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.