A Great Longing

Gig Harbor –

Mickey came with only a truckload of tools from the south. His body built for logging, the hair set back in a long rope with rubber bands every few inches. 

I went right over the street and pushed his shoulder. He grunted. 

“Are you really a Mexican?”

He looked around and winced because he didn't know how to answer a basic question. “I'm from Arizona.”

It was enough to just run up to a stranger and hug him. Really hug him and force him to realize that he wasn't in Arizona anymore. The playful rain came down and burned the native grass. The peninsula is full of water but the grass needs lime or there is an improper chemical reaction. 

I hugged him again and said, “we waited so long.” then I whistled for my dog and my woman. “Kanji boy, take a sniff!”

Kanji came over excited and completely ignored Mickey’s two hounds who wanted to play. He sniffed Mickey by the leg and got caught in his walking. Michelle was more reserved because she didn't know if he would stay. 

“We’ve waited for a Mexican for so long.”

It must have been overcast because Mickey couldn't tell that we were speaking in earnest. We tried to pull him over to our side of the street though the houses were all built by a quadriplegic and had wheelchair access in every shower. The appliances were new but called Hot Point and we feared that if we turned on the burners the quadrapolegic’s houses would burn. 

So we dragged big Mickey onto our covered patio with the six burner BBQ. Michelle ran back to the kitchen. Mickey just mumbled that he was only half Mexican. Half native. Half Arizona. It didn’t matter. Our cupboard had all the beers of the world.

I handed a cerveza called Rogue River and watched the Mexican take off the cap with his teeth. He was very strong. Michelle brought out a grand tray of thin cut meat. I lit the grill and sat back so happy. 

“You probably have spices, right?”

Mickey said he brought chainsaws but no spices. 

That was ok. 

We didn't want to be rude so we just listened to his story for a time. He was a cameraman for the local news in Yuma. Making only nine dollars an hour and wondering what it was all for. 

I nodded. Had to get out of the Southlands myself. Never knew there was an entire state up north with Green River killers and just a few hours ride to the Canadian border. A fella could get lost in all of the hot springs and rain forest of the Key Peninsula. 

The steak was marinating in its own blood next to the grill. Mickey looked over at the pan and we looked so joyfully forward that he didn't really feel the intensity of our love. In fact it took Michelle’s loud belly to cry out. That intense hollow numb we all know as digesting air. Hunger pains from a few feet away.

Finally, after nearly an hour, Mickey understood. “Did you need my help cooking the steak?”

Hallelujah!

We nearly clapped as we both ran into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of flour, some bacon lard we kept, and all the armful of spices we had ever found in the Pacific Northwest. There were Missus Dash, Allspice, peppercorns, and some good stuff called turmeric. We found cinnamon and dill. We had just a little bit of oregano left because we were still young and practicing to make pasta. 

“Is this right?” We didn't know. 

Mickey was a few years older and grunted as he reached down to take something out of his pocket. It was a beautiful pocket knife with a blade maybe four inches. Michelle and I nearly shared a kiss. It was so beautiful. 

Mickey looked around. The nearest neighbor was thirty feet away and her name was Lenore. A nice lady who had joined Alcoholic’s Anonymous just to have some friends. Mickey went deep deep deep down into his pocket. The wrist was covered by the denim. He sort of squatted as he reeled it out: one long green habanero pepper. 

Oh my God we were so lucky. 

He began cutting up the pepper on Michelle’s grandmother’s tea stand. It had been in her family for a hundred years and she didn't care that it was only a knifeboard now. He made the pepper go into little cubes – it was so beautiful. Then he poured this on the waiting meat, wrung his fingers free of seeds and added salt. 

“You _really don't know how to do this?”

We hadn't had Mexican food in three years. We were famished. 

Michelle told him he could spit on the steak if it would help. The saliva is ninety percent antiseptic but there are enzymes that collect on coffee beans from regurgitating tigers in Indonesia. Mickey didn't listen because we were not very good at cooking. He said, “You don't have tortilla or anything?”

We pointed to the sad bag of flour. it was slumped over like someone had punched it in the gut. 

Then Mickey shook his head like our sad little flour would ruin his dish. He ran out of our house into the rain and we didn't know if we would see him again. 

One minute

Then three

We began to argue over six minutes that Michelle had scared him off with her red hair. She always looked angry. She said that I should have given him more beer. I didn't know if the man could cook if I got him drunk. 

The steak was getting too hot on the grill and I turned off the grill, and closed the propane cylinder in sadness. It is very important to close the propane cylinder if it is being stored away for a season. 

We should have checked the cable channels but we were both miserably hungry..

We had offended the state's only Mexican..

I said, “What if we just sort of grab a tarp and go camp out in front of his house for a while?” We were so sick of Puyallup style chow mein served in an ice scream scooper. The flavors of the Northwest are like eating acorn meat without any salt. Michelle and I used to just get in the car and hunt for good food for hours. 

Now good food was right across the street. We didn't know how to repair the wrong first impression. Our dog, Kanji, didn't even bother to chase his tail because he already understood it taste so rotten. 

Michelle got all fixed up with blood red lipstick, a black woolen jacket and even a dress. We decided we were going to drive to Federal Way, south of the airport. There were always rumors of a black food market that gathered organically near Boeing's Air and Flight Museum. There were also rumors that if he got in the car and drove to Yakima that we might find a fledgling Taqueria. A little taste of the Southlands. We could maybe order a small U-haul and have Michelle follow in the Camry. We would humbly munch on the non refrigerated food for days. The U-haul representative would call, asking “Are you going to need the truck for a very long time?” And we wouldn't know.

How long did it take to eat a U-haul full of tacos and tortas? Would the burritos not keep in the 46 degree winter? We actually had too much rain to believe that the pico-de-gallo would mold over.

I put on in my tie and didn't bother fetching an umbrella. One had to get used to being cold and unfulfilled when they live on the dumpy side of the Cascade Mountain Range. 

“Hey guys?”

It was Mickey. That gorgeous man. I mean Mexican. 

He had a large tub of frioles and steaming flat bread. The new neighbor had crushed Roma tomatoes, grown a lemon tree, and found a Catholic priest to bless some salsa. We just stood in the rain not believing that anything so delicious looking could be found in Washington.

Mickey was not used to standing in the rain with any food. He motioned to our door with his head and said the tub of food was getting heavy. 

I threw Michelle away from me. I think she landed in a puddle with a broken cell phone. I know this because cell phones were new at the time and she woul not forget this phone for the next ten years. 

Mickey!

I wanted to make love to that man. He looked at Michelle in the mud but still remembers to wipe his feet as he entered with the tray. We ate like the Count of Monte Crisco after so much prison. We drank like Vikings coming home from Sicily, confused that the lower latitudes had made us so soft and needy. 

Mickey was given so much beer that he finally burped after a time. That belch filled our home better than any potpourri or extracted oil of jasper. We tried to keep it in for a month, only exiting the house by the garage. We didn't even answer the door when Lenore came over with a casserole. It seemed like our lives were complete for a time. We were happy. 

One day we decided to celebrate our great love for our neighbor. We also realized that it wasn't morally right to get drunk with Mickey every few days, have him cook off his tail for our great appetites and then kind of motion him to leave at midnight so we could make love without any instructions.

I said to Michelle, "You have to find him a woman!" Because Michelle is a woman and it is not right if I should do all the testing and make unwed babies. She understood the vast wisdom that a woman should find a woman. She went to her blackberry device because soft button QWERTY keyboards were not popular then. 

“Ah…. Ashley?”

“I don't know her. Is she good enough for Mickey?”

No. 

Ashley was a whiney sort of friend who was always single every few months because her man had no money. We didn't want Mickey to fall in love and leave us to get a better job. 

“Who else you got?”

Well there was Sofie. A curious case. The woman had been to a family reunion and drank so much that she had a child with her cousin. Now, she did not want to visit her own family and so she was always free. 

“What if Mickey doesn't want to be a dad?”

Michelle said with arms like that, “He’d make a wonderful Dad.” I had to agree. 

Then we considered that if Mickey fell in love with Sofie and her double-family child that he would definitely have no further time for our Taqueria Nights. He might even choose to grow out a beer gut and stay home and watch family shows like "Touched by An Angel." We might even lose him to the church. 

It was then that we decided to import a woman from the Southlands. To really find a beauty who could share for our life. We had a two bedroom setup and neither Michelle or I really needed an office. There were two handicapped showers. Plenty of forest styled parking. An imported companion could be just the glue we needed to hold all of the joy in our world together. 

Read through the State Department website to figure out how to legally get a worker from across the border. Back then you could find a foreign bank, deposit a hundred bucks, grab a business license and run the “Satellite Employee” at the federal rate of like 40,000 pesos a month with board. 

But what will she do? We can't say "Cleaner" because the Feds are cracking down on all the illegal Canadians.

I didn't know for sure. 

This is when we researched and realized that the Microsofties over in Kirkland all had young children and foreign au pairs. This means that the state department liked special skills for work vista. Like architects, nurses and nuclear scientist. They also understood that we wanted to raise our child with knowledge of bilingual Spanish. At least we told them it was so. 

There In began the hunt for a foster baby because we did not know if Mickey could wait ten months for our attempts at a child. Michelle’s digestion system is very slow and he might have have to wait a whole year. 

The quickest way to get a baby back then was to fly to the Peoples Republic of China and browse through the recycle shops. We decided to leave Mickey with our catalog of Au Pair options. Even though we knew it would be faster to drive to Mexico than France, we went off to get a new baby in Asia and left him home to his own devices..

When we got back with our new bay, Xi Pai Lei, Mickey wasn't too excited to help us with an Au Pair selection. He said that the good ones were probably already taken because the catalog was in paper and the America Online internet connector had just came out. Michelle and I grinned from ear to ear.

“Are you saying it is better to choose a live and available sitter for ourselves?”

Mickey shrugged ad tried to get us drunk on Molli. Hoping that we would forget about taking him south, below America’s beltline, get right into the nitty gritty and complain that gasoline was sold by the liter which made the Petro very expensive. 

We gave our new baby to Lenore for a week and packed up nervous Mickey into the Camry. We tried to get him to sing driving songs like, “I'm on my way to Caliiii-for---ni-ya (in the middle of Beverly Hills.)”.. we switched the lyrics to “in the middle of Au Pair love…” and Mickey got very nervous. 

We passed many taco stands but would not stop because we thought it was indecent to salivate over others. At the border, at that time, there was no one to stop us from driving through. As long as we left San Diego’s Freeway, ducked under the barbed wire, and felt the commingling of music/sun/maracas we knew there was a place reserved for us in heaven. The scattering of vendors as we drove through their offerings and street names like Revoluciones had such passion. We almost talked Mickey into slowing down so we could barter for our next family member. 

He said it was better to get out of Tijuana and we took some signs to a coast called Ensenada. There was an ironworks foundry of dinosaurs and unicorns for the lawn displays. They were already rusty looking and so we were tempted to bring them back to Seattle rain. Mickey said we should stay focus because our new child was bonding with Lenore and we did not know if she would rub brandy on it's gums that night. The woman was very old fashioned but much too ugly to keep Mickey home with us at night. 

We began worrying that we could have saved a girl from human trafficking back in Tijuana. We worried that our Au Pair would become homesick and that our child wouldn't have anyone to teach it the magic of Mexican Cooking. 

Michelle and I were just bending over, maybe in prayer, when we looked up and saw that he was talking to the artist who made all the ironworks. 

“I thinks he’s gonna get a deal on the Triceratops” This was long before the Triceratops became debated as a Torosaurus and people were not confused about dinosaurs at that time.

We waited. Crossed our fingers. Hoped and prayed that we could get a deal without offending the locals.

After a time, Mickey came back to our Camry and didn't even scratch his head without saying, “I'm not going back with you guys. “

He looked at he woman welder and waved. Then he turned to us and admitted he wanted to explore with his root. Or maybe "explore his roots." One of those things. 

Michelle and I were dumbfounded and too shocked to even get back into the car before nightfall. Back then they had roving gangs who would steal foreigners for ransome. We didn't have anyone back home to pay the ransom because Xi Ping Lei was too small. 

We drove quietly for many hours. Showed the custom officials our license and opened mouths to evidence our Yankee diet. It was very dreary driving home. 

Somewhere by the Oregon border we got the idea to send our baby back to China to get an education in Chow Mein and plum sauce. Now we have to eat our meals with large glass of water. The food is so sterile in the Pacific Northwest ...it's like not really eating at all; just taking medical pills. 

We believe that we have prepared for the future. When Xi Ping comes back we can retire. Who knows, maybe she will even love the rain.