I totally sucked, but it wasn’t my fault.
Merely two weeks before, I went to Walgreens to pick up a prescription for allergy medication and discovered, much to my horror, that the pharmacist wanted eighty dollars from me, which was sixty dollars more than what I paid the previous month.
Now, you know, if I’m going to spend eighty bucks on drugs, I’d better have to show ID and sign my name for the release of a controlled substance. I’d better be walking away with some Vicodin or her delightful cousin Xanax in my little paper bag, not a month’s supply of Allegra, which you can mix with alcohol and nothing happens.
In my book, that’s called “a one-trick-ponydrug.”
“You have to be kidding me,” I said as I stared at the white lab coat. “I paid less than that to have my gallbladder removed, I got knocked out for that, I got to keep the bedpan and a box of tissues. When did sneezing become so expensive?”
“Since Claritin went over-the-counter, the manufacturer of this drug raised its price, and your insurance company decided to make it a third-tier drug, which means it’s ‘lifestyle enhancing,’ and not a necessity, like Viagra,” the pharmacist informed me sympathetically.
“Wow, how appropriate,” I replied. “The activity of breathing is now considered less important than giving an eighty-year-old a boner. You know, if Allegra was oil, the marines would have invaded and we’d have bombed the manufacturing plant by now.”
So when I went home and told my husband that ounce per ounce, Allegra was worth more than cocaine, we decided to stage a standoff. A Mexican standoff.
After all, isn’t that one of the perks of living in Arizona, the land where you can die in fifteen minutes of dehydration during the summer if skin cancer doesn’t kill you first? But the trade-off is that cheap tequila and pills that we can actually afford are a mere border hop away. Now, I had heard from about a million different people who had all gone to Mexico and come back with all sorts of things—big, giant bottles of Valium, cigarette carton-size boxes of muscle relaxers, antibiotics, you name it—and it was there for the taking. They came back from a Mexican pharmaceutical shopping spree like they were Liza Minnelli the weekend before she was due to check herself into a joint called “Resurrections.”
We’ll go to Bisbee for a couple of days, we decided, hang out, then swing by Nogales on the way home, grab some lunch and pick up our stash. It was a plan.
It was a bad plan.
After our trip to Bisbee, we pulled into Nogales, and let’s just say for the interest of of those who have not been there, border towns aren’t exactly known for their glitz and glamour. Suddenly, I felt like I was on a soundstage and at any minute, a grainy image of Benicio Del Toro in cowboy boots was going to cross the street in front of me and Catherine Zeta-Jones would turn the corner with a big creepy cocaine clown in her hand. And mind you, I was still on the American side of things.
We parked our car on the Arizona side, paid five bucks to an old man who looked like he’d sat in that dusty, dry parking lot for so long he’d simply mummified, since essentially all he could move were his eyes.
Now, getting into Mexico is easy, because Mexico knows you’re not going to stay. I mean, who really wants to fill out a change-of-address form sporting a zip code south of the border, unless you’ve just killed your pregnant wife on Christmas Eve, assaulted your scalp with a box of Freida frosting, grown a jaunty goatee, and lost your chubby-hubby pounds to do your best “No, I’m not the guy who killed his pregnant wife on Christmas Eve, I am Ben Affleck, hombre!” act? Who really wants to stay there long enough to see if Mexico has seasons? Vincente Fox isn’t putting on airs, he knows the score, he doesn’t need to shell out extra pesos for any sort of border patrol. Instead, there’s just a turnstile. Getting into the Target by my house is harder once you consider the metal detectors.
We went through the turnstile and we were in.
Within five minutes, I had the goods—enough for almost a whole year, plus some other bonus things I picked up as long as I was there—swinging from my hands in a plastic bag. I was so happy. I was jubilant. I now had the ability to breathe out of one, possibly both nostrils, and for about the same price that my insurance company wanted to charge me for two month’s worth of pills.
“I’m a little hungry, do you want to get something to eat?” my husband said.
I scoffed. “Are you kidding?” I said, taking in my surroundings. “I feel like I’m in a United Way commercial. I just saw a donkey. To be frank, I really enjoy my intestines in their present, parasite-free condition. Sure, I’d like to lose some weight, but a tapeworm is the last way I’d like to do it, except becoming a prisoner of war. If you have to boil the water here just to drink it, there’s no way I’m touching taco meat.”
Ready to go home, we walked to the U.S. border checkpoint, which isn’t as loose and loving as Mexico’s. At all. It’s easier to get backstage at a State of the Union address than it is to get back into your country. My husband and I stood in line with the other people ready to be questioned, scrutinized, and searched, and it was just about our turn when I saw it: a sign in black and white that proclaimed that IT IS THE LAW THAT ALL PHARMACEUTICALS AND MEDICATIONS PURCHASED IN MEXICO AND BROUGHT INTO THE UNITED STATES MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A VALID U.S. PRESCRIPTION.
I looked at my husband in a panic. He looked at me, then looked at the plastic bag hanging from my wrist.
I had a prescription. I did. It was just two hundred miles away at Walgreens.
“Back to Mexico!” I hissed quickly. “Back to Mexico! Go back to Mexico!”
We bolted out of line and ran back to the marketplace, where we found a seat on a bench and sat.
“What are you going to do?” my husband said. “Do you think the pharmacy will give you your money back?”
I openly laughed. “Not even with a pretty por favor,” I replied. “I’m stuck. I’m totally stuck. There’s only one thing left to do.”
My husband looked at me.
“Smuggle,” I said, shrugging. “It really isn’t breaking the law. I have a prescription. If this goes to trial, I’m sure Walgreens would bring it down to the courthouse. It’s either that or try to find a toy manufacturer to get the Allegra compressed and formed into the shape of a clown doll.”
“Oh my God,” my husband said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Oh my God. Please tell me you’re not going to stick a year’s worth of Allegra up your ass.”
“I wish I could, but with my luck, they’d probably shoot out as bullets. No, they’re going into my other black hole,” I said as I opened my purse and started shoveling in my purchases. “I’ve just spent two hundred dollars on this stuff, there’s no way I’m leaving it on the bench and walking away.”
Back at the border checkpoint, we bravely took our place in line again, and this time, I noticed the cameras all around and above us, which had, without a doubt—in jerky, fuzzy black-and-white Circle K burglary footage—captured our previous appearance in line as we stood for a while, chatted, made fun of the people in front of us, the plastic bag swinging in my hand, then as we suddenly noticed the horrible, horrible sign, reacted with the appropriate melodrama, ran out of line, and then returned five minutes later with no sign of the plastic bag, save for my bulging and giving open purse, me looking as if I were Winona Ryder on a shopping spree or conducting research for a role.
When it was our turn, the border agent motioned us over to his station.
Deep breath, I told myself as we walked to his counter, be cool. Be cool. Stay calm. Act casual. Do not act like a smuggler.
“Citizenship?” asked the border agent, a gruff, surly, stocky, and sweaty man, said.
Be cool, I reminded myself.
I stepped forward, my arm outstretched, my driver’s license in hand.
“I’m an American!” I proclaimed excitedly, as if I were auditioning for a public service announcement boycotting any products manufactured by the axis of evil. Or France.
The age
nt looked at me and glanced at my license. “You with her?” he asked my husband, who nodded. “Citizenship?”
“I, as well, am American, sir,” my husband said so subserviently that had I not looked at him out of the corner of my eye, I could have sworn he was standing at a full salute.
“What were you doing in Mexico?” the border agent asked as he looked at us with suspicious, angry eyes.
“We ate lunch, sir,” my husband, the fake marine, lied.
“You came all the way down from Phoenix to eat lunch in Nogales?” the agent questioned, raising his perspiration-dotted brow. “I don’t believe that.”
That was the precise moment that the stuttering began.
“No. Ub—ub—ub—ub,” my husband, whose face had now turned the color of a hot tamale, said. “Bisbee! We were in Bisbee for the weekend!”
“Bisbee,” I added, nodding vigorously. “Bisbee!”
“Did you buy anything while you were in Mexico?” the border agent asked, his eyes narrowing in on me.
I looked back at him, smiled as best I could as my face flushed with hot, hot fear, nodding and shaking my head at the same time, giving him more of a convulsion than an answer.
He gave up on me and went to his subordinate little puppet, the fake marine.
“Did you purchase anything while in Mexico?” he asked my husband.
“Wa—was—wa—well, I didn’t,” my husband, the man I am joined with for life, the man whose underwear I wash, the man who just sold me up the lazy river without so much as a fingernail being tugged upon by a pair of border patrol pliers, answered, and then looked at me from the corner of his eye.
“And what did you buy?” the agent said, putting both hands on the counter and leaning toward me. “Did you buy pharmaceuticals?”
I paused for a moment. “Y-y-yes,” I whispered, lowering my eyes as my hands started to shake.
“I know you did,” the agent replied, smiling a very fake smile, I might add. “Empty your purse, please.”
So I hauled out the booty with my sweaty hands, spread it all out as the agent looked on, shaking his head.
“Is this all for you?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I nodded as he pointed to one of the boxes. “That’s for my allergies. And that…that, is for my asthma. That one is for my back pain. Those are for—um—for—uh, lady troubles, and those are because I get these really bad headaches that start on one side of my head and then work their way over to the other side but then eventually I always just end up throwing up anyway.”
When I was done spouting off my medical history, I realized I was an eighty-year-old woman from Palm Beach.
“When I asked you if you bought anything, why did you lie?” the agent asked me harshly, clearly very irritated, and it was at this point that I thought he wasn’t a border patrol agent after all, but a sales rep from Merck totally pissed off that I had cut him out of his commission.
But I didn’t know what to say, and I was so scared I gave him another convulsion, the only thing I had not purchased medication for.
“When you are asked a question, especially here,” he said to me quite sternly, “it’s in your best interest to tell me the truth! Do you understand?”
“I do,” I answered simply as he glared at me, and I had the feeling that I had just lost two hundred dollars and I was going to be talking to a judge very soon. Apparently, I had also taught everyone in line behind me a valuable lesson as they began taking all of their purchases from the farmacia out of their purses and fanny packs.
I was convinced that I was going to jail, and I even toyed with the idea of asking the guard if I could take one of my pills before he arrested me because I had a definite feeling I had a throw-up headache charging my way.
I looked at my husband again, and his face was so flushed he looked like he had just had a chemical peel. He had a little mustache of see-through beads gathered on his upper lip, and he was moments away from watching his wife get cuffed as a drug mule because she was just too damn impatient to wait the week it took for Monistat 7 to really work, across the border.
“What can I say?” I imagined myself addressing a jury of my peers. “I want to breathe, I hate to sneeze, and if any one of you has ever been itchy down there, well, you know you would have done the same thing.”
And then, against all odds in favor of a miracle at this particular moment, another guard came over to the station and nodded to the guard that was hating me.
“You wanna go on break now?” he asked my mean guard.
“Yeah,” my guard said, wiping his brow with his sleeve, then gave me one last dirty look, and simply walked away.
He walked away. Just left us standing there, with all of my medication, enough drugs on that table to start my own rest home. Then the other guard followed him, leaving us alone at the counter.
And that’s when I opened my purse, swiped my drugs into it, and very, very, very quickly walked away as fast as I could without generating electricity between my thighs.
The narc that I’m married to followed behind by a couple of steps, and when we finally reached the car and got in, neither of us said a word until we were at least ten miles outside of the Nogales city limits.
“We are assholes,” my husband finally said, still visibly shaken. “I can’t believe we did that. That was horrible! I never thought we’d get out of there. I’m so glad to be out of there!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “No thanks to you, Donnie Brasco! ‘No, no, I didn’t buy anything. Nope. Not me. Not I.’ Stoolie!”
“Stoolie?” my husband shot back. “What about you and your ‘I’m an American!’ act? Are you aware that you said it in a Texas accent? ‘Ah-meh-rih-cahn!!’ Oh! Oh! And ‘this is for my LADY TROUBLES!’ Lady troubles? Where are you, Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1940?”
“No, I was in MEXICO, about to go to PRISON!” I shouted.
“But yer ehn Ah-meh-rih-cahn!!” my husband shouted. “Who’s on more medication than my grandma!”
“You are a dork,” I said matter-of-factly.
“No, you are a dork,” he retorted. “And you are never going to Mexico again.”
“I already know that,” I informed him.
“And we are never telling anyone about this, O.K.? No one. No one needs to know what idiots we are. O.K.?” he said firmly.
“O.K.,” I agreed.
“Swear?” he insisted.
“On Ah-meh-rih-cuh!” I swore.
Laurie Notaro is currently unemployed and childless and enjoys spending her days searching for Bigfoot documentaries on the Discovery Channel, delights in a good peach cobbler, and has sadly discovered that compulsively lying on her headgear chart in the seventh grade has come around to bite her in the behind. Despite several escape attempts, she still lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is technologically unable to set up the voice mail on her cell phone, which she has never charged anyway. She is the author of I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) from which this story is excerpted.
On our third morning in Paris, I discovered that I was having “feminine problems.” Armed with a phrasebook, I marched down to the pharmacy. Swallowing any remnants of American pride and Catholic shame, I began to tell the sweet, bespectacled granny behind the counter that I had an issue “down there” and would need some type of cream. Words were exchanged but we were not communicating. Then, the untranslatable happened. Without warning, Grandmère squatted behind the counter, spread her knees, and made earnest jabbing motions with her index finger between her legs. I was so flabbergasted, all I could say was, “Uhh, non.” We tried a few other more subtle hand gestures until we finally arrived at the same answer and the right medicine. And while I will now always have fond memories of how helpful and kind the lady at my pharmacy was, I pray to all saints in France that I never have to hold another conversation that involves Grandmère jabbing at her hooha.
—Cookie Everman, “Grandmère”
TAMARA SHEWARD
Pil
ls, Thrills, and Green Around the Gills
A renegade Aussie in Laos struggles with the advice of Helen Keller.
AS THE PLEASURE-PAIN MAXIM WOULD HAVE IT, THINGS went rapidly downhill on our way back to the Mixai, when we were nearly run over by a samlor, pinched on the bum by a familiar-looking midget, and driven to fits of apoplexy by a shady monk who sprang out at us from a gloomy alleyway. Back in our room, the lightbulb burned out and I wound up stubbing out a cigarette in El’s pot of expensive moisturizer. And after a restless sleep plagued by ravioli-induced nightmares and mosquitos, I could only hope Lady Kismet would be a bit kinder in the morning.
But Fate’s a bitch. We spent the entire morning battling it out with everyone we came across. Our waitress at breakfast threw a spoon at me after I asked six times for milk. The cleaner at the Mixai yelled at us for smoking in our room. And on our way to register our presences with the Australian Consulate, two kilometers away, our songthaew driver took us on a forty-five-minute junket before charging us ten bucks for the pleasure.
“I think I’ve had it with city life,” I grouched as we pushed open the doors to the consulate. “Even a little pit like Vientiane is getting too stressful for me.”
“We should go up-country,” El said. “A city is a city anywhere, but we’d get a real feel for Laos if we headed north.”
The doors of the consulate slammed shut behind us and we leaned on the unattended front counter. “I reckon. What about that town we read about, the one with the bouncy-sounding name?” As usual, we had no plans and I had no clue.
“I think it’s called Luang Prabang. It sounds utterly brilliant and really gorgeous. Hey, is anyone even in here?”
“On my way!” came an Australian voice from behind a heavy office door. The voice was saddled with a less strident ocker twang than Bruce’s had been back in Nong Khai, but I cringed anyway. Back in Australia, where we spend so much of our time poking fun at the flat whines of the Yanks and the bizarre vowels of the Kiwis, it’s easy to forget we have an accent at all. But spend some time overseas, preferably somewhere they don’t broadcast Home and Away, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. We sound like freaks. Even in their rare moments of calm, Australian women sound constantly hysterical, and the men manage to give the impression that their words are suffocating somewhere between the glottis and their last meat pie. All this while hardly moving our lips at all.
The Thong Also Rises Page 2