Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  “Pretty realistic collection, eh?” the governor said.

  “It’s cool,” Ernesto said.

  “Cool” was definitely not the word I would have used. The place was giving me the creeps. The governor walked in front of us, and left us to inspect the room a little closer, and suddenly I heard the main door close, and the governor locked the door.

  “You get a better feel for the whole terror of the place if you’re forced to stay in there, for a while,” he said, and laughed. “I’ll be back at some point,” he said, and he left.

  I tried the door, and it was definitely locked. I tried to see Ernesto’s eyes, beneath his mirrored sunglasses, but all I got was a blank, mirrored expression. Only his pursed lips, between his beard, gave a sense he didn’t think this was in any way funny.

  —

  After an hour of being locked up, the governor came down to the dungeon and opened up the big wood door. For an hour, I’d gone through all the possible reasons the governor could have locked us in there. One option was that he was just one of those incorrigible gamers, one of those guys who loved to make the world of his magic and make-believe real. This is, more or less, what Renaissance fairs are all about, where people dress up like knights in shining armor to fight other knights, to get the love of a thin woman dressed like a damsel in distress. I did a story, once, about Mexican game-addicts, and the governor was showing some of those tendencies—life-size dolls, the grandiose way he showed us his basement with instruments of torture. It had all the signs of someone in way too deep with his hobbies.

  Another possibility I’d run through was that the governor was sadistic and any minute he was going to come down, personally, dressed in black leather to whip and torture us. This was more the Quentin Tarantino scenario, like in his movie Pulp Fiction, where the Gimp is kept in the basement for ages until turning into some kind of animal.

  A final option was that Ernesto had something to do with this treatment. I asked him point-blank: “Do you owe him any money? Is he usually like this?”

  “It’s the opposite,” Ernesto said. “If anyone owes any money here, he owes me a few thousand. I sold him a painting a month ago, by a pop artist in Mexico City, and he hasn’t paid me yet. But the painting is only five thousand dollars. He should be able to come up with that amount, easily.”

  “What’s the painting like?” I asked.

  “It’s a pink, airbrush version of Darth Vader in a gay pride parade.”

  “Is the governor gay?”

  “He might be. But I don’t think so. I don’t even think he knows what a gay pride parade is. I think he just saw the painting and loved the fact it had Darth Vader in it. As you can see, he’s a bit obsessed.”

  So, while Ernesto and I stood in the haunted house of horrors, I couldn’t come up with the reason we were being kept in such a “nice” place.

  The governor came down the steps, his feet dragging against the flagstones to the dungeon, and I could hear a few other men behind him, some yelling from the top of the steps to others at the bottom to be sure to protect the jefe, to stand in front of him.

  The door opened and two guards came and took ahold of Ernesto and me. The governor came in.

  “So, have you figured out why you’re here, yet?” he asked.

  I felt like giving a sarcastic answer, that the reason I was here was to write a story about his goofy, life-size action doll collection. Oh, the places writing fun stories for the editors back home will get you. But I’ve learned, over the years, to keep my sarcastic side in check and to play dumb.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “None at all?” the governor asked.

  Given his mocking tone, I tried to think further through the potential options for the fun treatment we were being given.

  “How about if I refresh your memory,” the governor said. “A year ago, you wrote an investigative piece about allegations of new drug trafficking in Cuernavaca. You wrote about the marriage of my niece to an important businessman, who had just opened a large apartment complex with a golf course, and you raised suspicions that the owners of the golf course—El Paraíso—were involved in laundering drug money. Does this ring any bells?”

  It did, of course.

  “That article was completely false, and you will write a retraction. You are going to turn in your resignation to your newspaper, and they are going to write an article saying you have been dismissed, completely, for improper conduct. The article will appear on the front page of your newspaper.”

  I was used to hearing about these kinds of requests, for local journalists, on a daily basis. There were dozens and dozens of journalists killed trying to cover the drug war. There were more than dozens told to shut up what they were writing, or they would be killed. The situation for local journalists was horrible, and getting even more so all the time. It was something that we foreign journalists talked about regularly when we got together, informally, at a bar in Mexico City every Friday. The noose of the violence was closing on anyone who wanted to expose the truth. But, so far, almost all foreign journalists had been left alone. And there was a fine line that we all knew, usually, not to cross. Don’t give any specific details of the hideouts of the drug kingpins. Don’t go into too many details about the people being pulled off buses and shot at gunpoint. Keep the articles from a mid-level distance, about the general trends in the drug wars, about the general territorial battle. As long as the focus was kept a little further back, you could get the broad story out while avoiding putting your own life at risk. But it seemed, in naming the governor’s niece in passing, I had put the focus in too close. And—who knew?—maybe he had some financial interest in the El Paraíso golf club.

  “I’m sorry if you were offended, in any way, by the article,” I said. “I had no idea your niece was mentioned.” I looked at the guards holding Uzi submachine guns.

  “The question isn’t whether I was offended but that you’re spreading lies,” the governor said. “Do you stand by your story?”

  I have learned that if you are going to be in this business, you can be polite, you can weasel around a bit to get the bad guys you report on off your back, you can tell a few white lies to be able to keep reporting the truth; but there are some moments when you have to stand up to the bullies. If you don’t, they’ll push you right over.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “Yes, you ‘do’ what?” the governor said. “You stand by your lies?”

  “Yes, I do stand by the story.”

  One of the guards twisted my arm behind my back.

  “You see this guy—Ernesto,” the governor said. “He never should have brought you here. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking he’s some kind of special smartass. Maybe he was thinking he knows more than he knows about everything. Here’s the deal. You are going to leave this place, and you are going to retract the story, and you’re going to quit being a journalist, and if I see you write one more story, then I’m going to send some people to your apartment in La Condesa and I’m going to have you taken out. You have one week to leave the country.” He had his men take us upstairs, and they pushed us out the door. I’d never seen Ernesto, such a big guy, look scared before, but leaving the governor’s house in Cuernavaca, he took off his shades and he didn’t look so big or tough anymore.

  —

  Back in Mexico City, I got to thinking about my twenty years of writing stories in Mexico. What had it all been for? After all the stories about every kind of human interest I could find, had I made any difference to the world? Had I done anything to help the people around me, or was I just documenting the freak show and the river of human misery? I’m fifty-two years old. I look younger than my years, with big muscles, with the build, still, of a Marine, but my head is bald and no one can deny the passage of time. I could call the editors in Houston and tell them it was time for the ship to come in. I could ask for an editing job that would be cushier than writing the day-to-day ins and outs of a countr
y on the brink of descending into chaos. If you live in Mexico City, you can have a fine, perfectly nice life. I have a fairly comfortable apartment with modern furniture. If you stay away from the riskier stories, you can do all right as a foreign correspondent. The big papers like the New York Times rotate their staff in and out of countries, so you don’t get too comfortable in any one place, so you don’t lose your edge and hunger as a reporter looking for stories. They do it to eliminate too much bias, as you get too close to the “natives.” Maybe it was time to pack it all in. If I left, I didn’t have to call it caving in to a piss-ant, small-time politician in Cuernavaca. I could call it coming to a “lifetime decision” after some “reflection.” But that was a bunch of bullshit. If I left, it would prove I was becoming soft and that I hadn’t given a damn about real journalism, about really standing up for the truth, since the first day I’d arrived in Mexico City, twenty years before.

  I decided to ignore the threat from the governor. It’s not that he was all bluff, but a lot of these evil guys, lurking in the shadows, just try to scare you and then—like a dog barking—they move on. It didn’t make much sense for them to try to take out a foreign journalist, especially an American one. It could lead to too many investigations by the CIA and the State Department.

  Seven days had passed and I went to a new, fancy bar in Mexico City called La Romita. There’s an old, art deco staircase that sweeps up a couple of floors to the main area. The bar is grandiose, with black and white checkered tiles, bartenders whipping up exotic drinks of mezcal mixed with guava juice that they flambé. The customers are trendy, dressed in the latest foreign jeans that go for $250 a pair in the Meatpacking District of NYC. Women come and go in strapless concoctions that show off their Acapulco tans. Men wear leather motorcycle jackets, or the latest glasses and shoes imported from Italy. This is the crowd of young hipsters that live off the bank accounts of their mothers and fathers, the elite-in-waiting of Mexico who, while they’re young, party hard, proving how cool they are by how much money they can spend, while beggars lurk on the streets outside.

  Ernesto’s band has an underground, decadent touch, and they were invited to play in the bar, so I chose to go see what was up in the club. I wanted Ernesto to know I wasn’t going to leave Mexico. I wanted to let him know he shouldn’t worry—any more than me, pretending I wasn’t visibly worried—about what had happened in the dungeon the week before.

  The ceiling of La Romita is two stories high, with a glass roof that opens to the sky. A wide balcony faces the street, hovering above the uneven sidewalks below. A couple hundred clients were packed into the space, some standing on the staircase that floats to the upper floor, dressed in their finest clothes, one woman with a Gucci cream-colored dress.

  As the band got louder and louder, Ernesto standing ramrod straight, the crowd was into the decadence of seeing a punk-sounding rock band in such an elegant space. Ernesto spewed out his somewhat filthy lyrics, and people ordered fine martinis with Bombay Sapphire gin.

  The gunshots came from out of nowhere. Maybe the guy who shot Ernesto was up on the top balcony of the bar, shooting down at him. Maybe he was mixed into the crowd. Three shots came fast, and by the sound—so powerful it cut into the amplified guitars—it must have been a 9mm weapon, something as big as a Glock 9.

  The crowd recoiled. People shouted and fell to the floor. The bartender, next to me, couldn’t see what was happening, at first. He seemed to think it was all part of the show, of the craziness of the packed bar. He lit another flambéed cocktail, and then, when he figured out what was happening, he doused the flame, dropping the drink on the floor.

  —

  I filed the story, that night, to the editors. I told them, at last, about the threat I’d received from the governor a week before. I hadn’t wanted to tell them, because I was afraid they would pull me back home. I didn’t want to leave where I’d been living the last twenty years.

  I called up the editors and told them, “You’ve got to publish this story. The significance is that the violence is now coming to Mexico City. It’s finally infiltrating the capital. This is going to be the next wave of the violence.”

  “Then get out of there,” they said.

  “But there’s no reason for me to leave, yet,” I said. “It’s not that dangerous for me, yet.”

  “Well, either it’s dangerous or it’s not. And if it’s not, then this story isn’t something new. Look, Shawn, you’ve been down there too long. You’ve been down there twenty years. Maybe it’s time to come back to Houston. We could find you a position at the foreign desk, or you could take time off to write a book, for a while. You could take the time you need to get back to some real stories.”

  It was two in the morning. Normally, this was the time when I would finish up going over a last-minute major piece with the editors, before they put the story to bed. But for the first time I could remember, when I said the story should run, they said no.

  I went outside my apartment, taking my dog to the Parque México, which runs in a big oval shape, with tall palm trees, where there was once a racetrack, decades ago. I walked around the park. It was so late, none of the usual people walking their dogs were in the park. I took out a cigarette, and I looked up at the palm fronds waving in dark silhouettes against the lit-up sky, over the giant valley of Mexico City. It was time to pack it in. It was time to move on. I was no longer strong enough, anymore. I was no longer a bounty hunter.

  EVERYTHING ELSE IS GOING TO BE FINE

  To live in Mexico City you have to pretend there aren’t many dangers. There are the occasional bullets, of course, which most of you “gringos” read about in the papers. I put the word gringos in quotation marks because I know better than to make that kind of slur, but the honest truth is that’s the way we think about you guys to the north. We have all sorts of guesses as to why we call you gringos. One of the reasons, supposedly, is that you guys wore green uniforms when you came down and took what are now Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico during the Mexican-American War. So we called you “green-gos.” But that doesn’t make much sense to anyone who speaks English, which I do. Take the origin as you like it, when we call you a gringo we mean it as a slur.

  I know what it’s like to speak to you about these things because I work for an American company, run by the U.S. gov’t., called U.S. Wheat. I’ve been working at the company for four years now. It’s not ideal. It’s a place I found some work, with a degree in biology, when the economic crisis started in 2008. The goal of U.S. Wheat is to make sure everyone in the world—from the Philippines to the tip of Tierra del Fuego—eats as much wheat grown in America as they can. And by “America” I’m using that all-encompassing word by which you guys call the U.S. (even though there are other Americas, like South America, and even though we, in Mexico, think about Mexico as being in North America, which you guys think is in Central America. Don’t even get the Canadians going on whether they think they’re Americans).

  In the office, I never tell my boss I’m gay.

  He’s two hundred and fifty pounds and from Kansas. He wears a crisp, white cotton shirt, ironed by his muchacha—the maid that most upper-middle-class Mexicans have—and he pits out, leaving big sweat stains under his arms. He moves as an imposing presence through the office, speaking to us only when he has something he wants us to do. “You’ll have to go to Colombia at the end of April for the Wheat Conference,” he’ll say. And, even though I already have ten other trips planned around then for work, I’ll have to jiggle them around to fit in the trip to Colombia.

  No one else at the office knows I’m gay, either. There are four of us. It’s a tight space. One of the four is our secretary, and if I told even one of them, they’d all know right away.

  —

  If you looked at me, the first thing you would think isn’t: he’s gay; you’d think: he’s a runner. I’m skinny. I’m five feet seven. My chin is fairly triangular at the bottom. I guess I’ve been told my face is a bit boyish. I h
ave soft brown eyes, with somewhat long eyelashes. My hair is straight and dirty blond, combed with a part on the side, and a bit long like a boy’s, though I’m thirty-seven. It’s hard to know what we look like to others, but I would say I look like a runner. Someone else might notice my thin legs. They might notice I always rush around, never really stopping, always in some kind of motion. Even when I’m sitting, my hands are moving, or my mouth is moving. I don’t like long pauses between sentences. I like to speak fast, even in English.

  So I’m always doing something: sending off a link to a YouTube video, like of a thirteen-year-old girl singing about what it feels like to suck at the tit of her mother. That song is called “La Tetita.” It’s campy, with this Peruvian girl dressed up in traditional mountain clothing and a tight blouse, swaying back and forth like a little girl, singing out in this high voice, “De día y de noche, la tetita”—All night and all day, the titty. I just think that’s hilarious. So I send that around to a few of my friends.