Without further ado.

Mexico City

Part One: 2 AMish, Hugito's bedchambers

***
Cost of a round-trip flight from Indianapolis, IN to Puebla, Mexico: $375

Cost of a rental car for twelve days: $600+ USD

Cost of the enchilada that did you in: $2.50

Waking up with a malarial fever in a foreign country, entrails poised to eject themselves from your basest orfices and bathed in your own precious brine, only to wonder if you have repatriation insurance: Priceless.

***

I'd been having the most extraordinarily vivid dream. In it, I'd managed to somehow ingest a completely living Fijian blowfish while I was simulaneously being vivisected by a filthy carnie who paused periodically to partake in the sooty pleasure of his Erlenmeyer flask filled with crystal meth. As he savaged me with what I can only assume to be one of those damn "Larry the Cable Guy" baseball-cap fish-hooks, an imp appeared to spray a tincture of bleach and lemon juice mixed with ocean water into the gaping crevasse that had become my abdomen. All told, it was a good time for all.

Needless to say, when I awoke into the predawn of a midsummer Mexico City morning in a bedroom I scarcely remember entering, relief caused me to be not nearly as concerned as I would have ordinarily been. I was interested, though, to see that I had managed to wind myself, shroudlike, into my bedclothes, which were unpleasantly clinging to my moist, Swedish sauna of a carcass. My eyes felt as if two charcoal briquettes had been inserted into my orbitals and, when I moved any portion of my anatomy outside of the shroud, the cool of the room assaulted the choice extremity and reduced it to a pallid, shivering mass of protoplasm.

Oh, I was stoked.

As the part of me that hopes and dreams was cooked alive, kicking and shrieking, I became slowly aware that my problems were not entirely fever-related. OK, there was nothing slow about it - I sat upright so quickly that the bedroom momentarily swam out of focus as blood rushed out of my head and tried to remember the layout of this particular Mexico City condominium. Of particular interest was the room wherein my salvation would lie.

The throne-room.

*ten minutes later*

As I mentally set all of my affairs in order in a sliver of pale moonlight on that black (I dunno, either), mercifully cool commode, I began to bemoan my fate. True, I'd not been careful with my consumption, but when one is presented with a single option (eat what the family is eating or subsist entirely on the ginormous bottle of water I'd stashed in my bag), you have to hope that things turn out for the best. As I felt every single electrolyte escape from my pallid, ashen body at speeds I generally associate with Formula One racing, I knew that Luck, that vapid wheezing cooze of a temptress, had FMITA yet again.

I returned to the bedroom and mummified myself against the damp cool of the early morning. Lying corpse-still so that I didn't ache like I'd been assaulted with a ballpeen hammer, I remembered with a start that this day was to be the day that I was forcing my uncle, his friend, my cousin Mary and our guide, Hugo (Hugito) to take me to the largest anthropology museum in the Americas, the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

And there I was. Moments from utter dessication. MF.

***

Dawn came and with it - why even bother? I thought - a large, egg-laden breakfast and a please-make-it-so-that-I-don't-have-to-wear-dignity-pants bluish pill. A look in the mirror in the hall confirmed my worst fears: I had begun a slow, yet relentless transformation into a largish, ghastly hunk of human jerky. And all of this before a half-hour drive through a city where traffic regulations are the merest whispers of suggestions and where, as my cousin Mary aptly put it, "I feel like I am breathing dirt."

[adventure!]

***

Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia

Part Two: 10ish: I am the Bat-God.

The mere act of walking to the entrance of the museum was likened immediately in my parasite-laden mind to a Soviet gulag death-march, but it was hot and, uh, people all around seemed to be happy, enjoying themselves with ice-cream, fruit-in-a-bag and lovely agua fresca. As I began the grim task of counting which of my organs had failed, I decided that I wasn't going to let something silly like a parasitic load keep me from one of the highlights of my trip.

Mind over matter.

I studied the map of the museum while we were in line so as to immediately memorize the location of the twenty or so restrooms, knowing full well that this knowledge would mean the difference between me having an OK day and me wetly taking a dump in my pants in a crowded, clean and foreign museum. As I silently cursed myself for not honoring my Boy Scout training and bringing a change of trousers, we began to make our way into the vast halls of Mexico's past and present, which had been attractively labeled and displayed for our viewing pleasure.

I won't bore you with details of the museum itself. The internet is a wonderful thing, and if you want to know more of what I actually "saw" that day, I urge you to Google its sweet ass in your own time.

One thing was clear, however: I seemed to have been the only one that lovely Mexico City afternoon who had held lively, animated conversations with several key pieces of statuary.

Me: Good afternoon, Creepy Zapotec Bat-God Mask. How's it hangin'? Upside-down, yeah?
CZB-GM: Haha, asshole. What do you wish of me?
Me: Well, seeing as how this entire experience will later be chalked up in my mind to a paralyzing bout of Montezuma's Revenge and the accompanying dementia, I suppose I can be frank. Where should I seek medical attention?
CZB-GM: Dude, don't ask me. In my day, a toothless old woman would have given you a llama placenta which you would have had to have eaten, raw, while standing waist-deep in the urine of several hundred young boys.
Me: MF. No wonder the Spanish took forever to whip your asses. You guys were totally HC.
CZB-GM: You're telling me. Say, you don't happen to have one of those corn-liquer enemas on you, would you?

I met up with my uncle and began to tell him about how much I wanted to die. To my -relief? - he told me that he'd also been stricken and that he, too, had been speaking to inanimate objects all morning long. As I sat on a bench in the little courtyard watching Mexican schoolchildren in curious little boarding-school uniforms cavort about heedless to my impending death, he left to seek medical attention for us.

He came back about fifteen minutes later with a sack of magical dust he'd procured from the nurse on duty in the museum. This dust supposedly, if I drank it suspended in two liters of bottled water, was to restore my stolen electrolytes while providing me with the bracingly delightful opportunity to pee every seven minutes.

With the aid of the horrid suspension, I miraculously managed to see the whole museum AND spend some time bathed in the splendor of the gift shop. While in the gift shop, I found myself looking for something I couldn't really place. I knew there was something I had to procure, and after about fifteen minutes I found it: a black-framed artsy postcard of the Bat-God mask. As I stood at the counter with pesos in hand, I looked down at the card and could have sworn that the creepy mask had winked at me.

***

Stay tuned for the final installment of the Dom Goes To Mexico series, wherein I travel to gorgeous but slightly troubled Oaxaca and make my way back to Tlaxcala AND Huajuapan.

Soiling my drawers the whole way.

Until then, I remain,

Domonic

PS. OK, I am not a whore for readership, but my counter says that only, like, ELEVEN people a day stop by. FTLOJ, send my page to friends! Send it to enemies! Send it to that ex of yours whom you wish would be beaked to death by a savage flock of sandhill cranes! If I haven't posted recently, I have

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