CONTRIBUTED BY MATT RIORDAN (New York)
Jack was in the middle of what would later become known as his Mexico period. He was smoking bales of the local skunk and reading all this crap about land reform and native spiritualism and lots of Chomsky. Grocery lists by Chomsky. He went down there after he got kicked out of school the second time, on the advice of one of the idiots who got him kicked out, and tried out for the Oaxaca Dragons in the Mexican Triple A. His curve still had enough on it to get him on as a left-handed reliever, which kept him busy four nights a week. The rest of his time he spent vigorously screwing this girl who fancied herself some kind of medicine woman, in a turquoise toe ring sort of way, from whom he likely heard the bullshit that he mumbled at me as I half carried his ass to the bus station, which amounted to the theory that a few drops of oregano oil under his tongue would work better than antibiotics. An hour later the little subcomandante was unconscious in a hammock over a puddle of pinkish Fanta vomit. Hasta la victoria siempre.
I had to leave him at the station. I asked him if he felt any better and he said, “Did you get a picture? Of the tortugas? Mom will love that. No, wait, yeah, I’ll be fine. Yeah. Fine.” Then he sank back into his hammock. I left him a two liter bottle of warm red Fanta and some American Marlboros that I had bought at the duty free. The ramshackle bus station was open to the street, and it was run by this lady in an apron who clearly didn’t like the look of us, but it had more or less everything he might need for the next few hours, including a hammock and a semi-private bronze-age toilet. Anyway, it was a place to stash my hallucinating kid brother while I went looking for fucking Epstein and the god damned pills.
Of course, it was hot like the womb of a demon and everything smelled like ass. Half a block from bus station there was a guy selling Cokes. I tried to buy one, but the guy wouldn’t give me the bottle. He kept trying to pour the Coke into a grimy looking plastic bag. I left without the Coke and he kept my money. He shouted at me as I went, but I couldn’t understand him. Jack was supposed to do the talking. I was supposed to spend a week getting a sunburn and shaking off the thirty days I had just pulled. But Jack was out of commission, I didn’t speak Spanish well enough to buy a warm Coke, and Epstein and his antibiotics were nowhere to be found. I decided to call Lena.
I had hopes Lena was eighteen. She was a cousin of Jack’s Medicine Woman. While we were still in Oaxaca the Medicine Woman had called Lena and asked her to show me and Jack and Epstein around Puerto Escondido and the Zipolite beach, which is a sort of naked hippie drug bivouac. We took an overnight bus ride from Oaxaca, checked into the Sun and Sea Guest House the following morning, and crashed for most of a day. We had fried platanos and beer for dinner, then Jack called Lena and we met her at a bar where you had to shout to be heard. When Jack and Epstein got up to get us another round she started asking me biographical questions, like she was filling out an application for me. I was lighting a particularly delicious duty free Marlboro, one of the two or three out of a pack that will keep you coming back, when she asked, “What do you do for a job?”
“I consider myself a motorist.”
“You fix motors?” Lena’s English was excellent.
“No. I was kidding. I work in the music business.”
“Do you have a wife?” She asked this like you might ask someone if they had a garden hose or a basset hound.
“I’m too young to be married.” The look on her face said she didn’t think so, and that she was trying to figure out what was so wrong with me that a decade or so of other women had decided to take a pass.
She said she wasn’t really from there. Her family had moved from Mexico City. She said the locals were hicks that called her a Chilango and told her she dressed like a prostitute. She was tall and brunette and had a few large angry looking zits on her face, but she was skinny, and all right looking with her clothes off. Back in my room she put her head right down on the flimsy bed and her ass up in the air and said, “Ready.”
* * *
When they come to you with the plea bargain and tell you thirty days or take your chances with the jury on a nickel hitch for assaulting a police officer, you think, well, fuck, I can do thirty days standing on my head. But later it comes time and you live in a tiny cell, like a honey bee, except you share it with some dull normal lowlife, and you eat food that tastes like metal. At any given moment there are dozens of people within earshot shitting. Not just any people, of course, but adult men. Felons. Dozens of shitting adult male felons. All day. Sometimes it was a slapping noise, like an aggressive bongo player attacking piles of wet hamburger, and sometimes it had more bass, like someone tugging the pull start on a snowblower that won’t turn over. You just lay there and sweat and hear it and think every few minutes about the smell of clean laundry and every woman you ever saw in her underwear, and you know the next time you look down thirty days you’d rather be hit across the eyes with a two by four.
* * *
There was a payphone in the first open bar I found. The few mid-morning patrons stared at me as I pumped a handful of fat Mexican coins into the slot. Lena answered the phone. Right away she asked me where I was.
“Well, right now I’m in a bar. I’m hoping you can help me. Jack’s really sick, and I need to find Epstein.”
“Where is Epstein?”
“I’m not sure, but I think he’s at a hotel on the beach, and, you know, I don’t speak shit for Spanish. I can’t get around too well without Jack. Epstein has some antibiotics that should bring Jack back around, but I’m not sure where Epstein is.”
“You need help from me. That is why you are calling me.” Her English sounded terrific to me just then, but I couldn’t tell if this was a question.
“That’s right.” There was a pause.
“You are lucky. I am home today. It’s a school holiday. Where are you?”
I told her the name of the bar. She never heard of it. She told me to meet her back at the Sun and Sea instead. I hung up and went outside. A skinny dog was standing in the otherwise deserted street. He had a crunched up disposable roasting pan in his mouth. There was a taxi parked in front of the bar. I got in the back before I realized there was nobody in the driver’s seat. I started to get back out, but when I did I saw a chubby middle aged guy in Mexican cowboy getup coming out of the open door of the bar. He was waving and hustling so I got back in. While I was ducking back into the back seat I noticed that the yellow taxi dome on the roof of the car was an upside down margarine tub, and then I noticed that more than one guy was coming out of the bar. The dog was wagging his tail. I tried to open the door but one of the guys shoved it closed. He had one of those enormous oval belt buckles. It was just about eye level. I locked the door and slid across the seat to the other side, but another guy had already opened it. He was holding a black handled knife. A third guy got in the driver’s seat and started the car. The dog barked. The guy with the knife ducked his head into the back seat. He kept his eyes on me and didn’t close them, even when I hit him in the face. He looked surprised. He had no room to move, so he just watched me as I hit him again, much harder. He fell back into the street. I yanked the door closed and slapped the lock down and then started over the back of the front seat. The driver hopped out and I locked the door after him. Now all three of them were on their feet surrounding the car. I think maybe these guys were new. One of them stood in front of the car as I dropped it into drive. He was holding one hand palm up and with the other he was waving a machete at me, to convince me to stop so he could use it to chop on my face. I stepped on the gas. I thought he would roll over the hood but he didn’t. He fell under the car and I ran over some part of him that made the car bounce. I drove a hundred yards or so before I stopped to let the dog in.
* * *
Thirty days in the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute is what you get, maybe what you deserve, if you go drinking in Pawtucket. Epstein and I had been on the road with a band called Dengue for nine weeks. Epstein was there to make sure the promoter got his percentage of the honest door. This was an absolutely critical job, as pretty much everybody is out to screw the promoter, but Epstein’s attentions were only required during the actual show. The rest of the time he dicked around selling t-shirts and scalping tickets. We had just done two shows in North Attleboro and Epstein wanted to go to Pawtucket. He said he knew some girls there. What he meant was that he knew of a motel where you could hire Brazilian hookers.
I’m no prude, and rare is the man whose life isn’t enriched by the occasional sunshine of a crack troupe of Brazilian hookers, but I wasn’t sure that my romantic life had become so desperate that professionals were called for. I told Epstein this, but he ordered up an impressive squad of hookers anyway. “On me,” he said.
They arrived at the Patriot motel, just off I-95 in downtown Pawtucket, and started their routine by smoking some of our dope and then stripping to some Euro synth pop from a boom box they had brought along. We were high and drinking, but we both got quiet when the gyrations started in earnest. One of the girls had on some impossibly tight white stretch pants. She put her hands on her knees and pointed her ass at us. She had it cantilevered way out over the stained carpet, her knees bent deep, and she got it to flail. Epstein was sitting on the bed smoking a cigar. He looked at me and said, “Like two puppies in a burlap sack fighting over a milk bone.”
* * *
On the drive back to the Sun and Sea people waved at me and shouted. Some of them made eye contact, but I just shrugged at them until I realized that they were trying to hail the cab I was driving. I pulled over for two guys in old school NBA jerseys. When they got in I got out and just started walking. The dog followed. It was a few minutes before they drove by with three more guys in the back seat. They honked and threw something to the dog. It was the crunched up roasting pan. I was hoping that diplomacy would fail when they met up with the parties from whom I had liberated the car.
When I got to the Sun and Sea, Lena was waiting on the porch. She was wearing aviator sunglasses. She stepped up, I thought maybe to kiss me, but it turned out she was trying to kick the dog. He bolted and lay down in the bald little yard. I told Lena that Jack was barfing in the bus station, that the express bus left at eight o’clock, and that we had until then to round up Epstein and his antibiotics. I held off telling her about the taxi incident, mostly because I wasn’t sure who she might tell. She listened to me quietly, then said she wanted to go up to my room. I had to tell her I didn’t have a room there anymore, that I had checked out in the morning when Jack had woken up sick. “Get another one,” she said. I turned to look up the street for any of the various parties that might be rolling up on me, or that I might be looking for, and she came up behind me and was suddenly convincing.
Jack had always been athletic. Even drunk at the beach he could throw a damn near perfect spiral. He played high school ball and had become one of those guys you knew that about without asking, even when he was talking some shit about social justice or foreign movies. Maybe not my proudest moment, but I figured his constitution could handle another round or so with the microbes while his older brother, just out of the crossbar hotel, got a little mud for his duck. Lena and I went to the desk and rang the bell that summoned up the expatriate hippie white lady that ran the dozen or so rooms in the place. She came in from the back porch with a melon rind in her hand. It was scraped completely clean of edible flesh.
“Back already? Forget something?” Then her eyes wandered over Lena, who had on a tube top. The hippie lady might endorse what we were up to as freedom, or she might see it as sexual colonialism or any of a number of brands of exploitation offensive to her personal creed, but the look of the place, and the slightly crinkly flesh on either side of her eyes, said that either way she was going to take my sixty bucks. Maybe twenty years ago her carefree ways would have aroused a moment’s envy from the shivering gringo wage slaves down for beach time and cheap dope, but now she just looked grimy and in need of some first world dental work, and no amount of cubicle-free living would convince anyone to swap lives and slip into her sweat stained batik and clunky sandals. She took my cash and handed me a set of keys.
We went upstairs to the room. I asked Lena to leave the aviators on. She did.
When I woke up she was going through my pants pockets. I was mildly disappointed.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Cigarette.” She kept digging, then stopped to look at me. “What did you think? You think I am stealing? I am not stealing. You have nothing to steal.” She went back to looking for my cigarettes. “I think you are the poorest man I have ever been with.” She found them and lit two at once. She sat on the bed and put one between my lips. She was wearing underwear that was more ornament than function. I asked her to use the phone downstairs to call the bus station to check on Jack. I showered and wrote a note for Epstein in case he showed up there. I gave it to the hippie lady and found Lena on the front porch.
“Jack is sleeping. The ticket agent says his bus does not leave for six hours and she is not running a hotel. He is also using the bathroom.”
“He’s sick.”
“If he is really sick, you should take him to the hospital.” Lena’s plan had a lot to recommend it, especially if I had done that when we got up that morning and Jack started puking up his Fanta and babbling fever dream gibberish. But now that I had run somebody over and stolen their car, my plan was to get Jack and Epstein on the eight o’clock bus back to Jack’s place in Oaxaca, then to get out of Mexico as quickly as possible. I explained the taxi incident to Lena.
“Do you think the fat man is dead?” I had mentioned he was fat. I had used the Spanish word, “gordo,” which is a Spanish word I happen to know.
“I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters anyway. I need to find Epstein and get all of us the hell out of here. Chop chop.”
Lena stood still. “You left your brother sick in a bus station and then you hit someone with your car, and then you were with me.” She seemed to consider this for a long moment.
“It wasn’t my car,” I said.
She reached into her bag, took out a pack of my cigarettes, and lit one. “You must not go to the police. The men who tried to rob you probably were the police, or family of the police.” It hadn’t occurred to me to involve the police, which I realized is the way a convict thinks. “Where is Epstein?” she asked.
As far as I knew, Epstein was still at the beach. We had left Epstein the day before, with some guy named Jared and two girls from New Jersey with tattoos just above the cracks of their asses. Both of them. Butterflies I think, or fairies, anyway, something with wings. Epstein knew the guy and had arranged to meet up with him before we left the States. It was plain enough that there was some commercial angle to their meeting that Epstein had chosen not to share with me, and, given my most recent address, I was happy to be left out. Jared and the two girls were staying in a resort hotel on the beach that had a pool and a buffet. Jack and I were both close to broke, but Epstein checked in with a credit card.
* * *
Epstein was the one who came and got me when they processed me out. He picked me up in his Pathfinder with the dancing bears sticker in the rear window and the empty Camel Lights packs underfoot. On the way to the motel he told me about the Mexico trip. He said he and Jack had cooked it up as a welcome home present. He didn’t mention Jared until later. Inside I had acquired a tattoo on the back of my left hand, on the fleshy spot between my thumb and index finger. It is a decision I have since had the opportunity to regret. The guy who put it there used a tattoo gun he made from a safety pin and the guts of a bic ball point. Not five minutes out of jail, when I reached for a cigarette, Epstein saw the indigo swallow on my hand and said, “There’s a real must for your next job interview.”
Four or five drinks later he asked me, “Is it true what they say about sex in there? The shit I read, well, anyway, everything went all right for you, right? I mean, I understand you had to do whatever you had to do. It doesn’t mean anything.” I looked at him for awhile before I said anything.
“You wanna know did I rent out my anus as a penis warmer for protection or cigarettes? No. No, I didn’t.” The bartender was pretending not to listen as he washed some glasses, and a fat woman wearing pastel stirrup pants got up to put money in the jukebox. The place was dark, but not dark enough. You could still see where you were and the people you were in there with.
* * *
“Do you think Epstein is still there?” asked Lena.
I did, but I didn’t answer her immediately. I asked her how she got there.
“Scooter.”
“Scooter? Who’s Scooter?”
“My Vespa. I rode my Vespa.”
It was kind of an aqua color. She insisted on driving, so I perched on the seat behind her as best I could and hung on around her waist. The dog set off after us. He kept up until we turned onto the coast road.
Lena backed off the throttle if the alternative was immediate death on the grill of a beer truck, but was otherwise pretty cavalier about highway safety. The road was leprous, and every fourth or fifth vehicle was a shit shaker of a truck that took its lane from the center of the road. Many were piled high with used mattresses and jerry cans and baskets of crap that looked to be worth just barely north of nothing, and anyway much too worthless to bother dragging on the roof of a truck to anywhere. This crap periodically fell off and bounced by us at life ending speed, but Lena worked the throttle and the brake without evident concern. I held on just under her rib cage and we were there in twenty minutes.
The resort where we left Epstein had a large parking lot and several buildings still under construction. We ducked the main lobby entrance and instead picked our way through a set of unfinished cabanas. There were sawhorses and tools lying around and the sound of hammers. Lena picked out a new looking cordless nail gun and put it in her tote bag. She didn’t look around first, and she didn’t look nervous. She just put it in her bag like she had left it there, and then we walked together out to the pool. Epstein was the first person we saw. He was in a chaise by the pool drinking orange juice. He saw us and waved.
When I explained the situation and Jack’s need for his antibiotics, I could tell Epstein wasn’t going for it. He kept wiping the sweat out of his eyes and running his hand over his hair. I told him about the guy I ran over, and then I told him I needed to borrow some money. Then I suggested that he should come with us right now and that we should, all of us, leave Mexico immediately. He was squinting.
“Well I can help you out with some cash anyway,” he said. “Let’s go to the room.” As he was speaking the dog jogged out of the lobby to the pool area, followed closely by a hustling bellhop. The dog paused when he saw us, and his pause allowed the bellhop to kick him. The dog snarled and ran out onto the beach.
When we got to his room, you could see that Epstein was sharing it with someone. Their stuff was on the floor. It was nicer than the motel room in Pawtucket where I had been arrested, or the room at the Sun and Sea where I had stayed with Lena. Lena was sort of inspecting the place, looking at the drapes. Epstein was explaining why he couldn’t spare any of his antibiotics. “See, the thing is I’ve got a bit of a not so fresh feeling myself. What happens if I’ve got some epic dose and it’s just now brewing up? I can tell you the leading edge of it is already here. You wanna follow me in there,” he motioned to the bathroom, “I’ll leave you in no doubt. Anyway, I can’t come with you ‘cause I’m not finished here yet, and if and when I wake up here puking, Jack will have eaten up my antibiotics and your two smilin’ asses will be on the express bus back to Oaxaca. You can see how that doesn’t work out so much for me.” He smiled. Epstein had read something in prep school that he really shouldn’t have and as a result he subscribed to that Ayn Randy sort of bullshit personal empowerment philosophy that looks to the rest of us like garden variety douchebaggery.
“Give me the fucking pills.” Epstein wasn’t big on conflict, which, as a general policy, had stood him in much better stead than my tendency to escalate shit, and I knew he would relent eventually rather than hassle over the pills. This process often took a long time though, and I wanted to skip the first several steps of wearing him down. Lena stopped inspecting the drapes and sat on the bed to watch.
Epstein laughed nervously. “This situation would benefit enormously from some hookers.”
“Where are the fucking pills?” I asked.
A voice behind me said “Who the fuck are you?” Before I turned around I looked at Lena’s face. She was looking past me. She appeared to be concentrating hard, like maybe she was trying to bend a spoon.
The guy was shirtless and had a row of upside down triangles tattooed in black on his chest. He wasn’t Jared. He looked several degrees more problematic than Jared. He had easily twenty-five pounds and several inches of reach on me, and he looked ready to use both.
“Easy Marty. This is Dan. He’s an old friend.” Epstein said.
“Dan isn’t my friend,” said Marty, looking at me. “I don’t know Dan. Dan’s leaving my room. Now.”
The skinny dog trotted in and laid down on the floor. Everyone looked at him for a second. Lena took the opportunity to lean off the edge of the bed and hold her tote bag up against Marty’s leg. It made a metallic snap noise and Marty went down grunting into that spot between the foot of the bed and the TV. Epstein jerked, then breathed “Jesus.” Lena’s tote bag was now nailed to Marty’s leg. She fished her pocket book out of it and stood up.
Epsetin was moving. I turned and he was holding out a wad of pesos and a ziplock bag full of prescription bottles. “Here,” he said. Lena was already at the door. We were on the Vespa and headed back inside a minute.
When we got to the bus station it was getting crowded. Taxis were lined up and dropping off passengers. We parked the Vespa behind the station and collected Jack. He seemed better, but still a little dazed. The cement floor under his hammock had about a dozen cigarette butts ground into it. I gathered up his stuff and put it in his backpack. We left the Vespa and the three of us took a taxi to the airport. I inspected the yellow dome on the roof pretty carefully before I got in.
The airport was painted the color of band-aids. I paid cash for two seats on the flight to Oaxaca. Lena went to the ladies room and I bought a bottle of water for Jack to wash down the antibiotics. That’s when he told me he wasn’t sick.
“Me and Epstein bought some peyote buttons at the beach. Last night I chewed them up. I thought we got ripped off, but I guess it just didn’t kick in ‘till this morning. It makes you puke and then you’re booming for like ten hours.” He made this gesture with his right hand like a plane taking off. “Like mushrooms, only a lot more, well, sparkly. Sorry I’ve been so out of it.” I didn’t say anything. He fumbled around in his pockets then looked at me. “Please tell me you didn’t leave the fucking cigarettes in the bus station.” I had.
The plane rolled up outside the airport windows. It had two propellers and a shiny metal skin that glared in the late afternoon sun, like the plane Amelia Earhart tried to fly around the world. Lena came back from the ladies room and said she was going home. She said she would like to come see me in the States. She kissed me on the cheek and then turned and walked away.
Jack had been watching. “You make like a love connection there or what?” He jerked his head toward Lena’s back. I didn’t answer. “You know,” he said, “that girl’s smoked more hogs than Bob Evans.” I was still watching her.
“You know that, right?”
