Susana lives in the rough-edged north of the city, near metro Consulado. Her nickname is Miss Masturbation after the title of the blog she kept in the early 2000s. It was a period of a great explosion in blogging in Mexico, an exciting time. “I was searching the word vodka and I found a blog, Blogger. ¿Qué es esto?” Susana recalls. “I started looking at blogs in English, in French.” She started her own blog, Señorita Masturbación, at some point in 2002. She posted vigorously for a while, about Centro, about her life, about her ideas. But after some time, like so many other bloggers in Mexico City and all over the world in that period, Susana’s interest in Web self-publishing withered away. The site died. Then revived. Then died again. In an intriguing mid-twenties transition, Susana has decided to dedicate herself to rescuing stray dogs and to writing fiction. Both pursuits have given her considerable success ever since.
She identifies herself as a former punk, but more than anything else, she is a creature of the night, a devota of decadence. We have lunch in a cantina because in cantinas the food is free as long as you’re drinking, and at any cantina where Susana goes downtown, she knows the regulars, a few of the waiters, or usually both. Some hearty mushy soup and three beers later, we are back on the streets. Every corner has a story, every mangy dog offers a memory. Susana leads me to Plaza Garibaldi, the traditional meeting point for the city’s roving mariachi musicians. It is in active transformation. Near the back, the plaza floor is busted open, workers buzzing about, concrete dust rising in the brisk afternoon breeze, as they replace the floor with new stones.
Around a corner, in a smaller plaza with a dead fountain, the Torre Latinoamericana regal and gray in the distance, we come to a ghostly building of three floors, abandoned. “This is the Acid House,” Susana says. The young vagabonds of the Centro used to gather here to do acid and crack and inhale mona all day. The cops always knew it was there, Susana explains. Some would even get in on the action. It looks completely abandoned, even for a squat. “They’re going to do something new here now,” Susana says. “What could it be? A hotel? A housing development?”
Walking more, Susana tells me stories about the Centro’s ghosts and about the junkies she knew who are now dead. On one corner, she stops, breathes in and out, smog be damned. “I love living here,” she says. “I’d get bored in provincia.”
From that day on, we start hanging out. A lot.
I never once question why I am here, Friday after Friday, at a new cantina in Centro with Susana. Week after week we stumble into bars we should probably not be found in, in Tepito, the Colonia Guerrero, and in and around the Garibaldi area. I rarely ever turn down her invitations to get together. Somewhere along the way, I guess, in Mexico or in California, I had decided that this kind of ritual isn’t just my right, it is my duty. The world stinks, the thinking goes. Go out, rub up against some trouble, and drink until it’s not there anymore.
In Susana I find a partner in leisurely nihilism who sees things just the way I do. And eventually, as always tends to happen when athlete drinkers find themselves, Susana and I find an untouched watering hole and make it our own.
The bar is tucked in an alley off a forgotten plaza near Garibaldi. The square is fitted with a fountain and a crumbling structure that appears as though it once functioned as a small chapel, veering wildly into the soft earth. The little building looks both dead and drunk, unused, and at least two hundred years old. Around the corner, next to a permanent mound of fresh garbage and behind a metal grate, with no sign and no fixed name, sits our spot.
It is just one room big and the bathroom is revolting. Nothing decorates the walls but a sticky film best left uninvestigated. Roaches the size of small rodents sometimes amble across the tile floor, giving me the frightening impression that they have large and complex brains. Old prostitutes, gangly old gay men, transvestites or transgendered ladies with saggy chins, gangsters, women with only a few precious bits of teeth hanging from their gums, dealers—it’s their spot, too. We get to know the “owners” and become quite acquainted with the running melodramas of the place. It is never certain when we will end up here, never planned. Sometimes Susana calls or texts me late in the night, informing me she is in the area and headed to the bar. I’m at home writing, trying to, stuck on a sentence or a complex thought. Resistance is futile.
Inside the bar, on any given night, customers drink and dance to the cumbias and Mexican pop standards blasting on the juke. Midnight turns into 2:00 a.m., and 2:00 a.m. then turns into 3:00, then 4:00, then time dissolves into a slimy toxic pulp. One night we meet an older black woman from the state of Guerrero who can balance a full caguama on her head while dancing, gyrating her hips to the African beat that thumps behind every true cumbia jam. She writes down her name and address on a small scrap of paper for me, insisting I come visit her, and possibly marry her, so that she can move to the United States. Her breath is spicy and metallic, like sea salt. On another night we meet a young Mexican air force officer with a cropped haircut and plenty of military-related tattoos to show off. Rascally and belligerent, the officer seems to be spending all of his bimonthly salary on beer and dances. He wants to go home with one of us, either of us—it probably doesn’t matter who.
Every night at our nameless ditch, the last bar on the last crawl, Susana and I have our beers and our dances and our new flirtations. I turn to Susana, who is busy passionately kissing a guy in a tank top and baggy jeans. She orders another beer. We sit around and ask ourselves, What’s next? What’s next? Nothing is next, it turns out. Nothing but the ritual pour.
“How much do you think this cell phone is worth?” the cabdriver asks Uriel and me, passing the device over his shoulder. Uriel examines it. The cabbie, a young guy with glasses, tells us that he just had sex with a fare, a woman who presented him with the cell phone in exchange for five hundred pesos. Uriel says it was an okay exchange, that the cell phone is probably worth a thousand pesos or more.
“Yeah, I just fucked her,” the cabbie says. “Took her to a hotel.”
He tells us the story as casually as can be. When he picks up the fare, she is “all hot and bothered” and gets into the front seat by his side. She tells him she wants to have sex with him. So the cabbie takes her to a hotel. She was all “torn up,” the cabbie says, and incoherent. He says he knew she was a “prosti,” so he used a condom. Then he takes her to meet some “scary dudes” in Zona Rosa, at a club. They were probably her pimps. The cabbie says that in all his years as a cabdriver, sex with a fare has happened to him only a few times. Most times, he says, it’s the jotos—the fags—who try to pick up their drivers.
The cabbie, a young guy, shows us a picture of the girl. She left an image of herself on the screen of the bartered phone. She looks pretty tragic: dyed-red hair, a dramatic pose. Poor girl, I think. So bored and lost in her life, she is a prostitute and gets wasted and screws cabdrivers for fun. The Mexico City night is fast and lonely. People get drunk, do lots of drugs, lots of pills, lots of cocaine, screw around, and screw each other over. The excesses of decadence and self-destruction as they are practiced in Mexico get to me sometimes. The stories I hear. The overdoses, the sexually transmitted diseases, the senseless deaths. Happening all over the place, upstairs, next door, right around the corner.
I can try to rationalize it. In Mexico City the everyday existential urban threats are mediated by partying—hard, extravagantly, with drama and often violence. In this atmosphere, self-destruction itself becomes a threat. Or a goal. It’s the idea that if you don’t do yourself in first, eventually the city will. Why relinquish control over your demise? This attitude dominated among upper-middle-class globally minded youth of Mexico City in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not yet on the world’s cultural map, the city’s young artists, designers, writers, pushed the limits of sobriety and safety in the overall cultural darkness of the period. Many wound up in rehab. Some went sober. Some moved away from the city to avoid the parade of temptations. Some did not survive.
&nbs
p; After the cabbie leaves us at Cuba Street and Eje Central, back in the Centro, I show Uriel the little dive Susana and I frequent. We walk in and greet the owners and the usual mix of hoodlums, dirty old men, hookers in their fifties, and kids sniffing paint solvent.
A stumbling old woman comes up to us and says, “My respects to you both.” A cumbia comes on and she asks me to dance. I tower over the old lady but I feel good, happy to be dancing, step-back-step, step-back-step. I love her jacked-up teeth and her green coat with puffy shoulders, and her little grandma shoes. Her name is Chavela. She starts telling us how hard it is to get approved for a conjugal visit in the Mexico City jail system. She has to bring her marriage certificate and all kinds of other papers. “Just so you can go in and fuck your husband!” Chavela says her husband is held in the Reclusorio del Norte and her son is in the Reclusorio del Oriente.
“So your husband is in jail in one place and your son is in jail in the other?”
“Yes.” Chavela starts to cry. She put her hands over her face and cries.
“Ánimo,” Uriel tells her. “Be strong. You will see them.”
From across the room another older lady with premature teeth loss hollers, “Oh, no, Chavela is crying again.” She seems indifferent to Chavela’s pain. “A lot of us have that problem.”
My friend Quetzal, the young fashion designer, dies on a Friday the following September. He is just twenty-three years old. We are not sure what happened. I am home alone, taking a nap. I get a phone call from a friend.
“Quetzal is dead,” Gabriela tells me over the line. “We’re looking for his parents’ phone number.”
He is discovered in the narrow inner well of his building, crumpled against the ground from a four-story fall. At the time of his death, Quetzal had been drinking for three days, since that Wednesday. A magazine party. That afternoon is the last time I see him. I am walking down Veracruz Street in Condesa and pass Marvin’s building. Quetzal’s familiar voice yells his usual hello for me from a waiting cab.
“Hey, BIOTCH!”
We haven’t seen each other in weeks. We chat happily and say we should finally get together again. He is waiting for Marvin to come down, and when he does and they drive off, they seem happy.
That day, Quetzal wears dark sunglasses and seems out of it, maybe hungover. This is not unusual for him. Quetzal’s binges are now becoming legendary. He’d drink all day and all night, for several days straight. He’d wind up in dangerous places, disoriented, alone, sometimes without money and sometimes without any of his clothes. His friends know well that Quetzal would take on a wild and obscene persona under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and when this happened, it meant Quetzal the fashion designer and charming friend would lose three or four days of his normal self to the blur of the bottle.
Some of us believed that Quetzal would eventually grow out of it, find a way. Quetzal, with all his talents, at his tender age, would go to rehab and retreats to attempt to curb his problem. He’d show signs of improvement, then return to the same cycle. Friends tried to remain tolerant and helpful, but many of us, over time, shut him out. Although I had known Quetzal for less than a year, I too found his problem too much handle. I tell him so one day, chatting online. He apologized and promised to do better.
It is sad. Quetzal was talented, committed to his visions and to his loves. But he also carried a demon, which so many countless numbers of people all over the city carry. It proves to be a demon he could not overcome.
Quetzal’s death confused many of us. It seems beyond surreal or unfair. It is a nightmare. In a community that values fashion, exclusivity, and money; in a world defined by competition, superficiality, and decadence, the death of an up-and-coming fashion designer in a megacity didn’t make everyone stop in their tracks. Even in his stomping grounds, the chic parties, the Mexico City fashion scene, life was essentially unchanged after Quetzal’s sudden death. It all happened so fast. His passing was too close for comfort, too violent, too dark.
But I know a lot of us were deeply affected by the loss of Quetzal. His death put in stark terms the dangers we all bring upon ourselves to some degree in the big, bad city. His death—I’d like to hope—forced many of those of us who knew him to question how far we take those risks that Quetzal took to the extreme, the dance with decadence, the dance with death.
I think about him often. I feel for his family. To me, the spirit of the feathered serpent is still strong. Sometimes he comes to friends in a passing thought on a street we had walked together, dancing somewhere, or in a dream. I think about what we could have done to help him. I think about what he’d be wearing these days.
El Internet is shut down right now, clausurado, by the authorities. I walk past it and remember the night there that ended poorly, and other nights that did not. I think about all the risks we take in the pursuit of fun in a violent world, and all the other strangers in Mexico City who commit death by decadence, and those who dance around it for years and years, somehow surviving. Could I be next? What are the chances?
A call at 3:00 a.m. I am in my study, writing. It’s almost Christmas.
“Are you asleep or awake?” It is Susana.
“Well, awake.” I am on deadline for a story.
“Can we come over?”
There had been a party, near the south. Susana is heading back to Centro, with a crew of friends and a few caguamas. “Can we come over?”
I look at my screen. I look out at the street.
“Well . . . yes.”
Part IV | MUTATIONS
14 | At Home
A barrio warrior’s essential armor. (Photo by Federico Gama.)
With great reluctance one cool winter morning, not long after moving here, I finally march to the U.S. embassy to renew my American passport. It feels like a defeat even before I get there. Having to renew a passport means reminding myself of the rigidity of national borders and national pretensions, and this is especially true when it comes to border attitudes in the United States. Starting in early 2008, a U.S. passport is required of citizens wishing to reenter their country. My American passport was set to expire. All the warnings from the State Department suggest that if I dare return to America—and dare I think is the correct word to use here—I had better be prepared to prove I belong. Visual indicators automatically work against me. In most situations related to U.S. security or sovereignty, my Arab-Andalusian Mexican features ensure I am regarded with extra scrutiny. I am brown, male, of working age, and often confused, ambivalently, as an “alien.”
I wake up earlier than usual this morning and dress in the most serious-looking outfit I can muster, careful to make sure it doesn’t look too “official” or forced. Dark jeans, a tucked in, buttoned-up shirt, a modest jacket, and glasses. I disembark from metro Insurgentes and walk briskly north through the Zona Rosa, cross Paseo de la Reforma, and arrive at a scene straight out of the frightening panoramas of the film Children of Men. Military-style barricades and fencing surround the stout marble embassy. Every few meters along the perimeter, imposing Mexican guards stand wearing cocked berets, navy trousers tucked into laced-up combat boots, and heavy fatigue vests. They hold firearms and I imagine them ready to shoot anything even hinting to be a potential threat.
The whole complex is fortified to withstand the kind of attack that happens mostly in movies—spectacular explosions, apocalyptic endgames—but also in small-scale Mexican real-life. Angry, sometimes violent protests are common at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Here fed-up Mexican kids always up for a decently rowdy demonstration come to fling their contempt at the policies of empire they see as inflicting harm upon the society, or perpetuating the sad polarity of Mexican subjugation to American dominance. And here, as in many U.S. bodies in foreign lands, you can witness the full force of official American paranoia, loathing and nasty.
I approach from the sidewalk, gulping unconsciously. “I have to renew my passport,” I say in polite Spanish to the first guard I see.
; “Over there,” he grunts. “There, at the corner.”
I wait at the corner, looking at others like me. They shuffle nervously through their papers and manila folders. The airborne virus of official paranoia is affecting my sense of reasoning. I don’t have anything on me but a book, my passport, and my driver’s license. Did I forget something? I shift through the book pages, pretending to have important business on my mind. When I am f to the gate, I feel a cold sweat coming on.
“Passports,” the guard at the gate says, in Spanish. “Go ahead.”
Just inside, another guard meets me, asking, “Cell phone? Electronic devices?”
“Yes, yes,” I mumble. He opens a small, worn plastic bag and indicates I have to put all my little gadgets inside. “Open your bag for me, please.” I do. “The front pocket.” I do. The guard grunts me forward, to have my backpack X-rayed, and to wait to file through a metal detector.
At the other end of the steps, on the other side of a railing, I watch as three tart young American diplomats, women in skirts and stockings and heels, skip into the building with their State Department badges, chirping away in American English. They look alien to me, to the place, to the bizarreness of the scenario. At the third guard, after the metal detector, I am led into another kind of outdoor holding pen, this time with two sections of plastic chairs, set in six rows, watched over by another guard, an American. He directs me to the back row of chairs on the left and without a word motions to the man sitting beside me to move over and make room.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 19