggle of chickens made up the collective society I called my "culture." From time to time, we also saw a pack of migrating cows, and once, my brother swore he saw a cougar. But more or less, my childhood was a simple one. The most danger I faced crossing the street (if that's what you call the dried up riverbed that wound its way up my mountain) was getting my foot stuck in a cattle guard. So, now, here I am, intrepid world traveler, insisting on hurling through the stratosphere to places peopled mostly by double-decker buses intent on killing me.

I came here with my friend, Martine, who is quite possibly the most brilliant, beautiful, innately sophisticated person I know. She is a high-powered corporate executive, and as such, she gets paid to come to places like London and do whatever high-powered executives do in places like London. Make phone calls and such, I suppose. She eats expensive cheeses. And yes, she wears cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarves. As I mentioned, everyone in London wears cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarves. Except me. I wear lime green earmuffs.

Martine brought me along on this trip, expense free, at least on my end, because somehow, I have inexplicably managed to con her into believing we are intellectual equals. She recently married Piers, a fine specimen of British mandom, who is also brilliant and sophisticated and would probably wear a smoking jacket if Martine wasn't too modern for such nonsense. He is a writer, and I can pull off vaguely intelligent conversations about writing with him, if he doesn't delve too deeply. Perhaps this is the reason Martine is under the illusion that I am bosom friend material, even though her IQ has to be 30 or 40 points higher than mine.

But mostly her confidence in me springs from, I think, the fact that I have perfected a social move called "the profound nod." This means that when someone discourses brilliantly on a subject about which you know little or nothing, you nod with great meaning, furrowing your brow and appearing to be thinking thoughts too deep for human utterance. If you know a little about the subject, you spout it, and then nod profoundly again, interlacing your fingers and staring at specks of dust in the distance, thinking deep thoughts. Last night, at a posh little pub peopled with scarf-wearing Londoners, Martine spoke of Mary Wollstonecraft. I am like her, apparently.

"You are so like Mary Wollstonecraft," she told me, staring soulfully into the fireplace. "So brilliant and misunderstood. But she came into her own later in life, as you are. Of course, those early years were a doozie. They say her suicide attempt was a sham, but you know, I've gazed down into the river Thames at midnight, and no one can tell me that someone plunging into those roiling, icy waters doesn't mean business."

After much deliberation, I took a sip of my beer, nodded profoundly, and said, "Ah, those 18th century British feminists. They have much in common with another group of British social activists/artists, namely, the Monkees." (See how I brought the conversation around to a subject I knew more about? That is a class-A move in the school of profound nodding.)

It is mostly through shenanigans like this that I have managed to convince Martine that I as smart as she is, though I think that after observing my behavior around double-decker buses, she may be on to me. Not once, but twice, she has snatched me back from the jaws of death after I stepped blithely into the path of an oncoming red streak of doom. She keeps telling me to look both ways before I cross, as if I don't know that.

Actually, I don't. Not innately. I think learning to cross a street is like learning a second language. If you don't do it when you are a child, you will never be truly proficient. I am not a fluent street crosser. I have to think about it each time I come to an intersection, which raises a gnawing sense of dread when I wander through a large city. This trip at least, this hasn’t been much of a problem, however, as my sophisticated, scarf- wearing friend has been with me to save me from being squashed like a grape in the middle of Fleet Street. But today, my high powered executive friend had to work, because that's what she does here.

So I was alone in this lovely hotel room that just so happens to overlook the courtyard of St. Paul's Cathedral. The sun was shining, more or less, bounding off the spires like a happy, scarf-wearing, British child. I had promised my British Lit professor back home a picture of Oliver Goldsmith's grave, partially because I like my lovely professor, and partially because I wanted an A in her class. Armed with a map, a water bottle, and the hotel address in case I got lost and needed to have a taxi take me home, I headed out. Wearing high heels.

Before you judge me, consider this. Martine told me before I came that I needed to wear comfortable shoes. So I brought tennis shoes. But when I got here, I found out that the only people in London who wear tennis shoes are joggers and construction workers. So if I was going to wear tennis shoes and "blend," (one of the goals of intrepid world travelers is to "blend"), I was either going to have to match the shoes with a pair of Lycra spandex and walk about heaving violently and sweating, or, I was going to have to carry a hammer. Neither seemed practical. So I settled on wearing my two-inch-heels, as opposed to my five-inch-heels. The grave in question was a block away anyway. No problem. As follows is a run down of my intrepid world traveller morning (which eventually brought me to the coffee shop, which will eventually lead to an epiphany. Bear with me. Or watch me move. Wait, forget bearing. Just watch me move. It sounds cooler.)

9:14 Exit hotel.

9:15 Return to hotel to get camera.

9:16 Exit hotel.

9:17 Thrill with the glorious sensation of walking the streets of downtown London, briskly, knowing I "blend." Still, wish I had a cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarf.

9:18 Realize I am lost. Turn around.

9:23 Wait, I'm not lost. Turn back around.

9:27 Come to a major thoroughfare. See oncoming buses. Have panic attack. Turn back around.

9:30 Suavely sit on curb. Nonchalantly take out map. Realize I have to cross the thoroughfare if I want A in class.

9:31 Look both ways. Look both ways. Walk. Shriek, "God, save me" and cover head with hands. Run.

9:32 Dive onto sidewalk. Scream, "Sorry, sorry," and wave at the back of the double-decker bus that almost mowed me down.

9:33 Sit down on curb and cry. Look around. Think, "This really doesn't look like a tourist district." Wipe away tears and take out map. Get my bearings. Walk.

9:35 Thrill at the sight of Westminster Abbey. Take photos of myself smiling, Myspace style.

9:35 See sign on front of Westminster Abbey that reads "National Bank." Realize I am not at Westminster Abbey and people are looking at me funny.

9:35 Walk. Fast.

9:37. Gasp and lurch violently as a man leaning against wall hisses at me

9:38 Walk faster. Contemplate the meaning of hissing. Is it a threat? A come on? The London-ese equivalent of a whistle?

9:40 Realize I have walked too far. Duck into a nearby pub, hoping that by the time I finish my beer, hissing man will be gone.

10:00 Leave pub and immediately see hissing man, who hisses again, and says, "You are most beautiful.” Say, "Thank you," and walk faster.

10:01 Freak out because hissing man is following me down the street. Start to run a little. Think, "I shouldn't have said 'thank you' when he said I was beautiful." Inwardly chastise self, mentally slapping forehead and saying, "Stupid, stupid, stupid." Hear hissing man scream, "Wait, wait, just talk to me, beautiful girl. Please." Run faster. For first time wish had not worn high heels.

10:02 Come to thoroughfare. See oncoming bus. Stop. Hear hissing man pound up behind me, asking, "Can you speak?"

10:03 Hissing man has given me an idea. Contemplate pretending not to be able to speak. I can do my ABC's in American Sign. He wouldn't know American Sign, would he?

10:04 Hear hissing man ask which languages I speak. Remember that everyone in the world besides Americans speaks about 14 languages. Realize there is a good chance that he may speak American Sign. Whisper, "I speak English" and hope hissing man will not kill me. Hear hissing man ask for my phone number. Tell hissing man I am visiting London with my boyfriend. Contemplate telling him that said boyfriend's name is Hulk, but realize this may be going too far. Watch with relief as "Don't Walk" changes to "Walk." Turn to go. Feel hissing man grab hand and refuse to let go. Hear him say, "Talk to me, talk to me. You most beautiful." Extricate hand. Run.

10:05-11:14 Walk up and down street looking for courtyard in which said grave is hidden. I mean really hidden.

11:16 Find grave. Take photos, noting that it is ugly and old and covered in green moss and not really worth the trouble I went through to find it. Worry that hissing man may have followed me and may be lurking behind monuments. Look over shoulder. Spout expletives.

11:18 Return to hotel

11:45 Realize I passed hotel and am now crossing the River Thames. Thrill at the thought that I am crossing the River Thames, haltingly, but still blending, no problem, with or without cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarf.

11:45 Wander into a building that happens to be the reconstruction of the Globe Theater. Watch highly trained actors swordfight. Thrill at the thought that I am in the Globe Theater watching highly trained actors swordfight. Buy souvenirs.

12:35 Wander into a pub near the River Thames. Order chicken salad. Sit down and try to blend. Look out window at river and nod profoundly, appearing to think thoughts too deep for human utterance. Smile at waiter and compliment him on his cleverly-tied, brightly-colored scarf. Watch him put down food and ask if I need "cutlery." Say, "What?" Listen to him say, "Cutlery, do you need cutlery?" Remember that that is what they call silverware in London. Say, "Oh, yeah," and giggle in posh way. Feel dismayed to note that in addition to chicken, salad is covered in little dead silver fish.

12:40 Choke down little dead silver fish, hoping to blend.

1:08 Hobble back to hotel. Worry because toes are numb.

1:37 Realize I am nowhere near the hotel, and the guy with crazy eyes in the alley looks like he wants to rip my throat out with his teeth. Try to look like I know karate. Turn around.

1:45 Wait. I walked too far. Try to recall whether or not I have ever read about anyone's toes falling off.

1:50 Are there cows in London? I mean, within the city limits, strictly speaking?

1:51 I don't think so. Say goodbye to cow. Turn around. Smell something funny. Casually sniff armpits. It's not my armpits.

1:52 Oh, it's urine. I am back at alley, and crazy-eyed man is peeing on wall.

1:53 Bust out my karate. Hear crazy man call me bad names. See spire of St. Paul's cathedral up ahead. Head for it and briskest pace broken feet will allow.

1:55 Look over shoulder. See spire of St. Paul's Cathedral behind me. Turn around.

1:57: See spire of St. Paul's Cathedral to the left of me. Make a left.

1:59 See spire of St. Paul's Cathedral to the right of me. Make a right.

2:04 See spire of St. Paul's Cathedral behind me. Curse St. Paul's Cathedral in bitter tones. Hail taxi.

2:05 Listen to taxi driver note that I am American and listen as he talks about American Idol with much aplomb. Wish I watched American Idol so I could make a friend. Listen to taxi driver ask me where I am from. Tell him New Mexico. Listen to him go off about tequila and Aztec ruins. Tell him New Mexico is a state in the U.S., knowing that this explanation will not really make a difference, having had this conversation in 15 other countries now. Listen as he asks me if everyone in Mexico still drives little green Volkswagons. Wonder what that even means. Say, "No." Listen as driver points out Parliament Building. Listen as he adds that "Parliament" (he says this word slowly, as if I am very young or mentally deficient) is their "government" (he also says this word slowly).

2:35 Hobble into hotel. Toss shoes in trash can. Go over pics from days adventures. Wonder if I can crop bank picture to look like Westminster Abbey for Myspace.

Eventually, I mustered the courage to leave the hotel again. I donned my tennis shoes and hobbled off to the coffee shop, noting with dismay that the weather had changed and there was no more sunlight hopping from spire to spire, nothing yellow resembling anything like a happy child. Instead, there was wind. And rain. And the sky was threatening to snow. I got out my umbrella, and, of course, an angry gust turned it inside out immediately. I tried to yank it back down. Didn’t happen. Wandered along like that, getting soaked, wondering what the hell I was trying to prove, leaving my little adobe domicile, coming to this posh place that so obviously hated my guts.

Now let me wax, if not philosophical, at least explanatory for a sentence or two. This self-doubt is not new. There is this moment, a heart stopping conglomeration of acute unease and profound mistrust of self, on every trip. (And who could blame me for not trusting myself, hobbling about as I was, blistered in my uncool shoes and lime green earmuffs, sporting an inside out umbrella?) In any case, the first steps, off the plane, the bus, the train, whatever metal womb has gestated you during your journey, are always the hardest. “I don’t know how to do this,” you say. “I don’t know the rules.” You tell yourself you don’t need no rusty rules, but fuck all if the guy hurdling down the street in the double-decker bus doesn’t think you do.

You cry. You always do. At the beginning, the first day, or the second maybe, of any trip, you cry. You cry and you wander into a coffee shop with your inside out umbrella, and you blush when you order your goddamn latte, because you try to pay with a credit card, and when the lady says, “Cash only,” it takes you a good minute to understand what she means. These people speak English, for God’s sake, and still, there is a language barrier.

Utterly beaten, you hobble to a corner, plop yourself by a window, and watch. Out there, those delicate purple flowers have somehow managed to survive this London winter, and they are dancing in the wind, purple as ever. The flowers have survived, but you can’t do it. You just can’t. You resist the urge to bury your head in your hands and wail.

A businessman behind you is talking on his micro-mini-cell-phone, stringing orders like beads on a wire, and you listen. He says this: He says, “Don’t just fucking sit there. Do something. It’s always better to do than die. Bloody hell.” And he isn’t Dr. Phil, and he sure isn’t talking to you, but you take it to heart anyway, you just need something, anything, right now. You take it to heart and congratulate yourself that tear-stained and ear-muffed you is sitting here in a quasi-cozy coffee shop in London instead of idling at home. You are doing, not dying, and even if your umbrella is fucked up beyond all recognition, it feels good.

A song is playing on the speakers, a song you used to sing in seventh grade chorus, and suddenly, looking out the window, you are just like the song says, on top of the world looking down on creation. You are wrapped in this warm thing that has nothing to do with the fire. For a minute, you own you, you know? You own yourself, your freaky earmuffs and your scarf-less neck and your shaking hand holding your inside out umbrella and your eyes looking out at the bustling posh people and the unbeaten purple flowers and you realize you were wrong. You are just like the flowers. Just like them, because you are fucking doing, not dying. (Now I will make the big jump. The promised epiphany, as it were. Though epiphany may be too big a word. Try “food for thought” on for size. Chicken soup for the lunatic soul?)

Think of life as this, as a trip. You slide out of the womb screaming, wondering at the enormity of the double-decker buses hurdling your way. “I can’t do this,” you say. “I don’t know the rules.” And for a moment, you are right. You almost get squished like a grape. But somewhere along the way, you decide that you don’t need no rusty rules. You rock your lime green earmuffs and inside out umbrella. You rock the shit out of those babies, and all those posh people in their brightly-colored scarves stand up and take notice.

“Are those Bugle Boy jeans you are wearing,” they ask, and you say, “No, K-Mart,” and the way you over-pronounce that “r” rocks the £30 argyle socks off their cleverly-tied world.
And that otherworldliness you have, that accent that is a dead giveaway that you are not from around here, stops embarrassing you and you talk more because, holy hell, these cats think you, you in your uncool shoes and freaky green earmuffs, you with that inside out umbrella, you who have to ask the waiter to repeat himself three times, you who almost got squished like a grape on Fleet Street, you who got chased down by a hissing man and cussed out by a pissing man. You. Yeah you. The one with no scarf. You. Are. Exotic.

Author’s Note (a disclaimer, as it were): Those last three paragraphs may not be an entirely accurate description of actual events. I finished my latte in silence, and no one, in fact, stood up and took notice. Except me. I noticed. Then I stood up. Which was enough.

(This piece was written during the course of two trips I took to London during the past year. I posted it today because, well, I just created this blog and it seems like as good a time as any. I am, in fact, in San Miguel de Allende, as I post it.)