The Mexican Year

Sometimes I sit down with this notebook and my favorite purple swirly pen and I don’t even know where to begin. Life is not a calendrical experience here in Tijuana. Blink and it’s only two days later, and already two days later, and everything in between is an impossibly vast journey that I remember as fragments of conversation, places and faces, emotions. I want to capture every moment, every heartbeat, because this is the bestest my life has ever been…but sometimes there just isn’t time to write, or even grope through my purse for my antique Polaroid camera. Sometimes I’m too busy enjoying myself, and two days of Tijuana remembering is just a hasty montage of moments starring the man who brought me here:

Nick standing in line at the taco stand, striking up a conversation with a couple vaqueros in huge straw cowboy hats and enameled belt buckles and cowboy boots, talking corn and cows, farmboys bonding.

Nick hurtling so aggressively down Carretera Aeropuerto — Airport Road — that Mexicans actually bother to honk in dismay, “high praise” as he calls it, winking at my seatbelted terror.

Nick sitting across from me at Beep’s diner, face even paler than usual, his mouth frozen in a gasping “O” as I wipe up the blobby chunk of bacon fat that I finally coughed out of my windpipe.

Nick discoursing about my alleged sex appeal amidst the bustle and bright vegetables of the Calimax supermercado, pausing with an eggplant in his hand, explaining very matter-of-factly, “I could starve to death in bed with you.”

Nick urgently waving me into a glassy storefront, hand a flapping bird, so I can marvel with him at a display of velvet paintings — really good ones, with Elvis and American presidents like Reagan and all the heroes of the Mexican Revolution cast in subtle purplish artistry.

Nick reclining cross-ankled on the bed, remote clicking in his fist as he replays the same scene again and again, patiently illustrating a point about Mexican masked wrestler movies, turning on a lightbulb in my head.

Nick glancing up from a cheap paper menu with PALACIO DE LA INDIA printed in Arabesque lettering, making a stricken face, imploring, “Not the really hot curry — that’ll burn like hell when I kiss you!”

Nick returning early from Maquiladora Alley to join my afternoon siesta, a gentle breathing that is almost lost in the fan blowing across me, the bed rocking, his body stilling to match mine.

There’s a disquieting moment too. We’re strolling amidst the dying grass and urban blare of Parque Morelos when a young mexicana mom and her toddler come staggering along on the sidewalk, going as fast — or slowly — as his stubby little legs will carry him. Maybe a moment like that clarifies your future, because I don’t look at them fearfully, the way I did when I was Saman’s anointed baby factory. Instead I look at the mother and child with a pang of curious hope, wondering if I’ll fall in love with Nick and have his babies.

The buttcrack of dawn on a Sunday and I’m already in the bedroom, slaving over the Korea Textile maquiladora archive for any glimmer of a publication-worthy doctoral dissertation. Except it’s not really the bedroom, it’s the “office”. Nooshin’s new name for her bedroom, which she is fastidiously pimping. Every time I utter the phrase “your bedroom” she smiles hopefully and says “Don’t you mean the office?” Semantics to me, an invisible pivot to her. Because if I start calling it the “office” instead of “your bedroom”, then it’s official. We’re living together. Not just under the same roof as roomies, but in the same bed as –

What are we, really? Buddies plus? Friends with fuckbuddy privileges? Boyfriend/girlfriend? That’s the real semantic dilemma here. Not this “office” and “your bedroom” shit.

Anyway.

I’m focused on the archive. Laser-focused. Using the kind of research tools that would amaze the giants whose shoulders I’m standing on. What would Foucault have wrought with internet porn and Google? Actually, that sounds like a better dissertation topic than small family-owned maquiladoras. I wonder if it’s too late to reinvent myself as an academic porn maven.

Double anyway.

Back to the archive. What a marketing blowjob that is, calling it an archive. Right now it’s just perilous stacks of yellowing paper that haven’t been sorted. Or indexed. Or paginated. Until then it’s a so-called archive. Kinda like Nooshin’s so-called bras, which are just micro-tanktops with pretensions. The Victoria’s Secret catalog prefers the term bralettes. I’ve never seen her wear one. But this way she’s a flat-chested girl who has bras, as opposed to a flat-chested girl who doesn’t even bother.

Triple anyway. FOCUS ON YOUR GODDAMN RESEARCH!

And finally I do.

For about five minutes, until that infamous laser-focus of mine is shattered by the sound of her voice. Keening. From the kitchen.

“I wanna be…the First Lady of Infinity!” she’s singing, dragging out the last consonant into infinity-eeeeeeeee!

That’s it. I hurtle into open space, slicing from her bedroom — the presumptive office — into the living room and finally the kitchen. In a grand total of two strides.

I discover Nooshin leaning over the stove, a stick figure in a wifebeater and saggy hiphuggers. She’s tending a pan of sizzling bacon. She keeps breaking into dance, spiraling around in her bunny slippers and repeating that line — “I wanna be…the First Lady of Infinity-eeeeeeeee!”

She freezes in mid-spin, and our semantic dilemma of a house is plunged into silence. Those widening eyes transfix me — until the right one drifts aside. I’m stranded in uncomfortable focus, hanging in the open doorway between living room and kitchen. My face is an irritable scowl. My boxer shorts are distorted by the tent-pole aimed at her.

“Oh! Hi,” she says a little breathlessly, and stops with her bunny slippers nosed together. Her gaze flickers between my face and my crotch. “So…what’s up?” She begins to dissolve into giggles. “Get it?”

What nobody knows about Nooshin — she really is the biggest goofball in the world.

I can’t peek into that pretty head of hers, but I imagine a vivid inner cosmos of silly puns and off-the-wall jokes and giggle fits that last for days. How else do you explain the way she’ll suddenly grasp my bicep and sag into me, stifling laughter? Or how she busts into spontaneous rap when I call for an update on her digitization progress: “The scanner is booming — everything is cool — I pull a couple hundred bucks a week — screw school!”

Nooshin seems to glow with inner light, a girl who always finds humor in her circumstances, no matter how bleak. At first I worried that she was a dork, or even manifesting a gradual derangement. But now I know better.

It’s depressing to realize that she’s always been like this, a girl trying to fill the gaping voids in her life where people should be. Humor is her self-defense. Her way of explaining to herself why strangers don’t befriend her. Why her parents and aunts pressured her to marry a stranger in a photograph. Why her sister coerced her to stay married to Saman. Why her husband and in-laws never showed her any love.

Maybe they’ve known Nooshin longer, but they don’t know her better. They don’t know the tortured girl who can still laugh about her circumstances. The free spirit who just wants to bloom. The brave face confronting Mexico. The gorgeous melting gasp beneath me.

She’s the girl they never wanted to know.

If they can’t understand what I feel for Nooshin — this combustive attraction of laughter and wide-ranging conversations and almost scary-strong passion — that’s their loss, not mine.

In Tijuana you get used to the beggars, I suppose. They’re everywhere, pooling in the cracks of the city, a human grit of sorrow and misery. They gravitate toward the border crossings and Avenida Revolucion and the Zona Rio, where American tourists roam with fat wallets and unprepared hearts. Because you have to prepare your heart. Harden it. Tell yourself I feel nothing for them. Otherwise there’s no way you can navigate this obstacle course of people sitting on newspaper and scraps of cardboard, reaching out with cupped hands and plastic cups, faces distilled into misery and shame. Not without an empty purse and a broken heart.

Sometimes I think I’m getting the hang of it, this seeing of beggars without really seeing them, without really feeling for them — but then something always happens to puncture my heartlessness and reduce me to near-sobs.

Today it happens while we’re powerwalking down the crowded sidewalks of Paseo de Los Heroes, aiming for the Plaza Rio shopping mall and its cineplex where American movies are playing. A woman who can’t be much older than Nick sits crosslegged on a discarded newspaper, her face upturned to the passing crowd in desperation, eyes brimming with the pain of her life. She has her dirty blouse hiked up, exposing a breast with a baby feeding. Next to her is a young teenage girl in an identical pose — crosslegged, t-shirt hiked up to expose a breast, baby feeding. They’re sharing an empty ice cream bucket, placed between them and jutting into the path of pedestrians. Mostly green American money barely covers the bottom.

“Oh. My. God,” I gasp, realizing they’re actually mother and daughter. Immediately I break down and fumble at my purse.

“Don’t.” The word is stony.

“But…”

Nick plants a palm on my tailbone and gives me a little shove, propelling me past the begging mother and daughter. “You see any Mexicans giving them money?”

I watch over my shoulder for half a block. Only Americans veer toward them and drop money in their bucket. Mexicans stroll right past, seemingly oblivious to their dire plight. “No,” I finally admit.

“What’s the lesson I keep trying to drill into you?” His profile is smooth and unperturbed. Already focused on the next thing.

“Always do as the Mexicans do,” I recite on cue, then sigh miserably. “But really, what kind of lesson is that? Five bucks don’t mean much to me, but imagine what it means to them.” I shiver in the hot sun. “Imagine what it means to their babies.”

“You can’t save the world by giving money to the beggars who look worse off than all the other beggars. All you can do is buy yourself some peace of mind.” The sweaty warmth of his hand vanishes from the small of my back, leaving me on my own little island of strappy sandals and guilt complexes. “Did you really want to make things right with them, or did you just want to feel better yourself?”

“How am I supposed to answer that question? I don’t even know how you begin to make things right with them!” And saying it, I suddenly realize that’s why I want to feel better. Because I don’t know how to make them feel better. I don’t know how to fix this messed-up world.

“I’d rather be smart about my charity,” Nick is saying. He grabs my hand and pulls me over to a deeply-wrinkled woman sitting on a plastic milk crate, vending flowers from a bucket. A hand-lettered cardboard sign says ROSES $1 EACH. The blooms are dangerously fringed with wilt, leftovers from floral shops. She probably buys their throwaway flowers at a vast discount or even gets them for free.

“A flower, senor?” the woman says, revealing flashes of teeth that are mossy with age. Her gaze flickers hopefully between Nick and I, trying to set up that situation where the boy is guilted into buying flowers for the girl. Then she notices my crooked gaze and crosses herself with a gnarled fist, warding off the evil eye.

“Para mi novia” — for my girlfriend — Nick winks at her, picking out a single red rose from the bucket and dropping a $5 bill in her outstretched hand. “Quedese con el vuelto” — keep the change — is his goodbye, as he spins on a hiking boot.

“Muchas gracias, senor!” she calls after him.

He hands the rose to me with a lopsided grin. “Now you can’t say I never buy you flowers.”

I trot along beside him, a rose that will be dead by morning clutched against my chest — the board-flat chest that somehow makes Nick puddle in desire — and I’m feeling almost ridiculously happy. He may act like a hardass, but underneath that icy aloofness is a man with a heart that’s so big and caring and vulnerable that he has to protect it. He has to protect himself. It’s the little gestures that really give him away. When he does something for others, a kind gesture, even just a look filled with compassion –

Oh god.

A beggar girl. Maybe 5 or 6 years old. No parents in sight, no siblings. Just a lost little thing alone on the hot dusty sidewalk, no gum or trinkets to sell, not even a cup to raise. She folds her hands in pitiful desperation, silently imploring us to give her more than our sympathy. When we don’t, she trails after us on bare dirty feet, a palm outstretched, her unkempt hair blowing in the backwash of passing cars.

All my sudden happiness is just as suddenly gone. I want to…god, I don’t know. Take her home with us or something. I squeeze Nick’s hand in misery and bury my face in his shoulder and start crying. “Shhhhhh…” he whispers into my hair, then “Aw shit!” when I stumble over a crack in the sidewalk and bang into his nose.

I’m in mid-apology when we reach the glassy doors of the Plaza Rio mall, an American-style indoor oasis of upscale shopping and floors paved with shiny tile and an honest-to-god food court. Up the bank of escalators is the megaplex, 15 screens of cinematic escape. Security guards loom amidst the shoppers, keeping out the riff-raff.

Riff-raff like the little beggar girl, her reflection a few steps behind ours, still trailing after us, but no longer bothering to hold her hand out, just following without any hope left. Then the doors swish shut behind us and we’re in an air-conditioned haven that could be anywhere — Kansas City, San Diego, maybe even Iowa — if you don’t look over your shoulder and out the windows to where she’s still standing, like I just did.

As a general rule, I try not to think about my family. Or my upbringing on the farm. Or anything prior to leaving for college, really. But sometimes Dad’s voice harpoons through my consciousness, a rock-ribbed echo that used to terrify a young boy and still discomfits me now, across all these years and miles. Usually I remember his prediction that I’ll never amount to anything, said as casually as killing a broken-legged calf. I hate the memory of those words. Maybe it’s the greatest gift he could’ve bestowed on me, this wounded motivation to prove him so fucking wrong, but I still hate that memory.

This time the words that stiffen my spine are “Never go anywhere with only a quarter tank of gas!” It was Dad’s wintertime principle for prolonging life if you’re caught in a sudden blizzard. Frigid white-out conditions are always a risk in rural Iowa, where it can take days to dig out of snowdrifts. But his rule is just as practical in snowless Mexico, where Pemex — literally Petroleos Mexicanos, the national oil company — sites its gas stations by government edict rather than anything more practical, like convenience or market forces. For lack of a Pemex station I’ve run out of gas in some of the strangest places you can imagine. Like Mexico City. 25 million people and zero gas stations, I swear to god.

That’s why I’m stopping for gas in the middle of this particular Tijuana nowhere, even though my gas gauge is still hovering halfway between E and F. An unkempt attendant reclines in the red-and-green aluminum shade while his kids work the pumps for tips. It’s just a way of bringing in more household income. Nobody in Mexico is going to tip a Pemex attendant for doing his job, but a gap-toothed 8-year-old girl with a shy smile?

I also fall victim to her sales pitch for a car wash, which consists of pulling the Explorer into an empty mechanic’s bay where more kids attack it with wet rags. I watch with the jaded eye of somebody who’s lost everything from hubcaps to license plates in Mexican hand carwashes, but they’re exuberant and hard-working and keep the truck in one piece.

My gaze is drawn to an hourglass shadow who stands apart from the rest of the kids. She can’t be more than 14 or 15, probably the oldest daughter of the gas station attendant. She wears a Metallica t-shirt that’s faded from too many washings and jeans with holes at the knees, the kind that aren’t there to be stylish. Her despairing eyes are locked on the road, where an endless stream of cars and trucks roar past in the direction of America.

I know what’s coming when her eyes lock on me instead. The desperation of a girl who’ll do anything for a ride out of here, but hasn’t discovered that about herself yet. Instead she hovers pointlessly, trying to be cute and flirty with me and accomplishing neither. All I can think is she’s already got more curves than Nooshin ever will.

When a pickup aimed toward the border and a better life pulls in, she shifts her gaze again. I watch from behind my sunglasses as she scrutinizes the balding middle-aged Mexican in the driver’s seat, sizing him up. He notices her frank appraisal and grins, shifting a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. She shuffles off to act cute and flirty with him.

Someday her Pemex station attendant father will wake up from a nap and she’ll be gone. Someday soon, if I was a betting man. I wonder if he’ll miss her, or even notice much. Probably not, if he’s anything like my father.

I spend most of Thursday afternoon with Tommy, Juan’s teenage nephew, riding horses around the tiny rock-strewn corral overlooking Tecate. We make an utterly ridiculous horseback couple. Tommy looks like his mode of transportation should be a lowrider, not a palomino nag. He’s dressed in that oversized San Antonio Spurs jersey and baggy jeans cut off mid-calf and shower sandals. A thick gold chain with his initials is worn backwards, dangling across the DUNCAN appearing above the gigantic numerals 21. It kept getting in the way of the reins, so he flipped it over his shoulder. I’m riding in a miniskirt hiked up around my hips because I couldn’t manage sidesaddle, and barefoot since I wore my cute wedgie sandals today. Not exactly conventional equestrian attire.

Afterward we trail through the house stiffly, complaining about our sore butts, and lean into the main room to check on Nick and Juan. They’re right where we left them, sitting hip-to-hip on the couch, staring intently at Nick’s laptop. Nick has solicited Juan’s help in constructing an index for the Korea Textile maquiladora archive. Apparently it takes a businessman to organize a business archive. The room around them looks empty without its piles of cardboard fruit boxes. Meanwhile the Explorer sags beneath the weight of all that paper, waiting for the drive back to Tijuana.

Tommy leads the way into the kitchen, a spartan expanse of bare countertops and linoleum flooring. He opens the refrigerator door and closes his eyes for a moment, enjoying the chill. “Whatcha want, Nooshin? Bud? Diet Pepsi? Water?”

“Diet Pepsi for me, thanks.”

He tosses me a bottle unthinkingly, shaking its contents into a bubbly froth that rises dangerously toward the cap. I twist off the top gingerly over the sink. Behind me I hear the sound of an entire can of beer being opened and guzzled and discarded. Then the sound of another can being opened.

“You wanna listen to some music or something?” Tommy asks, and belches contentedly.

“Sure,” I shrug.

“Come on. The stereo’s in my room.”

The words provoke a burst of irrational excitement that makes my heart pound. A boy’s room, omigod! I’ve never been in a boy’s room before, only seen them on TV and in movies. I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends or even just boy friends in high school, and I married Saman instead of going to college so I missed the whole boys’ dormroom thing. What vast secrets could possibly lurk behind that door? It opens like a portal to another dimension…

My eyes are immediately assaulted by posters, enough to almost wallpaper the room. Tommy’s male psyche is advertised with tricked-out street racers, black rappers loaded with bling, girls busting out of their swimwear and lingerie. The visual cacophony makes the rest of the room seem sparse and unlived-in. Inside the open closet is a rack of t-shirts and jerseys hanging above a couple suitcases and more shoes than I own, mostly Nikes. The twin bed is covered with a plain black bedspread. The only other furniture is a scuffed dresser with a mirror on top.

I’m surprised to discover that Tommy also has more jewelry than I do. A lot more jewelry. The open tackle box on the dresser is overflowing with more merchandise than you’ll find in a Tijuana joyeria. Chains of various types and thicknesses, many with crosses or St. Christopher medallions dangling from them. Bracelets and weird lace-up wristbands. Big chunky earrings that are probably cubic zirconia. Rings, including the rectangular kind that fit over several fingers and spell out words like DAWG.

Next to me Tommy is rummaging through his CD case, explaining “I’m kinda going through an old school phase, you know what I’m saying?” He slides a disc into his stereo. Beats waft through the room, some kind of laid-back gangster rap. “Now that’s some smooth styling.”

On the floor next to the dresser is a cardboard box filled with comics. I put my Diet Pepsi on the dresser and park myself on the bed, tucking one leg underneath me. Then I reach my leg other out, hooking my foot inside the box and pulling it close. I lean over and root through the brightly-colored covers, searching for manga or graphic novels. What I find is disappointing. Tommy’s taste in comics is pretty orthodox, mostly X-Men and Spiderman and stuff.

“You want a toke?” I glance up and find him standing by the window, face twisted around a miniscule joint, holding a lighter to its recalcitrant tip. After a while he blows the sickly-sweet smoke outside and coughs, despite trying not to. “Damn girl, this is some good shit.”

“Nah. I’m cool.” I flip through a Punisher comic, admiring the artwork.

“How’d your eye get fucked up?”

“It’s a condition called amblyopia. I’ve had it ever since I was born. It’s correctable if you catch it in time, but I never got treatment for it in Iran, only when we came to America.” I muster a laugh. “It used to be lots worse. You should see some of my pictures from when I was a toddler.”

“Iran, huh? Did your family leave after all the…” He puts out the joint and sits down next to me on the bed. “Uh, what was it again? The hostage shit? Or was that some other country?”

“That’s the right country. But my parents didn’t leave after the hostage crisis, when the Shah was overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and the Revolution happened. They stayed until the end of the Iran-Iraq war.” I feel like I’m reciting from a history book. Two generations of my family are still haunted by those events, but they aren’t even memories to me.

Tommy is silent for a while. It’s a typical reaction. Most Americans don’t know enough about the Middle East to hold up their end of the conversation. “So you’re, like, a Muslim?” he finally asks.

“My whole family is, yeah. But I’m not observant like I used to be. Not since my grandfather died.” Just saying it, I realize a lot of things changed when my grandfather died. He was the anchor tethering us to Iran. After his death Mom stopped packing me lunches of stinky leftover Persian food. Farsi wasn’t spoken around the house as much. Talk of our homeland ended. “Are you Catholic?” I ask Tommy.

“Not the getting-all-wacked-out-about-it kind. I don’t go to mass. Not since I was a kid.”

“It’s the same for me. I haven’t been to mosque since, since…” Since I went to the mosque in Kansas City and used their computer to email Nick. All the trapped desperation comes rushing back. But also a happy glow. I’ve been falling for Nick since the day I met him.

Forgotten in my hands, the comic book slips to the floor. I bend down to retrieve it — and discover a stash of porno mags underneath the bed. Penthouse. Barely Legal. Perfect 10. “Tommy!” I start giggling, then realize I’ve mortified him.

“Awww dawg,” he complains in embarrassment, kicking the glossy smut further under the bed.

“Sorry, dude. I didn’t mean to…” I don’t know what I didn’t mean to do. Make him turn that blushing color, I guess. “So, um… You’re not seeing anybody here?” The question makes me start giggling again.

Even he’s laughing a little. “Nah. The girlies here, they just wanna get married.” He puffs out the oversized 21 on his jersey. “I ain’t marrying no Mexican chick. They’re way too traditional for me. I need a girl who knows how to get down. How to freak like I freak, you know what I’m saying?”

Actually I’m clueless, but I assume it’s similar to everything Nick has been teaching me in bed. “What do you do for fun around here, anyway? Do you go out a lot?”

The 21 deflates. “Nah, not really.” He seems to reconsider his words, worrying that the admission makes him less macho. “I mean, I don’t got my posse here. I don’t like to roll alone, you know what I’m saying? Anything can go down in a place like this if you’re alone.”

I follow his gaze to a picture tacked to the wall. A half-dozen young Hispanic males swaddled in baggies and athletic jerseys, their jewelry glinting in the flash, mugging for the camera. It takes me a moment to pick out Tommy. He’s safely nondescript in their midst, blending into invisibility.

“Are you learning a lot from your uncle?”

Bitterness suffuses his features. “Yeah. Right. I’m learning a fuck of a lot.” He turns away and considers the stereo for a while, head-bobbing absentmindedly to the strains of gangsta rap. “So far I’ve learned all he does is talk on the cellie. Big fucking deal.” He chugs his can of Bud and crumples it in a fist.

I’m flashing back to my introduction to Juan, to his brief lament about Tommy, the nephew he was supposed to turn away from whatever dead-end future he was drifting toward. The bafflement and frustration in his words — even outright disdain for Tommy’s lifestyle and ghetto-style appearance and inability to speak Spanish — but also the underlying affection. I wonder if that’s what Dad and Mom experience when they think of me. A daughter who fills them with confused disgust, even if they love me. And hopefully they still do.