El Lowrider got a mystery gift for his birthday. It was an unrecognizable plastic figurine enclosed in a cough medicine box with no note. He didn’t know who gave it to him or even who it was supposed to represent. He found it on the driver’s seat on Sunday morning when he went to polish his ramfla for the Sunday vuelta.
It was a plastic statuette mounted on a round magnet with a peel-off sticky surface at the bottom. The figure didn’t seem to resemble any saint he knew about. Many of his friends had glued an image of San Martín de Porres on their dashboards, the most powerful wish-conferrer of the borderlands after the Virgin de Guadalupe. Presumably, the figurine offered a quick and convenient way to affix it on his dashboard, but it was so shoddily made that it’s face was unrecognizable.
El Lowrider had been wishing for such a handy tutú to complete his dashboard, but the generic face on the saint he was now holding gave him pause. So he put it in his shirt pocket and went cruising to think about it.
After a couple of vueltas, he parked on the side of the main drag to watch everybody cruise by and listen to Sonny Ozuna on his car stereo. The roadside was crowded with other lowriders doing the same.
A short while later, a carload of young women stopped next to him.
“Qué onda, ese?” one of them called out to El Lowrider.
“Nothing, Just madereando,” he responded.
They hesitated.
El Lowrider took this as an invitation to approach their car.
He walked over and leaned on the open front passenger door window. As he did this, San Martin de Porres fell out of his shirt, rolled onto the lap of the ruca sitting closest to him, then onto the floor of the car.
“What was that?” the young woman asked.
“My tutú. I was gonna…” he started to say.
But the ruca opened her door and pushed him away. The other woman followed her reaction and emptied the car.
“What was that?” they asked loudly, scared.
“Dark magic,” the first ruca said.
Lowrider leaned into the car and fetched the icon.
“No. See? It’s San Martin de Porres,” he said.
That doesn’t look like him. We can’t stay with that around,” the ruca said.
With that, they all re-boarded their car and left.
El Lowrider stood still watching them leave.
“Pos you’re not good luck, ese?” he said to the figurine.
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