The Mexican Year

In my subway car everybody looks like a professional athlete. Their physiques bulge under flame-red tracksuits inscribed with a snorting bovine logo and the word Toros — Bulls. Muscular arms are wrapped around duffel bags, protecting their athletic equipment from snatch-and-grab subway gangs. Black and mestizo and Indian faces are stoic under cheap meshbacks. The Toros must be some kind of low-rent baseball team, I guess. But I never find out for sure, because they get off at the next station, leaving behind an odor of muscle balm and moldering jockstraps.

Other riders pile into the car. A gang of tattooed punks is arguing about their next move — get off at Trincondero, or keep going to El Centro? Several day laborers are drinking their way somewhere, passing a plastic bottle of tequila around. A full-skirted senora rides herd on five — no, six — cherubic kids. Threading down the aisle, a pair of shady-looking businessmen in guayaberas search for a quiet nook. A subway cop in body armor stomps after them and drags one away. What the hell did he do? Nobody knows — with the possible exception of his flop-sweating partner.

On my bench a Panamanian chemist, seeking work in Mexico City, asks me questions with delicate persistence. He seems troubled by my nationality. Why is an American like me riding the subways alone? Aren’t I afraid of getting mugged or kidnapped? How did I get this Spanish and my knowledge of Mexico?

Only a weird-ass chica distracts him. The girl wedges herself between us, ranting. Her language is an angry diatribe of half-Spanish, half-gibberish. I can’t tell whether she’s high or mental. Maybe high, since her hair is a glossy tangle and she wears a goth amount of eye makeup.

Perfect timing for my exit. I stride through a subterranean colonnade of antiseptic white tile and brushed-aluminum doors, one of the cleanest stations in the world’s busiest subway system. The passenger lounge is tucked behind a sweep of robin’s egg plexiglass, like a giant aquarium filled with people. I’m stuck with a taco wrapper in my hand, searching for garbage cans that don’t exist — until I notice a Japanese tourist feeding trash into the wall. The receptacles are recessed, almost invisible.

Up a flight of granite steps is the smoggy glare of Polanco, the longtime address of Mexico City’s uber-rich. The district is a posh triangle of glassy office towers, honey-colored condo highrises ringed with balconies, Depression-era mansions in California Colonial style, baroque foreign embassies with obscure flags waving. You can’t jump out a window without landing on a luxury sedan. Overhead is a canopy of elm trees, genus and species unknown to me. Back home all the elms — ulmus americana — are deceased stumps that fell to Dutch Elm Disease, but this type is thriving in the Darwinian crucible of Mexico City, an arboreal cockroach.

Soon I find myself at the address of an office tower that isn’t very towering at all. The lobby is so generic I feel like I’ve walked into it before, in Des Moines, in La-La Land, somewhere else in Mexico City. A security guard is standing like a statue, unexpectedly Caucasian, a sidearm holstered on the belt of his merle uniform. He has small heartless eyes. I’m waved through a metal detector while another security guard — also white — roots in my backpack. They chat like old women in a language that could be Russian.

Eventually I’m allowed to ride the elevator up to the 16th floor. My destination is a spacious corner office with a smoked glass view of Mexico City’s dreaded “beltway”, as the Circuito Interior — interior highway loop — is called. The office is lined with display cases almost bursting with the flotsam of suburban American life — bowling trophies, books that have never been read, a framed shot of doughy men in waders pinching together for the camera.

The gringo rising from the desk is fat and oatmeal-faced and blinking through wire-rimmed glasses. He’s dressed business casual in a horizontally-striped polo shirt that exaggerates his girth, black jeans, and patent leather tasseled loafers. He beckons me across the plush carpeting, hand extended. His shake is soft but enthusiastic. “Elliot Parner. Got my doctorate from the program in 1986.”

I spot the framed diploma in his proud collection of life memorabilia. Yep, the date says 1986. “I’m Nick Roberts. Great to meet you. I should get my Ph.D. later this year, or maybe in 2009 — if I don’t take my M.A. and bail.”

Parner nods, understanding my dilemma. I’ve already explained it over the phone. I discovered him while researching the UCLA Department of Latin American Studies alumni directory. Former hotshot in the Ph.D. program, now working as a research analyst for an elite Mexican bank. Just the dude I need to talk to.

“You want anything?” he asks, retrieving a Gatorade from a small fridge. “A sport drink? Coffee? Soda?”

“Nah. I’m fine, thanks. Are you usually in the office on Saturday mornings?”

“Four times a year. That’s when I produce our copper industry report. I release it during the first full week of every quarter.” Parner opens his Gatorade and points at a wall decorated with framed magazine covers. Banco Commercial de Ciudad Mexico - Quarterly Mexican Copper Industry Report. “That’s my baby, right there.”

I think of my own baby, riding around in Nooshin’s bulge. “You have a family?”

His face clouds over. “Three kids, two boys and a girl. They’re back in the States with my wife. She doesn’t want to raise the kids in Mexico. Too dangerous, she thinks. So I fly back every couple weeks to see them.” He plays with his wedding band, sliding it on and off, then forces himself to brighten. “What about you?”

“I’ve got a girlfriend, and we’ve got a baby on the way.”

“Ah,” Parner says. He leads me over to an L-shaped couch in a corner of the office. He takes the side with the window view.

I’m left with the side that looks across his office at the wall of magazine covers. I wonder if he’s insecure, always needing to remind his visitors of what he does for the bank. I ask him how his academic career ended and his corporate career began.

“I never had a career in academia. There was no future in it for me. I figured that out after knocking around for five years. The only jobs I got were temporary teaching contracts. Never anywhere good, or I might’ve held on longer. Imperial Valley Community College, University of Montana at Dillon. Those kind of places.” Parner gives me a lopsided grin. A couple decades of living well has tempered the pain of those memories. “So I told Palmerston I was hanging it up, and I took a job as a — ”

“Palmerston was your dissertation advisor?” I interrupt. The alumni directory only lists dissertation advisors going back to 1992.

“Yep. Lord Palmerston, everybody called him behind his back. He must’ve been 80 at the time. Semi-retired. But still collecting a six-figure paycheck. I wanted to land a tenured position like that.”

“Was it tough for white grads back then?”

“In the job market, you mean? It sure seemed tough to me, although the old boy network was still around. Palmerston and his cronies. The jobs I got, I got thanks to him. But things were changing fast. Hercules and the other Hispanics were already throwing their weight around.”

“Hercules is my dissertation advisor.”

“Really? I never would’ve guessed it. He didn’t even have white students back then. We avoided him like the plague. Hercules was…” Parner raises his palms in a shrug.

I know the feeling. It’s hard to put the old reptile into words. “Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. You were telling me about your first corporate job.”

“Right. I was.” He glugs down more Gatorade, the bottle slowly emptying of neon-green liquid. “You get a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, that’s instant credibility with any company dealing with the Hispanic market. They assume you can walk the walk, talk the talk. And back then redlining and community lending was a big deal in LA. Banks were legally obligated to lend to Hispanics, and the regulatory agencies were cracking down. So I got a job as a compliance officer at Wells Fargo, making sure we did enough business with Hispanic homeowners and businesses. I did that for a couple years, then transitioned into research. It’s similar to graduate work. You do profiles on markets, on companies.”

“It pays well, from the looks of it.”

“Don’t even get me started about compensation. Compared to the best teaching contract I ever had, my first job at Wells Fargo was a 300% raise. Now I make more than any academic ever will.” Parner tosses the empty bottle at the wastebasket, halfway across the office — and misses. He heaves himself off the couch and goes after it.

Not sure if I’m being dismissed, I rise to my hiking boots and drift over to the smoked-glass wall. The view of downtown Mexico City is stunning, a forest of glittering mirrored shafts rising out of the haze. At this height the cityscape seems ethereal, the skyscrapers filled with reflections — ghostly clouds, the dull orb of the sun, other skyscrapers. Hard to believe the largest city on earth is hidden somewhere behind this idyllic backdrop. 25 million souls are grubbing an existence out of the squalor, inhabiting slums that coat the valley floor like a fungus of cinderblock and plastic tarpaulins. Out of sight, out of mind.

500 years ago it was Montezuma looking down from the massive Templo Mayor, the double pyramids dedicated to Tlaloc the god of rain and Huitzilopochtli the god of war and death. 1 million Aztecs grimed the canals and “floating islands” of Tenochtitlan, as the city was known then. They probably seemed like ants to Montezuma, if he ever noticed their pathetic lives at all. Maybe there’s nothing new in Mexico, only the past repeating. Maybe Mexico is just a wheel of shit spinning round and round.

Parner joins me at the window, a portly figure in my peripheral vision. “You haven’t told me much about yourself.”

I keep the backstory simple, focusing on my trajectory through academia, the only thing we have in common. When that seems to bore him, I switch to highlights from my solitary treks across Mexico, especially the near-calamities I’ve survived — corrupt federales demanding bribes, machete-wielding robbers, blah blah blah.

“Driving all over the country like that, weren’t you…worried?” he asks, more intrigued than concerned. “It’s not hard for an American to get kidnapped down here, or worse.”

“Yeah, I worry sometimes,” I admit, and my gaze falls to the plush carpeting. “My girlfriend…” I start to say, but the words die out. This conversation is beginning to tread on my soul.

Parner is telling me that it didn’t used to be dangerous. “Back in the early 80s when I was doing my dissertation research, nothing bad ever happened. I think I paid two, maybe three bribes the whole time. And driving around was safe back then. My Mexican girlfriend, we used to jump in her old Bug and go touring for weeks on end. The only thing we ever worried about was a flat tire.” He says it with a hint of disbelief, as if doubting that such a Mexico could’ve existed. “Now there are bandits on the roads. Pickpockets everywhere. Christ, the government is even declaring martial law in places. It doesn’t feel safe to leave the condo, not even with a bodyguard assigned to me.”

“You have a bodyguard?” I ask jealously. I’ve always wanted a bodyguard.

“Well, he’s my driver too. A driver-bodyguard. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not that important. The bank’s insurance requires it. All the research analysts get a bodyguard.” It’s a weak attempt at false modesty. His voice still drips with pride. “So what do you think you’ll do? Take your M.A. and leave the program?”

“Hell if I know.”

Parner spins clumsily and jump-shoots the bottle at the wastebasket again. It bounces off the rim. “Hey. Are you doing anything tonight? You could come over to my condo for the game.”

“The game?” I blink at him. “What game?”

“The UCLA game! They’re in the Final Four again. This is going to be our year.” Noticing my lack of enthusiasm, he nudges me with an elbow. “Aren’t you a basketball fan?”

“Yeah, sure. I usually watch the games. But I kind of lost touch this season, I don’t know why.” A lie. I do know why — because I don’t watch Bruin games with Hercules anymore. That was our time-honored tradition, my secret visits to his house to watch football games during fall semester, basketball games during spring semester. It was a convenient fiction. Neither of us wanted to admit the real reason I was there. I was his eyes and ears among the grad students, a glorified spy. Lacking brown skin, I could only suck up to him by trading on gossip.

“The last two Final Fours broke my heart too. To get so close, and then — ” SMACK. Parner pounds a fist into his palm. “But I’m not kidding. This is going to be our year. I know it, man. I just know it.” His eyes are glazing over, dreaming of another banner hung from the rafters of Pauley Pavilion. Then he refocuses on me. “So what do you say? Come over for the game tonight, Nick. You’re the only UCLA alum I know down here. Bring your girlfriend if you want.”

“Yeah. Thanks, dude. We’ll take you up on that.” I try to disguise a sigh. Nooshin and I were supposed to do something with Inez later. Given her emotional state it won’t be easy — or pleasant — to spring a cancellation on her. And for what, really? A night of watching genetic freaks, scarfing down nachos and salsa, and boozing while Nooshin can’t. But still, it’s a no-brainer. Inez doesn’t have the juice to find me a job, inside the ivory towers or outside of them. Elliot Parner, research analyst for Banco Commercial de Cuidad Mexico, just might.

Ahhhhh. This is how every morning should begin, with a nice relaxing shower. Sure, the water is bone-cold. And so freaking calcified that it takes half a bar of soap just to get some suds. And polluted enough to paint weird smelly rings around the drain. But if you can ignore all that — and I can, after living out of a tent for the last week — then ahhhhh.

From beyond the shower curtain, a single gasped word. “Omigod.”

I pause in the freezing deluge, inadvertently striking a disco pose — one arm upraised, the other cocked at my armpit with the soap. But the only noises are water splashing and the faint roar of traffic down on the street. Shrugging, I go back to my shower.

Then three more words shrieked in delight. “Omigod omigod omigod!”

This time I poke my head out, holding the shower curtain tightly against me so I don’t leak polluted water onto the bathroom floor. “What the hell’s going on?”

Nooshin is aglow in the other half of the claustrophobic space, a rail-thin girl with a tummy that juts out. She’s standing in profile and half-dressed, wearing her jeans unbuttoned at the top and tugged below her pregnant bulge. An unhooked bra is dangling loosely from her shoulders and across her flat chest.

“Nick! This bra is really tight!” To demonstrate, she twists her back toward me. She has to torture the clasp shut across her protruding ribs and vertebrae. “I think I’m finally getting boobs!” Then she twists the other direction, showing me her front. “Ta-dah!”

I almost burst out laughing. Nooshin is one of those girls who never needed to wear a bra, and usually didn’t. But now she can strain proudly against the panels of her 32AA.

I shut off the water and peel open the shower curtain. “You’re so sexy,” I say — and the proof is pointing right at her.

“Nick, don’t you dare!” she starts to say, giggling. Outside the bathroom door are the loud sounds of Inez and her mom clattering around the apartment. Nooshin points at a small pile of folded laundry on the toilet lid. “Your clean clothes are right there.”

I towel off and shrug into my clothes. Boxer shorts, white tube socks, cargo pants, gray ribbed t-shirt — all freshly laundered in the stacked washer/dryer in the hallway closet. One more thing we’re getting out of this stop. A free laundromat.

Nooshin is contemplating herself in the mirror above the sink. Her gaze is downcast at her shirt, which is actually my shirt. The largest t-shirt I own, a plain white expanse dotted with a tiny UCLA logo above the heart. She spreads her arms. “Look, I’m a kite!”

I join her reflection, embracing her from behind. My hands slide beneath the billowing shirt, feeling the silky bulge of her tummy. Our son.

Her dark gaze locks on mine. In the mirror her left eye is the crooked wandering one. “I really need to get some maternity clothes. Just a pair of jeans with a stretchy front and some shirts, that’s all.” She sighs dreamily. “And one cute outfit, just one. Like, a new maternity sundress. Or maybe a skirt with an adjustable waist.”

“We don’t have the money right now. Only your paycheck came through. Hercules put a hold on mine,” I admit sourly. Some provider I’m turning out to be. I can’t afford to buy her lunch, let alone maternity clothes.

Nooshin lifts my hands to her mouth and kisses the knuckles, one after another. “That’s okay. Once he gets your dissertation and the archive, he’ll change his mind. Right?” My stratagem to avoid dismissal from UCLA for knocking up my research assistant, repeated until we can almost — almost — believe it’ll work.

The bathroom door shudders with knocking. “Hey! You guys done in there or what!” Inez yells in Spanish. “Come on, I’m going to pee my pants!” Her voice is more ragged and hoarse than I remember. The breakup with Julio has precipitated a decline into chainsmoking, among other things.

We enfilade past each other in the cramped spaces of the apartment, which belongs to Inez’s mom, a fiftysomething patrician-looking woman with a coiffure like a coppery jetstream. She glides around in a svelte black catsuit, her attractive features screwed into an unattractive expression. She’s permanently dismayed by life, taking it — and by “it” I mean everything — very, very personally. I treat her like a minefield. Circle warily, and never cross.

Of course, somehow Nooshin has intrepidly struck up a friendship with her. Which is another way of saying things haven’t clicked between Nooshin and Inez. I was hoping they’d be best buds, like Phoebe and Inez during her visits to UCLA. Those two raised more hell on Sunset Boulevard than should be legal. But none of that feminine chemistry is evident here. Nooshin and Inez interact like two bricks rubbing together.

Inez’s mom is searching for her purse and bitching loudly about the bus. Surprise, surprise — according to her it’s usually early, frequently late, and never on time. The purse is a patent leather rectangle dangling on the back of the apartment door. I debate whether to betray its hiding place, then decide to see how long it takes her to discover it on her own. My fun is spoiled when Nooshin calls out “Alli es!” — there it is! — and earns an indulgent smile.

“Where are you guys going?” I ask in plaintive English, realizing their silhouettes are filing out the apartment door and into the stark light of the hallway.

Nooshin pauses to peck me briefly on the lips. “Inez’s mom is taking me to Vip’s for breakfast, then Chapultepec Park. We’ll be back sometime this afternoon.” She leans in close, throttling her voice to a whisper. “No being mean to Inez today, promise?”

“Promise,” I sigh.

She spins on a Nike and resumes her momentum goodbye, all skyscraper height and tossing inky hair and tragic ad-hoc maternity wardrobe. I’m already missing her before the door closes on the oddest couple in Mexico City.

Behind me the toilet flushes, really more of a flaccid draining noise given the lack of water pressure. The bathroom door opens. Inez squeezes around my hands-on-hips pose, a lit cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth, and disappears into the kitchen.

“They’re going to Vip’s and Chapultepec Park,” I gripe jealously in Spanish. “Did you know that?”

“Yeah, Mom said something about it.” Cabinets bang open and shut. She emerges from the kitchen in a tired puff of smoke, dressed in black leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt with some sort of complicated political cartoon on the front. Her silvery hair is spiked haphazardly with gel, like an aluminum can that lost a fight with a blender. She’s carrying a alcoholic-sized bottle of tequila.

“Whoa. A little early for that, isn’t it?”

Inez pointedly ignores me, collapsing onto the couch. She stabs out her Lucky Strike in an ashtray, then wrenches open the bottle and takes a gaudy swig. Tequila and cigarettes. What a lousy breakfast.

I pace restlessly in the small living room, a couple strides one direction, a couple strides back. “So what are we doing today?”

She takes another swig. “I don’t get the attraction. With Nooshin, I mean. I just don’t get it. Unless it’s because she needs rescuing. Her screwed-up eye and all that.” And another swig. “Is that it? Are you her knight in shining armor? Does she make you feel like a hero?”

I don’t stop pacing. “You’re just jealous because you and Julio broke up.”

“No I’m not!” Inez smacks the tequila bottle onto the coffee table hard enough to rattle the ashtray. The reflexive violence of the gesture seems to chasten her. “Okay, fine. I admit it. I’m jealous. But I still think you’re just trying to live out some stupid rescue fantasy with her.”

I’m watching the rhythmic progress of my hiking boots, but my eyes are seeing Nooshin, a whole collage of her. Her delicate beauty and shy beaming smile and octopus-ink hair. The way she always sits with one foot tucked underneath her. Her rampant silliness and atrocious accents. How she melts into me when we embrace, and the way I can feel her heart flutter just beneath the skin. The poetry scribbled in her secret notebook in fervent purple loops, with our initials in arrowed hearts. Her antique Polaroid camera snapping at weird sights, never what you’d expect. That crooked wandering eye, a window to her soul meant only for me, and the new life we made — our family — swelling her tummy.

My face is almost tortured with a huge smile. “You want to know what it is? She’s the coolest person I’ve ever met. Seriously.”

“You think she’s cool?” The question is poisoned with sarcasm.

I stop pacing and stare at Inez, hard. “Why don’t you like her?”

She can’t hold my gaze. Her shadowy eyes drift to the amber bottle, full of escape. “I like Phoebe better, that’s all. Liked. Whatever. Now SHE was cool, man.” She makes an off-handed gesture. “What happened to you and Phoebe, anyway?”

“Nooshin happened,” I shrug. It’s really as simple as that.

“That’s like me and Julio. Another chick happened.” Inez’s hoarse voice breaks, like concrete cracking into pieces, but her eyes only moisten. Knowing her, the tears ran out shortly after the breakup — if she ever allowed herself to cry at all.

“Enough of this?” I ask, leaning over to tap the open lip of the tequila bottle.

Before my hand can close around the neck she asks, “Why didn’t we ever hook up?”

It’s a good question. A long time ago we almost got together — a few times, now that I think about it — but for some reason it never happened. The buzz wore off and we retreated from each other, back into ourselves. But it’s just easier to say, “You met Julio and I met Phoebe.”

My answer is a door slamming shut, assuming it was ever open in the first place, and Inez of all people knows it. She steals away the bottle for a final gulp, then wipes her mouth with a shirtsleeve. “So anyway, let’s go find some trouble,” she says while teasing up spikes from her silver hair, doing her best impression of the Inez I used to know.

In Mexico the heat wakes you up in the morning, lulls you back to sleep in the afternoon, and torments you all night. That’s why the tent is a sauna shot through with dawn, lighting up the multicolored fabric panels in a rainbow of hot misery. I’m a soggy spreadeagled lump on a mattress pad that’s slimy with pooling sweat. Next to me Nooshin is half-curled on her side, tendrils of damp inky hair spilling everywhere, a sweat-darkened spaghetti tanktop riding up on her belly. The empty water bottles are stacked in a small pyramid nearby.

Through the tent’s mesh door is a sliver of church courtyard — crumbling stone wall, an overgrown Russian olive tree, what used to be a garden but is now just straggly weeds. I unzip the door and stumble out into the morning, wearing just a pair of jeans. The angry pink sun immediately heats up my bald spot and bare shoulders. I glance around, using the old whitewashed Catholic church to orient myself. The truck is right where I left it, parked just inside the closed gate and invisible from the road. On the other side of the small courtyard is a padlocked rectory and a pump with a frozen pumphandle. This parish hasn’t had a priest in decades.

I need to piss, but I can’t go far. The rocky ground is slicing at the tender soles of my feet. I manage a couple hobbling steps, then unzip and aim away from the tent.

“Camping is more fun when you don’t have to camp,” Nooshin sighs behind me.

“Better than sleeping in the truck,” I point out, shaking once…twice…three times.

Her laugh is a wan sound.

“What?” I ask, zipping up my jeans.

“You, that’s what. You always find the upside, even if it’s only not the downside. Or whatever I’m trying to say.” I can hear a long exhalation, probably Nooshin trying to blow the bangs out of her face. “I’m so hot I can’t even think. You done out there?”

I turn around gingerly. “Yeah, I’m done. Wear your flip-flops. This ground is hell on bare feet.”

She straightens up too quickly coming through the tent flap. It catches on the backside of her track pants, pulling them down her skinny thighs in a fabric tangle. Losing her balance she flails wildly, catching herself, teetering, then falling again — until I grab a scrawny arm and yank her upright.

Pulling her track pants back up again, Nooshin considers her pregnant tummy in dismay. “This baby is really starting to mess with my balance.”

“You need to go to the bathroom?” I ask, preparing to recommend a spot where she can brace herself against the courtyard wall.

“I need fresh air. And breakfast. I’m starving.”

“We’ve still got green peppers,” I grin.

Her delicate features screw into a blech! “That was yesterday. Today they make me want to throw up.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get breakfast in Mexico City. It’s just over those mountains, about a half-hour away.” I point at the weathered humps that fringe the Valle de Mexico — Valley of Mexico — a giant shithole of 25 million people covered with a lid of smog.

Nooshin is pinning limp and tangly hair behind her ears. “Any chance I’ll get a shower first?”

“A sink shower at a gas station, maybe.”

She lifts her bony shoulders in a shrug. Good enough. I’m reminded of her vast adaptability — plunging into a foreign country where she barely speaks the language, discovering she’s pregnant, going days without a real bed or a shower. And to think I’ve had girlfriends who wouldn’t even leave their apartments without makeup. But those girlfriends were nothing like Nooshin. They didn’t come to America as a little immigrant girl, or grow up skyscraper-shaped with a lazy eye, or leave an arranged marriage with a controlling Muslim asshole.

A gust of hot wind blows away Nooshin’s bangs, revealing the multitude of tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down her nose. For a moment her mocha-dark eyes don’t betray the cause — then the right orb drifts away, more interested in the Russian olive behind me. My heart thumps with adoration. I want to fold her perfect imperfections into my arms and kiss her until the sun transits back into night. But my breath could probably kill, so I settle for the hugging part instead.

She tries to nuzzle into my shoulder, but the baby is complicating our clinch. Finally she twists her hips to the side, aiming her belly away from mine, and we bake sweatily in each other’s arms.

After a while I break away. “The sooner we get packed up, the sooner we’ll get to Mexico City.” I crawl into the tent and began passing stuff out to her — mattress pads, some stray clothes, the pyramid of empty water bottles.

“Do you think you’re ready to talk about a name?” Nooshin asks tentatively, in between trips to the Explorer.

“A name?” I’m remembering my spyjob on her secret notebook and the baby names scribbled hopefully inside it. “Sure. Do you have any names you like? Come on, you go first.”

Her face lights up like a Roman candle. She’s been waiting to have this conversation since before the pregnancy test. “Do you like the name Finn?”

“Finn?”

“Yeah. With two n’s.”

“Nah, not really.” I scramble out of the tent, handing her the last item — a bottle of cheap cologne she’s been using to mask her body odor. “You don’t think I’m Finnish, do you? Because I’m not. I’m a mutt. German and Swedish and Dutch.”

She pours cologne into her palm and splashes it on herself, first one underarm, then the other. “Okay…what about Iraj?”

“Nah. Too much like Iraq.”

That’s worth a reprimanding glance. “They’re nothing alike if you speak Farsi.”

“Which I don’t,” I remind her, squatting to pull the tent stakes.

In my peripheral vision I watch her shadow pour another palmful of cologne, then dip into the front of her tracksuit. “Simon?”

“Like the American Idol limey with all the putdowns? No way.”

“Namdar?”

“Wasn’t that an alien species in the Star Trek metaverse?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m being totally serious here. The Namdar. I could swear — ”

“Nick Jr.” She’s standing hands on hips and looking annoyed.

“Well, I have to admit it has a certain egocentric appeal.” I grin playfully, testing Nooshin’s reaction, just in case her sense of humor is vanishing in a hormonal mood swing. “Too bad it’s a cable TV network.”

“What?”

“You know, Nickelodeon Junior. The kids’ network on cable TV?”

“Oh. Right.” The bottle of cologne tumbles around and around in her writhing hands. “I remember my niece and nephew watching it. Especially Saturday mornings. Nasrin would sleep in and Farid would let the kids do whatever they wanted.”

The past tense of her remembrance is piercing. Being cast out of her family is a harsh, fresh wound. The familial severance I would’ve welcomed is killing her. Maybe literally, if all this bullshit about honor killings is true.

“Hey,” I say gently, pausing with the tent half-collapsed. “We’ve got five months to pick a name, you know.”

That’s a happier topic. Nooshin lifts her chin and fixes on me with a hopeful expression, looking ahead now, not back. “Yeah, 5 months. Plenty of time…” Her flip-flops scrape on the ground, turning inward shyly. “What about…Afshar?” The name hangs like a sparkle between us.

Instantly I know it’s her favorite. I squint into the beveled morning, taking in her nervous pose, silent and frail as a cattail…except for that incongruous belly, sticking out between her tanktop and track pants in a caramel bulge. Then somehow — don’t ask me how — I understand why it’s her favorite. Afshar was her grandfather’s name.

I only know her grandfather as a faded picture in her backpack, a stubble-jawed man with kind eyes. She once described him as a simple Iranian farmer buffeted by the overwhelming strangeness of America, trying to hold their family together across hemispheres, doting on her the way nobody else did. A memory trace fires and I hear her voice breaking into sobs again — my grandfather always said that God made me this way, that I’m perfect just the way I am…

“Afshar,” I nod in approval. “Now there’s a name I like.”

I always figured I’d be a natural at panhandling, considering that it’s just asking strangers for money. Most people don’t have the balls. They’re too uncomfortable, or afraid of rejection, or unwilling to debase themselves. Hell, most people don’t have the courage to ask for a date. But I’m the kind of dude who’ll ask anybody for anything, and usually get it. The only reason I never tried panhandling before was motive — nobody begs for money unless they have to, right? Except now I’ve got motive galore. My girlfriend is pregnant, my wallet is empty, and my cellphone service was just suspended for non-payment. The only way Nooshin and I will survive to payday next month is if I panhandle a couple hundred bucks in the meantime.

Like most things in life, panhandling is harder than it looks. Especially in Mexico, where you’re competing with all the Mexican beggars — including some adorably rapacious kids — for the hearts and money of tourists. Since I don’t have a copy of Panhandling for Dummies, I’ve been learning my panhandling lessons in the school of hard knocks.

For starters, you need an elevator pitch. In Mexico you’ve got about 5 seconds to explain why you’re American and asking for money. Otherwise tourists assume the worst — you’re mixed up in all the shit filed under DRUGS, you’ve got federales crawling up your ass, blah blah blah. My elevator pitch is “I’m an American grad student and I got robbed at knifepoint.”

Then you need the right look. It’s kind of tautological — you expect a homeless beggar to look like a homeless beggar, right? And by “look” I’m not just talking about the way you dress, I’m talking about posture, attitude, everything. In my case that means trying to look vulnerable and victimized, which is hard work.

Finally you need the right approach. Do you raise $100 by panhandling $1 from 100 tourists, or $100 from 1 tourist? Mexican beggars prefer the shotgun approach. Partly it’s the law of averages — ask enough tourists for money and somebody will open their wallet or purse for you. But they also know $1 is a small price for a tourist to pay to expatiate their First World guilt. Meanwhile nobody thinks $1 will make a difference to an American, so I’m stuck targeting rich-looking tourists and asking for $10 or $20 or more.

That’s why I’m loping across this Pemex parking lot in the direction of a behemoth RV with Arkansas license plates. It probably cost $200,000 to drive that thing off the dealer’s lot. Wealthy American tourist, dead ahead.

Past the shiny rump of the RV is a man pumping gas. He isn’t the puffy and sunburned retiree I expect. He’s fiftysomething and rawboned and hard-looking in a throwback toughguy way, with a straw fedora pulled down over one gray eye. He’s the only person in tropical Mexico dressed in all black — black polo shirt, black Dockers with a black leather belt, black cowboy boots. His forearms are mottled with pre-cancerous sunspots.

“Excuse me, sir!” I say breathlessly, wearing my friendliest expression. “I’m an American grad student and I got robbed at knifepoint and, and…” I let my voice break with desperation. “…I really need to borrow $20 so I can make it to Mexico City.”

His steely gaze slides from the gas pump gauge to me. “Robbed at knifepoint, hmmm?” he says in a cold drawl. I can’t tell whether it’s a question, or a dismissal, or what.

I’ve been robbed at knifepoint in Mexico before, so it’s easy for me to describe the experience. The man doesn’t even blink, giving me the distinct impression that he’s been on the wrong end of a pointed knife himself. Robbed of shock value, I steer the conversation back to my goal. “So that’s why I need the money. $20 will buy me enough gas to get to Mexico City.”

Silence. A silence so utterly complete I can hear the spinning gauge. We contemplate each other across the oil-stained gravel. His disdainful look is screaming GET LOST, but I can’t. Not without $20 to gas up the Explorer.

Finally he cracks, if you can call it that. “You’re a graduate student, hmmm?” It’s another of his indeterminate statements.

“Yeah. From UCLA.” I fumble a business card out of my jeans pocket. Nick Roberts, Fellow, Department of Latin American Studies, University of California Los Angeles. The embossed logo glints in the sunshine when I reach out my arm.

The man takes the card and considers it stoically. Beside him the gas pump gurgles for a moment, as if sucked dry, then resumes its steady flow.

Suddenly the side door of the RV bangs open. “Honeypie? Carl, honey?” drawls a prissy ash-blonde woman dressed like this is Santa Fe, New Mexico. She descends on spike-heeled cowboy boots, kicking up her fringed jeanskirt. Her peasant blouse is untucked, but pinched by a silver belt with turquoise pendants. “Oh! Who’s this?”

“Nick Roberts, ma’am.” I lean past Carl to extend my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet y’all, too.” Her eyes are muddy and unfocused, and gin wafts on her breath. “I’m Amy-Ann, and this here’s…whoops, you already met Carl!” She lays a tanned hand on his shoulder, more for stability than intimacy.

“I was just telling Carl about how I was robbed at knifepoint,” I say, and segue into my increasingly well-worn fiction.

Amy-Ann holds a theatrical pose — leaning slightly forward, a hand cupped over the “O” of her mouth, eyes wide. “Lordy!” she gasps from time to time. Carl seems to harden a little more with her every utterance.

“…and that’s why I’m troubling you and Carl for $20, if you can spare it.” I roll my shoulders in an abject shrug. “My fiancee and I need gas money to make it to Mexico City.” I’m half-winging it, half-deliberately choosing to say fiancee instead of girlfriend or research assistant.

Amy-Ann leans even farther forward, taking the bait the way only a middle-aged woman with no ring on her finger can. “Y’all are…engaged?”

I try for a smile that’s coy but proud. “Yeah. We’re getting married this fall.” Then inspiration strikes. “October 22,” I say, repurposing Nooshin’s due date. “It’s her dad’s birthday.”

The moment is perfect — Carl glowering at me from beneath his straw fedora, Amy-Ann melting into drunken romantic sympathy — until we’re interrupted by the CHA-THUNK of the gas pump shutting off. The dials are frozen in an obscene combination. 6,293 pesos. That’s about $585.

I spin on a hiking boot heel, the jungle landscape whirling around me. “I’ll find somebody else with $20 to spare.”

Behind me Amy-Ann’s turquoise jewelry is clinking. She’s in slow and unsteady pursuit. “Wait, hon. Don’t go leaving now. We aim to help y’all out. Ain’t that right, Carl? Carl?” When he doesn’t reply, she drops her voice an octave. “Carl, do the right thing by these folks. I ain’t telling you twice.”

I don’t know whether that’s an implicit threat to withhold sex or money or whatever, but it works. Carl is a transformed man. “Aw, hell. Nick, come on back here. I can’t let you walk off with only $20. That just wouldn’t be right.”

I retrace my steps to the RV, where he’s fumbling open his wallet while Amy-Ann beams in approval. “Sir, I really can’t — ”

“Here. You take it. Go ahead, take it..” He’s brandishing a fistful of money. The multicolored pesos and green dollars add up to something more than $100. A fortune in Mexico, if you know how to stretch it.

“Thanks so much. God bless the both of you,” I nod gratefully. And I don’t have to fake the grateful part. I retreat across the sun-scorched asphalt, waving goodbye to Carl and Amy-Ann and their black hole for fossil fuels.

Nooshin has been observing the entire exchange from the passenger seat of the Explorer, tucked beneath a cupola of palm trees at the far end of the parking lot. Through the windshield she watches my approach tensely. I can see tendons standing out like piano wires in her neck. The stakes are that high.

“Well?” is her nervous greeting, twisting toward me. “Did you get anything?”

I slide behind the steering wheel and slam the door shut. “Check it out!” I laugh, holding up the money. “Fuck Mexico City! We can make it all the way to Guadalajara on this much!”

Nooshin’s big mocha eyes widen, staring at our salvation. Then they widen even more. “Nick! That’s, like…$100!”

Past the upraised arc of the bills I see her beautiful face, every delicate feature aligned in relief. She’s perfectly kissable, and that’s what I do…until her right orb peels away, wandering toward the highway and its steady blur of traffic. That’s where our journey is taking us — through the rainforest and across the altiplano and into Mexico City, the second-largest city in the world. I have friends there. Well okay, acquaintances. Or just…fuck it. I know people in Mexico City. And hopefully they still want to know me.

Growing up in the landlocked state of Iowa, I was always fascinated by ships. Big ocean-going ones, not the aluminum Lundcrafts we used for duck hunting and bass fishing. During harvest season I used to perch in the combine from dawn until dusk until dawn again, gobbling up endless rows of corn and soybeans, imagining myself at the helm of a transatlantic ocean liner in the middle of a watery nowhere. The fantasy never got particularly realistic. I just hovered in that escapist vision, which was based on Love Boat reruns and the blockbuster “Titanic”. Later in high school I almost — almost — enlisted in the Navy, which would’ve gotten me the hell outta Clark County and off the farm, but dropping out to join the armed forces was no way to spite my father. He’s been there, done that, got the tattoos. Excelling in the abstruse world of academia and getting a Ph.D., now that’s the kind of thing that spites my father.

During my first visit to Mexico, a summer-long college roadtrip from Iowa to the Guatemalan border and back, I was drawn to Veracruz by the towering container ships and its legendary port. This was the Fort Knox of the Spanish empire, a place where the vast plunder of the New World was warehoused until armadas convoyed it across the Atlantic. But I keep coming back for the contrasts of Veracruz. The jungle overlapping the city overlapping the Caribbean. The bustling ultramodern port that hasn’t lost its sleepy colonial charm. The Mexican dive bars catering to dockworkers and the UN-style dive bars catering to the international multitude of sailors.

Right now I’m eyeballing some of those sailors from the bathroom window of our hotel room, which overlooks a broad rope-strewn dock. A Liberian freighter is tied up and encased in cranes. African crewmen descend a gangplank and stroll down the dock, flashing teeth, opening their mouths in laughter. 300 years ago they would’ve been slaves destined for the sugarcane plantations that blanket the coast. Today they’re headed for a waiting string of Mexican hookers, colorfully posed along the dock’s chainlink fence, and then a cheap flophouse like this one, maybe.

Nooshin’s voice drifts into the bathroom. “I think it sounds like an Asian language this time. What do you think?”

I peek into the hotel room, cellphone clinched to my ear. The bed is queen-sized, but she’s precariously balanced on an edge, naked and caramel-skinned and trying to get as close as possible to the struggling air-conditioning vent. A singsong exchange is carrying through the thin walls, along with two softer Spanish voices. A couple foreign sailors and their “dates”, doubling up on a room to save money.

“Yeah, definitely Asian,” I agree. “But not Chinese or Japanese. Maybe something like Malay.”

The singsong exchange dissolves into laughter, then the relentless whack-whack-whack of headboard-slamming. Nooshin and I make eye contact — or as much eye contact as we ever make, considering her crooked right orb is still focused on the TV. Something brief and amused and glowing passes between us. We’re not complaining. We just finished a couple hours of headboard-slamming of our own.

Then the ringtone in my ear becomes a voice. The UCLA health insurance ombudsman. I wave off Nooshin with an apologetic gesture — nature calls, sorry — and close the bathroom door. In hushed tones I ask the questions that need to be asked, describing her plight. No health insurance, no money, no nothing. Pregnant. Due in October.

“So if I’m understanding you correctly, she’s indigent,” concludes the helpful voice in my ear.

“Indigent,” I echo in weary shock.

“It means — ”

“I know what it means,” I say testily, cutting him off. “Just tell me how the fuck she gets health insurance, okay?”

“Uh, yes sir. Does she meet California residency requirements?”

“What do you mean?”

“Has she been living in California for at least one year?”

A migraine is suddenly spreading across my bald spot. I try to rub it away with a palm. “Nah. She used to live in Kansas City, and someplace like Philadelphia before that. Now she lives in Tijuana.”

“Then she isn’t eligible for Medi-Cal.” When I’m silent, the ombudsman turns apologetic. “She isn’t eligible for any insurance coverage from the State of California. Not without residency.”

There’s a long dragging pause. I can hear Nooshin flipping through the Mexican TV channels, cranking the sound louder to drown out the headboard-banging from the other room. I let the pause drag even longer. The background noise increases in volume. Finally I cup my free hand over the cellphone and my mouth and whisper, “What if I marry her? Can I add her to my health insurance as my spouse?”

“Sir? Hello? I’m losing you…”

I repeat it in a louder whisper. “What if I marry her? Can I add her to my health insurance as my spouse?”

“I can barely hear you, sir.”

“Hang on,” I say, and symbolically flush the toilet before rushing out of the bathroom.

Nooshin is watching me with both eyes now, still naked, one hand clasping the remote, the other draped across her swelling tummy. “Who are you talking to?” And when I pause at the door, “Where are you going?”

“I’m still talking to the dealership,” I say, already twisting the doorknob in my sweaty fist. “I just need some fresh air. Be right back.”

She’s staring at me like I’ve got two lying mouths instead of one. “Fresh air? It’s 100 degrees out there.”

“Like I said, I’ll be right back.” I escape into the hallway and slam the door behind me, fleeing toward the elevator. “You there?” I say into my cellphone.

“Yes, sir. But I missed what you were saying before.”

The elevator doors squeak shut and I stab the 1 button. “What I asked was, can I add her to my health insurance if I marry her?”

“She doesn’t have coverage right now?”

“No! That’s what I’ve been telling you, dude. She’s uninsured.” The elevator doors open again, revealing a lobby that only a foreign sailor — and his Mexican hooker — could love.

“Then the prenatal care and childbirth wouldn’t be covered. However, if you were married, you could add the child as a dependent.” The ombudsman coughs briefly, a clarifying gesture. “Well actually, you can do that even if you’re not married. You just — ”

“So basically…” I’ve arrived on the sidewalk outside the hotel, a scalding humidity with a view of cranes and masts. “…what you’re telling me is that we’re screwed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m just giving you the facts. That’s my job, you know.” There’s another cough. “You mentioned that she used to live in Missouri? If she still qualifies as a Missouri resident, she could apply for Medicaid there. Sir?”

I feel like hurling my cellphone into the Gulf. Instead I snap the clamshell shut and take deep cleansing breaths. About a hundred of them. There’s no fucking way I’ll let Nooshin go back to Missouri, because that means going back to her husband. Back to her in-laws. Back to everything she already ran away from.

More deep cleansing breaths. So I’ll have to come up with $2,000 some other way. So fucking what? I sleepwalk through tougher shit than this. Raising money is cake for a dude like me. I’ll call my friends, call my profs, call my family. The Nick bank, making a withdrawal. That’s all I need to do.