the dovemother and other mentionables

part one: she´s a vegetarain

and she eats flautas, four of them - neat little six inch columns fried to a crisp on a grill that´s almost as greasy as her unwashed hair is as she sits on a plastic stool, gathering bits of character from the tortilla girls (who are, she thinks, just about the same age as herself).

the flautas are sauced in crema and topped with lettuce, avocado, tomato and cotija, and filled with sweet cheese and potatoes. since she´s a new mexican she can´t help but smother them with salsas - green and red - not like home, different, better, spicy as hell.

she picks out a big chunk of accidental chicken, and the tortilla girls'chatter continues, way way too fast.

part two: she has a friend

an english boy named sam. manchester. unkempt blond hair, unbelievably clear blue eyes, well-read in the kind of way she only hopes to be someday.

they talk books, philosophy, photography, sleeping dreams, drugs, mental illness, and lonliness, they go to yoga class together and they drink heradura antigua alongside the plaza in coyoacan.

on friday night they make it in time to arena mexico to see los luchadores, those infamous mexican wrestlers, acrobats really, and stars of an ongoing cultural soap opera where revenge is god. they drink beers out of styrofoam cups and laugh at the spectacle, say "hola chicos" to the hundreds of masked and thrilled little boys. sam buys a pink spandex, silver lined wrestling mask, tucks it away for an appropriate time...whenever that will be.

saturday they visit el mercado de sonora, a gem of a market tucked away south of the city center, surrounded by five blocks of streets selling nothing but bicycles and sex. hideous prostitutes dressed for work in broad daylight and with the local police hanging on the corners perhaps their best customers.

sonora sells items for voodoo and magic. it´s crammed with beautiful and ridiculous articles she´s never seen before: potions for money, sex, love, brainpower, a clean house. bottles of dodgy looking serums to ward off illness and sadness...statuettes of the virgin of guadalupe, the buddha, death himself...candles, coyote feet, deer hooves, precious stones, herbs, roots, feathers, halloween masks.

and then, the animals. they approached a tiny cage housing hundreds of miniature gerbils, each trying to claw its way to the top of the bin. then birds - songbirds, chickens, doves, turkeys, neon-dyed chiks, and soon they were deep in a maze of utterly cruel and fascinating animal trade. puppies and kittens, too, turtles, iguanas, mice, snakes and frogs, shoved like already-dead meat into unbearably small wire cages.

one man was trance as he violently shaved a white puppy, tossed it back into the bin, and dragged out another.

it was sam´s idea. they bought a perfect white dove for sixty pesos and had it boxed and wrapped with twine. on the street they found a loaf of white bread and tried to feed it to the bird, but it just stared up at them through the crack with its beedy red eyes and shat a dollop of green goo.

after much discussion, they named her "dovemother", in homage to both mother theresa and one of their favorite australian rock bands, and they found a nice residential spot where they thought she´d want to live.

the release was less epic than they´d hoped for, but hardly disappointing. she took photos as sam opened the box, and without a sound dovemother waddled off to freedom.

she and sam are still thinking about the dove from time to time.

part three: she mingles with the locals

more than one d.f. tipster led her to find "el bipolar" a hip club in coyoacan where the hottie bartenders wear tee shirts that read "soy bipolar" and upstairs the light is pure red and soft and smoky. she and sam danced and danced until they met a group of UNAM students who ushered them into a red sportscar, swept them off on a stoplight-dash drive through the city - repeating like a drunken, no broken, record that they rarely meet foreigners so game for a good party.

she finds herself cradling a bomber of cerveza indio on a balcony in an abandoned apartment, chatting with boys in leather motorcycle jackets and those perfect defeno faux-hawks. mostly they talk about her foreign-ness, about where she comes from, and about where she is going.

her spanish improves four hundred percent when she´s had something to drink.

part four: sunday morning

why?!?! she asks herself, doesn´t laundry do itself?
and she misses home, but not that much.