The Piñata Tragedy
By
Maximilian
Maier
The piñata was going to be the
icing on the cake, Stacy’s chance to prove herself. She was going to show
Pedro, her boyfriend of three months, that she was not your ordinary gringo,
that she had undeniable Latin flair. As for Maria, Pedro’s five-year-old
daughter, she was as good as won. The piñata was going to be symbolic. It was
going to represent the ancient image of the wicked stepmother. Every hit that
the little girl would deliver to the piñata would help disintegrate any
negative image of Stacy that the little girl might have formed in her small,
impressionable brain. And what could be better than a piñata to accomplish
this? What she wanted was a piñata with a dark theme, preferably a witch, and
she wanted to smile and hold the video camera as Maria took her junior baseball
bat and beat the evil out of this witch before the fist-pumping throng of
Kindergartners.
She
put on her sunglasses, rubbed her lipstick-stained cigarette out in the
ashtray, locked the doors in her SUV tight and drove eastward into the unknown.
Before he got rich writing screenplays, Pedro had lived in this part of L.A., and he had even invited
her to visit his abuela here, but Stacy
had never actually said Si to any of
these invitations, remembering all of the horror stories that her sorority
sisters used to recount about those dangerous quarters.
This
was about atonement, about the conquering of lingering fears. It was time to
act like a grown lady, to smash down cultural barriers and jump out of her pale
skin, if only for a few hours.
Stacy drove
quickly and with a purpose. She glanced up occasionally as the street signs
became less and less familiar and the automobiles increasingly less
prestigious. She wound her way about, darting in and out of lanes and waving at
the victims of her driving.
She expected
piñatas to be everywhere in this part of town. I mean, that’s what these people
do, right?. They don’t work in offices. They don’t bicker about the speed of
microprocessors. They just mow lawns, roll enchiladas, make meals for thirty
people and beat the crap out of piñatas when one of their kids has that
cumpleaños deal. Stacy figured that there would be piñatas for sale on every
street corner, that men with large black mustaches would be waving her down at
red lights, leading her to vans chock-full of the stuffed and papery figures.
She would put her painted fingernail to her richly red lips and have to decide
which was the best for Maria, judging of course on price, texture, overall
agreeability of the product, and of course the contents. She would speak
Spanish with the locals, raise their eyebrows with her turns of phrase, and
find out how good all the candies were that lined the bowels and innards of
these paper men, women, and beasts.
Stacy pulled her
SUV confidently into a large parking lot that seemed to belong to an impressive
tent, probably a food market of some sort. She got out of the car, pressed the
button, and the car alarm chirped nervously.
She made her way
through the market, saw lots of round ladies examining vegetables, massaging
colorful, natural goods with their soft, brown hands, pressing the potential
purchases to their dimpled cheeks, laughing and talking in Spanish. Stacy
attempted to study and mimic their gestures. She saw in these shoppers a
certain propinquity to the natural world that she and most others in her circle
lacked. These people don’t read labels. They don’t need the judgments of
bureaucratic bodies. They are in tune with natural forces in ways that she and
hers are not. They must have inherited this from the Mayans. These were the
same people that erected pyramids with symbolic numbers of steps. Why can’t
folks in her neighborhood shop like this?
She stumbled in
half awe through the market, feeling like a tourist in a faraway land, like one
of those globe trekking college kids that report from Thailand or Burma on public
television. As she made her way around, she tried to make eye contact and smile
to as many folks as she could. Half out of diplomacy, half out of hunger, she
filled plastic bags with fruits and vegetables and toted them about proudly, if
only to show the others that she ate the same food as they. It was about
proving herself, and she even seemed to notice in their benevolent, round
smiles an acceptance that just made her want to start giving out hugs by the
dozen. Democracy is best celebrated in the supermarket.
She felt so good about herself that she almost
forgot that she was there to buy a piñata instead of squash. She craned her
neck as she passed each aisle. There was an air of mysteriousness about the place.
The few who noticed her there seemed accepting enough. But they still spoke that language, the one that she had sort
of studied for two semesters in college before deciding that she wanted to
study a “civilized” tongue like French.
Despite carrying
three sacks of fruit in the crook of her arm, Stacy began to realize that her
independent search for the piñata was fruitless. So she swallowed, gathered her
wits, and approached an amiable old woman.
“Perdón, señora. Dónde están las piñatas?”
The lady’s broad
shoulders hunched together and she said, in English, “I don’t know.”
Stacy moved on,
saw an employee, a young lady with rich, flowing black hair and a friendly smile. She had an educated,
cosmopolitan look about her, seemed like the kind of lady that would deliver
news bilingually on TV, so Stacy decided to skip the Spanish this time.
“Excuse me,
Ma’am,” she said, tapping the woman on her shoulder. Touching is important, but
she did, however, regret the word ‘Ma’am”, deeming it excessively gringo,
intensely Southern. “I was wondering if you could tell me where the piñatas
are.”
The lady kind of
smiled with embarrassment and shrugged her shoulders. From the blankness in her
eyes, Stacy assumed that she had not understood.
“Tiene Usted
piñatas?”
“Piñatas? We no
have here. I sorry.”
“Gracias.”
As Stacy was
heading out of the market, an old fellow with a cowboy hat and a dignified
mustache, sitting on a metallic folding chair and drinking a Tecate, shot a look at her that made her feel uneasy.
It took her a moment to realize that this look had nothing sexual in it. The
guy was not some leering stranger but a security guard, and he was glaring at
her not because her boobs looked nice but because she was about to walk out of
his market with a bunch of fruit without paying.
Stacy smiled at
the security guy, embarrassed, and whispered ‘I’m sorry,” first in English and
then more demonstratively in Spanish. He tipped his cowboy hat and motioned for
her to wait in line like the rest of the folks there and that’s what she did,
although she was beginning to realize that this whole piñata expedition was
cutting into her day. Stacy has always been a miser with her time, just like
Tommie friggin’ Jefferson, and she has never liked running trivial errands. She
waited impatiently in line behind a round woman who seemed to be purchasing
enough food to feed half of Guatemala
with. To pass the tense moments, she began perusing one of the Mexican tabloids
displayed on what she labeled ‘the aisle of desperation,’ the place where gum
and batteries and magazines beckon to be bought so that somebody can be a
little richer and somebody a little poorer at the end of the day. The tabloid
was full of pictures of beautiful people, Mexican soap opera stars and singers,
the folks that dance around on Telemundo at those insane hours when the wolves
howl out to the desert moon. These were people
of enormous stature in their native land, complete unknowns to her and to most
‘real’ Americans. Their fates interested
her about as much as that of say Pakistani soccer studs. When her turn finally
came, she delivered a cold ‘Hola’ to the checker, paid for her fruit, handing
over a large bill and almost wanting to tell the lady to keep the change.
The sun did not
want to let up outside. It glinted off the buckled black asphalt of the parking
lot and turned the car windshields into razors of glare. Stacy got back in and
drove around streets with tried and trusted Anglo-Saxon surnames that in these
parts were pronounced interestingly. Heavy gusts of air-conditioning blew at
her from three directions and she dabbed the sweat from her brow with the base
of her palm. She looked over at the digital clock on her dashboard, still not
set correctly, the victim of daylight savings time, but more or less exactly
one hour off. She realized that she only had a couple of hours before Maria’s
party and that the search for the piñata had best be sped up. There would be no
more time for dawdling in supermarket aisles, no more free minutes to admire
and inspect produce. She could no longer afford to observe. It was all about
finding the bloated corpse of a toy with papery feathers, counting off as many
bills as the owner of said toy saw fit, and packing it like wild game into the
back of her SUV.
She hit two more
supermarkets and even a used clothing store before she began feeling desperate.
Clerks smiled warmly at her request but scratched their oily foreheads and sent
her to other places where piñatas were said to hide and cackle behind other
merchandise. These leads all turned out to be false. Piñata, probably the first
Spanish word Stacy had learnt, seemed to be a myth, a cruel joke on the gringo,
something that real Latinos only laugh about but never beat.
Of course, she
could always give up on the piñata altogether. But this was all about proving
herself, both in the eyes of Pedro and his daughter. This piñata was going to
be magical. It was going to make Maria smile widely and toothlessly and attack
Stacy with a hug, like a rabid little terrier. Stacy was going to hop on this
piñata, whichever incarnation it should take, and use it to wrench her from the
murky depths of gringohood and take her to the kingdom of the Latina.
So the search
continued, and seconds continued dripping off the precipice of time
relentlessly, vanishing into nothingness. Liquor store doors were thrust open
in haste, causing the bells to cling more neurotically than usual. Clerks drew
back as an angry blonde lady, perhaps packing heat, pointed her rifle-like
finger around and asked about piñatas in sentences that whizzed past their ears
like stray bullets. Convenient store clerks with English vocabularies not large
enough to fill the back of a travel guide were berated by a hot-tongued woman
for their “revolting inability to maintain the timeless tradition of Latin
peoples.”
A cigarette
dangling dangerously from her lips, the sun still relentlessly bright, Stacy started
the car, this time with the intention of leaving behind the barrio and the
piñata hiding somewhere in it. The party would have to be piñata-less. This was
Fate’s indisputable verdict. She turned off the Latin music that she had so
eagerly bobbed her head around to on her way into the labyrinth of the barrio
three hours earlier. She sought solace in the familiar sound of string quartets
on the classical station, but when she realized that folks might drive up next
to her at a traffic light, hear this stuff, and start resenting her even more,
she flipped it off for good and drove in silence.
Stacy usually
drives like a lady tranquilized by adult contemporary music, but today, she was
darting and weaving, making horns attract hands like magnets. She wanted to
laugh at the absurdity of it all but was too bitter to do so. She imagined all
of the store clerks mocking her behind her back. They were probably all tossing
about the hundreds of ripe and sprightly piñatas that they horde in the back of
their stores and distribute only to those with magic names like Sánchez and
Garza.
This was when the
miracle happened, the milagro. Like
many miracles, the lead-up was unspectacular. Stacy was stuck in traffic. Some
sort of accident involving a school bus and a postal truck and flames. Stacy
was too concerned with her failed piñata expedition to worry about any
schoolchildren being blown up or postal packages damaged. She was stuck in sullen silence behind a bunch
of overcrowded cars. In front of her was a station wagon with no license plate
that pooped out more exhaust than Manchester
back in the dark days. Her inoffensive vanilla SUV was flanked by two cars that
looked anti-social and bestial, one a run-down two-tone Mustang with a grid
that looked like shark teeth and flames on its dented doors. The man driving
this muscle car was staring lasciviously in her direction, loud,
incomprehensible music and static rushing out of his ailing speakers like spunk
out of a dog’s dick. As she was sucking on her cigarette and trying to relax,
Stacy noticed this leering, and she soon turned her head to the other side.
That was what brought her redemption.
The car was maroon
and loud, undeniably ugly. It was a ghost from the past, a model consigned to
the junkyard of history, an El Camino. Those unfamiliar with this model had
better not try to look up images of it online, for doing so has been said to
induce instant psychological trauma. Former owners, even occasional passengers
of the El Camino are said to wake up from ghastly flashbacks, drenched in
sweat, the growl of the car’s engine thick in their skulls. It is no lie that
those souls sick enough to have bought this car had higher suicide rates than
owners of any other car. The truth in that fact is unimpeachable. Stacy read it
from a credible on-line leisure magazine. No car could better express squalor
than this one. The driver of this beast of an automobile had a beard scraggly
enough to make Tolstoy blush. He had a half-mauled Pop-Tart in one hand and a
cigar in the other. There were paw prints on its windows. The vinyl of his
seats had been mauled and torn by paws and teeth. The ashtray harbored the
ashes of a thousand dead cigarettes. Techno music boomed out of his back speakers
and subjected the world around to a mild earthquake.
Were she not
leaving the barrio, on the verge of re-emerging into palm trees and prosperity,
Stacy might not have looked any further at this unsightly vehicle. But
curiosity swirled in her head and her eyes began to wander from the cab of the
car to its rear, like a drunken old man checking out his daughter’s sorority
sister at a cocktail party. In a strange way, Stacy found herself admiring the
car. There was, behind all of the squalor, a certain nobility in this car. It
was like a raised middle finger to all of the SUVs out there.
The back of the
car was what really fascinated Stacy. Like the back of a truck, the El Camino
offers those lucky enough to drive it enough space to carry life’s burdens in
it. While most owners of the vehicle elect to keep this back area empty,
perhaps in some attempt to bolster the car’s aerodynamic kick-ass capability,
others put their life into it. They put old mattresses that smell like eggs and
butter into them and let them fry in ultraviolet light. They toss all the empty
beer cans that are cluttering up the front into the back. It is waste disposal
of the most efficacious sort. Nobody’s toes are stepped on in the exterior
world. The car becomes an isolated instance of being, a bubble of tranquility
that does not stir the seas of chaos that all other forms of activity
inevitably contribute to.
And yet, this
tar-like tarp that concealed this car’s inner system was not entirely
effective. Something was sticking out, surging out shamelessly into the
exterior world. Stacy leaned forward and squinted to see if she couldn’t figure
out what it was. Intrigued, she reached onto the dashboard and picked up the
glasses that she is supposed to wear when she drives but never does out of
pride. After a moment of careful inspection, it struck her consciousness like a
gong. What Stacy was looking at was a
leg, undeniably human in form. She could make out a swollen foot, stiffly
jutting out. The foot was even manicured. Its toenails were painted and what
appeared to be a high heel encased it. A leg. Una pierna. There was no denying it. This was serious and yet
beautiful.
This leg was not
of a corpse but of something far more desirable. It was the kind of leg that
makes kids shriek with excitement and want to beat. Underneath its flesh was
not blood or muck or things that make kids’ eyes puff out purple. It concealed,
rather, candies and sugars, lollies and taffy, things that rot teeth rather
than spirits. It was, yes, a piñata in the back of this mysterious El Camino,
or at least a leg of one.
There was no time
to lose. This intervention was too obviously divine not to merit at least a
loud “Gracias, Jesus!” Stacy was so excited that forgot that, and perhaps it
would cost her later on.
Stacy quickly
honked her horn to get the driver’s attention. This attempt was unsuccessful.
Horns lose their potency in traffic jams. The ear becomes inured to their
alarmed cry. And besides, this guy had his music on louder than even the
angriest horn could honk. Stacy was going to have to get out of the car and
confront him in person.
She looked ahead
to see if all the mess might clear any time soon and was reassured that it
wouldn’t. She left her car running and hopped out and signaled at him with arms
flailing like an airport runway worker. He gritted his teeth and squeezed the
soft paper of the cigar in his mouth and rolled down the window reluctantly.
The music got louder.
“Sir,” said Stacy
eagerly, opening up her money purse and showing the stranger green. “I want to
buy your piñata.”
“Qué?”
Stacy kind of
waved her hands down so that he might turn down the booming music. He kind of
frowned at her and then finally realized what she meant by this, complied in a
jiffy.
“I see a piñata in
the back of your car. I want to buy it. I will pay whatever you like.”
At this moment,
something unsettling happened. A head emerged from beneath the steering wheel,
a woman’s. She made brief eye contact with Stacy and smiled back awkwardly and
yet lasciviously, wiping the running lipstick off her face with the back of her
hand. Stacy looked back at the driver and he looked back with embarrassment and
shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘I’m only human too, lady. B.J.s help make
traffic jams more tolerable.’
“What you need?”
he asked in English that sounded fragile.
“I need your
piñata.”
The man began
speaking Spanish fast to the woman in the car and they started laughing. Stacy
almost felt a rush of embarrassment come over her as she said this, praying
that piñata did not have a second, anatomical meaning in Spanish. Finally, the
woman leaned over, pressing her voluptuous body over the driver and sticking
her head out the window.
“The piñata is full
of things you don’t want. No good this piñata. We’re sorry.”
Just as she was
about to roll up the window and smash Stacy’s, and hence Maria’s dream, five twenty dollar bills flew into
the car and enchanted its passengers. One could almost distinguish in the El
Camino’s harsh idle a brief respite, a purr of contentment, and soon, the
engine was off. The driver ignored his lady friend’s shoulder-slapping and loud
and fast Spanish admonishments. He proudly emerged from the car and winked at
Stacy. She followed him to the back and helped him lift up the tarp.
Stacy felt in that
moment like a mortician uncovering a recently slain body for autopsy. This
piñata was already hers, but both the woman it seemed to be representing, a
hooker, and its condition, rather sordid, made Stacy feel empty. What was there
to do? The money had already changed hands. Still, to say that these goods were
damaged would be an understatement. Stacy almost wanted to avert her eyes when
the man rolled over the stiff paper body. The head had been partially crushed
by some of the lawn equipment with which the piñata had been forced to share
the back. The area between its temple and its left eye had suffered a nasty
contusion, and it seemed to bleed Styrofoam.
“She looks pretty
bad,” she said, shielding the sun from her eyes. “Is there anything you can do
for her to make her more presentable?”
The man scratched
his head and said “Qué?”
“Can you make her
pretty again?”
He blinked and
looked quizzical. Then, understanding jolted him like a surge of electricity.
He nodded and began patching up her face with his worn workman’s hands, mending
the ripped papier-mâché, putting some of the Styrofoam stuffing back into the
wound and pressing the severed skin back together.
“This okay?” he
asked with raised brows.
“I guess so.”
Engines behind
them began growling with impatience. The traffic mess ahead appeared to be
clearing, the tragic loss of schoolchildren and mail all but forgotten. Stacy’s
quick but fateful interlude with the man in the El Camino was ending
prematurely, without a sincere look in the eyes and a heartfelt ‘Gracias.’ She
took her prize, lifted it with all the strength in her limbs (it wasn’t all
that heavy), and jaunted back to the open door of her SUV. As she did this, she
thought she could hear the man and his lady friend laughing hard.
By the time Stacy
had made it to the ‘safe’ side of town, the party had already begun. An
assembly of children was whirling about the backyard, as desultory in their
motion as fruit fries, as loud as ailing hyenas. Their shrieks rang out without
warning, like sudden gunfire, piercing Stacy’s sensitive ears. Gladly would she
have gone inside to smoke a cigarette and cool off in the AC, but Pedro was
watching, as well as a convocation of parents and stepparents, standing around
with smiley-faces, sipping non-alcoholic beer and spinning yarns about Bobby
Ray’s exploits on the T-ball diamond or Juanita’s uncanny ability to memorize
time-tables.
The birthday cake
seemed to collapse in the heat of a dying day. The white icing dripped down its
walls like sweet wax. A ceremonial song was sung in English and then in Spanish
and then once more in English. Miniature infernos were extinguished by three
rapid pulmonary gusts. Several animalistic “hoorahs’ and barbaric clapping
ensued. Maria birthday girl blushed and chewed on her lower lip with her small,
doomed teeth. Then, Pedro emerged, like the high priest of an ancient religion,
holding high a knife sharp enough to decapitate a piñata with. The first sacrificial
victim of the afternoon was not the piñata however, but the cake, and when the
knife tore into its sweat-soaked mush, a sound was emitted that sounded like
the last gasp of an animal in the desert. Remnants of this sugary animal were
eagerly distributed, clumps of mush spooned onto plastic plates hardly firm
enough to carry the weight. Spike, the canine denizen of this backyard, wagged
his tail gaily. Good feeling was in abundance. The cake was gone in less then
seven minutes. Stacy knew this because she was counting off the seconds.
She had not told
Pedro anything about the piñata. She had just knocked on the door with a couple
of modest-sized boxes, hastily wrapped in glossy paper, smiling widely. The
idea was to wait for the consumption of the cake and maybe the opening of two
or three presents before dashing back to the SUV and retrieving the
cadaver-like party whore of paper.
Maria began
tearing her little fingers through wrapping paper, hardly appreciative of the
careful concern that had gone into this gift presentation. Several Barbie
dolls, some blonde, some Hispanic, were re-introduced into the world. Smiles
were exchanged among mothers, nods of approval offered. Finally, Stacy decided
that the time for the great revelation had come. Just as Maria had finished
opening up a plastic pony, she clapped her hands in a quick flourish and
vanished. No one noticed her go.
Her return was
glorious, far more impressive than she had imagined. As she stood in the
threshold of the glass sliding door that separated the cool realm of Pedro’s
home from the sun-stained and parched yard, the full body of a paper lady in
the crook of her left arm, heads turned around, fingers both large and small
pointed in her direction, and “Ooohs” of astonishment and gratitude were
emitted from mouths rich with bacteria, coffee and cake.
Pedro shook his
head and smiled warmly. He wanted to smother Stacy in kisses, to lick all over
her body and to hump her brains out. Of course, he had to banish all of the
lascivious visions and keep his mind G-rated. This party was too wholesome to
pollute.
“Babe,” he
exclaimed from afar, “Where did you find that?”
Stacy blushed and
shrugged her shoulders.
“I went to see
some of your people,” she said with a wink. “Gente muy amable.” Pedro approached her, hugged her, and the
piñata, kissed Stacy first deeply on the lips and then, perhaps out of sheer
lust for life, or maybe just because the paper lady looked like it needed a
kiss before its public execution, he delivered a soft and respectful
‘friendship kiss’ to the cheek of the sacrificial victim.
“Muchas gracias por estar aqui,” he
whispered to the piñata. Stacy held her and thought about playing the
ventriloquist, maybe starting a conversation in Spanish to the entertainment of
all in attendance, but the Spanish phrases that would enable such a
conversation evaded her mind in that proud moment.
And boy did she
feel good. To think that she had resorted to anti-depressants in recent weeks! Stacy’s
euphoria was too profound to spoil by words. She felt tears welling up. She
wanted to hug the world and to sing happy songs. She felt like a victorious
character at the end of a heart-warming Disney flick. Part of her was hoping
that the crowd would rush her and embrace her and lift her towards the skies
like a goddess. But perhaps she would have to wait until the piñata in her arm
was sufficiently beaten to death for this great instance of triumph to make
bright her day.
Using a shoestring
as a noose, Stacy tied the piñata to the branch of a sick but sturdy oak. A
light breeze, perhaps from the hills or the Pacific, tickled the piñata and
made it dance in the air, like a tap dancer who had drunk too much coffee. Children
began fighting over the baseball bat. They all knew why this sad figure hung
and all wanted a piece of it, all wanted to maim it, beat the life out of it.
Stacy had given a
name to the piñata—Lady Jane. Señora Selena was the original nombre that
bubbled out of Stacy’s brain, but Pedro shot it down. He disliked, read loathed
the idea of using an assassinated pop star’s name, and Stacy cupped her mouth
in false concern and said “Oops, I never knew that Selena.” Pedro shook his head and muttered something in
Spanish that Stacy didn’t catch.
Lady Jane was
fitting. The piñata looked like a gringo, and hence needed a gringo name. She
was, after all, as blonde as a Swedish model, though her skin was hardly as
soft to the touch. Pedro even cut his finger on one of the dangling paper
strands around Lady Jane’s ankle. He bled and called her a puta and punched her in the ass for this. The punch created a small
rupture but luckily, none of her goods feel out prematurely. One of the kids at
the party saw and heard this nastiness, and the girl, though only six,
understood the word puta. She looked
up at Pedro and covered her mouth. Her coffee-colored eyes bespoke some strange
mixture of scorn and giddiness. Pedro smiled and said Lo siento before she ran off.
Of course, Lady
Jane’s black paper skirt was unusually high. Underneath, painted on, was
something resembling a thong, though the piñata appeared to have suffered
significant water damage. It had, after all, been stuck in the back of a man’s
El Camino for untold time.
Whatever the case, Lady Jane was not dressed
appropriately for a child’s birthday. Were she a real woman, and were she in an
Italian basilica, she would have been hissed at and sworn at as a harlot. Pedro
was perturbed by Stacy’s choice of a sleazy looking piñata, though he didn’t
tell her this. But really, why did Stacy have to choose such a shabby looking
lady to be beaten into shreds by a stick? Was she trying to make a statement
about the dangers of promiscuity? Were the kids supposed to learn to say no to
sex by beating the brains out of this paper harlot?
The sun was threatening to go down. It was
time to put an end to the whole birthday brouhaha with one last exultant public
beating.
Before the
birthday girl, hanging lifelessly from the half-rotten branch of an oak, was
the piñata. Maria stood as silent and as
solemn as an executioner. Normally, before they thrash a piñata to paper shreds
and candy spewing, birthday girls wear blindfolds. It is about defending the
hanging entity from unfairly inflicted blows, adding some element of sport to
the otherwise senseless beating. After all, it ain’t all about the candy.
And
this time it certainly wasn’t. After her droopy face had been sufficiently
licked into a nasty smile by Pedro’s sloppy kiss, Stacy came over to Maria and
placed her hands squarely on her shoulder blades. She knelt down and whispered
encouragement in the little girl’s ear.
“I
want you to beat the life out of her.” Stacy really wanted to say this in
Spanish but fumbled the words around in her head.
Maria
nodded obediently. A safety radius was cleared. Maria was lightly shoved in the
direction of the hanging victim.
“Ahora!” hollered Stacy.
Maria
swung with blind ferocity. Lady Jane was spared this blow.
“Higher!”
called out one of the kids at the party. “Swing higher!”
Maria
missed again. Her swing was embarrassing and elicited scornful laughter from
the gathered.
That’s
when Maria got angry. This anger could not be seen. She was, after all, wearing
a friggin’ executioner’s mask. But if it could have been witnessed, it might
have sent even the most callous five-year-olds home crying, praying that a
Power Ranger or Teletubby could rescue their sorry souls from her rage.
And
who bore the brunt of this primordial rage? Well, luckily, the victim was human
only in form, not in content. Lady Jane, were she organic, would have died of
oxygen deficiency from the hanging. Of course, she wasn’t organic, unless you
count the contents inside her, which might rather be described as orgasmic.
What
the hell are you reading now? Is your narrator suddenly getting racy on you,
dropping spicy sauce on you at the last moment in some desperate hope that you
might find interest on this poorly spun piñata narrative?
No.
And that No is equally valid in English or Spanish. The contents of this piñata
were indeed orgasmic rather than organic. And when the proverbial shit (in this
case, the orgasmic contents of Lady Jane) hit the proverbial fan (literally,
the backyard, more broadly, all those present at the piñata thrashing), there
was hell to be paid.
You
see, Lady Jane’s uncanny resemblance to a harlot was more than just uncanny. It
was a friggin’ clue to her contents, and nobody, not Stacy, not Pedro, and
least of all Maria (who thank Díos was blind under an executioner’s mask),
would ever have suspected that those contents would be pornographic.
Porno
mags, DVDs with salacious covers, sex toys, condoms, whips, chains, cock rings,
vagina molds, no guns (fortunately), were spewed onto the backyard like innards
of a slaughtered pig. Kids were sent running in all directions. Their desultory
motion bespoke at once the zaniness of a
Disney flick and the desperation of a slasher film. If only one could
have played Strauss’ Trisch-Trasch polka at the right moment!
Pedro took his
daughter into his arms and shot facial hate at Stacy, who stood stiff with her
hand over her mouth.
She
now thought of the man in the El Camino who had hawked off this piñata. He
looked disreputable. He had a five o’clock shadow and missing teeth and a nasty
quality in his black eyes. And his car stank. And he was probably being
pleasured orally by the sleazy chica
in the passenger seat.
The
kids were all at home in less than a quarter hour. Stacy tried to apologize to
shocked parents but received scant attention, lots of quick and nervous and
unreceptive nods as the stunned and pissed parties made haste to their SUVs and
the copious protection from pornography and auto death that such powerful
vehicles confer. As for Pedro, well, he was out in the backyard, beating all of
the devilry to death with the same miniature baseball bat that his daughter had
used on the piñata. He whacked at Lady Jane with barbaric force. One blow split
off her arm at the elbow and sent condoms flying halfway into the neighbors’
yard, thoroughly violating the principles of aerodynamics. Lady Jane slain,
having bled out all the porn and the general nastiness that once constituted her fully debauched being,
Pedro put his hands on his knees and looked down at the agglomeration of smut
that lay there on the lawn before him in the near dark. Gasping and desperate,
he hollered various profane things at all the porn, “Ay
carrumba!” and “hijo de puta!”
being some of the tamer expressions employed. “La cucaracha” was not used, although it might have delighted Maria.
The smut was shattered. Were he God and capable of such miracles, Pedro might
have reduced the whole heap to salt, just like Gomorrah.
He
stood for a moment and admired the fruit of his work. The twelve DVDs had been
shattered into crunchy and sharp material that glistened in the moonlight. The
plastic penii were more stubborn. They would be summarily burned. Pedro did not
care if burning plastic emitted poisonous fumes and assaulted the ailing ozone
layer. This was, after all, L.A., and the air sucked anyway.
