On the first day in Mexico City, my dear friend M. and I put on tight sundresses, high heels and movie-star sunglasses and set out for the center of town with our friend “Xavier,” who is a native Mexican and a long-haired, leather-jacketed type who resembles the archetypal Leisure-Class Druglord. As the three of us entered the old city, surrounded by collapsing churches of soot-blackened rock, we created quite a stir. It was as if we had been airlifted from a Lite Beer commercial wearing nothing but wet thongs and dropped in the middle of a militant Islamic religious ceremony. Catcalls and whistles whirled around us like a meaty typhoon of dark lust. Spite and envy curled out from behind brick corners and rose up from poncho blankets spread with plastic Jesus paraphernalia, the poisonous sparks swarming around us like a swarm of black gnats. M., a doctor of anthropology, glowered defiantly at the drooling scowls of the poor and restless men from her impenetrable fortress of large, safe, White Money, Intelligence and Entitlement. I just started giggling and smiling at people, hoping to shuck the whole experience off as a momentary channeling of the Goddess of Love.

As we walked along, men kept running up to us and muttering something in Spanish to Xavier. When we asked him what they had said, invariably it proved to be something along the lines of “You will lend them to me for several hours?” All comments on our appearance were directed to Xavier, who was perceived to be our owner and proprietor. Our high spirits began to sag as we realized that our glamour and prestige was directly related to the oppression of the men violently slobbering at us.

As I walked out of a terrible little restroom, my ass was surreptitiously grabbed by a stealthy hand. This let the last air out of my otherworldly balloon. I suddenly realized that we were inviting not admiration but violation. We were buckets of bloody chum dropped into a knot of sharks, USO showgirls performing nude in front of a group of speed-addled war prisoners. “It is simply not done,” the city intoned about our sundresses. We embodied everything nasty, all evil temptations: porno videos, dirty money, hard booze, crack cocaine and free time, all rolled up into two unsuspecting touristas. Get your rich honky tits away from our good Catholic men, who wish to smear you into the ground with open-mouth kisses and frot you limb from limb, came the hum from the cobblestones and the Che Guevara T-shirts pinned to canvas frames. Go back on the television where you came from.

That night, Xavier gathered a group of us together for a romp in the Wayward Mariachi Graveyard, another square in the city, where vast numbers of the famed roving troubadors go to beg and howl and drink and die. Groups of three and four men in identically brocaded toreador suits chased alongside our taxi like packs of dingos with fat guitars, inflicting angry spurts of song on us with the desperate aggression of panhandling window-washers. When we arrived in the square, Xavier’s friend Geraldo and I posed for a photo in front of a plastic box containing a Virgin of Guadalupe, within eyeshot of another slurry of feral
mariachis. Geraldo, a fan of the nation’s tequila, feigned licking my armpit for a quicky polaroid with the Holy Mother. He did not realize that the burly serenaders were in charge of protecting her honor and that they now intended to shoot us. Sweating with fear, Xavier desperately tried to explain to the mariachis that we were stupid Americans who didn’t understand that imitating armpit-licking in front of a religious icon was grounds for being executed by musical Christian thugs. Geraldo and I, oblivious to this interchange, skipped away with our lives and the oblivious luck of the drunk.

The next day, Xavier, M. and I set out for the charming little craft village of San Miguel de Allende to stay in the palatial home of a friend of my family. We were to be taken care of, said the family friend, by the capable cook and delightful maids. In fact, the aforementioned employees greeted our arrival with less than ardent enthusiasm, and the next morning we were nonplussed to discover that all of M.’s jewelry had vanished from her purse, never to return. This disappearance was clearly a miracle, because the housekeeper and the owners of the home regarded everyone in the house as so far above suspicion that the only possible explanation was a sudden ascendency to the heaven where good jewelry goes following the Rapture.

Having been warned throughout my childhood that vagabonds in any foreign country would cut off your index finger with a dirty razor blade for a Snoopy ring, I was a little surprised that M. had brought thousands of dollars worth of jewelry to Mexico, but we nonetheless all felt the loss sorely and left San Miguel at once with a cloud of distress over our heads.

Far from making me feel hostile toward Mexico or Mexicans, though, the entire experience seemed to have a great equalizing effect. It reminded us of the importance of humility. The flexing of our obscene power before the natives in Mexico City had been somehow paid for with M’s queenly gems. It could have been a lot worse: Judging from how badly we pissed people off, we might have paid with our lives. The moral of the whole trip was, “Don’t wear a little tiny sundress in Mexico City or all of your jewelry will be stolen in San Miguel.” Or something. In any case, we all learned some kind of valuable lesson — I guess we’re still trying to figure out what it was.

The show dribbled with Christian claymation dialogue like “Do you
think mommy still loves me as much, now that I’m gettin’ a little brother or
sister?” and moments of sentimental family pornography involving the mother
having her older child touch her great misshapen abdomen to feel the jostling of
the sinister fetus within.

I sneered through most of the viewing and waited around for the big nudie climax. It was extremely disappointing. The mother was surrounded by some kind of papery
medical tent which obscured everything but the anatomical part itself, which was
completely trimmed and shaved and powdered for maximum attractive pre-teen
viewability. During labor, the actress, unflappable, with perfect hair and makeup, seemed to be “Havin’ “a minimum of strain while “Havin’ ” the baby, engaging in perfectly civil dialogue with all of the participants in the
delivery ward. The emerging head of the child glowed a healthy Revlon peach
tone, and was presented in its first moments of life as completely scrubbed,
with no attached tubes or unsightly effluvia. I expected the assembled cast to break into a song like the welcoming number in “Annie,” with acrobatic nurse puppets spinning the newborn out on a large lacquered plate where it would spring to life in a spangling red, white and blue diaper and
weep with musical joy for being born American.

I think that we are civilized enough now
as a culture to recognize that far from being anything like the aforementioned scenario, actual childbirth is a huge and, to be frank, sadistic biological mistake. It is painful, violent and unsightly, filled with screaming and bursting and squirting. All this loose talk that’s going around about “the miracle of life” is nothing but rank propaganda, most probably designed by the Pope.

My friend Angela is one of those who has been brainwashed by this insidious advertising campaign. “It’s amazing!” she said in a chipper monotone. “You walk into a room with four people and you walk out with five. It changes the energy of the whole group dynamic instantly.”

I hate to quibble, but there are a lot less painful ways to perform this “miracle.” If observing reproduction is such a primordial need of the human spirit, why not simply take married couples to the rodeo and show them forty or so tiny clowns emerging out of a Volkswagen?

Recently I saw photographs of the natural childbirth of my friends D. and R. The images burned their way onto my corneas. D. had assisted R. with
the birth. Normally a strong man of jovial attitude and ruddy
health and masculine good humor, D. looked like a 350-year-old vampire exposed to
the equatorial sun at noon. He was straining with every ounce of his ability to prevent
the listing of R.’s huge and rudderless body. R., with her eyes satanically
rolled back in her head, appeared to be waging a brilliant
battle against the father of her child. Thrashing wildly, she cursed in ancient tongues and screeched at “D.” that she was going to tear his arms out of his
sockets if he didn’t give her drugs and let her out of the “natural” squatting position.

From there it only got worse. The next shots were
festooned with dark, unidentifiable fluids. Midwives appeared, bringing to mind the final scene from “Carrie.” When the child itself emerged, it held long
tubes of shiny entrail in each fist and its toothless jaws were wide with deafening
wrath, like an avenging gargoyle bent on the destruction of man. “Isn’t she BEAUTIFUL?” cooed “R.”

I marvelled at the speed with which the Vatican had dispatched its team of Manchurian Candidate-like experts. I imagined the flock of black cars pulling up in front of R.’s house, furtive bishops and cardinals in black
overcoats, wraparound sunglasses and tall golden hats jumping out like a SWAT
team and blasting through the front door. Once inside they had kept her sleep-deprived and shown her films such as “The Miracle of Life” and “My Mom’s Havin’ A
Baby” and an onslaught of animated Disney classics, pumping her full of designer
euphorics and lite jazz, until she had that glazed, stoned-out look of exhausted
new-parent love. Then they released her into the world, changed, ready to
spread their doctrine.

Alternatives must exist. Surely the brilliant minds in the field of genetic technology could cross our species with that of more dignified birth-giving creatures, such as female alligators. Alligators in the Everglades lay up to three dozen eggs, then cover them with mud and leaves and check up on them casually every now and then for nine weeks to see how they’re coming along. The baby alligators either capably burst
out of the shells themselves, seething with independent life force, or the
mother bites the shell softly to give its more introverted infants a helping
hand. If the egg is infertile and all yolky, the female alligator eats it: a
waste-not, want-not solution.

Another attractive option is presented by sea turtles. Large turtles such as Kemp’s ridley or the olive ridley migrate en masse to Costa
Rican beaches in order to lay their eggs. When they are laid, the turtles bury
them and crawl back into the sea. Only about one percent of the eggs laid ever
become fully mature turtles. Even in an egg state, they must fight off fungi,
larvae, crabs and Latin Americans who steal the eggs and sell them to local
bars for $2 a dozen, where burly and lustful men eat them raw for their purported aphrodisiacal qualities.

Recently, environmentalists have been
assisting the rather ill-thought-out reproductive habits of the sea turtle by
surrounding the hatching baby turtles with large nets, then nudging them into
the sea before the aforementioned predators can eat them. In return
for this favor, the turtles would surely agree to help us out.

According to Dollo’s Law, the irreversible nature of evolution prevents a species from fully reverting back to its ancestral condition. So we cannot independently revert to such asexual reproductive measures as splitting in two or shedding off a part of ourselves in order to produce offspring. Fortunately, such extreme measures will not be necessary. It should be no problem for scientists to devise a method by which human females can converge with sea turtles. Then all we gals will have to do is fly to Costa Rica, lay a bunch of ping-pong ball-sized eggs in the sand (a MUCH more humane and intelligent size than the standard human infant), and swim off into the clear
blue water.

Environmental protection groups will supervise the eggs and protect
them from bugs and coyotes, allowing the mothers to return in nine months or so to
assist in the egg-crackings in the manner of the alligator. The unfertilized
eggs would be given to the Latin American bar patrons.

Everyone wins. Bar business would boom, helping the local economy. The children would be magnificent, with large powerful flippers and beautiful shiny exoskeletons. And since it takes up to fifty years in some cases for a tortoise to mature and reproduce, modern parents would have plenty of time to educate their young to make wise decisions concerning family planning. Like don’t.