Mexican Dog

It’s mid May and all but a handful of the many Canadians that populate this Mexican beach town during the winter have fled north. Standing on the street in front of my one room cinder block bungalow. The only thing moving is the fine dusty sand blowing from between the broken cobblestones.  It’s perhaps 10 am and already sticky hot. I’ve decided to head down for a swim. My body feels beat to hell from a fucked-up back and three days on a lumpy bed and cheap booze. Surprisingly I haven’t been in the ocean yet.  

At the end of the block the jagged cobblestone paving gives way to a sloping dirt and gravel path to the beach. I walk past cut off plastic barrels smelling of rotting fish. The roadway is wet, not from rain, it hasn’t rained in months, but from the beach restaurants on either side. They are open air thatched roofs with sinks on metals legs that dump directly into the street, fish guts and soap bubbles pouring into 5 gallon buckets overflowing and running down the gravel road making deep grooves and disappearing into the sand.  

I walk past wooden fishing boats, their faded, chipping paint give them a quaint and timeless look in spite of the outboard motors on the back. There are two young men pulling out nets and unrolling them on the sand.

I see a large group of Mexican kids playing in the water to my right. I head left. I walk past the empty restaurants to an open area of beach. As I walk the heat of the sand is radiating up in my face. I’m going to need shade.  The only trees I see are behind a rusty cyclone fence. I look back behind me toward the restaurants - beach umbrellas over funky wooden tables, each surrounded by those cheap plastic stacking chairs.  I know the chairs will be sticky from a season of sugary drinks, salt air and sweaty bodies. I choose the heat and continue down the beach.  

Someone nearby is burning garbage, or tires, and it’s left a haze in the air. It blocks just enough sun to take half the color away, like I’m walking in a slightly faded photograph of a beach.  When I get out of earshot of the kids I drop my stuff and head toward the waves.  As my feet near the water I hear my Hawaiian friend George's voice, No madder what the problem Paul, jus geddin da water. E'rything will be okay. I’ve been waiting since Hawaii to put his advice to good use.

The water is just a few degrees cooler than the air.  It’s dirty and brown near the shore so I wade out till it’s up to my chest. Here it’s a dark, muddy green. There is a faint smell of gasoline and oil from the boats anchored farther out. The smell mixes nicely with the burnt tire haze.

I swim out till I can’t touch, almost to one of the empty boats. Three grey-brown pelicans sit on the bow. They look like they’ve just survived an oil spill, but I figure maybe that’s their natural color. Maybe they’re Mexican pelicans. They sit and watch me like vultures.

Treading water I turn and look back at the shore. Beyond the cyclone fence, beyond the scraggly coconut palms, I see the looming concrete skeleton remnants of what was once a luxury resort hotel. Hundreds of stained honeycomb concrete boxes. Rusty rebar jutting out from collapsed walls and pillars.  I wonder if this is what Lebanon looks like right now, in the middle of a civil war. Is there a family trying to vacation right at this moment, the father stubbornly disregarding the warning of the government and taking his family on the trip to the coast they’ve been planning for over a year. The father swimming in the beautiful Mediterranean looking back on shore sees his young daughter waving at him from the balcony of their hotel room. As he watches a mortar shell explodes, leaving a smoldering black hole where his child stood moments before. Only then does the man in the water begin to question himself and his true reasons for taking this trip.

I take a deep breath and dive, swimming under water as hard as I can, away from the shore. Away from the pelicans. Away. Even out this far the water is still so thick I can barely see my hands in front of me. I imagine the cloud I’m swimming through to be tiny particles of fecal matter from the countless failed or non existent septic tanks along the shore. I kick hard for the surface and come up exhaling. In my first breath I taste gasoline. I reach up to wipe the water from my eyes and I feel the sting. I can’t tell if it’s salt or motor fuel. I see images of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the gulf. I feel like the entire coast of Mexico is a giant environmental disaster and what’s left of my hair has just become some kind of clean up rag, a Pemex quicker picker upper.

I swim back to shore. The heat from the sand is unbearable so I grab my bag and resume my search for shade. I find a row of collapsed beach umbrellas far enough from the nearest cafe that I think no one will bother me and open one up and make a spot underneath.  I sit back and try to write something, anything. I get stuck trying to contrast  the bare dirt and broken sidewalks here to coloring inside the lines in elementary school. I can’t seem to make it work. I reach for the bottle in my bag. It’s Jim Beam, not my favorite but literally the only bottle of bourbon in the only liquor store in town. I consider myself lucky. As I crack it open I see it comes with a pour spout inside the neck of the bottle. I can’t get it out with my fingers so I just drink. It takes a long time to get a mouthful so I hold the bottle up in the air for ridiculous lengths of time, sucking like an infant. It makes a bubbling sound like I remember my daughter’s sippy cup making, years ago. Each time I break the seal with my lips a bit dribbles out and runs down my cheek onto my bare chest and on my notebook.  I’m supposed to be an expert at this and I feel like an idiot teenager who stole his father’s whiskey and went drinking for the first time.  Hemingway I’m not.  I shake the drops off the notebook and read what I’ve written so far, always a mistake.  The words come at me in droning, repetitive, pronoun filled, short sentences. I am irritated. I stop reading. I drink more.

A flock of scavenger birds moves down the beach, I assume seagulls but as they get closer I realize they are all giant pelicans. Within a few seconds I’m surrounded by hundreds of angry noisy fucking pelicans.  They don’t stay long before a dog wanders down the beach and sends them all back in the air. The feral dogs are all over the streets of this town, and they all look related.  Like the Canadians.

The dog runs off when a man walks by. He’s carrying two umbrellas like mine. He is shirtless and barefoot and wearing loose brown pants. Almost the same color as his skin.  He doesn’t stop when he reaches me. He walks past quite a ways to a folded pop up canopy another man is erecting down near one of the paths to the street.  I see a pile of umbrellas there, ready to be given out to beach goers. Not given I realize, but rented. I’m squatting under one of their umbrellas. Shit. The man walks back by me down the beach and returns moments later carrying two more. He doesn’t say anything to me and he never attempts to make eye contact. I notice the wrinkles in his skin. I wonder how long he’s been doing this. Carrying umbrellas down the beach. I immediately feel like an idiot. Has there ever been some schmuck tourist visiting Northern California wondering how many fucked up bathrooms I’ve repaired? Not likely.

I turn back to my notebook and try again. When I look up there is a woman and her daughter walking up with trinkets to sell.  They are both darker skinned and skinnier than the locals.  The word indigenous forms on my tongue. I decide not to wave them off with a no gracias like I’d done with the endless stream of vendors on the street. The girl kneels down and rummages through her box of plastic trinkets. I guess her age at 6.  She is wearing a blue jean mini skirt and a neon pink tube top. My kind of girl. From her box of toys she picks up one at a time and calls each by name. I recognize the word pulpa when she holds the smiling octopus refrigerator magnet.  I had pulpas and runny eggs for breakfast. Neither the octopus nor I had been smiling much since. The whiskey was being a great help.  

Quanta questa? I had heard a pasty white lady say it earlier in a shop while holding up a hat. I assume it means how much?

The young girl answers me. I can’t understand her so I hold out some coins. She shakes her head, Oh no, she says and repeats her earlier words.  I shrug my shoulders and she points to a fifty peso note laying in my open bag. I say okay and she reaches in and grabs it, then picks a couple coins from my hand also.  I am sure I am being taken, since this is more than I’d paid for the bucket of watery Mexican beers the night before.  I say okay again and she hands the money to her mom. She says gracias and walks away with a big smile.  I am the only gringo sucker on the beach today.

The wind must have shifted because now with the burning plastic I can smell cooking meat. Maybe it’s time to find some lunch. But first I gotta piss, so I cap the bottle, now half empty, and drop it and my notebook in my bag next to the smiling pulpa. As I stand up I can feel a twinge in my back. It starts small but within a few steps it’s a stabbing pain and I’m leaning to one side. I jab two knuckles into the charlie-horse starting just behind my kidneys and hobble the rest of the way to the water thinking if I can just float for a few minutes maybe I can get the muscles to relax.  By the time my feet touch water I can feel the familiar tingling running down my leg and the numbness creeping along the bottom of my foot. The stabbing pain now shooting from my spine and engulfing my entire ass cheek.  Not far into the water my feet miss a step, a low spot the undertow has carved out. I lurch forward, my free hand flying out in front uselessly. I fall into knee deep, brown, foamy water. A wave shoots the sand and salt water up my nose, burning my sinuses. It smells like sulfur. I cough and try to lift myself up but can’t before the next wave hits me in the side of my head making a loud CLAP against one ear. Fucking Christ! I yell as I roll onto my back. The receding wave pushes my shorts up, giving me a sand-filled wedgie. I’m laying in maybe six inches of dirty brown water.

Fuck it.  

I let my bladder go, pissing on myself, pissing on Mexico.  

My Favorite Radio

I once bought a radio from a junk shop in Carlotta, California. It was an old wooden round-top style with gold fabric on the front and one giant, round dial in the middle. It looked so American and full of history I didn’t care if it worked or not.  I imagined families sitting around the radio listening to President Roosevelt’s weekly radio address. Or listening to the news of the first war to end all wars. I imagined radio shows like War of the Worlds coming through the speaker and scaring the shit out of Carlottians. It seemed so romantic. I paid $5 for it and I felt like I got the deal of the century.

I was excited to bring it home. I had just rented a funky old Victorian house and was enjoying decorating it with thrift store finds like this.  The first thing I did was plug it in. On one frequency it made noises like an airplane engine. That was the only sound it ever made. I found some furniture polish and gave it a once over. When I got the dust off I noticed it had many tiny holes, like pin pricks. Almost too small to see. I imagined an old grandmother, hand sewing some undergarment in her rocking chair. She would be listening to her favorite radio soap opera and when her least favorite character would come on she would lean forward and stab at the radio with her sewing needle, whispering you little bitch, before leaning back to resume sewing. Giving just a slight glance over the top of her glasses making sure grandpa hadn’t heard.

I put the radio on top of a small table in the corner of the dining room. Friends would compliment me on it when they saw it. But being a single man in my 20’s I wasn’t much of a cleaner. The radio would always get really dusty.  I thought maybe it was the rounded top that caused the dust to collect around the base.  How was I to know?

Circumstances in my life changed and I needed to move to the City for a while. I didn’t want to lose the great deal I had on that house so I found someone to sublet for the summer, which turned into two, and eventually three. Before I left I moved much of my furniture, including the radio, into the basement.

Like they do, circumstances changed again and I left the City. What a relief it was to come home to my beautiful little Victorian.  When I went to haul the radio back up from the basement I noticed the significant pile of fine brown dust around the base of it. The pin holes, which I remembered as being perhaps dozens, where now thousands, hundreds of thousands even.  So many that when I touched the wooden side of the radio it gave way beneath my finger. I thought I’d bring the radio out into the light of the back yard and take a better look. I went to pull it off the shelf and felt the whole thing collapse. The weight of the speaker and the fuses forcing the front wall to fall in on itself.  Underneath the thin varnish every wooden part had turned to dust, a large plume of which covered me and filled the basement. What a shame, I thought, I liked that radio. I scooped it into a trash can.

As I was sweeping the last of the dust off the shelf I noticed the wall behind it had a few pin holes in it.  A few feet away there were more. I got on a chair and looked closely at the floor joists above my head. More holes than I could count. I followed the joists to the center of the basement, to the main beam holding up the house. It looked like teeny tiny Swiss cheese. The center post, I noticed now, had a heavy ring of light brown powder around it’s base. I touched it with my finger, gently, and heard a crinkle, like a small dry twig snapping. I backed out of the basement room and shut the door. I saw pin holes in the door and the trim. As I walked around the house I saw more, in the siding and in the windows.

I called my landlord that day, and told him I needed to move again.

Paul, you just got back.

I know, I told him, but circumstances have changed.