Tommy Mexico, that’s his name.  What kind of name is Tommy Mexico?  I don’t have the answer to that question.  He got his name legally changed on his eighteenth birthday.  It was one of those rebellious, teenage, shitty parent situations.  Tommy Mexico was what he came up with.

Tommy isn’t married, never divorced, just a bachelor with a strange name.  He’s pale, except for the back of his neck which is always sunburnt from doing odd manual labor.  Construction, landscaping, paving roads – if it involves long hours and hard work, Tom would end up there, eventually.  At the end of each day he wanders home to his apartment, takes off his sullied shirt, blows his nose into it, admires the blackened, gravel-filled mucus, and then spends the next several minutes scrubbing his hands clean of the day’s work.

He has a few close friends, all of whom accept his strange adoration for blue-collar labor.  Most people called him by his full name because when you say it out lout, “Tommy Mexico” rolls off the tongue rather smoothly.  His Mexican coworkers have nicknamed him “Tex Mex,” a name that Tom isn’t too fond of.  He doesn’t make a big deal about it.  When someone shouts, “Here comes, Tex Mex,” from across the job site, the edges of Tom’s lips roll up like a wet paperback book.

It’s hard to describe Tommy Mexico.  He’s not extreme in anything.  Thin lips, dark hair, early thirties, forgettable features, curious nose hairs.  If he’s not at work he’s dressed neat, casual, with his hair gelled straight back.  There are a few bad habits, nothing out of the ordinary. A struggling cigarette smoker, he’s down to ten and a half cigarettes a day.  He’s been working on cutting back, a quarter cigarette at a time.  Seems like a strange way to go about it, but Tom’s slowly weaned himself down from three packs a day – so it’s working.

Tom had a girlfriend.  A thick brunette with beady eyes and breast like deployed airbags.  They argued about money.  Tommy Mexico isn’t the best when it comes to finances.  Living hand to mouth has always worked for him.  He’s got the skill and work ethic to pick up a new job regardless of the economy.  His ex-girlfriend Charlece wasn’t comfortable with the completely laid back lifestyle.  She was an aggressive go-getter, a future manager of some sort.  Not the brightest, but she managed to talk herself into more than enough opportunities.  Eventually, she packed her shit and stereotypically abandoned ship.  Stereotypical in the sense that she left a bedside note as if she were playing the lead role in a romantic comedy.

Needless to say, he didn’t take it well.  Tom wasn’t a boozer per say, but he took to the bottle pretty heavily after Charlece left.  Her letter explained the reasoning in a detailed fashion, but Tommy Mexico wasn’t ready to accept it.  She used words like “unambitious,” and “deadbeat.”  It took a while for Tom to recover from that. 

He’s a little better these days.  Nothing has changed in the sense of ambition, so Charlece’s letter seems to have landed on deaf ears.  Actually, I take that back.  Since they broke up, there’s been one significant change.  Now, is it a change for the better?  I’ll let you decide that.

Ever since Charlece left Tommy Mexico, he’s developed this social quirk.  He’s never stated it formally, but he must get some joy out of it.  A few months after she left him, when he was starting to pull himself out of the funk, he began pulling what I thought were practical jokes.  I understand they may not be practical jokes in the traditional sense, but there is a dark, inexcusable humor in it.

It first happened at a super market.  Tommy Mexico was grimy and sunbaked from working all day.  He was tired, hunched forward, pushing a shopping cart with his forearms, casually pacing up and down the aisles.  It wasn’t like he had a grand plan or anything.  The idea seemed to sprout naturally in his head.  And as Tommy often does, he went for it.

The kid was six or seven.  White kid, chapped lips, and for one reason or another, the kid was wandering alone in the grocery store.  Tom didn’t hesitate.  He didn’t giggle or break character.  He just walked right up to the kid and kind of stood there.  I wouldn’t suggest for a grown man to approach a lone kid, even with good intentions, but Tom has a very tangible, unintimidating quality about him. 

The kid looks up at Tom and sort of averts his eyes back to the shelf of cereal boxes.  Then he looks up again and there’s Tommy Mexico, still standing there in his dirty shirt, deadpan, staring right into this kid’s eyes.  Instinctually, the kid steps back, but doesn’t turn or yell for his parents – luckily.  After another few uncomfortable seconds, Tom raises his arms out to his sides, looks down at his grungy outfit, and allows his arms to fall back to his sides with a light slap.  The kid is staring up at Tom, a total stranger, but he’s not visibly alarmed.

Then Tommy Mexico says, “This is it…”  The kid’s eyebrows furrow.  He glances around in the aisle.  Then again, Tom raises his hands and drops them back to his sides, clears his throat, and says, “I’m you…from the future.”

The tone, the expressionless gaze, it was almost as if Tom was confessing to a crime.  “I’m you… from the future,” Tom repeats.  The kid’s eyes start shifting around.  For some reason, maybe he was too young, but the kid wasn’t alarmed by this bizarre man claiming to be his future self.  You could see in the kid’s face that Tom’s words were processing.  The kid opened his mouth, but Tom cut him off.  “I’m you, from the future.  Unless you want this to end up like this…you better figure something out.”

Tommy Mexico isn’t a bad looking guy.  He’s isn’t memorable, but he’s no ogre.  The entire situation was uncomfortable, but you should have seen the confusion grow in this kid’s eyes.  I think it’s what Tom was looking for.  Maybe he was trying to see how an honest kid would judge him, solely based on looks, and this was Tom’s little experiment.

The kid swallowed and slowly tucked his hands into his armpits.  Tom was still standing there, a few feet away, looking right into this kid’s soul.  “I’m you from the future.  If you don’t do well in school…this is what you’re going to turn into.”

And that was that.  Tommy Mexico turned, leaned back against the handlebars of his shopping cart, and sauntered on down the aisle.  The kid’s tongue was in his stomach at this point.  As Tom walked by, the kid slowly turned and watched him disappear into another aisle.  There was a lag time, maybe thirty seconds, from when Tom turned the corner and disappeared, to when the kid put his box of cereal back on the shelf and walked away with a look of pure bewilderment.

This isn’t the only time Tommy Mexico has participated in this type of social experiment.  And to be honest, I don’t know what he’s trying to get out of it.  Sure, some kids probably take it as a premonition.  That tiny bit of false knowledge, might even work in their favor, but I’m sure it has adverse effects as well.

Tommy Mexico doesn’t brag about this strange reoccurring behavior.  To this day, I don’t know what his true reasoning is.  Maybe it came from the breakup with Charlece.  Maybe it’s Tom’s way of manipulating his own insecurities.  All I know is, once every month or so, Tommy Mexico walks up to some innocent little kid and says, “I’m you, from the future.”