SARS and Sonora

I didn’t blog this week because absolutely nothing funny happened. On the contrary: I was pretty sure I had SARS and I was definitely hallucinating.

I actually felt compelled to write out the directions to the nearest hospital for the roommate, B Team, to take me to should I become volatile or unresponsive.

The illness, which I suspect I picked up at MRF2011 – hence my initial diagnosis of The Plague – got real bad around Thursday afternoon when I started to get delirious at work, and then even worse as the weekend progressed. Long story short I felt like shit and was incredibly incoherent and contrarian, and was naturally bemoaning my lack of good health and how life had reached a new low yet again.

But B Team reminded me that sometimes funny things happen in my life and I wasn’t really sick all of the time. To hammer home her point that my life is great and that I am not always on the brink of hospitalization, she reminded me of the time we went to Mexico for three hours.

This was the wrong story to remind me of to try to will me back to health.

Here’s what happened.

B Team loves to visit me in Tucson over the holidays because all the cool kids like to winter there in hippieville because it’s pretty and i guess kind of alternative. The first time she visited I was really excited to show her all the cool stuff there is to do in Tucson. For example, I took her to Saguaro National Monument and we drove by John Wayne’s old homestead and went to Nico’s and I even showed her our Paul Bunyan statue (I have no idea why we have one there – it doesn’t look like we have a rich lumberjack history – but I do remember that the whole town was in an uproar when some jerks stole his ax in 2009 – axholes).

Unfortunately, B Team was not satisfied with this type of sightseeing. She wanted to see Mexico – Nogales, Sonora to be exact. B Team had always wanted to go to Mexico and I felt compelled to oblige, mostly because I’ve been told I’m a terrible hostess by my mother and I wanted to prove her wrong. Additionally, B Team is from Georgia and used to work at a Mexican restaurant and she was sure as shit stepping foot in Mexico even if it proved to be impossible to return to America, and I was obliged to follow her lead.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have an unhealthy amount of love for my birthplace, the Sonoran Desert, and the Southwest in general. Because it’s amazing. Gaze upon its beauty for yourself:

Whoops. no. let’s see….here we go.

But 0 % of me hears the words “let’s go to Mexico, ya’ll” and gets excited.

This is mostly because my most prominent memories of Nogales come from when I was in high school and we would caravan south of The Border to get drunk and make terrible decisions. This worked out well once or twice until one time I got shit-housed and spewed in the backseat of my friends Buick on the drive back. I don’t remember what the reaction of my co-passengers was, but I do remember the car wash technician who we paid to clean it the morning after was really disgusted/intrigued by what I had consumed and why was it so blue? I also went to Nogales a lot with my mom and her best friend when they wanted to go get cheap prescription drugs and glassware. So I thought I knew the lay of the land pretty well.

However, as soon as we got to the Nogales I immediately regretted our decision. Not only had we forgotten that there was a drug war going on at the time so border security was really tight, we also neglected to bring our passports. To assuage my unease about the whole “getting stuck in Mexico forever and/or being kidnapped by a drug cartel” thing, B Team double-checked with a federale that we would be able to get back to the USA without having any passports and he was all si, claro que si.

No. Home-bre should have said claro que no.

But before we were threatened with life in Mexico, B Team was allowed to revel in the beauty and bounty that is Nogales. She was so excited to see all the Mexican ninos run up to her and try to sell her things and pregunta her for money, and I think she was genuinely flattered that so many gentlehombres wanted us to check out their wears in the back of their shops. It was more or less the usual kind of trip to a border town.

While I can see the charm Nogales might hold for some bright-eyed and bushy tailed southerner on their first trip, I was not so enchanted. I couldn’t quite kick the feeling that I fucking hate Nogales, not only because it’s dirty and dangerous but also because it reminded me that there was a time in my life when I was concerned my mom had an addiction to prescription drugs and that I used to willingly get roophied there by the locals. To cope with these feelings I demanded that we find an establishment where I could drink a margarita or 12 and forget the massive emotional trauma our visit was uncovering.

This was a 50% success. The bars in Nogales are, during the day, not devoid of other American idiot tourists. I seem to recall that there was a gentleman in our bar y grill who had a hat on that I believe said “American Pride”, and I remember being a little skeptical of the wisdom of wearing a hat with such hubris during such a tense time in US-Mexican relations. There were also lots of middle-aged sun-burnt peroxide blondes dancing with god-only-knows who and calling for mas cerveza y tequila. This was really funny until B Team and I realized we were looking down the tequila bottle of our own future, and then it immediately became depressing.

So we moseyed back up the calle and had half a mind to saunter back to America. There was an epically long line for gringos to stand in to return to US soil, but we made nice in the line and made some amigos. It was all going ok until we reached the front of the line and asked if we could please go home now. Seemed like a normal request to us, but Officer McDouchebag didn’t have the same impression of the situation. He was INCREDIBLY skeptical of our intentions and did not take kindly to the notion that two white, blond-haired ladies weren’t in fact drug mules. Our seemingly rudimentary understanding of English after all the margaritas didn’t really help our cause, either.

I was really surprised when McDick the crime dog finally had a change of heart and allowed us back into the land of our forefathers – especially since I was getting really nervous and sweaty and that probably should have tipped him off that I was getting antsy about all the coke I had hidden in my rectum. Nonetheless, we made it back to Tucson, rectums and healthy amounts of xenophobia intact

I don’t know where this was all going (delirium), but B Team and I went shopping today in my SARS-induced haze and we purchased throat coat, wrinkle cream/sunscreen, smooth move, tortilla chips, magnums, dayquil, calm-me-down pills and tortilla chips. Needless to say, I look forward to making a full recovery and utilizing each and every one of those items next weekend.