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.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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.
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.)
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.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)