The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (21 page)

So there I was, on a party bus with, basically, the children of the PRI elite. The hours—it seemed like hours—went by. When were we going to be let off? I stood alone near the back, keeping to myself, spacing out, tired, still at least a little drunk, just waiting. I didn’t even notice when the bus stopped to let off the Americans who’d invited us; they left without saying good-bye, at least not to me. I spoke to one of the Stanford business school grads for just a little bit—she was working for an Internet start-up in San Francisco—and to not one other person. Then Reyna, from the front of the bus, was urgently waving, summoning me. I pushed my way forward, and noticed, as I got closer to the front, that the atmosphere was very heavy. There were hard stares. A fair-haired, leanly muscular kid snatched the cigarette I’d tucked behind an ear to smoke later, and he lit it. His steady ice-blue narrowed stare was one I’d learned to recognize when I was growing up around Boston as an invite to a fistfight that I might not be able to get out of, a stare that ordinarily might have sent fear coiling through me, and then he told me to give a cigarette to his girlfriend. But now that stare, which I returned, brought something out of me, perhaps from very long ago when I didn’t always back down from fights I knew I was going to lose, and I answered, Fuck you. Which was a stupid thing to do. He moved toward me as if he was about to punch me but his girlfriend grabbed his biceps with both her hands and held him back, speaking into his ear. I pushed on, to the front, where good news awaited: the bus was stopping to let us off. We were on a bleak avenue—División del Norte, I think—on the outskirts of Polanco. As we were getting off the bus, someone shoved Reyna from the back, sending him in a scrambling tumble down the stairs, though he managed to stay on his feet.
Ay
,
mi
querido pinche
Reyna, you’re usually out of control by this hour anyway. I didn’t know that he’d hit on the birthday boy’s little sister, though it certainly isn’t surprising that he had. Why should he have known that she was, apparently, still a teenager? The birthday boy, Reyna told me later, had gathered his friends around him, as if Reyna’s having flirted with his little sister was something that demanded a response that could only be decided by committee or mob. I knew none of this, as I stepped off the bus. But then someone shoved me too, hard, from behind, and I almost fell down the stairs, and fury rose inside me. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already hate these people, as if I didn’t already feel ashamed, at my age, to be among them, which doesn’t necessarily justify how I responded but does make it seem to have been, in the moment, inevitable if also foolish. I shouted up at the bus, at its still open door, at whoever had shoved me, “Coward!
Ven
!” and gestured, Come here, with my hand, and stood there planted, fists ready, steely scowl, like a character in
Blood Meridian.
Would I really have fought the
fresa
asshole who’d shoved me? That would have been another mistake, of course, but yes, at that moment, had he dared come down the stairs after me, I would have. But he, whoever he was, wasn’t going to come alone. All the boys on the bus, like paratroopers in a World War II movie leaping one at a time from the fuselage of a plane, were clambering down the steps. I turned to Reyna and shouted, “Run!” And I tried to run too, but I have a bad knee. Later I learned that two of them reached Reyna farther down the avenue, and that he held them off with kicks of his cowboy boots. The rest swarmed over me. I was down on the pavement, my arms folded over my head. There were about a dozen of them, maybe more. All of them seemed to be kicking me in the head, or trying to, and battering my ribs and back, kick kick kick kick. I believe this kind of mob attack, in the United States at least, would be considered assault, or maybe even aggravated assault; but that is, I admit, given the circumstances and place, a ludicrous consideration. While the boys did their business, the party bus driver patiently waited. I wonder if later they gave him an extra large tip. I am not sure if it was then, while they were taking turns kicking my head, or a little later, that the video I’d seen of a mob of Peña Nieto’s police in Atenco clubbing a single protester nearly to death, which had truly horrified me, flashed into my memory.

Finally it was over. They filed like tired, heroic firemen back onto the party bus and it drove away, trailing bad electronic music like an ice cream truck from the Moronic Inferno. I lay motionless on the pavement in the rain. It was as if, in that 1:1 Borges-like
Guía Roji
map of the city, my body, instead of just my finger, had been plunked down on this wet, deserted stretch of avenue, as if on every edition and copy of the
Guía Roji
, on that map-page, on that avenue, a tiny red splotch now appeared, cipher of a transformative humiliation. When I stood up, the world seesawed one way, and then back the other, and I smelled ammonia in my breathing and thought I was going to pass out, but managed to stay on my feet. I recalled Muhammad Ali talking about how a hard punch to the head delivers you to the “green room,” where alligators playing trombones march around you. Slowly the world stabilized. Where was Reyna? I found him near the end of the block. He’d gone to a public phone to call the police. A man leaned out of a window in one of the plain apartment buildings, buildings resembling large air conditioners, lining the avenue and asked us if we needed help. Reyna told him we’d already called the police. But the police didn’t come. We took a taxi back to my apartment. As we had so often throughout that summer, we stayed up until dawn, listening to music, sipping
mezcal,
talking about what had happened. A drop of blood fell from my head, maybe from my ear or my nose, I don’t know, onto the floor between us. We both saw it land. Reyna said, “Frank, we have to change our lives.”

The next morning my skull felt as if it were covered with hard-boiled eggs. There were silvery flashes in the vision of one eye that persisted for over a month. I had bruises and cuts in different parts of my body, which I photographed with my iPhone. But when I went to the hospital a few days later for X-rays and an MRI, I was OK, only badly bruised.

Later my friend Gonzalo said, “Frank, you know this city, you know how to keep yourself out of trouble here, you go places where the people aren’t so different from you, and you stay away from places where they’re not. It took a couple of rich gringos to finally lead you into Mexico
profundo
and almost get you killed.” Deepest Mexico, Mexico
bárbaro
, the barbaric and murderous Mexico of legend and of all too dispiriting and terrifying fact, but that Mexico is always happening somewhere out there, not inside my bubble. Mexico
profundo
had turned out to be a bunch of daddies’ boys—
juniors
, they’re called in Mexico—on a party bus. How had they and the driver known as they pulled away that my brain wasn’t hemorrhaging after so many kicks to the head? I wanted to do something about it, go to the police, bring charges against them and the party bus company, but everyone, absolutely everyone, told me that it would be pointless. I’d only make more trouble for myself, everybody said. For one, because of the birthday boy’s wealthy and politically powerful father. Actually that also counted for two and three . . . People like that have impunity, Frank. There’s nothing you can do. (The birthday boy has a politically prominent cousin who, everybody knows, it’s no secret at all, has gotten away with far worse crimes than a party bus stomping.) Anyway, some of my friends also said, the entire incident was at least partly my fault, and I knew that was true too. And my friends unanimously warned me that if I went ahead and wrote about it for a newspaper or digital news site, as I was vowing to do, I would come off like a fool. People would ask, What was he doing, at his age, on a party bus full of twentysomething gilded children? They would say that I’d gotten what I’d deserved, and that I was lucky those
juniors
hadn’t shot me in the head and just left me there, because they easily could have done that too; just as easily as they’d kicked me in the head they could have shot me in the head, and the very same impunity would have protected them. Juanca even suggested that I should feel grateful to them for not having shot me in the head. “Sleep with little children,” said Juanca, quoting a Mexican saying, “expect to wake up covered in shit.” In Mexico people also like to say, “The fish rots from the head down,” and in the Mexican society constructed over many decades by the PRI, that is definitely how the fish rots, and has long rotted. The party bus carried a school of
junior
fry and this old turtle had gone for a drunken swim among them. What did I expect?

Less than two weeks later, I was sitting in El Centenario, the cantina in the Condesa, with Falstaffian Juanca, the novelist Yuri Herrera (one of the Mexican novelists I most admire), and Alejandro Páez, the founding editor of the digital news site
SinEmbargo.com
and a writer too, who talks Joe Pesci–fast, his laughter like machine-gun blasts. We bought a bottle of Herradura tequila for the table. I was still going on about wanting to write about the party bus incident and name names, and Paez said that while he wouldn’t really recommend that I do it, he’d publish the piece in
SinEmbargo.com
if I wanted him to. Juanca, a baritone maestro of sardonic commentary and sarcastic mockery, always punctuated by that booming piratical
harharhar
laugh, started up again about what a dumb backfiring thing it would be to do, to vent my anger and my humiliation in that way, and the others joined in, and I finally began to accept that they were right, and to acknowledge the humiliated pride of my defiance. The summer had been an alcohol-fueled relentless march to the bottom that I’d finally reached as I lay on the pavement, bloodied and nearly kicked to death by a mob of rich children. Somehow I’d ended up where I’d meant to end up. I don’t want to impose a retrospective clarity of will on what had certainly been months immersed in a flailing muddle, but if there isn’t some truth to the narratives of progress with which we sometimes try to frame our lives, however rooted in desperate delusion, we’d never be able to speak them, certainly not silently to ourselves, with any conviction.

So I spoke about that, my summer’s march to the bottom, and then the others began to talk about their own vices and addictions, and their own past marches to the bottom. Except everybody was being extremely funny about it. The bottle of tequila was nearly empty. And we started talking about the party bus again and now everyone was making fun of me, and of Reyna too, for having hit on the birthday boy’s teenage sister and for having “run away”—but I’d told him to run, and I’d tried to run too!—and finally the whole incident, from start to finish, began to seem sordidly absurd, pathetic, but also hilarious. Everybody was laughing. I loved my friends, the camaraderie and affection behind even the most loquacious mockery. I felt an ache deep in my sides, one not physically attributable to the party-busers’ kicks. What’s that? It was the ache of deepest laughter, and I realized that I hadn’t laughed this hard in five years, since I’d last laughed this hard with Aura.

Two hours later, we were in another bar, and still in high spirits. I spotted Jovi, a young woman I’d gone out with a couple of times a few summers before, and thought, I really like her! How come I never followed up? Of course, back then, in those years, I never followed up. When she approached to say hello, I looked at her and just knew that she was going to be my new love.

The next day, Juanca wrote me a long e-mail. I’ll quote a little of it: “OK, querido Frank. Now that you’re hungover after yet another
peda
hard-core with ‘the adults,’ I’ll share these reflections with you, because now that you’ve called me Falstaff I like the idea of appropriating that character for a moment.” It was a long recap, regarding my avowed intention to publish a piece about my party bus misadventure, of all the reasons that, as he put it, “you’d look like a fucking moron if you wrote that shit down.”

Juanca numbered his arguments, seven in all. They included, “You were as drunk as they were, and to think that you were inviting just ONE of them to fight is just naive. A crowd doesn’t receive communication in the singular. What you do to one of them, you do to all of them.” Number 5 was, “Where you are correct is that the wealthy are also violent. The poor don’t have an exclusive on violence. Classism is a form of very
cabrona
violence here in Mexico. More: POVERTY itself is a form of violence that the rich impose on the marginalized in so many ways. I could show you videos of how the rich humiliate the poor in this country every day, but in the case of what you just experienced, I don’t think it’s the same thing. So OK, to sum up I suggest that you try to avoid provoking aggression. Nothing good ever comes of that and in general it’s a very suicidal part of your personality that, like I told you the other night in the Covadonga, it seems like you like to tempt from time to time, probably at a subconscious level. I’m glad you admitted it there with Páez and Reyna and Yuri: hitting rock bottom this summer, with so much drinking, to find out if life can punish you, that’s a good therapeutic admission, but for it to be a breakthrough or an epiphany it has to be accompanied by a change in your conduct. It could also be a search for a rock bottom that is more bottom than the one you lived a few years ago, but with all the affection in the world I tell you, THERE ISN’T, ONE DOESN’T EXIST that’s more
cabrón
and devastating than the one you went through and that we’ve gone through together these past five years. Sometimes one tries to mitigate a major hurt with a more recent one, but believe me, it’s fucking USELESS. You’ve already done a lot of good in your life and especially in that tremendous ‘uprising’ you had after what happened to Aura. The prize, your book, your reincorporation into life itself, with women and in the everyday, is an achievement that fills many of us with pride and love. Calm the fuck down,
cabrón
. You’re on a good path.”