How What Looks Like the Worst that Can Happen, Could be the Best that Could Happen

Episode Two: Stress deep in the night, deep in Mexico, way out of our comfortzone..

Dateline: Mexico City Reforma Hilton International Branch Office.  The richest man in the world lives here.  He built, filled, and donated an incredible museum to Mexico City.

Note: to get on board on this late night Mexico highway, you need to have read Episode One.

As the miles clicked along, Sam read to me the mile by mile tracking of our trip from El Sanborn, adding a little history of her own.  With her announcement that we were about to pass the mountaintop where Maximilian (unfortunate king sent from Europe  believing his services were wanted when they weren’t) was shot, we decided a celebration was called for at El Sanborn’s recommended restaurant in Queretaro.  And toast the fallen Maximilian we did. And his wife (best played by Betty Davis), we gave her a salud or two as well.

Now if you’re hung up on the facts that we weren’t yet twenty and driving through the night in Mexico, kids were freer then or at least the ex-nun and the divorcee were. My mother had died the year before and my father was now in Europe with my ex-mother-in-law-now-stepmother escaping in his own way.  Sam’s family wasn’t speaking to her, much less asking where she was going and who with.

In fact, Sam’s fresh-from-the-convent status is the important element of this whole story.  A good story, I’ve learned, centers around the main conflict and the change happening in the person with the conflict.  And our Sam was indeed conflicted.  She had been in the convent since her fourteenth birthday at which time she’d been determined to make up for her older brother’s disappointing the family by leaving the priesthood, opening up a Church’s chicken franchise, and marrying a woman ten years his senior who claimed to be a Communist.

Yes.  Sam had a lot of making up to do and, for the first four years, she’d been steady in her commitment.  Only during the past year, culminating in the  psychology class we shared at the university, did Sister Victoria Marie start having second thoughts. This means that when we launched our Freedom Celebration Hayride, Sam had never had a date. She had never kissed a boy, had never talked on the phone to one who wasn’t her brother, or even flicked her eyes flirtingly at a person of the opposite sex.

She was terrified.  And me, already married and divorced, was just the person to frighten her straight back into the convent.  That’s why the tequila sours came in so handy.  All that pent up tension.

Now back to the highway between Queretaro and Mexico City.  We’re really singing now, “Dell-ell-ta dawn what’s that flower you have on?” Singing and laughing and singing and then I noticed we didn’t have but the tiniest bit of gasoline left.  I asked my jolly friend, “Say, my jolly friend, please consult with El Sanborn there and tell me where the next Pemex station can be found.”

She checked El Sanborn for instructions, then looked it up and said, “About forty miles.”

And I said, “Well, we ain’t a gonna make that.”

Sam shot me a look that me doubting she was ever serious about the nun project. Gasoline stations in Mexico are government owned which means—few, far-between, and hideously mismanaged.  We were stuck, the last fumes now being spent.

Sam freaked and started rethinking the convent.  In her weakened condition, she even suggested I was responsible for knowing how much gas we had since it was my car, and by the way she’d never even driven a car.  Since she was determined to maintain that delusion, it was up to me to find a solution.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, with a tone implying that because I’d been married and divorced, I knew exactly how to deal with our situation. “First, we are going to find some non-scary person and get him to follow us until we run out of gas.  Then we’ll give him twenty or fifty dollars to go get gas for us and bring it back.  It’s simple.”  I had to go over the “simple” steps several times before Sam calmed down enough for her to point out we were on a highway, and “How, exactly, did I plan on alerting Superman to our dilemma?”

Which is when I realized that being already married and divorced wasn’t the kind of credential commonly referred to as a ‘useful learning experience.’  It was evidence of chronic poor judgment of which the current predicament was only the most recent example. I had to come up with help and, unlike when I was in a bad marriage, the plan couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and the potential downside was too scary to contemplate. At least that’s the way Sam was viewing our situation.

She had a point. I had an idea.  I pulled off and spotted a small restaurant, okay a cantina.  I assured Sam that in my travels with family, I‘d been in a pinch like this before in Mexico, many times.  There was no problem.  (Picture Bill Clinton staring into the camera saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.“)  We cruised the gravel lot until we spotted the person to save us–a man with a child in a truck.  Perfect.  I man with a child wouldn’t hurt us I assured Sam. I pulled up alongside the driver and punched Sam without mercey, shouting instructions in English I expected her to translate.

Turned out it wasn’t a man and a child.  It was a tall man and a short man.  Great.  Oh well, as I pointed out to Sam, it’s not like we had a lot to choose from in the parking lot of a country bar in the
middle of nowhere Mexico in the middle of the night.  As luck would have it, the truckers said they’d be glad to help us.  We breathed a sigh, brushing aside the pictures we were both entertaining of our bodies being found in the morning after the rain cleared.

The sigh of relief was a bit premature.  As the driver explained, this was a toll road and the truck didn’t belong to him or his shorter friend. Thus, they could not turn around and come back bringing the
gas.  The driver said the best they could offer was for one of us to come along with them in the truck.  When they got to the Pemex station, they’d let out whichever one of us was with them, and we could for sure find a trucker to take us the other way back to the car. Oh, yeah. righ.

Okay, let’s clarify the situation.  It is one-thirty in the morning and raining. We are two nine-teen-year olds on the side of a highway north of Mexico City in an almost out-of-gas vehicle.  Add that Sam has seen very little of the outside world and I happened to be dressed in pink pants suits with diamond shapes cut out down the sides of my legs.

I’m thinking, “Oh yeah, now I remember why I wanted to get married instead of growing up.”  I was pretty sure Sam was visualizing the advantages of cloistered safety, too.

Next:  Will help be found at the Pemex station or is ever making it to Mexico City a dream?  Episode Three:  Riding in Glorious Mangos.