Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  Me and my compadres, we never asked for the shit to go down last night, you know what I mean? Yeah, we started selling some drugs in a new area. I admit it. So what? A guy’s got to make a living.

  I’ve been selling small packets for four years now, next Saturday. Four years, and I’m still alive. ’Cause I’ve got what it takes to move up the ladder. Not like a bunch of these sad-asses around the neighborhood. Chucho is the one who hooked me up. He came around four years ago to the little store, around the corner, where my father used to work before they fired him. I was sixteen, then. My father had told me to come help him move some gas tanks onto one of them delivery trucks. My papi never asked me for nothin’ unless he needed it, so I went and gave him a hand, and he said he was goin’ to give me twenty pesos if I helped him move the gas canisters. Those things are big. Too big for him. And I was trying to pick up change however I could.

  So when I was loading up the canisters, that’s when Chucho, who was driving the truck, asked me if I wanted some more regular work, if I wanted to make some real money. He gave me a nod to let me know he was talking about more than fucking twenty pesos. And I was interested, so I went in closer to him and he said, “Sometimes we’ve got some things we need distributed around the neighborhood, you know what I mean? I know you. I know all about you. I’ve heard from your father and others you’re a real man. They tell me no one can scare you.”

  So that’s how I started. Delivering small packages, in the gas truck. That’s how we moved around town. The old men, like Chucho, they’d sit in the truck while I’d unload the big gas canisters from the back. Those forty-liter tanks hurt like a motherfucker when you take them off the truck. But I’d take them off. I acted like a regular gas man, and then, every once in a while, I’d drop off a package. You know what I mean? A secret package. No one had to tell me what was in them. No one did, at first, but I knew they were drugs. That’s how we moved some of the product around the city. It was small shit at first, like that, and then I started moving up.

  And one time I delivered gas to the professor’s house. We had to do some real gas deliveries, too, and he opened them big-ass doors that keep his compound closed. I walked in there, rolling one of those 40L gas tanks on the base, along the ground, the way you have to after you’ve pulled the thing off the truck. And I noticed he didn’t even notice me. It’s like that professor, he was just lost in his thinking. He was lost in all those weird pieces of metal that looked like socks hangin’ upside down.

  It was strange in there. I couldn’t understand why there was so much space for one guy just making some paintings. We had heard about him. A painting professor from el DF. I like painting and all. I had my car airbrushed. Had my friend do it. But I couldn’t see no paintings around when I went inside. He had some cool shit in his house. There was some old ceramics and he had a big paper-mache doll of La Catrina—she was all bones and she was a big old skeleton rattling around with a sun hat on her head. I kinda dug that. But I noticed the professor thought I was just some boy. One of the people who just worked for him. Like his muchacha, Carmen. Everyone knows Carmen in the neighborhood. She says nice things about the professor. She says he’s a bit weird but that he treats her right. But I didn’t feel that one bit. He didn’t even notice me. Gave me a two-peso tip, which was the normal tip everyone gave, and I kept thinking—with all that big compound, with all that space, couldn’t he have found another peso or two? What’s he so hard up about?

  The day he had planned was unraveling. In the morning, after he’d pulled out the ladder and climbed up to the divots from the bullets, and had filled them with some of the adobe he’d found in bags stored in the wide factory space where he also stored his paintings—so many paintings, many under cloth, work from his earlier days that he held on to out of sentimentality, or because they were experiments which he hadn’t sold and would be valuable to collectors someday—his muchacha, Carmen, had called to tell him she was feeling sick and she wouldn’t be able to make it to clean the house. It wasn’t like Carmen to call in sick. She had a mother who had cancer, but even though she needed to help her mother, if she could, she was almost always present. It was one of the things that amazed Mauricio, the way people with the least made the most effort to help others. Some might say it was because they needed money the most and couldn’t afford to lose their job, and there was some truth in that, but he felt, without wanting to overly romanticize the poor, that in the case of Carmen, she was simply more giving. He had turned to Buddhism the last few years, because of his older daughter, and because of a half-Japanese, half-Mexican student he’d once taught, who had died tragically in an accident in Japan. He was drawn to the asceticism of the Buddhism he’d learned from the parents of the student. The discipline, the long sitting on a tatami mat focusing and training the mind, had appealed to him. He would sit and think about decoupling from the material world into the spiritual world. And he felt Carmen did this without having to do all of those elaborate meditations. She wanted less, and expected less, and so she seemed happier than those who wanted more, like Mauricio, who, even though he claimed he painted only because he wanted to paint, and even though that was his main reason for painting, his desire to have some fame also was something he couldn’t do without.

  He wasn’t sure why he needed the attention. He realized, even though he was now an adult man with a gray, rough-cut beard, the need for attention from his second wife and from his former student lovers, and from his children and even from his first wife, made him a little childish. But he liked to give, if he could, so when Carmen called in sick and said she might have to go to the clínica, he didn’t hesitate for a second and he took her to the hospital.

  The clínica was ten minutes away by car—not too far, but Carmen didn’t have a car. He took Carmen up to the third floor and waited with her in the lobby thirty minutes until a doctor could see her. The waiting room was crowded, and once she had gone off with a nurse to have a number of tests to see why she was feeling so low in energy, he felt his bladder full, pressing and demanding he take care of it. He felt his body more and more. He had given up drinking four years ago, when he’d understood it was taking over his life. It had seemed better, at first, even though he struggled with the temptation all the time. The only way he could give up the booze was going cold turkey. And, although stopping drinking brought him back on the right track, he found he had this restless energy, a need to constantly move, and with his bladder full, he couldn’t hold himself in the lobby anymore and he went off wandering. He found the bathroom on the third floor and it was locked. A sign indicated it was being renovated and was indefinitely closed. He needed to go badly, and he tried to remember just where the hell there was another bathroom in the building. He entered an elevator and wandered down to the first floor where he had once donated blood. In Mexico, you had to donate blood anytime someone you knew needed surgery. He had given blood six months ago, and he remembered there was a bathroom down there. His memory sluiced in and out, sometimes knowing exactly where a bathroom was but then incapable, anymore, of remembering just what he’d eaten for breakfast the day before. Down a hallway he traipsed. He felt his feet shuffle, without the full control of his mind. He felt the weight of his belly, which he hadn’t had until the last two years, a byproduct of giving up drinking. He had gone from skinny to fat, a potbelly that must have come as a side effect of the pills the psychiatrist gave him to try to calm his nerves. The blood-donation clinic was just ahead, the place where people waited, and then behind the waiting area the rooms where they took you to give blood. The donation area was closed off, forbidden for people who weren’t giving blood, but that’s where he had last gone to the bathroom in the hospital, so he opened a door with a sign that said for nurses and patients only. He walked back into an assault of bright fluorescent lights. The halls were suddenly tight like the innards of an endless spaceship, all lit up, far too incandescent. He wondered where the toilet had been. Where had he gone to pee, before? He saw so
me nurses and patients at the end of the halls, disappearing as he approached wanting to ask for help to direct him, though he didn’t want to be found out to have left Carmen.

  Before he could find the bathroom, he opened a door to where he thought he should go, and he entered a room full of complex machines, whirring, with IV needles plugged into the arms of three people donating. This is where he had found himself the last time he’d donated. The machines clicked in powerful ways, letting all the patients know the plasma separators were in control of their bodies, and as he looked at the three patients who seemed like blobs feeding the machines, he suddenly made out the face of one patient and realized it was the man who had been shooting at his studio building the night before. It was one of the men who had been firing wildly. The man’s forehead was wide and his black hair greased back. His jaw was tight and triangular. He had the peach fuzz of a mustache he seemed to choose not to shave. He was scowling, it seemed to Mauricio, at Mauricio and at the world. Mauricio didn’t mean to stare but his eyes—which were used to taking in all visual details—looked at the mole on the left side of the young man’s face, at the premature wrinkles on his forehead, at the wannabe rich gangster fake Gucci glasses perched on his head. This was one of the people taking over his neighborhood and threatening him. He had seen the kid crouched behind the white Ford station wagon the night before, looking up at him as the kid shot in his direction. It had felt like he was intentionally shooting in his direction. And now he stood face to face with this thug.

  “What are you staring at, old man?” the gangster said. “Haven’t you ever seen someone give blood?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mauricio said. “I was just looking for the bathroom.”

  “Well, I’m not the bathroom. Even though you might think I’m the toilet. You don’t remember me delivering gas to you, once, four years ago, do you?”

  He tried to remember all the people who had brought him gas, and he could only remember the round face of the man with thick grime on his fingers who had delivered gas the last year, or two. The gas-men came like men from the engine room of a ship, essential for you to move your boat forward in the ocean, and then they disappeared. Sometimes a new engineer popped up on deck, and then was replaced by someone else. The number of gas-men who had come and gone in his adult life melded. He knew he always smiled at them. He knew he always gave them a tip and thanked them; he knew he called out in frustration, sometimes, when his gas ran out and he couldn’t find a gas deliveryman. It was strange that—for someone so important, without whom he wouldn’t be able to cook or heat his tea in the morning—he couldn’t remember any of the gas-men except the one from the present.

  “I know about your two daughters,” the gangster said. “I know one of them used to be an airplane flight attendant. I know the other takes yoga classes in the center of town when she comes to visit you. I know you rarely go outside your compound. I know a lot about you, señor, and you don’t know a thing about me, do you? You think you own the world in there, inside your castle, looking down at us shooting below. You think your daughters are more beautiful than us. But I’ve got news for you. I sold a small package of coke to your younger daughter. Oh yes, she’s a lot more wild than you think. That one who goes biking all the time. That one who you think is fucking up not working anymore. She’s lonelier than you, inside your castle.”

  Was it possible this punk could really know so much about him? “How do you know these things? Who are you?”

  “I’m like the ghost of the barrio. I’m everywhere and nowhere. I lurk in the shadows. You’ve seen me all the time in the neighborhood. You just haven’t wanted to admit I’m there. But I’m there. Just like that paper-mache statue of La Catrina you have in your kitchen—that bag of bones you’ve forgotten about. And if you say anything to the cops, I’m going to come and get you.”

  He was lying, Mauricio thought. He was saying crazy things about his daughters just to torment him. Nothing he said was real. It was all made up. How could he possibly know his daughter had been a flight attendant? How could he possibly know his other daughter liked to do yoga? How could he possibly know he had a statue of La Catrina that he had looked at so many times he’d almost forgotten it was present in his kitchen? And then he realized the boy was no longer a boy. It was the boy who had been around the corner, the one who worked for the small grocery store a block away, but now all grown up. It was the same boy, only he was older now and shooting bullets.

  “Get out of here, old man, and forget you ever saw anything last night, or I’ll come and kill you.”

  It was a threat, like so many other threats to him now: his heart, his lungs, his mind. His mind hadn’t been behaving. His mind had been making up dark nightmares and secrets. His mind must be making up this one, too, he thought. This whole conversation was happening in his mind. It wasn’t a real conversation. He would shut out the hallucination. He would go. He would find the bathroom. He would go back up to Carmen. He looked away from the bad dream and it merged back into the machines, and the clicking and whirring sounds of blood being sucked in and out, donations being made to save lives of people hidden in back surgery rooms. He felt the texture of the fabric of the earth fold like a drapery around him. The demons were running and running through his brain.

  That old man, when he came into where I was giving blood so they could fix up my compadre, Angelito, he looked like he had just seen some guy trying to rape his daughter. He looked at me like I was the scum of this earth. There he is, thinking he’s some kind of clean-cut, perfect professor, and what’s he think he’s so fancy for? That house, it’s just a sock factory. My papi said my grandfather used to work there, fourteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. My grandfather, I never knew him. He died before my time, bless his soul, but my papi told me he was one hard motherfucking man. He busted his balls, working in that factory. And then, one day, this guy—the professor—he come into the town and he bought the whole place up like he thinks he’s some kind of king, and he locks himself in there, all hidden away. And it’s like it’s his harem, or something, but they say he never keeps no women in there long-term except his wife and two daughters. He’s just some hidden king working on his paintings. And I asked my papi, once, how can I see those paintings? I like paintings. I wanna see ’em, and my papi told me there’s no way to see the paintings there, you got to go to some museums in Mexico City. And I’m like, what’s he keepin’ them hidden for so far away, you know what I mean?

  So one day I was in Mexico City, and I’m in some bus full of people, holding on to the roof with my hands pressed against the ceiling, trying not to fall onto all the other people, ’cause there was a woman with a baby behind me, and we was all swaying like animals stuck together in that bus, with no air to breathe, but my face it gets pressed against a window where the doors are in the back and I look out the window and I see a photo with a poster of some painting by the professor and it says there’s a show by Mauricio Sanchez. So I thinks to myself, let me off the bus. Let me off this bus.

  I pop out at the next stop, when some guys jump on and off. There’s no official stops for the peseros. I squeeze by the baby cryin’ and I think to myself I’m going to go see what the old man’s art is all about, ’cause I never forgot the time I went into his house to give him that gas, and I thought, that’s what someone should do, you know. That’s what someone should do to move up the ladder. That’s what all of them rich people do. They look at art. And I thought, I want to be someone, you know. So I go up to that museum on the big Avenida Reforma. And it’s not like any other building I’ve ever seen. There’s strange statues in front of the building that look like chopped-up metal from a construction site, and the glass on the museum is black and reflecting, keeping the world out, like it’s some kind of rich man’s glass tomb, and I walk up to the front door and when I get to the door I tug at it, and it’s locked, and I think, man I just missed the bus because I was so stupid I thought I should go see this museum, but I know the
place ain’t for me. Them museums, they say they’re for free, but then the guards look at you once you get in there. That’s what happened to me. I realized the door wasn’t locked, it was just I was opening the wrong side, which made me feel like, why don’t they tell you which side to use, and when I gets in there one of the guards he looks me up and down and he tells me it’s gonna cost me forty pesos just to look around that building and I say, I just wanna look at the paintings of that professor, Mauricio Sanchez, ’cause he owns this strange fortress-like building in my neighborhood, and they say well, that’s fine but it’s gonna cost you forty pesos. And I tell them I don’t have forty pesos to give them to go into the museum. I just spent three pesos taking the bus, and if I had forty pesos I woulda taken a small taxi. And the guard he tells me I can come back on Sunday when it’s free if I want to. And I tell him I’m not going to be in el DF on Sunday. I was just doing a quick in-and-out from Puebla. So he wouldn’t let me in without the money. So the only thing I saw was that poster of the professor’s paintings.

  I slunk outa there and had to wait a bit more to get the bus and when the bus came I felt like a fool for having gotten off to go to the museum, before, so I just walked all the way to where I had to meet these guys to deliver a package. That wasn’t a package of drugs, but I was delivering something important—I don’t know what that was—in an envelope someone had given me to deliver.

  And the whole incident, it got me thinking about the professor more and those museums they build that are kinda like the professor’s studio, with big doors on them that shut tight. So I thought it was kinda funny when one day I was doing my rounds, making sure all the clients had their stash, making sure the guys below me was delivering, ’cause that’s what I spend most of my time doing now, checking up that others aren’t fucking up, that they’re getting the product to the customers. Lemme tell you, I’m just as good a fucking businessman as them bankers in those big towers. The only difference is they’ve got the connections from their papis to get there.