Fred Aiken Writing

El dia del amor y la amistad

I look at the notecard for over five minutes, searching in my memory bank for its meaning. I come up empty. I’m bankrupt of multilingual knowledge. Then I remember: Valentine’s Day. I check my calendar and sure enough it says today is Valentine’s. 

I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for the past several weeks. I tried to learn it back when I was thirteen because it was the only language offered by the school I went to and our curriculum dictated that we needed to learn, or attempt to learn, or pretend that we were attempting to learn, at least one other language besides our native one. I failed miserably. Not because I wanted to. Seems like a silly idea of anyone wanting to willingly fail. But I did have a reason for failing to learn Spanish in adolescence. I fell madly in love/had a stupid crush/kept getting distracted by the beauty of our Spanish teacher. He was an olive-skinned god from Madrid that I daydreamed about whisking me away to a faraway island with more syllables than people to enjoy an insouciant life of tender love, wonder, and maybe the occasional adventure so we didn’t get bored. I never learned how he ended up teaching remedial Spanish to acne-scarred, horny meat bags learning to be human in our small southeastern town of a few thousand. But I also didn’t care. I was grateful his fate lined up with mine for a brief moment in our lives.

Needless to say, I didn’t retain any Spanish. I know the basics, or the generic basics, like hola, gracias, and puta, but nothing else. That’s why I’m trying to learn. Well, that’s technically not the only reason I’m trying to learn Spanish. I probably could have gone the rest of my life never learning, but last autumn I was put into a bit of a dire situation.

I’m an addict. I don’t go around telling everyone, though I guess writing it down for others to read would probably be considered telling everyone, or at least telling everyone that reads this. But it’s also not like it’s some State Secret. My drug of choice? Gambling. I could gamble all night and day for years on end. In fact, that’s kinda what got me in trouble.

As you might have already guessed, and as is the case with people that share my affliction, I came into some debt. I don’t know the precise number, or at least I’m too embarrassed to say it out loud. But it was enough to get me into the predicament that I turn to now. The reason why I’m learning Spanish is because I’m holding some sort of illicit material in my body and crossing the Mexican border at El Paso to take to some intimidating figure waiting in some small pueblo outside of Acapulco that will relieve me of the content of the foreign object surgically wedged somewhere between my kidneys and diaphragm, I imagine, and absolve my debt once and for all.

I was assured that whatever I’m carrying in my body isn’t drugs. But it’s not positive whether they’re lying to me. I didn’t want some poorly tied party balloon that clowns use to make balloon animals to be filled with a lethal dose of whatever narcotic of the week holding sway in the drug community swashbuckling around in my inner sanctorum.

That isn’t to say, though, that I know what was put into my body. All I know is that I woke up from the surgery feeling like absolute shit, being told that I couldn’t take any pain pills so I wouldn’t damage the product, and given a four week recovery time frame before I could reasonably travel. 

I didn’t mind. It gave me time to eat all the cherry Jell-o I wanted while binging on Youtube videos in the comfort of a hospital bed that, while not the Four Seasons, at least was free. I got the impression that I was on a secret mission. A dangerous, spy-thriller type of mission. 

A man in a neatly-pressed suit with exotic cologne approached me in the dead of night after a brutal roulette spin. I felt dizzy. I felt like a trumpet after Dizzy Gillespie got through with it. All I wanted was to stumble my way back home and pass out for the next eight to forty-seven hours. Draw the curtains. Paint the sky obsidian. Pour gasoline over my eyelids. Bury my head in a box of concrete. Forget the past. Forget the future. Let a flood of dissolution envelope me until my body caved in on itself and I no longer had a single synapse firing. Just an electrical storm flickering in the dead of night. I could hardly understand what this mysterious figure of the alley said. I gleaned a handful of words that I made out to be a coherent thought but knew they were guesses at best, probably wrong.

What do you say? he asks. I don’t know. I shuffle a bit past him, wondering if he’ll stop me, hoping he won’t.  

I don’t think I’m that desperate, yet.

But you are. I know how much you owe. I know how much you own. I know what you make in a year. What you’ll probably make in the next ten. It won’t be enough with the way interest will jack your debt up.

I got the subtle impression this mysterious, spy-thriller of a man knew the future. He certainly seemed to know mine.

I don’t want to do it.

I guess I have no choice.

You really don’t. But you won’t regret it, at least. The job’s super simple. We have a client with very particular needs. They need their very rare, very expensive, very sensitive, very confidential item transported across state and country lines in a manner that can’t be detected.

I don’t know how I could be of any help. I don’t have any logistics experience.

That’s quite alright. We’re perfectly aware of what you are and aren’t capable of. Everything coming out of his mouth sounded vaguely like a threat, something akin to fine sandpaper scraping against my ear canals while his eyes caress me with malevolent intent.

What exactly did you need me to do?

The details aren’t super important. In fact, the less you know the better. Let’s just say that you’ll go to sleep, wake up with a slight pain, recover for a while, and then get to travel like you always wanted.

I never wanted to travel. I hate traveling. 

What are you talking about? Everyone wants to travel. You don’t want to be stuck in the same bleak urban landscape, cauterized from the rest of humanity, the rest of the world. You’ll see. There’s so much out there. 

I don’t think I was being given a choice.

Plus, like I said, this will cover your debt.

The prospect of being debt free does sound enticing. Though at that moment, the prospect of no longer having a deal with such a banally intimidating person sounded enticing, as well. Ice cream sounded enticing. Crimean sovereignty sounded enticing. The idea of never having to work another day in my life. The agency of being able to use my hands as I saw fit, for example, masturbating, also sounded pretty enticing. And while the classic Bond-villain figure standing before me never explicitly offered any threats of violence, I got the subtle impression that he would have no qualms whatsoever hacking my hands off with a rusty machete that he carried with him wherever he went just in case things went south.

Rather than resist, probably be cajoled in some manner, resist a little bit more for the sake of my ego, and actually and realistically lose a finger for the pageantry of just such a back-alley sort of transaction, I relent. Begrudgingly. Though I hardly think the shadow figure cares all that much, or even notices.

If anything, I am a man who constantly avoids harsh confrontation. While I might engage in the occasional online comment tet-a-tet, or a verbal rush hour scuffle, I shrink when situations become vastly too real for me to handle. The scenario seems to be playing out as if it were a mystery, spy thriller. Dark, cryptic individual approaches me at a low moment in my life, offers me a lifeline, in a manner of speaking, the prospect seems too good to be true, it ends up being too good to be true, though at the same time denying this man his formulaic setup, his swarmy sales pitch of Faustian proportions, would land me in immediate trouble, missing limbs, missing teeth, missing fingernails. No matter how I slice it, I wouldn’t be coming out of this bargain ahead.

I ask the nice gentleman what I need to do. He scratches the scruff on his jaw. He becomes a cat. A feline entity brokering a deal. My mom always told me never to get involved with any cats. They are tricky, she said. He appears to be contemplating how to proceed to tell me how to proceed with the next steps, like a gatekeeper not wanting to give too much information too quickly, lest I be too informed.

In keeping with his cryptic theme, all he tells me is to learn Spanish.

Puta de mierda.

Memorizing curse words always came easier than learning participles and syntax.