Down and Delirious in Mexico City (27 page)

I can try to rationalize it. In Mexico City the everyday existential urban threats are mediated by partying—hard, extravagantly, with drama and often violence. In this atmosphere, self-destruction itself becomes a threat. Or a goal. It's the idea that if you don't do yourself in first, eventually the city will. Why relinquish control over your demise? This attitude dominated among upper-middle-class globally minded youth of Mexico City in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not yet on the world's cultural map, the city's young artists, designers, writers, pushed the limits of sobriety and safety in the overall cultural darkness of the period. Many wound up in rehab. Some went sober. Some moved away from the city to avoid the parade of temptations. Some did not survive.

After the cabbie leaves us at Cuba Street and Eje Central, back in the Centro, I show Uriel the little dive Susana and I frequent. We walk in and greet the owners and the usual mix of hoodlums, dirty old men, hookers in their fifties, and kids sniffing paint solvent.

A stumbling old woman comes up to us and says, “My respects to you both.” A
cumbia
comes on and she asks me to dance. I tower over the old lady but I feel good, happy to be dancing, step-back-step, step-back-step. I love her jacked-up teeth and her green coat with puffy shoulders, and her little grandma shoes. Her name is Chavela. She starts telling us how hard it is to get approved for a conjugal visit in the Mexico City jail system. She has to bring her marriage certificate and all kinds of other papers. “Just so you can go in and fuck your husband!” Chavela says her husband is held
in the Reclusorio del Norte and her son is in the Reclusorio del Oriente.

“So your husband is in jail in one place and your son is in jail in the other?”

“Yes.” Chavela starts to cry. She put her hands over her face and cries.

“Ánimo,”
Uriel tells her. “Be strong. You will see them.”

From across the room another older lady with premature teeth loss hollers, “Oh, no, Chavela is crying again.” She seems indifferent to Chavela's pain. “A lot of us have that problem.”

My friend Quetzal, the young fashion designer, dies on a Friday the following September. He is just twenty-three years old. We are not sure what happened. I am home alone, taking a nap. I get a phone call from a friend.

“Quetzal is dead,” Gabriela tells me over the line. “We're looking for his parents' phone number.”

He is discovered in the narrow inner well of his building, crumpled against the ground from a four-story fall. At the time of his death, Quetzal had been drinking for three days, since that Wednesday. A magazine party. That afternoon is the last time I see him. I am walking down Veracruz Street in Condesa and pass Marvin's building. Quetzal's familiar voice yells his usual hello for me from a waiting cab.

“Hey,
BIOTCH
!”

We haven't seen each other in weeks. We chat happily and say we should finally get together again. He is waiting for Marvin to come down, and when he does and they drive off, they seem happy.

That day, Quetzal wears dark sunglasses and seems out of it, maybe hungover. This is not unusual for him. Quetzal's binges are
now becoming legendary. He'd drink all day and all night, for several days straight. He'd wind up in dangerous places, disoriented, alone, sometimes without money and sometimes without any of his clothes. His friends know well that Quetzal would take on a wild and obscene persona under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and when this happened, it meant Quetzal the fashion designer and charming friend would lose three or four days of his normal self to the blur of the bottle.

Some of us believed that Quetzal would eventually grow out of it, find a way. Quetzal, with all his talents, at his tender age, would go to rehab and retreats to attempt to curb his problem. He'd show signs of improvement, then return to the same cycle. Friends tried to remain tolerant and helpful, but many of us, over time, shut him out. Although I had known Quetzal for less than a year, I too found his problem too much handle. I tell him so one day, chatting online. He apologized and promised to do better.

It is sad. Quetzal was talented, committed to his visions and to his loves. But he also carried a demon, which so many countless numbers of people all over the city carry. It proves to be a demon he could not overcome.

Quetzal's death confused many of us. It seems beyond surreal or unfair. It is a nightmare. In a community that values fashion, exclusivity, and money; in a world defined by competition, superficiality, and decadence, the death of an up-and-coming fashion designer in a megacity didn't make everyone stop in their tracks. Even in his stomping grounds, the chic parties, the Mexico City fashion scene, life was essentially unchanged after Quetzal's sudden death. It all happened so fast. His passing was too close for comfort, too violent, too dark.

But I know a lot of us were deeply affected by the loss of Quetzal. His death put in stark terms the dangers we all bring upon ourselves
to some degree in the big, bad city. His death—I'd like to hope—forced many of those of us who knew him to question how far we take those risks that Quetzal took to the extreme, the dance with decadence, the dance with death.

I think about him often. I feel for his family. To me, the spirit of the feathered serpent is still strong. Sometimes he comes to friends in a passing thought on a street we had walked together, dancing somewhere, or in a dream. I think about what we could have done to help him. I think about what he'd be wearing these days.

El Internet is shut down right now,
clausurado,
by the authorities. I walk past it and remember the night there that ended poorly, and other nights that did not. I think about all the risks we take in the pursuit of fun in a violent world, and all the other strangers in Mexico City who commit death by decadence, and those who dance around it for years and years, somehow surviving.
Could I be next? What are the chances?

A call at 3:00 a.m. I am in my study, writing. It's almost Christmas.

“Are you asleep or awake?” It is Susana.

“Well, awake.” I am on deadline for a story.

“Can we come over?”

There had been a party, near the south. Susana is heading back to Centro, with a crew of friends and a few
caguamas
. “Can we come over?”

I look at my screen. I look out at the street.

“Well . . . yes.”

A barrio warrior's essential armor. (Photo by Federico Gama.)

W
ith great reluctance one cool winter morning, not long after moving here, I finally march to the U.S. embassy to renew my American passport. It feels like a defeat even before I get there. Having to renew a passport means reminding myself of the rigidity of national borders and national pretensions, and this is especially true when it comes to border attitudes in the United States. Starting in early 2008, a U.S. passport is required of citizens wishing to reenter their country. My American passport was set to expire. All the warnings from the State Department suggest that if I dare return to America—and
dare
I think is the correct word to
use here—I had better be prepared to prove I belong. Visual indicators automatically work against me. In most situations related to U.S. security or sovereignty, my Arab-Andalusian Mexican features ensure I am regarded with extra scrutiny. I am brown, male, of working age, and often confused, ambivalently, as an “alien.”

I wake up earlier than usual this morning and dress in the most serious-looking outfit I can muster, careful to make sure it doesn't look too “official” or forced. Dark jeans, a tucked in, buttoned-up shirt, a modest jacket, and glasses. I disembark from metro Insurgentes and walk briskly north through the Zona Rosa, cross Paseo de la Reforma, and arrive at a scene straight out of the frightening panoramas of the film
Children of Men.
Military-style barricades and fencing surround the stout marble embassy. Every few meters along the perimeter, imposing Mexican guards stand wearing cocked berets, navy trousers tucked into laced-up combat boots, and heavy fatigue vests. They hold firearms and I imagine them ready to shoot anything even hinting to be a potential threat.

The whole complex is fortified to withstand the kind of attack that happens mostly in movies—spectacular explosions, apocalyptic endgames—but also in small-scale Mexican real-life. Angry, sometimes violent protests are common at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Here fed-up Mexican kids always up for a decently rowdy demonstration come to fling their contempt at the policies of empire they see as inflicting harm upon the society, or perpetuating the sad polarity of Mexican subjugation to American dominance. And here, as in many U.S. bodies in foreign lands, you can witness the full force of official American paranoia, loathing and nasty.

I approach from the sidewalk, gulping unconsciously. “I have to renew my passport,” I say in polite Spanish to the first guard I see.

“Over there,” he grunts. “There, at the corner.”

I wait at the corner, looking at others like me. They shuffle nervously through their papers and manila folders. The airborne virus of official paranoia is affecting my sense of reasoning. I don't have anything on me but a book, my passport, and my driver's license.
Did I forget something?
I shift through the book pages, pretending to have important business on my mind. When I am f to the gate, I feel a cold sweat coming on.

“Passports,” the guard at the gate says, in Spanish. “Go ahead.”

Just inside, another guard meets me, asking, “Cell phone? Electronic devices?”

“Yes, yes,” I mumble. He opens a small, worn plastic bag and indicates I have to put all my little gadgets inside. “Open your bag for me, please.” I do. “The front pocket.” I do. The guard grunts me forward, to have my backpack X-rayed, and to wait to file through a metal detector.

At the other end of the steps, on the other side of a railing, I watch as three tart young American diplomats, women in skirts and stockings and heels, skip into the building with their State Department badges, chirping away in American English. They look alien to me, to the place, to the bizarreness of the scenario. At the third guard, after the metal detector, I am led into another kind of outdoor holding pen, this time with two sections of plastic chairs, set in six rows, watched over by another guard, an American. He directs me to the back row of chairs on the left and without a word motions to the man sitting beside me to move over and make room.

Now we are entering a twilight zone. It is suddenly chilly and brisk, in the shade. The deadline for certain forms of business at the embassy, 10:30 a.m., has passed. Every few minutes the front
row is allowed to go to the supergate, a window that looks bombproof, where some kind of attendant studies your face and forms and gives you a visitor pass to enter the embassy building. Every time the front row goes in, the row directly behind it has to get up and move one row forward, a cruel game of musical chairs.

The inspections so far have been conducted in Spanish, by Mexicans, and most of the people seeking to enter the embassy appear to be Mexican as well. Besides the young American ladies darting inside without a stop, I haven't seen a single “all-American” type around. Except for the man sitting next to me. He is as American as you could possibly get, wearing a crisp shirt and tie, tan trousers, and brown dress shoes. His facial complexion is unnaturally red. When I sit down next to the American, we look at one other with expressions that say,
What are you in for?

“I just need to notarize something,” the American says. “Not a good time to be refinancing your house.”

The American is a midlevel manager for a multinational telecommunications company. Mindful of whatever looming financial catastrophe is brewing in the United States at the moment, he says he is attempting to refinance his home in a suburb of Dallas. His mother is living there now, the American says. Casual conversation between Americans in recent years, anywhere in the world, must include the question that follows: “You looking to buy?”

“Oh, no,” I tell him.

“Where are you from?”

“San Diego.”

“Nice place,” the American replies. “If I could pick a place to live, it'd be San Diego.”

I nod. San Diego seems about three continents and four or five dimensions of sanity away. For a few seconds I fantasize about its glimmering waterfront skyline, that auburn Pacific sunset that
bounces golden and lazy off the cool dark waters of the San Diego Bay, up past the rolling hills of inner San Diego, past its bungalows and palm trees, into the barrios of my childhood. I sigh and ask the American, “So what do you think about Mexico?”

“Interesting place. A lot of classism. Even in the business world.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The man is pleased to have his opinion solicited on the topic. “Oh, yeah. Certain jobs here are done by certain classes.” He uses himself as an example. Here he is, a manager for a big telecom company, living with his wife and kids in a company-paid mansion in Lomas Altas. If he were born Mexican, he says, this would not be his reality. In the States, his mother was a waitress and his father “worked for a railroad.”