Life Style Refugee – The Ajijic Blog

Our little village abounds with urban myths of well heeled widows taking up with strapping young Mexican gardeners. One minute these guys are sweating in the sun, laying their, er, sod. I can’t even picture it without hearing imaginary porn music.  The next thing you know the senora is coming out on to the terraza with a big glass of limonada and a gleam in her eye. Chapter Two? The gardener moves into the big house. His latin machismo soon surfaces,  and he starts bossing the senora around. She is such a slave to passion that when he starts staying out all night all she can do is beg, clutching his leg and being dragged across the floor while he sneers in contempt and shakes her loose so he can go spend her money on some tart at the cantina, and the senora  starts drinking straight tequila. The next thing you know, you never see her for lunch any more.  According to the local grapevine, this pattern repeats itself all the time.

As common as these tales are, there seems to be a little something extra in the water at the moment. There’s been a recent spike in the number of stories regarding single women and their gardeners. It seems that the notion of  this kind of big house/ field hand carrying on doesn’t have the salacious firepower that it once did, and the local gossips are trying to make up for in quantity what they are missing in quality.  Last week, I heard three different gringa-and-the-gardener stories, which is pretty hot for the local demographic. We’re  kind of a small town to be having  this widows gone wild action all over the place. Frankly, I’d have a hard time swallowing three patronas falling for their gardeners in greater Los Angeles, never mind  the village of Ajijic.

Perhaps I’m not the only one to raise an eyebrow at the sudden uptick in ravenously horny homeowners who can’t watch their lawn getting watered without dropping their negligees.   I notice that recent stories include the addition of  details that are getting juicier all the time. One thrilling variation includes the added twist of the faithful servant caring for the senora when she twisted her ankle, and subsequently getting her addicted to heroin! How awesome is that! Now he is rumored to be keeping her docile with regular injections  of  exotic drug cocktails, and is moving her hand across the signature lines of various deeds and titles while she is nodding out in an opiate  coma. Once he gets the combination to her safe, well, I wouldn’t think much of her chances then….

Some of these chestnuts come my way in my job as a realtor, usually with the hopeful notion that it will result in an undervalued property, as in “I heard about a house in Chula Vista? where the woman is having an affair with her gardener? and she’s signed over all her property to him because she’s mad at her children for not coming to see her, and he doesn’t know how much it’s worth, so when she dies, he’s going to sell it for cheap!” Hope springs eternal, is all I can say.

Believe me, if you can’t take this level of small town drama, you are not ready for Lakeside. I  personally thrive on it,  the more lurid the gossip, the better. Unfortunately, the element that  interferes with my ability to suspend reality long enough to enjoy these stories is the fact that’s it’s always the gardener. Jesus, not my gardener! Nobody in their right mind would have an affair with him, no matter what kind of drugs he was packing in his truck along with the WeedWacker and pruning shears. All the gardeners I know are completely retarded, or have glass eyes, or —in the rare cases where they are under 50–would rather shoot themselves up with drugs than have to throw a schtup into one of the old babes I lunch with. Give me a break. There are a few brown eyed  hunks with flashing white smiles driving around in Chevy Avalanches, but believe me when I tell you, they know how much the land is worth. They know what they’re worth, too, and it’s usually a bundle, owing nothing at all to any dame in a negligee with a dope habit.

There is, of course, a kernel of truth to these stories. Somewhere along the line, some gal with a taste for margaritas in the afternoon probably did start a little something with her gardener, who was probably close to her own age and may have been with her for thirty years, and maybe her kids did neglect her.

The other dramatic structure that local gossip is likely to take involves lesbians, usually on motorcycles, who come into town and  break up marriages with their irresistible lesbian powers. Like cobras hynotizing helpless birds, these black leather clad fembots have only to crook a finger and cast a certain sort of glance, and wives who are about to celebrate their golden anniversary are unable to prevent themselves from packing up and moving into the poolhouse with them, a slave to unnatural sex that couldn’t be imagined before these mighty sapphists rolled into town.  A key element of this story is that everyone has sex with the ravishing seductress, who isn’t particularly fastidious about gender preference. Obviously, sooner or later the husband loses his mind and kills the lesbian, the wife, himself, or some combination of the three.

That story actually has a little  more than  a kernel of truth, happening pretty much just that way back in the ’80′s, when all the good stuff was happening around here. Frankly, the real story of that episode is even more sensational than the recycled fiction that gets handed around along with the gardener gossip, as it had the added zest of communism and theatre people.

There are local webboards that supply us with a cyber version of the back fence, but I never get any good stories there. The gossip on the internet is not more reliable than the stories I hear from  flesh and blood nut jobs all over town and it  seldom has the color and dash that I love so much. Who can get worked up over exterminators and visas? Bah. The internet isn’t always such a giant step forward.

But I’m sure glad to have it, so that I can share the really good stuff with you. Just between us, right?