I was sixteen when I decided I was ready to become a Mexican. I had spent years honing my abilities, and finally felt that I had all the elements in my repertoire. I knew all the gangster slang: cholo, rolo, vato, chingaso, carnal. I could even execute that last one with a perfect tongue roll and draw out the last syllable until it faded away into sweet nothingness. Carrrrrnnal. Carrrnaaaaaal. I practiced my accent along with Chuey in "Blood In, Blood Out", a movie I had watched eight times already (it was three weeks overdue back to the video store). I bought and studied voraciously every album by Lighter Shade of Brown, Delinquent Habits, and of course, Kid Frost. "Hispanic Causing Panic" was my favorite. I almost felt like I was right there in East LA, hanging with La Raza.

I had even had a real Mexican for a locker partner once. His name was Sebastian Recalde and he was cien porciento cabron. A real Mexican's Mexican. The kind of guy that gets respect, even if he is five-two. He had this jet black hair that he slicked back into a pony tail and that shined like a halo every time he passed under a fluorescent hall light. Sometimes he covered it up with a hair net. He had a whole closet full of ribbed wife-beater t-shirts depicting a giant, placid Jesus looking lovingly over a street full of lowriders and pistol packing gangsters groping the oversized breasts of voluptuous Chicanas with faces frozen in mid-orgasm. And best of all were his double-knit polyester Dickies, so baggy they swept the floor when he walked. We were locker partners for a semester and-a-half. He lucked out and got kicked out of school for bringing a bong. I, unfortunately, got student of the month.

That's was the real problem I guess. I was white, middle class, and well-behaved, so categorically I wasn't even allowed to hang out with those guys, although almost every single member of the Barrio Trese (our local gang) knew my name. The guys were the coolest. They didn't care what anyone else thought, they didn't try to be anything but themselves, it didn't matter to them that they were poor and that everyone in our redneck town called them Beaners and never expected them to do anything more than farm and work in grocery stores. They were real and cool. Real cool. I wanted to be in their gang. I even offered to let them beat me in, but they respectfully declined. And the girls, the girls were tantalizingly unattainable, dark skinned with attitudes and infectious laughs. I wanted to date a Latina more than anything in the world, if for no other reason than because I couldn't.

The only way to atone for my whiteness was in Spanish class, where I absorbed everything - vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation. Sometimes our teacher, Senora Balerio, told us to perform a skit using the week's vocabulary words. While most groups reenacted a family dinner or grocery shopping at the local market, I made my group smuggle weapons across the frontera, or drink cervezas and hit on hembritas at the playa. As you might expect, I got quite an earful from my mother after parent-teacher conferences, which was totally unfair. Didn't Senora Balerio realize I was her best student?

At any rate, it dawned on me that what I had been doing was not working. I was no closer to being accepted into La Familia now than I ever was. I needed to do something drastic. Something authentic. I decided to go live in Mexico.

My high school offered this program through a company called Fenix or Phenix or something like that, where kids were matched up with families in Mexico, and went to live with them for a couple of months. The minute I saw it I knew it was for me.

My Mom thought it was a horrible idea, of course, and was certain the experience would lead to my imminent abduction and violation at the hands of dirty Juarez gangsters. My father thought it was a wonderful idea (to get me out of his hair for awhile, no doubt), vetoed my Mom's decision, and even paid the three hundred dollar fee to send me there, but not before my Mom had preached upon me the dangers of spicy Mexican food, Montezuma's Revenge, Chiapas, and the corruptness of the Mexican government. She bought diarrhea medication in every form imaginable, and had me sent to the red-cross clinic to get every vaccination my body could handle. I got on a plane filled with small traces of measles, mumps, malaria, and dengue fever, and bid my family a fervent farewell.

* * *

I couldn't wait to meet my new family. The Limones, they were called, which in English means "Lemons". The fact that my host-family was called the Lemons should have been a clear sign to whoever screened these families that something was not quite right, but I was happy as a lark as we drove to the pick-up spot on our hulking brown bus. I felt like I was being adopted. Jose, Reina, Sergio and Alicia - father, mother, son and daughter. The family lived in a city called Puebla, which means town. This may have at one point millions of years ago been true, but today Puebla was a city. A big one. A giant, grey, mess of a city a couple hours outside of the Districto Federal.

As the bus came to a stop with a hydraulic puff, all of us exchange students poked our heads out the windows to try and spot our host families. They had come in droves with big posterboard signs extolling our names, names which they mispronounced atrociously and without coordination so that the whole experience was like a slave auction. I was scanning the crowd, trying first to spot the hot latin girls and only then looking to see if their sign contained my name. Slowly but surely my gringo friends found their hosts, while I wandered through the dissipating crowd with my bags.

At last I found the Lemons, waiting patiently beyond the throng with big white smiles on their tanned brown faces. They looked almost as happy as I did, and when I introduced myself they greeted me with hugs like we were old friends. They were chattering away in Spanish and I realized, despite all my diligence in school, that I couldn't understand a word they were saying. I couldn't even seem to pick out an "el" or "los" in the jumble, so I did my best to respond based on voice inflection. When something sounded like a question, I would nod my head, smile, and say cheerily, "si!" to which they would respond with hysterical laughter. It didn't seem to matter what I said, they always laughed, a quality I found admirable.

We drove close to an hour through the chaos that was Puebla traffic, while I clung with white knuckles to the "oh-shit" handles of the family's VW bug. Apparently I wasn't the only scared passenger that had graced the seats of the vehicle, for the interior was rife with scratch marks and seat tears, a testament to the complete and utter lack of planning in the city. Stoplights and caution signs seemed non-existent here, and "drive it like you stole it" seemed to be the modus-operandi. We nearly had our rearviews taken off numerous times, but Jose, who drove the car, seemed oblivious, chattering on unintelligibly while I tried to pry a smile from my pale-faced grimace.

We came to a stop abruptly in front of a large white wall with a little red door, and everyone extracted themselves from the Bug. I took a quick glance at the tires of the vehicle to see if by chance they happened to be smoking.

"Aqui Estamos" Jose proclaimed as he pushed open the little red door in the wall. I stepped through the door and nearly tripped on the television stand as I entered. My first thoughts were of how bright it was inside, and then I realized that above our heads the sheet-metal roof was torn and rusted, leaving a gaping hole above where I was standing. I wonder what they do when it rains, I thought. I would soon enough find out. My next thoughts were of the kitchen, which was the size of my closet and doubled as the washroom and storage room. The sink, in which a murky brown substance floated, doubled as the dishwasher and clothes washer. Further down a dimlit corridor, past the kitchen table and fly infested bathroom, were the two bedrooms where the three of us would somehow be sleeping. This was not that idealized, commercialized stuff you saw on TV - guys in sombreros playing mariachi in some dusty, rustic old-west bar, or beautiful people drinking Coronas on an empty, sunny beach. This was real Mexico, and the house was exactly what I had hoped for.

* * *

Or so I thought, before I attempted to take a shower, wash my clothes, go to the bathroom, eat, sleep, or watch television, for each of these ordinarily mundane activities came with its own unique challenge in Puebla. The household rule for the shower was three minutes to wash, soap, and rinse. "Three minutes..." I scoffed as I stepped into the shower and turned on the water. And that's when the water unleashed its icy wrath upon me. I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing when the first stream splashed down on top of me. My balls disappeared inside me and my voice raised a few octaves as I let out a yelp. "Is everything okay?" I heard someone call out from outside. I tried to speak but couldn't. I let the shower wet my skin and jumped back out, a minute and a half after I started. "Well," I said to myself. "These three minute showers shouldn't be so tough."

My "welcome to Puebla" meal was Mole con Mierda. That means shit in Spanish. I'm not sure what I really ate, but I am sure that it should have been reserved for misbehaving pets and people who eat intravenously. You would have thought it was the Body of Christ the way the Lemons' eyes lit up at its mention. They sat around the table and peered into the kitchen with hungry eyes and drooling mouths. They sniffed the air as Reina brought in the dishes, piping hot. She set it down on the table, and I remember how sad it looked, hunkered down on the plate; a forlorn brown heap of chopped up chilis covered in chocolate sauce. Accompanying it was a blackened heap of grilled banana peels which, I learned, were to be used to scoop up the mole and deliver it to one's mouth. The peels, apparently, were to be eaten along with everything else. I was asked if I cared for a drink - Tequila was offered, but thinking of my complete lack of alcohol tolerance, I opted instead for some water. Days later, convulsing and heaving on a smelly toilet, I would regret my decision. The water was drawn from a ten gallon water tank in the living room. Alicia made her way into the kitchen and took a small vial of what looked like iodine, squeezing two tiny drops into the giant drum. The iodine dissipated quickly, and Alicia scooped out a glass. The solution, I suppose, was for purifying the water, although I think a fifty-fifty mixture might have been more appropriate.

Clothes washing, as I mentioned earlier, was done in the sink. Judging from the lack of cleanliness of the tap water, I can only suspect the Limones used Mole to eat away the dirt and grime on our clothes (lord knows it cleaned out the muck in my bowels...about twenty seven times in two days). At any rate, after the clothes were washed, they were strung out from a rafter above the hole in the ceiling to dry. When finally they did dry, they were rather stiff and pliable. In the boredom of the days to come I would amuse myself with sculpting large biceps and pectoral muscles into my t-shirts and wearing them around the neighborhood like a body builder.

Of course, that was when I was not hanging out in the bathroom. I spent a good portion of my day in that room, every minute of which I loathed. I usually arrived there in full sprint, spurred on by the flames churning and broiling in my backside, as if the Mole had somehow survived the digestive process and was now seeking a way to get back at me for eating it. The cool, porcelain seat did little to relieve the burning in my bowels. I sat in a pool of sweat, while a swarm of flies buzzed about the trash can, waiting for scraps (the used toilet paper in Puebla must be placed in the wastebasket, not flushed). I would strain and squirm, unable to evacuate anything of substance until suddenly, the pressure would build in my stomach until I erupted like a chocolate-chili-banana peel volcano. After the eruption, just about the time I would stop sweating and start breathing easier, the aftershock would come.

Television, as much as I hated and still do hate it, was a savior of sorts for me in Puebla, for I had no friends and understood no one. I would wake every morning to an empty house - the kids having gone to school, Jose to work, and Reina not yet returned from her night shift at the Volkswagen plant. So it would just be me and the television - watching endless hours of futbol and telenovelas. The futbol I liked, and since that time it has become one of the few sports I can watch on TV. The telenovelas I detested, but they were inescapable. On every channel, some incredibly buxom, beautiful, and incredibly well-preserved mother was renouncing her love to a father in favor of the love of another, which more often than not was the father's brother or mortal enemy or some other highly unlikely coincidence. I watched them and despised them and yet was unable to do anything else, enrapt in implausible plotlines and too afraid to stray more than ten meters from the toilet. It was horrible, but my television watching, believe it or not, served one important purpose for the Limones collective good. In the summer, when the rains of Puebla were at their most potent, a storm could happen upon our barrio within instants, clouding up and casting down fury upon the unsuspecting residents. Our home, with its hole in the tin roof and TV directly below, was a prime candidate for utter ruin. I'm not sure what the Limones had done previously in my absence, but at the first hint of rain, I would quickly shut off the TV, drag it to the corner of the room, and push the couch back against the dinner table, just steps ahead of a torrential downpour. Then I would run to the bathroom and poop.

Sleeping, though, was the hardest thing. Having five of us in two bedrooms was not nearly as hard as I thought. Sergio, Alicia, and I shared an ample sized room painted in blue and bedecked with Winnie the Pooh sheets, curtains, and memorabilia, which was fine. I had a little mattress on the floor all to myself and Sergio and Alicia would share the slightly larger bed. Reina and Jose were to share the other bedroom. Reina, however, was almost never there, and in her absence Alicia would sleep in the bed with her father, Jose. Jose, unfortunately, snored like a wildebeest, each and every night. His guttural snorts would saw through the paper thin walls of the house and into my ears keeping me awake and miserable. This matter was complicated by my sickness, which confused my mind into thinking I was cold when it was hot, and hot when it was cold, but never just alright. At night I dreamed an endless string of unfamiliar Spanish words, drilling their way into my skull while I smiled under the excruciating pain and nodded "si," "si," "si," to each.

Just about the time I had devised an elaborate and foolproof scheme to rub out Jose Limon, he inexplicably disappeared. It was not until nearly a month after, when I had managed enough of a command of the Spanish language to even ask, that I learned he and Reina had become separated. I instantly felt bad and hoped it was not on account of me. He visited a couple more times, once for some religious festival and once to take me back to the bus station for my departure from Puebla. It was then I learned what he did for a living - sold sewing supplies out of the back of his car - door to door to endless door. So we were four, then practically three, with Reina never home. Alicia, whose charge it had been initially to look after me, would acquire an extreme distaste for me, and so then it become just Sergio and I, between which a friendship would develop that lasted far longer than I ever imagined. But that will take some explaining.

* * *

Alicia was my preordained caretaker, a full-figured Mexican girl with solemnity and experience beyond her sixteen years. She was dating a Mexican boy who looked to be quite a bit older than she, and, after the novelty of having a gringo in the house wore off, became concerned only with him. In the spare moments she had she would make a half-hearted attempt to hang out with me. Being that we were all poor and that Puebla was a largely industrial city, when I was asked what I would like to do, I usually had no response. And so we would go do the only thing we could afford to do, because it was free - we would go to visit churches. Puebla must have a church for every family, because they are everywhere, each unique and ornate enough to draw visitors but yet somehow totally uninteresting once you actually arrive. And arrive we did, like Archbishops, to all reaches of Puebla, giving a polite once over to the all-too-familiar vaults, arches, and cisterns, making an absent comment about that particular stained glass window or this gilded tabernacle before realizing we would much rather be at home numbing our minds on whatever soap might currently be showing than paying our homage to ingenuity of Catholic faith. My devotion to extracting myself from that dismal home was stronger than hers, however, and Alicia soon became sick at the mere sight of me, for fear that I might ask her to escort me to yet another house of God. I believe she even began to hate God himself in those days, for she stopped going to church with the regularity that she had when I first arrived. Luckily, as Alicia quietly inched toward the door of gringo-free living, Sergio obligingly stepped in.

Sergio was the youngest of the band, maybe twelve years old I guess, and acted even younger. He looked like a Mexican Kermit the Frog, with spikey hair, wide, ogling eyes, and a big gaping, always flapping mouth. He was flamboyant and obtrusive, prancing about the tiny house like a bull in a china closet, constantly throwing his arms around whomever he talked with, unable to speak with anyone if it was not six inches from their face. For an American like me, for whom space and solitude is a commodity oft-taken for granted, it was quite unnerving at first. He was for me that persistent ray of sunshine that pushes past clouds and curtains both, waking you up when all you want to do is sleep. No matter how down I got - about my sickness, about my dismal surroundings, about my inability to understand a lick of what was going on around me, Sergio was there, arm around my shoulder and smiling. He didn't understand the concept of miserable and would not allow me to understand it either, and his love of United States culture could not be deterred.

When I first met him he offered to buy the clothes off my back. He took one look at my shoes, Nikes, and seemed ready to kneel at my feet and kiss them. It seemed that Nikes, real ones at least, drew a hefty premium here in Puebla, and only the cheapest brands and least desirable models seemed to make it to Puebla shelves, even though they had probably been manufactured here in the first place. And so Sergio, a size 6 at best, offered to purchase my size 10 Nikes with money he didn't have, and as much as I wanted to give them to him, I was forced to decline for they were the only pair of shoes I had.

Sergio then proceeded to demonstrate to me his familiarity with American pop-music by turning on quite possibly the most atrocious line up of songs I have ever heard, beginning with Aqua's one-hit wonder, "Barbie Girl", which he sang in eardrum-shattering soprano, with a school-girlish enthusiasm. From Aqua he transitioned into a rendition of Michael Jackson's 1981 smash hit "Billie-Jean," replete with crotch-grabbing and moon walking. I begged him to stop, but one could not stop "the Surge." He was there at six a.m., every morning hovering over my face to say goodbye before he went to school, and returning precisely at 2:10 in the afternoon to say hello again.

It was only after I realized I was completely and utterly alone that I acquiesced to Sergio's emphatic pleas to leave the house. I bought him a basketball and started teaching him how to play on a nearby court. He was a quick learner, tall, gangly, and persistent - and after a short time he could hold his own against me. The playing was difficult, for the court we used doubled as a concrete soccer field. Soccer, the only sport according to most Pueblanos, took dominance over our infidel's game, and if nearly getting trampled to death on each team's charge to the goalposts did not deter us, a few resounding blows to the head by soccer balls eventually did. We learned to find time in the quiet hours of the morning to play - him dragging me out of bed and hauling me out onto the court, displaying whatever move he had practiced in gym class the previous day - a hook shot, a one handed layup, a spastic round-the-back pass. I learned to love those early morning hours because they were all I could love, confined in solitude the rest of each day to the tiny house while the Limones were at school and work.

Somehow Sergio's eternal sunshine eventually began to brighten my spotted mind, and the sickness that had plagued me for so long seemed to retreat into the furthest reaches of remission, still present, but pleasantly powerless. Feeling better, I resolved to explore what lay beyond the borders of our barrio. Of course, that meant taking a Combi...

* * *

What is a combi? It is a terrifying death contraption. A hulky, rattling casket-like VW bus with the seats removed so that the drivers can prod passengers inside like cattle. The typical Combi carries no less than twelve human cattle, and it carries them like they are stolen property. The procedure if one wishes to embark on such a journey is this -

1.Wait on a street corner. Seemingly any street corner will do. I'm not even so sure Pueblanos know from where their journey should begin.
2.Wave maniacally at the approaching vehicle. As it slows, squint and lean out and try to read the hand-written sign to figure out of the vehicle might go somewhere near the vicinity of where you are going.
3.Give up, because Puebla is enormous and the little signs only ever list one or two destinations, and board the first Combi you see anyway.
4.Push your way past the crowd of people toward the driver. Dig your toes down toward the floor and press your head firmly against the metal ceiling while you fish around in your pocket for change.
5.Throw the change over the seat at the driver and hang on for dear life, for he almost never will wait for you to actually hand the money over before rocketing off into oncoming traffic.
6.Pray to the good lord that you will live to see just one more day, and as an afterthought, add something in about maybe also arriving at the correct destination as well.
7.Exit vehicle. Vomit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

My first mission beyond borders was an attempt to find something in the city to eat that would not rend apart my insides. I made my way to the nearest main street and flagged down a particularly rickety looking Combi. As I hopped in and we approached warp speed, I attempted to crane my neck down through the dirty, bouncing, jarring windows and catch a glimpse of the surroundings that passed blurrily by, and somehow eventually managed to spot a supermarket. I hollered at the driver and he let me out near the corner, dizzy and tottering, in a cloud of his exhaust.

The "supermarket" as it turned out, was not quite so super. In fact it was little more than a group of tents posted up in a dusty lot and guarded by a couple of scant, dying dogs. The smells from a hundred different stands mixed together in the air and became almost solid, and I choked on the pungent aroma they created. Near the entrance was a carniceria, where a white-aproned Mexican was chasing down a chicken with a large butcher's knife. He wrangled the animal, slapped it on a table, and ended its life, holding it still on the carving block while the body writhed, long after the head had rolled off to the side. I threw up in my mouth a little bit, then quickly abandoned the market.

That first journey scared me, but it also gave me the confidence I needed to escape the solitude of my surroundings. When Sergio learned of my expedition he begged to come on the next. And begged. And begged.

I ended up taking him ice skating at a giant rink in the center of the giant city. He had never been, and from the look in his eyes when we arrived, you would have figured our pilgrimage might as well have been to Mecca. His eyes lit up at the huge, empty white patch of ice, the unfamiliar cold that chilled our bones, and the big, domed ceiling far above. It was then that I realized, Sergio probably hadn't been much of anywhere in his twelve years. He was a quick learner. By the end of the day he was skating on his own, swooping around corners and grinning like a fool, whooping and hollering as he passed. I bought him ice cream and rented him ice skates which, at the end of the day, I had to wrench from his feet as he pleaded to stay just a little bit longer.

It was to be the first of many journeys for me and Sergio. We went and watched a movie and ate Pizza Hut, a slice of heaven for me and an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil for Sergio. He looked as if he was tasting food for the first time, awakened from a Mole induced slumber to the wonders of American grease. We went to race go-karts, where Sergio unleashed twelve years of Combi-induced road rage into his poor little vehicle. We were asked to leave and never return when Sergio drove his car over a grassy median and beyond the borders of the track, crashing into a ravine and starting a small brush fire. We went to a nature reserve called Africam, and had a good laugh at the monkeys which climbed up into the open windows of the tour bus and rubbed their oversized balls in unsuspecting tourists' faces. We visited the underground temple of Cholula and got lost, not emerging to the surface until long after darkness had fallen and a full blown tempest had set in.

It was here, hunkered down under a snack-vendor's awning and waiting for the bus, shivering, cold and sick, that I realized how happy I was. Or rather, I realized how much less it took to make me happy. Somehow I had learned to glean enjoyment from such simple things as the sound of rain, the release of silence, or one of Sergio's simple, apish grins. In poverty, I felt rich.

* * *

At long last it came time for me to leave Puebla, and, in truth, I was eager to return to familiar territory. I spent my last night at the dinner table talking with Sergio and Alicia. Sergio, having discovered my talent for drawing, asked me to make him a picture, and so I sketched out a scene from the Lion King, one of his favorites. We talked late into the night, and had a laugh when I finally realized that, from the very first moments of my stay, I had been confusing the words pobrecito with lo siento, so that for every time someone had spoken to me in Spanish and I had attempted to apologize for my lack of linguistics, I had replied in Spanish with "you poor thing." That night I also realized that I was speaking Spanish. Garbled and butchered, but Spanish nonetheless.

We were still awake and laughing at 3:00 AM when Jose Limon appeared at the little red door to the house to pick me up and take me to the bus station. As a parting gift from a kid who had next to nothing, Sergio gave me a little pin that he had received in school to remember him by. A heartfelt goodbye is tough enough in English, but it's nearly impossible in a foreign language, so I settled on an honest thank you, and turned my back on Puebla.

The trip was an experience I'll not likely ever repeat, but one I will never forget. When I arrived back to the States I reveled in the joys of drinking fountains, grassy space, clean clothes, and home cooked meals. I no longer wanted to be a Mexican, but in some respects, I wanted to be a Limon. A few days later I went to a shoe store and picked up the nicest pair of Nikes I could find and shipped them off to Sergio, a metaphorical thank-you for allowing me to live life in his shoes.

* * *

Sergio wrote back to me after receiving the shoes, a long winded letter complete with drawings of his Nikes covered in flames, sparkling rays of light, and other general radness. He told me about how he had made the basketball team at his school and was a starter. We kept corresponding for years, calling on Christmas or sending a letter when reminiscence gave us pause. He called me years later and told me of his plan to visit the States soon and of course I offered to put him up. Shortly thereafter there was a severe earthquake in Puebla, in his neighborhood region of Tlaxcala measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale. I haven't heard from Sergio or the Limones since. And while I have since traveled to many parts of the world, learning and forgetting countless lessons on my journeys, the lessons I learned from Puebla cling to the forefront of my frontal lobe. Enjoy the life you live, live it to the fullest, take pleasure in small things, and never forget those who are less fortunate than you...you never know when you could be in their shoes.