The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

The Mayor of Mexico

In the quest to know my father, I’d travelled a long distance to visit Mexico, this tiny village in the mountains, where I’d heard my father had lived after he’d left us, had even become mayor.
Don Johnson, they chuckled derisively when they said his name. You’re talking about Don Johnson. Everybody remembered Don Johnson. He’s legend, they said, but the first few people wouldn’t tell me his legend. They simply laughed and brushed me aside. It was a man named Regente who loosened his tongue.
“Don Johnson!” And then Regente laughed like a pervert. I was afraid I didn’t want to hear more, but it was too late. He began to tell me of Don Johnson’s two penises. “He had a ribbon tied around himself. The ribbon could inflate one penis and deflate the other.” Regente gestured with both hands like he was milking a cow. “One was black, and one white. He called the black one Blackie, and the white one Pilgrim. Oh man, that guy could go all night! Blackie and Pilgrim.” He looked out toward the horizon of nostalgia, and then came back as if he’d suddenly remembered. “When he died, they saved Blackie and Pilgrim.”
How could my mother have hid that from me?! But she’d spent her life hiding from me. The only thing I could think to ask was, where did they take Blackie and Pilgrim?
“To Town Hall, of course. I’ll show you.”
Mexico’s Town Hall was a double wide trailer in a dirt parking lot. There was a chicken near the front door. Inside, wedged next to a water cooler, was a small glass case.
“There they are!” Regente said and pointed to my father’s two penises each on their own cushion. They looked like stuffed but withered grape leaves. And indeed one was pale and one was, if not black, then an ashen gray.
“Long live Pilgrim and Blackie!” Regente shouted like he was at a parade. The two town employees crowded around us when they heard Regente’s shouts. “He’s come to see Don Johnson!” They smiled in welcome and I could tell such a visit was not all that rare. The penises were good for the economy.
“Don Johnson’s two bubbas!” One woman said with a thick accent and with obvious affection. She slapped me on the back in a gesture of what I supposed was penile conviviality.
That would’ve been the moment to tell them Don Johnson was my father. I might’ve been given keys to the city, or a free ticket to a cockfight, though I also had the feeling there were many of Don Johnson’s illegitimate children running around the Mexico vicinity. But I couldn’t join in the merriment. A lump rose in my throat, and I was overcome by the terrible feeling of not knowing which penis I’d come from. I needed to know which one fathered me. Was it the one who wanted me, who at least planned to stay? Or was it the one who already knew he’d leave? Pilgrim or Blackie, which one? I looked at what remained of my shriveled patrilineage, and tried to divine an answer, my worth.
“To Don Johnson!” someone else cheered and I found a shot glass full of tequila thrust into my hand, but I couldn’t clink. I’d come too close, I’d gone too far, and after all this distance, I needed to return to the singularity of my mother.

JEFFERSON NAVICKY is the author of four books, most recently the novel-in-prose-poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Jefferson works as the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. He is the recipient of grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation.

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