The Hairpin Travel Serial, Episode 8: That Witch Is Tied Up
From The Hairpin’s eight-part Kindle Serial “An Experience Definitely Worth Allegedly Having.”
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My friend Carrie and I were in an open-air market in Mexico City when an old man tried to lick her shoulder. She jumped, we turned around to look at him, and he held out a clear plastic bag filled with liquid. The liquid was brown and opaque, and we backed away but he followed, extending the bag toward us, and at some point we started nervously referring to it, in English and to each other, as a “bag of shit,” although it was probably just a drink. I’m not even sure what he was doing to her shoulder, maybe it was all a lot more benign than we’d interpreted. But he kept following, holding out the bag, liquid sloshing, so we walked progressively faster, and so did he, until all three of us were basically running through the market. Eventually Carrie and I found an exit and crossed a street just as a stoplight turned red, putting cars between us and him. “Dejanos, pendejo!” she yelled from our sidewalk — “Leave us alone, asshole!” Although it’s rarely clear if you’re the hero, the villain, or the idiot when traveling, and maybe you’re always all three. Later on that same trip we snorkeled and I saw an eel, or a sea snake, and I wasn’t scared, despite the weeks I’d spent memorizing facts about snakes in the guidebooks. One fact was that the sea snake is the most poisonous snake in the world, except that no one should worry, because its jaw opens only wide enough to bite you on the webby flesh between your thumb and index finger. I’ve told many people this fact, although I don’t even know if it’s still true or ever was. I know a similar “fact” about daddy longlegs.
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A youngish bald man with almost spookily white-blue eyes checked me in at the Blue Lagoon geothermal pool in Iceland. He spoke perfect American English, and we struck up a conversation as he gave me my towel and electronic wristband. It turned out his father was from Cleveland and his mother was from Reykjavik (or the other way around), and we exchanged email addresses to possibly meet up later that week at a bar in town. It never happened, but I wondered then and still wonder now how many people he’d been giving (or still gives) his email address to. Anyway, I drifted through the lagoon alone, drinking beer from a plastic cup, trying to figure out where the clay everyone was smearing their faces with was. (In wooden honey-pot-style boxes off to the sides, and on the lagoon bottom.)
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Another spa, in Stockholm, several years earlier. I was sixteen, with my mom. It was a no-bathing-suits place, and she’d gone out first. I took my time in the locker room, nervously undressing, preparing for the first time my mom would see me naked since I’d been a kid. Because (as I reasoned), if I were her, I’d be curious to see how I’d turned out — would my boobs look like hers? etc. — but also not want to stare or freak me out. Anyway, I went into the spa, got into a pool, and it was fine. Just a bunch of relaxed women hanging around. If my mom noticed anything — and now I feel like I’m the one making this weird — it never showed.
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Las Vegas spa. No longer embarrassed of nakedness. We lay back with cucumbers over our eyes, but I hadn’t actually known how to arrange them, so after a few minutes I took them off and examined my friend Carrie (another Carrie) lying serenely next to me. How do people learn these things? They go under the towel, aha. It was echo-y and peaceful there, nearly empty, with pools and pools and pools. Our boobs floated in them, pre- and post- cucumber, and I remember acting slightly more at ease than I felt. Just having a normal conversation with my friend Carrie, but naked. So I guess I was a little embarrassed. Because we all want to stare at one another naked, right? Or: how do people graduate out of wanting to stare at one another naked? Should we??
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If you’d like to read the rest, “An Experience Definitely Worth Allegedly Having” is available via Amazon for $1.99 $3.99, now that the serial is over. Parts 1–7 are excerpted here and here. A Kindle or (free!) Kindle app for computers or smartphones is required.
Edith Zimmerman is the founding editor of The Hairpin.
