The Stink

Before I plunge too deeply into the Mexican chapter of my life, it is necessary for me to digress a bit and describe to my faithful viewers my living conditions in the great city of Berlin. I will draw heavily from the journal I kept during that time and embellish where necessary. My intent is not to slander my former roommate, Ben Pham, who persists living in those conditions somehow. But it is important for me to reconstruct those days of squalor so I can figure out how it is I wound up here – working close to sixty hours a week for five hundred bucks a month – and how the hell I survived for so long in Germany, working six hours a week and blowing five hundred Euros a minute.

So, we will pick things up on the 4th of July, in the present tense:

July 4th, 2008
We live in squalor. Ben's room is big enough for two grown men to live in, provided they took the time to erect some kind of partition, but we have not. The room is segmented into sovereign zones of garbage. My territory includes the deflated air mattress that I no longer sleep on and the heap of musty blankets on the floor that I curl up into these days, as well as a sinister black bag that contains six months of unwashed laundry. Ben has an actual mattress, an empty bookshelf, and several islands of dirty clothes and Assorted Shit that dot the floor like a Micronesia of filth. Thankfully, he has disposed of the lime green nylon mesh tube where he used to stash his dirty laundry. It dangled from the Chinese lantern in the ceiling and the fusion of light and stink attracted the fruit flies in droves.

There is a frameless mirror leaning up against one wall, like a portal to another equally disgusting dimension where all the crap on the floor is reversed. There is a constant droning, as though someone is drilling into cement, that seems to come from one of the neighboring apartments but assails us from all sides. There is a long hardwood desk where Ben and I do our paperwork. The desk is cluttered with triple-folded visa applications, US passports, the phone numbers of people who might be able to bail us out of jams, half-eaten foil-wrapped bricks of chocolate, a webcam that Ben hasn't used once since I got here, and scattered bits of plastic. Curled up on the empty chair next to me is the bike lock that I bought Ben for eight Euros at the flea market. He hasn't used that, either.

The place is so sloppy that I can't tell if it's getting better or worse, whether I am having a positive or negative impact on the apartment's overall level of entropy. The kitchen floor seems to be getting progressively stickier. It is impossible to ignore the fruit flies. Perhaps they stowed away in my luggage and followed me over from Poland. Or perhaps they have been here all along and I just didn't notice them when I arrived. Fruit flies become more noticeable as you go along. The Stink works the opposite way. You notice The Stink the first time you enter a room and notice it less and less every day thereafter, until the only people who smell it are those unfortunate souls who come into your room, or the people who are buying your drinks, because by then, The Stink is on you.

I'm thinking about leaving the country again. I'm approaching the possibility of life in Berlin like a starved wolf circling a visibly diseased carcass. Surviving here seems financially doable, but it only appears that way because I am not yet trying to make a living in Berlin. I am just a loafer and hobo-speculator at the moment, so I must be leaving a lot of things out of the equation. I can sit here and say, "$200 for rent. $200 for food. $200 for language school. I need $600 a month and fuck the rest." But there are always intangibles, and not just the ones people usually cite – unplanned medical disasters, travel expenses, taxes, apartment repairs – but also the True Intangibles, like Where the Hell Did it All Go? Those intangibles are multiplied twofold-and-rising by the flaccid dollar. So although the Berlin Bohemeslebens seems possible on the most abstract bohemian paper, in reality working a lot and coming home sweaty and depressed to our crumb-strewn apartment might not be so great for my psyche. It would be much easier to volunteer at an Italian winery. I would have my daily work. My host farmers would feed me three times a day and take me to the hospital if I started squirting chyme from my pores. I could stay there through the winter without having to buy any new clothes. And by the time the Peace Corps summoned me back to Blade Runner USA for my cough-and-turn, I would fly home with 500 bucks in the bank, all suntanned and lithe from months of Mediterranean cuisine and romantic farm labor.

I need to shut down this computer. Staying inside is driving me mad. I'm going to kidnap Ben and take him out for a ridiculous night in the Valley of the Turkish Whores.

That was July 4th. At that point in time, Ben and I were still going out on the town. Our credit hadn't yet crunched. Today I had planned on writing a pretentious rant about teaching the present continuous tense, but for our purposes, I think it would be better for me to continue regurgitating Berlin stories until I am fresh out of them. Then the pretentious rants will continue.

Hasta más tarde,
- Karate Keith

Nebraskano: Ilegal

Oh, yes. Here in Mexico we have something that we simply did not have in Korea or Poland: danger. Peligro. Korea is a sexually frustrated antfarm. Poland is colder than a welldigger's ass. But Mexico.

Yesterday, one of my teenagers gave me a plastic spoonful of congealed caramel wrapped in a plastic baggie. I brought it home and left it on the kitchen counter, where it will remain for the duration of my contract. Today, the same kid reached into his backpack to hand me another caramel spoon and instead produced a big ol' orange-green bag of pot. I did what any English teacher would do: I whipped my head the other way and started scribbling phrasal verbs on the whiteboard. When I turned back around, the baggie was gone and nobody seemed to have noticed it. I'm not sure how the boss would have reacted if my First Certificate class had successfully hotboxed Room 4, but a career in beachside burrito vending would probably have been in my near future.

I joined the gym this afternoon and was walking downtown after work to give the place a whirl. I made it a couple of blocks before I noticed an unusual number of machine gun wielding soldiers. A few blocks later, I saw the canopied truck they were spilling out of, seeming to spontaneously generate like Pac-Man ghosts. Within minutes, the streets were flooded with troops. It was all I could do to avoid catching a Kalashnikov in the crotch. I slowed to a stop, stood very still for a moment, then turned and walked the other way. Whatever sense it is that warns us about impending gunshot wounds recommended in no uncertain terms that I go home, so that's just what I did.

The nickname for my neighborhood wasn't hard to come up with: I live in the Green Zone. In addition to the public hospital where at midnight throngs of exhausted people wait with blank expressions in a queue that winds halfway around the block, my street hosts six heavily fortified compounds where Zamora's rich and foreign hide from the indigenous poor. Stationed at forty-foot intervals on the sidewalk are several contracted security guards. They all cut the same Hitchcockian figure. I doubt any of them could chase down a Frisbee. The one across the street works a 14-hour shift and sneaks frequent pulls from the grenade-shaped bottles he keeps stashed in the front basket of his bicycle.

Tonight I went out with the roommates and we ate six tacos each for $1.20 a person. The taco stand was situated on the curb, so we sat on plastic stools in the right lane of oncoming traffic, making crunchy noises as screaming Chinese motorcycles whipped the wrinkles out of our shirtbacks. Jaded isn't really the right word, because I’m hypersensitive to my surroundings and I am often frightened by them. Denial is closer to the target: the danger is so palpable that I deny the danger altogether. But that isn't quite it, either. What is the word I’m looking for? Ah. Estúpido. Soy estúpido. Si, es correcto.

The Lazy Mexican

Today, as I was leaving school for siesta, I heard the word "Kimchi" screamed in my direction. It was one of my teenage students, smoking a butt on a park bench. I just started teaching two days ago; no doubt this nickname will spread. I asked him what he was up to. He and his friend were just smoking some dope before class, he explained. I nodded. I've never understood why my students are this cozy with me, but they always are. They spill their guts to me, tell me about their sex romps and drug regimens. It is my greatest asset as a teacher and it is my Achilles heel. In a profession where bonding with one's students on anything but the most platonic subject-verb-object level is strongly discouraged, I somehow wind up playing guidance counselor and wizened sage for people only slightly younger than I am. It's frightening and reassuring.

In Spanish class, my teacher turned around and searched the coffee shop for a la object. She couldn't find any. Everything in the room was male. (She finally found (and later devoured) a tarta.) While the rest of the class moved on to ser and estar, I couldn't get my mind off it: a room full of el objects, of masculine nouns. One could work with this. One could arrange one's rooms in a German gender-based feng shui. You could bring your MENSA friends over and have them guess the motif. "Wrong, Blaise. Everything in this room is neuter in Slovakian, not in Serbocroat." Would there be a palpable difference in aura? In a room of der objects, would a game of poker break out? In a room of die objects, would everyone start ovulating at once? My curiosity knows no bounds.

The lazy Mexican is a myth. True: for two hours in mid-afternoon – the standard hours of Nordic productivity – the Mexicans loosen their ties and lay around in the shade drinking and smoking and sleeping. But that just means that they get up earlier in the morning and work later at night. Mañana exists, but it only applies to social engagements: my friends show up an hour later than they say they will. Hell, I do that in America. But work-wise, mañana doesn't apply to me, or the taco vendors, or the bankers, or the clerks at the supermarket. It might be different with Mexicans in the States. I'm not sure. But after someone has made a mad dash across hundreds of miles of desert at the risk of death by gunshot, starvation, thirst, or combinations thereof; after they have lived in a sublet closet and spent months scrapping around for work before finally earning the privilege of disemboweling pig carcasses for twelve hours a day at minimum wage; after they have sent the last of their paycheck back home so their children, parents, and grandparents can scrape by in rural Michoacán; after all that, how anyone can call the Mexicans lazy – I must admit, it is beyond me. But then, so are many things.

Dia Luna, Dia Pena

And so here I am living in a walled-off compound across from the public hospital in Zamora de Hidalgo, Mexico. The view from my balcony is of the hospital junkyard: dumpsters overflowing with colostomy bags, bloated rubber gloves lying in puddles of gasoline, a fluorescent orange BIOLOGICAL WASTE sign, etc. It seems to rain every day at 3:37 PM sharp, or not at all. Last night a mariachi band played inside the hospital, which must have lent a Lynchian touch to any medical emergencies going on at the time.

The balcony is where I sit and listen to Radio Michocán. The plan is to learn Spanish by immersion. I absorb Mexican public radio for hours on end, then I walk down to the kitchen and fry my ham-and-parmesan tacos, waiting for it all to click.

I sit and watch the painters work. They have spent three days painting our vacant carport. When they smile, it's all gold and empty spaces. They are 53 year-old identical twins. For a while I thought it was one extremely diligent man, but instead it is two slow twins. One of the twins whistles verses and the other sings the choruses. When it is siesta time, they squat on the sidewalk drinking Pepsi and smoking Delicados. Yesterday one of the twins gave me his business card. "We are painters," he said, "and we don't drink beer." The question arises: would I rather be down there singing and painting walls, or am I happy where I am, perched on a balcony, binge drinking instant coffee and sweating about the four classes I'm about to teach? The answer is not clear. Probably there isn't one. Teaching suits my mental and physical build, but is there any way around all this white collar nausea?

Hats off to Spoon for composing the best hipster couplet of all time:

I spent the night in the map room
I humanized the vacuum