UNIVISION PRESENTS:
Una Escritura para Una Telenovela Existencial
SCENE 1
[Static-garbled Spanish pop facilitates the conversion from sleep to 2:55 in the morning, replaces the confusion of disturbed r.e.m. with the disorientation of half-received Latin pop.]
Paco Pico Piedra: [Confused, tumbles from the bed and finds the ground, his Gap carpenter pants with the stylish hammer loop, a rumpled long sleeve T-shirt. He struggles into the clothes on autopilot and lurches out the door and down the stairs with sack-of-potato grace. He coughs, then faces the camera and speaks.] Outside, the moon pierces through rippled clouds, waifish vapors seeded by exhaust from thousands of airplanes braving the city smog to deliver millions of haggard businessmen and tired tourists from various Asian countries into this teeming, sleepless, cliché-ridden metropolis. How poetically the light dimly reveals the paisley sofa sitting squat in the college quad. The couch should be lonely, here amongst the sad palm trees and scrawny grass that would wither up and die without constant watering and attention from teams of Mexican gardeners, but it is not, thanks to the comfort provided by a Mr. Coffee machine that burbles happily to itself on an equally misplaced endtable. Strewn about are donut boxes, at this hour containing only those pastries with unidentifiable jelly fillings.
Paisley Sofa (played by midget actor): [sighs contentedly]
Paco: [Eats too many peculiar donuts and excitedly whispers three-in-the-morning delusions.] Occasionally we abandon our assumptions (gestures towards paisley sofa) to saunter about the dormitory buildings, stumbling drunkenly with early morning inebriation. Campus is quiet but the raccoons are noisy, seven little babies and two large parents as big as Rottweilers but of indeterminate ferocity. We crumple bits of cake into #4 unbleached cone coffee filters and feed the raccoons pastry, which they appear to enjoy. On past evenings we have made offerings of lime-flavored Tostitos, but icing seems more to their liking.
Raccoon Chorus (animated, a la Mary Poppins): [pensively] We live in a big hole under the “annex,” which is really a trailer but can’t be called such because of the negative connotations. Only a single family of raccoons can survive in this particular isolated area of Southern California, so a great deal of inbreeding occurs amongst our folk, giving credence to trailer stereotypes.
(Camera pans up from animated raccoons towards heavens, where stars shine brightly as they slowly arc across the sky. Occasionally stars veer off of arc and can be seen doing the "hokey-pokey.")
[By four, giddiness has subsided into exhaustion, and those who cannot find a place on the midget's lap curl up into fetal positions on the concrete.]
Time: [sludges by]
Consciousness: [retreats upon itself]
Rosa: [raising her head from the concrete and looking alarmed] Wayward sofas are irrelevant in the witching hours, and the donuts are obsolete. Five o’clock oozes forth like cold honey, finally relenting and letting us stumble back upstairs to warm beds or creaking sofas or hard floors to sleep with no time for dreams.
[Fade to black]
SCENE 2
[Raccoon chorus stands on each others' shoulders to make the shape of a “2,” then scamper off past the coffee-stained reception desk of a dirty Travelodge]
Travelodge Receptionist: [Peering at Paco and Rosa over the top of half-glasses on a chain of the type popularized by grandmas and librarians] Even during the day, Tijuana is not Mexico; at night, Tijuana is barely Tijuana. You will pass through the clanging turnstiles with no small trepidation, the act feeling illegal and somehow dirty. Silent streets greet the border-crossers, not completely empty, but apocalyptically quiet. Here and there individual males trudge in ebbs, coming and going from somewhere unspecified in the night. Fearless Americans will pursue the human trickle towards its source, passing the occasional locked cage with a fearsome mechanical bull, a gyroscope with boots attached for strapping in those who have had too much to drink and agree to be strapped into a gyroscope.
[Paco and Rosa wave farewell to the Travelodge Receptionist, turn their backs to the reception desk, and cross a concrete bridge over the Rio Tijuana, an unglorified drainage-ditch channel replete with stagnant, unpleasant smelling water.]
Paco: [to Rosa] See how the tide of strangers grows as we walk through the deserted streets. Like raccoons after a tortilla chip we follow unthinking, the dull thump of nightclub music slowly seeping into our ears, whispering against our ear drums.
Downtown: [in a swirl of neon and drunk pedestrians] No cover! Half-price and topless! [Gives Paco and Rosa a sour look, less empty but no more wholesome.]
Teasers: [bad suits, bad english] No cover, half-price, topless...
[Paco and Rosa accept an invitation, slap Teaser on back, climb dimly lit stairs into a throbbing inferno. Rosa is asked for ID despite being sixty-seven years old, Paco is briefly frisked. They drink two-dollar Coronas and tip the waiter after he demands to be tipped. Bad dance music penetrates the skull and bounces about in the sinuses, the head convulses against the beat and the hideous lyrics. The tequila bouncer lurks menacingly in the shadows, pouncing on each table in turn. He stings from behind, wrapping a towel around the neck with the left arm and thrusting a putrid bottle of tequila with his right. Physical force is needed to rebut his advances, but at last he withdraws.]
Paco (holding aloft a skull, to which he speaks): That man there is as a wasp in the room. I keep my right eye on his whereabouts at all times, but my left eye roves across the dance floor to ponder a lone, rotund lady sitting at a bar stool and jiggling up and down to the music. She looks like she would enjoy being asked to dance, but I decline. [Paco becomes uncomfortable from having each of his eyes looking in different directions.]
Paco and Rosa: [singing, each to a different tune] We leave and wander, no cover, half-price, topless, eventually passing through vinyl curtains into a little yellow bar. We crowd into a confused, circular booth, the unevenly round chair threatening to tip us plunging into the small table, drowning us in rounds of Coronas. Movies dubbed in Spanish play silently on yellowed TV screens overhead. We ask the bartender for directions to Senor Frog’s, a club we have seen advertised on billboards, T-shirts. He gives us directions but we speak Spanish badly. The bartender fetches a taxi-driver friend of his, who informs the bar is too far to walk but he could drive us for cheap. We decline because we fear being murdered.
Taxi Driver: [proudly, undeterred by Americans’ refusal to ride in his taxi] You like cocaina? Best cocaina en Mexico. You come right here si want coke.
Paco’s Nose: I must agree the yellow bar would definitely be my first choice for future coke needs.
SCENE 3
[Paco’s Nose appears and grows larger and larger, until the camera is snorted up into the left nostril… hairs hanging from the nostril roof brush against the camera lens like greasy stalactites, leaving little trails of snot. A little further inside the cavernous nostril, we see all of Tijuana laid out before us as if we were approaching by hot-air balloon.]
Tijuana and Time: [slipping in and out of little pieces of consciousness, they perform a dance resembling the Tango, but occasionally utilizing the “pinkie swing” from a basic square dance. Time leads, Tijuana sometimes follows.]
[Somewhere inside Tijuana's dancing streets, Paco wanders into an ornate church, where a high school graduation appears to be taking place. Avoiding the crowds of Mexican teenagers in paperboard hats and their anxious mothers, he staggers into the confessional box at the rear of the church and kneels.]
Paco: Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
Father: No eres Catolico, verdad?
Paco: I have seen unspeakable things, Father.
Father: Lo siento, mi nino, pero no hablo Ingles.
Paco: The horror! The horror!
Loud voice: ¿Qué hizo Paco? ¿Hacen cuántos "Avemarías" él tiene que hacer? Averigüe el próximo tiempo... aquí mismo en Univision!
END SCENE
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