Down and Delirious in Mexico City (23 page)

As tortillas and beer round out the meal, Flexi tells me about an especially terrifying night of battle in Santa Fe with the riot police, two months into the war. Again, she says, the state came in the middle of the night. “We strapped ourselves to gas tanks and said, ‘If they come in here, we'll kill ourselves.' We didn't want to lose, so we brawled with those
cabrones,
” those motherfuckers.

Hours pass. Reyes seems happy to be at home. He lives on the
exact opposite side of the city, making any visit to see his sister a feat of endurance. He jokes with his nephews and hugs his father. Finally he suggests that we go back to his area, to the remaining slums of Santa Fe, for a daylong
toquίn.
He refers to the street concert as a
ruido.
Literally, a “noise.” Flexi shows me some of her embroidery work while a baby boy I assume is her nephew or grandchild walks carefully in my direction to hold on to the top of my knees.

“Now I show up at El Chopo, and apparently there are nationalist
pelones.
” Flexi shrugs, perplexed. “They are nationalists and they sing the national anthem.”

After filling up on beer and
consomé,
we say our good-byes. I remember to ask for a group photo. I capture the happy day out on Flexi's street, the entire family standing in a row, arm in arm, smiling.

Reyes doesn't say specifically where the concert will be, just that it is in an
hoyo fonqui,
just as in the old days of the Mexican counterculture. This
hoyo fonqui,
Reyes says, is happening at a place known as El Garcy, way up in the slum hillsides from the Tacubaya transit hub, in the Santa Fe neighborhoods that were not cleared to make way for the “new Santa Fe” of corporate office buildings and heavily guarded condo complexes. Bands will play, El Reyes says, and we'll meet more original punks.

At this point, around 6:00 p.m. on a Sunday, we have been to the far eastern fringes of the city and are now heading to the city's outskirts on the opposite end, entirely by foot and public transit. Metro Tacubaya is the cavernous westside transfer station that connects three lines. After arriving, we climb aboveground, where Tacubaya is also the hectic and confusing terminus for many bus
routes that serve the rising hills of the far west. Taco-stand men call, and where anyone can find space, vendors sells snacks to help ease long commutes. Chocolate-covered marshmallows, peanuts, sugar-coated gumdrops. “I used to live around here,” I tell Reyes, who is happy to hear it.

We hop on a microbus. The musky sweat of a damp afternoon in the city lingers on every sidewalk and on every moving body. Reyes briefly chats up the bus driver and scores the tiny navigator seat up front on the dashboard, the barrio way of riding a
micro,
while I hang on to a greasy standing pole. He keeps glancing back toward me, smiling reassuringly. We ride up, up, up, into the dense, graffiti-scarred streets, past shops and stores of every kind, into territory as unfamiliar to me as any I have ever seen in Mexico. By the time we land on pavement, I immediately sense a heightening of the dangers involved in the outsider-insider dynamic that comes with walking the streets of a neighborhood that isn't yours.

This urban rule governs the backways of any dense city, analogous to how I imagine the streets operating in the slums of Bombay or the favelas of Brazil. Yet the gleaming towers of the modern Santa Fe are just a few blocks over the hills to the north of us. We cross a street, and a band of no-good-looking guys standing on a corner whistle at us menacingly. Reyes ignores them and stops before a poster for the
tocada—
yet another term for an underground concert—taped to a public telephone.
Security is all of us,
the flyer says, listing the bands, then reminding rockers,
No violence. No weapons. No glass bottles and no drugs.
Reyes yanks it off and hands it to me as we walk up a steep alley, where more bands of youth are standing around eyeing us.

After greeting a few old-timers he recognizes, Reyes turns to me, steely-eyed. “If someone asks you to go with them, if someone talks to you that I don't talk to, you don't go nowhere,” he warns
under his breath. “You're with me.
Machίn. Machίn.
” The word sends me echoing back in time to the streets of Tijuana and inner-city San Diego.
Machίn
means to be tough, ready for anything. The threat of violence is a form of mediation or negotiation in the hood, anywhere in the world. It's the only way things are kept cool, if everyone displays equal and balancing levels of
Machίn.

At a crest in the hill, a breathtaking urban canyon with a dank reservoir at the bottom opens up before us. Cinder-block houses slouch down the steep hillsides, as if piled atop one another, and still more and more houses pile up on the canyon's opposite side. These meager homes were built during the chaotic expansion of the city in the 1970s and '80s. Many now appear refined with time, painted, neat, as relatively stable as the economic position of their inhabitants. People stare at us from windows and stoops. The streets before Reyes and me now turn into steep cement staircases, diving down into the canyon. From far below, drumbeats and guitar riffs echo upward.

“An
hoyo fonqui,
” Reyes says, grinning. “Just what we wanted.”

The “hole” is an asphalt basketball court at the very bottom of the hillside, surrounded by trees. It is late dusk now, chilly, the sky inked in brilliant purple. The
ruido
at El Garcy had officially started at 10:00 a.m. and was supposed to have ended at 6:00 p.m. We arrive at seven. A dark-core band called Cicatriz has yet to play. People are hanging out, drinking, holding on to one another. A few mangy dogs keep watch from the edges of the scene. Reyes and I stroll down the steep asphalt road to the basketball court and clearly draw attention to ourselves. Indirect but not indiscreet whistles rise from a row of guys sitting on logs and drinking against a sagging metal fence. Without minding them, Reyes leads me directly to the back of the stage, just a yellow tarp hung over a few elevated wooden planks where the drum set, microphones, and amplifiers
stand. “What a miracle!” Reyes's friends holler, throwing their arms around him. “Reyes! Reyes!” There are Mary, Alfredo, La Mouse, Rebeko, Robo, and D'Mon, a graying punk who had put the
ruido
together. They are drinking, smoking, jamming along to the music. They are Reyes's other family, his band of punks. He identifies them all as Santa Fe originals.

They don't look it,
I think. No chains, no spikes. Now in their mid-thirties, this
banda
is mellow, pleased with defending their punkness by their actions and not their dress. Someone offers me a cigarette and I decline, a nervous reaction. It is hard getting your bearings in a new place, among new people, trying to figure out who's who and what's what.
No one seems to wear punk out here,
I think. The younger kids out in the crowd appear more influenced by the downtown San Judas aesthetic—white T's, white baseball caps, jeans, and white sneakers. The culture of Santa Fe has, it appears, shifted since the days of Reyes and his crew.

A few guys are stumbling around glassy-eyed, beyond drugged. The smell of marijuana and paint solvent hangs in the crisp air before us. One guy does look like a Santa Fe throwback, lost in 1983. He wears
Top Gun
–style aviator sunglasses, a bright blue bandanna knotted into a headband, and mesh cloth gloves with the fingers cut out. I feel as if he should be break dancing. The guy strolls around the basketball court like a mute, concentrating on something invisible to the rest of us, then suddenly—
POW!
—he is pumping his fists into the air before him or jumping up and down to the music. “Don't mind him,” Rebeko says, noticing my mixture of fear and fascination. “He's just crazy.”

I am still scanning the
hoyo
when someone thrusts a
caguama
in my face.

“Drink up,” D'Mon says. “What, you don't drink?”

D'Mon has the sort of persona that I imagine is made by constant
proximity to old
Rolling Stone
magazines, old records, old rock-festival posters, and old leather. His hair is gray, his skin pale, and with a large hooked nose and sad, clear eyes, he has a vaguely witchy air about him. I'm told he used to be in some pretty serious Mexico City punk bands in his day. Today, he plays in a band with Alfredo, Mary, and La Mouse. They call themselves A.C.V., Agudos, Crónicos, y Vegetales.

“Drink!” D'Mon commands.

Cicatriz is bringing the
ruido
down to a suitably somber finish. In front of the bandmates on the drums and guitars, a girl wails into one microphone in a high operatic voice while taking puffs off a cigarette, and a guy on another microphone screams in death-metal style while ravaging his guitar strings. They all wear black boots and long black leather jackets. Behind the stage Reyes's friends pass around the same
caguama,
swigging at it like pirates—an essentially punk activity because it is very punk to swap spit without a care. My guide for the day, the original punk of Santa Fe, is back in what is left of his home turf. He smiles at me broadly from across the way. Reyes looks happy.

And that's when the fight starts. It happens so fast. I am standing behind the sound guy—“I'm beat,” he has just exhaled—when in the middle of the basketball court before us a girl appears, arguing loudly with a guy, who knows over what. They are cursing and yelling, and people are gathering around them, moths to the flame. In a snap, the girl delivers a direct closed-fist blow to the guy's chest. The guy bowls over, stumbling back. Someone grabs the girl, someone grabs the guy, and for whatever reasons, in between all of them, six or seven or so people, the pushing and blows begin. It is a rumble swaying this way and that.

Reyes and his crew of older punks look on briefly. The members of Cicatriz begin rushing to pack up their things. “Let's go,” I say to
Reyes, who was now beside me, quietly watching the commotion.

Back against the court's fence, against the logs, dozens of Santa Fe kids are now in a rolling brawl—and it is getting bigger by the second. I hear a glass
caguama
shatter on the asphalt. People are whistling, calling new fighters to rush up from the hillsides and down the stepped alleys, ready to rumble. The noise grows. The bassist and drummer in Cicatriz smile at me nervously.

“Well, this is gonna get heavy,” D'Mon says flatly.

Mary, who had happily been chatting with me just a few moments earlier, is now corralling her two small children.

“Let's get out of here,” someone says. “Where's Rebeko?”

The group explains to me later that a
ruido
in Santa Fe almost always ends in a brawl, usually between rival neighborhoods. It is like an obligation, the event's natural ovation. But this doesn't minimize the fear rising among us. Reyes and D'Mon and La Mouse and Mary and Robo are quickly striking the stage. The
ruido
is over. It is now time for the rumble, but no one around me appears eager to stand around and watch it find its finish.

Old women and small children begin peering out from windows and doorways. We are trapped in the back of the court. Our only way out would be back through an alley and down into a grassy ditch, across the reservoir's dam, to Alfredo and Mary's house on the other side. We begin walking along, carrying instruments and empty beer bottles.

“Where is Rebeko?”

Rebeko had been plenty drunk and is now somehow in the middle of the rumble. Mary goes in after him. “Be careful, Mom!” her little son shouts.

“This is where we walk fast,” Robo says.

Mary pulls Rebeko from the rumble and they quickly catch up with us. Everyone in the circle briefly chides Rebeko for straggling.
Reyes leads the way. A neighborhood guy in a white tank top stumbles along behind us, following our crew absently. He is intoxicated to his maximum, unable to keep his balance. We hike down the wet, grassy ditch. The guy following us is sliding and falling on the wet rocks.

“He's gonna fall into the water,” Mary's little boy says.

“Let him,” someone calls ahead of me.

“Let him die,” Robo chuckles. “We'll read about it in the morning.”

It is nearly nighttime now. The dying reservoir—the Presa Mixcoac—is filled about a quarter of the way up with still water that smells like putrid filth, and I have only a moment to ponder the state of the water supply in Mexico City, the dehydrated metropolis. We cross the lonely dam's bridge and are now safely on the other side of the
presa
. The rumble in the distance is turning into a riot. Police sirens echo in the canyons. Mary's little boy keeps a frightened watch up the alleys that peel off the desolate road before us. Across the canyon, we hear a few piercing rounds of gunfire. We march more urgently. Up a few more slanting blocks, into a metal doorway, up a flight of crooked stone steps into the darkness, and into the house.

Outside, the muffled sounds of sirens and gunfire filter inward. Safe now, Reyes and his crew and the children are chatting and decompressing. Someone passes around another fresh
caguama
. We would wait for the commotion to die down, for the rumble to end. We'd hail a cab, get on a bus, and make it back to Tacubaya. In the meantime, Reyes throws in a student-made video about D'Mon's life as an original Santa Fe punk. La Mouse turns down the lights. I am past my own point of total exhaustion. Exhaustion of the body and mind. We watch the thirty-minute video from beginning to end: footage of D'Mon talking, remembering, rocking out,
staring absently into the leaning camera, a forlorn voice-over. I sit at the dining table, behind the living room couch where Reyes and Rebeko and D'Mon sit. Overcome by nostalgia and other emotions only he could name, D'Mon curls over in the dark. It sounds like he's crying. I see his silhouette in the glow of the television. Reyes takes his friend in his arms and cradles him, holding him tight.