After many WhatsApp messages back and forth on New Year’s Eve Day, with her apologizing profusely for being tied up with clients and trapped at the copy machine at Office Depot, it was determined I would take a taxi to La Comer (think Mexican Costco but with flair – their logo is a gigantic pelican), she would drive there and park, and we would meet her friend Gina (not a typo) to go to Dolores Hidalgo. She allowed as how she’d actually made an appointment for me at 1:00 with Xochitlj, her manicurist.
That’s right, Xochitlj. Also not a typo. And it’s taken me eleven tries to get that typed without spellcheck scolding me like a Central Park squirrel.
Xochitlj. I had Gina pronounce it for me all the way to Dolores Hidalgo and I still can’t say it. Sounds like someone threw the losing hand of Scrabble tiles down the stairs and named their baby that. Your guess is as good as mine. Knock yourself out. Try this: sneeze, hiccup twice, turn around and yodel the alphabet backwards, and you’re off to a good start.
Gina found me at La Comer at approximately 12:40 pm. Appointment was at 1:00 pm in a town half an hour away. And our ride, Gina Two, was nowhere in sight. You do the math.
My anxiety twisted in my guts like a serpent, and I began to worry about being late. Gina One just stood by me and chatted in her accented English, occasionally conjugating verbs incorrectly, asking me to correct her, and quite clearly unconcerned about this time conundrum.
It suddenly dawned on me that I was operating on American Time, and that I needed to quiet the monkeys in my brain (more like shoot them out of the trees) and just relax. If she wasn’t worried, why should I be? It was HER Scrabble-named friend for whom we were tardy, not mine, so why worry?
In America, we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of “my time is precious, and time is not only precious but it is money, and if you encroach on my time, you’re encroaching on my money, and that is the most Cardinal Unforgivable Sin of Capitalist America, and therefore if you are late, you are impinging upon my Bottom Line, whereupon you shall be fiscally responsible for your appointment/my time, along with an inconvenience fee, and I’m going to nurse a resentment against you for a good, long while just for fun.”
Well…perhaps I might be overthinking things just a titch…but this relaxed attitude did give me pause.
Gina Two finally pulled up in a small, white Jeep. Everything about her was eensy, down to the wee cleft in her dainty chin. She was Holly-Hunter-meets-Michelle-Pfeifer baked down to Shrinky Dink size, and was delighted to practice her Ingles with me. As in literally clapped her hands cheerleader style when I said I’d practice with her. To be fair, it’s not really practice on my end, but I’m the friendly, obliging, gigantic gringa, remember?
Gina One rode shotgun, and I mostly sat in the back and prayed so hard I almost converted to Catholicism as Gina Two negotiated Mexican traffic. How any of these cars manage to keep their side view mirrors, much less an intact paint job, just flummoxes me.
Let’s talk Mexican traffic: in Centro there are no stop signs, stop lights, speed limit signs, yield signs, or pedestrian walkways. Zero. Nor, contrary to what you might expect, are there dead bodies piled in the gutters or twisted heaps of wreckage every thirty seven meters. Good thing, because woe be to the person who is in dire need of an ambulance or wrecker – how anything larger than a Kia navigates those roads mystifies me. And yet every vehicle from the size of the smallish green and white taxi sedans to the enormous fuschia buses to the tourist trolleys (trolley colored) shares the road with the hordes of locals and tourists on foot.
It rather reminded me of a coral reef: schools of thousands of tiny silver fish, similar in appearance, with the colorful darts and tangs thrown in for spice, interrupted by the occasional barracuda or shark, all sharing the same reef, working together, dancing in time to some unheard band, moving gently in concert with each other in a bemusing harmony.
Oh, and then there’s me. The clown fish.
The undeclared speed limit in Centro (the colonial cobblestoney part of town) is thirteen kilometers per hour (no signs posted…I learned that from my food tour guide), there’s some kind of Mexican Mind Voodoo going on when four means of transport meet simultaneously at an intersection determining who has the right of way, and pedestrians trump all the rules. The millisecond a person on foot’s foot departs the curb and hovers in the air to cross the street, all traffic – from buses to bicycles (sweet God, why would you?) – halts immediately and yields to the pedestrian.
Outside of Centro in the badlands, where shit gets real, there are still no yields or stop signs or lights. Traffic control is maintained by roundabouts (did I mention there are NO SIGNS???) and speed bumps.
This brings us to a necessary discussion of Mexican speed “bumps.” Our friends south of the border are not fucking around when it comes to speed bumps. Not remotely the kind of “bump” you’d find in an American school zone, these bad boys more approach the size and shape of a British Steeplechase hedge. They’re as wide and domed as high as a coffin (I don’t believe that’s by accident), and the Mexican government will throw them down anywhere – in town, approaching a roundabout, and in the middle of a highway.
I can’t make this up…cars, buses, motorcycles – we’ll all be cruising along at a healthy clip (whatever seventy miles an hour is in kilometers) and WHAMMO!, out crops a speed coffin. But at least they’re sort of nice about it – what pittance the Mexican government has distributed for traffic signs manifests in yellow quadrilaterals with a picture of either two or three black lumps in a row – think a snake that has swallowed a few animals about six hours apart, and they are just lodged there in his gut, waiting to be digested. The best I could decipher is that the number of lumps on the sign indicates either the height and severity of the speed bump, or that there might be more than one. Or perhaps one has teeth.
(It’s like Xochitlj…I’m still trying to sort out some of the nuances.)
It was later explained to me by Dali, my tour guide to Guanajuato (more losing Scrabble tiles down the stairs), that the government saves money on stop lights, signs and other traditional means of traffic control by dispersing these speed nightmares about.
Well, it’s effective.
Gina Two (or, as Gina One introduced her around, “Ginita”) managed to survive the THREE-LANE-WIDE roundabout as we left La Comer, and Gina One only had to screech at her twice. This navigational task left me surreptitiously rooting about in the floorboards for a rosary…this is Mexico, surely there has to be a fallen rosary in the backseat floorboards somewhere???…and I was also learning my Spanish curse words sooner rather than later. Fun, I reminded myself. This is fun. Adventure. New friends. Hang tight, we’re almost on the open road.
A quick word about Mexican “highways.” Or at least the one we were on. It’s a two lane road, one lane going each direction, with a solid white line on the right side of the road to indicate a “shoulder,” and a dashed or solid yellow line to the left of the driver to indicate the directional division. Each lane is a car-width wide, the “shoulder” is about half a car width wide. However, every vehicle – from Vespas to cattle carriers – treats each direction of traffic as two lanes…but mostly by straddling the white line. When you feel someone coming up behind you, wanting to pass, you snuggle over onto the “shoulder” (I will never not be able to write that in quotes) and the other car moves left across the yellow line to pass. In total, it’s a three lane road that’s treated like four to five lanes. Which means I was sitting in the back, rubbing an imaginary rosary and popping Xanax like they were Tic Tacs, praying to every god from Bacchus to the Virgen of Guadalupe that we made it to Dolores Hidalgo alive.
Which we did. Ginita all but smeared the sides of her Jeep in butter and bacon grease to squeeze it into a “parking space” that allowed for approximately a saint’s whisper of space on either side of the car to open doors. Gently. And all but a crack.
The space wasn’t marked in any way — in fact one side was comprised of a utility pole and a thick yellow line. I was totally confident we would return to no car. Or, if the car remained, the wheels would not. Kinda like me packed in ice minus one liver and half a spleen.
Gina One handed me the thin sack containing the hair dryer and began marching confidently down a tilted, dusty hill, her punk grrrl hair bristling against the weak breeze. Concrete and stucco shop facades in faded pinks and reds lined both sides of the street, where WWII era motorcycles negotiated nimbly past twenty first century jacked up Fords, straight from the set of Pimp My Ride. This town straddled the epic timeline, one foot in each millennium, clearly in no hurry to make up its mind.
“We have to walk to Xochitlj’s,” she barked over her shoulder while Ginita and I played Frogger across the busy main road to catch up. She even kinda sounded like Gene Simmons. Gene Simmons cum Pee Wee Herman. Part scream-shouty, part nasal-swallowy, all tuff grrrl (remember, she’s got some Pat Benatar in there, too). “Eet’s too bessy for the New Years.”
In America, this street would be condemned. The facades of the walls were crumbling, and probably should have been accompanied by the signs along Colorado highways that indicate falling rocks. It could have used a good power washing, followed by another round; however the shop faces might just wash off onto the sidewalks. But while dusty, dirty, old and faded, the street was bustling with life. Families crowded the sidewalks, men half my size and thrice my strength pushed taco carts against the steep grade effortlessly, and ancient, wizened women as wrinkled as raisins moved at a glacial pace up the street with canes, occasionally accepting the proffered arm of a passerby for a few steps. At the rate they moved, it would be 2021 before they reached the end of the street, but they continued on, reminding me of the quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.” A lesson learned from the human raisins.
Halfway down the length of the sidewalk (dear God, I huffed to myself, is this a forty five degree grade? Where am I, the Alps?), in a doorway I would have missed had Gina One not stopped in the frame, she suddenly scream-shouted, “XOCHITLJ, MI CORAZON! Buenos tardes, que pasa, mi amiga! AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!” From my vantage point five feet uphill from her, it looked like she was shouting at the wall. But two steps closer and I heard a tsunami babble of excited Spanish tumble out from the back of a narrow but deep shop tucked into a thin opening.
Why does every native Spanish speaker in Mexico sound like they’re a high speed record to me? Surely the entire country doesn’t really talk as fast as my sister in law.
Gina One pressed into the shop, followed quickly by Gina Two, and, lastly, more hesitantly, me. I peeked around the corner as timidly as Bambi spying through mom’s legs.
Two manicure desks abutted each other on my immediate right, bathed in sunlight from the open door. Dust motes hung like a curtain in the sun shafts. A couple of steps up midway through the shop led to the back where the hairstyling section was housed – all two chairs of it. The closest was occupied by a middle-aged woman being attended by a young, beautiful Mexican girl who could have been nine or nineteen. The young woman was hot-gluing hair extensions into the older lady’s hair. With a hot glue gun. As in, from Hobby Lobby. Based on Gina’s reaction and AK-47-fire conversation, one of them was Xochitlj, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure which.
The woman in the chair had a yarmulke-sized patch of obsidian hair at her crown. Blacker-than-the-inside-of-a-cat kind of black. From there down to her shoulder blades her locks were orangutan-orange, the exact color of when black hair tries to be bleached the first go-round. And at the dramatic line of color change were being attached cornsilk blonde hair extensions that continued south past her bra line to mid-back. The hair extensions were a touch frayed and crunchy, and looked like they’d already been chewed up and spit out by a goat. It was a Latin American Neapolitan Coiffure extravaganza.
After waving off the attendant with a coral-clawed hand, the woman in the chair swept up the technicolor swath into a wan ponytail, stood, beamed at Gina One, and threw her arms wide. Air kisses were exchanged, and lively Spanish conversation ensued, rife with multiple gesticulations in my direction. I earned an air kiss, followed by a keen appraisal with a sharp eye sweep from sombrero to zapato and up again, stand-back-hands-on-hips-cocked-head- style on the part of Miss Neopolitan, leading me to assume that introductions were being made. Either that, or they were bargaining for the exact price of my organs.
I was ushered to the manicure station closest to the exterior door (okay, I’ll admit it, the possibility of a fast getaway crossed my mind) and pressed gently into a seat with firm hands on my shoulders. The younger woman (hair extensions fitter) sat limply on the other side, awaiting orders, and somehow I deduced this was Carmen. I noticed with relief she’d left her Hobby Lobby glue gun at the hair station.
Using pantomime, pidgin Spanish and endless repetitions of “mucho gusto,” “si,” and rapid fire Spanish translation through The Ginas and Miss Neopolitan (had to be Xochitlj, just had to be) I tried to communicate that I wanted exactly what Gina One had in terms of fingernails. Same shape, length, color scheme, all of it. Nods were exchanged, and Gina One assured me that they would return in about forty minutes.
Uh…okay. Bye, I guess? I hoped my face didn’t look like I felt – a five year old being dropped off on the first day of preschool amidst all these strangers who ate different food than me.
And there I was, The Lone Oklahoman, in a manicure chair in the middle of a country where I did not speak the language, beyond being able to find the bathroom and order one cold beer (But only one. I really suck at counting in Spanish). I seriously considered what the chances were of (a) my new friends returning to retrieve me, and (b) me still having all of my major organs intact when they did so.
But what I really was, was perfectly happy at this new adventure. Remember, improv. “Yes, and…”
I turned to the teenager occupying the seat next to me. “Me llamo Katie,” I beamed both shyly and proudly, so excited that I could utter some Spanish. She grinned to show a wide, generous smile of straight, white teeth. “Me llamo America,” she returned softly.
“No shit!” I exclaimed. “America? For real? That’s fabulous!” She grinned wider.
I was giddy with communication skills. Let’s see how long we can ride this ride. “Quantos anos tienes tu?” I asked, desperately hoping I was asking what I intended – how old are you – and not inadvertently offering her free cocktails on Quantas Airlines.
“Quince,” she replied proudly. I held up my free hand (Carmen had a death grip on the other) first with one finger extended, then with five.
“Fifteen?” I asked, as I pantomimed.
“Si! Quince,” she beamed.
I pointed my free hand at my chest and thought hard. “Yo soy quarante ocho anos.” Which in direct, word-by-word translation means “I am forty eight years,” but in Spanish probably means something like “forty eight years ago I had some soy sauce.” Talk about lost in translation.
And that was the end of the conversation. Unless I wanted to order a beer from her.
Carmen got to work. I was in for a full set of acrylic nails, which I figured would be fine no matter if it was a butcher job, as fingernails are unlike actual fingers and have been scientifically shown to grow back. She whacked what existing nails I had back to the quick and began efficiently fitting me with clear acrylic extensions…no small feat considering her own nails extended at least an inch and a half beyond her fingertips, and were filed to a talon-sharp point. I marveled at them constantly, desperate to ask how she put in contacts, or opened the car door, or picked her nose with those things. They weren’t fingernails, they were green-and-silver sparkled weapons. I was mesmerized.
She cut my freshly affixed nails down to a length that was slightly more human and slightly less pterodactyl, and began to file them into shape. They were looking fairly blunt, a bit squared off fo my taste, and I grew concerned. My preferred nail shape is what we refer to in the US as “squoval,” a word I was pretty sure wouldn’t effectively translate. So I asked her, using my hands to pantomime, if she could round the edges just a bit.
Whoops.
She rounded them, all right. A lot. While they weren’t quite as bird-of-prey as hers, they were definitely more coffin shaped than I preferred, but it was too late and impossible to go back. By the time she got them all filed and painted – albeit the paint job I asked for – I had nails that would make a Tijuana hooker weep with envy.
Grand total? Two hundred seventy pesos, before tip. With tip, approximately fifteen US dollars. I figured I could live with them for a few days, see if I grew into them, and buy a lima de unas (thank you, Google Translate) and file them down to a less avian or Svengali predator cat length myself if necessary.
Huzzah! The Ginas returned to collect me! I was almost positive Uber didn’t exist in Dolores Hidalgo, and I was thrilled I wasn’t going to have to try and negotiate my non-Spanish-speaking ass back to San Miguel on New Years Eve. And so far, I still had my spleen!
Half Maverick 
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