Taco Bender Taco Bender So by June ...

So by June all this stupidity?this crescendo of dog-brained schemes?had me driving around Corsica in a rental car searching for my ex-girlfriend. On the passenger seat, a Kinko's box of flyers, each with her photograph and requesting any information as to her whereabouts on the island. I was papering the seaside towns where I suspected she might be staying with the new guy. I'd check my email and voicemail twice a day, hoping for clues, the kindness of strangers inadvertently complicit in my international stalking adventure. In Ajaccio, this Corsican flic spots me stapling a flyer to a telephone pole and wants to know what I'm doing.

"I come from New York, searching for my lost girlfriend who I love. I know she is somewhere on this island with another man and I must find her."

He tells me to stop or he'll put me in jail.

It wasn't long before the partners at the firm got wind of these cackling vignettes I'd been publishing. It was April when the shit hit the fan and splattered all over my little office, covering me with their fetid opprobrium. They were angry. They didn't like the way I saw my fellow attorneys or the firm. But more than insulted, they were afraid of losing business. Money was the life source and not to be fucked with.

Light spring rain was just starting to make the air smell fresh. I was working ridiculous hours, reviewing documents until my eyeballs ached and my ass was freckled with boils. But I felt the new season on my face and in my mouth when I walked the thirty blocks from this superb little apartment I rented?down to Wall Street in the early morning and then back up again with the moon high above the city. I rented the apartment from a friend's father who was a professor at NYU.

The rent was cheap and the professor was doing research in Spain, indefinitely. My life plan was to slave at the firm for a few years, pay back my law school loans as quickly as possible and then write full time. In January I had started a column about what it was like to be a lowly junior lawyer in a giant firm?fictive riffs of a modern Bartleby. Every night I forced myself to write for an hour or so. Sometimes I imagined pulling the stories into a novel and selling the book for some boner-inducing sum. It was my little dream.

But the message from the partners on that spring day of fecal splatter and condemnation was clear: Stop writing or stop working. So I stopped writing. That makes me a coward, I know. But I needed the paycheck. Money is the life source is what those white-shoe lawyers taught me. It is not to be fucked with.

She was a French attorney, and I'd make long detours to pass her office. She wore tight pencil skirts and had long brown hair. I was smitten and horny, and so began the seduction game. There was one crucial dinner?a long, drunken meal in Soho that revealed my essential charisma. This was a frosty March evening. We went to her apartment and humped drunkenly until dawn. The next day at the office was brutal, but the hangover was tempered by a lovely post-coital glow of conquest. A workplace fling is a fine secret and makes any job more tolerable.

She was beautiful, and I was grateful for a while. I felt chosen. Lucky. But I had all this work and my writing. Manumission from the firm was my priority. And so there wasn't much time for the girl except as a character in one of those stories that got me into so much trouble. Anyway, I had started to feel a bit bored. Nothing can replace that first hopeful attraction. Sad but true?desire is the only perfect thing.

Are you shitting on me?

May nights are warm, not hot, perfect. The mornings are cool. The days are long. You know how it is. Spring. I could make more time for the French girl, but I prefer to work and write.

Am I doing what?

Are you shitting on me?

Oh, I see. Cheating. When would I find the time? Do you know how many hours I bill? Maybe we can go out this weekend if I don't have too much work.

But I don't call her on the weekend. I ignore her voicemails and her emails.

Every month I write two checks?one to the professor and the other to pay down some of my student loans.

I meet a girl in a bar and we return together to the apartment where the walls are lined with shelves of books from floor to ceiling.

Corsica is a small island, but I am defeated before I am halfway around. In Bonafaccio a policeman confiscates my remaining flyers and asks to see my passport.

Stop, he says with a touch of sympathy after I tell my story. Return to your home, he says. Return to New York. This is folly. And it is a crime.

I am sorry, she told me. You are not a bad lover, but you are a terrible boyfriend. I have someone else now.

Someone else. After ignoring her for weeks, somehow I now find it intolerable that she is with someone else.

I start begging, promising, fixating miserably.

No. It is too late now. Let me start this new story.

I am plotting, pleading, wheedling, an insane obsession.

She is leaving on a two-week vacation with her new man.

Where are you going? I demand to know, an acid jealousy boiling in my gut, an unbearable pressure on my chest like a fat man sitting there. The fat man named "regret."

What happened to the indifference? To the satisfaction with the conquest? To my manumission?

A few weeks after I return from my brief Mediterranean voyage, a friend of hers tells me that she and the new guy never set foot on the island. They decided to go to Vietnam instead.

Did you not receive my letter?

I am back from Corsica, standing in the professor's apartment with my bags at my feet.

Now it is hot in New York?a cloudy summer afternoon with the sky hanging thick, gray and low, pregnant with water.

The professor is back from Spain.

You are welcome to stay until you find a place, but I hope you will not require more than a week or so.

The professor opens a bottle of rioja and slices ham off a cured joint that he smuggled back from Madrid. We sit on the apartment's terrace, and I tell him about the girl?about the spring lust and then the indifference and then the obsession that burned bright as heat lightning. I tell him about the law firm?about how I am a leper now, a freakish malcontent, radioactive, a rotting corpse. I tell him about the flyers?about my attempt to win the girl back with a heroic proof of love.

He listens thoughtfully, drinking the wine and chewing the delicious ham. Occasionally he asks a question. How much money did I owe? Did the Corsican police write down my passport number? Would I like the name of one of his colleagues, a competent and compassionate psychologist?

When I am done, the professor sighs. He says: Unfortunately, from all you have told me, it sounds as if things must get worse before they get better.

That night, I sleep on the couch, jet-lagged insomniac, oppressed by the tower of books and the night's humidity, suffused with dread. It is one of those sleepless summer nights when all you can do is sweat and think about all the mistakes you've made.

They always ask why you left New York City to live in Mexico.

Was it the Twin Towers?

No, it was much before?five years before.

But everything was good in that moment in New York with Giuliani.

(Everyone knows Giuliani now that he's been hired to help fix Mexico City's crime problem.)

Yes, it was good. It was comfortable. But I wasn't sleeping enough. I made some bad decisions. I lost my apartment.

You can tell some of the Mexicans assume the worst. Pinche gringo loco?sure he got in trouble with the law and is hiding down here.

Mexicans cannot fathom why anyone would leave New York. They all know someone living there and prospering?wetbacks bussing tables or wealthy kids studying?depending on whether you're talking to a taxi driver or someone with a bodyguard. Everyone loves New York. Me too?especially in the springtime when the street trees are budding, and the wind loses its winter bite, and the women wear less and less.

Sometimes I explain about the girl and Corsica and that long sleepless night on the professor's couch. Or I talk about how uncomfortable it was to have people treat you as if you'd purposely splattered yourself with your own filth.

I needed a change of scene, I tell them. And I spoke Spanish. And so I came to Mexico.

I never relate the essential truth the way I see it: New York spat me out in disgust that summer, and this is where I landed.