Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  Or I go to el Cabaret. I like to go to the Cabaret. It’s a theater in the neighborhood of Coyoacán where they perform all sorts of outlandish, raucous theater. Men dress up as women. People sing in drag. They do political spoofs, making fun of the president, or whatever. I go with a small group of my gay friends who, like me, are out to each other at night but not to our coworkers or to our parents or to most people during the day.

  —

  Six months ago, I was out running on one of the elevated freeways that stretch across Mexico City. When I’m heading into a marathon, I’ll do a twenty-mile run. I run six miles every day, and then I’ll do a twenty-miler at the end of training. It’s almost impossible to run in normal places in the city. There are a few running tracks and a couple big parks, like Chapultepec, but those get pretty confining when you want to do twenty miles. There are oncoming buses and cars everywhere in the city, and no one follows the traffic rules in any case, so I run up on the elevated freeways. It’s illegal to be up there. But, unlike in the U.S., no one ever comes to force you out of the way. There’s a Wild West attitude in Mexico, so if you do things like you know what you’re doing, most people just let you do what you want. So I run along the side of the freeway, elevated sometimes more than ten stories in the air. Up there I feel free, like no one knows who I am. I look out over the wide valley of Mexico City, with hundreds of thousands of concrete houses below, stretching for miles into the distance until they roll up the ring of mountains far away. The sky is dramatic, with big gray clouds that come and go, indifferent to the activities of the human beings below. There are more and more skyscrapers in Mexico City. In the center there are few, because of the prevalence of earthquakes. Most are up on a hillside called Santa Fe, and only one big tower, of Ixe Banco, stands in the center. The building is fifty-five stories tall, but it looks minuscule and alone beneath the clouds, standing ostracized, smaller than the power of the choices nature makes.

  I wonder, sometimes, looking at the clouds, why God made me gay. It’s a question that comes to me every time I run, looking at the immensity of the force of nature and at the Catholic churches that dot the floor of the jammed urban valley below. Call it what you will, a gift, a curse, I’ll tell you what they call it here: maricón. Faggot.

  Six months ago, on the segundo piso—the elevated highway—a van pulled up beside me and drove slowly, neck and neck, as I ran forward as steadily as I could in my mental running zone.

  The van was a Ford Aerostar—thirty years old—with the paint peeling, white tinged yellow from the Mexican sun. One of the guys on the passenger side rolled down his window. He was drunk and he held a bottle of tequila.

  “Where you running to, faggot?” he yelled out the window.

  I ignored him. I’ve discovered silence is the best way to confront that kind of comment.

  “Eh, maricón! I’m speaking to you! Where are you running to in your faggoty clothing?” I had on my usual electric-blue nylon running jacket with fast-looking white stripes running down the back. I was wearing my black running tights, which hug me like a second layer of skin. My shoes had neon yellow soles and silver reflective mesh. It was standard gear for any runner.

  “He must be a faggot,” the man yelled, “because he doesn’t answer me.” The driver, on the other side, seemed to look into his side mirror to see if any cops were behind him.

  He sped up, pulled over in front of me in the lane I was running in, and halted. Four men jumped out of the van. They were all drunk. They spoke with slurred words to each other.

  “Grab the motherfucker,” the guy who’d been shouting out the window said. “Hijo de puta,” he said, which means son of a whore. “Just tell me you’re a faggot. Just tell it to me. Just admit it. Look at your fagotty-ass haircut and the way you run.”

  I didn’t break my normal run as I approached them. I thought I could just ignore them and pass through. In Mexico, a lot of times, you have to bluff. You have to pretend you don’t hear or see things, because if you do the whole world will come crashing in on you like a tidal wave. It was only when I got closer to them, and I could see they weren’t going to let me go, that I started to sprint to the left to get away from them, but the drunk guy who’d yelled at me out of the van lunged and caught the back of my right leg. He pulled my foot out, suddenly, into the air like a ballerina in an arabesque. Then he pulled my other leg out from under me, and I fell with my chin onto the pavement. I struggled as much as I could. I’m small, and a bit scrawny, but I’m tough.

  “Just let me go,” I said to the guys, firmly, with my face against the ground. “This is going to be a problem for you if you keep holding on to me.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. A problem for me, if I keep holding on to you?” the guy who’d had the tequila bottle said. The others laughed in unison, with me squirming like a worm on the ground.

  They kicked me in the ribs. They kicked my face. They kicked me until I went unconscious, and flopped me like a U over the guardrail as a warning sign to any other faggot who might come along. When I finally came to, I felt a wave of nausea, the shock of vertigo, and I looked down from the second floor of the highway at the pavement far below, cars rushing into the remote, aloof distance of the city.

  —

  The next time I saw my family, I did not tell my father what had happened on the highway. I did not tell my sister. I didn’t tell the one of my two brothers who was present. I didn’t tell my grandmother who was there. I believe I am close to my sister and to my father and my brother and my grandmother, but I have never told them I am gay.

  The reason for us all getting together was to celebrate the upcoming wedding of my sister, which would take place in a few months. She had told me over the phone she was getting married, and I was really pleased for her, because I like the guy she’d been going out with. When my father heard the news, he immediately organized a brunch at one of our favorite restaurants in the center of the city.

  My sister hadn’t arrived yet for the brunch. My father and I waited at the crowded restaurant to get a seat. It’s an old Colonial building, like many in the center of Mexico City, which reminds you of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, when Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic king and queen, took Spain back from the Muslims and sent Columbus forth to the New World to bring “civilization.” The staircases in the restaurant, of ancient cedar wood, have yellow Sevillian tiles between each step that commemorate the taking of the Mexican people under the “protective wing” of the Church.

  My father didn’t ask further about my black eye when I told him it was “nothing.” It’s not that he wasn’t concerned, it’s that he knows when he’s approaching too close into my private life. Sometimes, I imagine he must have known I was gay. It’s simply not possible he couldn’t know. But we kept complete silence about the matter. I never volunteered if I was going out with someone. I’d simply keep the conversation light, or about something—anything—other than what my sexuality was. As we waited for my sister to arrive with her new fiancé, my father said we would have to go looking for a bouquet of hideous plastic flowers, that afternoon, to give my sister. It was a running joke in the family to give a kitsch gift to celebrate marriages. It was our way of showing deep love. And I knew I would never get one of those kitsch gifts.

  My grandmother was the only one who didn’t follow this protocol of dancing around who I was. Halfway through the meal, later, she turned to me, just after we’d toasted my sister and her fiancé, and she said, “And when are you going to get married, Miguelito? You’ve been a bachelor for too long. Tell us who you’re going out with these days?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I guess I just haven’t met the right one.”

  She gave me a look like I needed to hurry up. She took my hands in hers, which were old and soft with age, her wedding ring still on her hand, though she had been a widow for twenty-seven years. “A man without a wife is nothing,” she said. “Without a wife a man is like a lost sock fallen
to the ground.”

  —

  I have been living with a roommate for three years now, and he doesn’t know I’m gay. He’s home most of the time, and I’m rarely home, traveling the world—especially the Caribbean and South America—promoting U.S. Wheat. He likes to bring friends back to our apartment and to open one beer after another, speaking with his buddies into the night. He’s as hetero as they come. He’s the kind of guy who plays poker with his friends late into the morning, and wears his jeans a bit baggy, hanging down so his underwear shows. It lets you know he has a lot of hair down there. It lets you know he’s a bit stinky.

  I take showers every day. I have almost no hair on my body. I like to make sure the bottles in my part of the medicine cabinet are in order. I like to make my bed. I like to cook, when I can, though I’m usually on the road. I don’t bring friends over. I don’t think they’d like the space. It feels too dominated by my roommate. But I stick with my roommate because he never asks me anything. He just says, “Hey,” when I come in the door. He respects my space. I respect his. Everything is properly compartmentalized, and I save on rent.

  —

  “If I could have love without sex, that would be my ideal,” I tell Raúl. We are on our second date, three months ago. Raúl is smart. He’s a stock trader for Banco Santander. He’s older than me, by a few years, and his hair sits like a gray mop on his head. His leather jacket is a size and a half too large for him, and he slouches in his chair, outside at an Italian café in Polanco, a rich neighborhood of Mexico City, yet in a no-man’s-land part of the neighborhood. This café is known to almost no one. No one fashionable would ever come here or know the place exists. The sign of the café burns with metallic, fluorescent light. We’re the only ones sitting outside, and the café is about to close.

  “Why would you want love without sex?” Raúl says. He seems to ask the question more to the evening air than to me.

  “Because I’ve never been that interested in penetration, you know? I just want to be hugged. I just want someone to hold me.”

  “You mean you don’t want to be on bottom?”

  “I don’t want to be on top or on bottom. I don’t want sex. I want love.” Like with most people, Raúl and I lasted no more than a few weeks. We never had sex. Eventually, he got tired of waiting and he moved on.

  —

  When I was thirteen, it happened in back of the cathedral in Cuernavaca where my grandmother used to take me. My parents didn’t care about going to church. They went once in a while, and they’ve been divorced for fifteen years now. But my grandmother took me, regularly, to church, and I became involved. It was the thirteenth of December, and there was a humid chill in the air, though it was a bright, cloudless day.

  The cathedral of Cuernavaca is one of the biggest in Mexico. There’s a large patio connected to the main worshipping area. Beneath the portico, around the patio, there are paintings of old frescoes, worn out, with row upon row of the hierarchy of the Church. The priests are scrunched so close together in the paintings, it’s hard to tell one from the other. The priests stand over the nuns on the map of the hierarchy. The paintings let you know there’s a code of obedience, who is master and who is not.

  Padre Francisco took me into his office, after he’d finished the 8 a.m. mass. I was dressed in the long frock of a choirboy. He had never touched me before, but I had heard he’d touched others, and I had remained silent about the rumors I’d heard. He was a major figure in the church, at the time. He told me to put down the large candle he had asked me to carry into his office. He closed the door behind us, and the room was dark except for the big candle, which I had placed on his mahogany desk, where he’d told me to. His cheeks were white with powder, which he seemed to have put on to cover some of the popped capillaries on his face. His glasses were thick, with bifocals and a sharp metallic frame.

  When I put the candle down, I felt his body suddenly behind me. I felt the weight of his black vestment, a flowing robe as thick as it looked, the heavy cotton brushing against me. He put his claws on my shoulders and squeezed. “Come now, Miguelito,” he said. He ran a hand down the side of my ribs. “The Heavenly Father calls you into his arms,” he said. He put his lips, old with the juice of wine, against my ear and whispered, “In the name of the Father I pronounce you my son.” He lifted my robe and stuck his finger in my asshole. He stuck his penis in me and pushed back and forth, rapidly, for a few minutes, as I lay over the desk with the candle next to my head nearly burning my hair. I didn’t say anything. I knew not to say anything. It happened another dozen times, and then he moved on to another.

  —

  Three days ago, a friend of mine from the Cabaret, Arturo, asked me if I wanted to go to the Vazquez Hermanos Circus with him. The Vazquez Hermanos Circus is one of the five biggest circuses in Mexico. There are more than four hundred smaller circuses that tour around the country. Arturo regularly plays the role of a clown at the Cabaret, and he used to work for the Vazquez Hermanos Circus. After fifteen years of touring with the circus, he gave it up. He loved making the children laugh. He loved handing out balloons to the kids, or play-fighting with the other clowns and watching the whole audience fall back in the aisles with laughter. But the rigors of picking up and traveling after every performance—the circus took six hours to put up, with its three rings, and two hours to take down—wore him out, and he eventually gave up the life on the road.

  “The other thing that got to me,” he told me once, “is that when you’re a clown no one knows who you really are. They expect you to always be funny. I got tired of people looking at me and assuming the person I was, inside, was the mask.”

  Arturo has been a longtime theater partner with me. We go to shows at the Teatro Auditorio Nacional together. Sometimes I get him free tickets, since he doesn’t have much money. When the Vazquez Circus came to town, he had two comp tickets, so he asked me to come with him. Arturo can make those sad clown faces, in pantomime, if you don’t do what he wants, and I can’t resist that look, so I decided to drop what I was doing—preparing for my next U.S. Wheat trip to Nicaragua—to go with him.

  During the performance, I watched the tightrope walkers sway back and forth as they passed above the arena. I watched the trapeze artists barely grab onto the hands of the receiving man on the other side. I saw a Bengal tiger put his jaws around the neck of the lion tamer. The audience oohed and aahed, on the edge of their seat, wondering if each performer would survive. I was on the edge of my seat, too, but nothing in the show could come close to the fear I experienced after the regular performance.

  On our way out of the ring, I saw a bunch of schoolchildren, tightly grouped together. I saw some priests accompanying them, and it reminded me of the way Padre Francisco used to shepherd us to events around the city of Cuernavaca. Arturo must have seen my reaction because he said to me, “What’s wrong? You look pale as a ghost.”

  I found myself unable to stop looking at one priest in particular. He looked so much like Padre Francisco, though he was much younger than Padre Francisco had been. His metallic glasses were the same, now thirty years out of date. He must have been from the countryside, or he wouldn’t have been wearing that kind of glasses anymore.

  I pulled my shoulder away from Arturo, who had patted me on the arm to try to comfort me. “It’s nothing,” I said.

  Arturo looked at me intently, as if trying to make sure I was truly OK. He tried to distract me. “Let’s go to the back of the circus. I want to introduce you to my friends.”

  As the audience rushed out of the main tent, Arturo took me back toward the trucks, waiting behind the three-poled, big, movable arena. Dozens of men were already rushing about, putting the hippopotamuses, tigers, elephants, and camels into their cages, giving them straw and snapping the faces of the animals away from the bars if they tried to poke their noses out too far.

  “Come back here, further,” Arturo said. “I want you to meet the man who taught me everything I know about acting. He�
�s the one who convinced me to be a clown.”

  We approached an old, wood trailer, with its red paint beginning to peel off. On the outside center of the trailer a large poster of a clown laughing uproariously was plastered to the wood. The mouth of the clown was open with melodramatic joy, and no sound came out of his mouth, but the promise of laughter was implied.

  Arturo opened the trailer. I looked around, seeing no one at first, and Arturo pointed toward the floor at a dwarf still dressed in the costume of a clown, with a bowler hat with polka dots, and clown-red cheeks, his lips drawn with makeup in an upward swoop on both sides, a tear penciled in black and white coming down off his left eye. His Rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer nose had already come off. But in all other ways he still looked like he had just come from the stage.

  When the dwarf saw Arturo he began to pull a long handkerchief out of his short pants. He pulled and pulled, and one handkerchief led to another, all connected in a long line; he pantomimed struggling to get to the end of the handkerchief, and the cloth came further and further, coiling into his hands and down to the floor. He pulled, and he pulled, and it seemed the handkerchief would never end. Arturo pantomimed back, in silent laughter, slapping his knees, throwing his head and chest back uproariously, laughing so the whole audience could see. It was a sign of mutual respect, a sign Arturo had learned well from his master, the dwarf. When it seemed the string of handkerchiefs could come out no longer, the dwarf gave one last harsh tug and pulled out a stuffed rabbit that seemed as big as the pant space around his legs.

  Just then, a cold draft of air came from behind me, and I turned to see who was at the door. A man with a baseball cap with the logo of Ed Hardy—with a skull on the cap and a bloody dagger through the skull, in the style of a tattoo, with shiny rhinestones like white diamonds studded all over the cap—had punched open the door. He strode into the trailer, moving slowly with his hands patting the sides of his jeans like he was itching to pull out a gun. He wore a red leather jacket, unzipped most of the way to show a white undershirt below. His hair beneath the cap, to the sides, was gelled back, combed too neatly. The cap sat large on his head and cocked to the side.