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Nothing Personal
Thirsty heart
For The Boss, it's gotta be Hellmann's ... and orange bubbly. Plus: More mammarial madness from photogenic Scientologists! And: David Duchovny takes umbrage.
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[03/24/00]

People Feature
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People Feature
Blame Canada? Hell, let's declare war!
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Nothing Personal
Hugs 'n' drugs
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[03/22/00]

People Feature
Where the boys are
A new wave of films shows a fresh element in filmmaking: The sexualization of the male actor by the female director.
By Jessica Hundley
[03/22/00]

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Well, the barrenderas have a first cousin, called leafcutters. And having leafcutters is like having hiccups. You remember hiccup cures? Paper bag over the head. Peanut butter and mayonnaise. Hold onto both ears and have someone feed you water. Pant, heavily. Everybody and his brother has a stupid idea on how to get rid of hiccups.

This is the third in a series of dispatches from our correspondent in coastal Mexico. Read the previous article in the series, "Fred's dead. Or is he?"

Leafcutters are the same, and the advice is about as good. Take the leavings -- the little piles of dirt -- from one nest to another. Stick rotten eggs in their entryways. Put Tanglefoot around the base of the fruit trees. Or Tabasco and Ivory soap. Stick a bag over your head, pretend they aren't there.

You don't even know you have leafcutters until you come in one day and your trees have all been defoliated. This happened to me last week. At first I didn't associate it with ants. I thought it was the work of the U.S. government. After all, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Congress have been whining about Mexico's sloppy attitude toward trafficking and transshipment of drugs. This has been going on for so long that I figured the president had finally gotten miffed, sent in the Marines to invade my orchard, to spray my trees with Agent Orange to teach the Mexicans a lesson in good citizenship.

My workers said no, that it was not the Halls of Montezuma, but attas cortahojas. Leafcutter ants.

Alexander F. Skutch -- and I don't make up his name -- tells us in his book "A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm" that leafcutters live underground, in caves about the size of the Astrodome. There may be as many as 2 million ants in one colony. You know they are there if your property collapses, or if the trees go bare naked on you. Their favorite foods are my beautiful flowering lemon trees, followed by the gracious white bougainvilleas that grow -- or tried to, anyhow -- over the entryway.

Leafcutters hide out during the day, but at night, you don't want to be around. All 2 million come out to scare the dog and strip the trees and take the leaves down into the ant Astrodome to make fungus potpie. Which they masticate with hops and malt to make dynamite ant beer. Then on Saturday nights, they challenge neighboring leafcutters to come over for keg parties and to play championship soccer games. They get riotously drunk, cheer noisily and sing old drinking songs. "Antie Mame" is a favorite, along with "Ant Misbehavin'" and "Don't Leaf Me Behind." Bloated and hung over, they sleep all day Sunday.

Despite their noisy ways, you just can't get rid of them. My workers claim that you can irritate the little bastards by flooding their superdome with water. If you do it enough times, they get in a huff, move off -- probably off to Acapulco, to do their partying there.

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The 3 o'clock in the morning blues

I wake up at 3 or so in the morning and my heart is going bang-bang-bang. It does that when I indulge myself -- when I have two margaritas instead of one.

In the old days, I could swill a dozen margaritas and then a half a bottle of brandy and dance all night on the table with a lampshade on my head and then come home and sleep like a top. No more.

One of the privileges of being a geezer is that they take away our pleasures one by one. Ten years ago they took away my food festivals: medieval dinners consuming whole beefs, chicken swimming in butter, three orders of cheesecake. After I topped 225 on the Richter scale, we -- my doctor and I -- decided I should be more selective about the things I put in my mouth.

Then they took away most of my drinking privileges. A simple case of beer would keep me awake all night. You're talking to a man who was famous for demolishing whole cases of Corona beer, single-handedly, and was still able to talk.

Finally, and not soon after, they decided to take away the pleasures of the flesh. You don't want to know the details. My doctor, who is getting to be quite friendly with me now, since I spend so much time with him complaining about being a geezer, tells me it might be "peripartum cardiomyopathy." Or maybe he said "transgenital cardiomyopathy." Or perhaps "transgenerational pheochromocytoma." In any event, I've pretty much stopped listening to him. I'm no longer interested.

Tonight, despite being on the straight and narrow (one thimbleful of mountain red, no zabaglione or crème brûlée, saying my prayers as I settle in), I wake up and my heart starts jackhammering and I know, with the certainty that comes to all of us at 3 a.m., that I my goose is cooked. "Thank God I didn't pay American Express this month," I think.

I open the door to look out at the world before I say adieu. It's dark, very dark. They've turned off the moon. Most of the stars are fading fast. There is a bird nearby, in the arroyo, singing, "It's real, it's real, it's real." Funny, I never heard that one before.

I turn over on my other side where, because of my tinnitus, I can't hear my heart. The bird grows quiet, or maybe it just up and dies in sympathy. A Very Stupid Song starts up in my brainpan jukebox -- the one where you don't have to put in any coins, the one where they play the same song over and over again, about 15 million times, till you get to know it perfectly:

Please don't worry
'Bout a thing
'Cause every little thing's
Gonna be all right ...

My hit of the week. Bob Marley. Who isn't worried. And doesn't want me to worry, either.

Next page | Do I have to listen to this miserable song?