'El alacrán

'El alacrán, el alacrán, el alacrán te va picar …' Music twangs out of a bar next to a gas station. The truck parks by the bar, and I watch the driver climb down from the cab. He's smaller than me, with a bunch of growth on his face, and a hefty mustache,mont blanc pens. He takes off his hat to slide into the roadhouse, cool and straight, like he's wearing guns. Then, when he's nearly inside,UGG Clerance, he gives his balls a squeeze. A little boy jumps from the truck behind him. I shuffle into the building without touching my balls. Nobody seems to mind. Inside, the air's tinged with muddy cooking oil from an alien kitchen. The driver stands at a rough wooden bar, and looks around at some tin tables where a couple of other dudes sit hunched over their beers. The bartender is Mexican-looking, except that he's white with red hair - go fucken figure.
The kid scampers to a table near a wall-mounted TV. Everybody else checks me out as I move to the bar with an idea in my head. A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say 'Milk and fucken cookies' in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit's established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle.
'Sa-lud! he says.
Don't fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly,Designer Handbags, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar,shox torch 2, with stars like droplets on a spider's web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I'm loaded off my ass. These guys' mustaches are up where their hair should be, and huge fucken caves are howling underneath, full of gold and tonsils, just look at them, singing their hearts out. Other folk join in, one of them even kneels. The whole night is snatches of humdinger, me and the boys, yelling, laughing, playing bullfights, pretending to be iguanas - I swear you'd load your drawers if you saw this one guy, Antonio, being a fucken iguana. Dudes hug and bawl around me, they become my fathers, my brothers, my sons, in a surge of careless passion that makes back home seem like a fucken Jacuzzi that somebody forgot to switch on.
It must be the same oxygen in the air, the same gravitational suck as back home, but here it's all heated up and spun around until nothing, good or bad, matters more than anything else. I mean, home is fucken crawling with Mexicans, but you don't get any of this vibe where I come from. Take Lally; what difference is there in his genes that he ended up so fucken twisted? His ole man probably did iguana impersonations, in his day. Nah, Lally caught the back-home bug. The wanting bug.