Senorita Guerita

It's already driving me crazy that I can't make the en-yay symbol above the "n" in the title up there. Faaahck. I'm not sure how long I can look at that before I just delete this whole post out of frustration.

Well. Anyway. I've been speaking a lot more Spanish lately. Yep. I'm preeeeeetty much just a bad-ass now. I'm going to take you on a little journey to the very beginning of my history with the Spanish language. For me, it all started when I was in the eighth grade. Since I quit marching band after seventh grade (which I realized later was a mistake cuz there were actually hot nerdy band guys in high school, damnit), I was able to actually choose my elective class for my second year at the junior high. This was a big deal-- while I had been tripping over my shoelaces and accidentally bashing people in the jaw with my flute case, everyone else had been bonding over the generic set of elective classes, gaining coolness levels by not caring about the quality of their freshly sanded wooden bowls but more about who made-out with whom in the photo lab's Red Room. I was giddy with fourteen-year-old girl adrenaline at the prospect of rubbing elbows with non-nerds in a class other than P.E. (We called Phys Ed "PE." I'm sure that's self-explanatory, but it just occurred to me that maybe it's not. But I mean... it is. Right?) I was so tired of seeing the same faces in the desks around me in every classroom-- all the same honors students taking school a *little* too seriously in our rush to be perfect mini-adults before our balls even had a chance to drop. I yearned for a fresh batch of blood to mix with, to hear the gossip of the more sexually advanced, and to develop crushes on the "bad boys" that I otherwise never had a chance to be around.

As I daydreamed about tossing flour into the air with all the other care-free students in Home Ec, pretending not to be super pumped about learning to make a pie crust in a perfect rendition of Snow White's lacy artistry... my mother was discovering that Spanish was going to be offered as an elective for eighth graders for the first time at our school. My powdered sugar dreams slipped soundlessly through the cracks of my doughy fingers and morphed into "suenos" before they hit the floor. Yet again, I was signed up for an elective that was surely to house every helplessly nerdy try-hard student and myself. Thanks Mom.


I was surprised to find that the variety of students in my Spanish class was actually more diverse than every other class of mine. It seemed all kinds of moms had forced their kids into taking an academic course as an elective. I scanned the mixture of jocks and druggees, until SHE crossed the ugly off-blue carpet in one sturdy quarterbacker's stride and took the the center of the room.

"Hola, ethtudianteth. Mi nombre eth Thenora Borrith de Barthelona. Thoy la profethora de ethta clathe."

We stared. Some of us may have even clapped. There she... towered. At least six feet tall. Probably closer to eleven. White as can be, with a mommish style radiating a faint yet terrifying glow of sheer power and strength. Within half a minute, she had the attention of every hormone-rattled brain in that room. I honestly can't explain the hold her presence has over people. I mean, here I am actually TRYING to explain it, and I realize that it just sounds stupid. But... when she speaks in a room, you feel like you'd better listen to what she's saying, or else you're either going to get a spanking from her seriously intimidating forearm or you're going to miss out on a sentence that will be crucially important to you later in a life-or-death situation. Yeah. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.

I lapped up every word that lisped out of Senora Borris de Barcelona's lips. Though I must say that it was difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between what SHE was physically saying with her mouth and what she wanted US to say with ours. Her Castilian accent caused much confusion. I distinctly remember going through the numbers that first day: "Repeat after me. THERO."

"Thero." 


"No no no, I say THERO, you say CERO!! Okay? THERO!"

"Sssss--uhh--ther...o.... Thero?"


"NO! SAY-RO! CERO! SSSSSS-ERO!! I SAY THE 'TH' SOUND, NOT YOU!"

And it was fine until we got to numero "doth" and had to go through it all over again. Eventually the Thenora had to just abandon her usual accent and give it to us straight-up. After every lecture she gave she would lean her shadow over our desks and shout "WRITE IT DOWN!" in case any of us were so caught up in watching her large arm swoops that we forgot to take notes. We started referring to her (secretly) as The Borris. We all loved her. Well, and we feared her. I more loved her than feared her though, and inwardly I aspired to be as Spanish-ly savvy as she. I slurped up that vocabulary as if it were Nantucket Nectar lemonade (I didn't drink booze for another four years, so I had a pretty solid addiction to lemonade, and this particular brand was my bottle of choice). I got a raging boner when I discovered that the same grammatical rules I had devoted my heart to in English existed for the Spanish language as well. I could NOT get enough.

Freshman year of high school I entered Spanish 2 with a different instructor, and she chose me as her Student of the Year the first month because I was the only student to turn in a flawless paper for our initial essay. At the lunch thrown in the awarded students' honor, she found out I was a freshman and then seemed upset that she'd chosen me. I was too busy waving across the room excitedly at The Borris to be bothered by the fact that my own teacher was pouting, though. The glorious Borris sat a good four feet above the student trying to have a presence at her side. I felt a kick of jealousy for the girl she had chosen.

I took Spanish for the next three years in high school. Incidentally, The Borris was my teacher for all of them. I was thrilled. However, this is the reason that after taking five years of Spanish, I could still go into a group of Mexicans and be positive that they were speaking Mandarin. I essentially learned text-book Spain-Spanish with a Castilian accent. I studied Nineteenth Century novels and absorbed the culture of The Borris's experiences from living in Spain for eighteen years. I could write ten-paged essays about the politics of Don Quixote, but when a woman stopped me on the street and asked me directions to "El bano?" I dropped to the ground and played dead. On many occasions, I resorted to idiot-status sign language and squeaks of exasperation when confronted with someone who only spoke Spanish. Finally, maybe after four painstaking minutes scraped by, I would bust out a sentence in semi-perfect-but-perfectly-helpful Spanish, and the person would do a double-take and then I'd run away before the stress of it all gave me a heart attack. I just always worried too much about making a mistake with words. One thing I don't like is ANYTHING I AM NOT GOOD AT. True story. Swimming (although that may have more to do with the whole bathing suit thing). Video games. Marathons. The list goes on and on. And when it comes to language, I am very, VERY self-conscious. I actually feel a great deal of disappointment in myself because of the fact that I constantly end sentences and phrases with prepositions. This drives me crazy. I highly doubt anyone else cares, or that anyone was even listening to what I was saying or writing in the first place. But to imagine messing up entire sentences PUBLICLY makes me want to put on all white and go rock in a corner somewhere. Fuck that, lady you go find the bathroom yourSELF.

I took a dozen more Spanish classes at UCSB. They were less intimate than our sessions with The Borris. I didn't really care for any of the professors. They didn't really care for me. I didn't try to distinguish myself from my peers, and my learning curve tuckered itself out. In my linguistics class, I all-but phoned in my presence. I waltzed into class late one day, texting my boyfriend at the time about dinner plans (omg lol ttyl), only to find people reciting poems in Spanish that they'd memorized. I looked at my peers' faces to make sure I was in the right class, then hastily made an exit before I had to try to make up some "Rosas son rojas" shit. When did I lose my zest for the language??

It wasn't until I graduated from college that I actually put my eight years of studying the Spanish language to any use. No, I didn't travel to Europe and go running with the bulls. I was busy sucking the teat of the service industry in hoity-toity downtown Santa Barbara, whose entire back-of-house staff is dominated by talented chefs from Mexico. When you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are greeted by the young hot hostess with the dangly earrings and the side-swept bangs. She leads you to a table, where your surfer hunk of a server lists the evening's specials to you. He directs your difficult questions to the nicely dressed, slightly older gentleman with the manager's smile and efficient demeanor. When your inquisitions have been satisfied, the dreamy server returns and shakes his sun-streaked locks from his eyes as he jots down your order and you settle into your seat and wait for your food to materialize. As a patron, what you don't know is that because you changed five hundred things about your order, your server is about to have the most complicated language barrier battle of his life. Imagine being a chef, standing in front of a hot flame in an overheated kitchen in a warm town, cooking food to-order for hundreds of customers with different modifications on each ticket. Then imagine stressed-out servers shouting important specifics at you for each ticket in a language that is secondary to you. The amount of tension created by this scenario is quadrupled by the fact that the kitchen staff all have access to many sharp knives. It was this extreme environment of terse, mixed-up communication that forced me to reach into my supply kit and pull out my Spanish vocabulary. Granted, half the time the guys in the kitchen laughed at me and corrected me because many of the words I was accustomed to were either outdated or nonexistent for SoCal Spanish. However... after a certain amount of effort on my part, I was gradually accepted as a pseudo-Spanish-speaker, and a camaraderie formed between my Mexican coworkers and me. They started referring to me as la Senorita Guerita, and I proudly translated anxious new servers' requests to the kitchen, joking with the chefs at the doe-eyed unilingual lass's expense. Jajaja.

Because I prided myself so much on being a part of the Mexican community at my restaurant in Santa Barbara, I was utterly thrilled when, after our company Christmas party last year, a group of the guys from the kitchen asked me to go with them to their bar, La Copa. My female coworkers were NOT so happy about this invitation, and immediately started mom-ing me and warning me that they'd ground me if I even THOUGHT about going there, yadda yadda yadda. We'd all heard the stories from that bar. That was where the guys got so drunk that we wouldn't see them for days and all of a sudden a random cousin of theirs would be working for them until they got their shit together again. That was where married men had mistresses, and single men had hookers. And some single men had MALE hookers. And (singlewhitefemale)'s did not belong. Buuuut... in the good ol' Christmas spirit, heightened by a few yard-long Hefeweizen influences, I grabbed the arm of mi mejor amigo de la cocina and told him that as long as he would keep an eye out for me, I would go. Note to everyone: you should always, ALWAYS listen to your girl friends when they're telling you not to go do stupid drunken shit.

La Copa. Well. First of all, there were only five women in the whole bar. I was one of them. And incidentally, I was the only non-prostitute one. Aaaand the only clueless-looking white girl sitting there with a Corona in her hand and a posse of grinning Mexican dudes around her. It would have been an insecure seventh-grader's dream for the amount of guys coming up and asking me to dance with them. Well, it wasn't exactly like they asked me. They just poked me on the shoulder and nodded at the dance floor, and then stood there waiting. I said "No gracias" like a hundred times before my friend started telling them I was with him and that they needed to stop asking. Five minutes later, the same exact line of guys started asking again. I was more than a little weirded out at that point. I sat glued to my barstool of safety, my arm pressed firmly against my friend's, which I had decided was "home" in this situation. When my own coworkers started asking me to dance, I started nervously giggling and saying no, while a cold sweat was glittering across my hairline. I pressed harder against my friend's arm, willing my "home" to get up off his ass and take me to my real home. He committed an epic friendship fail and told me to dance with one of the guys. Sergio, my favorite dishwasher. Okay. Nothing against Sergio. He's a good guy. Very sweet. We joked around all the time at work, and he always helped me when I was being macho and trying to carry too much stuff or was in danger of dropping anything (which was always). So really, nothing personal, Sergio. It's just that I was watching one of my married coworkers grab the breasts of one of the hooker-ladies and squeeze them like those stress-relief balls that my boss had to keep in his desk after he had an anxiety-induced heart attack. And I was watching men on the dance floor grabbing the asses of the other hookers and putting their fingers under the ladies' skirts and I started panickinganditstartedfeelingtoowarminthebarandIjustneededsomeairandnoSergioIdon'twannadancewithyouand-- all of a sudden I was being led by Sergio to the dance floor. This is it, (singlewhitefemale). Just remember: nosenoseNOSE! groingroinGROIN!! I smiled fakely at Sergio as I discreetly practiced flat palm thrusts behind my back. As I tried to gauge whether or not I could truly smash his nose into his brain if necessary, Sergio placed one hand in my left and the other on my upper back/shoulder area. Keeping a good two feet between our bodies, he began to shuffle side-to-side to the mariachi band. I raised my eyebrows in confusion. I looked back into my junior high references, sticking back the self-defense lessons and selecting instead memories from the school dances. We were replicating the exact junior high dance that everyone jokes about, only this time instead of my preteen hormones being annoyed by the distance between us, I was fist-pumping my joy behind his neck. As I looked around, I became aware that other than the guy feeling up the hooker next to us, everyone else was mimicking our modest sway on the dance floor. Was it the traditional Mexican bar dance? If so, halle-fucking-lujah.

When we got back to the bar everyone was slapping Sergio's back in approval and they had all bought me like five hundred Coronas. I looked at their smiles skeptically, but saw in them such a genuine sense of generosity and welcoming. I realized this was the first time I was hanging out with them on their turf, and I was the only girl from the restaurant to dare to enter the super sketch-town place they frequented. I smiled back at them, picked up one of the beers, and pretended to drink it. (Come on. I might really like beer but I'm not a comPLETE idiot. That one creepy guy was coming back to tap me on the shoulder to ask me to dance again, and I needed aaaaaaall my wits about me.) A half hour later, I was chatting up a storm with all the guys and not caring if I floundered on my Spanish at all. I felt truly accepted. So when I jokingly leaned in to the lady of the night who was letting my married coworker get all kinds of handsy on her and said in my form of Spanish, "What are you doing, you're WAY better than him!" I expected everyone else to laugh along with me. This was not the case. Mister Married shoved away from her and got in my face, yelling obscenities in Spanish and thrusting his finger at my nose. My friend jumped in front of me, trying to calm him down. Tears filled my eyes as I tried to explain that I had been just joking, and my false sense of comfort shattered around my feet. Everyone in the bar was fixated on the stupid white girl causing a bar-brawl about a hooker. I decided that was probably the best time to go. My friend grabbed me and shoved our way to the exit. About twenty hands tugged at me on the way out. Not in an aggressive way, but more in a solicitous way, as if I had just been playing hard to get the whole night by telling them I wasn't interested. I followed one of the grabby hands up to the face it belonged to and saw a pair of eyes that legitimately just had a question mark there. Like, eh eh? Maybe? In the blur around me I shook my head in slow motion, and he dropped his hand, a new shadow of defeat taking over his features. Then, we were outside, pushing past more throngs of curious hombres, and scrambling into a cab. After I heard my seatbelt click in safety, I turned to my friend. "Well, tonight I learned that you should never insult a Mexican in front of his hooker." He laughed at me, shaking his head.

"Estas loca, Senorita Guerita." Then he pulled a Corona out of his pocket and started to sip on it, gazing out the window at the fuzzy Christmas lights.