Engaged, part 1: Cohabitation

This one might get a little sappy, but I feel like it’s a topic that deserves some discussion.  And some explaining.  Exactly seven months after meeting Brenda on the beaches of Mazatlan, and exactly three months after embarking south of the border in a Toyota Corolla packed to the gills, I made the seemingly drastic decision to put an end to all these little adventures and commit to a lifelong one.  Yes this included a knee on the ground and a (modest) diamond ring.  For those who are curious, I chose to actually “pop the question” in English, as I’m not 100% exactly what to say in Spanish and didn’t want it to sound weird.  I figure as a general rule you probably don’t want to sound like a foreign fuck in the moment you ask a girl to marry you.

Naturally, many factors, thoughts, feelings, decisions, events led up to this point.  The first two major events would have to have been falling in love and moving to Mexico.  The next was a change in the living situation.  Without getting too gossipy, let’s just say mom has some issues (don’t we all?) which flare up from time to time and occasionally last for more than just a day or two.  The incredibly long story short is that she “threw Brenda out”.  I use quotes because this usually means absolutely nothing—dad intervenes, Brenda stays, mom cools down, but this time dad said “she crossed the line.  Go”.  I was woken up at midnight as Brenda snuggled up next to me. 

Her sister was next to follow—mom was on a roll—and she stayed in the extra bedroom the following night.  Within 36 hours, the quick fix (i.e. mom learns her lesson and everything goes back to normal) became more and more of a long-term commitment, and an irreversible one at that.  I came to this realization when they started moving the clothes over, carload after carload—it really hit me when the carload of just shoes arrived.  Before you begin to think that a family with a ton of clothes must be pretty well off, keep in mind that a) the girls have not been growing for quite some time, b) Mexicans keep even the most worn-out belongings until they are absolutely unusable—and then they try to sell them, c) knock-off clothing is cheap as hell down here. 

So the girls were here to stay.  Bilingual Three’s Company.  We got cable, we got internet, we started shopping for three, I cleaned more.  Then things took an even more unexpected turn.  Dad met a similar fate two weeks later and soon he and the two girls were sleeping on the king-sized bed in the guest bedroom.  With dad’s presence we had to attempt this charade that Brenda and I had never so much as napped next to one another.  Through mere observation and rudimentary deduction skills, he quickly figured out the sleeping arrangement prior to his arrival. 

I should mention that it had always been one of Brenda’s cherished principles that she would never live with a boyfriend, i.e. the first night she would share a living space with a guy would be her wedding night and he would be her husband.  Strong Catholic beliefs play a large role in what some might call “old-fashioned” values, but another factor is that Mexican culture says that you only get one shot.  If you live with a guy and it doesn’t work out, you’ll forever wear the mark of the beast and no other decent guy will want you.  Obviously, I was delighted to have her staying, for however long, but still acknowledged and respected the bittersweet circumstances that made this blessing possible.  And in this case, Brenda used her one shot wisely. 

From a distance, I watched as each member of the family secretly hoped or assumed that things would go back to normal but gradually made decisions that made a return back to the normalcy of the last 25 years less and less possible.  This also slowed things down.  As long as the hope of a quick reversal lived on, why would they go looking for a new place?  And once they began renting a new place, why would they bother moving furniture over or buying a fridge?  Yes, these things did finally happen, but Brenda really had to ride people’s asses to get it done.  We began to refer to dad and sister as "the kids", as we were putting quite a bit of effort (happily) into caring for them.

And as for Brenda, as the moment approached in which she would have to give up the beauty of cohabitation with the love of her life, she finally mustered up the cajones to talk to dad and explain what SHE wanted.  And I think he was speaking from the heart when he replied that she’s an adult, he knows that she puts great consideration into everything she decides and therefore would not tell her no, he doesn’t think she’ll ever meet a better man who will respect and care for her more, and he thinks that one day we’ll probably get married (she didn’t know this, but he and I had already had “the talk”).

Living together continues to be an incredibly beautiful thing.  Brenda works 9 hours a day and makes the same salary as I do working 4 hours per day, so in the mornings we carpool most of the way and I pick her up from work 3 days a week.  In the couple free hours I have in the late morning I play housewife: cook, clean, make lunches, hit the farmer's markets, all the while listening to fiscally-conservative talk radio.  We recently bought a dining room table together (regularly about $425 for $160 out the door, wooden with 6 chairs included, and last weekend we decorated a Xmas tree that now resides in our living room.  The extra bedroom is once again unused.

Extorted

Another milestone for an American immigrant in Mexico, on the way back from Vallarta I was extorted.  Textbook.  Highway robbery (literally).  Only clichés come to mind because that’s what this was. 

For some background, it was a one-lane-each-way highway along the coast.  Speed limit is usually about 55 mph, and occasionally you pass through “towns” where it looks like a gas station gave birth to a convenience store from which sprung a service center all of which provided a nucleus for the construction of a few residential cement shacks, etc, and the posted speed limit significantly drops for a few hundred meters.  Perfect for a speed trap.  The difference is, in America they choose to pull you over based on a recorded and factual speed; here in Mexico they hunt you down based on the fact that you look like you have money but have no ties to neither the government nor narcotrafficking, then they pull you over and invent whatever the hell they want because no one will ever be able to prove it. 

Although I was trembling with anger, I remained calm and polite.  I mean, at least he had the tact to pretend that he was doing his job (sometimes they pull you over and say “how much do you have?”… if it’s not enough, they hold your precious documentation hostage while you make a run to the ATM).  I held firm to my previous training: force him to write you a ticket cuz those California plates make it totally worthless (not to mention we were in a different Mexican state as well).  However, this puerco had caught on, probably due to the fact that he patrols so close to gringo-ridden Puerto Vallarta, and told me that yes, he was going to write me a ticket AND he was going to confiscate my license until the ticket was paid.  I’m fairly certain they don’t have the right to do this.  Think about the technical implications of this had we decided to abide by the law:

First, we would have to call a tow truck to haul my car off the highway as there would no longer be a licensed driver in our party.  Second, it was a Sunday; obviously all government offices were closed so forget about paying the ticket that day.  So we would have to tow our car to a hotel, call our bosses and ask for Monday off, and wait til the next day to pay the ticket.  As you can see, he was just playing the game… and he one-upped us.  Speaking of government laziness, if you thought government employees in the US had a loathsome work ethic try getting something done in Mexico.  A typical government office might only be open four hours a day, and public sector employees not only get to celebrate all national holidays but most Catholic holidays as well.  The good thing about the US is that government workers get to retire at 50 and continue to receive inflated checks for their achievements in doing the bare minimum until the day they die; I’m not sure what the pension packages are like south of the border but there’s no way they compare.

So now the cop has my license and my driving permit papers and tells me he’s going to go back to his car to write the ticket.  This is my cue to palm some bills and go start the negotiation.  I decided to start the bidding at 100 pesos ($8 USD) and strolled over to the patrol car with bribe in hand.  There was no more point in pretending that my Spanish wasn’t really up to par, so I laid it out to him clearly and fluently: "obviously, I don’t want to leave here without my license and don’t want to have to return to another state just to pay a ticket, and you, sir, probably want to get on with your day and make a little extra money.  Let me give you 100 pesos so we can both leave here satisfied?"  Something like that.  He pretended not to understand and took out a little penal code book that states that a speeding ticket should cost between 10 and 20 days of the daily minimum wage.  The daily minimum wage… wait for it… is 54 pesos (about $4) PER DAY.  He also warned me that it could cost even more depending on how he noted my “recorded” speed. 

Now I got angry and did my best to show it as little as possible.  "Yeah, but I’m not a typical gringo.  I didn’t come down here with a shitload of dollars to throw around like all the other gringos you pull over.  I work, and I earn pesos, not dollars, just like you and just like any other Mexican.  Sometimes I teach all day for as little as 200 or 300 pesos-- (a white lie that he did not believe),-- so 100 pesos is a lot of money for me.  And sure, a ticket might cost me as much as 1,500 pesos, but you know what?  You’re not going to see one peso out of those 1,500.  All of it goes straight to the government and not one single peso will end up in your hand.  I know you want to earn-- (yes, I used the word “earn”)-- some money for yourself, and you know I want to leave with my license and without a ticket.  How about 200."  He nodded, and I walked back to the car to get another 100 pesos.  When I paid him, in order to feign trust, I decided not to demand that we do a “one, two, three… switch!” kind of exchange like you sometimes see in a run-of-the-mill action comedy movie.  I handed him the 200 pesos and gave him the opportunity to cherish being an asshole just one more time.  He began to fulfill his end of the deal, but then in mid-reach he retracted my papers and pretended to inspect them one last time, forcing me to sweat for 10 more seconds.  No, I did not thank him when it was all said and done. 

I’m not sure what you guys think about this experience.  A lot of you are probably thinking “200 pesos?  Isn’t that just a piddly $16 dollars?”.  But we were pissed.  Fuming for the next hour.  Those 200 pesos represent 2 hours in the classroom and at least another hour of commute time.  I recently saw a Mexican movie about narcotrafficking in which corrupt police officers are murdered but not before significant torture occurs, and I found myself dreaming of a similar fate for my own corrupt cop.  

Dinero

Gavin recently did the math for me (not a direct quote)…

So you work about 20 hours a week, make $10/hr at best, and spend another 10 hours driving between classes and home.  Logan, that’s $6.67 per hour!  Can’t you find something more lucrative?

The sad reality is, when you account for gas it comes out to be even less.

Working for pennies in the 3^rd world drives a guy to contemplate the economic value of his time, the purpose of working at all, and to constantly compare prices here vs. prices there, all the while converting between two currencies (“divide by 10 and subtract 20%”… i.e. 100 pesos = $8 USD… the reverse would be “multiply by 10 and add a quarter”).

Sure, from an American point of view I’m working for next to nothing.  Less than minimum wage.  Pathetic.  In order to accept such a drastic change in salary, I’ve spent the last two months attempting to put things into perspective.  One perspective is that if I work 20 hours a week, make just under $800/month, and live carefully, I can get by.  To save everyone the mental and emotional turmoil that my constant perspective calculations involve, I’ll sum it up here for y’all:

-I pay $240 per month for a two bedroom, 1.5 bathroom 2-story house.  In Berkeley I was paying over 3 times that for a 100 square-foot room (hey, you pay a premium for kick-ass roommates). 

-A well-educated professional can hope to make about 20,000 pesos ($1,600 USD) per month. 

-Jobs that require neither education nor experience (i.e. cashier at a little store) pay 100 pesos ($8 USD) per day.

-Day laborers (construction, road work) work for as little as $4 USD per day, possibly even less. 

Now the question of “why work at all?” grows even stronger.  If you’re working for $4 per day you can barely even cover the bus ride to and from.  The answer is that you also earn rights to government support in the form of healthcare, loans, and vouchers.  To all workers, public and private, the government provides nationalized healthcare for the employee as well as his family, and also guarantees a loan (no- or very low-interest, I believe) to facilitate the purchase of a home.  Once the school gives me something like 25 hours per week, I’ll be eligible for these same rights. 

So the employer of that worker who takes home $4 per day might actually be paying $20 per day, but 80% goes to el gobierno in order to pay for healthcare for a big Catholic family of god-knows-how-many.  I’m still trying to figure out the voucher thing.  Apparently many companies will decide to give their employees vouchers for gasoline or food, subsidized partly by the government and partly by the employer, on top of their contracted salaries.  Brenda couldn’t quite explain it to me; she just knows it exists.  And since I have trouble believing in outright altruism, I don’t yet understand how this can be beneficial to both paying parties (govt and employer).  Will look into it. 

Continuing with the theme of financial perspective, let’s talk prices.  There’s a huge discrepancy between the prices of various products; the more primary a good, the more 3^rd world the price:

-3 lbs of tomatoes, $1.

-Bananas: $0.25 per lb.

-Tortillas: <$1/ lb.

-Over 2 lbs of dry beans for $1.

-A bus ride costs less than $0.50

-A pack of made-in-Mexico Marlboros costs $2.25

-Meat and dairy aren’t AS cheap; milk runs about $2.50 per gallon and cheap beef about $2.50 per pound. 

-A dozen quality roses, less than $5.

-Services, obviously, are incredibly cheap as well.  For less than 30 bucks a mechanic made the smashed-up front of my car look almost as good as new. 

-12 sandwich-sized rolls, $1.

-2 lbs of limes, $1.

Then there are products that carry exactly the same price as in the US, even though folks here make about 25% of an American salary or less:

-Little netbook laptops cost $300 to $400 dollars.

-I can guarantee that any Apple product costs the same or more over here.

-Gasoline is just under $3 per gallon.

-Yesterday I paid $3 for a stick of deodorant.

-A pack of Trident gum and a two-liter Coke both cost about $1.20.

And then there’s pirata.  Pirated goods.  Knock-offs.

-We used to rent DVDs for $1.60 per night; now we go downtown and buy a copy of the damn movie for $1.25.

-You can take a textbook to these paper/Xerox stores and the next day they give you a spiral-bound copy for about 7 cents per page.  More than half of my students acquire their text books in this way. 

-“Namebrand” clothing can also be found at incredibly cheap prices if you know where to look.  Shirts, jeans, even shoes.  The shirts are totally convincing and 3 “Abercrombie”-esque etc T-shirts usually cost maybe $10; the jeans, upon donning them, reveal themselves as not having been produced with the expert craftsmanship of Mr. Levi himself; and the shoes I’m told fall apart pretty quickly.  

Fitting In

A quickie.

A friend of mine owns a little “cowboy wear” (sombreros, saddles, belts, boots, etc) shop in a pueblo on the outskirts of Guadalajara, close to one of the businesses (circuitboard/electronics company called Flextronics, previously Selectron) where I give a class some mornings.  For perspective, the shop can’t be more than 100 square feet.  In order to beat traffic I decided to pay her a visit yesterday. 

Got to talking to a 13 year old kid that spends his afternoons there for lack of a better thing to do.  He claims that he also goes to school.  We chatted for a good hour.  I guess his family owns some horses and gives tours of the surrounding countryside, and he promised to take me around next time I’m in town… I’m still trying to determine if this is a real promise or a Mexican courtesy promise. 

A shipment of cowboy hats arrived and we tore into the box and began sorting them all out and trying them on.  I put on a wide-brimmed feaux-leather sombrero and the kid stared at me for a second, laughed, and declared “You look like a foreigner!  Wait, are you from here?”  Hilarious and flattering.  I guess I’m gradually fitting in, starting with ignorant country children and hoping to one day deceive the rest of the nation as well.

Small Business

Dad’s a veterinarian of 26 years and over time has upgraded his location from utter slums to his current office, situated on prime real estate between the local church and market.  Despite gradual improvements in locale, I get the impression that upgrades to his equipment have occurred at a much slower rate, if at all.  The majority of his business is house calls, so he spends most of the day passing between home and office (4 blocks apart), receiving and running errands from mom, eating and napping from 2 to 4 as is the Mexican way, all the while anticipating phone calls from clients. 

When he’s at his small office, he is guaranteed to be sitting outside, probably due to the smell of animal filth that has at this point thoroughly saturated every fabric of the place.  But there is also very poor lighting which, if you could stand the smell, might also cause you to prefer to be outdoors.  On the inside, there’s an old wooden desk and a plant; a divider separates front from back behind which you’ll find a metal table, a couple cages in the corner of various sizes, and that’s about it.  It appears that all of his tools and supplies fit into one of two carrying cases.  The only semblance of beauty in the place are the four framed photos on the wall, captured and framed by photographer extraordinaire Trish Linderman, of an iguana, a donkey, a parrot, and a pair of elephants, respectively.  The donkey gets at least as much attention as the other three combined. 

Prior to arriving here for good, Brenda and her dad has both individually more-or-less boasted about the fact that dad doesn’t pay income taxes.  Apparently four or five years ago an auditor came by the office and dad basically told him: “You’re right.  I haven’t been paying taxes nor do I keep very thorough records [I think he actually does], but come in and take a look around.  Do you see clients?  Do you see evidence of prosperity?  Does it look like I make more than the bare minimum to survive?”.  The auditor, seeing the bare and (in my American opinion) filthy office, and not realizing that a large majority of his business consists of house calls, was content with that explanation. 

HOWEVER, just recently the Mexican government has been really pushing to root out non-paying business owners like Brenda’s dad, as well as those who engage in more unofficial and under-the-table type businesses (food sold from houses, various services, people who make a career out of flea markets, etc); if you’re prosperous, or rather if you have a little left over after you feed your family, then you’d better share with the government.  And rightfully so.  I’m coming to realize that in some respects the Mexican government offers comprehensive social services.  Medicine is one that stands out.  There are cheap, government-owned hospitals that are covered by social security; any worker in Mexico plus their family is entitled to some level of health care.  But they also respect the other side of the coin and demand more of the Mexican people.  A law was recently passed that says that obese teachers and parents with obese children can be fined.  Will continue to investigate.

An auditor recently came to dad’s office and basically told him “you’re busted and it’s time to pay up”.  Dad was freaked.  I watched him grow clearly more and more worried over the course of the week as he waited for his appointment.  The damage?  He had to pay a fine of 4,500 pesos (less than $400 dollars) to cover the last FIVE years, and from now on he has to pay 100 pesos ($8 dollars) per month.  I explained to him what I think he already knew… that mathematically he lucked out.  

"Mexicanada" defined

We Americans utilize the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  And when something finally DOES break, our hard-earned dollars, or our “Obama money”, or both, provide us with the convenience and liberty to choose between a repair or simply purchasing a new one.  There happens to be a little-known third option which may be a foreign concept to most Americans: dealing with it.  Because the first two choices cost money, Mexican salaries usually render repair or replacement impossible, leaving my slightly-tanner countrymen forced to simply deal with it when something falters.  I think a more appropriate saying would be “if you can make it work, it never even broke in the first place”. 

And this philosophy gives birth to the mexicanada.

While a literal translation of the word mexicanada would have to be something like “mexicanized”, mexicanada is slang for “jerry-rigged” (or if you’re from the Central Valley maybe you said “okie-rigged” as a kid), something quickly thrown together, something that shouldn’t work but does, certainly something that doesn’t operate exactly as it was constructed or intended to. 

Some examples:

--Brenda can’t remember the last time the bathroom door at her house closed completely.  Possibly never in her life.  Instead, there’s an old-fashioned metal iron on the floor of her bathroom that you have to butt up against the door when you do your business.  And this still doesn’t close it ALL the way so no matter what anyone in the living room hears everything.

--Their toilet seat had plastic-coated cushioning on it once.  If I had to guess I would say about a decade ago.  Now the cushioning has worn away so much that you end up sitting on some sort of checkerboard honeycomb matrix instead.  Melanie attested to it actually hurting.  But hey, as long as it separates your ass from the toilet water it’s still doing its job.  I took her mom out one afternoon and after hours of looking for the exact shape and color I splurged on the $14 heavier-duty model.

--One of Brenda’s friends has to take out her earring and use the post to poke somewhere in order to turn on her iPod.  (On that note, ANY mp3 player down here is called an “iPod”, even the lightest-weight little stick that takes a AAA battery and displays only Chinese characters)

--Brenda gave me the CD player that she used at her old job.  The volume knob broke off long ago and volume was then adjusted using a pencil or, again, an earring.  At this point it has been poked and prodded so much that it’s useless to me. 

--Recently a friend asked me to take a picture for her.  The whole time I had to hold the battery casing closed in order to operate the damn camera.  As soon as I relaxed my grip to hand it back to her the camera shut off.

--A neighbor lady picks guavas from her tree outside using a mangled little fork that she fastened onto the end of a ~9-foot pole.

--This one is more ingenuity than mexicanada… Brenda’s sister spilled red wine all over her black and white blouse.  I imagine most of us would have forfeited it to Goodwill or even the trash.  However, with the help of bleach she now has a brown and really really bright white striped blouse. 

Hopefully this more or less explains the title… Vida Mexicanada.

La Muerte (Death)

I’m fairly certain I saw a dead body.  I’m also fairly certain I just witnessed an accident that resulted in death for the driver. 

The first occurred two weeks ago while we were driving home from the little mountain town where we celebrated the 200^th anniversary of “El Grito” (the yell… for Mexican independence).  On the side of a two-lane highway (one each way) with no shoulder was a man sprawled out on the ground.  A handful of local and state police had gathered and were looking down at him.  No one was attempting to revive him or wake him, nor did anyone seem to be in a hurry.  The rope connecting the man to his donkey was still affixed to his hand, and the donkey appeared to be just as concerned as the police officers.  The dominant theory (our theory… no, we did not stop and talk to the police) was that maybe he was grazed by a car while trying to lead his donkey along the edge of the highway and that the driver probably made the right decision by continuing along as if it never happened. 

Every morning I teach a class at a business on the outskirts of town.  It’s a 30 minute drive out and can be as much as an hour to get home in traffic.  Yes, I’m in the car more than in the classroom.  The highway has a 2 to 3 foot barrier down the center which, as I learned yesterday, can also act as a ramp.  I’m not sure if the driver lost control of his vehicle because of a distraction or for reasons unavoidable, but the sound of an oncoming cargo truck (not a semi, but a helluva lot bigger than a pickup) smacking against the center barrier got my attention -- hell, he must have been just 20 feet away from me – and then I watched a scene from Die Hard in my rearview mirror as the truck sailed into the air, traversing the barrier and doing a half turn, landing top-down in oncoming traffic and proceeding to flip and roll, seemingly in slow motion due to the size of the vehicle, sparks flying.  It did not come to rest until it had been virtually disassembled—wheels, axles, bumper, cargo bay, etc were all strewn across the highway. 

For everyone but the driver, luck intervened in two ways:

1)      Had it happened 1.5 seconds earlier I would have been underneath that rubble.

2)      That particular stretch of highway, in my direction (where the truck landed), is usually completely jammed; it takes me about 20 minutes to drive about 2 miles.  However, for whatever reason yesterday was a holiday for the public sector (and, as always, only the public sector).  The truck flipped and spun across 3 lanes of traffic and as far as I know it did not touch a single oncoming car.  On these days you realize exactly how many people feed their families with a government paycheck (I’m not sure how the proportion of government employees compares to that of the US, but the keyword is employees--there’s no doubt that the US government is infinitely more likely to pay its citizens to do absolutely nothing). 

You may ask “But what makes you so sure the driver was killed?”… it’s about a  10% chance that any given person is wearing a seatbelt down here, despite recent seatbelt laws.  The fact that he was driving a truck means that he was probably male and over 35, which, to my best estimate, reduces that probability to about 1%.

Stranded and Towed... plus a glance into business practices

Long story short... we got stranded about 60 miles from GDL on the way home from celebrating Mexican independence (200 anniversary) in a little mountain town.  Luckily we were 7 people in two cars and were able to push Dennise´s (Brenda´s sister) car about a mile to the nearest pueblo.  While some folks called insurance and tow trucks and the rest found shade against a deteriorating building, little Logan came out of the woodwork and proceded to uncover multitudes of grasshoppers, caterpillars, spiders, etc.  Soon our whole wagonparty was engrossed.

A quick glance into the quality of Mexican business... Dennise had just paid her insurance the week before, was told the new policy would not take effect for a month but that she would be covered, even had it in writing.  Nevertheless, the first operator informed her that she was not covered and that it would cost a whopping $220 (dollars) to tow us home.  After a brief tantrum and many more phone calls she finally got it worked out.

On that note, another quick glance... my phone policy allows me to establish 3 phone numbers to which I can call and text for free.  We called two separate times to make Brenda and Denisse's phone numbers free for me.  Otherwise, cell to cell convo costs me 4 pesos (32 cents) per minute.  There was no language barrier because Denisse made the calls.  Well, two weeks later my approx $80 of credit disappeared.  Investigatory phone conversations revealed that they had entered the numbers into the computer but neglected to activate them.  Unlike American businesses, they felt no need to make it right, nor do I think an inflammatory email would do the trick.
The phone company here is something else, and they basically have a monopoly.  I think the owner/creator of Telmex recently achieved the crown of richest man in the world?  Just yesterday I received a text that they would give you double credit and that the offer would last for ¨max 48 hours¨.  30 hours later I bought 100 pesos of credit but did not get the deal.  They had successfully baited me, screwed me, and covered their own asses with the simple phrase ¨max 48 hours¨.

In all, I think it took about 3 hours for the tow truck to arrive from GDL.  The other car of four took off and Brenda and Denise and I passed the time walking the limited dirt and brick streets, eating 80 cent sandwhiches, drinking 80 cent beers, and chatting with whatever locals found us interesting.

Finally the tow truck shows up and I was the first to realize... we can´t all fit in that cab... and south of the border, the gringo holds a permanently short straw.  I climbed up into the passenger seat of the broken down car, buckled in, and listened to some words of advice from the driver... ¨If you want to sleep, go to sleep.  If you want to drink, go ahead.  If you need to use the bathroom flash the lights (note that this was impossible because the battery was completely completely dead... it appears that some sort of alternator belt or something had broken some time before).  If you see police, put your head down.¨  And we were off.  Halfway I received a phone call instructing me to get down immediately because we were coming up on a federal checkpoint.  They did not stop us.

The first half hour was amazing.  I was elevated above all other traffic as we descended from the mountains and circumvented Lake Chapala.  Then discomfort began to set in.  The chain reaction of momentum transfers meant that with each little bump in the road my ass nearly lifted off from the seat, eliminating the possibility of sleep and planting a seed of testicular pain that grew to dizzying proportions over the next hour and a half.  To make matters worse, it was getting cold and the automatic windows were stuck all the way down.  I arrived a wreck, exhausted, with sweatshirt wrapped over my face, clutching balls, searching for remedies that were just not meant to be found.

Sexy Little Chemist

I finally pinned down exactly what Brenda does.  A major fruit company that ships fruit nationwide under 5 different labels recently came to the realization that they are suffering minor losses by having to discard aesthetically-displeasing batches/harvests/shipments/whatever—fruit that is technically perfectly good but not fit for stores due to appearance.  The logical remedy?  Start a juice and marmalade company!  Erase the bruises, scratches, and bug burrows by blending it all up, and ultimately provide two new ways for the fruit to pass through the gullets of the masses!

Brenda was hired as one of two chemists tasked with developing the production line, recipes, quality control measures, you name it.  This particular company is hoping to create slightly-unprecedented 100% natural juices, and utterly-unprecedented marmalades that use agave syrup as sweetener (diabetic friendly).  She’s a little doubtful that either is even possible.  Without additives, how can you maintain color/flavor consistency across batches?  I suggested they turn a negative into a positive.  Make some sort of hipster-friendly slogan like “uniformity is NOT 100% natural” and then put a brief discussion about flavor/color subtleties that may be encountered from bottle to bottle, maybe with reference to seasons and weather patterns/conditions.  Sierra Nevada Pale Ale labels contain(ed?) a brief discussion about the layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of each bottle, which looks like dirt and has the potential to gross out customers, and how it’s supposedly testament to the quality of the beer; in reality it’s very possible that leaving some yeast in the bottle simply saves the company time and money.  

Nevertheless, the wealthy 26 year-old son of the fruit moguls who has been put in charge of their new juice/marmalade outpost demands that they give it a shot and doesn’t seem too concerned about cost nor possible unfavorable outcomes.  They have solicited advice from an extremely pretentious PhD from the US, who responded with lengthy (10s of pages) and difficultly-worded emails (even for an English speaker… I mean, come on, he knows he’s sending this to a Mexican company and that his audience, at best, will have command of English as a second language), which we periodically discuss over coffee in the evening.  I think I’ve reached the point where I could possibly consult the next start-up juice factory.

GDL = Good (place for) Drug Lords?

The drug wars have made it to Guadalajara, which for quite some time was thought to be protected—the narcos were allowed to seek refuge at their mansions tucked away in gated communities, the musicians were allowed to sing about drug cartels and then walk the streets, and the cops enjoyed a comfortably corrupted life of looking for something better to do.  However, a few weeks ago they raided Nacho’s mansion and some musician was recently murdered on one of the most beautiful and pedestrian-friendly bar-and-art-filled streets in the city.  Yesterday, in a neighborhood adjacent to and much poorer than my own, three were killed and two injured.  But it isn’t much different than any big city in the US with its gangs, drugs, and shootouts.  Think about going out in the Bay at night, strolling through the Tenderloin hammered, waiting at a bus stop in Oakland at 2am while your roommate sleeps on your shoulder.  You don’t need to be in Mexico to be an easy target, to be in potential danger, and yet time after time we arrive home safe and sound.  It’s the same here.  The ones who get it were asking for it in some way or another.  When you add the media’s love to invoke fear and inflate the slightest happening into a major crisis (see swine flu), it’s easy to see why we have this idea that certain death awaits anyone who travels into Mexico.  Granted, the border can be a different story.

Bribes and Fines

While we’re on the subject of bribes and fines, the general sentiment is that it’s totally normal to bribe a cop a mere 50 pesos ($4, and what I estimate to be less than 10% of the cost of a ticket) for a minor infraction.  After spending a year of my life in big-government Berkeley, where you need a permit to park in front of your house, and after hearing year after year how California beaurocracy pisses away our tax dollars on god knows what, this Mexicanized form of “government control” feels refreshing.  Instead of sending 500 pesos to the Mexican government and letting them inefficiently recycle it into 50 pesos on a police officer’s paycheck, here you can cut out the middle man completely and therefore choose to infuse the economy with your remaining 450 pesos as you see fit.  

However, it is a little unclear who exactly the law applies to.  Right from the start, Brenda’s dad told me that if I ever get in trouble with the cops I should take the ticket, which supposedly, because I’m from out of state, is as good as a piece of garbage.  Apparently, tickets need to be sent to the state where the vehicle is registered and is therefore totally pointless for out-of-staters, even those from other Mexican states.  Something like that.  He said they’ll take their sweet time and may even threaten to tow me, which is illegal (the towing, not the threatening), yearning for that precious $4 bribe.  

Well, the cops pulled me over the other morning as I zipped from my house to Brenda’s.  She lives on the first block of a little one-way residential street, so for logistical reasons pretty much everyone goes the wrong direction (her father, her sister, and now myself are the only ones who, when leaving, reverse down the block instead of turning around, essentially going the right direction but facing the wrong way).  They got her sister once for going the wrong way as well; apparently she cried and told them she only did it because she was experiencing an overpowering bowel emergency.  

It was exactly how her dad had said it would happen.  I pretended to be utterly confounded by the slow Spanish sentences they presented me with; once they said the word “ticket” I just kept saying “Está bien.  Give me the ticket.”  They took my license and my driving permit and spent about 5 minutes filling out the ticket, then told me not to go the wrong way down a one-way street and left, taking the theater prop ticket with them.  Apparently the same goes for metered parking.  They say foreigners are immune.  I have yet to put a peso into a machine and also have yet to get ticketed. 

 
A second driving-related rite of passage occurred: the fender bender.  Legally it was my fault because I was in back, but both parties agreed that it was just downright unfortunate and caused by the guy in front of us who, while we were entering the freeway, suddenly rode up onto the curb and came to a complete stop.  I rear-ended an SUV at an under 10 MPH skid, causing the most minor of damage to their bumper and leaving my car appearing completely fucked and leaking water.  Thanks to Mexican resourcefulness and cheap labor rates, $100 fixed both vehicles in under 24 hours.  Numbers were exchanged and Brenda and I may go out for beers with the girls I hit.

The Trip Down

For the record, the trip was easy as hell.  I drove down with a friend of mine, Melanie, who had lived in GDL for an extended period 4 years ago (and whose couch I slept on for way too long when I first came down).  Luckily her desire to relive some of the joys and freedoms that can only be encountered in the 3rd world persuaded her to accompany me on an epically long road trip.  On day one we drove for 24 hours starting at Pleasanton BART at 5:30 pm and finishing at the same time the next day in Guaymas, the only significant stops being Gib and Hil’s apartment close to midnight for hugs and energy drinks (and a wonderful care package of breakfast bars, fishy crackers, and the added night-driving security of starbucks double shots), at the border (Nogales) at about 9am for IHOP (“goodbye sweet America!”), and finally at a hotel in Guaymas.  Needless to say, the emotion, the energy drinks, and the adrenaline of driving through the night had me trembling at the border, which I think piqued the curiosity of the mustachioed, semi-toothless, machine-gun-laden adolescents that pepper the highway near the border (on the Mexican side, of course).  But no problems.  They spent maybe 2 minutes looking through my stuff (think about it… what kind of idiot transports contraband from the US into Mexico?).  

As much as we read that Americans are targets, my experience has been that it’s quite the opposite.  We’re protected.  I’m not sure exactly why, but two contributing factors are that no one wants to face the hassle of traversing the language barrier, and also Americans are good for the economy.  Something about not biting the hand that feeds you.  And no, we didn’t need to hand-feed anyone nor grease any palms, but were certainly prepared to.  Most of the time, Melanie carried about $350 in her bra, one boob for my money and one for hers, while our pockets/wallets had $10 to $20 (“this is all I have… take it or leave it”), which is at least double the suggested bribe down here (i.e. a win-win for both parties).  In the end, I think we drove just over 2,000 miles, almost 40 hours, over the course of exactly 3 days, arriving in GDL Saturday afternoon, just in time to party.

Accidente

Well, I had my first Mexicanesque near-accident, resulting in a negative, a positive, and an annoyance, respectively: my eyelashes are significantly shorter, I won’t need to pluck my nose hairs (informally called “cockroach feet” in Spanish) for a week or two, and all I could smell was burnt hair for the rest of the evening.  


My gas comes from a tank up on my roof (I think).  It was about a $50 buy-in, and then whenever it runs out I’m supposed to stare out my window, intently waiting for the gas truck which is usually accompanied by a catchy and/or annoying little siren.  Otherwise it could be mistaken for the water truck, the garbage man, the knife-sharpener, the balloon man (just balloons, not balloon animals), or the corn salesman.  Everyone makes a trademark noise.  When you decide you need one of these services, you basically have to run the hell outside in the five to ten second window of opportunity or be forced to await another day or another week.


In an effort to avoid for as long as possible the task of not only flagging down the gas truck but also somehow surmounting my little two-story house with full gas tank in hand, I decided to get into the routine of turning off the boiler every day.  Why should I maintain a constant tank of hot water if I only need one hot shower a day and it can heat up in 20 minutes?  Not even Mexican prices can turn off the Linderman inside of me (I have yet to find a taco shack that offers free refills with the purchase of one small soda).  


This “routine” lasted one day.  You can probably see where this is going.  I turned the nob on the boiler, could see the pilot light grow a bit larger, could hear gas flooding into the space under the tank… I continued to wait as curiosity gradually overcame patience, finally unlatching the little 4-inch by 4-inch door for a better view.  If it were 6x6, I might also have a new hairdo and no eyebrows because in the moment that I peered into the now gas-filled space it ignited and the burst of flame had nowhere to go but out the little window.  Recounting this to Brenda’s dad reminded him to tell me that I should be careful because he had had trouble with the boiler when he first hooked up the gas.

Bienvenidos to the Blog

First attempt.  I feel slightly ashamed by the stigma that I associate with the words ¨blog¨ and ¨blogger¨... someone with extreme beliefs who bitches about politics while he stuffs his face with pringles and diet soda from the comfort of his own home, right?

Maybe this isn´t even a blog after all....

Obviously it will get better, a photo will show up one of these days.