When I used to live in Monterrey I would go on many unproductive walks. They said taking taxis was dangerous but that wasn’t why I chose to walk. I chose to walk to count the dogs, and not the feral ones that littered the streets in packs—I had too much respect for those. No, I wanted to count the ones that families kept on their roofs. The ones that pranced back and forth on their raised embankments, peering over the edge. And, sometimes, when it got really late, maybe around 2 or 3 am and the only other cars left on the city streets were the forest green military convoys, I’d take a minute or two to just stare directly into one of those dogs’ eyes. It didn’t matter what kind of dog, any would do. I would whistle to get their attention and then it was on—who would break eye contact first? Why I did this? I’m not sure. I’d like to think because, usually, I was drunk during those types of hours and always wondered if I could get any of those dogs to actually jump off or not. I guess you could say I’m a little morbid.
Well one night I had a bit too much to drink at this bar called Nandas and wound up walking home with this girl that studied theatre at the Escuela de Filosofía y Letras UANL. Aside from that, I did not know much about her and would go on to not know much about her ever, except that her favorite book was The Little Prince—but that’s irrelevant. That night we should have just headed south toward the Santa Lucia river where my apartment was, but, no, we took a detour instead. We headed north from Nandas to stop by an Oxxo (I wanted to buy a half-pint of Jimador before the morning dry hours hit). It took us a while to find one, but by the time we had we realized that we’d wandered away from the trash filled valley streets and were now walking up the hillside neighborhood streets—it did not take me long to find a dog on a roof. Drunk, I asked the girl if she thought I could get the dog to jump. Y porque harías eso?
“He wants to be freed, can’t you tell?”
She told me not to be silly, but I didn’t listen. I went on and on, trying to get the dog to jump, practically howling, until it happened: I heard a thud and, sure enough, the dumb dog had jumped. The girl had cried out in a mixed state of shock and grief but not because the dog had died from its fall, but because it was very clearly not going to live much longer. I did the best I could to put it out of its misery with whatever had been available to me but there had not been much. The girl had just watched in bewilderment toward the situation she, through no fault of her own, had been placed to witness. Occasionally she had tried to say something about trying to fix the situation, calling someone, or getting someone—but that had not been possible. Some minutes later we found ourselves inside the back of an overpriced taxi, speechless.
When we arrived to my apartment the girl would not stop drinking from the tequila bottle. There had not been much left in the half-pint, but, for a woman of her size, it had been plenty. Porque hiciste eso? Que tienes? I had tried to calm her yelling down, telling her that it had just been a dog, but statements like that never work. She had called me un imbecile and some other words that were spoken too fast for me and my pocho spanish to understand. I told her that she was probably right about all those things, but to please try and relax. I even tried to make a joke and brought up the movie “All Dogs Go To Heaven.”
Que? Piensas que eso fue chistoso? Mirando algo asi? I didn’t think it would happen, I tried to tell her. Tienes una problema sabes? Haciendo algo tan mórbido! There was that word again. Maybe, I admitted. Mira, a la otra que quieres caminar, pretendiendo que eres un hombre lobo o que sea, no me invites!
I don’t know what caused what happened next to happen, but it went like this: I began to speak to her in English—I named things in the room, curtain, lamp, chair, talked about the Kremlin in Russia, what I had for breakfast the day of my 13th birthday, I told her that the flip of the coin was more often than not to repeat itself and to be careful about it; completely random streams of consciousness. I knew that she couldn’t understand the language yet the words all came out in a manner as if I thought she could. I couldn’t help it. Even after she’d had enough and left the apartment, I didn’t stop. I just went on and on, talking to no one. At least that’s how I’d been found. There’s a lot wrong, I guess.