The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories (5 page)

Nobody hits me,
hijo de chingada
. Nobody drives me crazy. I couldn’t do or say anything. I was shitting my pants. She could easily misfire. I thought about screaming, crying for help, but that was ridiculous. Besides, nobody was going to get out of bed to save an imbecile like me. Fortunately, the little calf began to cry and The Western Bible took off to console him. I immediately started looking for the keys. They were hanging from a wooden cross in the kitchen. I took another moment to reach into her purse on top of the refrigerator and grab as much as I had spent on the two of them at the fights, plus what I needed for my taxi
home.

At the bar now, they consider me an expert on fat girls. A luminary. I have told my story to many a tourist, how a succulent fat girl rescued me from a sexual jam. They respect me. In here. But out there as well. People point at me. The devil sucked off your wife, güey. But I don’t care. My little wife and I are intimate again. And whenever we finish making love, I caress her burn scars and she purrs like a kitten under a birch
tree.

The Cowgirl Bible
had huge tits, a greasy face, and a mess of hair. From preadolescence, she had suffered flare-ups of rebellious hair. She learned early that letting loose those tresses was only possible for gals who could afford certain products. From the time she was just twelve or thirteen years old, as she entered the bloom of puberty, she focused blindly on the wild vertical porcupine that had begun to grow between her
legs.

The punkospine, which had transmuted from the armadillo, developed in an onrush, like a flood, and could only be compared to the beards flaunted during certain musical phases by two members of ZZ Top. It could also be equated with the historic materialism of a certain identifiable and renowned pubis. The Cowgirl Bible suffered. She suffered from the folklorish dimensions of that wild bush. Her pubisexy mop could not hide under a bikini. It didn’t matter how many atonal rakes she employed to shave, or how many blades she ordered from the hair-removal industry’s complete catalog of new products, the punkospine always overwhelmed the emergent hairs like shrapnel, as is so often the case with certain honky-tonk
gals.

During countless encounters with her mane, she avoided trying to control its erratic growth, until the day she was discovered by a buoyant hair talent scout. Once she found a skilled manipulator for her estimable hair of the loins, The Cowgirl Bible became the most committed participant in the national contest
Shave Your Triangle
. She won various awards in the ingrown hair category. At fifteen, she won the contest’s most important honors: The Golden Porcupine, the equivalent of the Hotsprings Award for the Radioactive
Bud.

When a competitor is awarded the top prize, she should retire. Traditionally, Goodbye My Love plays at these affairs. And because pubic hair was her life, The Cowgirl Bible said that telenovelas and hosting would not be her path. A change of scene meant only one thing: to go under the knife, to invest in plastic surgery the way one does with horse racing. She decided it was better to follow the example of certain ex-baseball players who become minor league coaches upon retirement. She would impose herself in stylology, specializing in the pubis. She had memorized the exact manipulation of the mini mini electric shaver they used to shave her before every catwalk competition.

The Cowgirl Bible was a living legend. She had been inducted into the hall of fame at fifteen. She was the youngest ever to conquer the big screen. No one didn’t know who she was in the Guorl circuit®. But that didn’t keep her from signing up for the hair removers’ union under the snooty alias Ms. Las Vegas. As was tradition with novices, her first razor was a used one. A red Yamaha with white frets.

The secret to being a virtuous master of the blade, according to the first lesson from her virtual instructor on
The World’s Great Epilators
DVD, not only resides in worshiping the divine mandate of shaving, but also in never forgetting the fundamental principle: that the music is in the wires. Handling an acoustic razor is not the same as handling an electric one. Check out the style. The style is the man (or, in this case, the gluttonous little girl, or whoever occurs to me). That’s the trick, the plan, the gift. It might come from heaven or as a spark of ingenuity. Some people say the key is in the tube amp, others lift the strings with their hands as they arpeggio or use a homemade instrument.

From the Yamaha, she went on to a Fender Stratocaster, which she called Lucille. She dreamed of shaving next to the greats. On the wall above her bed she had a giant poster of her hero, her holy moly, her one and only: Jaimito Hendrics. As a pre-celebrity teen, she’d go out on the streets with her razor hanging off her back and get together with her buddies, all aspiring virtuosos, and they’d watch video clips featuring Hendrics, this dude who played the razor with his teeth, threw it against the speakers, and lit it on
fire.

Already marked as a product of the ghetto, she made her first public appearance at Cabelo do Porco, the PopSTock! interracial fair. Before, as was the case with all the aspirants, she’d taken part in small jams at highway bars and in neighborhood garages. She’d even had a small trio called Confessions of a Fried-Chicken Peddler. The power trio, rock’s analectic formation, was the gospel she needed to follow. As models there were two of the most reputable groups in history (now gone): Cream and The Experience.

The interracial show consisted of lining up prospects before they went up onstage, as if they were waiting at a bank. On the stage, a group—razor, bass, and drums—was improvising on the pubis of a top model. The novice had to better, or at least equal, the rock and roll rapture of the stationary shaver going at another bush. Whoever managed to advance to the next phase, to be decided by the auditorium crowd, would compete in the last round for a Marshall amp, a car, two thousand pesos cash, and a Sony Ericsson cellphone.

As if she was getting in line to cash a pension check, The Cowgirl Bible took her place in that long queue. Just before it was her turn, the girl in front of her warned her not to go onstage. She’d only make a fool of herself. But our girl didn’t give a shit. Decided, The Cowgirl Bible climbed the backstage steps.

—What is your name? asked the house band’s razor player.

—The Cowgirl Bible.

—Where have you played?

—Around.

—Ladies and gentlemen, The Cowgirl Bible, from around.

The competition started. First up was the local, then the visitor. The local organized her model’s pubes into a tiny pair of angel wings. The bass and drums never stopped improvising. Then The Cowgirl Bible launched into her performance.

She started calmly, too sweet for rock and roll. But then the performance went out of control. The Cowgirl Bible was out of this world. She was operating on a whole other beat, which, because it was new, sounded out of tune and awkward. The bass and drums interrupted the song. The model feared for her parts. The audience was disconcerted. The Cowgirl Bible hadn’t realized there was absolute silence in the room except for the hum of her instrument. Everybody was completely focused on her, and she was completely focused on playing. To make her come back, the drummer took a plate from a pile and threw it on the ground. The sound of it smashing on the floor brought The Cowgirl Bible out of her abstract pyrotechnics. The test was over. The audience started laughing and jeering, and The Cowgirl Bible came down from the platform sad and lonely, as if she’d just swallowed some matches.

The Cowgirl Bible first heard about Crossroad in a documentary. If, as I suspect, her biographer is Latino, then her story will be titled
Encrucijada
. Perhaps they’ll also make a movie. It will star Karen Bach. The soundtrack will win a Grammy®. Then there’ll be a tribute by some black blues players. A street in the Bronx will be named after her and, finally, they will erect a statue of her along a path in Central Park and the inscription will read:
The Cowgirl Bible Parker Iniesta Herbert Novo. The cursed poet of electric shavers.

But I am getting ahead of myself, being too cute for words, and a little nasty. Before The Cowgirl Bible appeared on the covers of all the magazines, before she became the great mother hen, godmother to all the girls, mother of Marianne Faithfull, she suffered for a second time. She suffered from the futility of being a fledgling. And this is off the record: After her failure in the contest she thought about abandoning—definitively and without the option of Methadone, like a beautiful trauma—her love of the bush-sculpting
art.

That night after the concert, when all the bars had closed like wounds, she discovered Crossroad on TV. The documentary showed a mephitic location in the midst of a mythic nothing. It featured two paths that came together to form a cross. Or an X. Depending. On one side there was a bar attended to by a blind man, where they only served cola. Out in front, on a humble veranda, a deaf black man pretended to play guitar on a stick. They say a few meters up ahead there used to be a boot store called El Infierno, but nothing in the registers indicates such a thing. There is absolutely nothing there
now.

Everything I’ve told of so far is relevant to the story because legend has it that if you can’t figure out the signs, you won’t be able to make a deal in Crossroad. If there’s just one missing scenic element, then the journey will be harrowing, like dealing with a bureaucrat. If, by a stroke of bad luck, the bar is closed or the black guy is just meowing, then it will be necessary to return during lobster season. If by virtue of the Holy Child Jesus of Peyote, patron of PopSTock!, the requirements are met, then the devil will present himself at Crossroad at midnight, and you can make a deal. In exchange for your soul, you can even ask for press credentials.

The documentary had testimony from people who asked for the wildest things. One guy was happy with a lifetime season ticket to see his favorite soccer team. Granted. Another wanted to play the drums in Beck’s band. But Beck wouldn’t change his Christian drummer, he was too good. Yet a soul is like a caress, it’s never unwelcome. So, in order to not squander his wish, the devil granted him a job as a percussionist. The last case was that of Old Man Paulino, the prestigious composer of El Mono de Alambre (whoever can’t dance to that can just go fuck themselves), who traded his soul for a pair of leather boots from The Cowboy Bible.

At the end of the documentary, there were various fine-print clauses. But there was only one warning to those who might dare introduce themselves to the devil. The warning was not to do it while drunk. Contrary to popular song, Satan can’t stand drunks. Showing up intoxicated to meet him runs the risk of him putting you in charge of the municipal dog pound or making you a Green Party volunteer for some political cause.

If, as Santi Carrillo proposes, music journalism is just a bourgeois extravagance, then we can understand the reviews that followed The Cowgirl Bible’s first presentation, what we might call a comeback, with her new trio: The Midnight Angel of Oil for
Cars:

The lewdness The Cowgirl Bible Parker deploys so directly reflects the nearly endless pubis she’s had available during almost the entire tour of England she’s just completed. It’s part of one of the rhythmic patterns that have become her trademark during that time. During the intro and the verse we can hear the drums, the blade, and the bass playing in unison through an upbeat 7/4. The emphatic gestures come before and after the beat in a way that’s totally innovative for heavy metal, especially when the band emphasizes the bass-drum pattern. At other times, it’s more conventional, as in the razor solo, which is nonetheless very effective. The Cowgirl Bible’s solo is like a high spiritual scream and evolves to a sonorous seduction, intensified by the use of the Octavia and its shameless adornments. It’s one of The Cowgirl Bible’s most inventive interludes, complete with phrases that she builds on as if she were talking to herself.

Portinarismos
aside, and no longer the amateur who’d been invited to perform only at informal gatherings and cocktail parties, The Cowgirl Bible turned out to be a real virtuoso on the wah-wah pedal. As with Jesus’s life, a part of The Cowgirl Bible’s life runs perpendicular to this narrative, without our knowing her whereabouts. There’s a hole in the story. If indeed INRI went into seclusion in the desert to talk with YHWH, in an anti-apocryphal version of Vicente Fernández’s song,
Hoy platiqué con mi gallo
, The Cowgirl Bible Parker, on the B-side, also decided to seclude herself in the desert, according to certain non-canonical gospels, to make a deal with the State’s unholy lover, Satan. This happened between her visit to Crossroad and her triumphant comeback. It was about a three-year period. What was The Cowgirl Bible’s address during this time? Could it be true she was abducted by Egyptian extraterrestrial telenovela addicts? Was this foretold in Jaime Pausán’s prophecies? Remain in your seats. After the talk we’ll open up for questions.

Jesus fled to the desert so he wouldn’t be seduced by evil’s gourmet desserts: flan, egg custard, rice pudding, pastries, cookies,
sodacerveza
sodacerveza
,
gorditas
,
chicharrón picadillo gorditas
in mole,
lonches lonches lonches
, and masks masks masks bring your masks we’ve got a Místico el Huracán Ramírez Damián 666 mask, send your boy send your gal we’ll give you three packs of caguama for six caramel apples, tamales tamales we have hot tamales, yes you heard right for just forty pesos we’re gonna let you have two pairs of socks four swim suits and a shawl today only and before eight p.m. c’mon up close, for your mother-in-law the plague spider fly cockroach bring your roach powder bring it bring it, a watermelon fat watermelon Chinese watermelon sweet five for ten pesos, red melon red melon red, a little something for the love of God ma’am I’m just trying to get enough for fare to Juárez I’m gonna cross the border to join up with my
carnal
who’s in Elay I’ll sweep your street wash your car mow your lawn in the name of the little virgin of Guadalupop even if it’s just a taco ma’am may God repay you with many children and may God keep you in his Holy Glory amen,
etc.

The Cowgirl Bible didn’t have to go anywhere. She was already in the desert. So she went to meet the Boss of Bosses. Respected at every level. Old and wise: Satan.

This is how it happened:

But first, a problem that all systole narratives face: how to represent the devil. Is it true or false that he appears as a mantelpiece, or as the folkloric figure in the Mexican lottery?
Chalupa y buenas.
To try and solve the problem, we can humangenomemap it in three
ways:

1. A
   Appealing to the common denominator. That is, like Ned Flanders;
   
2. B
   Like a
   culiche
   boxer before he steps into the ring. With Los Huracanes del Norte’s song, Lincoln negro, like an idiosyncratic headline;
   
3. C
   Refuting the theory that God is black, and sponsoring evil as such from November 2nd, 19**. A chocolate devil.