Mordechai Stone

Romance Languages. Definition. Any language derived from Latin.

I loved the idea when I first heard of it as a kid. It sounded so…romantic. And for a guy who dreamed of becoming a writer it seemed the logical thing to do, learn a romance language. I started with Spanish and Latin. I thought it would be cool to talk to chicks in Latin, impress them with my mastery of the language of poets and priests so I concentrated on that.

Then I met Aida.

Aida was our Mexican housekeeper. She didn’t speak a word of English. The family communicated with her through me.

Aida had long dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, a true Spanish beauty. I could sit and listen to her for hours as she talked in her native tongue while preparing the evening meal. There was something exotic about the way she moved. When she sang Spanish lullabies my heart went pitter-patter. All of the sudden Spanish seemed way cooler than Latin.

Maybe the fact that I was failing Latin also had something to with my sudden desire to focus on Spanish. And living in Texas, close to the Mexican border, it seemed the logical thing to do. Lots more girls spoke Spanish than Latin in Texas.

One day I told my Spanish teacher I was pretty sure I’d become fluent because I’d started thinking in Spanish. He smiled and shook his head

“No. Even a donkey can think in Spanish. The day you will know you are becoming fluent is the day you begin to dream in Spanish.”

Made sense to me. So I waited. Had I known it would take thirty years I might not have bothered.

July 2005, South Padre Island, Texas. My life was a smoking ruin. I’d bankrupted my film company in LA to the tune of $250K. I’d shredded my writing career. Fleeing to Dallas, Texas with little more than my intellectual property and my manhood intact I thought it’d be a good idea to hook up with an ex-stripper who couldn’t stay off the hooch. When that blew up in my face I fell all the way down to  South Padre Island at the border of Texas and Mexico where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf Of Mexico. SPI seemed like the closest thing to the end of the earth for me.

I took a job managing the biggest restaurant/club/sports bar on the island, Louie’s Backyard. Most of the employees spoke Spanish and if I was going to successfully navigate a shift at Louie’s I needed to polish my old romance language. So I set about speaking to everyone I could in that sweet tongue I heard Aida sing. But South Texas Spanish was different with it’s own idiom. And the main characteristic of valley Spanish revolved around the verb chingar…too fuck.

Chingate…Fuck you.

Chinga tu madre…Fuck your mother.

Necesito la chingaladero pendejo cabron…I need that fucking thing you goat fucking bastard.

Chingao!  Jesus Fucking Christ you fucking idiot I can’t believe you just fucked that up!

And none of them cared that I was a manager. I asked for a recook on a steak, Chinga tu madre. I needed some help carrying shit to the buffet, Chingate. I dropped something in the kitchen, Chingao!  But the fact that I cussed right back at them and addressed them as best as I could in their native language earned their grudging respect. That and my beautiful blue eyes. Mexicans, especially the women, are obsessed with blue eyes. They wanted their kids to have blue eyes. They thought my DNA might do the trick.

It was a difficult time on the island.

One night after a particularly hellish shift I dreamed I was trying to get a steak recook out of Ricardo the grill impresario. There were thousands of people in the restaurant and I felt as though I was walking through quicksand. I just couldn’t catch up. I walked by a table full of Monterrey Mexicans and they cussed at me demanding their recook. By the time I made it through the quicksand back to the grill Ricardo would hold up two fingers and tell me just a couple of more minutes. Round and round I went all night. Finally I demanded the steak. He held up a bloody, charred human foot and said, “Chinga tu madre.”

I awoke with a start and realized I’d dreamed the whole nightmare in Spanish.

Fluent at last.

Chinga tu madre.

Fuck your mother.

Language of the Romantics.

Right.

They pulled the stretcher out of the back of the ambulance on a Friday night at Parkland Hospital. A fat man lay there, naked save for a sheet covering his hips and legs. A piston, strapped to his upper torso, chugged vigorously compressing his chest. Every time the piston chugged a small trickle of blood leaked from two bullet holes in his side.

Chug. Chug. Chug.

The rhythm of life.

I sat on the curb with my friend Ron as the ambulance attendants wheeled the stretcher into the ER. They didn’t seem to be in too big of a hurry. We watched the spectacle as we waited for word on his wife, Julie. Earlier in the evening she had tried to kill herself with a hammer.

A hammer.

Not a razor or a gun or an overdose.

A hammer.

She didn’t leap in front of a bus or throw herself off a bridge.

She tried to bludgeon herself to death with a hammer. That’s committment.

Sweet Jesus.

When the hammer failed to take her to the peace she sought she tried to hang herself with a bathrobe sash tied to the shower head. That’s the way her husband found her, face swollen, bloody and bruised from the hammer blows, skin purple from the lack of oxygen. But this wasn’t the first time for Julie and Ron. They’d partied like this before.

We stared in silence as ambulance after ambulance pulled into the ER bay in steady intervals delivering their payloads of bloody carnage. Friday night, county hospital, South Dallas, the devil danced and kicked up his heels. The procession kept up all night. That was 22 years ago. For all I know it’s still going on, ambulance after ambulance, keeping pace with some hellish, darkside metronome.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

When the doctor finally came out to talk to Ron he seemed to be at a loss for words. Working at county you know he’d seen it all. But he found it hard to tell Ron that his wife had hit herself in the head and face 23 times with that bloody hammer. 23 times she had stood in front of the mirror and watched her own hand swing that hammer straight at her own face and skull. 23 times. Blow after blow. Steady. Determined.

The Rhythm of Life…