Imperial (140 page)

I’m not going to wear that short skirt anymore, she said, because it just causes trouble.—The next night she was wearing a shorter one. I remember Emily on the dancefloor in a pink miniskirt and a black low-cut top of itsy-bitsy straps, swishing her hips, wriggling her bottom, with her fingers spread between a man’s shoulderblades; most happily and gloriously and with the same firmness as the gum stuck to the undersides of the Thirteen Negro’s tables do I remember Emily on the red bench with her thighs spread so that all the way across the immensity of the scratched and silvery dancefloor and into the darkness where I sat I could see the deep black triangle of her underpants.

DIALOGUE ABOUT ADRENALINE

Are you rich or poor? I asked Javier Armando Gómez Reyes, who stood on a Mexicali street with a collection box, soliciting donations for a drug-free Mexican youth.

Poor, he said promptly.

Why are you poor?

Because my family is poor.

Why are they poor?

My family has always been poor. They’ve always worked to get ahead and have a house; but I’ve never had a house.

His collection box boasted him rehabilitated, so I asked him whether he used drugs, and he said yes, ever since he was little, although he had now been walking the sober path for a good two weeks.

Do you listen to
narcocorridos
? I asked, and he commenced to smile so sweetly like all the others; raising his thumb in benediction over good illegal substances, he nodded.

His favorite prohibited ballads were, of course, “Camelia”—he said: I’ve loved that one since I was a little kid!—and “Golden Pistol Grip,” which he summarized as follows: It’s about a hired hit man. The Mafia would hire him to kill the competition. It’s just a song about him, because he was famous.

Why do most people like the
narcocorridos
?

Adrenaline. It makes people want to be like the people in the songs. It’s like when you gringos get drunk and you hear Mexican songs and you go
yee-haw
because it makes you happy!

If you could make money from drugs without risk, would you do it?

Of course, he said. He was one of the most straightforward people I ever met, this Javier Armando Gómez Reyes, from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuaha; he was as clear as a mountain lake.

Which one would you sell?

Coca,
heroin, crystal . . . he rattled off with a big smile on his face, and I liked him more and more.

Would you rather sell many drugs or specialize?

It would be a good idea to just sell one, but make sure that it’s really strong. If a drug has a lot of chemicals in it, it’s cheaper . . .

RESPECTED AT ALL LEVELS

At the beginning of the glorious twenty-first century, the police of my state were running meth scientists out of their labs in the Central Valley. Some of these refugees set up shop in northern California; many reestablished themselves in Southside—for instance, in Mexicali, where my street-friends’ favorite drug used to be cocaine of near Colombian purity; then it was crack; and in the year of grace 2005 I asked at a souvenir stand which pipes were best for crystal, and the man immediately opened a discreet box and showed me a glass bowl and stem. Had I been asked to associate a drug with the cheerfully energetic personality of Javier Armando Gómez Reyes, I would have chosen crystal. But for a less hypothetical link with that vitamin, I must refer you to Cookies, whose grandfather was born in Venice, grew up in Spain, married a Yaqui and became a revolutionary.

When did you hear your first
narcocorrido
?

Ooh! A long time ago, said Cookies.

Her colleague María, who’d invited herself to dinner with us at that taco restaurant, put in that she didn’t like them because they were
too aggressive.
Cookies quickly said that she had not known what the words meant, but she had wanted to sing them just the same. It was the song called “Camelia.” And now María remembered a
narcocorrido
about a piñata which got shot open with bullets to reveal drugs, and she didn’t like it:

There once was a piñata
bought by a high-powered man . . .

(And here I beg you to witness María as I did, singing with her sunglasses on the top of her head.)

In America we don’t have many of those songs, I said. They are new to me.

Unfortunately, here they are very popular, said María, who bore a mole beneath her heavy left eyebrow, grew long hair down between her breasts like lines of silver, and was built like a sack of potatoes, although she could move fast enough. She went on and on about America and how much she wanted to go there.

They were both from Sonora. They got paid a dollar per dance by their customers at the cantina El Cordobés. The rest was negotiable.

Americans are always very friendly with their big hamburgers, said Cookies. But when I used to go to Tucson even when I had a passport, the American government was very rude to me. I used to dream about living in the United States, but I don’t anymore, because I don’t like the way I would be treated.

Cookies, what’s your favorite drug?

Should I tell you the truth? she wondered absolutely.

Absolutely, said I, with my pen upraised ever so obediently.

Well, then to tell you the truth, I’ve worked very hard as a prostitute, but I’ve had to drink a lot and smoke a lot of drugs. I smoke crystal. It helps my work. I’ve thought about going to a rehab center, a certain Christian rehab center. I really like them. People have offered me crystal to make me thin. I smoke ten dollars’ worth of crystal when I’m drunk. There’s a white kind, and then when you’re drunk there’s a green kind that’ll end it. You have to know whom to buy it from. You just ask for crystal, but if when you put it on the aluminum foil you start to light it and it’s white, it’s not gonna do much for you.

I showed them some of the titles of the
narcocorridos
that Terrie had written down at the Thirteen Negro, and María, the one who disliked
narcocorridos,
started smiling and singing, although she had to look down at the lyrics. She remembered one song called “The Mule,” about a man who was so successful that police let him cross the border with impunity, so he brought his children along; they got hungry, ate his drugs and died. That tale spoke to María’s tragedies, I could see.

Cookies, who was prettier than María but still used up, with floppy old breasts and wrinkled cleavage, sang with relish a song about a man who was also a pirate; they tortured by him by cutting off his testicles, then let him go, and he killed himself by crashing his plane.

In Tijuana, strange things happen
without any reason.
It is said they tortured him
without compassion or regard.

Why had she remembered those lines in particular? What sort of life might she have had?

With skewers they punctured
the noble parts of his body . . .

Was he a hero? I asked her.

No. Just a narcotrafficker.

Maria added: But the thing about him was, he didn’t want to deal drugs anymore, and that’s why they tortured him.

Both of them were singing it to remember the words, struggling over it.

Why are the prohibited ballads popular?

Mira,
said María. Here’s how I see it. All the narcotraffickers—no offense, Cookies—all the drug dealers and users listen to them.

Cookies lived with an addict; it scared her.—But those people can’t help themselves, she said.

And María said: The brother of the dealer I lived with, they put his head in a plastic bag and shot him. All of his friends are addicts.

What makes the music of a
narcocorrido
good?

Cookies answered: It has to be the music and the beat.

María bitterly said: The music is the costume of the lyrics.

But Cookies was not bitter at all; indeed she sang the following lines with that
narcocorrido
smile:

I am the chief of the chiefs, my friends.
I am respected at all levels.
My name and my photograph
you’ll never see in the papers.

Those words came from another Tigres del Norte song, called “Jefe de Jefes,” naturally. And the smile they gave to Cookies was the smile of one who can dream for a moment of freedom, power and a good name.

THE SONGS OF ÉRICA

He likes people to sing to him,
I had Terrie say,
he pays.
But all the girls in the doorway of the Hotel 16 de Septiembre were asked, and got shy or said they couldn’t sing. Fortunately, Érica from Guadalajara was swaying at the intersection across from the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico on that ninety-degree Saturday night which felt so cool after the hundred-and-fifteen-degree day; she was willing to sing prohibited ballads for money in my hotel room. Why not? She used to sing them in the shower, she said. Some of the
corridos
which flew into her head had nothing to do with narcotics, for instance the song about a girl who is in love with a man and he only sees her as a little girl even when she grows up and expresses her love for him and she kisses him and still he only sees her as a little girl:

Put your plans in my hands.
I am the same little girl
but now I am old enough
to say I love you and I can’t forget . . .

The
corrido
about the man who drinks and sends his son out to ask for money and his son dies from exposure, and he realizes that he has killed his son, was nearer the mark, especially when sung by Érica in her druggy voice. (I wanted to meet her dealer, and she said that there were some dealers maybe in the Hotel Santa Cruz. Then she said: I know a guy but he’s not here in the street. They don’t come out. You have to go there and knock and come and get it.) The ballad about the neglected boy seemed not dissimilar to the song about the little boy whose mother is dying at the same time that the father is marrying another woman, and the priest says that anyone knowing anything against this marriage should speak out now, and the child says my mother is dying and the father says I don’t know this child. But then Érica remembered the
corrido
(I think by Los Tigres del Norte) about the two inseparable brothers who fall in love with the same girl; they’d fought over drugs and money and would always stay together but once they quarrel over this woman they kill each other:

Pedro and Pablo were brothers,
inseparable friends.
They were abandoned when their parents died.

Pedro it’s so good to see you.
I think we know each other.
Something erased your smile.
I cry from happiness . . .

She’d forgotten the words of the climax, but she remembered

Pedro, what has happened to you?
I cry happy tears . . .

—the dark and slender girl’s abscessed arms hunched together like those of a praying mantis, her chin on her fist, the dim silver circlet of her earring hanging limp because she barely moved her weary head, barely opened her gaptoothed mouth.

She remembered the one that María had sung, the one about the piñata shot full of bullets.

She used to go to the Thirteen Negro and the Playboy Club before she had her daughter, she said. She used to drink a lot in those days, she said. I doubt that the Thirteen Negro or the Playboy would have admitted her now. She was twenty-three with two girls. The baby was with her here in Mexicali, just about to turn three.

She said: I think they should get rid of all those
corridos,
since there is so much murder in cold blood. Killing little children, brother against brother. For example, somebody who sells drugs listens to them and they make him feel good.

With many such pieties she sought to please us, scratching her mahogany-red skin, lapsing ino song, swaying. Her arms’ many abscesses she explained as being actually the result of Mexicali’s airborne viruses; there was something in the dust, she said. The next morning she came to apologize for lying: she had pretended to live in a
colonia
when in fact she slept in the street.

The next scrap of song she sang with the
narcocorrido
smile:

In a grey truck
with California plates
they brought them all fixed up,
but . . .
²⁶⁶
his girlfriend.
He brought a lot of dollars
to exchange them for drugs.
On the way back to Sinaloa,
Pedro said to Inés:
“I feel like someone’s following us.
Maybe we should disappear . . .”

That was all she remembered.

ANGÉLICA AS THE CHIEF OF CHIEFS

Angélica, who was loitering on the street but had an urgent all-night appointment working at a restaurant whose name she couldn’t remember, gladly sang a snatch of
narcocorrido
right there on the street and asked which ones I preferred, the ones where they cut people up or
what
? The next morning she staggered upstairs to my hotel room, reeking of urine old and new, bearing a garbage bag of empty cans in each hand, and because she was very tired by then she could sing only snatches of the prohibited ballads, which suited me since I most wanted to hear what she remembered the best.

The first was called “Three Animals,” and it began in typical
narco
style by describing the three animals innocuously; then it turned out that the Federales took them away; the hen was marijuana, the goat was
injection
as Angélica put it, which I take to mean heroin; and then the third animal, whose species she momentarily failed to recall,
²⁶⁷
was cocaine.—In this particular
corrido,
she added, the drug dealers are bragging because they say that, unlike the Federales,
they
are giving the orders.

There are three animals
that I need to live.
This is why I earn money
for my parakeet, my hen and my goat
so the Federales
have me as their target.