The Braindead Megaphone (16 page)

I can’t find a room in Eagle Pass, so just start driving. I make it nearly to Del Rio, start falling asleep at the wheel, then park the minivan in a white-stone quarry, get out to pee.

Mounted on a pile of drill pipe is the severed head of a buck.

Around the head, five does pay tribute.

At the sound of my many electronic doors flying/ sliding open at once, the mounted head grows a body, then disappears up a steep cliff, followed by its worshipful does.

It occurs to me I’m too tired to be driving.

I sleep a few hours, drive west all morning. I pass a vulture feeding on a baby deer, then another vulture feeding on a second baby deer, then a third vulture feeding on a small unrecognizable thing, decide to discontinue the noting of vulture sightings.

Then it’s Big Bend National Park, like a Pecos Bill cartoon. Cacti, dust devils, a couple of mules preparing to fuck, the horizon a kind of Model Showroom for Used Mountains: Here’s something kind of Gibraltar, if you like that; a huge cleft chin; a classic butte; a Tibetan hooked-nose cliff; four in a row we just got in from Peru (see how they’re covered with green near their peaks?); a flattop; a Rushmorish one with faces in it, but not the faces of anybody famous.

Above the Used Mountains appear three Muppet-looking clouds, the size you imagine God to be when you’re a kid and imagine God has size.

The countryside is so big, so gorgeous, that it outs human ideas for what they are: inventions, projections, approximations, delusions. In the face of all this Size, action seems pathetic and comic, and fearful, preemptive action seems most pathetic and comic of all.

I find I’ve been made sad by Minuteman dread. They take a fact and make the worst of it. This beautiful world, all this magnificence, seems to inspire in them only a fear that the beautiful world will be taken away. I liked them, I had a good time with them, but it feels good to be away from them, out in all this open space, where anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.

A PLACE WHERE WHAT IS TRUE IS AT THE VERY LEAST BEING MADE A LITTLE BETTER

In the old days, the border crossing at Rio Grande Village was considered a Category B, or “historical,” crossing. Mexicans from Boquillas would cross by rowboat to shop at the little American grocery, and it was considered part of “the Big Bend experience” for American tourists to cross into Boquillas and spend the day there.

But a few months after September 11, a TV helicopter shot some footage of a couple of guys wading across, and Boquillas was identified as an example of Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome. On May 10, 2002, the crossing was closed, as were those at two nearby villages, Paso Lajitas and Santa Elena.

The effect of these closings has been the slow death of the villages. Boquillas has shrunk from 250 to 90 people. The store, denied its Mexican shoppers, has lost 40 percent of its business. Paso Lajitas is made up mostly of people too old to relocate and who have to drive eleven miles on a terrible dirt road to get their drinking water. Santa Elena is now down to just three families.

I hear about this from Cynta de Narvaez, a former Manhattan debutante, Studio 54 vet, crew chief for the French hot-air balloon team, and river guide, as we sit on her porch in Terlingua.

Imagine a map, Cynta says. Color drug activity purple. Before the closures, you would have seen a few blips. Now the entire fucking border is purple. Stop watering half a plant; parasites move into the dry half, it dies.

The Terlingua hippies used to take their town band, Los Pinche Gringos (the Freaking Gringos), over to Paso Lajitas on weekend nights for a binational all-ages hoedown: grandmothers dancing with nine-year-old boys, fathers dancing with babies in their arms. But this is now a five-hour trip for the Americans; they can still cross at Lajitas but legally have to come back in via the Customs Station at Ojinaga.

So no more dance parties.

“This was a bicultural community before they closed the border,” she says. “The people over there aren’t numbers, they have names and faces. We’ve danced together, reached for onions in the store at the same time.”

But the hippies struck back.

So far they’ve sent a solar-powered water pump and two wind-powered generators across to Boquillas, begun facilitating a craft-importing business for the Boquillans, bought a solar water pump for Paso Lajitas, and are working on one for San Vincente, which, in the meantime, is being served by a Terlingua-provided reverse-osmosis water filter.

“At least they know we haven’t forgotten them,” Cynta says. “And they know we’re not our government. Love thy neighbor, right? Not only does it give you the warm fuzzies, you get to live in the world without worrying.”

Cynta’s been sick, with Lyme disease. Her adrenals are all but gone. She recently, briefly, lost the use of her arms.

But she’s feeling pretty good today.

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.

Which is right?

Neither.

Both.

Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR. YOAKAM

In certain places, the border possesses a lovely kid’s-book geometry. For example: Per my map, there should be
an exact spot
where the border stops being the Rio Grande and starts being a fence.

And there is. It’s behind a brick works near El Paso.

Standing in the shade of a big tree are two round, middle-aged Mexican guys.

“Dónde está Mexico?”
I say.

“Aquí,”
one answers.

We introduce ourselves, reaching across the border, which is just: a monument and a stripe on the concrete.

Yellow Shirt/White Hat is Jesse. Red Shirt/Black Hat is Tomás.

“So,” I say, stepping across, “this is Mexico?”

“Yes,” says Tomás.

“And this is the U.S.,” I say, returning to my native land.

“Yes, yes,” says Jesse, stepping into the U.S. “Mexico now, now U.S.”

We step giddily back and forth; straddle the line so we’re in both countries simultaneously; stand on the line, declaring ourselves to be nowhere at all.

Using my arms and baby Spanish, I ask: Why don’t the people, the Mexican people, come from there (I gesture to Mexico) to here (I make a grand sweep encompassing all of America and the grand opportunities contained therein).

“Problems with the
migras
,” says Jesse.

“I don’t see them,” says Tomás. “But they see me.”

We agree that Mexico and America have been good friends forever. We agree that, historically, the rich man has, forever, been stamping on—we all simultaneously perform the same gesture: stepping one foot each down on some imagined Poor Man. I snag three bottled waters from the van, and we drink to our shared respect for the worker; them in their country, me in mine. Occasionally, a foot, absentmindedly kicking at a pebble, will wander out of its own nation, or one of us will briefly emigrate to keep the sun out of his eyes.

As I pull out, a Border Patrol truck’s blocking the road. The agent looks like Dwight Yoakam. Technically, he tells me, I’ve broken the law.

“You, uh…you saw me go back and forth?” I say.

“I saw you standing in Mexico,” he says. “What I could do—and of course, I’m not going to DO this—is take you to Juárez and have you cross there. No biggie. But just so you know.”

This, we agree, is the beauty of the United States: Here we stand, the Law and the Lawbreaker, joking about the fact that he’s busted me, comfortable in the knowledge that he’s not going to shake me down, as would most assuredly happen if this was, say, Juárez, where he says some drunken cops recently shot at a journalist who’d taken a photo of them getting wasted, then beat the crap out of him.

“Although how much have you got?” he says. “Ha ha!”

“How did you know I was even down there?” I say.

“Camera,” he says, nodding up in the direction of the sky.

I LOVE YOU, I DO, BUT NOT IN THAT WAY

I leave Texas, drive across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and see no sign of a crisis, no sign of an overloaded system at the point of breakdown, no crime, no discourtesy even.

Which, of course, does not mean that crises, overload, crime, and discourtesy do not exist.

It just means I didn’t see them.

Everywhere I go, the next town ahead is said to be the really dangerous town, the one that justifies all the cartel fears and border paranoia, the town where the real shit goes down. Ditto for Mexicali.

I walk across the border at Calitex, and find, on the exterior wall of a strip bar, an inadvertent poem:

But mostly, of course, Mexicali is just a town, waking up on a quiet Saturday morning: A gangly teen guy comes out of a changing room in too-baggy jeans, waits for the Judgment of Mom; a guy holds his toddler in a gentle headlock, kissing kissing kissing her repeatedly on the neck, which fails to stop her wailing; three slouching, hotted-out teenage girls loll on a bench, watching the street with eager who-might-love-me attentiveness; pigeons troop across the sunlit grass of a park like an overfed gray army. Whatever scams, corruptions, or cartel-related high jinks went down last night, all is well in the park this morning, with the bad boys still in bed.

It’s a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people’s dreams begin to be of leaving.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.

If Mexico were as rich as we are, we’d only be getting their tourists.

I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave.

Outside, a pregnant woman displaying much cleavage, selling Chiclets on behalf of a “home for poor women,” asks if I am sleeping in Mexicali tonight. It’s hot and I’m tired and my mind is playing tricks and I suddenly see her as she would be if, instead of a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, she were a Calitex soccer mom:
The school does not properly emphasize reading; their vacation plans are proving difficult; she really hopes her daughter will stick with the cello.

But she’s not a soccer mom, she’s a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, and in spite of the far-along state of her pregnancy, asks, several more times, with increasing urgency, where I’ll be sleeping tonight, and only finally believes me when I say: America, for sure, honestly.

Imagine the following scenario: Two babies are born at precisely the same moment. Baby One is healthy, with a great IQ and all its limbs and two kind, intelligent, nondysfunctional parents. Baby Two is sickly, not very bright, is missing a limb or two, and is the child of two self-absorbed and stupid losers, one of whom has not been seen around lately, the other of whom is a heroin addict.

Now imagine this scenario enacted a million times.

Now imagine those two million babies leaving the hospital and beginning to live their lives.

Statistically, the Baby Ones are going to have a better time of it than the Baby Twos. Whatever random bad luck befalls the Babies, the Baby Ones will have more resources with which to engineer a rebound. If a particular Baby One turns out to be, say, schizophrenic, he or she will get better treatment than the corresponding Baby Two, will be generally safer and better-cared-for, will more likely have a stable home to return to. Having all his limbs, he can go where he needs to go faster and easier. Ditto if Baby One is depressed, or slow-witted, or wants to be an artist, or dreams of having a family and supporting that family with dignity.

A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber.

Now we might ask ourselves: What did Baby One
do
to deserve this fortunate birth? Or, conversely, what did Baby Two
do
to deserve the unfortunate birth? Imagine the instant before birth. Even then, the die was cast. Baby Two has done nothing, exerted no will, and yet the missing limb is already missing, the slow brain already slow, the undesirable parents already undesirable. Now think back four months before birth. Is the baby any more culpable? Six months before birth? At the moment of conception? Is it possible to locate the moment when Baby Two’s “culpability” begins?

Now consider a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “paranoia.” His life will be hell. Suspicious of everyone and everything, deeply anxious, he will have little pleasure, be able to forge no deep relationships. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his future condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Is he “to blame”? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition in himself? Clearly, he “did” nothing to “deserve” his paranoia. If thirty years later, suspecting that his neighbor is spying on him, he trashes the neighbor’s apartment and kills the neighbor’s cat with a phone book, is he “to blame”? If so, at what point in his long life was he supposed to magically overcome/transcend his condition, and how?

Here, on the other hand, is a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “being incredibly happy.” His life will be heaven. Everything he touches will turn to gold. What doesn’t turn to gold he will use as fodder for contemplation, and will be the better for it. He will be able to love and trust people and get true pleasure from them. He is capable and self-assured, and using his abilities, acquires a huge fortune and performs a long list of truly good deeds. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Can he, justifiably (at fifteen seconds old), “take credit for” himself? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition of future happiness to manifest? Where was the moment of the exertion of will? Where was the decision? There was no exertion of will and no decision. There was only fulfillment of a pattern that began long before his conception. So if, thirty years later, in the company of his beautiful wife, whom he loves deeply, Baby One accepts the Nobel Prize, then drives away in his Porsche, listening to Mozart, toward his gorgeous home, where his beloved children wait, thinking loving thoughts of him, can he justifiably “take credit” for any of this?

You would not blame a banana for being the banana that it is. You would not expect it to have autocorrected its bent stem or willed itself into a brighter shade of yellow. Why is it, then, so natural for us to blame a person for being the person she is, to expect her to autocorrect her shrillness, say, or to will herself into a perkier, more efficient person?

I now hear a voice from the gallery, crying: “But I am not a banana! I have made myself what I am! What about tenacity and self-improvement and persisting in our efforts until our noble cause is won?” But it seems to me that not only is our innate level of pluck, say, hardwired at birth, but also our ability to improve our level of pluck, as well as our ability to improve our ability to improve our level of pluck. All of these are ceded to us at the moment that sperm meets egg. Our life, inflected by the particulars of our experience, scrolls out from there. Otherwise, what is it, exactly, that causes Person A, at age forty, to be plucky and Person B, also forty, to be decidedly nonplucky? Is it some failure of intention? And at what point, precisely, did that failure occur?

The upshot of all of this is not a passive moral relativism that makes the bearer incapable of action in the world. If you repeatedly come to my house and drive your truck over my chickens, I had better get you arrested or have your truck taken away or somehow ironclad or elevate my chickens. But I’d contend that my ability to protect my chickens actually
improves
as I realize that your desire to flatten my chickens is organic and comes out of somewhere and is not unmotivated or even objectively evil—it is as undeniable to who you are, at that instant, as is your hair color. Which is not to say that it cannot be changed. It can be changed. It must be changed. But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster.

If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive—if only for a few seconds more—the possibility of transformation.