Mexican Money No Good
The summer I wanted to die, I had a nice tan.
I was deeply depressed. The bends of my early thirties had led me to a landscaping job. I lied on the application, because I thought if they knew how much education I had, they wouldn’t hire me. I weighed 271lbs. Three months later, at the urgent care, they said I was 242. That’s a pretty good weight for someone as tall as I am, I suppose. I looked good.
I found the end of my landscaping career slumped against a building on a private Christian high school campus. It was July in Alabama, the kind of thick heat that takes your hope away. At hour 12 of a workday laying sod, planting trees, and cutting grass, my body simply gave up. I crawled into the only shade I could find, leaning against the wall of the empty school. Heat exhaustion, I would find out later. Not quite heat stroke, but it might have been, if I hadn’t found the shade.
My boss sent me to the urgent care.
“You…probably don’t need to go back outside for a while,” the doctor said carefully, listening to my chest through his stethoscope. My heart didn’t sound right. It didn’t feel right, either.
He made me an appointment with a cardiologist, but I didn’t have insurance, so I didn’t go.
The owner of the landscaping company gave me a check for the rest of the week, and that was the end of my time laying sod. The bends would continue: further into debt, further into the darkness, then a job scrubbing church toilets, where I saw the ETL character’s reflection in a bathroom mirror one night while I listened to Paper Route and sprayed lemon Lysol.
But we’ve gone too far. Back to the summer, before I nearly baked to death. Back to those three months of digging holes for 9 dollars an hour.
There is an expanse of gray that exists between “I want to kill myself” and “I wouldn’t mind if someone else did it.” That’s where I spent those three months. Lost in melancholy, living in slow motion. Dissociated, like you are watching yourself in a movie. When the only peace you have is sleep, because it is an escape.
As I wandered around in that fog, God made sure that I wasn’t alone. He could have sent me a preacher to quote Bible verses to me. There are a lot of those guys in Alabama. But I got someone different: God put me next to someone strange, to make sure that I kept laughing.
Miguel was my coworker in the landscape crew. He was a scrawny, grinning weirdo. Imagine a Hispanic Steve Buscemi, sort of. Stomping around in the red Alabama clay in a straw cowboy hat and a gold grill on his teeth. Always talking to himself, always cutting his eyes around the group, looking for someone to bounce a wild story off of.
Miguel rarely told the truth about anything. He was 25, or 30, or maybe 19; it didn’t matter, he would tell you whatever age danced to the front of his mind in the moment. He said, proudly, that he was Mexican, although the other Hispanic guys told me that this too was a lie: he was Guatemalan, but was embarrassed by it. I suspected that he was not in the country legally, but to ask a question about that would be to throw yourself at his mercy: he would tell you that he was an American, or a Mexican spy, or friends with Obama. Sometimes, a plump woman would pull up to one of our job sites and park in the distance. Miguel would sheepishly wander over to her car, where she would hand him a Tupperware container of food. Was that his wife? No, he said. Yes, said our coworkers.
I knew enough Spanish to pick up on when the Hispanic guys were swearing or joking about sex, but their longer conversations faded out of my grasp. Miguel would occasionally orbit into English when he grew bored of his Latino compatriots and wanted an audience with the gringos. Several times a day, he would stop what he was doing, lift up a finger, and announce
“Mexican money…no good!”
This tickled him to no end, and he would let out a high-pitched cackle.
A coworker named Jesús gave me an explanation that didn’t really explain anything:
“He heard it on a tv show once.”
Back to July, wilting in the sun at the Christian school. I remember setting something down—a weed eater? A leaf blower backpack? Something. Staggering to the shade as everything got fuzzy. Then, sick. Violently retching, trying to throw up. Like my body was trying to eject a demon.
None of the other guys saw me; we were too spread out over the campus. I just sat there, back against the building. My heart was pounding in a way that I had never felt before. Was this a heart attack? I had no idea. Was I dying?
It was just me and God in that moment. And in that moment, where I thought I was dying, I didn’t ask Him to help me. I didn’t ask to live.
If this is it, I said to God, make it fast.
Which, to be clear, was a stupid thing to say.
I had a wife and small children at home. I was loved. I was needed.
My life was not the tragedy I thought it was. I was not the main character, not then, or ever. I was just a guy who lost his office job, got down, and got overheated in the sun. Sometimes, life just knocks you down. I have always been ashamed that in the moment I thought I might be dying, I was flippant. Angry.
But that’s the thing about the darkness, I guess: you lose all your bearings. You aren’t sure where to step next, and you get stuck. People say all sorts of things when they are stuck.
“Hey, 300, joke for you.”
In Miguel’s curious mind, everyone in the landscape company was identified by a number. The number was their approximate weight, and it also represented their strength. The system made sense to him. I was 300, and I accepted the name. Miguel called himself 150, which seemed about right.
In spotty English, Miguel walked me through the setup:
“Man goes into Taco Bell. The Taco Bell guy say ‘what do you want?’ Man say ‘I want…everything on menu. How much?’”
Miguel paused, grinning maniacally. And here came the punch line:
“Taco Bell guy say ‘no charge…but you gotta go take a CHEET somewhere else!’”
Miguel’s jokes were broken, but so was I.
I always laughed.
A month or so after I left the job, I drove by the landscape crew working a site. Miguel was nowhere to be seen. I thought about stopping to say hello, but decided against it. There were already a lot of new faces in the crew. It wouldn’t take long for the whole roster to turn over. Soon, no one would know that I was ever there.
A specialty of our landscape company was building paver patios and sidewalks. Rich people loved them. It wasn’t as backbreaking as some of the other jobs we did, but it was tedious: the ground had to be graded and regraded, then measured and marked for the paver blocks. The blocks had to be carefully sawed at precise angles and dropped in like Tetris pieces.
One day Miguel and I were building a patio in the blistering heat. When you are on your hands and knees working like that, the sweat runs down your face and drips off the tip of your nose like a faucet that won’t stop leaking.
After a while, I realized that we were being watched: one of the homeowner’s neighbors had wandered across his back yard and was watching us work. He was an overweight man, firmly in the Open Robe stage of his old age. He just stood there, bare-chested in his bathrobe and slippers, his large stomach hanging out over his boxer shorts.
“300,” Miguel whispered to me.
Once he had my gaze, Miguel cut his eyes toward the heavyset old man.
“ONE THOUSAND,” he whispered, and flared his eyebrows for effect.
Everyone who works that kind of blue collar job has a plan. Everyone is trying to get out, to move on to something better. Even the guys who don’t have a plan will lie and say that they do. They’ll make something up, to fool their own brain into having hope.
Yeah, man, I’m just doing this until my parole is up. Then I’m moving up North.
I’m going to start my own business. I’ll be the one in charge. One day.
My buddy is doing this thing and I’m going to go work with him. I’m just waiting on him to give me the call.
I never saw Miguel again. Maybe his plan came through for him. Or maybe he wasn’t real, and I hallucinated him after getting sick in the heat. Or maybe he was a guardian angel, sent to make sure that my sense of humor remained intact. That I made it to that church bathroom, where another chapter in my life could begin.
Maybe the joke was on me.
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Merry Christmas
I love you all
Regular (humor) articles resume after the holidays
İ always enjoy the ETL character, but my favorite is when you tell stories from your own life. Thank you for sharing.
God bless your voice, brother