I often tell slightly edited but mostly truthful stories from my life to my students, as a kind of reward at the end of a good class. I've had an interesting life, and so some of the stories are pretty remarkable, I suppose. One of the ones the students seem to most enjoy is The Story About The Time I Got Shot At While I Was Riding A Horse.
I really did get shot at – but the bullet missed. Here is a slightly less-edited version of the story.
After I quit my job in Mexico City in January of 1987, I went to visit a friend of mine named Jon who was living at that time in Morelia, in Michoacan state, about 8 hours by bus west of Mexico City. Jon was actually quite a bit older than me, but he sort of treated me as a younger brother. So we hung out for a while in Morelia, when he made an outrageous proposal. Well, actually, he made many outrageous proposals, but this is one I assented to, and this was it: we should buy some horses and travel around the mountains of Michoacan by horseback for a few months.
We did that. We bought horses and some low-tech camping gear, and we played cowboys in the mountains. We met many Mexicans, and even native Americans (in that part of Michoacan, they were P'urep'echa indians, known sometimes as Tarasco). We visited villages which were not connected to civilization by automobile. We found scorpions in our shoes and drank raw eggs mixed with coca-cola, which seemed to be a sort of local delicacy.
We met a tribe of American and Mexican hippies living on a farm in a town called Ihuatzio, and while my friend Jon flirted with resuming a previously defeated drug habit, I read back issues of Co-Evolution quarterly and Mexican comic books about Condorito and a battered copy of El Poema de Mio Cid, which conveniently had the 12th century Spanish and modern Spanish translations on facing pages.
After some time in Ihuatzio, we went around the Lago Patzcuaro to a town which was called, if I recall correctly, Santa Fulana de Tal, or something in that vein. Now, I should first explain, that my friend Jon had acquired a puppy. It was a husky, dirty white in coloration, which Jon, in his infinite naivite, dubbed "Negrita." Negrita, unfortunately, although funny in a punny sort of way for a white dog, is a very bad idea for a name for your dog, becaues "negrita" is a way to call the attention of a woman of low-repute, in that part of Mexico: "Ey, negrita, negrita!" means something like "Hey, bitch," or "Hey, baby." That kind of thing.
So in this village named Santa Fulana de Tal, Negrita the dog ran off, and Jon, in his infinite naivite, began yelling at the top of his voice, "Negrita, negrita!"
Let's just say, this was a bad idea.
Several of the women on the street appeared alarmed. It was a conservative village, where people came through on horseback frequently enough, but where gringos on horseback yelling "negrita" after their dogs where perhaps less well-known. One of the women who were inadvertently being offended by Jon's yelling (and maybe I was yelling the name too, honestly, though I should have known better – my Spanish was better than Jon's) had a husband or father who overheard this yelling, and this man decided to take offense.
Unfortunately, he was drunk.
Unfortunately, he had a gun, and so he decided to begin shooting at us.
Fortunately, he was drunk, so his aim was really terrible. He hit my shoe. He hit Jon's foot, with a graze. He was shooting low. For all I know, he hit a horse, though we found no wound on them later. Jon's horse ditched him, leaving Jon sprawled on the cobblestone. My horse ran like the dickens, but I held on tightly. Several kilometers later, my horse stopped.
When Jon finally caught up to me, later, he blamed me for abandoning him. I said it was the horse's fault, and I was just along for the ride. I blamed him for so stupidly naming the dog. Jon said I was saying the dog's name too, and if I knew the dog's name was offensive, why didn't I say anything. I said I had said something, but that Jon was too drug-addled to pay attention at that time. Etc.
Our friendship effectively ended, that day. I ceded ownership of the horse to Jon, forfeiting my investment. I took a bus back to Mexico City. My passport was stolen later that week. It was a bad week. By the end of the month, I was back in Minneapolis. But it was a grand conclusion to my year-and-a-half in Mexico.
What I'm listening to right now.
Mexican Institute of Sound, "Mi negra a bailal."