how the brujo got his name
Sunday 11 November 2007 | I like a cookie
One winter, while still in his twenties, the Brujo spent his vacation in Mexico.
Afterward he drove to the border to reenter the US, with one carton of cigarettes and one bottle of tequila. The guards scratched their heads and were ultimately unable to accept this paucity of consumption—that’s it?! They peered at him suspiciously. Hair down to his waist and a beat-up, falling-apart hippie car; what else could he have been in their country to do but smuggle drugs or guns? (They probably couldn’t imagine “to hop over barbed wire into other people’s cow pastures and stare at their cacti.”)
Again and again the guards asked, drogas y armas? drogas y armas? both of which he steadfastly denied. This made them all the more determined, so they began to dismantle his vehicle, seeking the plastic baggies of pot or coke, the undeclared bottles of alcohol that just weren’t there. (”Because I’d already drunk it all!” he explained to me when he told me this story, spreading his hands in mock innocence.) Methodically at first, then with increasing berserkitude, the border officials ripped apart his car, searching but finding nothing. Until one of them came across the tarot cards.
He never travels without them. (I get up and go into the bedroom to verify this and sure enough, along with the Big Book and the 12 & 12, they’re gone—for a 48-hour trip to NM.) The guards gathered around to see, asking each other what they were, until one said, in quiet horror: Brujería. He pointed at the unlikely looking scrawny squinting russet-haired Irish boy in question, declaring: El brujo! El brujo! Within minutes his car had been repacked and they were waving him hastily through.
As well, I call him that because—because when, year before last, I swore never again—when I said honey stick a fork in me, ’cause I am SO DONE—he somehow talked me into everything all over again—the vacuuming, the baby talk, the mismated pillowcases, the bickering, the exploding toilet and the funny-smelling Thai leftovers, the guilty lesbian-affair dreams and the groggy after-nap erotic awakenings—my forgetting ever to play my own CDs; my absentmindedly turning crunchy black dress socks right-side-out when I sort the laundry; my saying that this time I am not going to be the one to split the utility bills and write the checks and address the envelopes and make sure we have stamps, and then somehow being the one who does it—the all of it. And the missing him like a son of a bitch when he’s out of town for two bloody days. The saving up of weird, random, disturbing and pearling things to tell him—the barely ambulatory anorexic girl outside the language building, swaddled in a heavy coat in ninety-degree heat, interior and lethally fragile; the again cowboy in line at CVS with an automatic handgun casually stuffed in the butt of his jeans; the way Persephone lowered her voice so her girlfriend, gurgling happily in the nearby swimming pool, wouldn’t overhear, us talking in a Tucson clay-tiled courtyard about relationship’s strangling of desire; the way I fell into a highway trance and imagined, goosepimpling, La Llorona ripping and pulling at gauze-purple star-scattered nightsky. The involuntary selfish thoughts of what I would do if he died in a car accident (what music we would play at the memorial service, how the Ex would probably kill me with her bare hands, how I would enter some monastery afterward and wither away into silence). The looking at the clock, because he called from the road at noon and it’s 5:40 now and it will probably be another couple of hours before he’s home. Pye strolling back and forth across my typing hands and occasionally rubbing her fur, still smelling faintly of sour butter, against my face.
I’d better finish disinfecting the bathroom before he gets here.
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