Vernon God Little

Don't fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider's web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I'm loaded off my ass. These guys' mustaches are up where their hair should be, and huge fucken caves are howling underneath, full of gold and tonsils, just look at them, singing their hearts out. Other folk join in, one of them even kneels. The whole night is snatches of humdinger, me and the boys, yelling, laughing, playing bullfights, pretending to be iguanas – I swear you'd load your drawers if you saw this one guy, Antonio, being a fucken iguana. Dudes hug and bawl around me, they become my fathers, my brothers, my sons, in a surge of careless passion that makes back home seem like a fucken Jacuzzi that somebody forgot to switch on.

It must be the same oxygen in the air, the same gravitational suck as back home, but here it's all heated up and spun around until nothing, good or bad, matters more than anything else. I mean, home is fucken crawling with Mexicans, but you don't get any of this vibe where I come from. Take Lally; what difference is there in his genes that he ended up so fucken twisted? His ole man probably did iguana impersonations, in his day. Nah, Lally caught the back-home bug. The wanting bug.

Thoughts travel with me to the urinal, which I find is piled high with spent green limes, like they use in their drinks down here. I don't say it deodorizes a hundred percent, like you'd probably need them on the floor, and up the walls, but there's definitely a lemon-fresh effect, to boost up your thoughts. As I spray the limes, I realize there's a kind of immune system back home, to knock off your edges, wash out the feral genes, package you up with your knife. Like, forgive me if it's a crime to even say it, but remember my attorney, ole Abdini? They don't seem to have washed many of his genes out. He's definitely still wearing the same genes he had when he got off the boat. Know why? Because they're make-a-fast-buck genes. Our favorite kind.

Down here, in another space and time, I spend a night among partners with correctly calibrated Mexican genes.

An aneurysm wakes me Friday morning. I'm curled up on the floor behind a table. A brick in my head smashes into the back of my eyes when I look around. I give up, and try to focus instead on a rough, lumpy-looking wooden cross on the wall above my head. My Nikes hang from it.

'Mira que te esta esperando Ledesma,' says the truck driver from the bar.

'Cual

Ledesma cabrón,' says the bartender.

'Que le des mamones al nabo, buey.'

The driver drops a big ole load. You hear him spit on the floor. I sit up, and spy the boys at the bar straining to focus on the TV. I turn to the screen just as Lally's image is replaced by my school photo. Machine-gun bursts of Spanish rattle over the top. The boys don't seem concerned.

'¿Que le ves al güero?' says the barman.

'Si el güero eres tu, pendejo.'

'Ni madres.'

'Me cae – tas mas güero que la chingada, tu

.'

I know 'chinga' is the fuck word, I learned that at school. There must be a few ways to spin it, but 'chinga' is definitely the mothership of local cussing. Don't even ask me the rest of it. The bartender picks up three shot glasses, wiping each one with the tail of his shirt, and lines them up on the bar. I watch my picture shrink into a corner of the TV screen, while a map of Texas assembles underneath. Photos of strangers scatter across it. Glowing red dots appear, like throbbing pain sites on an aspirin commercial. Places I must've been sighted. Lubbock, Tyler, Austin, San Antonio.

No dot appears at Houston, though. God, I love that girl.

Suddenly, the driver's kid runs out of a back room, and switches channel to some cartoons. I tremble off the floor and make my way to the bar, island-hopping between tables for support. Then I notice something familiar about the bartender. He wears my fucken shirt. And my jeans. I turn to see if it's true about my Nikes, my soul, now hanging from another man's cross. It's fucken true. I stare at the bartender, and he points to my trouser pocket. I look down at myself, past a T-shirt with 'Guchi' printed on it, to some orange pants dangling loose above sandals with ole tires for soles. My body is a fucken shrine. I check the pants pockets. Two hundred pesos in local bills are stuffed inside. Vernon Gates Little, boy. Mexican Fate.

The boys serve up a shot they say will cure me. It stings, and as I drink it, a sunbeam bursts into the room, a blinding shaft that frames the crucifix on the wall, and lights up memories of last night. Pelayo, the truck driver, is driving me south, to his home state of Guerrero. To the mud-flaps.