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.