Brain Food (3 page)

5.

The vintage Chevy taxicab smelled like an ashtray mixed with urine and something he cared not to identify. He would have been concerned if he weren’t preoccupied with finding the secret formula, the key to unlocking his mind. The story Alejandro told him sounded promising, so promising it had him on the edge of the springy, splitting vinyl backseat, staring out at the pitch-black highway. He’d learned the girl’s name was Teya. Not from her, but from her cabbie’s license hanging on the dash. Teya, he’d quickly discovered, didn’t talk much.

After hours and hours of driving, Teya navigated off the main road, taking dirt sidestreet after dirt sidestreet through slums Stan never dreamed existed. So remote, so vast. Leaning, haphazard structures with boarded windows lined the roads in an endless maze, a perpetual shantytown. How Teya knew where to go was a mystery. Stan had gotten lost after two turns. Even with a trail of bread crumbs, he wouldn’t have been able to get out of that place.

At last, they pulled next to a row of small shops, in a garbage-strewn space alongside the road barely wide enough to park. He saw Teya’s eyes in the mirror.

“Are you going to wait for me?” he said.

She nodded.

He got out of the yellow, fifties four-door. The warm late-night air smelled faintly of baking tortillas, then the wind shifted and he caught a different odor, one not so pleasant. Nothing along that stretch of shops seemed open at that early hour. He turned and looked at her. She pointed ahead, smiling. Near the corner, in faded letters, he saw on a window,
Gomez
. Then he had to wipe away some filth to see the next word,
Boticario
.

The door didn’t budge when he pushed, so he pulled. Nothing. He knocked. Still nothing.

“Shit!” he turned to leave when the lock clicked, the door opened to the ringing of metal chimes, and a grey, heavily-bearded face peered out at him.

“Cerrada!” his gruff, little voice perfectly matched his gruff, little exterior. Eyes opaque and squinting, it was a wonder the old coot found the door, let alone ran a shop. “We are closed!”

He slammed the door, but Stan wedged his foot.

“Sir, Señor, listen. I’m sorry for coming so late, but I heard you have a unique store, here. I heard you have something that might help me.”

The man considered him closely, hazy pupils traveling up and down and up again. His hair was long and white. He wore a grubby apron, a stained short sleeve shirt, and frayed dark slacks.

“Come in,” he said in a heavy accent.

Inside, amid a jumble of ancient apothecary jars containing bizarre insects, dusty vials of outdated tinctures and tablets and tonics, he found nothing unusual. There were a few rather dubious vessels stuffed with what looked like tongues, fingers, and a whole foot. Aside from that, he discovered no magic potion, no legendary mind-enhancement drug, no mystical creativity pills. In fact, it looked much like his own cabinets at home, or what used to be his home. The ginseng, the maguey leaves, the shiitake. There was nothing in Gomez Boticario he didn’t already own or hadn’t already tried, excluding the bugs and body parts.

“This is it? This is the legendary Gomez Boticario?”

He rummaged through the dirty decanters, the grimy bottles, searching, desperate for that needle in the haystack, that one thing he’d never seen before, that one breakthrough supplement.

“Is there something special I can help you find?” asked the old man. He barely came up to Stan’s chest.

“You’ve got to help me,” Stan took the man’s shoulders. “You’ve got to show me where you keep the real stuff.”

“Real stuff?”

“Yeah, you know…the stuff that helps people get smarter, use their brains better. I need help to get my head working again. You see, I used to be a writer, and I was really good. I know I can be a good writer again, even a great one, if I can only get my-my creativity back.”

The old Latino watched Stan’s every move. “You’re looking for something to…stimulate your mind?”

“Yes, yes!” Stan drooled.

“And you’ve heard I might have something that works…miracles?”

“Yes,” Stan drooled harder. “Do you have it? Do you?”

“No!” the old man turned and walked briskly through a curtain of red crystal beads into a dark passageway toward a foreboding place, deep in the heart of the shoddy shack.

“Wait! Wait! I need this. I’ve looked everywhere, tried everything. Nothing works. Nothing will break me free from this damned writer’s block. If I can’t write anymore, I might as well die. Do you hear me, old man? I said I’m gonna die if I can’t write again, so that means this is a matter of life or death. And if I die, it’s on your hands!”

The man stopped with his back to Stan. “Wait one minute,” he sighed, and disappeared into darkness. When he finally emerged from the back, he had a wooden container in his hands about the size of a shoebox.

“Is that it?” Stan employed the most reverence he could muster while still bursting with exuberance.

The box sounded heavier than it looked when the shopkeeper set it down. He slid the tarnished brass locking mechanism and opened it, hand-carved hinges creaking. Inside, Stan saw a bundle of fine fabric, much finer than the box’s exterior. The man removed the bundle. Unwrapping one, two, three layers of silken weave, he reached the ultimate prize—a large, grayish, pinkish…lump.

Stan reeled back, assaulted by the sudden stench. “What’s that!” the thing smelled worse than limburger. “Some kind of cheese?”

“This is alimento del cerebro. Brain food.”

“Brain food,” Stan whispered, reaching to touch it.

The old man slapped his hand and he flinched away. “No touch!” Gomez frowned, then began to rewrap the strange merchandise. “Go away if you can’t be respectful,” his accent became heavier and he began to speak in Spanish, presumably cursing as the words got faster and more heated.

“No, no!” Stan put up his palms. “I’m sorry. I-I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“You are right,” the man took it out from the wrappings again. “You have not.”

“It does what you say it’s supposed to do, right?”

For the first time, the old, crusty shopkeeper cracked a smile. Stan thought his face was going to splinter into pieces. “This will make all your dreams come true. It will boost your intelligence, it will enhance your mind’s capacity…among other things,” he chuckled.

“Wait a second,” Stan became skeptical. “What’s the catch?”

The man looked at him closer. It made Stan nervous, the way he scrutinized his face, his head, his every inch, really. “No catch. You only have to eat it all. That is the only stipulation.”

“Eat it all, huh?” he regarded the putrid, grayish, spongy mass. It looked like a giant, dried up turd. Smelled like one, too. “All right, I guess. Eaten a lot worse than this. Then there’s the other thing…the price. That’s what it is, I bet. You’re asking an arm and a leg for this, aren’t you?”

“No, no, no,” the man laughed. “Not an arm and a leg, no. But close, ha-ha!”

Stan said outright, “How much do you want?”

The old man lost his levity and squeezed his eyelids into tiny slivers. “It is not money I seek in payment for the brain food. It is something much more valuable.”

“Oh, yeah?” Stan was starting to get the gist. The old guy was a flimflam man. A con artist. And he thought he had a sucker. Still, the strange substance
was
intriguing. If only Stan could only get a free sample. “That sounds a little nuts, you know? What kinda scam are you trying to pull?”

“Forget it,” Gomez began to place the item back in the box.

“Wait!” Stan reached quickly. “Let me take another look at it.”

“I said NO TOUCH!” the man wrapped it up in its three silk tissues and slammed the box closed, latching the metal lock. “You are not worthy. The secrets and wonders of the all-knowing are not for everyone, and it is obvious they are not for you. Not yet. Now go!”

Stan backed away as Gomez tucked the box under an arm and took it through the beaded curtain, into the dark recesses of the shop. After two steps in reverse, Stan spun on his heels and worked the piece of brain food out from under his thumbnail. In the quick try to get his hand on the coveted material, he’d managed to swipe a small piece. Just a taste. Not much more than a bit of waxy residue. Still, it was something.

He popped it into his mouth. Just before reaching the exit, he stopped, wincing, wanting to spit out the wretched, bitter, moldy thing. It was the worst he’d ever tasted, bar none. Worse than the worst. Take the worst thing he’d tasted and multiply that by a hundred, a thousand. It was that bad. He wanted to tear out his tongue and now understood why he saw several of them in glass jars lined along the top shelves. They were people who’d tried this shit. His eyes watered and he started to cough. Then Gomez returned from the back.

“What’s the matter?” he sounded suspicious.

“Nothing,” Stan left hastily, spilling into the street and hurrying to where Teya was leaning against the fender of her 1956 Chevy Bel Air. He was taken with the sudden and overwhelming urge to have her right then and there. It was way out of left field, considering his track record—not exactly burning up the sheets. That, though, was over, and in a big way. He felt himself get rock hard when he saw Teya’s sinewy hips, her tits heaving from a top that looked two sizes too small. She saw him coming and smiled, popping her gum. Then she saw the look in his eyes and spat out the gum, accepting him with open arms, and legs. They slid, wrapped inside each other, to her front seat somehow.

6.

Boom-chick! Boom-chick! Boom-chick! Boom-chick!

The discothèque
surged with a fervent rhythm. They shared a heartbeat, dancing with the heat and passion of mad lovers. Joined at the waist, hips grinding, locked in a hungry, eternal stare. All around were tanned bodies, sparkling with sweat, raging hormones, a hundred young men and women—the late-late nightlife of Cabo San Lucas.

Boom-chick! Boom-chick! Boom-chick! Boom-chick!

He caught his own reflection in her eyes, pulsating with the DJ’s stage show. On-off-on-off went the bright colors—red, blue, red, blue. Spinning, pushing, pulling, savoring each other over and over. Circling, using, devouring. Night spilled into day, the crack of dawn in the outskirts of Mexico’s badlands.

She led him along an alley behind El Diablo’s to one in an endless string of claustrophobic streets, littered with cardboard, rusted car parts, and riffraff with nowhere better to go. She took him to a crumbling concrete high-rise, paint chipping, rancid water flowing from open pipes, which she deftly avoided, motioning for him to do so, too.

Inside, she carted him past a group of unsavory ladies playing poker amid a whirlwind of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. More than one puckered up and batted a fake eyelash as he went by. Straight up some rickety stairs to the third floor they ran, to what looked like an apartment no bigger than the guest bathroom in the house he no longer owned.

She had his pants unzipped as she closed the door, and her hand wrapped around his dick before it was even out of his Jockeys. That night he didn’t make love. He didn’t even have sex. He fucked. Fucked like a wild animal, like he’d never fucked before. Untamed, uninhibited, untainted by any moral or even physical limitation. He felt like he could go forever, climaxing over and over, until she became a quivering mound of Jell-O. Not him. As soon as they’d finished for the seventh time, he rolled out of bed, his brain buzzing.

An old story he’d hit a roadblock on, suddenly he saw it from a new perspective. The narrative was being told from the completely wrong point of view, and that limited the plot seriously. Not only that, the lead character’s motivations were all wrong. The ideas began to pour out of Stan, and he had to write them down.

“Shit!” he searched the cluttered mess—clothes, makeup, feminine products he’d rather not see. He found a pen, but no paper. “Shit!” his head spun. Desperate for a way to get the words out, he started on the only blank slate he had to work with—the discolored, cracked plaster wall.

He only meant to jot down a few ideas, a couple sentences, maybe some notes. Before he knew it, he was actually writing the story, from beginning to end. It came easy, one chapter flowing into the next, complications arising freely, characters developing naturally, intricate storylines weaving with the precision and mastery of fine tapestry. It was a marvel to behold, and he would have thought it impossible if he weren’t the one actually writing.

Then, it was finished.

He sat on a chair spilling over with little dresses and even littler unmentionables, ready to look at what he’d done. Teya stirred. She saw him and smiled. Then she saw the walls of her apartment and her jaw dropped. Every inch was covered with ink, a handwritten masterpiece.

“You have to take me back to that place,” he said. “I have to see Gomez.”

She nodded.