It was the ghost with heavy lip gloss that grabbed my attention.
“So what do you think the deal is with her?” I asked my buddy across the table.
“Who?” he asked. He was deeply into his burrito, and being a guy who takes his burritos very seriously, not really giving his full attention to the conversation.
“The girl up there,” I said, pointing to the tv in the corner of the restaurant. “The Fuzzy Girl.”
“Fuzzy?” he asked in a distracted sort of way. “Is she wearing a sweater or something?”
“No,” I explained, “she’s swimming in and out of focus and her voice is all echoey. Do you think she’s a bad memory or an evil spirit or something?”
“Dunno,” he said, peering suspiciously into the depths of his burrito. “Do you think this is all pork, or did they put some mutton or something in this?” Clearly, he was less enthralled in the Mexican soap opera than I was.
I decided not to let it drop. “No, really,” I said, “the guy with the goatee is obviously on the run – he’s hurrying through the airport and he’s looking over his shoulder all the time. Someone’s definitely chasing him. Every time he starts sweating, the camera breaks to this cheesed-off-looking Fuzzy Girl with the lip gloss who talks in echoes at him.”
My friend turned to look at the tv, but just then, the scene changed to a too-pretty woman in a penthouse office arguing with a too-pretty man. “El Stupido!” she hissed at him before going into a full-blown rant, which included one of the dozen or so Spanish words I understand, “loco”, or crazy.
My buddy was riveted by this. While he speaks even less Spanish than I do, he has heard this particular conversation too many times in English not to understand it.
“What do you think?” I asked. “ Something like, ‘ You’re stupid if you think I’ll be crazy enough to stay with you’ ?”
“AbsoLUTELY!” he sad. “I wonder if she knows that girl I went out with last month.”
By this time, even though neither of us could understand the dialog we were both completely absorbed in the storyline of this show. I speculated on whether the woman in the office was evil or not.
“How can you tell?” he asked. I explained the theory a Puerto Rican friend of mine had shared with me once – all beautiful women in Spanish-language soap operas are either evil or virgins. If a character looks naïve and a little nervous, it’s pretty likely that she’s a virgin – and thus one of the heroes. If she looks like she’s been around the block a few times, you can bet that she’s plotting someone’s death.
“Speaking of death,” my buddy said, “here’s that Fuzzy Girl again.” He looked at her thoughtfully through the haze. “Hmm… she’s wearing too much lip gloss to be a virgin but if she’s evil, why do they have that angel-haze all around her?”
“I don’t know,” I said, finishing my beer and deliberately grabbing too slowly for the check. “Maybe he killed her and now she’s haunting him.”
“Ooh,” he said, standing up and grabbing for his keys, “good one! Why don’t we ask her?” He indicated the cashier, who was watching the program too, totally hypnotized.
We asked her.
“Oh, this is a good story,” she explained enthusiastically. “The guy with the beard killed her and now she’s haunting him.”
My friend and I nodded knowingly at one another.
“Was she evil or a virgin?” my friend asked her after a moment. She responded with a blank look, so we explained the evil/virgin theory to her.
“Oh, wow!” she replied. “I never thought of that before – they are all either evil or virgins!”
“But what about her?” I asked, as the ghost with lip gloss reappeared, whispering intently at the Sweaty Guy. “Which was she before she died?”
Our new friend thought carefully for a moment. “Actually, neither,” she said finally. “She’s just about the only woman on this show who isn’t evil or a virgin.”
“And so,” I said gravely, “she had to die,”.
We all nodded knowingly at each other.
“But why does a ghost need all that lip gloss?” my buddy asked after another moment’s thought.
