The Devil Knows Best
Copyright © 2011 by Ryan Moehring
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U. S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Author’s note: Most of the stories in this book are inspired by real events. Some are embellished. Others are completely fabricated. Characters based on real people have fictitious names and identifying features. If you happen to see your name anywhere in the text, then you probably have a pretty common name. Either way, if we’ve never met, please assume that the story in question isn’t about you. I must mention that neither the Hostess® brand nor Twinkies® have any affiliation whatsoever with this poor excuse for literature. In fact, I’m confident they wouldn’t approve of it at all.
Special thanks are due to the following gentlemen, who gracefully endured my bouts of premature manopause as we pieced this book together.
Editing and Typesetting: Ben Dayton Cover Design: Jacob Custer
Interior Illustrations: Jared Moehring (my very funny fourteen-yearold brother)
For my Faceless Wonder
Contents
The Devil Knows Best
The Mexican word for drinking straw is popote. I learned this while finishing my bachelor’s degree in Mexico. What I didn’t know at the time was nearly every Latin American country has its own word for straw, and when you order a piña colada con un popote in, let’s say, Nicaragua (or virtually any other Latin American country), you’re asking for a piña colada with a side order of poop. Popo means poop, which makes popote a big pile of poop. I must have ordered poop with my mixed drinks in three different countries before one kind bartender alerted me to the error of my ways.
Besides naming their straws after piles of excrement, I also learned that Mexicans eat nearly every meal together as a family. After lunch and dinner, they have a sobremesa, during which everyone sits around talking, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes. I enjoyed the tradition because it allowed me to get to know my Mexican host family and my two gringo roommates. But more importantly, it provided me with an opportunity to practice my Spanish, which I desperately needed. My Spanish sounded something like a Special Olympics gold-medal winner with a speech impediment struggling through his acceptance speech—while tripping on psychedelic mushrooms.
At the end of the first week of the semester, my roommates and I attended a school-sponsored retreat to a nearby natural spring. When we returned, I recounted the story of the excursion to my host family during an after-lunch sobremesa. I told them that on the way home, a group of girls sat with us in the back of the bus, flirting with us the whole time. As Maria, my surrogate Mamá, gasped in horror, I instantly knew I had said something wrong. I later learned that I had confused the word for flirting, coquetear, with chaquetear, which means to jack off. It took Maria’s husband, Guillermo, a week to convince her that I wasn’t a sexual deviant who needed to be locked in his room at night.
Everyone called Guillermo “Memo,” for short. He was a serious-looking man in his early sixties, with a tight bottom lip and very handsome features. He fancied himself a gentleman and took great pleasure in showing off his extensive art collection to anyone who would indulge him. If you liked a particular painting or sculpture, Memo would provide you with a detailed story about the inspiration behind the piece, as well as point out those works containing personalized tributes by his artist friends.
I spoke the best Spanish of the three American students living under Memo’s roof, and apparently had the best grasp on art history. I mercifully restrained myself whenever a tribute on a painting or piece of pottery was made out to someone else other than Memo, or when a painting he claimed was given to him by a close friend and famous Mexican artist was actually a drug-store print by Rembrandt or Picasso. He declined to comment when I asked him how long he and Monet had been friends.
Art defined Memo. He had spent his whole life working for the local phone company, and even now, as a senior citizen, he was regularly asked to make the long drive from Cuernavaca over the mountain pass into Mexico City to help with particularly complex issues. The only material possessions he had to show for his lifetime of work were his art collection and his house, which fittingly, was situated on Calle del Artista—Artist Street. Memo proudly told me one afternoon that the street was named after Paul Newman, who lived in this exact house in the late sixties when he and Robert Redford filmed Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. According to Memo, my room was the exact same in which the famous American icon had stayed during filming.
Memo’s eldest son had slept in that bedroom after Paul, and now it was my turn to enjoy the view that overlooked the backyard garden and pool. Some nights I would pop out the screen of my window, smoke a joint, close my eyes, and replay famous scenes from the movie. My favorite scene to reenact was Butch (played by me) and the Sundance Kid holding up a Bolivian bank with a crib sheet and our pistols, neither of us able to communicate well enough in Spanish to get the message across to the bank teller. “Dame todo el money before I shoot you in the stinking cabeza, cucaracha!”
Maybe it was the fact that Memo saw a bit of Paul Newman in me, or perhaps it was because I was the only one whose Spanish was good enough to have a semi-normal conversation with him— whatever it was, he took a liking to me. While my somewhat younger roommates were out on the town stalking women, Memo and I would stay up late, making mojitos with the fresh mint from his garden and arguing about any number of topics. Religion, politics, sex; no subject was off-limits, and more often than not, Memo and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the fence. After seven or eight drinks one night, I told him that instead of going with my roommates to Acapulco the following weekend, I intended to travel three hours to the Aztec ruins at Teotihuacán. As a man who appreciated art and culture, his reaction surprised me.
“Why do you want to travel all day long to look at the crumbling pyramids of a failed, blood-thirsty civilization?” He harshly slurred in Spanish. “Besides, these days it is nothing more than a dusty tourist trap.”
I gave him my standard academic response. “Because Aztec origins are a vital part of what it means to be a modern Mexican. Octavio Paz once said that Mexicans are not only enigmatic to others, but also to themselves. Maybe if Mexicans were more in touch with their heritage, they wouldn’t be—”
“Ay, puta madre,” Memo interjected with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This! This is exactly my point. You read too many books. You don’t live enough. You see this?” He gestured toward one of the several nude female portraits hanging in his mini art gallery. “This is what you need, Ryan. You are young. Go with your friends to Acapulco and get laid. Get some pussy while you still can. Before you know it, you will be married with kids and working a job that you hate. Your woman will get fat. Then what? Life will be over for you, my friend.”
I shook my head, speechless.
“Trust me, mi’jo. I know what I’m talking about. Más sabe el Diablo por viejo que por Diablo.” He then stood up on his wobbly legs and braced himself against the table before leaving. “I have to piss.”
With that, Memo left the room. I waited for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the nude artwork on the wall and finishing the last of my drink, but he did not return. I lay awake in Paul Newman’s bedroom that night, thinking about what Memo had said about the Devil. The saying roughly translates to “The Devil knows more from being old than from being the Devil.” An equivalent proverb might be “With age comes wisdom,” or as Julius Caesar once said, “Experience is the greatest teacher.”
Before I fell asleep that night, I pulled out my copy of the complete works of Tomás Rivera, one of the most well-known Chicano authors. The author’s parents were migrant workers of Mexican descent, and his stories center on his childhood experiences growing up on farms across America. Like Memo, Rivera’s parents were devout Catholics, and despite their unrelenting hardships, they were steadfast in their faith. Young Rivera resents their superstitions, because, as he sees it, if God really existed, he would not allow the Devil to cause them so much suffering. After all, they said their prayers every night and went to mass every week. They were good people, but for some reason, God continued to allow the Devil to punish them. One night, despite his uncle’s warning, he decides to take matters into his own hands. Young Rivera sneaks outside, exactly at midnight, and tries to confront the Devil himself.
Unsure what to call him, he tries all the names he knows: “Devil! Lucifer! Satan!” But he receives no reply. Next, he thinks it might be better to curse the Devil. He uses every cuss word he has ever heard—he even curses the Devil’s mother, but still nothing happens. It is just him, all alone, in the peaceful, silvery night. Emboldened by this apparent victory, he declares that there is no Devil. But if there is no Devil, then neither is there a—but he doesn’t dare finish the sentence.
In Rivera’s stories, the youth are portrayed as heroes who transcend the ignorance and superstitions of their elders. Reading that story reminded me of my discussion with Memo that night. The Devil isn’t smart because he’s old, I thought. The Devil doesn’t even exist. I liked Memo, but he was just wrong about the ruins. I’d take ancient pyramids over getting laid any day.
The weekend came, and Memo still had not talked me out of going to the ruins. Convinced that trying to change my mind was a lost cause, he instead focused on making sure I knew exactly where to go and what to say to the people I encountered on my journey. He volunteered to give me a ride to the bus stop, mostly I think, so he could quiz me. “What is the name of the subway stop that will take you to your second bus?”
“We’ve already gone over this, Memo. Indio Verde.”
“Perhaps if you would stop smoking all of those goddamned marijuana cigarettes you could remember something for once in your pitiful life. It’s Indios Verdes. Plural. They still teach plural in those godforsaken American schools of yours, no?”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Yes, mi’jo,” he said. “I know all about your little stash of marijuana. You can’t bring any with you to the pyramids, by the way. So, if you have some with you, you need to give it to me now.”
Fortuitously, the very first person I met when I arrived at Mexico City’s airport was a drug dealer named Freddy. When Freddy picked me up in his car to sell me pot, he asked me how much I wanted. “I don’t know,” I said. “How much will forty bucks get me?”
It turns out that forty dollars gets you a lot—certainly more than I wanted or needed, and enough, were I to get caught carrying it, to land me in a Mexican prison for a very long time. My roommates and I spent the first two days rolling enough joints to last us the whole summer. Our hands got tired after number one hundred and seventy-seven, so we decided that would have to last us for a while. The rest we divided up into smaller bags and sold to other students to pay for our excursions and nights out on the town.
“But Memo, I always wanted to get high on top of a pyramid,” I protested.
“And I always wanted to fuck four women at the same time. You can’t always get what you want. That’s The Rolling Stones. You should know this.”
“I hate the Rolling Stones.”
“Goddamned Americans,” he retorted. “Screw up the entire planet and don’t even appreciate the few things you actually contribute to the world.” “The Rolling Stones are British, genius.” It wasn’t very
often that I was able to prove Memo wrong, so I relished every opportunity.
He quietly cursed me in Spanish.
When we arrived at the bus station, I reluctantly handed Memo the joint I had stashed in my bag. I got out of the car and asked him to take my picture. “Me la sacas, Memo?” Several bystanders turned their heads and gave me dirty looks.
Memo frowned. “God help us,” he muttered.
In Spanish, if you forget to say one word it can completely change the meaning of the entire sentence. I later learned that instead of saying, “Will you take my picture?” I said something closer to, “Will you pull it out for me?”
As I started toward the bus station, Memo called me back to the car. “Listen, boy,” he whispered. “This is not like the Estados Unidos where you can just go anywhere and do anything you like. The police are corrupt and they will try to get you into trouble if they can. If you have any problems, do not argue with them. Just give them this and they will leave you alone.” He slipped a $20 bill in my hand and closed the car door. As I tried to protest he pointed to his temple with a boyish grin and said, “Más sabe el Diablo, Ryan.” He turned the key, revved the engine, and drove away.
By the time I arrived at the ruins I was gushing with excitement. I read in one of my books during the bus ride that the base of the Pyramid of the Sun was larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. This is going to be an epic adventure, I thought. However, when I got off the bus my enthusiasm quickly deflated. On both sides of the quarter-mile-long road that led to the ruins’ entrance were at least one hundred vendors selling the same, cheaply-constructed NAFTA-era souvenirs you find on street corners in every part of Mexico. Some of the booths were occupied by children no older than nine or ten. These vendors clearly lived in the vast slum that surrounded the ruins, and were likely being exploited by some Mexico-City-based manufacturer. I wondered if somewhere in those slums was a boy, not unlike Rivera, who someday would sneak out under the twilight and boldly curse the Devil.
The complex at Teotihuacán is indescribable. A brochure I picked up on my walk toward the ruins claimed that the site covered more than 80 square kilometers and that at its height, around 450 A.D., the city was home to nearly 200,000 inhabitants. Since the majority of the historically-relevant monuments were located along the Avenue of the Dead, I decided to go there first and check out the huge pyramids at either end of the road.
In ancient times they called Teotihuacán, “the place where men go to become gods.” I found out very quickly that today it is nothing more than a bustling tourist trap where vendors and tourists alike come to be exploited.
“Excuse me, sir,” a teenage local said to me in impeccable English. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Manuel Angél Gutierrez de la Rosa. I am a citizen of Teotihuacán, and I would be honored if you would allow me to be your tour guide today and show you all of the magnificent splendors of this archeological treasure.” “Thank you, Manuel, but I need not services of guiding
temples this same day,” I responded in my infantile Spanish. His look was one of confusion that faded into disappointment. “But the most good of luck for you,” I added. “It appears as though there are many sweaty people here who would love to pay you for showing them how to make love to these old rocks.” He walked away without a word.
Months later, after my Spanish had improved tremendously, I often used this tactic to ward-off pesky vendors. Two of my favorite phrases were: “My explosive diarrhea is angry at your face,” and “The benevolent herpes monster that lives inside the castle in my pants would like to cross your moat.”
I walked through the crowd, trying my best to admire the architecture of the ruins, but with all of the tourists around, distractions were inescapable. Perhaps the loudest of these disturbances was a small American child, no older than nine, who was throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of the main plaza. “But mommy, I WANT that baby doll NOW! Pleeeeeeease, mommy! I’ll be good—please just buy me the baby!”
“Now, sweetheart, we’ve already gone over this,” her mother rationalized. “If you’re a good girl we might consider buying you the baby later, ok, angel? You know, when you scream like that it hurts mommy’s feelings. You don’t want to hurt your mommy’s feelings, do you?”
“I hate you, mommy! You’re the worst mommy in the whole world! I hope you fall down the pyramid and die! Waaaaaaaaah!”
“Well, mommy loves you anyway, my little angel.”
This was not at all what I had anticipated, so I decided to climb to the top of the main pyramid, thinking its heights might provide me some refuge from screaming toddlers. Before I reached the base of the pyramid, a man handed me a flier. Apparently Walmart had purchased land directly adjacent to the ancient city, and was planning on building a giant superstore to “serve” the surrounding population. The flier stated that the building site contained precious artifacts, and since Teotihuacán was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was illegal to build upon it. I stuffed the piece of paper into my pocket and shook my head. Memo was right about everything. I began my ascent.
The Pyramid of the Sun has exactly three hundred and sixtyfive steps, one for each day of the year. Most of the steps have had their edges worn down by the footsteps of millions of visitors over thousands of years, making their navigation a bit tricky. Once on top, I sat down on the sacrificial alter and admired the view. To my right was the Pyramid of the Moon, and behind it, the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range stretched out into the distance.
The summit of the pyramid was surprisingly high, and the people walking around down below looked like busy ants at work. I was thankful that I couldn’t hear any of them or their screaming children. For a moment I resented Memo for taking my joint, because this was the perfect place to get high, but then I thought back to his reaction when I told him of my intentions to come here.
He had been right about this place. The obnoxious tourists, the screaming children, the exploitation of the vendors—it was all too much. And now the multinationals were coming with their bulldozers.
The negativity was beginning to overwhelm me, when off in the dusty, cactus-laden distance I saw a bus approaching the complex. I suddenly wanted out of this place, and the next bus to Mexico City wasn’t coming for another two hours. If I was going to catch that bus I needed to hurry. I sprinted down the sheer steps, nearly plummeting to my death several times like the countless human sacrifices before me. As I made my descent, I imagined Aztec parents taking their kids to watch the sacrifices: “Mommy, mommy, when are they going to rip out the heart?”
“Shh, child. Very soon. We must be patient.”
“But, mommy, I want to see them rip out the heart nooooooow!”
When I reached the bottom I took a deep breath, dusted myself off, and raced to the bus loading area. On the way out of the complex, I noticed the same little girl’s parents buying her the doll she so coveted. As I passed through the vendors’ square, the sweet aroma of roasted pork filled my nostrils. I heard a man yell something in Spanish that sounded like, “Stop, chorizo!” but as tempting as a chorizo sausage snack was, I needed to catch that bus. I ignored my hunger pangs and continued sprinting. I reached the loading area with just enough time to catch my breath while I waited for the last handful of passengers to board.
This was a state bus, so it would be packed with locals and the fare would be cheap. I looked around as I paid the driver twenty pesos, noticing that I was the only gringo on board. I made my way to the back of the bus and sat down in front of a young man who was playing “Hotel California” on his acoustic guitar. The bus took off and I reclined in my seat, relaxing to the guitar’s melody. Twenty minutes into the trip, I had almost fallen asleep when
the hydraulic brakes screeched and the bus came to a stop. Two men dressed completely in black boarded the bus—M16 assault rifles in hand—and surveyed the faces of the passengers. If these chaps got on your bus in America you could be certain that something was terribly wrong, but Memo had warned me about the Mexican Federal police and their overly-dramatic tactics, so I didn’t panic. I heard one of them say gringo, and I sighed heavily as they walked towards me. Naturally, I thought. In the middle of the Mexican desert, two angry men with assault rifles are looking for me.
One of the men asked me in Spanish to open my backpack, saying something about chorizo. “A thousand sorries, sir,” I cordially replied in his language. “What business has you with my gigantic sausage? Everybody in this places seems to be in love with my sausage, yes?”
“Open the backpack,” he repeated in Spanish, confused by my response, but undaunted.
“Listen, dude,” I responded in English. “If this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny. I know that sausage guy is probably pretty broke, and on most days I would have bought lunch from him, but I was in a hurry, OK?”
“Open the backpack.”
“Is that the only sentence you know?” I started in English. “You might be the only person in Mexico whose Spanish is worse than mine.” I tried to continue in Spanish, “I knows not what you think in your fat Latin brain, but I read on occasions about the constitution of Mexico’s greatest nation, and even foreign intruding viruses such as me is protected from the searching, even so far up as seizures in the anal cavity. Now you understands me, yes? I have no sausage in my sack.”
The man paused for a second, clearly confounded by what had just escaped from my mouth, and trying to decide if he should be offended. “Open the backpack, chorizo,” he said, emphasizing the last word as if it were an insult. Why this guy had nick-named me after a spicy sausage I did not know, but he was persistent. He was also now pointing his gun directly at my face.
“Jesus Christ. All this over some goddamn sausage?” I had given up speaking Spanish to them. It was going to be all English from this point on. “Memo was right—you guys are a bunch of lunatics. Fine, have it your way.” I handed the backpack to him. “What happens next, are you going to plant some chorizo in my backpack and take me down to the precinct?”
All I had in my backpack was my passport, my wallet, a couple of liters of water, the Tomás Rivera book, a bottle of sunscreen, three granola bars, and a digital camera. The twenty-dollar bill Memo had given me, along with the rest of my money, was stashed safely in my sock. It didn’t take long before the police officer realized that I did not, in fact, have any stolen sausage in my backpack, and that my passport matched the only wallet in my possession. He threw my bag back at me and departed with a grunt. Before I knew it, the bus was moving again. I noticed several of the passengers staring at me, which made me uncomfortable. I shrugged at a woman across the aisle and said, “I don’t even like chorizo that much.” She glared at me accusingly, as if I were some sort of perverted sausage addict. I asked the man with the guitar sitting behind me if he would
let me play his instrument for a while, but he just gave me a dirty look and silently stared out the window for the remainder of the ride. I’ve had the good fortune of being punched in the face many times over the years, and I could tell from those experiences that this guy had a sincere hankering for punching me square in my nose. Mexicans, especially Mexican men, are very proud, I thought. Maybe it’s an insult to ask to play another man’s guitar?
Memo was waiting for me at the bus stop. When I got in the car he grinned and said, “I bet you wish you had gone to Acapulco and gotten laid, yes?” The look on my face apparently said it all, and he laughed, relishing his victory. I tossed my bag in the back of the car, and as we drove away I recounted the events of the day to him. When I told him about the incident with the police on the bus he laughed so hard that I thought he might crash the car. “You actually believed that they thought you were a sausage thief?! Hahahaha! A chorizo is a pick pocket, you moron—they thought you had stolen someone’s wallet! God has sent me this shit-forbrains for amusement!”
I then asked him about the guitar player and why he had acted so strange when I asked to play his guitar. “You asked him what? Oh my god, just when I thought it could not get any funnier, you top even yourself! Eres pendejo, o nomás te haces? You know that you asked this man if you could touch his penis? You are lucky he did not punch you right in your stupid American face. If you value your life you do not say such things to a Mexican man. Oh my god, the comedy! What have I done to be so blessed today?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I responded, blushing. “Laugh all you want, old man. But seriously, I guess I need to thank you. After all, if you hadn’t made me give you that joint, you’d be bailing me out of jail instead of picking me up from the bus station.”
“This is true, Ryan. And you know why? It’s because the Devil is smarter from being old than from being the Devil. If your empty head remembers nothing else that I have said to you, remember this.”
Memo fumbled through his ash tray and pulled out the joint he had taken from me earlier. He lit it, took a couple of puffs, and broke the silence before I could express my shock. Memo smokes pot?
“You know, Ryan,” he said with a strained voice while holding in a lungful of smoke, “You should not feel so bad about making these mistakes with your Spanish.” He took several more puffs and passed it to me. “Even big companies do this sometimes. I remember an airline commercial many years ago. They were trying to advertise their new leather seats and extra leg room in first class. The problem was that their slogan, ‘fly in leather,’ sounded like ‘fly naked’ when translated into Spanish. Get it? Those sonsabitches were saying that when you flew naked with them they would give you three extra inches. Hahahaha!”
Before long, we took the final puffs of the joint and our laughter died. We were quiet as Memo drove the car over the mountain pass, revealing the beautiful valley below. A brilliant red-orange sun was beginning to set over the ridge in the west, bathing the valley in a rich, scarlet hue. Memo and I weren’t exactly Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but we were friends, and I felt for a moment that we were riding off into the sunset in an old western movie. The devil was nowhere in sight.
Other Titles by The Author
The Fried Twinkie Manifesto:
and other tales of disaster and damnation
Whether solving biblical foreskin mysteries, having his head split open by a crowbar-wielding man named Thor or getting busted for pickpocketing in a remote Mexican desert, Ryan Moehring reveals in his debut collection of stories and essays, The Fried Twinkie Manifesto, that his irreverent wit and capacity for uncovering nuggets of insight from the rubble of the mundane make him one of humor’s most promising newcomers.
While maintaining a voice unmistakably his own, Moehring evokes the wild imagination of Tom Robbins, the soul of Sedaris, and the wisdom of Vonnegut. Though readers will more often than not find themselves laughing out loud, Moehring’s eye for the profound and his unyielding honesty ensure that they are just as likely to cry—or cringe.
About The Author
Ryan Moehring was born in Nampa, Idaho and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. (He’s still not sure what he did to piss off his parents.) Ryan attended Beals Elementary School in Omaha, where, as a result of his unfashionable mullet and husky physique, he was indiscriminately pummeled during recess by white and black kids alike. As a result, to this day he is terrified of playground gravel— won’t go near the stuff.
He currently lives in Colorado with his wife and dogs, where he earned his master’s degree from Denver University’s Sturm College of Law. The Fried Twinkie Manifesto is his first book.