Mexico (Part Five)

The next morning I left and given that it was the fifteenth I pointed myself up towards Mexico City. Despite having pesos in my pocket Letty and Erika had given me money for the bus and the bus I took. But the bus turned out to be complicated and slow – missing the fast one because I was busy getting hot and lost in Oaxaca’s seedy complicated red light district – and I didn’t hit Mexico’s capital till after midnight.

No matter, I thought: the party would be rocking all night and I had a cell phone number for Yair and…

But first I should say that I never wanted to go to Mexico City. All the time I’d spent there in previous trips I’d shuddered at the thought of its sprawl and criminals and danger. And when I was planning my trip up from Guatemala I had two alternatives in mind – and both of them were carefully plotted to bypass Mexico’s capital. One east and one west – but I ended up going straight bang up the middle and there I was in the behemoth and the metropolis. Me! Who hates cities and would rather sleep alone in a Yorkshire graveyard without tent than live another month in London. But there I was. The road, I felt, wanted me there. All those people heading in that direction. Yair and his French girl and the others. And what better opportunity to see two million Mexicans waving flags and blowing trumpets in a square while fireworks go off and proud patriots shout “Viva el Presidente!” and such?

Plus, Yair had a pad for me. And it would be one or two nights. And then back on up the country to what was now obviously my destination all along: that magical hot springs canyon in Baja, and maybe even a reunion meeting with John Milton. My paradise found.

One or two nights…sheesh! How many times have I said that kind of thing and then said pretty much exactly this kind of thing: one or two nights? I didn’t leave there for nearly two months.

Mexico City! Who could imagine that place grabbing me by the heartstrings and wooing me in?

But it did.

It begins in style. The bus pulls in and I march towards the Metro – the dangerous fearsome Metro – but the Metro’s closed, no more trains till 5 a.m.

No bother, I’ll take a bus.

There are no buses.

Hm, I say, I’ll ask a gun-toting security guard what to do.

Taxi, he says, taxi’s the only way.

But the taxi’s mad money and I’m not about to do that.

What about walking? I ask. Is it far?

Four, five kilometres, he says, but you can’t do it, it’s too dangerous.

Really? Hm. Too dangerous?

But guess what – I do it anyway.

I exit the bus station and step into the dark, post-midnight streets. It feels gloomy and, sure, unsafe. There aren’t any people around. The odd car. Very much a deserted industrial big city kind of feel.

I keep looking around me, keeping a check on things. I head in what I think is about the right direction. Pretty soon, a car comes to a stop by me and a girl asks me for advice in getting somewhere or other. I tell her, of course, that I don’t know where that is. Probably she’s going somewhere near to where I want to go. I ask her if I can get a ride but she says no. Man, that’s a shame: I’d really like to get off those streets.

But, instead, walking on I go.

And then things change. I start to find more walking people and they’re not the kind of people one feels afraid of. Standard looking friendly Mexican guys with moustaches. Couples. Couples with small children. Couples with children chomping on candy floss and being happy and relaxed in the late night streets.

Children, man! Children out again having good times way past their bedtime and they’ve obviously come from some fun fair or something – and then I come upon it, and the people are still there enjoying themselves on the rides and the games and I figure I’m going to be okay.

All that fear in the world – and then you walk right on into it and all you find is candy floss and plastic ducks shining under bright lightbulbs and joy.

How many times have I experienced that old chestnut in my life? Right back to my first New York days, and especially that first venture into Mexico, right there in supposedly grim and horror-laden Tijuana, when Mexico’s terror dissolved almost instantly in a sleeping dog fountain and an old man dozing in the sun.

And right here again, in the pit of ultimate terror: Mexico City, after midnight, walking empty streets from the grimmest place in the world: a North American big city bus station.

And all is well.

I walk on. I spy a police pickup and, not knowing where I am, I ask for directions to the big central square. They tell me, and I start to walk, and then they say, hop up on back, we’ll give you a ride.

Imagine that! And imagine too the smile on my face as I sat with my backpack in the back of that police pickup watching the Mexico City streets unfurl and disappear behind us.

Mexico City Welcomes Intrepid Travellers With Open Arms, the banner might well have read.

I get to the square: the square is there, but the party is gone. All it is is people sweeping up and a few milling hundreds and not the two million I was expecting to be fiestaing into the night.

Ah, I thinks, this is a spanner in the works. Where Yair? Where my bed for the night? And what to do if I can’t find him, now that it’s getting on for 2 a.m.?

I find a phone. I call him. He’s asleep and groggy and sounds like he’s been asleep a while. He says he doesn’t know where he is but he’s knows he’s a long way from the square, somewhere out in the suburbs.

For once in my travelling life, I lose my cool.

What am I gonna do man? I say, a little bit angry and in my heart blaming him. Where am I supposed to sleep?

But all he can groggily say is give me a call in the morning and, really, what more is there to do? I see the futility of it. I can’t expect him to rescue me and I know he’s not going to. Damn and blast, I shoulda got there earlier.

Silly Rory, always thinking everything’s going to work out fine.

I check out the square. I see a youth hostel. I have a look inside and it’s full of young hostellers – no attraction there – and costs something mental like fifteen whole English pounds, which I know I’ll never shell out to pay. They have computers but they’re closed and that gives me an idea: I’ll see if I can find a twenty-four hour internet place and just sit there doing silly things online until the Metro’s up and running and I can make my way to Yair. And then I exit once more into the Mexican night and think, hm, maybe I’ll just walk around until sunrise or hunker down to get some shuteye like some of the local homeless seem to be doing. What the hell: I’m not afraid of Mexico City anymore and walking its street until dawn seems like an okay thing to do. And so I set off into adventures new.

I walk. It’s more deserted than I’d have thought and there’s not much open. But then not too many streets away I hear this sound, and it’s a sound I know all too well. But I shouldn’t be hearing it here: it’s Britpop, goddamnit! It’s Elastica! Connection all booming out from under some steel roll-a-shutter half rolled down and I find it intriguing. I have a look under the shutter and the guy says they’re closed and I say, can I just come in and listen for five minutes, and he says, sure, okay, and – whaddya know? It’s a mad insane Britpop bar right there in the middle of Mexico City all full of Anglo-loving young Mexicans all dolled up like it’s 1995! The whole thing is incredible.

I sit. I listen. I watch. Song after song from the prime of my youth. Blur and Oasis and Pulp and even more obscure bands like Echobelly and Cast. Obscure songs too – and yet all these hip young Mexicans know the words, and know the moves, and jut their hips and make their faces just like good old Jarvis did nearly fifteen years ago. I don’t know if they can speak English or understand what they’re listening to – but when they sing along to “raised on a diet of broken biscuits” and swing their brown corduroy flares I know they’re getting the spirit of the thing.

Isn’t it just wonderful, the places you find when you’re lost and out on a limb?

Soon enough, I get chatting to some people. One guy, especially, who’s smooth and knows everyone and says he was a footballer or a footballer’s agent – something that brought him lots of money and women and gadgets – and when he asks me where I’m staying the night and I say, I don’t know, he veritably booms “you’re coming home with me” and starts making all these plans for our coming days together such as going to champagne parties and seeing genuine Mexican wrestlers and fancy restaurants, none of which come to fruition – but he does put me up for the night. Four a.m.ish we leave and hop in a cab and all the way back to his place he raps with the driver and calls him “papa” (father) and the driver calls him “joven” (youth, even though he’s like thirty-eight) and it’s yet more Mexican sweetness even here in its grandest city, where the respect for age and the familiarity between strangers – ‘cos they’re all Mexican, man! iguales! hermanos! – is evident and beautiful and heartwarming. It makes you fall in love, all this stuff. Grown men calling cab drivers “papa” and respecting the things they have to say and not even a whiff of the one-up-man game it seems nearly everyone in England is playing with their thinly veiled arseholeness disguised as banter. Dear sweet Mexico and Mexico City…

Still, this man loves England, even if I don’t, and raps to me all about The Smiths and Manchester and the scene back there and his time in the UK and then insists on putting on This Is England (the movie) which we watch till about seven a.m. until I fall asleep dog tired on his couch. Nice getting put up and rescued and experiencing wonderfulness – but you are sort of at the beck and call of others’ whims. Then again, hostel nights ain’t so settled neither, what with young ‘uns all excited by nights out and drinkypoos and all that malarkey, all stumbling in and turning on lights when you’re trying to zed. And it sure makes a good story: Rory rescued right there in the middle of even Mexico City when he rolls up after dark and just plans to wander the streets for his nightly occupation.

How many times, right?

Mexico City. Quite an introduction and it just gets crazier and more wonderful from there on in. The next day I bump into one of the girls from San Cristobal after going on a merry goose chase trying to buy a homeless man a taco and then I meet up with Yair in a park in a district called La Condesa and he introduces me to some people that he’s actually only just met himself. But, thing is, Yair being Israeli is Jewish and it weirdly turns out that there’s a load of Mexican Jews right there in Mexico City. A friend of his had family there and had put him in touch – and then people from that family had put him in touch with others in the community and, wow, in only a couple of days he’d got himself tight in with a whole bunch of like two dozen hip cool Mexican Jews who turned out to be awesome, awesome people. They welcomed me in like I was one of their own. They were into yoga and meditation and, sure, they smoked pot on occasion – but they did it in a nice way, through a vaporiser, and didn’t just go off into babbling trances when they did so. They were groovy, man: Mexican Jews! I don’t know what the story was but I guess they’d come over back in the forties or fifties – maybe to Costa Rica first – and worked their way up and, Jews being Jews, done pretty well for themselves and kept the community tight. Seems to me like once you got to know one person you got to know a hundred and…

I’m getting ahead of myself but then that’s what happens when you’ve suddenly a two month experience in your brain and the chronology of the road is dispensed with. In a nutshell, though, that first day Yair and I get invited to stay with David and Yael, a lovely, lovely couple, and by the time Yair departs a couple of days later to fly back to the US and then Israel David’s decided that he’s gonna show me a ton of things in Mexico City and he keeps saying things like, oh we’ll do this thing on Wednesday and, oh, on Friday there’s this market that you’ll love, we’ll buy these awesome [variations on a taco] that you’ve got to try before you leave. And, me being me, I’m happy to go with what feels like the flow and take things as they come. David wants to treat me to tacos at the Friday market, I’m down with that. Like I say: lovely people.

I guess that’s how it goes then, for the next two months. Though – two months, man! I can hardly believe that I was there that long! Though it was, of course, pretty much a one day at a time thing – at the time – and you do that for long enough – for sixty days, in fact – you’ll get yourself to two months. Hm: that’s the way life goes sometimes. What on Earth did I do there?

Two weeks with David and Yael. And then when that was up – all the markets and tacos and quesadillas and – wait! There were parties! And there were Jewish parties too: seems like I’d landed right there in festival season and David and Yael took me at least twice to their families for a big Jewish celebratory dinner in which we all several generations of us gathered around a big table and us (the guys) put on those little hats – which I actually really dug – and I swear you’ve never seen so much food in your life. If there were twenty people at the table there was food enough for a hundred. And if there were fifty…well, you do the math(s). Ridiculous amounts. Cookery Gone Wild. Extravagant Jewish moms making sure there was absolutely no possibility neither in heaven nor on Earth that no matter how many strays and stragglers showed up, and no matter how much each person crammed into their bellies – even if they hollowed out their bones and jettisoned livers and lungs and scooped out their legs to make room to cram in all the sundry Jewish delights – that the food would run out. It was immense. It was insane. They must have been cooking for days and I’m not exaggerating when I say they cooked ten times more than was needed, huge bowls barely dipped into when we’d finished. It was awesome. The prayers and the fun and the hospitality and the way they brought me in and gave me the hat and said, here, throw this bread across the table, don’t mind where it lands, even if it’s in someone’s soup, it symbolises something or other from three thousand years ago, it’s all good.

Mexican Jews, man: who’d a thunk it?

I met tons of them. And when it got time to leave David and Yael and probably Condesa and Mexico City itself someone else would spring up and say, but why don’t you come stay with us? And then it sort of felt like Condesa was a good place to be and why not just give into it for a while? Plus, in the midst of that I’d been musing on the re-release of my book and thinking I ought to get down to it. Can’t remember the ins and the outs of all that but the upshot of it was that it was right there and then – staying at that time with a Mexican girl called Mariela (a non-Jew) – that I set up Capera Publishing and bought a bunch of ISBNs and created an account with Lightning Source (the print-on-demand people) and knuckled down to some serious editing of the poor old Discovering Beautiful that had lain neglected since I’d knocked the disastrously inept YouWriteOn edition on the head and cancelled it way back in June.

I’d forgotten all that: but I guess that was kind of momentous.

So I stayed in Condesa. I flitted from house to house, from invitation to invitation, and during the day I edited and wrote and played football in the square and associated with the various Condesa-ites and I really really loved it. Condesa was just so mellow. The people were so good. And they amazed me too. They were into juice and yoga and they even had psychology for children and Buddhism and it was sort of like the poshest, nicest part of London except far infinitely posher and nicer and more hip but less pretentious. Although everybody had a dog, and every dog wore a neckerchief, and walking dogs in the park and saying hi to everyone there was kind of like the Condesa thing. But a beautiful self-contained community. I was content there man. I didn’t even really leave, but for brief wee little excursions out to [the big pyramids] and –

That one day where I thought, damn! Here I am in the middle of Mexico City – supposedly one of the world’s most dangerous places – and all I’m doing is living a real total middle-class sort of easy-going young person’s hip existence. Where danger? Where real Mexico? Where all the drugs and muggers and grit?

So I got online and I googled “most dangerous place in Mexico City” and the general consensus seemed to be “Tepito”. And so – “ah,” I said, and I got myself on that groovy fast clean ten pence to wherever you want to go Metro and I went.