The bathtub water became rose pink. I couldn't handle the smell. I've encountered that smell occasionally since that evening in 1988. I called it "the smell of blood"... But that wasn't so. It was the smell rising on vapors, of blood in hot water. I smelled it in the beautiful Venezuelan female jazz singer's hair, who I met singing on 3rd Avenue around the entrance to the 59th Street Bridge in 1999. She was participating in a street benefit. White carps, a lot of suits. I was on one of my long walks, probably up to Spanish Harlem. She had long black curly hair, of African descent. With her were later to become my friends too, Gousey, the Haitian Jazz pianist and singer who did a memorial concert in honor of Cole Porter, I met her father that evening while she sang on Avenue A. I danced... I believe Michael and M'nique were there with me too....With the Venezuelan singer was a beautiful Colombian Carribean woman who introduced me to a Latin American culture house on the upper West Side, Columbus Avenue and 105th Street if I'm correct, that same night we all met on 59th Street (faded memories. What a shame!). She taught classes there. One evening Michael invited me there for a benefit art exhibition in support of Ex Subcommandante Marcos and his Zapatista movement in Chiapas. I can tell you a little about those charades, especially during Manuel Lopez Obrador's presidential campaign here in 2005... The circus has come to town...
I was very attracted to the Venezuelan woman. I even wrote poems about her. But her hair smelled like blood.
I know when the pico de gallo (literally translated as rooster's beak, is a Mexican salad consisting of 5 ingredients: Jalapeños, Tomatos, white onions, salt and cilantro) is not disinfected; it smells like blood. Maybe it's a warning and not something other people can smell. Maybe it was a warning against pursuing the Venezuelan woman or not to eat the food, since it would cause problems later, sometimes very serious problems. It's not that you shouldn't drink the water in Mexico. It's that some of the fresh produce is irrigated with aguas negras, raw sewage... No, don't drink straight from the tap. Most of the water here comes from tanks above the houses and those water tanks have a ton of parasites, some you can see with your eyes...squirming... The tanks are dirty and the climate helps breed these organisms. Because of the local economies (Mexico is the 12th richest country in the world) here in Mexico, the restaurants don't wash their dishes with hot water. Put the glass to your nose. If it smells of raw egg, maybe you should ask for another glass. It's the smell of the bacteria...
Occasionally passing chicken tables/chicken venders on the streets, I smell that odor of blood... But that's understandable... I still eat chicken.
I left the bathroom. I cut my wrist in the "living room", in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the walk-in closet. When I finally struck oil, the blood painted the ceiling. I felt it drain from my head, from my tongue. I felt myself falling. I didn't feel myself hit the floor. And then for some reason or another, I awakened and I stood up and I hit the "vein" directly and, crossing the floor, I slid in my puddle of blood while feeling myself drain again and I fell. And I awakened one more time and I painted my apartment red and... and... and...
Here in Mexico, I don't worry about cutting my wrists. I worry about someone cutting them for me; someone lopping off my hands... Don't let them fool you. This is not a war on drugs. There is a belief that, if you aren't doing anything "wrong" here, nothing will happen to you. Did you know that Mexico City is #1 in kidnappings in the world? What do you think happens here when they kidnap you? Do you remember the stories about the American and European and Turkish and Korean and... contractors kidnapped in Iraq during the second Gulf War? Well, it's worse here. Why? Ask the Mexican government. But they won't tell you. Ask the C.I.A., the Pentagon. They won't tell you either. Maybe Noam Chomsky will suddenly gain access to that information; someone always is leaking it out to him and, for some reason, he has the freedom to share it with us...
Here in Mexico they kidnap you, ask for a ransom, mutilate you in the process, receive the payment, return your mutilated body and then also send your family the video tape... how they raped your daughter and then shoved a stake in her vagina... And the not so funny thing is that she was the innocent daughter of successful business owners and no one has located her murderers, nor do they care... When we started travelling around the country with our coffee bar, we noticed billboards advertising the Green Party's supposed movement asking for Capital Punishment as a penalty for kidnapping. And then those billboards suddenly disappeared. You can argue against capital punishment for many crimes. But, what you may not understand is that kidnapping is not solely a crime against the kidnapped and does not end with bringing the kidnapper "to justice." It's a crime against the family and the friends. Because, after death, the questions, the fears, the concerns, the horror, the personal incrimination continues in the minds of the survivors. While the deceased ceases suffering with death. The living will suffer as long as they remember their loved one. It could be a horrible torture. I can't imagine it... There must me some way to deter this lucrative business. But why would the government support it...
In the super inaccurate Mel Gibson film, Apocolypso (we knew a bunch of the actors, since they came from the dance faculty at the University of Veracruz. The female lead role called me "Arroz con Pollo" because Ross pronounced in Spanish sounds like Arroz. I always responded, "then Margarita must be Pollo") filmed near Catemaco, Veracruz; one of the most beautiful places in Mexico and now one of the more dangerous... After Hurricane Stan in 2006, Mel gave 1 million dollars to the governor of Veracruz, Fidel Herrera Beltran, supposedly involved with the National Inmigration Services in the kidnappings of Central American migrants. Veracruz is one of the main train routes for crossing from Chiapas to the center of the country and then to the U.S. It's one of the 6 states invulcrado (involved) in the kidnapping of around 10,000 Central and South Americans in 2010. What do they do about this and this information? They air news reports of Mexicans "senselessly" killed in the U.S. Popular today is the story of the young man from Guerrero who was beat to death in Jamaica, Queens. They don't know why... So, it must be because he was Mexican. But, it couldn't be because there are 90,000 Mexican gang members competing for the local drug trade in the U.S. It couldn't be because of a conflict connected with his girlfriend. It couldn't have anything to do with his walking into the wrong place at the wrong time. No, no one is beaten to death every day in New York City. Have you ever been to Jamaica, Queens? I have. I have been to Bed Stuy, Clinton Hills, East New York, Brownsville, Crown Heights, the South Bronx. I've walked through. I've biked through. I've worked in the projects. I've left running... I've spent the night in a cell with these guys, mostly Latinos. I've seen the games played by the prison guards... Cock fighting, but with humans. It was July 4th, 2001. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. After midnight they piped in air conditioning. Everyone was laying on the cement floors with nothing to cover them, nothing to cover the floor... Why was I in Downtown Brooklyn at the Sussex County Jail? Ask Joey. It was her idea... No, just kidding, not a big deal. However, it all depends upon how I want to write about those months...
Supposedly, the NYPD made rounds in the projects rounding up groups of adolescent boys and charging them with misdemeaners, such as the possession of a joint, a marijuana cigarette, that would be thrown out of court, because those trials were wastes of money. The kids were humiliated and thrown into the slammer for one night and quite a few hours the following day and then released for the most part, fomenting a horrible mistrust of and hatred towards police officers... It created a cycle. These adolescents hating the police officers and mouthing off at them and the police officers further hating these adolescents and mouthing off at them too, but with the upper hand; who piped in the air conditioning? Who opened the door of one cell, removing one gang member and placing him in the other cell next to the enemy gang member while he was asleep? My mates were surprised to see a "normal" white guy with them... One by one, they approached me and asked me how I ended up there... One by one they helped me remove my fear of being the only white guy. One by one they told me their stories..., their perspective. One of the Latinos was a genius, very intelligent... One day he would become a Capo... I didn't doubt it... I wasn't there as a journalist, nor an investigator. So I didn't record the information I learned. Too bad, no? Just one more notch on my belt of life experience. I'm not proud of how I landed me there. But I am proud of myself for having actually been there... I don't believe in what Joey's father said about not having to die if he could read about it. Reading There are no Children Here is not sufficient for actually understanding and knowing the situation on the South Side of Chicago.
But back to kidnapping and torture... I've wondered what I would do put in that situation. How strong would I be? I think about Mahatma Ghandi, about Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King... the peaceful protesters, the activists who withstood tortures and didn't break, who had such an incredible faith in God or in themselves, in their people... But the tortures didn't leave them destroyed. The torturers wanted information or to deter their movements, to scare them, not to anger them. These Mexican mutilators enjoy dismembering, mutilating genitals, cutting off breasts, pulling out hearts and skinning people... They enjoy the grotesque...
The last time my mother and Bruce visited us, we visited Guanajuato; one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. We went on an incredible 4 hour tour. The first site on the tour was the mummy museum (not truly mummies and just another example of human socio-political illness; some of the "mummies" had been buried alive).
The last site on the tour was the Torture Museum. It was a museum of the Inquisition. There are Inquisition museums that tour the country; popular attractions at the fairs... I had always thought that the Spanish Inquisition was limited to Spain. Not true. Supposedly many of the Mexican Cathedrals had torture chambers below. All in the name of God. Right? I didn't take photos in that Museum. You have no idea the contraptions on display, the horrible things monks and priests and "normal" people invented. In World Without End the wonderful sequel to Ken Follett's Pilars of the Earth, the nuns catch a man trying to steal the treasures of the Cathedral. This is when England was still Catholic, when it was half-French. Because the man was robbing the Cathedral, as an example, he was skinned alive infront of the whole church community. Like the pelt of a bear, they hung his complete skin from his feet to his scalp/hair above the entrance to their treasure valt... I bought the book in February, 2011 when we were in Tepic, Nayarit. At the same time they were finding men without skin, with their hearts cut out, with traditional Charro Sombreros placed on their heads, placed on the side of the main exit roads of that capital... Someone thought the activity was funny. Someone took those photographs that ended up in all the newspapers... This isn't about drugs. It's about frightening people or worse. And why? Decapitated bodies hung from bridges in Acapulco, Tepic, Monterrey,... Men hung by their hands and shot point blank in their faces and shot until they are unrecognizable. Someone was teaching these guys how to skin humans... And they were doing it with a purpose.
In the fairs we are friends with a middle-aged Colombian couple. This past March I asked them, "Which situation is worse: Columbia 30 years ago or Mexico today?" The response was Mexico. In Colombia, the violence was between the cartels and then between the cartels and the government. It didn't affect the civilians, with the exception of when Pablo Escobar blew up the airplane. And when they killed someone, it was with the number of bullets necessary. But here, they are extortioning, assaulting, robbing, kidnapping people not involved in the drug trade. They don't kill you with 1, 2 or 3 bullets. They shoot hundreds of rounds, destroying your body... It's not a war. It's a sickness...
There are many reasons I left for Mexico. All those reasons are equally important. The moment I mention one reason as being the ONE, I realize that there is another reason. You must have a lot of reasons for deciding to permanently leave your country. If it's for work, well you'll return. If it's as a missionary, well that's another type of work. Do you remember The Thornwood Bible? Great book. Nice Lesson. If it's for marriage, well, you can always return with your husband or wife. If it's due to war... Well, it's for your country and you will either return as a hero (with the exception of the Vietnam War) or as a corpse... If it's for cultural or academic reasons, you'll probably return to your country and visit another one somewhere down the road... But, why did I leave the U.S. for Mexico?
I never had an interest in Mexico, especially not after having met Fiametta at the Alt.Coffee on Avenue A infront of Tompkins Square Park. She was Sicilian, lived in Palermo and expected me to learn Italian and visit her, supposedly to live with her... I didn't like the Spanish language. Italian was for me. It's very expressive and I speak with my hands. Plus, my father had lived in Bologna 3 years and had learned Italian fluently to be able to graduate from the university there... The problem was, in order to leave for and live in Italy, I must have a lot of money. So, I never learned Italian. I never even made the effort. I wasn't about to fool myself. But leave for Mexico?
I was a run away. I was a suicidal. Easy... I finally succeeded at running away. I finally succeeded at killing myself. But there was something else going on. I can blame much upon circumstances and abuses during childhood. But, there was something else... Estrella knew I was leaving almost 2 months before I made the decision. Alba and Margarita appeared in my drawings. Michael appeared in my life 5 years earlier. I became friends with Mauricio in the West Village 8th street around the corner from Bleeker... We were in a café, I was drawing, he was writing on his laptop. It wasn't the first time we had seen each other, so he started talking to me. And he offered to meet me for John's Pizza on Bleeker or for a beer. He had a press pass for the opening of an exhibit at MOMA. He talked about his brief encounter with the crazy blonde girlfriend, waitress at that café. Her name was Gabriela. Why do I remember her name? Because at that moment, James introduced me to Bossa Nova, Astrud Giberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jobim had a song called Gabriela and then I met Petra's 9-year-old daughter Gabriela at Las Cañadas and told her that men would sing her name one day
I've thought about PTSD and the constant stress level; how the victim becomes accustomed to that certain style and level of intensity. Peace and tranquility must seem horribly boring. The problem was that I was seeking a more useful and productive life for myself; but a life that fed me intellectually and creatively... My best arts are in the kitchen and painting and drawing. I don't include writing, because I can't even approach inventing fiction... Maybe it was because my life experience was just as crazy or rare or traumatic as could be invented by a creative mind... In order for me to write fiction, I must first overcome this writing project called my life... Maybe that's my true desire. But, I don't believe in following pipe dreams. So, I finally left for Mexico.
Joey's father, Joe, also sharing my sister Beth's birthday, March 12th, frequently said to his daughter, "If I can read about death in a book, I don't need to die..." It's to say, why visit another city or another country if he can read about it in a book... I don't believe that. In fact, I believe it a very fortunate experience for someone to read about a people, a culture, a geography, a country and then experience it in person. But not as tourists; actually immersed in that culture. But tan poco that's my experience here... The journey is spiritual, it's part of a journey for which I was being prepped. Will this journey end with my body being cut into little itsy bitsy peices as begins the album by Pink Floyd Echoes? Truthfully I doubt it. Will it end with me cutting my wrists? Less likely. It's more likely I will drown in my own shit...
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