A Drinking Life (32 page)
De piedra la cabecera …
And everyone joining in the mournful line
Ay, ay: corazón porque no amas.
My heart is broken. Because you don’t love me.
Dos más, por favor.
I had grown up in New York and visited Baltimore and Miami and New Orleans. But Mexico City was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, as we walked in the cool nights along the hard-packed earth of the great wide Paseo de la Reforma. Ash trees climbed high above us. One-peso cabs hugged the curbs. Thick-bodied pigtailed maids met their boyfriends in the shadows and sat on stone benches to listen to the music drifting from the fancy supper clubs. There were elegant office buildings and great Victorian mansions from the days of Porfirio Díaz; cafés on the sidewalks of the Zona Rosa and tiny restaurants where they served octopus in its own ink and shrimp flown in from the Pacific ports. Freshly arrived from the countryside, campesinos in straw hats and white pajamas stared at the great light-bathed statue of the Angel of Independence in the center of the circular
glorieta
where Río Tiber intersected with the Reforma.
In the crisp mornings, the air thin and clear at 7500 feet above sea level, we walked seven blocks to the school bus, passing shopkeepers washing their sidewalks, and schoolgirls in uniforms hurrying to class. We bought the sports papers,
Esto
and
Ovaciones,
and read about how Floyd Patterson, from Tim’s high school in Brooklyn, had knocked out Archie Moore in five rounds to become at twenty-one the youngest heavyweight champion in history. We were the same age as Floyd; wasn’t everything now possible for us too? We also read about the great Mexican fighters, the bantamweight Ratón Macias, who could box and punch and sell a hundred thousand tickets, or the featherweight Pajarito Moreno, who could punch out a Volkswagen with a right hand and was even the hero of his own comic book, or Toluco López, great macho, wonderful fighter, king of the cantinas.
The orange school bus moved up past the monument honoring the 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry into Las Lomas de Chapultepec, where the rich people had their great mansions behind stone walls topped with broken glass. That year in Mexico City, there were only three million citizens and the air was clear. On those crisp mornings we could see the snow-topped volcanoes Popocatéptl and Ixtac-cíhuatl, the first male, the second a sleeping woman, or so we were told, and so we believed. We came out of the Lomas and turned onto the two-lane Toluca highway, still climbing, with deep gorges falling away on either side, and a vast stone quarry way off to the left; until at the sixteenth kilometer we reached the school.
Mexico City College was a converted country club with the name lettered in deco style over the main archway. I thought, as I stood there on the first day:
I’m here, in Mexico. I did it.
I walked on the irregularly patterned stone path into the campus and found the administration office in a cluster of plain red sandstone buildings. Tim and I completed our forms for the Veterans Administration, then he went off to the general studies office and I went in search of the art department. The studios were on the top floor of an ivy-covered concrete structure that also housed the theater and the cafeteria, and as I climbed the stairs I picked up the fragrance of oil and terps. For a moment, I flashed on Laura. Maybe she was here. Painting. Teaching.
She wasn’t, of course, but a pretty Mexican woman took my papers, checked them against her own list, and told me that all I needed for my first classes was charcoal and newsprint paper. My first class was in the morning. I was in. With any luck, I would stay for three years, learn the painter’s craft, become the first in my family to earn a degree. Here. In Mexico.
I
N THOSE FIRST GLORIOUS MONTHS
, I gazed in awe at the work of the Mexican muralists. I looked at the dark, brooding drawings and paintings of the new Mexican artists, led by José Luis Cuevas, who were the enemies of the painted oratory of the muralists. I studied Spanish. Money was always short, the checks from the Veterans Administration slow in arriving. But Carta Blanca was one peso a bottle, the equivalent of eight cents in that time when the peso was a solid 12.50 against the dollar. Bohemia and the dark fermented-looking Dos Equis cost more, but another brand, Don Quijote, was only fifty centavos a bottle, or eighty cents for a case of twenty.
There was drinking everywhere, and Tim and I were part of it. We went drinking in the small hut across the highway from the school, in the cantinas near where we lived, at weekend student parties all over the city. Those parties bound us together. In some ways, it was like the navy. Everyone was far from home, far from Ohio and Illinois, from states with age limits on drinking, far from inspection by friends or family, all using drink to deal with strangeness and shyness and a variety of fears. At MCC, there were two American men for every American woman, and the sense of male contest gave the parties a tension that occasionally resembled hysteria. The rule was BYOB, bring your own bottle, and in the doors came cases of beer, bottles of tequila, mezcal, pulque, rum. These were 1950s parties, young men and women packing the chosen apartment, dancing, as we said, teeth to teeth, to the music of Benny More and Los Panchos, drinking with little care about food, faces swirling, ashtrays overflowing with butts, hot eyes falling upon asses and tits, tits and asses, until the midnight hour had long passed, and finally the last of the women were gone, and the remnants of the bleary male squadron kept drinking on until the beer ran out and you could see the worm in the bottom of the mezcal bottle and it was time to face the gray dawn.
I was happier than I’d ever been.
One Saturday night in December, on the eve of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, there was a big party in an apartment shared by four MCC students. It was more formal than usual, because some Mexican girls had been invited from a commercial school downtown and we’d been told to try to make a good impression. I wore my only suit, dark blue with a thin pinstripe, a shirt and tie. The beer was flowing. As the Orquesta Aragón played a
charanga,
I watched the dancing Mexican women, in their formal dresses, their tapered legs, rustling crinolines, high heels; the American women seemed more formal than usual, even awkward, and the men worked too hard at being cool. I danced a mambo with a girl named Yolanda. Another guy cut in and I moved aside and drank beer. I danced slowly with a girl named Maria to “Sin Ti.” She thanked me and hurried away and I drank beer. In the kitchen, I opened another bottle of Bohemia and laughed when some of the louder gringos made bad jokes about La Virgen. Tim Lee was there with me but left early with one of the young Mexican women. I danced a cha-cha with a woman named Lourdes. She left early with two other women. Around midnight, there were about fifteen men still drinking and two American women, neither of whom was free. I was drinking with a Mexican-American friend named Manny when he suggested that we go out on the town.
There’s gotta be some women someplace, he said. Let’s take a look.
¿Porqué no?
We ended up down on San Juan de Letran, the wide neon main boulevard of
la vida nocturna,
where the dance halls and strip joints and burlesque houses called to the working class and the slumming
ricos.
Down here, you could go in pursuit of the women of
la vida galante.
On this chilly midnight, our goal was as clear as the vision was blurry.
We moved off San Juan de Letran into dark side streets lined with one-story houses, their walls painted, doors and shutters locked against the night, iron grills over the windows. Then we crossed a small cobble-stoned plaza and a dry fountain and then up ahead there was a street full of light and noise and people and music. I remember hearing the song of Agustín Lara:
Solamente una vez
Amé en la vida,
Solamente una vez —
Y nada mas …
(I loved only one time in this life, only one time, and nothing more.) I was singing the song — or those lines, for I knew no others — as we walked into the Calle de la Esperanza, the Street of Hope, lined on both sides with bordellos. These were the ten-peso whorehouses, the cheapest in the city, and had been here since before the 1910 Revolution. Each had a tall locked door with a window opening into a parlor. Dozens of customers, all of them Mexican, strolled along the street, gazing at the women through those windows, making comparisons, whispering offers or compliments before moving on or choosing admission. I kept humming,
Solamente una vez,
and thinking, in a thrilled, tingling way: Orozco must have come here, and Cuevas, to look at these whores who were old and listless or young and frightened, to see these altars to La Virgen made of cigarette tinfoil and fat candles, to remember the pale harsh light from the ceiling bulbs and the worn furniture and the drinks served on beer trays. From one parlor, glimpsed through the window, a young girl smiled at a visiting gringo, her wide mouth full of gold; another looked up and turned back to a comic book; a third stared at the patterns on the rug as if she would never again have enough sleep.
And then in one of the parlors I saw a frail young woman with cinnamon skin and liquid eyes. She was sitting alone on a flowered chair with worn arms, a Dos Equis calendar of a bare-breasted Indian princess above her on the wall. From a radio, Los Panchos were singing, and I went by, wishing I had a sketchbook, imagining myself sitting in that parlor and drawing that girl, the way Pascin or Toulouse-Lautrec sketched the whores of Paris; imagined then taking her away, to live with me in some other place, where I could draw her and fuck her and sleep with her and then draw her again. She wasn’t a beaten hulk, like the whores in Orozco, or a grotesque out of Cuevas. She was beautiful. I was certain of that. In all the other parlors, the women repelled me, and as I moved on down the street, I had a sudden moment of panic; someone else would see her, go in, take her into the back and I would lose her.
Let’s go back to that place up the block, I said.
You see one you like?
Yeah.
She was still there. I went up to the door, bent down, and leaned in through the window.
Perdóname, señorita.
She looked at me and smiled.
Uh ¿cómo se llamas?
What’s your name?
She didn’t answer. Suddenly, an older woman stepped over and heaved a pan of water at me, drenching me, shouting in Spanish. I didn’t know why (and never found out). But I reacted. I lunged forward, like a fullback hitting the line, driving my body half into the window. The door came off its hinges and went straight down, with the older woman under it, screaming. In the same wild action, I stepped on the door, squashing her, and then the young woman, my model, the woman I would take to a more gallant life, attacked, swinging a pocketbook at my head. Other whores came out of the back, belting me with more pocketbooks and ashtrays and a tray of tacos, all shouting and cursing in Spanish, and then Manny grabbed my arm.
Let’s get the fuck out of here, man.
We ran out of the Calle de la Esperanza, laughing and still a little drunk. In the cobblestoned plaza, a beat-up rented car pulled over. Inside were three gringos, looking for directions to the whorehouses. They were in their twenties, tourists from Texas, beefy, drinking from a rum bottle. We blurted out what had happened and they opened the back doors and offered to drive us away. We were all laughing now.
Broke down the door of a fuckin’ whorehouse! In Mexico! Gab-damn!
We were laughing right up to the moment a taxi cut us off. Out came the two whores followed by two policemen in blue uniforms. The young whore,
mi vida, mi corazón, amor de mis amores,
was enraged, her body coiled, her nostrils wide, her eyes glazed in fury, with her arm straight out and one painted fingernail pointing at me.
¡Eso es!
she screamed.
¡Este cabrón, eso es!
That’s him! That son of a bitch, that’s him!
And then the cops were aiming guns at us. They ordered us out of the car. The three Texans were jittery. I kept my eyes on the guns while the whores shouted curses. Manny was talking very quickly in Spanish, his manner conciliatory, now smiling, now worried. The policemen were small and mustached, with brown complexions and worn uniforms. They did not look convinced of our good intentions. They ordered us all back into the car, and one of them barked orders at the two women, who hurled a few final curses, entered the taxicab, and were driven away. In our car, Manny sat in the front, between the nervous Texan who was driving and one of the cops. I sat in the back, the other Texans beside me and the second cop planted on my lap. The cop in the front was giving orders to the driver.
Izquierda aquí.
As commanded, the driver took a left.
A la derecha . . . .
The Texan dutifully turned right, down empty streets with blind windows.
I was suddenly very sober, struggling to believe that this was happening. Clearly, we were under arrest. All of us. I was the guilty party, but they were taking us all to a police station. Over a broken door! But, hey (I told myself), I didn’t do anything so terrible, did I? I asked a whore for her name and another whore threw water on me and then … Shit. What a pain in the ass. Still, it wasn’t murder. It wasn’t some great armed robbery. We’d go to a police station and pay for the broken door and that would be that. And I remembered that I had almost no money. About sixty pesos. Less than five dollars. Maybe Manny had money. Maybe the Texans could loan us whatever we needed and we’d pay them back when we got home. A few bucks. Just for now.
Solamente una vez.
But then, as the cop ordered an
izquierda,
the driver took a
derecha.
The cop on my lap cursed at him, this
pinche gringo cabrón.
The fucking gringo son of a bitch kept going into the wrong street. And then the Texan beside me changed everything. He threw a punch at the cop in the front seat, hitting him on the side of the jaw. The driver panicked, slammed the brakes, the car skidded, everyone was shouting, and we spun to a halt. The cop on my lap had his gun out. I pushed down on the door handle and he and I rolled out in a tangled heap. I got up and started to run. And then heard shots.
