Getting Mamipilled

Love, chicken tenders, and chia Latinas in the time of lockdown

The Mami Pills came to him as advertised, five business days after ordering. He had been getting ads on Instagram for them. His favorite began with a well-endowed woman wearing khaki-colored coochie-cutters, walking on camera, and bending over to pull a pill off the floor, floor-pills and tushies being two of his favorite things combined, like the peanut butter and jelly-swirled paletas he bought from the ice cream shop with the sign that said, “Bodega,” near his ex’s apartment. The thing is, when you went to replay the ad, it always picked up where it left off instead of at the beginning so you could never be quite sure if you had actually seen what you’d seen: A big-tushied woman displaying the goods like she had no clue the camera was there. Or had it been the consequence of a few errant vapors of horniness interacting with his Zyn, causing him to hallucinate those first few frames? Biology was a mystery.

But the pills, they were pretty straightforward. Mami Pills were really two sets of pills. Red pills and blue pills. You swallowed the blue pills every day with sixteen ounces of water. The red pills needed to get dropped into a bathtub, pool, or ice plunge at the same time you took the blue pills. Basically, something that could hold thirty gallons or more. The syncing process required two red pills and two blue pills dropped down their respective receptacles every day at the same time for two weeks.

The time went fast. In the two year run-up to this latest purchase, he had been speedrunning self-help courses every six months to no avail. One had turned out to be a multi-level marketing scheme by David Ben David, a podcaster who covered politics, finance and, of course, self-mastery. During the course of his self-improvement, he would have an occasional one-night stand or relapse with this ex or that one but for two years he had no prospect of a gf, no mami to speak of.

He was 5’10” and 170 lbs and good-looking enough. His parents referred to themselves as Heritage Americans, which mostly made him feel like a chicken, something niche, organic and air-chilled but, in reality, none of the women who bought those kinds of chickens wanted anything to do with him. Which is what the Mami Pills were for: After fourteen days you got a Latina gf who could live off three chicken tenders and two mojitos per day.

At first he had tried run clubs, volunteering at the SPCA, getting manicures (although he wasn’t sure if it was the manicure that was supposed to secure the woman or if he was supposed to secure the woman doing the manicure), and FaceFCKR, an app that showed you profile pictures of a woman’s butthole and let you meet her, provided you were first 6’7” and could correctly answer a thirty-seven question astrology survey. Plus, he had looked into Robowaifus but he wasn’t good with technology and worried he wouldn’t be able to introduce her to his family. But a Latina, he could make up a story for that.

It was only fourteen days but, in those fourteen days, he had a lot of time to work on himself and think. In the last two years he was always spending time trying to get dates or trying to work up to being the kind of guy who could get dates but that was all over now that he had the Mami Pills. With the peace of mind the pills afforded, he had time. He started an introductory workout program, only forty minutes per day, three days per week. And he began reading a book on the evolutionary roots of charity. He had never been much of a reader before and had generally found pop science to be cringe for whatever reason, but the breezy writing style, the large charts, the cavalcades of factoids: He was enthralled. In fact, right as he was rounding chapter thirteen of twenty-seven, she hatched. Technically, it was more of a spawning scenario since there was no egg to speak of but after two weeks of getting up early, starting the day with a glass of water and a little lemon juice, and reading during every spare second, on the train, at lunch, and after work, there she was all of 5’2” and 100 lbs, right as he was in the middle of reading this book on giving.

True to their promise, the Mami Pills delivered: a shivering Latina twerking beads of water across her little brown arm hairs. There she was. Cute, helpless, hungry.

The first thing he did was give her a towel, some chicken tenders, and a razor since her leg hairs were longer than his. She sat on a plastic chair in the kitchen of his apartment licking barbecue sauce off her fingers and occasionally wiping them on the white towel that swaddled her.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was really great.” She asked if he had speakers she could play music on. She picked a cumbia playlist, kicked up her feet and began signing the charity book with little crimson fingerprints every time she turned a page.

“So about this razor,” he said, staring into the dense triple canopy of leg hairs before him.

And she said, “Yes, maybe you could grab a basin and some warm water and go to work while I read this. I believe the book is about giving to others.”

“Your English is really great,” he said.

And she replied, “You wanted someone who couldn’t read or speak?”

He grabbed a bucket, some warm water, and his CantoVali Men’s shaving cream.

When he was almost done with her first leg she threw the can at his head. Once he had fingered a girl from the Philippines under the bleachers in high school but otherwise, most of what he knew about Spanish girls and their feistiness was gleaned from rumors, memes, and internet shorts where women said things like, “¡Dame la leche!”

There it is, he thought as the can ricocheted off his head. That famous problem-solving flavor Latina women are so known for. The can was still rolling around on the floor when she asked, “You put cum on me, just like that?”

Had he found a way to slice through all the foreplay of life and skip straight to domestic violence and sex? He wondered whether this is what people meant when they called themselves trad. If he said yes, would she at least let him finish off or was he going to have to have sex with her while she still had the Chewbacca leg? This and a thousand other questions shot through his head like a kitten on catnip when she asked him again, “You put cum on me? From a can?” This time she pointed to the label on the can which had conveniently rolled back to her.

“No,” he said. “Not C-U-M. It says, C-V-M.”

“Ah—you can finish,” she said, “but when you’re done bring me more chicken tenders.”

As it happened, it turned out the chicken tender thing was a tad misleading. They could live off of a few strips and a couple of cocktails but this is kind of like saying you can drive around keeping your tank between ¼ and ⅛ full at all times. Just because you can get away with it doesn’t mean you’re going to. He was hoping she would have pretty frugal taste but this was not the case. Her palate was actually far more sophisticated than his. Plus, each model came with its own iPhone, which was attached to the end-consumer’s credit line, which meant that food deliveries started early and came constantly. A cafecito from here. An empanada from there. She started making a habit out of banana walnut pancakes with fresh clotted cream from a brunch place with a mural of George Floyd looking through a telescope at a Ruth Bader Ginsburg constellation.

In the beginning it was all pretty endearing. The price of chicken tenders was comparatively low and he could still work from home, which strangely made it easier for everyone to pretend they were working and he could theoretically keep an eye on her purchases.

But the purchases and the inflation added up. One day he called American Express and told them he had lost his card so they would cancel it and send him a new one. The problem was the charges came through anyway, a bargain between large merchants and credit card companies to keep the juice running even if people lost their old cards and received new ones, fifteen and sixteen digits at a time. More cafecitos. More empanadas. A salad with golden beets and chèvre with a single flake of gold leaf sitting on a bed of hydroponic microramps sous vide in camel colostrum. She tipped generously. 25-40% minimums, giving extra money to Hispanics and hirsutes.

She did make good on her end of the bargain, sleeping with her owner a few times a week until certain patterns started to emerge. Every parent attempts to interrogate and indemnify the child who asks for a puppy, letting them know that the puppy will neither feed nor walk himself and yet, no figure stands to warn America’s young men against the upkeep of a mami gf. And as often happens, people lose interest in maintaining certain behaviors and begin the long, slow process of weathering each other down like two rock faces which long ago made contact with each other through the tectonic movements of nature itself but get stuck together harder and harder through each face’s desire to move the other, and eventually it would become hard for him to orgasm without the sandpaper friction of her stubble sawing tiny canals into his tailbone as her ankles sank into the crooks of his back.

After a few months he had to start going back into the office. The initial outbreak of the pandemic was now two years in the past and commercial real estate was taking a hit. Accordingly, many employers complied with pressure from all the major real estate holders to bring their employees back in and that’s where he was, back in the office pretending to work, instead of pretending to work from home.

Now that she had all this time to herself, she developed a two-part plan she could use on him. The first part went into motion when he came back from the office. She had her feet kicked up on the kitchen table where she was wearing nothing but terrycloth and a residue of Carolina Sweet, painting her toes deep candy plumb. He asked how her day was and she said she was tired of talking and just wanted to travel. She had been living there a few months. She had been a pretty good mami thus far. She wanted a trip.

He said, “Just a second,” put his bag down, went into the bathroom and emerged five minutes later, totally bypassing her on his way to go watch Youtube in the bedroom without bringing it up again, as though through the sheer art of redirection, he could overcome the nagging impulse she had to bankrupt him with waffles and air travel.

And this is what the second part of the plan was for: making the first part work. After a while he had gotten a little complacent with the credit card thing and stopped checking his statements. They were always going to be bigger than he wanted. His previous forays into self-help had taught him that negativity was the enemy and, at a certain point, ignorance just seemed like the only viable move, which is why he didn’t realize she had ordered her own Mami Pills.

In fact, she had an entire routine and secret life he knew nothing about. In the off-chance she woke up early, she would bed rot until 10:00 am, which is when she ordered her first delivery of the day, usually requiring the driver to make multiple stops, one for food and another for coffee, sometimes she would throw in a grocery order for small things like sugarless gum, chapstick, tampons, a bottle of barbecue sauce or honey mustard. By 11:30 or 12:00 she was usually doing some yoga or stretches either from a streaming service or just self-led with slants of golden light cutting across her little mami body through the blinds.

She would watch nature documentaries, sitting cross-legged, eating edamame or acai from takeout containers that said things like, “Sustain your future,” and “Be touched.” One featured a Jew and a Palestinian fellating each other in space. Even the most omniscient of narrators would have difficulty imagining what society would yield such cultural products. Occasionally she would indulge reruns of a now discontinued reality show called Shibari in the Kalahari, about developmentally challenged people who tie each other up in the desert. Other times she would watch Newskake, a show where twenty low-information voters verbally assault a low-information pundit. Her serotonin levels were incredible.

And just like that, after fourteen days of blissfully going about his normal routine, he came home to Mami 1 onboarding Mami 2. So far, they had gone through a meet-and-greet, an ice-breaker, a trust-fall, two Beckhart Lowell videos, a meditation, a breakout session, two smoothies, two hot chickens, two double espressos, two matcha lattes, and two bottles of Tush, the Mineral Water that Gets You Caked Up, each glistening with miniature droplets of condensation slowly dripping down the glass clefts of the four cheeks as the cold glass met the warmth and humidity of the room.

A million age verifications couldn’t prepare him for the neotenous Latina + slightly smaller, more neotenous Latina combo happening before him. Long past the days of DVD’s and far into the era of casual internet prostitution, it wasn’t every day a new porn category was minted. As soon as the word “threesome” left his mouth, Mami 1 said, “Not exactly.”

Mami 1 explained how she would be taking a trip, how Mami 2 would make sure to fill in while she was out, that she had been shown the ins and outs of various delivery apps and was similarly briefed on the yoga and fitness apps so that her own tush might also stay bouncy like Funfetti.

Though it was hard for him to conceive what was happening, though he didn’t know whether to feel betrayed or not, he was shallow. He asked to be bought off, saying that he’d approve the plan provided he could watch them kiss just once. Mami 2 said yes, but that she would do him one better. She said she would tie him up and give him a show.

Not to disappoint, once he was tied up, they turned on some cumbia, took off their clothes, and ordered a pizza before beginning an Ashtanga series as the last glints of sunlight snuck through the cracks in the blinds and onto their bodies. When the delivery came, they opened the door together slowly and completely naked, letting the driver, an old Albanian man, take a good look before sending him on his way, having already issued him a $200 tip in the app. Mami 1 instructed Mami 2 how to cram every last piece of Neopolitan into their owner’s mouth before tying a gag around him, ordering two frozen daiquiris, and shaving his legs. The sun went down. They grabbed their bags. Their serotonin was strong.