14 March 2009

up for the climb into the mountainsthat loomed ahead all green. After this climb we would be on the great central plateau again and ready to roll ahead to Mexico City. In no time at all we soared to an elevation of 5,000 feet among misty passes that overlooked steaming yellow rivers a mile below. It was the great River Moctezuma. The Indians along the road began to grow extremely weird. Don’t you see this is a nation in itself, these people are mountain Indians and shut off from everything else!” cried Neal. They were short and squat, and dark, with bad teeth; they carried immense loads on their backs. Across enormous vegetated ravines we saw patchworks of agriculture on steep slopes. “The bastards walk up and down those slopes and work the crop!” yelled Neal. He drove the car five miles an hour. “Whooee, this I never thought existed!” High on the highest peak, as great a peak as any Rocky Mountain peak, we saw bananas growing. Neal got out of the car to point. We stopped on a ledge where a little thatched hut suspended itself over the precipice of the world. The sun created golden hazes that obscured the Moctezuma now more than a mile below. In the yard in front of the hut, for there was no back to it, only a chasm, a little three year old Indian girl stood with her finger in her mouth watching us with big brown eyes. “She’s probably never seen anybody parked here before in her entire life!” breathed Neal. “Hel-lo little girl…how are You?...do you like us?” The little girl looked away bashfully and pouted. We began to talk and she again examined us with finger in mouth. “Gee I wish there was something I could give her! Think of it being born and living on this ledge---this ledge representing all you know of life---her father is probably groping down the ravine with a rope and getting his pineapples out of a cave and hacking wood at eighty degree angle with all the bottom below. She’ll never leave here and know anything about the outside world. It’s a nation. They probably have a chief. Off the road, over that bluff, miles back they must be even wilder and stranger because the Pan American hiway partially civilizes this nation on this road. Notice the beads of sweat on her brow” Neal pointed out “It’s not the kind of sweat we have, it’s oily and it’s ALWAYS

13 March 2009

other side and all I heard was the faint hoofbeat fading away in the woods. The dogs subsided and sat to lick themselves. What was this horse? What myth and ghost, and what spirit? I told Neal about it when he waked up. He thought I’d been dreaming. Then he recalled faintly dreaming of a white horse and I told him it had been no dream. Frank Jeffries slowly woke up. The faintest movements and we were sweating profusely again. It was still pitchdark. “Let’s start the car and blow some air!” I cried. “I’m dying of heat.” “Right!” We roared out of town and continued along the mad highway. Dawn came rapidly in a gray haze revealing dense swamps sunk on both sides, with tall forlorn viney trees leaning and bowing over tangled bottoms. We bowled right along the railroad tracks for awhile. The strange radio station antenna of Ciudad Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska. We found a filling station and loaded the tank just as the junglenight bugs hurled themselves in a black mass against the bulbs and fell fluttering at our feet in huge wriggly groups, some of them waterbugs with wings a good four inches in spread, others frightful dragonflies big enough to eat a bird, and thousands of immense mosquitoes and unnamable spidery insects of all sorts. I hopped up and down on the pavement for fear of them; I finally ended up in the car with my feet in my hands looking fearfully at the ground where they swarmed around our wheels. “Lessgo!” I yelled. Neal and Frank weren’t perturbed at all by the bugs; they calmly drank a couple of bottles of Mission Orange and kicked them away from the watercooler. Their shirts and pants like mine were soaked in the blood and black of thousands of dead bugs. We smelled our clothes deeply. “You know I’m beginning to like this smell” said Frank “I can’t smell myself anymore.” “It’s a strange good smell” said Neal “I’m not going to change my shirt till Mexico City, I want to take it all in and remember it.” So off we roared again, creating air for our hot caked faces, and went to Valles and on towards the great foothill town of Tamazunchale. This town is at an elevation of 682 feet and still in the jungle heat. Mudhuts leaned brownly on both sides of the road; great groups of children stood in front of the only gas station. We loaded

12 March 2009

and rotten jungle all over from hair and face to feet and toes. Of course I was barefoot. To minimize the sweat I put on my bug-smeared T-shirt and lay back again. A huddle of darkness on the blacker road showed where Neal was sleeping. I could hear him snoring. Frank was snoring too. Occasionally a dim light flashed in town and this was the sheriff making his rounds with a weak battery and mumbling to himself in the junglenight. Then I saw his his light jiggling towards us and heard his footfalls coming soft on the mats of sand and vegetation. He stopped and flashed the car. I sat up and looked at him. In a quivering almost querulous and extremely tender voice he said “Dormiendo?” indicating Neal in the road. I knew this meant sleep. “Si, dormiendo.” “Bueno, bueno” he said to himself and with reluctance and sadness turned away and went back to his lonely rounds. Such loveley policemen God hath never wrought in America. No suspicions, no fuss, no bother: he was the guardian of the sleeping town, period. I went back to my bed of steel and stretched out with my arms outspread. I didn’t even know if branches or open sky was directly above me, and it made no difference. I opened my mouth to it and drew deep breaths of jungle atmosphere. It was not air, never air, but the palpable and living emanation of trees and swamp. I stayed awake. Roosters began to crow the dawn across the brakes somewhere. Still no air, no breeze, no dew, but the same Tropic of Cancer heaviness held us all pinned to earth where we belonged and tingled. There was no sign of dawn in the skies. Suddenly I heard the dogs barking furiously across the dark and then I heard the faint clip clop of horse’s hooves. It came closer and closer. What kind of mad rider in the night would this be? Then I saw an apparition: a wild-horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly towards Neal. Behind him the dogs yammered and contended. I couldn’t see them, they were dirty old jungle dogs, but the horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see. I felt no panic for Neal. The horse saw him and trotted right by his head, passed the car like a ship, whinnied softly, and continued on through town bedeviled by the dogs and clipclopped back to the jungle on the

11 March 2009

on a June night in New Orleans. All up and down the street whole families were sitting around in the dark chatting; occasional girls came by, but extremely young and only curious to see what we looked like. They were barefooted and dirty. We leaned on the wooden porch of a brokendown general store with sacks of flour and fresh pineapple rotting on the counter with flies. There was one oil lamp in here, and outside a few more brown lights, and the rest all black, black, black. Now of course we were so tired we had to sleep at once and moved the car down a dirtroad to the backside of town and flopped off to sleep. It was so incredibly hot it was impossible to sleep. So Neal took a blanket and laid it out on the soft hot sand in the road and stretched out. Frank was stretched on the front seat of the Ford with both doors open for a draft but there wasn’t even the faintest puff of a wind. I in the backseat suffered in a pool of sweat. I got out of the car and stood swaying in the blackness. The whole town had instantly gone to bed, the only noise now was barking dogs. How could I ever sleep? Thousands of mosquitos had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles, there was nothing to do but give in to it and even enjoy. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze but the steel had an element of coolness left in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into the cakes of my skin and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summernight. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same. Soft infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face as I slept and they were extremely pleasant and soothing. The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy. I could lie there all night long with my face exposed to the heavens and it would do me no more harm than a velvet drape drawn over me. The dead bugs mingled with my blood, the live mosquitos exchanged further portions, I began to tingle all over and smell of the rank, hot

10 March 2009

“What! what! damn now what? And he punched and fumed at his dashboard. Oh my, we’ll have to drive through the jungle without lights, think of the horror of that, the only time I’ll see is when another comes by and there just aren’t any cars! And of course no lights? Oh what’ll we do Jack?” “Let’s just drive. Maybe we ought to go back tho?” “No never-never! Let’s go on. I can barely see the road. We’ll make it.” And now we shot in inky darkness through the scream of insects and the great rank almost rotten smell descended and we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Victoria the beginning of the tropic of Cancer. “We’re in a new tropic! Nowonder the smell! Smell it!” I stuck my head out the window; bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly our lights were working again and they poked ahead illuminating the lonely road that ran between solid walls of great drooping snaky trees as high as a hundred feet. “Son-of-a-BITCH!” yelled Frank in the back. “Hot-DAMN!” He was still high. We suddenly realized he was still high and the jungle and troubles made no difference to his happy soul. We began laughing all of us. “To hell with it!- -we’ll just throw ourselves on the gawd-damn jungle, we’ll sleep in it tonight, let’s go!” yelled Neal. “Old Frank is right, Old Frank don’t care! He’s so high on those women and that tea and that crazy out-of-this-world impossible-to-absorb mambo blasting so loud that my eardrums still beat to it - -whee! He’s so high he know’s what he’s doing!” We took off our T shirts and roared through the jungle bare-chested. No towns, nothing, just jungle, miles and miles, and down-going, getting hotter, the insects screaming louder, the vegetation growing higher, the smell ranker and hotter until we began to get used to it and like it and love it. “I’d just like to get naked and roll and roll in that jungle” said Neal- -“No hell, man, that’s what I’m going to do soon’s I find a good spot.” And suddenly Limon appeared before us, a jungle town, a few brown lights, dark shadows, enormous and unimaginable skies overhead and a cluster of men in front of a jumble of woodshacks---a tropical crossroads. We stopped in the unimaginable softness. It was as hot as the inside of a baker’s oven

09 March 2009

wonderful bath. And he directed us to the strangest thing in the world: it was an ordinary American type bathhouse one mile out of town on the hiway, full of kids splashing in a pool and showers inside a stone building for a few centavos a crack, with soap and towel from the attendant. Besides this it was also a sad kiddy park with swings and a brokendown merrygoround and in the fading red sun it seemed so strange and so beautiful. Frank and I got towels and jumped right into ice-cold showers inside and came out refreshed and new. Neal didn’t bother with a shower and we saw him far across the sad park strolling arm in arm with good Gregor and chatting volubly and pleasantly and even leaning excitedly towards him to make a point and pounding his fist. Then they resumed arm-in-arm and strolled. The time was coming to say goodbye to Gregor so Neal was taking the opportunity to have moments alone with him and to inspect the park and get his views on things in general and in-all dig him as only Neal could do and does. Gregor was very sad now that we had to go. “You come back to Victoria, see me?” “Sure man!” said Neal. He even promised to take Gregor back to the States if he so wished it. Gregor said he would have to mull over this. “I got wife and kid—ain’t got a money---I see.” His sweet smile glowed in the redness as we waved to him from the car. Behind him was the sad park and the children. Suddenly he jumped after us and asked for a ride home. Neal was so bent on the road he was momentarily annoyed by this and brusquely told him to get in. And we went back to Victoria and dropped Gregor a block from his house. He didn’t understand this sudden businesslike grimness on the part of Neal and Neal realizing it began talking and pointing what he could to him, and finally they were straight again and Gregor walked down the streets of his life. And off we bowled for the jungle, the mad mad jungle that we never expected. And after all this what more could we take in? Immediately outside Victoria the road began to drop, great trees arose on each side, and in the trees as it grew dark we heard the great roar of billions of insects that sounded like one continuous high-screeching cry. “Whoo!” said Neal, and he turned on his headlights and they weren’t working.

08 March 2009

Neal saw that, and began frowning and thinking and trying to straighten himself out, and finally I broached the idea of leaving once and for all. “So much ahead of us man it won’t make any difference.” “That’s right!” cried Neal glassy eyed and turned to his Venezualan. She had finally passed out and lay on a wooden bench with her white legs protruding from the silk. The gallery in the window took advantage of the show; behind them red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a sweet and orgiastic final dream. We staggered out; we had forgotten Frank; we ran back in to get him, like the boys run to get Ollie the seaman in Long Voyage Home, and found him charmingly bowing to the new evening whores that had just come in for the nightshift. He wanted to start all over again. When he is drunk he lumbers like a man ten feet tall and when he is drunk he can’t be dragged away from women. Moreover women cling to him like ivy. He insisted on staying and trying some of the newer, stranger, more proficient senoritas. Neal and I pounded him on the back and dragged him out. He waved profuse goodbyes to everybody, the girls, the cops, the crowds, the children in the street outside, he blew kisses in all directions of Victoria and staggered proudly among the gangs and tried to speak to them and communicate his joy and love of everything this fine afternoon of life. Everybody laughed; some slapped him on the back. Neal rushed over and paid the policemen the four pesos and shook hands and grinned with them. Then he jumped in the car, and the girls we had known, even Venezuala who was wakened for the farewell gathered around the car huddling in their flimsy duds and chattered goodbyes and kissed us and Venezuala even began to weep---tho not for us, we knew, not altogether for us, yet enough and good enough. My dusky darling love had disappeared in the shadows inside. It was all over. We pulled out and left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us and it didn’t seem like a bad day’s work. The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks. It was all over. “Goodbye Victoria!” cried Neal blowing it a kiss. Gregor was proud of us and proud of himself. “Now you like bath?” he asked. Yes, we all wanted