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…

Have you ever had a gun held on you?

I have.

Three times.

Well, technically, four—but that one doesn’t count coz the gun was pointed at my chest, not my head, during a little drunkman’s-bluff between friends.  The other three I felt the pistol ‘held’ firmly to my skull and friendship had nothing to do with it.  Those three times the wielder of the magic wand wanted drugs, money or both and the pistolero was willing to trade my life to get what he needed.

In the business I chose in the early eighties, I learned very quickly that criminals come in all sorts.  My life depended on knowing who I dealt with.  And everything I needed to know came stored in their eyes.  In those small, round orbs I could detect with certain probability the outcome of most encounters.  What I observed gave me my course of action. And that course of action determined my life expectancy.

Scared eyes.

Anyone with scared eyes believes in God, and if they believe in God then they fear going to hell.  I do my business quickly with anyone with scared eyes, don’t do anything stupid and chances are almost 100% that I will live.  You see no one with scared eyes ever enjoys pulling the trigger.

Business eyes.

Money is their God. If I produce consistently chances are very good that they will never interfere with my ability to breath. It’s all about accounts receivable and accounts payable with this class of criminal, all about balancing the ledger.  Great people to do business with.  I always knew where I stood.  Their money or my life were the only two things that could balance the scale.  They don’t mind using the magic wand. It’s the pen they use to make marks in the ledger.

Crazy eyes.

Criminals with crazy eyes believe they are God or they just plain hate your God.  Race hate, drug-blasted brains, fucked-up genetics, religious fanaticism they all have one thing in common, they are unpredictable. I hate unpredictable criminals, very bad for business, very bad for living.  They could buy me drinks one day, kidnap and torture me the next.  I do business with crazy eyes one time because I know I might not survive a second encounter.

And now to the stuff of nightmares…

Dead Eyes.

They know God doesn’t exist.  They have no soul.  Walking dead, they feed then move on.  They don’t dream because they are a wide awake nightmare.

I had a guy with Scared Eyes hold a gun to my head and I survived.

I saw Crazy Eyes dancing in his head as he kept tapping my forehead with his magic wand.  I looked at the ground so he couldn’t feast on the fear in my eyes and I survived.

I looked into Dead Eyes as he racked the slide on his Browning and couldn’t turn away.  And although my body survived he took a piece of my soul. I still have nightmares and wake up in cold sweats when Dead Eyes slithers into my slumber.

The last time I saw that look was in 1997 long after I got out of the business. I picked up a beautiful girl in a bar.  We went back to her place and had incredible sex for hours.  She was insatiable.

In the dark hours of early morning I woke with a start, heart pounding.  Something stirred in the bed. I looked up and saw her naked, gazing down at me.  She smiled, her eyes cold, dark, empty stared straight through me as though I wasn’t there.

Dead Eyes.

She said, “I’ll be right back. I have something you might like.”  She went to the bathroom.  I heard her humming off key while she rummaged around. I quietly dressed and quickly left her apartment.

I ran and never looked back.

I worked on South Padre Island, TX for 18 months. From my third floor condo I could look west across the bay and see the sun set on the mainland then turn east and see waves from the Gulf of Mexico roll onto the beach of the longest barrier island in the world. Every night I managed a large bar/restaurant literally hanging over the bay. Anytime the moon rose the reflected light shimmered on the still waters of the bay like broken glass on an undulating carpet of black velvet.

Fiery sunsets, still moonlit nights, crashing surf…paradise. Most days I forgot to look.

The last few weeks we’ve had rain and high winds in the LA valley. The sky cleared of haze. But it took a friend to point out how majestic the mountains looked in the distance. I never even looked up.

I have yet to leave the house today. I have to leave the house to look up. I have to remind myself to look up to see the beauty.

Now I torture myself with the loss of memories I’ll never have because for decades I’ve walked around, head down, thoughts misplaced, missing…The View.

I am assaulted by fear. It paralyzes me. If by chance the sudden assault happens while I am away from home I cement a smile to my face to hide my dread while longing to return to my sanctuary.

Some days the fear is so overwhelming I can only find refuge in darkness, sleep. I retreat to my bedroom. I mask the eerie silence of my safe place with the artificial sound of a rainstorm. I climb in bed and pull the covers to my chin. I block out the dim light of a city night with a dark shirt placed carefully over my eyes. But my bedroom is too large, it contains too many hiding places for scary monsters. So I retreat to my closet.

I lay out blankets and towels to separate my naked body from the dirty carpet. I cover myself with jackets, blankets and sheets before pulling the closet door shut. I can hear the sound of the recorded storm. A sudden crack of thunder brings me peace.

I rest in the darkness secure in my safe place…

My tomb.

Since I moved back to California in 2007 I have attempted to make my life manageable. I followed a formula. I cut expenses to the bone. I quit spending money on entertainment; no movies, no books, no dining out. I quit dating. I bought a disposable car. I rented a cheap one room apartment. And I did all of this in the name of art.

I reasoned that it would be good for my writing. I could work odd jobs and live off the money I’d saved while working on South Padre Island. Not having a full time job I could spend vast swaths of my time creating new stories. And it would all be manageable.

In the last three years I have completed one screenplay and three short stories. I began numerous other screenplays and a major novel. I wrote several screenplay synopses and registered a bunch of story ideas with the Writers Guild. But considering the amount of free time I had the writing output has been dismal. And now the disposable car is gone - sold for scrap, the bank account is empty and I am unemployed.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have the company of a female as we watch moving images on the silver screen, to enjoy a nice meal out with friends, to smell the fresh cut grass at the ballpark. I have robbed myself of the joy of my existence. What artistic inspiration can possibly come from that?

I believed that if I did penance and sacrificed for my craft that I would be rewarded for my pain and suffering. What an ass I am. The person I’ve always had the easiest time lying to is the one I find it hard to look at in the mirror every morning.

By trying to get a life small enough to manage I have ended up with a very Small Life.

Another day. Another God forsaken, fucked up day that begins with me opening my eyes followed immediately by THE CHOICE. FUCK. Will I write? Or will I do nothing. I agonize in bed, the covers pulled tightly over my head.

Maybe if my life was full, if I had a job that ate up the majority of my day and a relationship, with a sweet, young thing, that took up the remaining hours I could look at myself in the mirror and shout, “SEE! I have no TIME to write. I am BUSY!” Unfortunately, I can’t look in the mirror because I have time, eons of cursed time.

I have ordered my life to have this time. I put almost 30 grand in the bank so I wouldn’t have to work full time for a year. I find menial jobs to pay some bills. I found the perfect writer’s chair and new lap top computer. I dumped the drunk, deliciously decadent, ex-stripper fiancé to give myself more TIME to write.

And yet I will do nothing.

I know this.Of course that is not entirely true. It is impossible to do nothing because doing nothing is actually doing something. Even as I lay still I am in the act of reclining. I f I shut my eyes I still breathe, my heart still beats.  And I can never shut off my brain. “WRITE, you LOSER! WRITE!” it shouts, howling in the silence of my apartment, my spiritual prison.

With every beat of my heart I move close to interminable death, to infinite regret at a life spent in the promise of better things if only I would have WRITTEN. I look back 6 months upon my barren artistic path. I have sown it with salt. Nothing has grown.

I read Kerouac and dream of writing as he does. My dream mocks. I am a hack with the singular talent of writing a good hook at the end of average chapters of verse.

The clock is ticking. The money is getting thin. When will I write?

I pluck the white from my brow.

Richard Matheson wrote I AM LEGEND. How nice. I AM PARASITE, SUCCUBUS, SYCOPHANT. I must borrow from my many selves to accomplish even this simple task.

And now - to sleep! I regard my anticipated slumber with bitterness and trepidation. Because, on awakening it will be there again, waiting with bared claws, dripping fang and leering grin…

…THE CHOICE.