Mexico F#$@%^*g City

Boshier

The end of life as we know it.

Dad got pink slipped today. A common term used in the States for getting ‘fired,’ without someone actually standing in front of you, leaning into your face screaming you’re fired.

It’s Friday on our three day Labour Day weekend that celebrates the working man here in the good old United States of America; there’s irony for you; fired on Labour Day. Dad said that’s when it usually happens, (although not usually Labour Day), but at the end of the working week, when you get pink slipped. I am dreaming of being slipped the tongue one day, Labour Day or any other day in fact would be fine by me.

The pink piece of paper that details and terminates one’s employment is added in with your last and final paycheck in a little brown envelope that is left in a cubby hole in your office and basically tells you never to come back. Up until an hour ago our Dad was the Charter School coordinator at Notre Dame High School in Van Nuys, where up until an hour ago Dad was also the head of the Philosophy Department. (Both prestigious positions).

Over his five year stint, he called it tenure, (obviously not the case as it turned out), he moved up with promotions to supplement his pay in the administrative office to become the second in command under the Principal as the highly esteemed leader of the highly academic Charter School. But now, as I write this journal, come diary, come memory; he is unemployed, out of work and we are broke.

A lot can change in the space of an hour.

The Principal explained to Dad that Dad made too much money as the coordinator and head of the Philosophy Department as well so he was chosen as the first to be given the ‘boot’ as it were, whatever that means, given the cutbacks in Education, and now all of the other teachers could stay working at the school because of his pink slip and he should feel proud of himself. This is where Dad’s confused expression first started.

The Charter School Education Program is one run by the city. The program takes all the smart kids, the Asians mainly, Indians and a few Whites and puts them in special classes, where they get a better education than the Hispanics and Blacks.

I forgot to say we live in Los Angeles. Mom, Dad and Mag and me. Dad always said he didn’t make the rules and none of the school programs were his business or responsibility. He stated, matter of factly, to Mom that there were many Hispanics and Blacks in the program, but she always came back and quoted statistics of less than one percent of one percent and said he was a racist and a liar when it came up in conversation at the dinner table which it never did unless she brought it up, which she always did. I have to admit there were very few of us Whites so I couldn’t really figure out who was right or wrong or left or right or straight forward. What do I know?

She said Blacks were African Americans anyway and should not be referred to as Black. Dad said what was he supposed to call them, off color whites and this was semantics, whatever that means, and he didn’t like to talk about it over dinner. He always followed this up with the glaring look across the table at Mom, not in front of the children. She said he was an idiot and that it was a name of a television program back in the sixties, whenever that was.

We could be talking about baseball, soccer or the weather and suddenly she would be talking about the demographics in the classroom. She called these comments segues, whatever that means. Dad said her segues were a complete change of subject which nullifies a segue and that a segue is supposed to be a natural lead into another subject. She always said semantic, pedantic or something ‘ic’ back, and carried on with her rant. We usually cleaned the table as she rambled on and drank more wine.

Mag and me go there or went there, that is, Notre Dame High School. Guess what program we are in? We were in the Charter Program, wonder how that happened? I am ten years old and Mag, short for Maggie May, is nine. I know that we are young to go to high school, but Dad, (when you are the Charter School coordinator), can do wonders, so he thought we could just push on into high and miss middle school. He called middle school a waste of time. I tended to agree. Mag asked him why we didn’t just push straight into college. He said he would think about it.

On the way home that sunny Friday afternoon, (the three of us drove back and forth from school together), Dad said he needed to stop for a drink. Mag and I thought, great, smoothies, yipeee! It was a swelteringly hot day in L.A but Dad said he needed something stronger than a smoothie if he was going to face Mom and break the news. I wasn’t sure on breaking news, I knew that toys broke all the time, but I kept silent. Do you hit news with a hammer? Mag and I started to get an uneasy feeling about this. Not only that but Mom had mentioned at dinner last night about going to Shul for Shabbat. Jews do that on Friday night, say prayers, blah blah blah. Both Mag and me felt like a drink too so we were in.

We went to this sports bar called the ‘Springbok.’ Apparently a springbok is a type of gazelle that lives in South Africa, wherever that is, and is the nickname of the South African rugby team. (We were going to start geography next semester but I suppose that’s out now as we no longer have a school to go to, we were thrown out too.)

It was really great there, the ‘Springbok’; Mag and me had never been inside before, kids aren’t allowed. They all knew Dad and when he told them what had happened they said Mag and me could stay. They all called Dad by his first name and he put everything on a tab, whatever that is. There were TV’s all over the walls, big flat screen ones, not like our twenty inch cube in the den at home, showing rugby, which seemed similar to American football but with no pads, no instant replay and seemingly no rules. There was sawdust on the floor that Mag and me ran around and slid on like an ice rink; it was great fun. People kept patting Dad on the back and buying him drinks to cheer him up. Dad held his shaking head in his hands most of the time at the bar moaning some kind of indistinguishable mantra that sounded something like, I’m fucked, over and over and over again.

Mag and me didn’t think his friends’ idea to cheer him up seemed to be working well as he still looked rather gray and sullen. The waitress brought us buffalo wings in hot sauce and said, they are on the house. Mag whispered to me that she must be an idiot because they were on a plate, not a house.

On the way home Mag asked Dad why there was sawdust on the floor? He said it made it easier to clean up when people vomited. I asked him what that meant but he didn’t speak to us the rest of the way home. When we did eventually get home, we had been driving around all over the place looking for where we lived for what seemed like hours but was actually closer to eternity, Dad staggered up the path. Mag said to me that we should probably see if there was any sawdust in the garage.

None of us were allowed in the front door so we always went around back. Mom said only guests were allowed through the front door. Mag said that we didn’t have any guests, but we never once got through that door. I don’t think it actually opened. Had it, it would have led into the hallway that again led into the living room. Mom vacuumed the room each day in expert fashion to make it look like a manicured football field with the vacuumed rows running in parallel stripes across the shag pile of the carpet, created by the push and pull action of the ‘Hoover’ also known as a vacuum cleaner. Mom said that footprints would mess up the pattern, meaning we were not allowed to walk on it. We didn’t use that room much unless we could learn to float. I think Mom did it because the bar with the booze was at the other side of the room near the window and she could see if Dad had gone and fixed a cocktail from the footprints indented into the carpet. Dad was smarter than that, he had a stash hidden in the garage. Mag and me knew, but we wouldn’t snitch, we sometimes shared a cold one ourselves when Dad was out.

We walked around to the back door and went into the kitchen. Mom was reading a food magazine, ‘Good Cooking,’ at the kitchen table with her bottle of wine. There was no sign of food on the hob top and nothing in the oven so she said we all needed to go away and buy a takeout. So much for Good Cooking Magazine, I said. Mom didn’t think it was funny when Mag and me high-fived. Mag whispered to me good retort. Dad blew it and slurred his first word, hi. Mag and me wondered why he could not even enunciate a two-lettered stinking word and that this was going to be trouble. We were on the button. Mom went ballistic, called Dad a drunk and said she was going to bed. Mag commented that it was only five thirty in the afternoon. The venomous piercing look Mag got from Mom would have melted the iceberg the Titanic had hit in thirty seconds, which would have actually saved everyone, so Mag dropped the subject and we both slunk off to our room wishing that Mom had been on the ship itself. But Mom had forgotten about Shul so we were all off the hook.

Dad sobered up and we went to Del Taco for dinner. (Funnily enough as you read on, a Mexican fast food place). He said we were on a budget now and $1 tacos were a good idea and we could each have one. Dad said he would look for a job tomorrow if he doesn’t wake up with a knife in his back. We all had a good laugh.

Before Mom got up the next day Dad told us he’d break the news after breakfast about the pink slip. He was putting it off. Things were breaking again and I was lost. Mag and I thought of dressing in black, but on reflection we thought it might give Dad’s game plan away, whatever it was going to be. We were trying to come up with a plan ourselves. We came up with some cracking good ideas for him.

#1. I came up with this: They had to pink slip Dad so they could fire the Principal and make Dad the new one but that they had to pink slip him first and lay him off for a few weeks before they could do it, to give them time to pink slip the Principal.

#2.Mag came up with: They had pink slipped Dad because they were building a new special racist Charter School in Beverly Hills full of Hispanics and Blacks shipped in from Watts and South Central and that Dad was going to be the new coordinator there, but it was going to take a little time to build, five years. (We thought Dad could use the time).

By noon on Sunday Mom still hadn’t crossed the bedroom threshold, Dad slept on the couch. Dad said he needed a drink. Mag brought him a bottle of Scotch from the garage. She said we were on a budget and that the ‘Springbok’ could wait. She also mentioned that now that he had been fired, all the so-called goodwill there may have expired and they might call in the tab and that we should avoid going there for a while. Dad said, good thinking.

Dad called his friend Dennis in Seoul, Korea, who teaches English to Korean students. He was Irish with a thick accent that no one east or even west, for that matter, of Dublin could understand. Apparently Dad said that Dennis doesn’t speak any Korean and the Koreans don’t speak any English. Mag asked how that worked. Dad said he didn’t have a clue. But he seemed a little more upbeat as it were.

His friend said, or what Dad could understand from the conversation, was that he had a friend who had a friend who had a friend etc. etc., I won’t bore you, but there was a job opening as an English teacher at a middle school in Mexico City, Mexico, but no one was taking it for fear of being kidnapped, held for ransom, and shot for being a white anglo-saxon mother fucker or tortured and raped or both and a combination of all of the above. Dad thought this was a good opportunity for us to see the world and a positive step forward. Mag and me had serious doubts.

Dad called the school and he got the job. He asked if they needed to see a resume, but the lady on the end of the line asked, why?

Mag and me knew when Dad told Mom about the pink slip. He had his plan worked out, so when Mom finally got up he found the guts to tell her. Flowers were involved and Mag said Dad was an idiot. I tended to agree. We went to our room and had to climb under the blankets and put pillows over our heads during the melee that ensued.

This is how it went: The first hint that something was up was the loud scream followed by the long deafening silence, I think they call that an oxymoron, whatever that is, and it wasn’t coming from Dad but we knew someone in there was a moron. The next give-away was glass smashing against the walls behind the closed doors. Mag said to me there goes the Lalique vase and the glass menagerie that Mom had been collecting since she was a child. The little animals we knew and loved and played with were a gonner. Mom had told Mag that one day they would be hers but we both realized we would need an awful lot of glue now. So we both kissed Mag’s inheritance goodbye there and then. There is something funny about possessions; Mag and me don’t think they really mean much anymore, we won’t have any anyway.

The furious slaughter of the objet d’art as Mom called them was so fast and furious it was like Mom had a Gatling gun in the bedroom and was loading it with all of our future stuff with a shovel. Mag looked through the keyhole and saw Mom jumping up and down clutching and pulling her hair out, screaming, Mexico fucking City over and over again. We decided to feed the cat. (P.S. it was a feral because Mom would never let us have a pet and the neighbor said she would feed it after we had left).

I think Dad is tired. He is back with his head in his hands at the kitchen table. He told us to go out and buy a Big Mac or two and we thought it was great idea. We took money from his wallet on the counter and Mag lifted the keys for Mom’s car. I didn’t know Mag could drive.

We went into the drive-through lane to order and the girl at the pay window asked Mag if she was old enough to drive and had to lean out of the window as Mag’s arms were a little on the short side, to take the money. Mag asked her if this was the best job she could get and if so she needed to go back to school. She shut up and we got our food. Life was starting.

Dad slept in the car in the driveway that night. He thought it might be safer out of the house. He said it would be fine. Mag got him a blanket and I poured him a drink. I was getting better at this bar tending stuff. The next day we woke him up and he said we should push onto school. Mag said it was Monday and reminded him he had been fired and that there was no school to attend. I am not entirely sure what that had to do with anything but it sounded good. Dad said he had been fucked out of the blue with the pink slip. I started to wonder what colors had to do with anything and I thought some LSD could come in useful.

Mom calmed down and very quietly slit both her wrists in the bathroom with Dad’s razor. Mag told Dad that they were supposed to be safety blades in today’s razors and he replied Mom was then very clever to have managed such a feat, bravo.

Mom had barreled out of the bathroom, blood squirting everywhere. She was like a red human fire hydrant. It spurted out all over the walls and her precious carpet in the living room. Dad raised an eyebrow and said, lucky we are moving to Mexico City. I shook my head. I can tell you I for one am looking forward to it, life was getting nutty even from my perspective but Mexico City is looking good. I am