Stuck Between a Mariachi and a Hard Place
 Gil Gevins - PVNN
November 13, 2010
| | Gil Gevins, named "Jalisco's Funniest Human Being," is a twenty-five year Puerto Vallarta resident. | |
Whenever a North American moves to Mexico one of the first hurdles he or she must overcome is the challenge of dealing with tanks - those tiresome containers which play such crucial roles in our day-to-day existence. Though they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, these rascally receptacles can, for the purposes of simplicity, all be lumped into three general categories.
First, there is the propane tank. At our house, these thirty-kilo cuties were replenished twice a month by a pair of slapstick individuals who, but for the lack of a "Larry," could have had their own TV show. Moe, the more urbane of the two, drove the large clunky truck.
His assistant, Curly, was an affable young man with a gently sloping brow who had been exposed to an excess of gas fumes at a critical stage in his embryonic development. Curly was forever surprising me with questions which anyone who had been dwelling on the surface of the Earth for more than six months should have known the answer to. Once, after five years of regular bimonthly visits to our home, Curly had turned to me and said, "So, do you live here?"
But half a loaf is better than none, and while Moe stood around eating tortas, drinking beer and casting aspersions upon his partner's manhood, Curly did all the work: connecting, disconnecting and carrying the cruelly heavy tanks back and forth between our house and the truck.
Then, there is the septic tank, a sinister submarine-shaped chamber of horrors buried deep in the ground beneath our terrace. The first time we were compelled to unearth this monster, the consequences went beyond anything even Steven King could have conceived.
Most of our neighbors, terrified out of their tacos by the atavistic associations aroused by such an appalling procedure, had voluntarily evacuated themselves to Yelapa for the duration, or until our fearless plumber, Gomer the Gringo, had sounded the "all clear."
And finally, there is the water tank (tinaco), a large rectangular cement box built atop a brick tower adjoining the north side of our home. Once a year I was supposed to arrange with the gardener to have this tank drained and cleaned, a task I was happy to perform since the sum total of my participation consisted in holding on to the ladder for thirty seconds while the gardener climbed up it, and then several hours later holding on to it again while he climbed down.
Sadly, as the years flew by and our gardener, not young to begin with, streaked right on past mandatory interment age, the entire responsibility for cleaning the tinaco fell upon my less than willing skinny white shoulders.
Soon, the tinaco's annual enema, like many another chore which my wife regarded as essential (but which I considered optional), became something of a sore point between us. And when Lucy became convinced that a foreign body had invaded the tank, tainting the sacred waters, our small difference of opinion ballooned itself into a full-blown schism.
"Trust me," I told her, "there's a cement cover firmly, squarely and securely in place over that opening. It is absolutely unmovable, and nothing larger than an ant could possibly squeeze past it."
"How do you know it's still in place?" Lucy asked.
"Because the last time Filiberto was up there, he told me it was."
"That was two years ago," Lucy pointed out, "and Filiberto was practically blind even then. And why is the water looking grayish all of a sudden?"
"Honey, we're in Mexico," I said. A lame excuse to be sure, but one which, oddly enough, worked more often than not.
Several days later Lucy became convinced that a mild but inappropriate odor was now escaping from our taps along with the water, which she insisted had turned a more ominous shade of gray. "I don't know," I told her. "Maybe my nose has stopped functioning altogether, but I don't smell a thing."
"Pretty soon," Lucy remarked, "counting all your malfunctioning organs is going to require an abacus, starting with what's left of your Johnson, after I've run it through the Cuisinart."
Our roles reversed, it was now Filiberto, the largely sightless gardener, holding the rickety ladder while I, stripped down to a pair of cut-off jeans, made the long climb up to the tinaco. The first thing I noticed, upon dismounting the ladder, was that the cover was indeed askew, and I was fairly certain I knew why.
"Well," Lucy called from down below, "is the cover in place?"
"Not exactly," I mumbled.
"Unmovable, huh?"
"Must've been that quake, back in '94," I called down to her. "Remember, it gave everything a pretty good..."
"Are you going to look inside?"
"Yes, honey."
Not without difficulty, I slid the heavy cement cover away from the opening and stuck my head inside. We had already drained the tinaco earlier in the day. All that lay inside it now was a small puddle of water. And a dead iguana.
"You were right, honey."
"What is it?"
"An iguana. A really nice one," I added quickly.
"Dead?" she asked. "Like you're going to be?"
"Oh, come on, baby..."
"Come on, baby?" Lucy snarled. "I've been bathing in dead iguana water for five days, and..."
"We can't be sure it's been dead that long," I said reasonably. "Iguanas are notoriously strong swimmers."
"Brushing my teeth!"
"Honey, you spit that water out. It's not like you've been drinking..."
"Washing the dishes! Eating off plates rinsed with dead iguana water!"
"Look, it's only an iguana. From what I understand, they're strictly vegetarians. It's like having digested lettuce in your water. And he seems to be, uh, basically intact. At most, he's been dead for a few..."
Lucy had a pretty fair arm for a woman, and the rotten mango she launched at my head whizzed by my left ear with surprising speed. Fortunately, she decided to go back inside the house then, which allowed me to safely descend the ladder and gather together the tools of my newly adopted trade.
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