Mexico (Part Four)

I dreamed this morning of Britney Spears, flirting with her and she was actually sweet and nice. I think I was getting somewhere. A bit of chemistry. Funny old dream. Can’t say I think of her in waking life that often…

Yesterday I played a football match with the Law Society. Usually a decent team but they were all massively hungover from a social the night before and some of them still drunk. As a result, bloody awful match: lost seven-nil. I was up front but the ball very rarely made it’s way that far. Nobody could see straight, nevermind kick straight. But eventually there was one chance to score and it fell to me about eight yards out with a nice big target to hit and I spooned it past the post. Man! If I coulda just got that even losing – and I HATE losing – wouldn’t have been so bad. But the whole thing was so depressing I was in a funk the entire rest of the day, and still am.

To make matters worse, after a stint of evening reffing I went down Morrison’s for a late night shop and there I was, pushing trolley, loading up on goodies, enjoying the relaxed supermarket vibe – I LOVE supermarkets – when they said, we’re closing, please come to the checkouts and actually meant it. Further bummer. So I had to rush, and forgot the essentials, and couldn’t make use of having the car, and what seemed to be my salvation turned out to just drive me into deeper despair.

What a woeful day! Losing at football and not being able to complete my late night shop! Starving Africans don’t know the meaning of suffering.

Anyways…now that that’s all put into perspective, let’s get back on with the Mexico tale. Where I was last in stoned out nudist Zipolite having lost my journal and money and bankcard and driver’s license – though not passport – and where I was hunting said items and slitting my eyes at a bearded lost American with dubious stories and a history of drug and mental problems. Oh, and I guess I should also mention that Yair had gone by the this point – it seemed like we’d done enough together for now – and gone jetting after his lovely-eyed Frenchwoman up to Guanajuato or Acapulco or some such place. Which he did.

I don’t know why I stayed in Zipolite once Yair had left. I sure as hell didn’t like it. Although the barmaid at the bar, despite being into pot, was real nice and interesting to talk to. She was Mexican, older with children. Took really amazing photographs. Yolanda was her name. And she was good to me while I was going through my lost money/hunt the thief trauma.

Hunt the thief. Watch him hawk-like and try to trick him into disclosing things and then just come right out and say it and say, I think you took my shit. Go to his boss and tell his boss the same thing. Talk to the boss’s girlfriend and listen and she tells me that he’s done similar things before. Get her help in searching places she thinks he might have stashed the stuff. Go through his poor meagre ragdog possessions rattily stashed by a bare mattress behind some boards, which is wear he sleeps, and care only a little bit that the poor blokes got nothing, got what amounts to a five minute scrounge in an average trash can. He really is Robinson Crusoe, all barefeet and bedraggled and bearded, trousers ragged at the calf and thousands of miles away from home lost of some beach. I rationale that he needs it more than me – but I’m still pissed at my loss. Let him keep the money! But the driver’s license and the words and, more importantly, the email addresses and contact details of people like the Arriaga immigrant boys – those I want. The journal words I’ve already reconciled. And…well, fuck it, I want the money back too. But despite all my searching and Columboing and pressure and whathaveyou it comes to nothing and I leave the poor soul desperately protesting his innocence through pin-prick eyes and I don’t know what the fuck to believe. In any case, everything’s gone and since I’ve got my bankcard back the main crisis has been solved. And on the road we go once more, lesson learned.

Yolanda drives me to Puerto Angel, to use the ATM. Buys me breakfast along the way and we share some nice times. Lovely lady. Faith restored, after the paranoia of Zipolite. I really don’t recommend that place, even though you can get your togs off. There’s more to life than that. And apparently Mazunte’s much better if you’re into the weird-ass pot chess hippy thing. A little less icky, they say.

A bus, for once – why the hell not? – to San Jose del Pacifico, which is famous for its magic mushrooms and beauty. It’s way up in the mountains and we’ve gone from the burning sand of Puerto Escondido, too hot to step on, to shivering mountain mist and drizzle. The town is shrouded in cloud and maybe it is beautiful – probably mountain vistas out there somewhere – I’ve seen photographs – but the visibility is pea soup. I check out cabañas and, indeed, some of them include magic mushrooms in the price of a bed, but I’m not sure I’m in to that. Mushrooms are painted everywhere. On all the walls, on all the hotels. But it’s a deserted little place and I can’t say I’m bothered. Mushrooms not my thing. I want to get high purely. I have a think and then hit the road again outta there, this time by thumb.

And mad ride that is! One or two rides out of San Jose and it starts to rain, and really rain, and it’s also fuckin’ freezing too. All I’ve got is beach clothes and not even anything long sleeved and wouldn’t you just know it but the next guy that picks me up wants me to hop on in the back bed of his truck, even though he’s alone up front, and there I sit sliding around getting soaked and shivering while the thing fills up with puddles and my pack and therefore sleeping bag get wet. The road is twisty and windy and an endless series of sickening curves rising and falling and I hang on tight but constantly lose my balance and I swear he must be taking some sort of gringo revenge. Cold and wet and sick of all the curves and sliding I eventually say enough is enough, and bang on the roof, and hop out in a wee small hamlet where there’s at least a piddling corrugated roof to shelter under. The rain comes weeping down and there I am in the wet, in the middle of the mountains, sick of it all.

Or, probably not really sick of it all; that’s just the sentence I felt like typing. Probably, rather, I was amused at where I was, and the shivering and the cold. Though I tell you what: it’s a rare, rare thing that I get out of a ride before I hit where I want to go. But that one was exactly the opposite of fun.

So I shelter. And the rain beats down. And I shiver, ‘cos I’ve got no more than a t-shirt. And then a dear sweet angel boy appears out of a house and starts talking to me. He’s about seven – is exactly seven, in fact – and he talks calm and lovely and mature and considerate and after a while he tells me it’s his birthday and would I like some cake? Yes please, I almost tearfully whisper. What an angel! He goes inside and tells his mummy and back he comes and they invite me in. She gives me cake. She gives me hot water. She smiles and the boy smiles and I smile too.

They’re lovely, like almost every Mexican I ever met. But especially so.

Faith lost restored again.

And the rain stops and it’s back to the highway. Back to the road to Oaxaca City. Back to an appointment with Yair’s Puerto Escondido women.

I get to Oaxaca City late at night. It’s a beautiful place and the main plaza is alive and buzzing. There’s nothing special about the night – just a standard weekday night – but everywhere there are families perusing and outdoor cafes and restaurants bustling and even mad performers and fiesta-like parades and musicians. Thousands of people out in the Mexican plaza night just doing their standard Mexican thing of being in the company of others and taking the air and seeing what life has to offer rather than Eastenders and our standard English thing of standing drunk in stinky pubs and shouting dizzy at people we don’t even like. Sweet Mexican children wide-eyed and awake behaving themselves well past ten and eleven o’clock at night, and parents not even blinking twice at their kids being out so Englishly late. My friends in Kent struggle and fight to get their kids to bed by seven, even in the summer when the sun strains at the curtains, and no wonder the kids stare confused and wonder what the fuck is going on. It’s light outside mummy! I’m not even tired! I want to stay up with you! And of course there are tears and strains and the whole thing takes two hours anyway – so why not be Mexican and just take them walking with you and being adult and seeing this whole different picture of the world. Kids learn by example. But they have the weather and we don’t. Though it’s more than that – you never saw such an outdoors city as Beijing, and it sure gets cold there in the winters. Thousands all night long crowding the parks to do tai-chi and play sports and dance or do aerobics or merely promenade and be among others. No, we can’t just blame the weather – a lack of imagination, that’s what I think it is. And out awkwardness in not knowing how to be human, having forgotten all that, and so all we know how to do is drink in the hope that it’ll circumnavigate all those things. Either that or sit alone with our TVs and wave flags proclaiming “Height Of Civilisation” and “We Really Are The Best At This Living Thing.”

Foolish creatures.

Oaxaca is awesome. Groovy place and the night is kind. The hostels, though, are expensive – a hundred and fifty pesos! three times what I paid to stay on the Pacific with a pool! – and so I do what looking back now seems like a real random thing to do – given how beat and tired and late and rainy it/I was – and I grab a bit of cardboard and find me a friendly looking doorway – it’s by now 1 a.m. – and there I snuggle down in my sleeping bag stuffing the entire rest of my possessions into my stuffsack for a pillow – that’s how little I was carrying – and chortling myself to sleep being once more the mad English travelling fellow kipping in Mexican city doorways even though coming up to thirty-four years of age just like I did back in mad days of my early twenties when I slept wherever and especially that one time in the November Paris night with nothing but a blanket all giggling and shivering and barely getting a wink but loving it, the eccentricity and the adventure of the whole thing. Who grows up to imagine themselves sleeping on cardboard in doorways!

And the next day I locate Erika and she’s got a place for me to stay and the place is her cousin’s place and she’s winking at me ‘cos she thinks the cousin and I might hook up. But the cousin’s not to my fancy, though nice, and I resist, even when she comes in one night tipsy and sits next to me on the floor in my sleeping bag and talks about wanting a man, you know, just for the company or the feel or the sharing of a bed with someone – no, no, not that, don’t get me wrong – but…you know, it would be nice, and it doesn’t have to be anything and – goodnight, I say. I don’t know what’s got into me but I’m just not into that. Not drunk women, anyways. They turn me off.

But – now don’t get me wrong: despite the impression I might have given of Erika and chums down in Puerto Escondido – where they were indeed playing a Mexican version of “Girls Gone Wild” – her two chums did after all land blokes once they’d given up trying to land me and brought them back to our hotel for quick nights and quick goodbyes in the mornings – once back in Oaxaca City she was all lovely and indeed quite the lovely girl that I thought she was, and her and her cousin and myself and also her two friends took off for a few trips here and there and had some really nice times. Trips in nature. A place with some petrified waterfalls and mineral springs. A couple of ruined cities from old style Aztec (or whatever) days – oh yeah, I went to Monte Alban the first day I was there, before I hooked up with Erika – though mostly just slept behind a pyramid sleepy-eyed from my night on the street – and they loved it. They had spirituality. They talked about the energy and the feeling. They found it beautiful. They even liked the rain, and when it rained on one walk we had at some really beautiful old Mexican ruins place they walked straight and true and lapped it up, despite improper clothing. I hunkered down and wanted to get out of it.

Don’t you like the rain? they said.

The rain? No. Who likes rain?

But they did. To them, the rain was a treat, a rare pleasure. Getting wet bothered them not one jot.

The difference in growing up in a place where the rain is a loathed enemy and the ruiner of pleasures.

They were nice. I enjoyed my time with Erika and her cousin. The cousin lived in a lovely little cabin style place even though it was in the middle of the town and she let me rest up and relax and I felt right comfortably at home. She had some English books – one of which was by Robert Monroe, all about his out-of-body experiences; I’d previously downloaded CDs which purported to help generate said OOBEs (good for sleep) – and I lazed barefoot in her armchair and read them. We ate quesadillas or whatever they’re called in Oaxaca – everywhere you go in Mexico they say, oh, you’ve got to try the tacos – the burritos – the tlayudas – the quitlacotches – the whatevers – they’re delicious – and then when you get there you order them and out comes a tortilla maybe of slightly different size or preparation method, with some subtly changed arrangement of cheese or eggs or beans and – voila! – it’s a whole new local delicacy and meal, totally transformed from anything you’ve ever seen before. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s a tortilla with stuff on it. Though it is always delicious. One day I decided to treat Letty – I’ll stop calling her Erika’s cousin – to some English food – I had a hankering for a good old fried egg sandwich – and I fried up my eggs, and prepared my bread – meal of meals back in England – and…well, shit, it was like the plainest thing I’d ever eaten. I was embarrassed – for myself and for her and for England. There am I, ambassador among nations, and all I can do is present a flimsy egg sandwich and indeed confirm that English cuisine sucks raw ass. Fuckin’ egg sandwiches! And yet if I ate one now I would think it the very offerings of the Gods. But there, hare-brained though their variations on a tortilla undoubtedly are, my egg sandwich couldn’t compete. And back to the quesadillas and tacos and tlayudas it was. And they were good.

My last night there we three got down to talking matters spiritual. Erika and Letty didn’t speak English but we’d gotten along just fine those three or four days. My Spanish with flowing good – but my Spanish flowed extraordinary this night. It was as though something else took me over – or, at least, that because I was talking about things that really mattered to me I had a confidence and a conviction and I found the words came easy. Same in English, really: when I’ve a good connection with someone and the topic is spirituality – which is really just Life – the words come easy. Other times I stumble and flail, ‘cos I guess really I’m having a pretend, trying to enter into someone else’s world. But this night it flowed and the conversation was good and I told all about certain experiences and also my days when I did healing and Letty was really keen to experience that.

Well, okay: I hadn’t done it in a long time but I trusted it would be there and cracked it out and the energy flowed and she went after to lie down teary-eyed whispering “gracias.”

That was nice – but what followed with Erika was sort of extraordinary.

I did my usual thing. I put one hand on her back and one on her upper-chest. I say and meditated and said the 23rd Psalm and then let the words come to me. Always, generally, variations on a theme: “let every cell in this body be open to receive this gift…every aspect of this being, in body, mind and soul…nothing but love, nothing but light…bring peace to this mind, joy to this heart…in the name of Yahweh, let it be done…amen” – and so forth. The words, I guess, are kind of important but more so as a way of plugging in, setting intention, being focussed and clear as far as being a channel goes. I dunno: I just know it works.

I did all that and I felt the energy and I felt, as I always do, good and high and happy. Spacious and peaceful and immense. Grateful and glad.

And Erika…

It was strange. She sort of went into a trance. And her head started moving slowly back until her neck was stretched out straight and her face was pointing at the ceiling. Never seen anything like that before – save, perhaps, the one exorcism thing I did. I’m not sure why she did and I don’t think she knows either. Don’t think she was aware. Something else was going on and something else was at work. Something getting cleared, I guess.

In any case, she stayed like that for maybe ten minutes, even after I was finished, and then she came back and I looked and she had tears streaming down her face and she was so silent and peaceful and glowing. Different eyes. New eyes. She nodded and was quiet and said thank you. She barely said a word after that. I don’t know what had happened for her but it seemed like something big. When we said goodbye, she was intensely grateful. I hope I was able to give her something good.

The next morning, I left.