The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (20 page)

The next week, when I was back in New York, I told my therapist how I’d sensed a quake coming all that day and that then it had come, and she said she wasn’t surprised. What I’d been through in my own life, she said, had heightened my sensitivity to disaster. Could that possibly be at all true, that I’d developed something like my own extrasensory early warning system? Then how come I hadn’t at all sensed the violent incident of the night of August 2 in Mexico City that ended up so altering my life, after assailants left me lying nearly unconscious on the pavement? Because it turned out not to be a disaster at all?

But there’s been plenty of violence in my life. I used to fear that once I’d reached the proverbial nine lives of a cat in incidents involving guns and knives that in some way menaced me, then it would all be over. Some of those incidents were minor, others perhaps not, but I kept count of them and then I passed that number. Serious fistfights and beatings, of which there have also been too many, were not included in that countdown, though I’ve had too many concussions, and have a few nasty scars on my scalp.

There was, in about 1979, the time in Livingston, Guatemala, on the Atlantic coast, when a drunken German hotel owner held a pistol to my head at about five in the morning because he’d caught me trying to leap the hotel wall and thought I was a thief. The reason I was going over his wall was that I’d slept over in the hotel with an Austrian girl I’d met in the town and it was nearly time for both of us to catch the dawn ferry to Puerto Barrios and the hotel’s front gate was locked. Maybe just in the nick of time, she heard his uproar and came out onto her balcony and saw what was happening and started to scream.

There was, in the early 1980s, the bodega holdup on the Upper West Side that my then fiancée Bex and I walked in on, she bolting out the door just as the robber was aiming his sawed-off shotgun at my chest, but he kept his cool and ordered me to lie down on the floor in back with the other terrified customers, then bashed the bodega owner in the face with the butt of his weapon and left with his stolen cash. That same year, I walked in from the sidewalk into the armed holdup of an elderly neighbor in the vestibule of our apartment building. After I reflexively hurled a bottle of grapefruit juice at the mugger’s head that missed and shattered against the wall, he fled out the door with his pistol. There was the kid who robbed me of my wallet with a blade held to my heart on Avenue C.

In Nicaragua, at the battle of Teotecacinte, I climbed out of a Sandinista trench to stretch my limbs even though I’d been told not to and a line of Contra machine-gun fire from the surrounding Honduran hills tore a line in the dirt about ten feet in front of me.

There was that late afternoon in Guatemala City in 1984 when Jean-Marie Simon, the photographer and human rights reporter, and I were walking from the apartment we shared—it was where my late great-aunt had lived, over my late grandparents’ house—to the corner store when four men got out of a black Cherokee that had been tailing us and drew weapons out through the open doors, but we “escaped” by throwing ourselves down behind the row of parked ambulances in front of a small private hospital, and then we got up and sprinted alongside a bus that suddenly drove between them and us and jumped onto it, and the Cherokee rocketed away down the long straight avenue, running red lights. The next morning when I went to the U.S. embassy to report the incident the consul somehow already knew about our encounter with a death squad and said, “They could have splattered you all over the sidewalk like tomato sauce if they’d wanted to,” and that it had been “a heavy-handed tail, meant to send a message.”

There was the time Jon Lee and I had to stay over in a fleabag pension in Sayapulas, a grim military garrison town in Quiché, and a drunk lieutenant carrying an automatic rifle tried to break down the latched double doors to our room, hurling his weight against them and kicking, shouting that he was going to kill us, while we crouched on either side of the doorway in our underwear, each of us brandishing a jaggedly broken beer bottle.

When I was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at the height of the so-called crack era, I came out of my building and obliviously stepped into the middle of an imminent gun battle, kids crouched behind parked cars in front of me aiming at the also armed kids directly behind me on the sidewalk, but I don’t know if that one should really count, since they weren’t threatening me and no shots were fired.

A pistol was trained on me the night I was kidnapped in a Mexico City taxi. And there was the other night that I’ve already mentioned, in the Condesa in the summer of 2008: the two punks on Avenida Mexico brandishing frightening-looking razor blades in my face while I handed over a considerable amount of cash, having just collected it from the half dozen people Mariana and I had dined with in a nearby restaurant where I’d paid the bill with my credit card. When they demanded Mariana’s bag too I told them they couldn’t have it, because I knew she’d spent the day at the French embassy getting the papers she needed for her move to Paris, where she was soon to begin graduate school at the Sorbonne. Now she was crouched behind me against a building wall. The muggers seemed jumpy and nervous, one of them, punk haircut dyed blue, dancing his razor close to my face as he demanded Mariana’s bag. I practically shouted that I’d already given them enough. If they slash me, I thought, I’ll tell her to hand the bag over, but I knew they didn’t have much time, because probably people in the apartments behind us could hear our “argument,” and we were near the house that Mayor Marcelo Ebrard was then living in with his second wife, on Parque México, so I knew there must be police around, and sure enough, the punk robbers turned and bounded away like startled hares. Later Mariana wrote a blog post listing all the objects that she’d been carrying in her deep bag, which did not include her papers for France after all—she’d forgotten to tell me that she had to go back to pick them up the next day.

There was an earlier incident that I considered the most furiously violent and dangerous of my life, in 1996, when I was subletting a ground-floor apartment in the Edificios Condesa. At lunch I’d outlined in my notebook the last chapter of the novel I was close to finishing, and then hurried home abstracted and excited to get back to work. Standing in the hall outside my apartment door were two adolescents collecting money for a home for orphans. Kids from that home came by fairly frequently, and I usually gave them money or spare clothing. I vaguely noticed that these two were a little older than those other kids usually were, but otherwise didn’t give it a thought. I told them I didn’t have anything for them today and when I unlocked my door they shoved their way inside behind me, pulling the door shut, and began beating my head with their fists while simultaneously trying to tackle me. But I kept my legs churning as if seized by the muscle memory of an old high school football drill, and I knew that I had to reach the door before they got me down onto the floor. Falling forward, I extended my arm and managed to strike the latch and the door popped open, and on hands and knees, their blows and kicks striking my head and ribs, I crawled out into the corridor and toward the courtyard shouting for help. Now those boys had no choice but to flee. It was lunch hour, and there were going to be people coming and going in the long apartment-lined courtyard. I managed to get up and stagger after them, shouting for the security guards, while they, walking fast instead of running, looked back at me over their shoulders, snarling threats. They fled out the gates onto Avenida Mazatlán before any security guard reached me. When I went back to my apartment, bloodied, my jaw feeling broken—it wasn’t, but it would be weeks before I could yawn without pain—I found two nylon laundry bags that they’d discarded on the floor just inside the door, and a long knife. What were they planning to do to me, at that hour, when there were always people going about in the courtyard, if they’d been able to plunder the little of value that was in that apartment?

Thirteen incidents in all—I left a couple out of this list—thirteen cat’s lives used up. The one I count as fourteen—though no guns or knives were involved—was about thirty-six hours away when, on the night of August 1, 2012, I went to a party at Yoshua Okón’s. The plan was to stay up until the Olympic gold medal
fútbol
match between Mexico and Brazil was televised from England at about six in the morning, but as the night wore into the morning hours, people began to leave, and others, like Yoshua, whose idea the marathon party had been, fell asleep on couches. Near dawn, only Reyna, an American female friend of his, and I were awake. We walked back to the Roma and found a restaurant on Alvaro Obregón that was open early and showing the game. There’s much to say about this game and this team and about Mexican
fút
, but I’ll keep it brief. In the Olympics, national teams consist of players twenty-three and younger, plus seven more players who can be older. This team consisted mostly of players from Mexico’s Golden Generation, who had been triumphing in international youth tournaments—seventeen and under, nineteen and under, twenty-three and under—and were now on the verge of the greatest victory in the disappointing history of Mexican
fútbol
. Decades of TRI teams—so called for the
tricolor
of the national flag—had been good but never quite good enough, or seemingly excellent teams had always fallen short of expectations: when what should have been a historic Word Cup victory against Germany ended in last-minute defeat, and in those fierce matches and rallies against Argentina that always ended up breaking their fans’ hearts. This new generation was said to have overcome the defeatist characteristics of earlier ones; the players liked to win, knew how to win. The TRI squad had a thrilling run through the Olympic tournament and now was facing a Brazilian team that was said to be the same team, under the same coach, that was likely to take the field at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Mexico won the gold, defeating Brazil 2–1. On that morning, August 2, people poured out onto Avenida Alvaro Obregón, and into streets and plazas all over the DF, all over Mexico, to celebrate the victory. (The national joy would somewhat dissipate a few days later when the “grown-up” National Team did something it had never done before: it lost to the United States in the Estadio Azteca.)

But we went back to my apartment to sleep, and after we woke up in the afternoon, Reyna’s woman friend went home. Much later that night—by then we were in the morning hours of August 3—Reyna and I were back in the trendy after-hours club on San Luis Potosí where we’d ended up so many nights that summer. I was having a good enough time flirting with a pretty bartender. She’d asked me for my telephone number, telling me that because she had a boyfriend I shouldn’t call her, but they were breaking up soon, she said, and we could meet one afternoon later that week in a cantina in the Centro. Reyna was talking to a pair of wealthy fortysomething American guys in another part of the club; they were corporate types from the Northeast, New York City probably, in the city on business. Then Reyna was pulling me away from the bar, saying that we were leaving. Why? I was having a good time, I protested, I didn’t want to leave. Reyna said that the Americans were inviting us to a party. I followed them out of the club, out onto the sidewalk.

There was a two-decker bus waiting in the street in front of the club, thumping electronic music pouring from it, and a young woman was leaning out one of the windows, calling to one of our new American friends. He’d apparently arranged for this “party bus” to pass by there to collect him and his friend. The woman, I learned later, was the daughter of one of his Mexican business partners or clients. Party buses are one more dreadful thing that rich young Mexicans have decided to “import” from the United States, one more ostentatious way for them to display their separateness and status; such displays are apparently considered, in their very particular culture, the ultra of cool. I didn’t want to go on a party bus, and if I’d had the time and lucidity to think about it, or if it had been any other summer but that one, I would have decided to just go home. Instead I followed Reyna and the Americans up onto the party bus. I hated it instantly. How the hell does anyone find it fun to drink and party on a crowded, moving bus? I climbed the stairs to the open second deck, and decided to just wait out the night there. A light drizzle was falling, and a few times I just barely managed to duck overhanging tree limbs, but otherwise it was all right being up there atop the bus, watching the streets go by and considering what silly or mystifying assholes we must seem like to the people observing us from the sidewalks. Even when it started to pour, I endured it as long as I could, but finally retreated back down the stairs.

The party-busers were very young, in their early to mid-twenties I suppose, and dressed, many of those
muchachos
, in the Brooklyn hipster style that has become fashionable in certain
fresa
circles: plaid shirts, jeans, goatees. I’d been seeing such kids around all summer because they often came to the neighborhood’s bars and clubs at night from their homes in Las Lomas, Polanco, and Pedregal—they live with their parents until they marry, I’d been told. Others among these party-busers were dressed more Ralph Lauren preppily. They belonged to the same demographic and were from or close to the same age group as the La Ibero students who’d sparked #YoSoy132, but I seriously doubt there were any even secret student activists on that bus. There were some American girls on the bus too, recent graduates of Stanford business school, who were visiting a Mexican classmate. It turned out that the party was to celebrate the birthday of the son of a well-known and politically connected businessman, the owner of a chain of pharmacies, who is close to Peña Nieto. During his presidential campaign Peña Nieto had promised a government program to benefit the poor by providing pharmaceuticals produced by this businessman and sold in his pharmacies; according to Peña Nieto, the PRI government was going to purchase these from him at a really good price.