FIVE BROKEN TOYS PART 3: I’LL FUCK UP A VOLVO

The story so far: My family rented an apartment in Mexico through an American realtor, the Bird Lady. She made me think of some other animal hoarding sociopaths I have known, the Cat Lady and Dog Man.

The apartment the Bird Lady showed my wife looked great. So we sent her a deposit check. A few weeks later she emailed me that the check was short 20% tax – hundreds of dollars over the rent originally quoted. When I emailed her back that I had never heard of tax being charged on a rental above the asking price, she sent me a screaming all caps email back: “HAVEN’T YOU EVER RENTED BEFORE? I TRIED TO HELP YOU AND YOUR WIFE AND THIS IS THE THANKS I GET!” and so on.

I was all set to get into it with her. I remembered my cat and dog experiences and realized I was about to add a bird. We called the landlady and explained what was going on, how we weren’t happy with the Bird Lady. We struck a deal directly with her. We got our money back from the Bird Lady, minus a surprising amount arbitrarily deducted. I wanted to get it back, but again, fearing psychic warfare, sucked it up, since we were moving right down the street from her.

Since moving here, we’ve often seen the Bird Lady, who doesn’t seem to remember my wife, thank goodness. Like Cat Lady and Dog Man she has problems with her legs, and limped down the street, often with her feet wrapped in bandages. Sometimes you could hear her parrots loudly cawing like pterodactyls, from her place. But now, she has abruptly gone away.

It started when the seaside restaurant owners where she would do her sunset dancercise got together and successfully had her banned from the beach. She would sometimes do her routine in the nude, before which she would try to get flabbergasted tourists to hold her parrot while she danced. Mexicans here are in the tourism business and extremely tolerant of gringos, but only to a point. I’ve drawn her here as the Sea Hag, a crone who lives by the ocean in a cave.

It turns out that the burn on the rental we suffered was not the first time this happened. Bird Lady often accepted rental money and then asked for more, resulting in a feud between her and the potential tenants, and in her keeping some of their dough, and them usually giving up. Most people don’t want the time and expense of pursuing a lawsuit in Mexico over a few hundred dollars, so she would get away with it. But people would complain to the Tourist Police. As the complaints mounted, the locals were getting pretty tired of her.

She was unpopular in the expatriate community as well. One night at a local restaurant popular with gringos, she had a dispute with the owner over the bill. Since he would not budge, she stripped down completely naked in the crowded restaurant. The cops came and took her away.

When she got out on bail, she went to see an American lawyer to see if he would represent her in the trial. He said he couldn’t, since he was a part owner of the restaurant. So she took her clothes off in his office. He still did not take the case. She did eventually find a good Mexican lawyer, who’s kept her out of jail and deportation till now.

She was finally carted away for pointing a rifle at her neighbor. While the cops were on the way she tried to set herself on fire. Once in jail, she beat herself in the head with a water bottle and claimed police brutality, then burned her legs with a cigarette lighter she had smuggled in within her body. The local paper devoted a two page spread to the lurid story, with pictures of her in a jail cell, her burnt legs sticking through the cell bars, getting an injection from the doctor who has treated her for years for bi-polarism. She has no family to come get her. The American consul arranged for her to be sent to a mental hospital in Mexico City.

Our once-shared street is in Gringo Gulch, an area catering to tourists. It has a spectacular view, from the top of a hill overlooking a storybook perfect tropical paradise bay. The street is mostly apartment buildings, which rent out to foreigners in the high season. There are also two or three small, run-down old houses that belong to poor Mexican families. They’ve lived here forever. These people will give you the stink-eye. Which is understandable, since their town is effectively being taken away from them. It’s hard to love some grinning, sun-burnt tourist who comes sauntering down your street like he owns it, with his “Hola!’ and his belly pack, his camera, his stupid hat.

We get a lot of stink-eye from the lady across the street. She is tall and looks like Geronimo, with sharp features. I think of her as the Hatchet Lady, since you could chop wood with her face. She wears flowery Mexican old lady dresses, a big sun hat and has a high, reedy voice, and piercing, cold eyes. She runs a small hotel out of her three unit compound. Even though her livelihood depends on tourists, she hates them, except for the ones actually giving her money at a given moment. Our landlady warned us when we moved in that she was not very friendly and to just ignore her, because she gets all wrung up about parking.

For most of the year, parking is not a problem on the street. It’s only in high season that it’s hard to find a space. The Hatchet Lady is obsessed with keeping the parking in front of her house car-free. This is an impossible dream, since it is a public street and a public parking space. Not wanting any trouble, we had tried to not park there, but in high season there were often no other spaces. One day, my wife parked there and Hatchet Lady came out and started yelling at her about how she couldn’t park there.

My wife told her to leave her alone, it’s a public street. Hatchet Lady got even more worked up and began yelling again. Fed up, my wife called her “pinche culera”, which translates as “fucking busybody”. Hatchet Lady was flabbergasted, and left screaming insults in the street as my wife exited.

The next day, we found the tail light of our car broken, the red glass all over the ground. There were several neat, hammerhead shaped holes. It was obvious who had done it, but there was little we could do, we couldn’t prove it. Our landlady’s son said it was not the first time people who parked in that space had their car vandalized. There had been tire slashing, keyings, and windows broken. He said to just not park there and leave her alone, since she was loco. We, instead, began to plot an elaborate revenge. She was, like Dog Man, a keen gardener, obsessed with the plantings in front of her house. My wife hatched a plan to get some sort of super plant poison and top all her plants. Like myself with Dog Man, she was getting obsessed with the Hatchet Lady.

We were on the verge of actually buying the plant killer. Then we got together with another local who knew of her, and they warned us off. Not that we wouldn’t get away with it, at least with the police. “Oh they won’t catch you, but she’s a bruja, a witch. She’ll put the evil eye on you.” Indeed she has the stinkiest of all the stink-eyes we occasionally find ourselves on the receiving end of, and was willing to fuck up a Volvo, what next, so we aborted the plan. Being told she was a witch was in keeping with my belief that people like Hatchet Lady are somehow more in touch with the other side, with an unseen world that protects them.

Lately, the Hatchet Lady still makes appearances, but the tourists are gone and there’s plenty of parking. She floats around benignly, looking at the new houses being built and grimacing in a hideous approximation of a smile. Our landlady says her relatives stepped in, and she is now on big doses of feel good meds.

The filthiest guy I have ever seen walking down a street made his appearance just before high season. He looks like a grown-up version of Pigpen, from the Peanuts cartoons. He is caked with black dirt from head to toe, barefoot, scabby, usually clad in filthy shorts and t-shirt, to be seen walking the streets with his hands held up in a feral way, like a squirrel or a kangaroo. His face is long and rat-like. His eyes look like peeled grapes. His appearance causes families to move their kids across the street when he approaches, shuffling down the scorching street, barefoot. He seems totally out of it, and is scorned even by those who will always flip some pesos to the needy.

Yet, he survives. I went into a lunch place one day, and there he was, with a plate of bistec Mexicana, pesos on the table, chatting with the counterman in a good natured, intelligent voice. People say he follows the tourist season, moving up and down the coast, God knows how, but going from Puerto Vallarta to Mazatlan to here to Acapulco, to Huatulco. He has that thing too, something from another world, the wind that blows through all the broken toys and makes them dangerous to hate. Maybe he’ll be moving on soon.