Mexico (Part Six)

Saturday morning. No refereeing today – which is good, given the ache in my legs. And a week after I thought for sure Nicky and I were going to break up things seem to have turned a corner. She got her positivity back and realised a few things. I threw an I Ching and the I Ching said “stick at it, this is the relief after the tension” (Hexagram 40: Deliverance, with changing lines 3 and 5) and I’ll go with that. So life’s a bit better this particular Saturday morning.

I’m in bed. It’s eight thirty-three. I’m going to start writing again on my Mexico story. Yesterday, I didn’t write anything in the daytime – was too tired and beat from the football of the night before – and by the evening I was starting to feel restless and down and thinking I wasn’t doing anything with my life. Urges to make a to-do list. To get on with the things I’ve been long time saying I’m going to do. Pangs of wasteful guilt. And then I got down to my typing about eight o’clock – though never usually write owt at night – and, whaddya know, I felt great and perfect afterwards. Powerful lesson. I know it ain’t nothing grand I’m doing – but it works for me. Typing out this life just seems to satisfy something, on a deep down level.

In a nutshell: when I type, I feel like I’ve done something useful. When I don’t, I feel like I’m wasting my life. And so I type.

Where were we then? Mexico City. Scatter-fire introductions to my life amongst the Jews. Random scene setting probably not setting the scene at all. Just stream of consciousness absolutely most definitely only typing, not writing. But, thing is, I don’t care, I just want it out and down. That’s really all I need for now.

Mexico City. La Condesa. The leafy tranquil neighbourhood with all the young Mexicanos walking their dogs in the park – the park that was once in the centre of a race track, which is why the whole neighbourhood is oval – and drinking their carrot and ginger juices and stopping to chat in the street and also delicious cheap tacos at this Seinfeld-like place where you have to get there early and queue otherwise they’ll sell out of certain things and you might not get any guac. Happens everyday. Why don’t they just make more guac? But that ain’t the point: the point is that it’s good and something rare, to treasure. Like when the bin men come ringing their bell and it don’t matter how big your house or how chi-chi you are you still gotta haul your bags out to the middle of the boulevard and slip them pesos. Or the man coming around with his little cart selling some kind of hot bananas blowing a steam whistle to let you know he’s there. Condesa, like I say, swisher and lovelier than Hampstead or whatever the swishest part of London is – but still containing mad traces to let you know it is still Mexico City after all.

And quesadillas at the Friday market, different again. Thick purple corn tortillas and this strange Mexican fungus that grows on corn but is actually quite delicious. Big dollops of sour cream – ain’t it grand how the Mexicans lay out their condiments and then just say, help yourselves, as much as you want, when English chip shop owners, in the rare cases they actually give you some ketchup – probably watered down, never Heinz – you can feel them narrowing their eyes at you and saying, yeah, we’re providing free ketchup – but don’t take the piss, that’s enough, steady on. And no wonder we go mad at all-you-can-eat condiment counters by these Mexican taco stands. Pile it on! The whole mad salsa and sour cream and guacamole and chopped onion and hot peppers and sliced lettuce ensemble! Pile it on until the tortilla is buried and the thing you’ve actually paid for is just a forgotten side dish, an excuse for the salsa and the guac. Six pesos, seven pesos. I love it.

I head on out for Tepito and Tepito reminds me of East End Park, up in Leeds – the big car boot sale my dad used to drag me to in the dark early on a Sunday morning. It’s just people selling stuff – burned CDs and biscuits and second-hand shoes laid out on blankets and maybe they’ve a pair and maybe not – you just never know when a one-legged guy’s gonna come past. It really is like Leeds: just working class folk buying and selling their tat and looking for bargains and eating fried food and maybe hustling for crime. But it don’t feel dangerous, and I don’t feel scared – and Mexico City’s really let me down as far as that is concerned. Seacroft at night – now that’s rough. Or downtown LA. Or Coldharbour Lane between Brixton and Loughborough Junction. Or South Elmsall. Or the voodoo neighbourhoods in New Orleans. Those are some scary rough places. But not this Mexico City Tepito.

Although, like I say, it was only the day and probably all those places above – downtown LA aside – I’m thinking of at night.

Point is, all this talk of foreign lands and the dangers you can find there – but there’s just as much badness and worry to be had in fairly standard places in England. A London nightbus? A Friday night in Wakefield? Give me Tepito, even by night, over those any day.

Mexico Lindo, that’s what I says, through my rose-tinted spectacles.

Drug wars? Sure: I heard of ‘em. But in all my fourteen months in that country I ain’t never seen nothing bad with me own fair peepers – and only good. The newspaper’s got their agenda and I got mine…

What else did I do in Mexico City? Not much, really: I was just content to be in Condesa with these people that had become my friends, hang out and play some football and be in the neighbourhood and occasionally go to Chapultepec and marvel at the murals or stroll the streets of La Roma but…no Frida Kahlo house, no whatever else they have there. The people, huh? That’s what really makes a place. And in David and Yael, and the other David and Dalia – and their wonderful kids Maya and Itan – and Shimi and Greta and Mariela and…mostly Dalia I ended up spending time with. She was fun! She was like forty-two but a little girl. A psychologist. Into woo-woo stuff. Could rap endlessly for hours talking dizzying sentences sort of like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. But we connected, had a good energy together, enjoyed one another’s company. I introduced her to British comedy shows like Peep Show and she went mad for them and we ended up watching hours and hours of it together, her poor husband walking in after a day at work to us giggling with tears in our eyes having been sat in front of the computer for like three hours getting high on Jeremy and Mark’s antics. Walks in the park. Talks and talks and talks. Chemistry, but…

Two months. Two months since Guatemala and Xela and my lovely Irish girl and our night in the hot springs. And two months before that, probably my last night with Perlilly, before leaving London. Two months was about right – and two months it was when I spied Mariela and thought, she’s fit, and seems nice and my type, and so it was that after a party where we ended up as the last guests she invited me back to her place and sat swinging in her living room hammock she looks at me and says, so what do you want to do?

Answer is clear. Question is, do I say it?

I do.

I feel like putting my arms around you, I say.

Answer is right.

And that’s the night taken care of. Lips find lips, bodies enter bedroom – clothes get discarded and pleasure is arrived at.

Mariela. My first Mexican. My first quartagenerian too (that is, someone over forty). But what a relief to feel her nice tight body easily in as good a shape as the twenty-somethings I’d been partaking of the last few years. Hope there for the future, as my own years advance. Six months later I shared a bed with another forty-year-old and she was just as fit and in shape and hot – body-wise – as anyone half her age.

Things don’t change so much. We hear horror stories when we’re growing up and we recoil at the thought of all that getting older – the sag and the flab and the spread and the yuk – but it ain’t necessarily so.

Certainly not in this case.

Ah, Mariela! Two weeks I think I stayed with her: two tempestuous and fun and difficult and easy and challenging and learning and growing and horrible weeks. Weird times, looking back. She worked and I wrote and sometimes we had good close fun and I thought, my God, I’m falling in love with this girl – and sometimes it was shit and I’d grab my bag and want to walk out the door. Imagine that! Arguments and tears with a girl you don’t even know! Though her tears, not mine. God only knows what was going on. But I think it gave me something good – something I’ll probably put into words when I get stuck into the relationship book.

I dunno. Tough days really. Weird days. But close and nice days too.

In the end, I went to stay with David and Dalia. That was just nice.

Writing. Editing. They had a little room up the top of their house where the roof terraces were and it was perfect for my needs. All it was was a bunkbed and a shower room. One bed for sleeping on and one bed for writing. The toilet right there. And a little secret staircase to slip down into the kitchen. I worked my ass off in that room. I went through the entire book word by word and then over the course of about four days I sat on that top bunk and read the entire thing out loud, trying to pick the rhythm of the thing, looking for words that stood out as wrong, things that could be made better. And still I’d find things later when I looked back later. Man, how does a person ever edit anything? A thousand times you could go through something and still improve on it.

Writing, huh? Such an imperfect and endlessly improvable art. Is it ever possible to type something and have that be the perfect and final way to say it? Or is that just the nature of words? Or my words, at least?

Maybe that’s why I’ve given up trying: because I know I’ll never get there and to what end anyways? To provide distraction for others? To be misunderstood or ignored? Such a lot of effort for such little reward. Whereas in this blog, with its gobbledygook and gunk, mistakes and nonsense and things forgotten and interjected, long sentences and bad punctuation – who gives a fuck? Such little effort for such great reward. My heart feels good in typing like this. I close the lid and go about my day and there’s a satisfaction in my soul that editing could never bring. One month to type out a book and then ten and twenty times that for the polishing and the nitpicking and the satisfying of publishers who don’t want it anyway. So let it flab! Let it hang loose and let others make of it what they will. Expression is where it’s at – there’s the joy.

But not the satisfying of literary standards, all that neatness and form and blah fucking blah. If paintings can look a total mess and still be art, why not writing?

Ah, the blesséd relief of no longer desiring money or livelihood for one’s words! Isn’t it nice? :-)

So I did that. And I made it with a perhaps unhinged Mexican lady. And I visited with the lovely Condesa-ites, and talked long and weird – and laughed long and hard – with Dalia, and they were good to me. I felt kind of at home. I even spent some time investigating jobs and wondered if I could make it teaching English to kids or fixing computers, encouraged by first David, after souping up an old laptop of his that was basically ready for the bin and getting it rocking faster than his brand new Vaio (I’m right good at that: the old Compaq I’m working on now rocks as fast as any brand new computer I’ve seen. Word is up and running thirty seconds after I hit the power button. There ain’t no flies on she.)

But all good things come to an end. I’d done the rounds, and fulfilled finally all my invitations of places to stay, and the time was ripe to go. It was the middle of November. I had two months left on my visa. And I still had to get to Baja and do my Baja thing – plus whatever would come after that: remember, I was on a one-way ticket and I had no real plans. I didn’t know where I would be when my visa was up.

Good point! What was I thinking at the time?

Baja. Overland and then a ferry. Pop in and see Salvador on the coast and maybe find out about these so-called ships to China. Or maybe hitch on up to America and have a go at sneaking in. All trip long I’d been meeting Guatemalans and Mexicans who had done exactly that: who told me about when they were youths and they made the trek and hopped the border and how easy it was and not a problem and then they enrolled in high school and got jobs and married American or Mexican girls and had kids who were still up there and then they’d come home because they’d missed home but sometimes they went back and the whole thing filled me with the hope and conviction that I could probably do that too, my mad dreamed-of sneak to the good old States and start the whole thing over again. Literally, dozens of people. And all those Arriaga boys. And it didn’t seem so hard.

I don’t know what I was thinking: I was just taking it one step at a time. I had no idea I’d be staying in Mexico City for two months just as I’d had no idea I’d be anywhere near there when I’d left Palenque. Hell, when I’d landed in Cozumel way back in July I’d had half a mind on being back in London in a week’s time, semi-convinced I really needed to try and crack being normal. But a few days on the road had liberated me from that fallacious and desultory way of thinking.

But still, even in San Cris I was thinking of Peru. And hitching through Belize and Guatemala had been a total whim, spurred only by the thought of Cuauhtémoc and that road as good as the direct one. And then, of course, the difficulty in escaping Palenque and the synchronous meeting with Yair. The whole thing was planned and pre-ordained. How else me ending up on a rooftop in Mexico City with funky cool Mexican Jews talking about Buddhism and meditation and God and getting insights into my own path and life from the lips of Dalia’s wise and lovely husband David? Two months in that city – and it was all thanks to going with the flow and not getting a bus to Villahermosa, entertaining foolish raft-building dreams and wanting to sneak into Palenque. Think of the timing! Think of everything that had led to that meeting with Yair, which had then brung me to Condesa. So what possibility of plans now? Everything just goes with the flow. Everything is taken care of. No need to think beyond the immediate future…

I left Condesa to make my way west overland, to the Pacific. I had been thinking of going to San Miguel de Allende, weirdly drawn by its name, and then later finding out it was the deathplace of Neal Cassady, who I felt strangely akin to – sometimes entertaining thoughts of being his reincarnated and improved upon soul – but instead I went to Valle de Bravo, to call in on –

Yes! More synchronicity! For you remember Patti, from way back in first Baja days, at the Way of Nature in ’99? Well somewhere in there she’d given me the details for a friend of hers who lives on a permaculture place in Valle de Bravo and I’d been invited to a stop-in if I was ever going that way. And now I was. But wouldn’t you just know it? Patti’s friends were friends too with the guys in Condesa! So the whole thing ties in and – wow, ten years apart and triangles of lines stretching from Baja to England to Colorado to Mexico City – and the whole thing’s interconnected. Yes indeed. And so Valle it was.

Valle with its pure mountain air. Ah: breathe it in. And great good Jose and Carol with their funky almost Tibetan house sitting solo in the woods, views over the fields and groovy cats and good people and good food. They gave me a massive comfty double bed in my own big room and – what can I say? Three more days of heaven.

Heaven everywhere. Heaven on the road and heaven in the angels you meet.

Heaven in Mexico.

Everything heaven.

We talked. We hung. And then somewhere in there I realised I didn’t want to hitch anymore across Mexico and I found a dirt cheap flight – cheaper than the piddly little ferry across the Sea of Cortes – all the way from Mexico City to Los Cabos and back to Condesa I went, for one last night, and one last goodbye.

The next day I was on the Metro and at the airport for my sixty quid flight all the way, all of sudden, to my spiritual home.

Baja California. The airport not even two hours from my belovéd and longed for hot springs.

Nine years we’d been apart. And now we were to be reunited.