A Drinking Life (33 page)

Pap, pap. Pap-pap-pap.

I heard at least three bullets whiz past my head.

I ran. Thinking: They’re trying to kill me.

And then, up ahead, I saw a blue wall of police. They were piling out of a police station, alerted by the shots, and I was running right at them. I stopped and one came at me swinging a long club. I bent down and threw a punch and knocked him down. Then all the others were on me, swinging clubs, punching, kicking, screaming
pinche cabrón
add
chingado gringo,
until I was on the ground, pulling myself into a tight ball as they stomped me some more.

They shoved me into the
delegación,
and I saw Manny at the far end of a high-ceilinged greenish room, surrounded by cops. The Texans were nowhere in sight. Obviously, they had chosen a better street, and we never saw them again. But in flight, they’d also taken one of the policemen’s pistols. So I found myself charged by a fat lieutenant with
lesiones
(causing cuts with punches), destruction of private property (the whorehouse door), assault, resisting arrest, and
robo,
for stealing the pistol. I didn’t have enough Spanish to explain myself. My back and ribs and legs hurt. My nose ached, and when I touched the bridge, blood came off on my fingers. Worse, my teeth felt cracked and sharp to my tongue; one small piece broke off, and when I picked it out with my fingers, one of the cops smiled.

I was in a mess. I asked for
el teléfono
but the lieutenant shook his head and grimaced.
No hay,
he said; there is none.
No hay teléfono público.
I looked out through the dirty window at a car passing on the street and wished I was in it, heading home. The sound of the shots and the whirring of the bullets now seemed louder. And I realized that I could be dead. One bullet in the head and I’d have ended on the sidewalk with my life over before it really started.

The cops shoved me through a door and down a corridor and then opened a blank steel door that led to a cell block. In some ways, the long night was just beginning.

They put me into a large dark communal cell at the end of the block. One high barred window opened to the night. As the cop locked the cell door behind me, I gazed around. There were about fifteen men in the cell, a few in modified zoots, most in rough clothes; I was the only one in a suit and tie, and I was certainly the only gringo. There were no beds, but some men were sleeping, huddled on the filthy floor against the scabrous walls. The air was a compost of stale beer and rum, sweat and entrapment and shit. The only toilet was an open hole in the floor in the far corner. The men gazed at me. I nodded, shrugged, said
buenas noches,
and smiled. A bone-thin mustached man came over and asked me for a cigarette. I patted my pockets and said,
No fumo,
which was true. He stared at me in a chilly way, his face impassive, his eyes searching for some sign of weakness. I stared back, tense, ready to fight. But he turned and walked away. I felt exhausted and drained and hurting, but I knew that I could not risk sleeping.

I squatted against the bars of the cell, wondering where Manny was, and as my eyes adjusted to the murky light I realized that there were three men in the cell directly across the corridor. There was also a pile of bricks. Some kind of construction must have been interrupted by the holiday weekend. Now more men were being brought into the cellblock, the gatherings of the holiday, and I could hear shouts of recognition from other cells and banging on the steel bars and much drunken laughter. I called Manny’s name, yelling in English, Are you there, Manny? But there was no answer. I wondered how I could get word to Tim, to arrange for bail, to get a lawyer, maybe notify the American Embassy. But there was nobody to ask. The guards came in with prisoners, threw them into cells, ignored all pleas or shouts, and disappeared beyond the steel door.

Then they started bringing in the women. Two of them were thrown into the cell across the way, where there were now about eight men. One of them was a worn-out woman, her hair gray and wild. But the other was young. She was wearing a yellow blouse. I could see her white teeth against dark skin. The men in my cell moved toward the bars to examine this new arrival. Suddenly the mood shifted; sexual excitement seemed to thicken the air. Across the way, two men were easing around the young woman. She was terrified, backing away from each of them, screaming in a thin voice,
Ayúdeme, por favor, ayúdeme …

Help me, please, help me.

Nobody came to her aid. One of the men, short, compact, muscular, reached out swiftly and tore open the front of the blouse. She made a yipping birdlike sound, her voice weak and trembling, and then he grabbed the center of her black bra and ripped down, exposing her heavy dark breasts, and now all the men in my cell were shouting encouragement.
¡Vaya, macho! ¡Ándale!
The old woman cringed against a wall, but the rape was delayed. The second man intervened and shoved the short, muscular man, who threw a punch and grabbed at him, the two of them closing violently, throwing punches to do damage, the short man’s shirt coming off, the girl retreating in wide-eyed fear, covering her breasts, screaming. And then the combatants found the bricks. Their eyes were wide, faces gleaming with lust and violence, as they circled each other like boxers, each armed with a brick, the men in my cell roaring now as if at a prizefight in the Arena Coliseo, urging them to use the left or throw the right. Every time one of them landed with a brick there was a loud thwacking sound as if something had broken. Sweat glistened on the body of the shirtless man. Blood ran from a gash in the other’s cheekbone, and their shoulders and arms were welted and raw.

Finally the young woman was shouting something to them, something about death, and offering her breasts, then placing a hand up under her skirt, as if saying that she didn’t want them to kill each other for her. I couldn’t make out the pleading words over the roar of the men in my cell. But she seemed to be saying, Stop! Go ahead and rape me if you must, but stop.

They paused.

My cell went silent.

And then the short man lunged at the other, prepared to kill or die, and the roar was immense, the codes of men triumphing over the mercy of women.

Finally, the steel door opened and guards rushed in, hurrying down the corridor. One drew a gun, shouting into the cell. The men stopped, then sullenly dropped the bricks. The girl looked forlorn. The guards opened the cell door, first called out the old woman, then the younger one, while one guard shouted at another about his stupidity. The fighters were locked in with their inexhaustible supply of bricks. The men in my cell were still roaring, calling out to the girl,
Muñeca, eres mi reina,
Hey, doll, you are my queen, and offering to never fight again if only she would take them forever to her bed. But she stared at the floor of the corridor, walking sadly on one high-heeled shoe, the other in her hand, covering her lovely breasts with the shredded blouse. The two women went out through the steel door. I didn’t know what had brought her to that cell; I supposed she was a prostitute, perhaps a thief; but I felt certain that she would carry that hour of horror with her for all the years of her life. I knew I would too.

7

I
N THE MORNING
, they started moving me around. The first stop was another jail, where I was put in solitary confinement. The room was like a closet, no windows, no toilet, no bed, with a thin line of light at the base of an iron door. I ran my fingers over the wall and found letters gouged in the surface. My eyes slowly adjusted. The letters said:
Viva Stalin, el Rey de los Rojos.
Long live Stalin, the King of the Reds. And I thought that maybe Siqueiros had been here, or the leader of the railroad workers, or some amazing guerrilla fighter brought down alive from the Sierras. I wondered too if I was a political prisoner of some crazy kind; maybe they’d separated me because they were afraid the Mexicans would kill me, a gringo, one of the people who stole Texas and California and New Mexico and Arizona and Oklahoma and Utah, one of the people who called them greasers, spics, beaners, and wetbacks on the cold scary other side of the border. Maybe the cop I hit had died. Maybe I fit the description of some other killer. Some fugitive who killed eight people in Nebraska and made it across the border.

And how did I get here? In the black closet, as I gazed at that sliver of light, the night played out in my mind. If I hadn’t gone to the party, or if nobody had cut in when I danced with Yolanda, or if I’d said no to Manny, said, Manny, I don’t want to go anywhere, if I’d gone home and read a book or made some pictures; if I hadn’t seen the young girl in the crib on the Street of Hope, hadn’t gone back to see her again; if I’d had some money to bribe the cops; if I’d run down the street behind the Texans; if. If, I said. If. I wondered what time it was too. What day. Where Tim was. Wondered what my mother would think if she heard I was spending my life in a Mexican prison. Wondered if I’d ever read a book again or paint a picture. And fell asleep, wedged against the wall, under the name of Stalin.

That evening, they took me out of solitary, with no explanation, and put me in another large cell with a dozen guys. I was starving now, aching with thirst, my tongue furry with hangover. The mood here was brighter, kinder, the men speaking slowly so that I could understand their Spanish. I quickly learned that nobody was fed in these jails. Food was delivered by wives and girlfriends, and when the other prisoners discovered I had neither, they shared their food with me. They told jokes. They laughed. They explained why they were there. A busdriver was arguing with his girlfriend and ran his bus into a limousine whose owner — a politician — had him arrested. Another man had beaten up his father-in-law at a family party, for coming on to some woman in the kitchen. A third had stolen some shirts from a market and tried to sell them to buy a dress for his
mujer.
When I told my story about the whorehouse, they laughed and slapped each other and handed me some water. I was one of them: another crazy bastard fucked up by women.

They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the jail (it appeared in
El Universal,
where an “I” was dropped off my name and I was described as being of Arabic descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four other men I was taken through side streets and across wide gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.

I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing; and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to be thousands of men here, some walking independently down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a prisoner.

They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking about what had happened and what might happen and focused on what
was
happening. And for the moment I was safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.

Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in
El Universal,
flanked by cops on the stepe of the
delegación
as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer explained to the official that he was representing me, signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.

I’m sorry, I said.

Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.

I’m glad you found me at all.

We hailed a cab.

Where to?

I laughed.

A bath, I said.

Nothing else? Not even a meal?

No, I said, not even a beer.

I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept for eighteen hours.

8

W
ITH MY FRIENDS
, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.

I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans had been kind to me. But
something
had happened. I was trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult life that accounted for accident and choice and human ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that; an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned; he should know what
his
life has taught him. But when I made drawings of the events of that evening they all came out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and crude, mere diagrams of place and action and consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside, instead of felt from the inside.