TOTAL IMMERSION
By Gil Gevins

I had been living in Puerto Vallarta for almost three months and was, like many new arrivals, feeling somewhat frustrated by my inability to connect with the local culture. Part of the problem was my lack of language skills. Unable to communicate with the many marvelous Mexicans I met, most of my new friends were turning out to be Americans and Canadians whose greatest concern was how many English language channels they could receive with the illegal black boxes attached to their satellite dishes. My wife, to whom I expressed this frustration on a daily basis, counseled me to be patient, that opportunity would soon knock.
And knock it did, in the form of an invitation to attend a wedding in the tiny pueblo of Las Gardenias, some two and a half hours north of Vallarta. “It’s kind of rustic out there,” Lucy warned me. “Are you sure you want to go? “Are you kidding?” I cried gleefully. “This is what I’ve been waiting for: a chance to totally immerse myself in Mexican culture!”

Las Gardenias was little more than a long dirt road dotted with shacks. But despite its simplicity it possessed, for me at least, a great deal of charm. Chickens, pigs, dogs and burros wandered the village freely, while an abundance of banana and palm trees gave the place a lush, tropical air. As we pulled up to the tiny adobe-walled church, I felt as if we had entered an enchanted dream, as if we had gone back in time to a more pure, more innocent era. The interior of the church was heartbreakingly humble: dirt floor, a patched-together roof, unadorned walls and no pews. But it was packed to bursting with chattering people, bouquets of colorful flowers and a quintet of confused doves, who had flown in through a hole in the roof and couldn’t find their way out again. Since the poor church contained no furniture of its own, everyone had brought wooden folding chairs from their homes. By the time we arrived all of these chairs were occupied, including several pairs which had been placed before the altar. Standing between these last chairs were Paco and Eva, the bride and groom, so small they looked like children. And facing them was the Padre, who had just cleared his throat and was about to begin the ceremony.

Our arrival, for some reason, brought everything to a grinding halt. Paco and Eva seemed surprised, even alarmed, by our presence. After consulting briefly with the Padre, Paco approached my wife and they held a short conversation in Spanish.

“He wants us to be padrinos,” she said, turning to me. When I shrugged with incomprehension, she added, “A padrino’s a godfather.”
“You mean, like Marlon Brando?”
A vision flashed briefly before my eyes of a long line of Mexican bakers waiting to kiss my ring, and then asking me to have their neighbors’ legs broken.
“Not exactly,” Lucy said. “It’s a big honor.”
“But why us?” I asked. “Why now?” She explained to me that all the available chairs were taken, so Paco wanted to bump two of the padrinos out of their exalted seats before the altar in order to make room for us.
“He feels bad about us having to stand up for the whole ceremony,” she added.
“That’s very nice,” I said, touched by the young man’s thoughtfulness. “Tell him we accept.”
“Being a padrino can be expensive,” Lucy warned me.
“How expensive?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“Well,” I said, “if it’s going to cost more than fifty bucks, tell him we’d rather stand."
In the end, without a plausible excuse for refusing the honor (except that we were too cheap), we graciously accepted Paco’s offer.

The ceremony, accompanied by lots of sweet-souled singing from an impromptu chorus, was, despite my inability to understand a single word, beautiful nonetheless. Babies and very small children crawled freely about on the floor throughout the entire Mass, which gave the proceedings a wonderfully natural and down-to-earth quality. Much to my delight, one child, who had somehow escaped his diapers, even peed on my shoe.
When the ceremony was over we all walked two blocks down the street to the house of Paco’s parents. This, like most homes in Las Gardenias, was really a small ranchito, with a fenced-in vegetable garden, a miniature orchard and small enclosures for the livestock. The entire compound had been gaily decorated with brightly colored strings of picapapel (cutout paper squares), balloons and flowers.

Night had fallen now, and since Las Gardenias lacked electricity, our hosts had been obliged to procure a generator in order to provide illumination, and to power the four enormous speakers stacked up just inside the garden. Unhappily, this generator ran on gasoline and produced, along with the electricity, voluminous clouds of fumes and a sound not unlike that of an outboard motor revving up inside a shower stall.
But the noise from this generator, it turned out, was a mere whisper, like the sound of a feather falling, compared to the awesome, brain-crunching, unbelievably loud music which abruptly exploded forth like scratchy thunder from the titanic speakers.

The onset of this cacophony was the signal for the start of a series of beautifully quaint and typically Mexican customs. They began with a waltz, the bride and groom moving gracefully around the dusty yard as the several hundred guests applauded wildly. After a while, the couple broke off dancing in order to switch partners. The bride’s new partner, after half a minute, took out a bill and pinned it onto her wedding gown. Across the yard, the woman who had been dancing with the groom did the same. Then they departed, to be replaced at once by another couple.

“What in the world is this?” I asked my wife.
“It’s the money dance,” she said. Everybody takes turns dancing with the bride and groom and pinning money on their clothes.”
“You’re joking!” I said.
“It’s no joke,” she said. “No money dance, no honeymoon.”
Several minutes later, a woman approached and handed each of us a pin. It was then that I noticed quite a few people were staring at us expectantly. With a heavy heart I fished two twenty dollar bills out of my wallet and handed one to my wife.
I’ve always been a spectacularly bad dancer, and when my turn came my ears began to burn with embarrassment. To make matters worse, there was a dramatic height differential to be reckoned with; I am only moderately tall, but the diminutive bride was almost as short as Dustin Hoffman. In order to hold my partner I was therefore forced to stoop grotesquely, making me look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame trying to tie his shoes.

When, after a few seconds of this torture, another man mercifully tapped me on the shoulder, I put the pin through the twenty-dollar bill and attempted to attach it to the dress. But I was never very good with pins. My shaking hand missed the mark entirely and I wound up sticking the tiny bride, who gave out a little yelp. In the end, she plucked the bill from my hand and pinned it on herself, as above the deafening blast of the music could clearly be heard the sound of the entire wedding party laughing uproariously at my ineptitude.
The money dance was followed by a curious ritual in which the groom put on an apron, picked up a broom and began to dance by himself all around the yard.

“Why is he dancing with a broom?” I shouted into my wife’s ear.
“Quiet!” she shouted back, we’re going to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
Many of the groom’s male friends and relatives gathered around him now, whistling, jeering and hurling insults. This activity went on for a surprisingly long time. I later learned that the entire business was supposed to symbolize the groom’s imminent emasculation--something like a reverse Bar Mitzvah.
Then, suddenly, the groom swooned melodramatically into the arms of the same group of young men, who proceeded to pick him up and carry his limp body around the yard like a corpse. In the midst of the wild whoops, shouts and general hysteria that accompanied this puzzling spectacle, I turned to my wife and demanded an explanation.
“Now what are they doing?” I shouted.
“He died,” she shouted back.
“I can see that he died,” I said. “But what’s the point?”
“How should I know?” my wife replied. “What do I look like, an encyclopedia?”

I never did precisely ascertain what this macabre custom was supposed to symbolize; though according to known authorities on the subject, it is in many ways reminiscent of infertility rites performed to this day in certain sections of New Jersey.

But I’ve forgotten the beer truck incident.
Halfway through the money dance a big beer truck pulled up to the front gate and Paco’s father went out to talk to the driver. Then, hat in hand, he approached my wife and I and explained that since we were the padrinos of the beer, could we please fork over three hundred thousand pesos (around two hundred dollars at the time), so that he could pay the driver.
“Three hundred thousand pesos!” I fumed. “Just to sit in a folding chair!”
“I warned you,” my wife said.
“For two hundred dollars, I would’ve stood in the street,” I moaned. “I would have stood on my head!”
In the end, I paid the driver, who gave me a terrible exchange rate, the entire amount in dollars.

With the arrival of the beer, the conclusion of the money dance and the mock funeral, the party really got under way. The lugubrious waltz was replaced by lively Ranchero music and soon everyone was laughing, hollering and kicking up their heels and along with them an extraordinary amount of dust. Before long, all the dancers, including my wife and I, were covered from head to toe with a festive film of fine brown powder. But none of us minded in the least; we were having far too much fun. Then someone handed me a bottle, and in the spirit of the occasion I took a healthy slug. It was Raicilla, a lighter fluid-like form of homemade liquor. After I got over the near-death experience of it napalming its way down to my stomach, I realized that this drano-esque beverage produced a rather pleasant effect. So I sought out the man with the bottle, who seemed to take an instant liking to me, and took another pair of painful pulls on the unlabeled bottle.
“That’s Raicilla you’re drinking,” Lucy cautioned me. “You better take it easy. I don’t think they’re transplanting duodenums yet.”
“Sure, baby, whatever you say,” I said, swilling down some more.

As the party progressed, the dust, the fumes from the generator and the Liquid Plumber I had been imbibing set off a dangerously synergistic reaction in the vicinity of my brain, causing me to partially lose consciousness. As my awareness shriveled to the size of a sunflower seed, the only thought to which I could consistently cling centered on my need to find a bathroom.
Apparently there wasn’t one, or else it was hopelessly occupied. So I sought out my Raicilla connection, with whom I had now established a strong fraternal bond, and the two of us, utilizing gestures which in other circumstances could have gotten us both arrested, held a short wordless conversation. Raoul—I believe that was his name—seemed to be telling me that I should wander off into the bushes and take care of my necessities there.

Dizzy, disoriented and, not to put too fine a point on it, drunk, I proceeded to do just that. Because I did not want to relieve myself too close to the festivities, I wound up wandering rather far afield, into areas of near-total darkness. Which was how, stumbling about uncertainly, I tripped over a low wooden fence and fell full-length into a pigsty.

For several moments I was unable to determine exactly what had happened to me. I spent this confused time rather unprofitably, I’m afraid, thrashing about in the muck like a beached fish. The pigs meanwhile, startled by my abrupt entrance into their exclusive domain, began to make excited (possibly angry) snorting sounds. Visions of voracious man-eating swine tearing me to pieces flooded my imagination, which, along with the impressively disagreeable odor, impelled me to hurriedly navigate my way out of the pen and back toward the lights and sounds of the party.

Lumbering through the overgrowth, there was no way to ignore the fact that large portions of my person were now covered with what I tried to think of as mud, but knew deep in my heart to be sheer, undiluted pig slime. This knowledge naturally made me somewhat reluctant to rejoin the other guests.
So I circled cautiously around the party’s perimeter until I spotted my wife.

“Oh my God!” she said. “What happened to you? You look like you’ve been swimming in pig shit.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Tell Paco and Irma I got sick. I’ll meet you at the car.”
At that moment, as my excremental luck would have it, Paco himself came trotting up to inform us that it was time to eat. Then, becoming aware of my unusual appearance, he said, “What happened to him?”
Holding her nose, my wife replied nasally, “It looks like he fell into a pigsty.”
An utterly horrified expression transformed Paco’s handsome young face as, holding his own nose, he grabbed my arm and began to yank me towards his house, nasally sobbing incomprehensible apologies.
“What’s he saying?” I asked frantically. “Where’s he taking me?”
“He’s really upset,” my wife said. “He’s taking you to the bathroom so you can wash up.”
“I don’t want to wash up,” I cried. “I want to leave.”

Just as I was about to break free of Paco’s surprisingly strong grip, his father came along, was informed of the situation and immediately grabbed his nose with one hand and my free arm with the other. Together, the two men, continuing to pinch their noses, escorted me forcibly across the yard, with my hysterically laughing wife trailing close behind. All around us, partygoers stopped what they were doing in order to stare at us with mystified expressions on their faces.

Struggling and cursing in English (which fortunately no one understood), I was dragged into the small house and up to the bathroom door, before which stood a long line of urologically-challenged individuals, all of whom had long ago ceased to feel any pain.
One look at me and the entire room of people broke into unbridled laughter, catcalls and whistles. “I want to go home,” I whimpered.
“Oh, come on, honey,” my wife chided me, “you’re the life of the party.”

Whoever was inside the bathroom was taking an awfully long time. Soon everyone was holding their noses. Then people began to demand that I leave the room. Finally, Paco barged into the bathroom removed its occupant, who had apparently fallen asleep, and dragged me inside. Lucy and Paco’s father squeezed in behind us and secured the door.

With the four of us crowded into the tiny rustic bathroom, it was difficult to breathe and almost impossible to move. Paco, gagging and choking, attempted to wipe off my face with a tiny hand towel. His feeble but valiant efforts succeeded only in clogging both of my nostrils with pig slime. It soon became apparent that, short of stripping me naked in front of a fire-hose, there was little that could be done in the way of tidying me up. So I dove for the nearest exit.

Out of the house, I ran, through the yard, past tables full of party-goers chewing chicken mole, past all of the neighbors in the street who hadn’t been invited, but who were having their own party anyway, down the road and up to my car. All along the way I passed astonished looking people, all of whom began at once to sniff fearfully at the air, certain some environmental catastrophe had befallen their village.

Naturally, a small crowd was gathered around my car, why, I have no idea. In a moment I was joined by my wife who pointed out that it would not be wise in my current state to get inside the car. Then, as the incredulous on-lookers stared with there mouths agape, Lucy dug a pair of large black garbage bags out of the trunk. Poking a hole in the first bag she slipped it over my head. Then, poking two holes in the second bag, so that I would be able to walk, she slipped it over my feet and up to my waist.

“Ill drive,” she said.
“Good idea,” I said. “I’ve never driven with both my arms stuck inside a garbage bag before.”
Halfway back to Vallarta, small, round unidentified objects suddenly began to fly past our car. Then two of them smashed into the windshield and stuck there. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a garbage truck racing past us in the opposite direction.
“Pull over!” I screamed.

Parked safely on the side of the road, we inspected the windshield. The objects plastered against the glass turned out to be a pair of tortillas, which had struck our vehicle with a combined velocity of almost one-hundred and twenty miles an hour. Freeing an arm from the garbage bag, I attempted to peel them off with my fingers. But to no avail: due to the incredible force of the impact the tortillas had apparently fused with the glass!

As I stood there prying away futilely with my fingernails, saturated with super-viscous effluent and dressed from shoulder to ankle in hefty-sized garbage bags, a federal highway patrolman cruised to a halt behind our car. The policeman climbed cautiously out of his vehicle and approached, hand on holster, to within ten feet of where I was standing.

For a full minute the dismayed policeman stood staring silently at what had to be the first American he’d ever seen up close covered in pig filth and dressed in matching black plastic trash bags. On and on he stared, never uttering a word. Finally, I felt compelled to say something by way of explanation. So I pointed to the windshield and uttered one of the few Spanish words I could pronounce without difficulty.
“Tortillas,” I said.

The policeman, apparently concluding that this was not a situation he wished to become involved in, shook his head, climbed back into his patrol car and sped away.
Having nothing better to do, I resumed clawing ineffectively away at the tortillas, while my wife resumed her fit of maniacal laughter.

It took my wife nearly a week to get over her giggling, and the birds in our yard even longer to finally peck away the last remnants of the tortillas from the windshield of our car.