Los Huevos del Señor

I wanted to get hit by a car.

I’d heard about drunk, suicidal types running out onto the freeway and putting their heads through some poor, unsuspecting bastard’s windshield, turning their bones to powder against the hood in a gory scene of unholy carnage. That wasn’t for me. My plan was to casually step off the curb and get clipped by a passing Fiat Uno, or some other equally common, equally small, relatively powerless vehicle. No head injuries. No broken back. All I wanted was a fractured arm or leg or collar bone: just enough to get me sent back home to Utah, but not enough to be permanently crippling.

For weeks, as I walked through the neighborhood on the north end of Montevideo where I had been stationed for the past month or so, I eyed every car that passed, gauging its speed, mentally measuring the height of their bumpers and hood, the thickness of its windshield. It would look like an accident. That was certain. I would appear careless or stupid, anything but deliberate.

My companion, a fellow white shirt-, tie-, and backpack-wearing Mormon missionary, had no idea what I was up to. He was Elder George Tree hailing from Texas City, Texas, and he was pious as hell. Or at least that’s what he—along with the rest of the battalion of clean-cut Christers and secret raging masturbators serving their two years in Uruguay—wanted everyone to think. He had always been an active Mormon, had never dated girls who wore two-piece bathing suits and was much more thoughtful and kind to his widowed mother than I was to mine. He was unbearably nerdy, talking endlessly of fantasy novels and sneezing in these magnificent eruptions of snot that actually lifted his feet off the ground. We had spent a painful month together, trying to convert heathens and meanwhile keep each other entertained with everything we had ever done, all the stories we knew, the gross stuff we could do with our eyelids. We were like prison cellmates, cut off from the world, rotting away together. He was stiff and boring, and I hated him.