Mexico (Part Three)

Woke from the closest thing I’ve had to a nightmare since I was a kid, so cinematic and full of horror and genuine terror. I was in a house with Sophie, my ex, and my current girlfriend Nicky. They were in a bed together sleeping. In a dresser I could hear a coin moving about in an empty drawer all by itself, sliding one way and then the other. A presence in the room. I could feel it trying to get in me. Somewhere in there I become aware that a small girl died a terrible death in that room and that her body was stuffed or stashed for a long time in a wardrobe or in a cavity in the walls. The room is dark and I’m seeing her and seeing things and feeling an entity coming into me. I feel it. Terror. And so I pray, the 23rd Psalm and things like that. Almost like an exorcism. Trying not to wake the others but they wake anyway and Sophie is grumpy and short – as she often was – and Nicky sweet and forgiving – as she generally is. I see which I prefer (interesting parallels/insight into actual real life) but I can’t make either of them understand what’s happening. The terror is growing and intense. The girl’s spirit is evil and taking me over. I puke thick yellow liquid onto the bed and it’s like puking out her. I find a box of photos under the bed and one is of the girl – something to do with the war, the holocaust – and I understand that her parents murdered her. She has suffered terribly stuffed in those walls and now she wants out. But the prayers are holding her off, and I want to give her love. Two young black women come in – psychics – and without a word between us one of them goes to the wall/wardrobe and says, she was here, she’s in here. She’s crying and the energy is too intense for her and she has to leave. Everybody’s gone and it’s just me in the room – though somewhere I think both my parents appear and come and go – and maybe my brother – and then the girl is there in the flesh, the energy of our focus on her having made her physical and real. She’s in a mess! What a state. To be brutally murdered and bodily stuffed into the walls and left hidden there for decades. And now out. Confused and angry and mean. Wanting to possess others. To screw up their minds. But still just a little girl and my mind is strong, keeping her at arm’s length, not giving in to her energetic takeover attempts. The prayers are helping. Staying focussed and calm and present. Relaxed, too, mentally warding off the terror and the fear. I want to help her. I try love and I seem to be getting somewhere. She softens. I hold her in my arms. She’s dissolving in the love and the love, I know, will help her pass on and complete her journey into peace. I fill her with it, bless her and wish her well. But then her face is horrible and monstrous and her jutting-out jaw is full of animal teeth and she is trying to bite me and rip off my flesh. I don’t know what happens next – except a flash of being a writer at a typewriter and being maybe drunk and someone reminding me that I’d written the script for a commissioned and made and successful film but I’d forgotten to do anything about it beyond sending it in and was therefore probably due some financial reward and recognition. Script was maybe about the holocaust. I was older than I am now. And then I woke.

Awesome dream! Can’t remember a dream so full of terror and genuine feeling, and so cinematic in scope. But not the terror of a real proper nightmare – the kind where you feel terrible even upon waking – something else. A terror from outside, foreboding and invading – but also something to be worked with. Not usual helpless dream terror. A terror to choose what to do with. To accept and manage and observe and overcome. Working with emotions. Just like in real life. Feeling it want to enter into you and saying, okay, yeah, that’s there and that’s coming for me but I’ve got tools to deal with that. Breathe and stay strong and centred in my mind. Do what I think is right. Help the child and give her love and not run screaming out of the room despite weird self-moving objects and vomit and ghouls. All I felt upon waking was gladness at having had such a vivid and enjoyable dream. Marvel at how real and movie-like it was. An entertaining script. And me not just watching but in it.

I wonder why. Nicky’s been having plenty nightmares lately. Sometimes she lies there wired and unable to sleep and I feel her energy and it wires me up too.

Maybe her nightmares leaked into me – and maybe I took some of them on and did some work with them. Her demons, you know.

Though not real demons, obviously.

Anyways, that was this morning but what I really came here to do was continue my last Mexican adventure, which I left on the road to Puerto Escondido with Yair. One thing I forgot from earlier was the one day in San Cristobal when we took the bus over to San Juan Chamula to dig the funky church they have there (all the tourists in San Cris go there). It’s Catholic but sort of mixed in with indigenous religions and they do mad things like sacrifice chickens and make offerings of Coca-Cola and Fanta and stuff. The floor is all covered in straw and all around the walls are these big glass boxes, like coffins, filled with creepy mannequin saints in full regalia lying there dead. Candles and smoke and it’s quite dark and full of people really getting into their rituals. I’d told Yair I was going to do some chanting with him – get the boy high naturally – and we sat cross-legged and closed our eyes and got into this Sikh thing I still remember from way back in ’99 that Siridharma taught us in New Mexico. I remember, in fact, many of the Sikh chants I was taught that summer, like they’re just right there in me and there’s no way I could forget. Still feel good too. This one was call and response, nice and easy, no struggle with learning the words. Gubinde, mukande, udare, apare, arryong, karryong, nirname, akame (all the e’s on the end are pronounced “ay”). Something like that. Chanting one word at a time and Yair following – then two – then four – then speeding up. Really getting into it. Booming it out. Raising the pitch. In the middle of that mad Catholic church in Mexico. Nobody minds. They’re sacrificing chickens! We do it for I don’t know how long and then finally and naturally and organically it dies down to a slow, quiet end and we sit a while longer in silence still eyes-closed and then I open my eyes and Yair is there in meditation still eyes closed but beaming goodness. And then he opens his eyes and nods. We’re twelve feet tall and smiling enormous and full. Good old groovy chanting.

But that was from before. And no doubt there are other things I’ve missed: oh well. And now we’re back on the road and heading for Puerto Escondido – it’s maybe 200 miles, I don’t know – and already begun in some style with the pickup hijacking and continue in some weird style as well, even though it’s accidental…

Hitching across from a gas station, I need a pee.

I go in and when I come back Yair has gone.

Got a ride, I bet. Ha!

That’s okay, we’d been joking about racing and it’s something I’ve long wanted to do and maybe here’s the opportunity.

And right away a red pickup stops and in the back I jump.

Roars off. We’ll catch him up!

Sitting in the back looking back down the rapidly disappearing road.

And there’s Yair, emerging from the gas station.

Hey! He shouts, waving.

And later tells me, son of a bitch! is what he was laughingly saying.

Fuck. He hadn’t gone. But –

Oh well, I might as well keep going.

What will be will be.

We know where we’re heading.

Or perhaps we’ll never see each other again.

Anyways…

The red truck drops me off.

I decide to wait by the road for Yair to come past.

I’m hungry so I grab some food at a roadside stand and sit there watching the cars and figure Yair can jump out and eat with me and then we’ll continue along together.

I keep watching the road but whaddya know? Here comes Yair in a massive white semi leaning out the window and grinning and waving his cowboy hat. Good old Yair! He’s made it and we’re back together already and he’s even got us a ride.

I stand and wait and finish my food real quick and get ready by the road – but the truck doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around, he just goes on and leaves me there.

Sonofabitch! We really are racing.

Right.

Off we go.

The game is on.

I get another car, a ratty old thing, and then I hitch a ride on the back of truck full of pineapples. We race down the road and we’re in beautiful ratty desert and it’s getting wide open and immense. Sitting or standing there in amongst the pineapples with the wind in hair and bearing down on Yair. We’re rocketing and I’m sure we’ll catch him. But instead of that what happens is we come across a massive line-up of traffic in the highway – several miles long – and it’s like some kind of road-block, or a bridge must be down. Dozens and dozens of big white trucks. We flash by them on the wrong side of the road and I look in all the cabs for Yair. But no sign. Meanwhile some guy has come up in another pickup truck and spoken to my pineapple driver and he’s leading us past everyone. The jam is immense and nobody’s going anywhere, all engines off and cabs completely empty. And past them all we go and I don’t see Yair and we end up diving off down some dirty side street and out into the dusty nowheres and it leads around to the river, where it’s shallow, and where people in pickup trucks are crossing and giving pesos for the privilege of the route. I try and figure what’s going on and it’s maybe something to do with the teachers. Either they’re striking for better pay, or someone’s been shot, or it’s some completely other reason why the road has been blocked. Anyway, that’s the main highway and there’s no one getting through except us.

Over the river and back on the road. Back past another immense line of traffic sitting going nowhere in the other direction. And then once more onto the lovely lush fairly new desert highway which is even more spectacular because of how empty and pristine it is right out there in the scrubland with the distant mountains framing everything. Another hour and they drop me by a lonesome gas station, and give me three pineapples, and there I am all these years later right in the place that I love the most: the deserted desert highway looking out over miles of nothing to small desert peaks under a burning sun and massive wide blue sky and barely a soul around. One car every ten minutes. Just enough to stay interested, but not too much to distract from the magnificence.

And, in any case, I’m tired and I figure I’ll definitely catch Yair this time so I figure to get off the road for a few hours and just rest up and dig. The blockade’ll have to lift at some point. And then I won’t be able to miss him. But the hours pass by and the road remains empty and when sunset approaches I figure I’d best move on.

In the meantime, also, I’ve eaten two pineapples. I had nothing to cut them with but what I did was this – which is an awesome tip if you’re ever left in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of pineapples – I found a bit of blue string on the ground and I figured I could use it like a cheese wire. I pressed it down through my lovely juicy succulent pineapple and sliced the thing right in half. And then I just got stuck in. Juice running everywhere. All down my chin and over my face and soaking my t-shirt and stickying up my hands and – who cares anyway? Covered in pineapple juice and sticky but it don’t mean a thing. Chomp it down sitting there in the roadside dirt and then rinse it off under gas station tap and good as new. Ah. Full of pineapple and my lips on fire because of all the acid, I guess. Never ate such good or plentiful pineapple in all my life. Big ones too.

And then I’m back on the road to P.E. rocketing through the night. I get dropped off by a lonely military checkpoint – you know the ones that the idiot gringos are always so scared of – and even though it’s dark and in the middle of nowhere and the soldiers are right there I just carry on thumbing and they don’t mind. That’s the thing: people see soldiers and guns and they think they’re like the soldiers we have back in the UK or the US and, sure, that would suck if our streets and roads were patrolled by them – but these boys down here – or the guys and gals in Israel, for example – they’re just youngsters doing their public service, not looking for no troubles or griefs. At least, that’s my impression – and I’ve never had a problem with them yet. And I’ve been through plenty. They just take a look and wave you on. Young Mexican innocent-faced chaps not even shaving yet. A gringo stands in the night and thumbs right by them and they don’t even bat an eyelid. Beautiful sweet Mexico.

I’m hankering for hijacking another truck. Coca-cola trucks come by and they’ve got wee little platforms on the back and handles I could probably hold on to. I don’t know why I don’t do it, looking back: scared, I guess. Of falling off or getting caught or annoying the driver. In any case, I get picked up by three pissed up guys who have maybe been drinking all day, or all the last two days, and it’s a pretty grim and shitty ride. Not just the drunk driver weaving in the road and being raucous and wasted, but mainly the slurring eejit on the back seat with me, talking rubbish and repeating himself and making no sense and I can’t understand what he’s saying anyway, nor responding, but he insists nonetheless. Goes on and on and it’s the same thing over and over and, wow, normally I’m real good at the pussy-ass nodding dog thing and tolerating all that crap and saying, si? que interesante. Bueno, amigo. Si, soy Ingles. Blah blah blah. But this time I think, why the fuck should I do that? He’s mad and drunk and wasted and talking shite so why should I pretend to be normal and play the polite little English hitch-hiker I’ll go along with whatever you want game? And so I don’t. Instead, I cut him off mid-sentence and start singing “The Lord’s My Shepherd” softly to myself, just looking ahead placidly and singing it over and over – “I’ll not want” – and then close my eyes and keep on singing – “He lays me down to sleep” – and, whaddya know? Not only does he shut up his drunken slurring and bothering me, he goes completely silent and nods off himself. Wonder! And then we come to a town and though they’re going further I think, enough’s enough, and tell them here will be good. Protestations and wanting to offer more help but I’m done. Enough road for one day.

I walk out the town and find a half-built house in a nicely secluded spot and lay me down to sleep.

The next morning: Puerto Escondido. I make it by nine and I hit the town and do a bit of shopping and check out internet options – send an email to Yair – and hit the beach. I walk up and down and ask a few people if they’ve seen a big tall smiling guy with an enormous backpack and a cowboy hat on – but nobody has. A few circuits of the beach and then out of nowhere here comes Yair carrying two drinks with straws sticking out dressed only in his swimming trunks – no backpack or hat – grinning massively and there we are again. Everything’s beautiful and he loves the way everything worked out and I do too. What fun! Too boys racing to a far off beach and both having their different adventures and no catching up. We crack up and roll with laughter – recount the initial misunderstanding that led to our separation – “‘sonofabitch!’ I thought, ‘he left me!’” said Yair, laughing enormous and then saying how he quickly realised that we then had to race and never actually had any intention of getting the trucker to stop, he thought it was all part of the game and perfect, which it was. And then talking about the roadblock and he said he was there like five hours and I did indeed pass him but he was off the other side of the road sitting in the shade getting bought beers and shrimp ceviche by the truckdrivers who were all quite content to sit there waiting for God knows how long, never no hurry in beautiful chilled out Mexico. Five hours and then dark by then but on he goes, and ends up in a truck with a guy who pulls in somewhere for a bit and sleeps on top of the guy’s truck for a few hours in the garage and then the guy continues his journey and practically sleepless Yair lands in Puerto Escondido about five a.m. and, unbelievably, he’s already found us a cheap hotel a ways up the beach and met some people and here he is grinning in the sand by the sea holding refreshing drinks and no wonder no one recognised the description, his backpack and clothes are long set-down.

And – the hotel. Ah, Yair’s scored good with that one! Fifty pesos a night each – two pound fifty! – to get our own beds in a shared room pretty much right on the beach and it’s even got a swimming pool and kitchen for us to cook up in. Two pound fifty! To dwell in Pacific glorious luxury. Puerto Escondido is a good place to be. Three nights I think we spend there. Chilling on the beach and treating ourselves to fish dinners and oysters – my first ever time – and then also buying big lumps of fresh fish from the fishermen, and bags of avocados, and taking them back to the hotel to cook. Sitting in the pool to cool off and then hopping across the burning sand to go frolic in the pounding sea and love it and laugh and, well, it’s the whole lovely boys and raging men of Mexico ’99 all over again. I’m thirty-three but not much has changed in ten years as far as Mexico and the effect it has is concerned. Viva this wonderful life.

On our first night Yair and I are sitting in the pool in the dark and a dusty Honda Civic pulls in and three Mexican women climb out. Yair’s eyes light up. One of them is gorgeous and one is okay and the other one’s not. He nods and me and says, Hola in his friendly charming way and a little later on the girls are in the pool with us. Erika and Claudia and somebody else. They’re already drunk and getting more drunk all the time. They’re making eyes at us and Yair’s keen. They want us to go out with them but I’m right into my early nights and waking fresh and believing there’s nothing to miss out on anyway. I’m the daddy, the grown-up – but I don’t mind what my son wants to do. And so off to bed I go – the girls looking on disappointed – and off to fun goes Yair, who comes back the next day telling me, wow, those girls drunk more than anyone in my life! I was so wasted – but they kept drinking and drinking and drinking. And in the end he made it into Erika’s bed and tells me how she was brown and lovely and knew how to move and the others had their eyes on me.

Ah well: Erika was the only one I was interested in. And drunk mad chicks? No, not missing out there.

And so, a couple of days of that. We hang alone and we hang together and then sometimes we hang with the girls and giggle and chat. But when the sun goes down and their eyes start a-roving…I make my excuses and leave. Boring Rory. Old, no fun Rory. But – whatever; I gots no urges to sit in bars and get slobbered over all for a go at a floppy, clumsy mouth. But Yair and Erika have their fun. They’re from Oaxaca City, the three girls; they invite us to go stay up there and give us addresses. All good. We might even make it.

And then we decide to check out Zipolite, which was recommended to me way back at Lake Atitlan by a Bulgarian I spent a few hours with. Apparently it’s a nudist beach and nobody cares. Hippies and stuff. And so off we go. But what it mainly turns out to be is a place where people smoke massive amounts of pot and sit around brain-fried and uninteresting. And in some ways Yair and I make a split, despite several more connected talks, his curiosity in me unwavering. But he do love the pot and the pot and me just ain’t that compatible. It’s a strange old time, Zipolite…

Chess. That’s what I remember about Zipolite. They loved their chess and they played it all day long, and even when they were zonked they played real good. I won some and lost some and there was even some pretty little Mexican girl in a bikini who was well into her chess.

And nudity. Yair going ga-ga over the naked women – one in particular, who was the girlfriend of the big-chested Mexican head-honcho of the main chess and pot bar where we ended up spending much of our time.

And weird money-saving exploits, like not wanting to spend more than fifty pesos on a bed, so instead half-sleeping in the sand or sneaking onto the roofs and even into rooms of closed-for-the-season hotels, which I look back on with furrowed brow wondering why I was being so tight when I knew it didn’t make me happy and hadn’t I learned that lesson already anyway?

And the way, then, that that perhaps led to me forgetting my little moleskein notebook that Perlilly had bought me back in London to apologise for kicking me one night and smoothing things over when she thought I was going to speak up with her – just before we moved in together – leaving it on a hammock by the bar and in its pouch my drivers’ license and bankcard and about a hundred and twenty pounds sterling and also many thousands of words already written about the trip. I was last man there chatting with some German girl at night and back very first thing in the morning but it had gone. Many things to think about that.

Number one: yes, the cause. Just like when I went to the Dominican Republic in ’98 and found myself in an all-inclusive resort and sneaked and lied my way into a week’s worth of food and drinks – and then came one day to my stashed backpack to find all my money stolen and me there with still a week to go not yet having discovered trust and everything’s all right panicking out of my mind and begging the holiday rep’s to get me back on that day’s flight otherwise what the hell was I going to do? And yet – what right for complaint did I have, karma being karma and me cheating my way into that resort and you gotta pay one way or the other, right?

And so, once more, hotel sneakery and roof-dwelling bullshit when, fuck, it was only four quid a night for a bed – and who cares that I thought I was on a budget, I was supposed to have learned that lesson in Guatemala.

But now all my money was gone. And all my access to money too. Many thousands of miles away from home and with no plane ticket neither.

Like, proper fucked.

Number two: the words. The words in the book I had written all about my journey thus far. The thoughts and the feelings. The realisations and the highs and the lows. The things you remember a fraction of when looking back later, like now. ‘cos although where you went and what you did is fairly easy to recall, harder to recall the moods and introspections of those moments by the highway, or the uncertainty of the early days, or the little breakthroughs that we take so much for granted. But then, what point recording all that anyway? For all the good stuff that you need surely stays with you whether you write it down or not? And, if it’s so precious and useful and necessary – well then why only existent in something so fragile as the pages of a journal that can be gone in a flash, as it was here?

I learned something big in this. That all those words…just don’t matter. Not the preserving of them anyway. The expression, yes. That is useful. That has benefit. But needing to come back and look at them, edit them, force them back into your conscious mind as though you can’t live without needing to constantly remember. No, no that. The truth of wisdom realised, surely, never leaves you, whether you write it down or not. If it’s such an effort to remember something it’s probably not worth remembering. A man must be able to stand naked before the world and declare – and feel – I have everything I need right here. Words are a pale imitation of reality anyway. All that jazz.

No, what I realised when that book had gone was not that I mourned for the loss of the tens of thousands of words so neatly and carefully scrawled therein, but for the loss of the empty pages as yet unscrawled. For the possibility of expression that those empty pages represented. And yet empty pages are so easily come by.

I changed my style of journaling right there and then. Suddenly, everything made sense. The way that when I had written my book the sections that I had no notes for had flowed so easily, while those that I did have notes for came difficult and stilted. The first, I was really on myself, and on what I had within, and I found a kind of magic in that. Things I thought were long forgotten. Details remembered that I amazed myself with. The shape of sentences and paragraphs and chapters almost writing themselves, almost as though they were always there to begin with. And the filtering out of the unnecessary, leaving only what was needed. There was beauty in all of that. An ease and naturalness. It seemed kind of mystic. And yet when I came to the sections for which I still had old diary entries it was so much more confusing, as though a battle commenced. What to write with? The mind or the heart? How to shape these paragraphs and chapters when I have so much already recorded? That was work. I almost came to believe that deleting my journal had been the right thing. I learned something big about trusting that everything you need will be there when you need it, from within, and that there’s a hell of a lot more within than we could ever realise.

Likewise, with losing that journal. I realised it just didn’t matter, much as a small part of me longed for those words and those records and thoughts and feelings already passed. Thinking they might be useful. One day typing them up. Digging the poetry and magic of some of them. And yet at the same time knowing overwhelmingly that the preserving isn’t what matters, but the release. The expression of writing, that’s where the beauty is. Getting the inside out and using that process to see things more clearly and move on. It’s about relinquishment, not conservation. About letting go, not holding on.

From then, I wrote differently. I had a few exercise books that I’d been using for Spanish vocab, etc – leftovers from my Xela Spanish lesson days – and I wrote my thoughts and feelings in those. But I no longer wrote them neat or dated them or attempted to keep them in any kind of order: I wrote them madly, on non-successive pages, maybe using a third of the page here, and then turning the next page and finding it full, and the next, and then coming across a half-page where the writing was upside, some list of Spanish verbs, and I’d write it there. Wherever my page fell open, whichever way up it was, that was where I writ. And then I took it further and wrote messily, and wrote so messily so I couldn’t even read it back. But reading back wasn’t what I was looking for, getting it out was all that mattered. Even writing illegibly still had the same effect. I got my feelings out of my. I moved on. I emptied myself and made room for something new. On and on and the more I went with this the more I saw it worked. I’d look back at those books days or weeks later and I’d come across half- and quarter-pages of scrawled thoughts and feelings and I’d know that they didn’t mean anything anymore, that they were the old words of someone who no longer existed. I got into tearing them out and throwing them in the trash. I had no interest in them and their purpose was served. Every three days I’d tear out everything I’d written and write some more. And then sometimes I’d even tear out what I’d written immediately afterwards – beautiful, poetic, heartfelt and meaningful stuff – but meaningless once the expression was complete.

Liberating, that’s the word. No longer the possibility of mourning over things that could be lost. Everything I need right here. Marvellous.

Number three: the suspect. Because, for sure, me being the kind of guy I am, I didn’t give it up without a fight. There were only so many people you would have thought could have come across it, between one and seven a.m., when I realised it was gone.

Prime suspect number one, this German guy whose girlfriend I had bonded with. She and I had been the last person there and we’d really connected in a deep way, sort of mystical and beyond words and understanding, just like in days of old. We were drawn to each other in a physical, magnetic way. My lips wanted to touch on her lips, and hers on mine. She didn’t understand it, maybe not having experienced it before, as I had back in ’99 with Shane, et al, and it confused her. And yet it was real. She knew we had something. Past life? Who knows? In any case, we managed it and avoided doing anything naughty, but in our moments and goodnight hugs, etc, her boyfriend could feel something and he didn’t like it one bit. So did he get his revenge by nicking my journal, and taking it for a read to see what I’d said about his woman, and then deciding to fuck me up by not giving it back? Or…

Prime suspect number two – except, really, he was Prime Suspect Numero Uno – was this American guy who was working at the bar as a waiter. He was a fuckin’ lunatic, all full of paranoia and weird delusions. He told me his story one time and it was the story of a maniac. How he’d gone down Mexico and decided one day while he was off his head to bury all his money and ID and everything somewhere on the beach and now he couldn’t find it so there he was sleeping on a mattress in the corner and working at the bar for his food and trying to save up money to hire a metal detector so he could look for his shit. Major into drugs. Tried to talk me into giving him the detector hire money and then paying me back when he found it. Bedraggled and scrawny, like he just washed up as Robinson Crusoe. Poor bare brown mad feet and wildman eyes. Jesse, he was called. Said he’d been there early that morning but hadn’t found anything. And yet, he had my pen. Found it in the sand, apparently.

I slitted my eyes and made my detective plans and traps. Goddamn, I said, I don’t even care about the fucking money – but my bankcard, man, if I could just find that. ‘Cos it’s no use to anyone else and without it I’m fucked, I can’t get access to any funds, what the fuck am I going to do?

I bemoan, sort of acting, and then walk off and look for it elsewhere, leaving my backpack at the bar – and when I come back later my bankcard’s there in the top of my pack and I’ve access to money at least.

The sly sonofabitch…but do I have my proof?