We are passing the shanty towns of the Cienéga, some half sunken in water. People in worn out t-shirts and cut-off jeans amble about the sandy streets lined with scrap-metal and plywood huts, on top of which corrugated steel roofs are held down with cement blocks, tied with string and wired with clothes hangers against the coastal winds. Half buried tires painted pastel colors mark the boundaries of yards, and awnings composed of palm fronds shield sinking porches from the sun. Puddles, which are full of garbage and the color of Pepto-Bismol, stagnate a little ways from the houses. A girl blows a kiss to me as the bus passes.
I’m in Colombia, ten years, four languages and many solitary voyages after my first solo trip when I was 17. My bus has left Cartagena, city of sin, bound for Bogotá, city of smog. I haven’t slept for a while. And I have three grams of cocaine left from the seven my friends and I bought for fifteen bucks from a squat speed-freak of a man who ran around our table in a rooftop steakhouse in Santa Marta, giving all of us five and calling us brother. He showed up on a moped after our Colombian friends asked the six and a half foot tall cook if he knew where we could score some weed. That steakhouse is the best I’ve ever been to, for the money; you eat in the open air and a long lean steak with potatoes and salad is 2.50 US$. Fuck yeah, brother.
That night, Saturday night, our bus creeps through the crowded main street of a village, we, behind glass windows trapped, hear garbled music and stare out at the lights, the rustling of bodies, and the flashing of eyes made heavy and carnal with eye-shadow. The bus lurks on. There is an entire soccer team of seventeen-year-olds with their hair hi-lighted, gelled, and spiked, who are constantly swearing and gawking at the girls on the street. I repeatedly trouble the wrinkly white-haired man with the trucker hat next to me, to go to the tiny bathroom, where I stab a key into a minuscule plastic bag full of white powder which I greedily inhale through my nostrils and smear upon my gums. Get it. I come back to my seat, climbing over the old man. He remarks from time to time on the village we are passing, and how he used to know a girl there many years ago. His Spanish sounds like my grandpa’s English: country-style, rural, farmy. I look down at his hands, just like my grandpa’s, huge and calloused with big clumsy fingers like the Hulk. My mind soars on cocaine wings…
My grandfather’s old house is a stately mansion on County Farm Road outside of Salem, Illinois. It is the symbolic ancestral domain in whose rooms and corridors my dreaming mind strolls nightly. It is my only home, although I have lived in so many others and another family now makes it their’s. Beside the mansion are silos of corrugated steel full of corn in which we used to play (me and my cousins), the big yellow shed full of farm equipment, Mack trucks, John Deere tractors and combines we used to climb on and later drove, and barns and garages fragrant of hay, grease, and rotting corn and full of the shiny four-door Cadillac’s my grandpa collected. And my grandpa is out front, dutiful as ever, in the sun, in his unfashionably short shorts, mowing the lawn on his yellow Cub Cadet riding mower, on which he had a custom-installed cup holder, so he could drink Busch beer (only the best). Inside the great decaying barn, where paint peels off the walls and sparrows nest in the rafters, are the work trucks I taught myself to drive way before I had a license. Well, now they are long gone, and so are my grandparents.
Back in Colombia, it’s the middle of the night and the bus has broken down. We all file out while the drivers bang around on the engine in the back. Then, the entire soccer team and I line up behind the bus and try to push start it, without success. Everybody lounges around and sits on the curb, while I sneak off to do some bumps in the darkness. My mind wanders as I walk…
I sat six years old on the shoulder of the interstate outside of the puny town of Conway, Arkansas, as my dad worked on the engine of the mauve motorhome with the baby-blue stripe, which we had bought after selling the the land my grandpa had given us in Illinois. We had no bills, pretty much; no car payments, no house payment, no phone bill, and no credit cards. All we needed was gas and food, and another church at which to preach and perform faith-healings. My dad had just preached at the Pentecostal Church in Conway, and we had been treated very hospitably; everybody wanted to know us, the visiting preacher and his wife and kid, and all the girls, of course, wanted to know me. Now, we were on the side of the road, surrounded by silent pines, as my dad fiddled with the back engine, which powered the lights and AC. Dad had been trying to start the back engine, just to get the AC running, but, in the process, the front battery died. This was unintended, and ominous. Things were tense, if we didn’t get any juice from the battery on the next try, we’d have to wait for a jump, or maybe we’d have to replace it, which would deplete half the money my dad had just been paid by the Conway Pentecostals.
So my parents and I prayed. We bowed our heads in supplication to almighty god that the ignition of our mauve motorhome with the baby-blue stripe would turn over. And it worked, that time. The engine started, and, although we still didn’t have AC, we thanked the Lord magnanimously. I can see myself seated afterward, in a scene I often imagined in the years following, as I sat in the plush passenger-side Captain chair, which had armchairs and rotated, with my feet on the dash as the pines blurred past, and I felt the rush of the road again as if for the first time.
The old man is asleep beside me and the gray light of dawn begrudgingly reveals the Colombian countryside. Hours pass and I doze off intermittently as we skirt tall mountains, high above a little village to which the old man points, remarking in his hillbilly Spanish how much it has grown, and how there is no wind down there, so very far into that valley where the village sits, which will soon be boiling in the heat of the day.
The old trucker-hatted hillbilly Colombian man dozes off, and I sneak out my bag of yay, tired of bothering him to pass by to the stench and the relentless, lurching violence of the bus’s itty bitty bathroom. I carefully untie my prized little baggy, readying my key to swan dive into its contents, and I look over to see that the man is suddenly awake, looking straight ahead. Did he see it? Damn. I close my fingers around the bag, not knowing, paranoid, and I open my book, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, reading distractedly, casting suspicious glances every so often at my neighbor. Calvino writes, “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past, dead branches.” How many memories of lost or unrequited loves do I hold on to… So many…
Our Colombian bus driver slips in a DVD, what will it be; there’s no telling in Latin America. This time, it’s a DVD full of music videos from the Mariachi legend, Vicente Fernandez, which is like having a prayer answered that I never could have conceived of in my wildest psychedelic visions, because I fucking love Mariachi music, and it never crossed my mind that this Mariachi legend (may god preserve him) made music videos. Two weeks ago I sang a Vicente Fernandez song with a nine-piece Mariachi band in front of (at least) one-hundred Colombians in pin-striped suits and silk dresses at a wedding reception in Cucutá. The setting was espectacular, an old-style hacienda with a cobblestone plaza filled with tables all candelabras and floral arrangements surrounding an elegant stone fountain. Next to the plaza there was an open-air pavilion where three totally different bands played, first Mariachi, then Salsa, then Vallenato, which is like Colombian folk music. The mansion was built by a cocaine dealer, but it is now rented out for parties such as this one, the wedding of two Colombians with wealthy families. I was with my half Colombian-half Gringo friend, Manuel, and we’d spent the days preceding the wedding getting high a lot, getting 10$ massages, and lounging in the pool in the local country club where we were continually stared at by rich teenage girls and their moms.
Funny story, we were rolling five deep down the road in Manuel’s cousin’s car, smoking a gigantic joint and laughing without a care in the world as smoke clouded the windows like a Cheech and Chong movie, when we spied a military police checkpoint just ahead. Dios Mio! We had just sped around a bus, and Guillermo almost stopped in terror, with the bumper of the bus filling up the back window and its honk filling our ears. We were instantly all sobriety and seriousness, gasping for breath with the same sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs, as the bus tail-gated us. Guillermo stubbed the joint in the ashtray and we all prepared for the absolute worst. We must have all looked super relaxed, because we were so stoned and despondent, sure that we were busted. If we rolled down the window, the game was up. However, the military police waved us by without ceremony, machine guns slung casually over the shoulder. Four seconds passed the checkpoint, it was a party on wheels again, and we laughed as if there weren’t any danger and did shotguns.
The night of the wedding was extravagant. I wore a navy-blue pin-striped suit that I’d bought in Bogotá and shoes with holes in them that I’d bought in Budapest. I had already told Manuel’s uncle and the father of the bride of my absurd passion for Los Mariachis, and they both insisted that I sing. I had never sung in front of an audience, but I instantly agreed nevertheless. Ten minutes before I was supposed to sing, I imbibed a big glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks, but I wasn’t particularly nervous. Five minutes before I was set to sing, the band played a song which reminded the bride’s family of their deceased daughter. No one in the family seemed able to bear even an instant of thinking about her tragic death without paroxysmal sadness, and so it was when they heard that song. The entire crowd of wedding guests watched, powerless, as the father, mother, and two remaining daughters sobbed with abandon. Everybody had known this girl, who was also Manuel’s ex-girlfriend, and had watched her grow up. Then, the father of the bride made a helpless and exasperated gesture to the Mariachi’s, who abruptly stopped playing, which shattered the mood of festivity. It was the perfect moment for something completely absurd, like a Gringo singing a Mariachi song, to divert all attention from the great sorrow which had momentarily taken control. So the singer put the mic to his lips and introduced me, in Spanish, with his husky bedroom voice…
“Ahora es mi placer de presentarles al Gringo que va a cantar El Mariachi.”
I sauntered up and took the mic, without saying a word. The guests gathered around, and we stared at each other, as the opening notes were struck on various guitars and brass instruments. I didn’t know when to start and looked back at the band, in their full Mariachi regalia, all baby blue, sombreros, bolo ties, and nut-hugging polyester pants. The trumpets were singing and musicians nodded to me anxiously, canta! Canta! And I began…
“Tienes las llaves de mi alma,
Puedes entrar en la hora que tú quieras,
Para que veas si haya en el mundo
Que puede darte lo que yo quisiera.1”
It all came out perfectly, I sang in a deep voice so that I wouldn’t find the higher notes out of my range, which is, I think, what the Mariachi’s do as well. It’s quite easy to sound good like that, or maybe I’m a natural. In any case, the crowd seemed quite taken aback, and more people joined the quiet multitude, all eyes on me. Manuel was laughing uncontrollably.
Tu boca tus ojos y tu pelo
Los llevo en mi mente noche y día
No me pides que deje de quererte
Después que te entregué la vida mia.2
I forgot the entire second verse and enlisted the help of the singer. At some point, a black sombrero appeared on my head, as if the Mariachi gods had smiled upon my offering. I sang the last chorus on my own, adding dramatic fist-waving and a drawn-out, deep finish that came straight from the depths of my soul. The wedding guests didn’t stop to cheer, clap, and jump up and down during the last minute of my performance, and the families of the bride and groom rushed to me in unison when the song was finished, calling all cameras. While I was posing for pictures with a massive shit-eating grin on my face and being told repeatedly how divine was my song, the Mariachi band slowly packed up their stuff and walked out. It almost seemed as if they were dejected, but I doubt it. Manuel told me, “Dude, no one in my family is ever going to forget what you just did!” Indeed, no one in the family was going forget anything anyone did, because they were all sitting there watchful and surveillant over every single move anybody made on the dance floor. I was able to sneak off to make out with Manuel’s cousin, however, without being detected. Everyone in the family still calls me El Mariachi.
I thanked the Mariachi gods after every music video of Vicente Fernandez back on the bus. They were superb. I was literally choked with delight by the images of women stroking agave plants, by the profile of Vicente entering a dark cathedral to confess his salacious conquests to a visibly entertained priest, by Vicente in short shorts (like my grandpa) atop a Volkswagen Beetle scrubbing and sweating into his mustache and hefty eyebrows, by Vicente singing to a girl with her eyelashes aflutter and her boyfriend brooding beside, by Vicente, looking magnificent as always in full gleaming Mariachi regalia, seated upon a dancing horse. “Vicente, Vicente, Vicente!” the teenage soccer team kept shouting in unison. They were not at all pleased with this choice of DVD’s. They yelled at the bus driver without ceasing (which, I can tell you, does no good) and cheered with sarcastic scorn. When the videos ended, to my great dismay, I let myself slip into a strung-out sleep, satisfied and smiling over the images of Vicente, my hero, the almighty Mariachi Mujeriego3.
Mariachi may seem cheesy to you, and rightly so, because of the mustaches, the tight pants, the artless lyrics, sombreros and such, but Mariachi, well, you see, it’s the bomb, and those very characteristics are what makes it so. When the parade of Mariachi’s passed by me in Guadalajara, Mexico, entire orchestras of them on floats and dancing horses with confetti raining down, something inside me changed. It was like being baptized. Mariachi is the great heart of Mexico. It is the voice of the pueblo, the people, the little man, who will never be rich, whose dreams must be modest because fate, underdevelopment, and corruption have conspired against him. The singers often sob while they sing, I sob while they sing, everybody does, because El Mariachi’s message is universal. Every new woman, for Vicente, is an angel, then she cheats on him or leaves him, and he pines and is paralyzed by woe, drinking tequila, firing his gun at the moon, and kickin’ it in bars where women aren’t allowed, until he finds a new girl and the cycle begins anew. Obviously, every relationship begun with such unrealistic expectations is destined to fail miserably. It’s a disaster, but that’s why Mariachi music is so powerful. The Mariachi dares to hope for the impossible, then he relentlessly denounces and slanders and wallows in self-pity, when she doesn’t measure up. They bring everybody together, at the bottom of the barrel. I’m listening to Vicente right now, for inspiration.
Once in Bogotá, I sought asylum from every harsh aspect of the city in the airport, my crash-pad away from crash-pads. Before realizing that I had been sitting on his glasses for twenty minutes, I had a serious and sincere conversation in Spanish with the taxi driver. Before leaving my bag of cocaína and another of weed under a rock in the park by the airport, I smoked a huge spliff and did a rail. Before falling off to sleep across three chiropractically supported airport chairs, I was stared at by all the giggling and precocious Colombianas who were finishing work inside the airport. Then, before my first class flight in the morning, I awoke to discover my battered red backpack was gone, but it was just a little prank played on me for the amusement of the surprisingly jocular military police.
