Dr. Q.

Salsa had no last name. She had only an initial: Q. I had to admit that having a girlfriend named Salsa Q. was a turn-on, especially when I needed to introduce her to someone, which wasn’t that often owing to the fact that nude burritos don’t engage in social networking as much as the rest of humanity. When it comes to the ebb and flow of life, nude burritos mostly ebb.

But I digress. Salsa Q. was an exotic dancer on Bourbon Street. During the day, she worked on a doctorate in anthropology at Tulane University. Tulane is expensive, and Salsa made a thousand dollars a night in tips.

“So you’re going to be Dr. Q. one day?” I asked after one of our pretzel sessions.

She slapped me on the face, as she’d done on the day we met.

“What did you do that for?”

“You make me sound like a bimbo antagonist from a James Bond movie,” she said before kissing me passionately.

“Oh.”

I had to admit her rationale made sense.

“Why are you interested in anthropology?” I asked.

“I dig bones.”

I could have engaged in all kinds of literary analysis with her reply, but I decided not to. I let Salsa be Salsa. In fact, that would become my mantra: Let Salsa be Salsa. I didn’t know it then, but I had a lot more slapping in store from the fiery pole dancer and future bone digger, and each time she made the fillings in my molars rattle, I merely said, “Let Salsa be Salsa.” I knew a good thing when I saw it.

Salsa Appears

If you fall off a horse, get back up, right? I was working as a mime on Bourbon Street, hoping people would throw a few coins into the hat on the ground beside my feet. Not moving is a tough job, the kind of job that makes you stiff after six or seven hours—ten in this “Great-Depression-is-around-the-corner” economy. At the end of the day, I often wished for the trained fingers of a chiropractor to play my back like a piano, but as I have described previously, I had caught my ex-girlfriend in bed with her boss, a chiropractor who had always treated me for free. I now know why. I could have looked for another bone cracker, but mimes make nickels and dimes. Literally.

As luck would have it, I was contorted on the street one day, my facial features frozen like a glacier from the last Ice Age, when my eyes spied a Latin honey, a dark-haired vision of tropical love. My glacier started to melt. Romantic global warming was coming on strong. “Would you like to go out?” I whispered. She slapped me in the face, laughed, and then said, “Yes.”

We went to a Korean restaurant at the edge of the French Quarter that night. The medicinal qualities of love are underrated, for my spinal cord felt as if it could be twisted into a pretzel without pain. Two hours later, my feelings were validated as Salsa, love goddess from Honduras, twisted me into a pretzel. One would think that simultaneously being a burrito and a nude pretzel might be too much for one man, but things worked out just fine. Endorphins were running amok through my bloodstream like foolhardy men sprinting from the bulls in Pamplona. It was grand.

“Why did you slap me today?” I asked Salsa when she had untwisted me.

“To see if you were a man of your word. If you had fallen down onto the street, I would have known you were untrue, a gigolo.”

I was happy to be a mime, albeit poor. Salsa was my only fringe benefit in an otherwise rigid profession.

Birth of the Burrito

It’s what comes of living with a pretty young witch, the kind that casts spells when she’s not working as the receptionist for the local chiropractor. She was pretty and young, and that was okay, and she had straight black hair down to her waist, and that was okay, too. She was a good cook as well, a Mexican cook named Maria. I wish her name had been more exotic, but it wasn’t. I’m sorry about that.

I came home from work one day and found her in bed with the chiropractor. That wasn’t okay. She said he was aligning her vertebrae, but here was the problem: she was lying on her back and he was begging me not to hit him with a baseball bat. I didn’t think that the professional medical corporation lying naked in my bed was up to any good, and so I kicked him out. That’s when she cast the spell.

“You’re a burrito!” she shouted. And then she made some arcane gestures. She added for good measure, “And you’re not just any burrito—you’re a nude burrito.” She then got dressed and left. I never saw her again.

Now let’s get something straight from the outset. I knew I wasn’t really a burrito, but I felt like one. I felt like wilted lettuce and a flour tortilla. Worse yet, the burrito was falling apart. I was indeed naked, albeit in a metaphysical, Mexican kind of way. Such were Maria’s powers of persuasion. From then on, people started calling me “Burrito.” I don’t know what they saw, but that’s the moniker that stuck after the chiropractic fiasco. I was pretty sure I still had arms and legs, but everyone else treated me like a burrito. A nude burrito.