Ah, Mexico. Land of pristine beaches; of gentle guitar music strummed softly in the background while you sip your margarita. Land of linguistic nightmares.

The year was 1994. The Willem Dafoe paraplegic drinking scene in Born on the Fourth of July was still fresh in my mind. Thus when I asked my friend Mary* if there was indeed a worm in every shot of mescal down there, she suggested a trip to Nogales to find out! I was twenty-four at the time; naïve and new to the ways of the world. Be gentle.

Not that this is a drinking story, mind you. The whole point of the trip—for me anyway—was to buy one of those awesome Day of the Dead skeleton masks for my apartment. It was a part of the World Traveler image that I was trying to cultivate… Buy local folk art, decorate walls, women swoon. My command of Spanish could be described as limited at best and butchered at worst, but this did not faze me. Using my ever handy English-Spanish dictionary, I scribbled down rough translations of questions and phrases that I thought might prove useful:

“Where can I buy Day of the Dead masks?” ¿Dónde puedo comprar yo Día de las máscaras Muertas? “I’m deaf.” Soy sordo. “Your burritos are at once delicious and a digestive gateway to hell!” ¡Su burritos son simultáneamente deliciosos y una puerta digestiva al infierno!

Armed with these newfound and formidable linguistic capabilities, I flew out to meet Mary in Tempe, and a few hours later we found ourselves bravely entering the streets of Nogales, Mexico! I firmly believed that I knew enough Spanish to (at the very least) get myself pointed in one direction or another by someone who knew his way around, which would in turn enable me to find my mask. In an entirely unexpected way, I turned out to be right!

Not five blocks across the border we encountered three little girls—the youngest was about ten—selling trinkets out of an old wooden Pepsi crate. One of them held up a doll that looked like it was made out of a corncob, complete with a little cloth sombrero. She held it out to me with one hand and said something, showing me five outstretched fingers with her other hand. Buy this? Five dollars.

“Uh, no,” I said. “¿Dónde puedo comprar yo Día de las máscaras Muertas?”

She looked at me blankly, not comprehending. I tried again.

“El día del Muerto?” The Day of the Dead?

No response. The other two girls drifted away toward a new group of tourists.

“Uh… diablo rojo?” I mimed the action of putting a mask on my face. “¿Las máscaras?” Red devil masks?

No response. I looked at her Pepsi crate and saw what looked like a skeleton puppet draped over a stick, which was pretty close to what I wanted.

“Um, cráneo? Calavera?” I mimed putting on a mask again while pointing at the puppet. “Máscaras cráneo?” Skull masks?

She picked up the skeleton puppet and showed me three fingers with her free hand. Three dollars.

I shook my head “no” again and said “Baila con el Diablo,” looking to Mary for help. She was standing across the street looking at bracelets and necklaces being sold by yet another group of children. The second my attention wandered, the little girl I had just been talking to kicked me sharply in the knee—yes, directly in the kneecap, not in the leg… The kid could aim—and took off. I yelped and hopped backward. She was already at the far end of the block before I could put weight on it again. She turned around and flipped me the finger before vanishing around the corner. Thus my earlier hopes were fulfilled; in a manner of speaking, someone familiar with Nogales was pointing me in a specific direction.

Mary laughed at me as I hobbled across the street. “What’d you say?” she signed.

“I don’t know! I asked her if she knew where any mask stores were.”

“So she kicked you?”

“I said ‘Baila con el Diablo.’ The festival with the devil masks.”

“What festival? That’s not. . .”

Just then we saw the same girl come back around the street corner, this time with some tall guy in tow. He was carrying what appeared to be an axe handle, and he was quite angry.

Mary met him halfway, speaking fast. And thank God, too. The tall guy calmed down enough to merely point the axe handle at me and hold it steady—making this the second time that I was being pointed in some sort of direction in the city of Nogales—until Mary came back and towed me away, walking us around the corner as quickly as possible.

“You idiot,” she signed furiously, “You said ‘It dances with the Devil!’” You didn’t even call her ‘she!’ You called her an ‘it!’”

It was then and there that I swore to refrain from ever speaking Spanish in Mexico again. But a few hours later I accidentally mispronounced “mescal” as “sexo,” (translate that one yourselves) while being served in the bar where Mary insisted she could prove to me that all shots came with their own worm. This particular round of miscommunication resulted not only in our being thrown out of that fine establishment, but also in our quite literally having to flee the country before I could get us into any more trouble.

I did, however, manage to steer us into a shop and purchase my diablo rojo mask before we crossed the border again. So that’s something.

*Not her real name.

(P.S., Next week my wife and I are going to Cozumel on our first real vacation in three years! If I survive, I’ll let you know how the trip went when I get back!)