by DBC Pierre
'Where are you? Just tell me that – Vernon?'
'Ask him when he last ate, Doris.'
'Mom, these credits are gonna run out – what's important is that I'm fine, and I'll call when I get settled.'
'Oh Vernon.' She starts bawling again.
I badly want to leave her some cream pie, tell her about my beach-house, and her visit and all. But I just fucken can't. I just kill the call.
seventeen
'Ay, ay, ayeeeeeee, Lu-pita! Ay, ay ayeeeeeee…'
Tunes scratch out of the radio as we roll south in the truck, Pelayo, the kid, Jesus the Dead Mexican, and me. 'A veritable hotch-potch,' as bastard Mr Nuckles would call us. You'll drop a load when you hear the local hoe-down music; big ole polkas with guitar, bass, and accordion, and all these guys going 'Ay, ay, ay,' and shit. Even better is the station-breaks; announcers holler echoes like they're calling a fucken boxing match. I sit as high as a God on the passenger side of the truck, squinting through the slit of glass between an overgrown dashboard shrine of the Virgin, and a fringed curtain with baby soccer balls hanging off it. Pelayo's kid is in a game with me. His name is Lucas. Every time I look at him, he looks away real fast. So I keep him in the corner of my eye, train him to expect my eyes to move slow, until he's lulled into that pattern; then I suddenly cut back and catch him staring. Ha! He blushes like crazy, and buries his face into his shoulder. For some reason I get waves from this little game, I really do, a flock of butterflies in my heart and all. Don't get me wrong, I'm still an asshole. I haven't gone The Other Way, or anything. But, just honestly, it's like one of those Simple Things in Life, that folk always talk about, but you never know what they fucken mean. Imagine a regular ten-year-old doing this, back home. I don't fucken think so. He would've already primed some cusses, just in case you fucken looked at him.
We heave deep into the guts of Mexico, past Matehuala and San Luis Potosi, where greener scenery blends with my hangover to weave frosted dreams, of home, and of Taylor. I try to push away the silken threads, the octopus flesh writhing, flashing purple and red, puffing tang-spray and honey, so I can air the musty, upholstered ole thoughts, lavender-smelling thoughts I get every day about the dead. Thoughts too big to even shiver at, thoughts just calmly there, to stay forever, like flounces on the satin in your casket. The thoughts combine with the climb into Mexico City to bring soundbites of everyone I know, crying behind their fly-screens, 'Devastated, devastated, devastated, the nightly news, the ni-ghtly newwws, the Nigh-tly Nooze…' until in my mind, I'm chased through skies of churning bile by a black and putrid vortex that swirls across whole states, whole fucken countries, just to gash me, hook out my guts, pulsating, and stomp them with boots and spurs, like a nest of baby rattlers, 'Get that end! Stomp! Cut that fuckin bastard, he's still movin!'
Vernon Godzilla Little.
By midnight on this foreign Friday in June, a permanent shiver hangs around me. I leave my flesh and bones at the northern edge of Mexico City, and just the noodles of my nervous system drive with me south. We only nearly get killed a dozen times. When we finally pop out of the city, we're in a dangerous condition to be driving. Just like everybody else around. Alpine forests we drive through, dodging humongous motorcoaches lit up like space shuttles, down to tropical places that give way to areas of rock and cactus, and empty noise on the radio. Everything adds up to make me edgy. I expect to see Dr Goosens's secretary out here, or the meatworks' marching band or something. I try to keep the dream weaving in my head, a thread of Taylor, a thread of beach, a thread of 'Sailing'. But the weaving gets harder, the threads get matted and replaced by veins. 'Devastated, devastated, devastated…'
We finally stop in a town where they must have a fly farm. I fight with some flies over a sweaty hot-dog, until one gets stuck in the mustard. Mexican flies are slow. I look around. The place is just like the TV-movie where these casino gamblers are in death's lobby, waiting to see if the elevator's going up or down. You expect nightclub pianists' bones in a display case somewhere, I swear. There's Muzak, needless to say. Muzak, and evidence of rats. Then, when I step into the hot, dishwashy dawn, to take a leak before retiring to the truck, a fucken scorpion scuttles towards me. The omens just ain't clear anymore.
Acapulco spreads out in a pattern just like Martirio: saggy, colored underwear districts on the outskirts, sharpening through Y-front and sensible-shoe zones to the center, where silk speed shines tight. The edges show up as we climb the last hill before the coast. Pelayo has to leave his load in Acapulco before heading to his village, farther north. Smells tag our progress into town. We should soon reach the Medicated Pet Soap district, then travel through the Old Spice, and Herbal Essence zones, if it's anything like home. Right now we pass a zone where you just jam a finger up your ass and sniff it.
The road winds out of the hills until blue ocean unfolds in the distance. Acapulco is this huge round bay, with hotels and hotels and hotels. I have to find the biggest one, and call Taylor. I realize the risk of being recognized will grow, because I've heard about this place before, which means tourists will be here from home. Acapulco I've heard of, and Coon-Can, or wherever fucken Leona went one time. I start to feel the shiver breathing down on me. I scan the distance for the correct-looking hotel to call from, but deep in my soul I'm hoping I don't see it. That's how your mind operates, to avoid the shiver, fucken look at it. My face even acts like I'm scanning the bay, my eyes squint, and my lips push out with the concentration of looking for the correct hotel. I even play games with myself, like: if I see a blue sign on the street, I'll get Pelayo to stop. But I know if I see one, my brain will find some excuse why I can't stop. Then the game'll go: if I see a sign with the color green on it, I'll double-definitely stop. I just take the fucken cake, boy, fuck.
Pelayo solves it by pulling over at a little roadside bar, behind the main boulevard. We haven't eaten since our death-dog, and now Saturday is well underway. Pelayo stops on the sidewalk by the bar, and just looks at me. He senses I have to melt back into my dry-cleaned world awhile. He makes me understand that if I want a ride to his town, I should meet him here in two hours, after he's unloaded the truck. An awkward membrane grows between us as he says it. As if he knows my natural habitat is in one of these towers full of wealthy people. He knows he'd be like a fucken gardener in one of these places, if so much. His eyes grow shy from the truth of things, and for the moments past of our unusual friendship. He slaps my back, and turns to the bar with his invisible guns. Lucas turns too, with confused eyes. So much for Vernon Gonzalez Little.
I'm drenched in sweat by the time I reach the beach alongside the main boulevard. It's fancy. It doesn't cost anything to walk on the sand, so I take off my shirt, and my flappy ole Firestone sandals, and start to look American again. Two security guards watch me head for this massive hotel. They wave when I look at them, just another American dweebo, they must say. I spit back my hair and eyebrows, and strut into the hotel like I'm wearing guns, just like Pelayo learned me. The lobby is about the size of fucken Dallas – Fort Worth airport, marble floored, with beautiful lobster-people gliding around. Awesome place. A bellhop holds the elevator doors open for me, and I ain't even near them.
'Going up, sir?' he asks.
I try not to drop a load, but it's fucken hard. I see myself at that place last night, with the flies, and the nightclub pianist's rotting corpse, and today it's like I'm waiting for hula-girls to suck my boy, I swear. Leona Dunt could only dream of coming to this fucken place. An American family sweeps past me into the elevator, dressed like Tommy Hilfiger on a golfing convention; it's a mama with a tense ole man, and the traditional two kids – a good one and a bad one. Type of folk who get lighthearted over dinner-music, and start talking about their feelings, to show how liberated they are. Your fucken cutlery drawer on parade.
'Now, Bobby, remember what we said – you know the deal,' says the mom.
'Yeah, Bobby,' says the dad in back, like a fucken sock puppet. The girl hoists her eyebrows.
'But I don't feel so great,' says Bobby.
'We planned the bay cruise days ago, and it's already paid for,' says the mom.
'Days ago,' says Dad.
The kid just sulks. The ole lady tightens her lips. 'Forget it, Trey, you know what he's like. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like the other time, after we spent all that money on scuba lessons…'
World-class knifing, I have to say. And just one smug face left, on the girl.
I saunter toward smells of sausage and coffee, looking for a public phone. Outside, I see a huge patio laid out with a buffet. I stupidly pick up a menu. The cheapest thing on it costs more than a fucken helicopter joyride. Then a waiter starts to hover, so I keep walking towards some bathrooms that are in a service area by the pool. I pass a real-life psycho on the way, too; an up-and-coming one. This fat little dork is standing next to another kid in the pool, being a real pal, while his little sister dive-bombs the water around them. Then, out of earshot of his buddy, the fat kid snarls at his sister: 'I told you to jump on him, not near him…' A future senator, guaranteed.
I pass some lounge chairs facing the bay, with boats and parachutes gliding past them, and the squeak of bitty children in the surf nearby. I start fantasizing that some kid starts drowning right in front of me, and I jump in and save him. In my mind, I rehearse what I'd tell the reporters, and I even see the newspaper headlines spinning up. 'Juvenile Hero Pardoned,' and shit. After a minute, it's the fucken president's kid I'm saving. The president weeps with gratitude, and I just shuffle away. See me? All this drags through my head like a fucken rusty chain.
To snap myself out of it, I go find a phone on the street outside the hotel. I punch in Taylor 's number.
'Glassbadanbow?' says a kid. He's handing out flyers by the road.
'Say what?'
'Jew like croose in Glass badan boat?'
'Tayla,' the phone answers. I wave the kid away.
' Mexico calling,' I say.
'Hi, killer.'
Something's wrong, I can tell. I get a pang to curl her up around me, her and her safe, deodorized world, where her biggest problem in life is getting bored, or smelling Glade around the house. Probably her biggest personal secret is eating boogers. She's been bawling just now, you can tell.
'Everything okay?' I ask.
Taylor gives a sniffly laugh. 'I'm just like, what the fuck, you know? This damn guy I was dating…'
The doctor?'
'The so-called doctor, yeah. I just want to run away, God...'
'Know how you feel.'
'Anyway, where are you?' she asks, blowing her nose.
' Acapulco.'
'Dirty dog. Lemme see the map – are you, like, by the beach?'
'Yeah, on the main boulevard.'
'That must be the Costera Miguel Aleman – there's a Western Union agent at a place called Comercial Mexicana.'
'I'll make it up to you, Tay.'
'But listen – it's Sunday tomorrow, and I can't get the cash till Monday. The agent's open till seven Monday night, so if you go at six…'
'No sweat,' I lie, watching the last credits drip off the screen.
'And babe,' she says. Beep. The line goes dead.
*
The fucken Love Boat is here. I swear to God, from those ole shows my mom watches, with the horny cruise director, and Captain Stupid and all. It has the Wella Balsam kind of logo on the funnel. Star-studded Acapulco, boy.
I pull my head into the cab as the bay falls away behind us. Pelayo's truck bangs over some hills, then heads north along this TV-movie coastline, with coconut trees, whole fields of them. The beach ain't as white as Against All Odds, and the water ain't as blue, but hey. A lagoon runs alongside us for part of the drive, right out of Tarzan or something. We even pass through a military roadblock, with a fucken machine-gun nest, no bullshit. My intestines pump, but they end up just being kids, these soldiers, like cartoon ants, in oversized helmets.
After a few hours, we leave the road and turn down a track toward the sea. The track ends with some logs sunk into the beach, and jungle backed up behind. It's a minuscule town, of slummy wooden houses, with pigs, chickens, and grizzly-looking dogs around. Not even slummy, more like out of National Geographic. Fucken paradise. Pelayo parks behind a store that's held together with Fanta signs, and a porch of dry palm leaves. Two men lay in hammocks there, sucking beer. A flock of kids gather as we pile out of the truck. You can tell Pelayo's the dude around here. He's probably like the Mr Lechuga of town, except human. Now I'm the alien in his world. He takes trouble to make me feel at home, snapping at the kids to get away, and calling up a beer from the store. I just stand quiet, nose up to the breeze, listening to a dictionary full of new bugs. Ungawa wakashinda, I swear. Pelayo opens the beers with his teeth, and proudly walks me to a covered patio on the beach. Two older men sit at a table, and an ole lady leans behind a makeshift bar.
A naked kid suddenly brushes past her, trying to spear a wounded crab on the sandy concrete. He finally stabs it clean through the back, 'Yesssss!' he says, stopping to pull back an imaginary lever with his fist. Pelayo kicks the crab out of my way, and sweeps me to a table by the beach.
A crowd of bottles gathers on the table. Toward evening, a young dude turns up who speaks some English; a lean, smart-looking guy called Victor, with braces on his teeth – something you don't see much down here. He tells me how important it is for him to get ahead in life, so he can bring wealth into the village and all. Makes me feel like the lowest fucken snake. He translates the words painted between the mud-flaps on the truck. 'You see me, and suffer,' they mean. 'Me ves, y sufres.'
When I first show signs of being loaded, the boys offer me oysters as big as burritos, right out of the sea. Fucken forget it. I ate one when I was a kid, and it felt like something I sucked down the back of my nose. They even offer me the oysters at a time when I have a booger-plug ready to suck down my throat. Without thinking, I point at my nose while I suck it down, then pull a face, and point at the oyster. They drop Acapulco-sized loads over that. They can't look me in the face for an hour after, for the fucken loads they drop. Typical of me to introduce slime to paradise.
After a tequila, as lions and tigers stir under this silicon-clear evening, I try to explain the beach-house dream, the mud-flaps, and Fate. I'm a little loaded. Fucken loaded, actually. But as soon as I start to talk about it, Victor and Pelayo take my arm and lead me up the beach, through the palms, where bats now orbit, to a place ten minutes away, where the jungle almost pushes you into the sea. Kids follow us, shining in and out of the surf. Then Victor stops. He points through the fading light, and I squint to follow his finger across the sand. There, all locked up, almost hidden in the jungle, sits an ole white beach-house. My place.
The boys say it's okay to camp here until Monday. Maybe longer. Maybe for fucken ever. After they totter home up the beach, I sit on the balcony of the house, let the evening filter off the sea and through my soul. Suddenly all the different waves inside me alloy into one tune, with feathers of my original dream dancing the edges of this new symphony; my ole lady down here, checking out the neat sanitation, reflecting on how good things got. I may have to change my name, or become Mexican or something. But it's still me, without any trace of slime around. I look out over the garden of this place, onto the beach, and see Taylor there running around in her panties, brown like a native.
I spend all Sunday in this Valhalla, lazing with my dreams. When I wake Monday morning, a hot, wet wind blows across me, and my boy is like fucken reinforced cement, like he's chipped off Mount Rushmore. My hand's nowhere near him, he's just being guest of honor at his own little parade. I look around to see the sky clouded over, and shabby gray pelicans swoop and dive into the surf. The heads of coconut trees swish and move around at the speed I wish my life would go, cool and smooth. For the first time in a while, there's that little edge of gladness to be waking up this morning. Today's my birthday.
Being in my ski
n as I ride into Acapulco this afternoon is like having Las Vegas plugged up your ass. I'm sixteen, and Las Vegas is plugged up my fucken ass. I'm on my feet before the bus even gets into town, buzzing with potentialities; tropical fish and birds, banana leaves, monkeys, and sex. The beach-house. Turns out it belongs to an ole fruit farmer behind the village, who doesn't use it at all. Victor thinks I could probably stay there for free, if I tended it.
The boulevard in Acapulco is sticky this evening, colored lights blare as big as ideas along its length. Victor loaned me a straw hat, to soften my coconut-tree hair, and oyster-shell ears. I catch my reflection in the window by Comercial Mexicana; Huckleberry Finn, boy. I put on my guns before entering the store, to compensate for the hat, I guess, then just strut around in a circle, like a dog deciding where to lay down. I eventually spot the Western Union counter, with folk waiting around it, including shiny red and white folk from home. An attendant sees me right away.
'Uh – I'm expecting a wire from Houston, Texas.'
'Name?' asks the clerk.
My face starts to calculate Pi. 'Uh – I ain't sure who she sent it to…'
'You have the password?' asks the guy. Fuck. I feel more people line up behind me.
'I better call and get it,' I say, shuffling away from the counter.
Folk look at me strangely, so I keep on shuffling, right out of the store; out of the freezer, back into the fucken oven. I have to get hold of Taylor. Maybe she didn't send it, once she knew about the password. I have no points left on my phonecard. I can't even call Pelayo. Vegas sputters and dies in my ass.
I walk up the boulevard until I find a phone. I don't know if it's like TV, where you can call anybody collect, from anywhere. I decide to call her collect. Sweat flows between my mouth and the operator when I talk. She speaks English at least. Then sweat runs between my ear and the operator when she tells me you can't call this mobile number collect. When I hang up the phone, sweat dammed on top of my ear crashes onto my fucken shoulder, then runs crying onto the road. Probably back into the fucken sea after that.