Down and Delirious in Mexico City (26 page)

The leader of the temazcal then calls for our attention and tells everyone gathered, glistening with moisture, shivering now that the flaps are open, that if anyone wishes to leave the temazcal, now
is the opportunity to do so. I ponder my options for roughly two seconds. I nudge Adonai and tell him I will see him outside. Adonai nods, without judgment. I stumble out. Thanking the temazcal with my thoughts, I excuse myself and exit to the left.

I clearly didn't learn enough about the temazcal before trying it out, even with a special information booklet squeezed into my stacks of reading material. But then, I find, neither do most other people who enter the sweat lodge for the first time. At the temazcal in Ixtapaluca, I am followed out early by a voluptuous young lady from the nice suburbs in the northwest. We chat in the yard while she reapplies her makeup and sparkly designer eyeglasses. She had gone into the sweat lodge, couldn't handle the heat, and also decided to go out. She didn't seem too tortured by her choice. For her, trying out the temazcal is like trying a dress on in a department-store changing room.

The temazcal just isn't for me. I find urban indigenous practices of today more interesting than those from yesterday. Conquest bred mixture, and mixture implies leaving some ingredients out and adding in new ones, a constant cycle of evolution, a constant stirring. The Indian citizens of Mexico City have created new sets of rituals in five hundreds years in the apocalyptic city. They buy Coca-Cola and cups of Maruchan soup in convenience stores like the rest of us. They ride the metro, which since its inception has been mapped with icons rather than words, so that navigating the system would be possible for non-Spanish-speakers. They sell things on the street like so many others of us. Some of them vote.

The younger generations of urban indigenous gather on Sundays—for many their only day of rest from construction or domestic work—and mingle at the Alameda Central, transforming it
every weekend into a festival of modern urban Indianness: music, food, dancing, flirting.

Claiming the Alameda Central as their social space is a significant social coup for these young people, who merge the fashion codes of cholo, ska, and punk. In the viceregal period, Indians were not allowed inside the park. It was strictly the territory of the criollo and his attendant mestizos. In the twenty-first century the Alameda Central is Indian land.

You see them laughing, walking together in pairs, attempting to woo a new romantic interest, boys and girls, young and old, wearing jeans and sneakers and chain necklaces. A young Indian couple—looking like any other Mexico City youth—argue fervently on a corner in a language I cannot understand or identify. A young Indian girl, in supertight jeans, in modern makeup, is gabbing energetically on a public pay phone. The coos, snaps, and scoops of her indigenous words are single-handedly lifting the echoes of Mexico's past to right here, on this street, on a gray corner facing a glowing
O
xxo convenience store. She might never have been in a temazcal, but to me she is the true Mexico City indigenist. The mutant metropolis is her inheritance.

Potential perdition in Plaza Garibaldi. (Photo by the author.)

O
ne of the oldest eateries in Centro,” Susana says, pointing to a hole-in-the-wall. It is literally that, a large hole in a whitewashed wall on Callejón 57. There is no sign or signal of commerce other than the throng of people who are lunching in the shadows on quesadillas.

“What's it called?” I ask.

“It doesn't have a name. Everyone just knows it as the Quesadillas del 57.” It opened in the 1930s, Susana says. “But now, who knows how long it will last.”

There is no time to take a picture of the Quesadillas del 57 or take in its smells. We are on a mission. From the moment Susana and I meet, on the steps of the Torre Latinoamericana, Mexico's first skyscraper, she has a plan. She is determined to show me the corners of the Centro Histórico that she knows and loves. The “real” Centro, she says, the Centro under threat of extinction as the D.F. government implements gradual plans to spruce up the area—a process accelerating with the generous support of a foundation belonging to Carlos Slim, the Mexican magnate and world's richest man. In recent years sidewalks have been cleared of unlicensed vendors, streets have been recobbled, and historic buildings have been refurbished. Police roll around slowly at night in their cruisers, siren lights permanently flashing. Back when I first came to Mexico City, Centro was not like this. The streets were crowded with vendors to the point of making pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost impossible. That summer, almost a decade ago, Mexico City was just entering the early stages of its contemporary sparkle. There were no boutique hotels, no tourist-information booths near major landmarks, no hipster party photoblogs, no Turibus route coursing past the major landmarks. Much of Centro was in decay, with many buildings abandoned or still in ghostly ruins since the 1985 earthquake. Few people of means had dared to venture there since the earthquake and the economic crises of the 1990s. Except the young creatives and misfits of the capital, people like Susana Iglesias.

Leading me up Eje Central, Susana is serious about the task at hand. She has merlot-colored hair and wears green-colored contacts and a black Misfits T-shirt. She carries a bag covered in a black-and-white skull print. Her wide smile communicates pure mischief, the smile of someone who has an eternal hunger for more—and for more after that. As we walk, an abandoned theater
with a vertical marquee sign that reads
TEATRO FRU FRU
catches my eye. “That place won't be there for very long,” Susana says. “All of this. All of this won't be here for very long.”

Susana lives in the rough-edged north of the city, near metro Consulado. Her nickname is Miss Masturbation after the title of the blog she kept in the early 2000s. It was a period of a great explosion in blogging in Mexico, an exciting time. “I was searching the word
vodka
and I found a blog, Blogger.
¿Qué es esto?
” Susana recalls. “I started looking at blogs in English, in French.” She started her own blog, Señorita Masturbación, at some point in 2002. She posted vigorously for a while, about Centro, about her life, about her ideas. But after some time, like so many other bloggers in Mexico City and all over the world in that period, Susana's interest in Web self-publishing withered away. The site died. Then revived. Then died again. In an intriguing mid-twenties transition, Susana has decided to dedicate herself to rescuing stray dogs and to writing fiction. Both pursuits have given her considerable success ever since.

She identifies herself as a former punk, but more than anything else, she is a creature of the night, a
devota
of decadence. We have lunch in a cantina because in cantinas the food is free as long as you're drinking, and at any cantina where Susana goes downtown, she knows the regulars, a few of the waiters, or usually both. Some hearty mushy soup and three beers later, we are back on the streets. Every corner has a story, every mangy dog offers a memory. Susana leads me to Plaza Garibaldi, the traditional meeting point for the city's roving mariachi musicians. It is in active transformation. Near the back, the plaza floor is busted open, workers buzzing about, concrete dust rising in the brisk afternoon breeze, as they replace the floor with new stones.

Around a corner, in a smaller plaza with a dead fountain, the Torre Latinoamericana regal and gray in the distance, we come
to a ghostly building of three floors, abandoned. “This is the Acid House,” Susana says. The young vagabonds of the Centro used to gather here to do acid and crack and inhale
mona
all day. The cops always knew it was there, Susana explains. Some would even get in on the action. It looks completely abandoned, even for a squat. “They're going to do something new here now,” Susana says. “What could it be? A hotel? A housing development?”

Walking more, Susana tells me stories about the Centro's ghosts and about the junkies she knew who are now dead. On one corner, she stops, breathes in and out, smog be damned. “I love living here,” she says. “I'd get bored in
provincia.
”

From that day on, we start hanging out. A lot.

I never once question why I am here, Friday after Friday, at a new cantina in Centro with Susana. Week after week we stumble into bars we should probably not be found in, in Tepito, the Colonia Guerrero, and in and around the Garibaldi area. I rarely ever turn down her invitations to get together. Somewhere along the way, I guess, in Mexico or in California, I had decided that this kind of ritual isn't just my right, it is my duty. The world stinks, the thinking goes. Go out, rub up against some trouble, and drink until it's not there anymore.

In Susana I find a partner in leisurely nihilism who sees things just the way I do. And eventually, as always tends to happen when athlete drinkers find themselves, Susana and I find an untouched watering hole and make it our own.

The bar is tucked in an alley off a forgotten plaza near Garibaldi. The square is fitted with a fountain and a crumbling structure that appears as though it once functioned as a small chapel, veering wildly into the soft earth. The little building looks both dead and
drunk, unused, and at least two hundred years old. Around the corner, next to a permanent mound of fresh garbage and behind a metal grate, with no sign and no fixed name, sits our spot.

It is just one room big and the bathroom is revolting. Nothing decorates the walls but a sticky film best left uninvestigated. Roaches the size of small rodents sometimes amble across the tile floor, giving me the frightening impression that they have large and complex brains. Old prostitutes, gangly old gay men, transvestites or transgendered ladies with saggy chins, gangsters, women with only a few precious bits of teeth hanging from their gums, dealers—it's their spot, too. We get to know the “owners” and become quite acquainted with the running melodramas of the place. It is never certain when we will end up here, never planned. Sometimes Susana calls or texts me late in the night, informing me she is in the area and headed to the bar. I'm at home writing, trying to, stuck on a sentence or a complex thought. Resistance is futile.

Inside the bar, on any given night, customers drink and dance to the
cumbias
and Mexican pop standards blasting on the juke. Midnight turns into 2:00 a.m., and 2:00 a.m. then turns into 3:00, then 4:00, then time dissolves into a slimy toxic pulp. One night we meet an older black woman from the state of Guerrero who can balance a full
caguama
on her head while dancing, gyrating her hips to the African beat that thumps behind every true
cumbia
jam. She writes down her name and address on a small scrap of paper for me, insisting I come visit her, and possibly marry her, so that she can move to the United States. Her breath is spicy and metallic, like sea salt. On another night we meet a young Mexican air force officer with a cropped haircut and plenty of military-related tattoos to show off. Rascally and belligerent, the officer seems to be spending all of his bimonthly salary on beer and dances. He wants to go home with one of us, either of us—it probably doesn't matter who.

Every night at our nameless ditch, the last bar on the last crawl, Susana and I have our beers and our dances and our new flirtations. I turn to Susana, who is busy passionately kissing a guy in a tank top and baggy jeans. She orders another beer. We sit around and ask ourselves,
What's next? What's next?
Nothing is next, it turns out. Nothing but the ritual pour.

“How much do you think this cell phone is worth?” the cabdriver asks Uriel and me, passing the device over his shoulder. Uriel examines it. The cabbie, a young guy with glasses, tells us that he just had sex with a fare, a woman who presented him with the cell phone in exchange for five hundred pesos. Uriel says it was an okay exchange, that the cell phone is probably worth a thousand pesos or more.

“Yeah, I just fucked her,” the cabbie says. “Took her to a hotel.”

He tells us the story as casually as can be. When he picks up the fare, she is “all hot and bothered” and gets into the front seat by his side. She tells him she wants to have sex with him. So the cabbie takes her to a hotel. She was all “torn up,” the cabbie says, and incoherent. He says he knew she was a
“prosti,”
so he used a condom. Then he takes her to meet some “scary dudes” in Zona Rosa, at a club. They were probably her pimps. The cabbie says that in all his years as a cabdriver, sex with a fare has happened to him only a few times. Most times, he says, it's the
jotos
—the fags—who try to pick up their drivers.

The cabbie, a young guy, shows us a picture of the girl. She left an image of herself on the screen of the bartered phone. She looks pretty tragic: dyed-red hair, a dramatic pose.
Poor girl,
I think. So bored and lost in her life, she is a prostitute and gets wasted and screws cabdrivers for fun. The Mexico City night is fast and lonely.
People get drunk, do lots of drugs, lots of pills, lots of cocaine, screw around, and screw each other over. The excesses of decadence and self-destruction as they are practiced in Mexico get to me sometimes. The stories I hear. The overdoses, the sexually transmitted diseases, the senseless deaths. Happening all over the place, upstairs, next door, right around the corner.