Mexico

Reann was in the mood for mexican, she wanted to to listen to a mariachi band and drink tequila until she spoke their language fluently.  She wanted a salt rimmed margarita and a big funny sombrero with velvet tassels to be placed on her head as she danced on the bar top to another rendition of Feliz Navidad.  She wanted to eat chimichangas or at least she wanted to order them and hear the words roll off her tongue --  chimichangas.  She loved the sensation of the chili pepper tingling in her mouth and burning her lips.  It reminded her of the way that boy, the one she dated her senior year of high school, who was twenty-eight and called her immature, the way his kisses lingered on her lips for hours after he had gone.  The chili pepper's sting was like a love bite from a heartless man, or like the constant pressured pain of a tattoo, giving pleasure in the consistency of the lacerations.  And just like that pain, Tequilla was the only balm that soothed.

She went to MaryAnn’s on the upper east side with her friends from school they bought a bag at the old spot up on 103rd street and blunt at the deli on Amanada’s corner.  Amanda rolled a nice size blunt and the three of them headed to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to smoke their weed.  She loved the way the smoke would fill her lungs, and rush to her head.  She loved the heavy feeling behind her eyelids that would make her see in fractal patterns and crave cream filled cupcakes, because of that one time when she had bought some really beautiful acid from that weird hairy man at Limelight and she and Amanda had saved them for the first snow fall in Michigan and when they did them they decided to eat ding-dongs just to see what they felt like on the tongue.  The patterns she saw on her eyelids and in fact everywhere she turned were reminiscent of tribal designs she had often seen on the tapestries hanging in the very museum behind her.

She loved MaryAnns; they had a small mariachi band that rotated the room singing mexican favorites such as “sierras morenas”  and “la cucuracha” and “Feliz Navidad” (even on the fourth of July that one was a favorite), and the margaritas had just enough liquor to make her taste it and it sent her already buzzed brain buzzing a little louder.  Oh to be in Mexico, she often thought, to be away from the City and the horrible horns of those nasty yellow cabs that were constantly running her off the road.  To take a nap in the middle of the day and have it be the custom.  To drink a beer cause it’s better for you than the water, oh and to be tan, like the olive skinned goddesses she had read about in those harlequin romance novels that occasionally occupied her eyes on her ride to work.  She wanted to wake up with sand between her toes and cactus juice in the fridge.  She didn't know what cactus juice tasted or even if she would like the taste, but she thought it sounded exotic and well intrinsically a part of the fantasy of Mexico.

When she was younger she had wanted to have a mexican theme party with a piñata and a dancing hat game.  She thought that mexican fried ice cream was the coolest thing in the world and any food with as many fun sylabols as quesedillas and chimichangas and yes even salsa, had to be good.  She had always loved the idea of absorbing cultures and customs.  She found anything other than her own whitebread carbon copy suburban childhood fascinating beyond belief.  She was always that strange child in the corner of the room who read faster and added quickly and spent her free time drawing pictures of nothing in particular while staring out the window and just wishing with all she had that she wasn't there.

Even the very first day if kindergarten had bored her and she couldn't imagine the next 13 years of her life would be very stimulating.  She was always in search of drama, always in seek of a way to make things interesting and it was unfortunate really that the rest of the world was always satiate with the current state of affairs.  Couldn't they see that Twinkies had no past, and meat loaf was bland for want of spices found in the treasure chests of pirate ships and Myan Temples?  Didn't they know that their sneakers were white and vying to climb up the steep hill paths of the villages across the world?  Didn't they know, that the fingers that had sown the sturdy stitching of their favorite madras jumper had seen millenniums of mystery stand still before them?  Didn't they want to?

She made a spectacle of herself nearly everyday in grammar school, and she liked it that way.  She cut the hair of her barbies and tried to break dance with the boys.  The girls thought she was too much like a boy and the boys knew right away that she was a girl, there was no fooling them, her Princess Leia lunch box gave her away every time.  She did want to belong, she did want desperately to be a part of something and stop blending into the tile work of the long hallway floors between classes and lockers, but to be a part of what?  The better homes and gardens cliques that develop into bridge clubs and poker circles of the future?  Oh no Reann wasn't the type for gossiping and backhanded compliments.  She just wanted to be a part of whatever this wasn't, and tonight she was in the mood for Mexican.