28 February 2009

Twenty pesos, thrity pesos.” “You serious? True? Now?” “Now mon, ennytime. Too hot now” he added with distaste. “No like gurls when hot day. Wait tonight. You like shade.” I didn’t want the shade but I wanted the girls. I woke up Neal. “Hey Man I told you in Texas I’d get you laid---allright, stretch your bones and wake up boy, we’ve got girls waiting for us.” What? what?” he cried leaping up haggard. “Where? where?” “This boy Gregor’s going to show us where.” “Well lessgo, lessgo!” Neal leaped out of the car and clasped Gregor’s hand. There was a group of other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy strawhats. “Man” said Neal to me “ain’t this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It’s so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Gregor, you got gurls? Where? A donday?” he cried in Spanish. “Dig that Jack, I’m speaking Spanish.” “Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got mari-ju-a-na?” The kid nodded gravely. “Sho, ennytime mon. Come with me.” “Hee! Whee! Hoo! Yelled Neal. He was wide awake and jumping up and down in that drowsy Mexican street. “Let’s all go!” I was passing Lucky Strikes to the other boys. They were getting a great pleasure out of us and especially Neal. They turned to each other with cupped hands and rattled off comments about the mad American cat. “Dig them Jack talking about us and digging. Oh my goodness what a world!” We all got in the car and lurched off. Frank Jeffries had been sleeping soundly and woke up to this incredible madness. We drove way out to the desert the other side of town and turned on a rutty dirt road that made the car bounce as it never bounced before. Up ahead was Gregor’s house. It sat on the edge of Cactus flats overtopped by a few trees, just a dobe crackerbox, with a few men lounging around in the yard. “Who’s that?” cried Neal all excited. “Those my brothers. My mother there too. My sister too. That my family. I married, I live downtown.” What about your mother?” flinched Neal. “What she say about marijuana.” “Oh she get it for me.” And as we waited in the car Gregor got out and loped over to the house and said a few words to an old lady, who promptly turned and went to the garden in back and began pulling marijuana plants out of the earth. Meanwhile

27 February 2009

won’t change for a long time. If you’ll drive I’ll sleep now.” I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, Through Linares, through hot flat swamp country, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on. A great verdant jungle valley with long fields of greencops opened before me. Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow oldfashioned bridge. The hot river followed. Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country began reappearing. The city of Victoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the worldwide fellaheen people of the world, the Indians that stretch in a belt around the world from Malaya to India to Arabia to Morocco to Mexico and over to Polynesia. For these people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly American lore---they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways---they were not fools, they were not clowns---they were great grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land, they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot sunbaked town of Victoria where we were destined to spend the maddest afternoon of our entire lives. Earlier, back at San Antonio, I had promised Neal, as a joke, that I would get him laid. It was a bet and a challenge. As I pulled up the car at the gas station near the gates of sunny Victoria a kid came across the road on tattered feet carrying an enormous windshieldshade and wanted to know if I’d buy. “You like? Sixty pesos. Habla Mexicano. Sesenta peso. My name Gregor.” “Nah” I said jokingly “buy senorita.” “Sure sure!” he cried excitedly. “I get you gurls, anytime.

26 February 2009

girls that cut along with groceries. And downtown Monterrey was our first sight of thick city dobe neighbourhoods with thousands of shifty hipsters hanging around doorways and whores looking out of windows and strange shops that might have sold anything and narrow sidewalkscrowded with Hongkong-like humanity. “Yow” yelled Neal. “And all in that sun. Have you dug this Mexican sun, Jack? It makes you high. Whoo! I want to get on and on—this road drives me!” We wanted to stop in the excitements of Monterrey but Neal wanted to make extra-special time to get to see Bill Burroughs as quickly as possible and Mexico City and besides he knew the road would get more interesting, especially ahead. He drove like a fiend and never rested. Frank and I were completely bushed and gave it up and had to sleep. I looked up outside Monterrey and saw enormous weird twin peaks shaped like a wild saddle cutting clouds high up in the sky. Now we were going beyond Old Monterrey, beyond where the outlaws went. Montemorelos was ahead, a descent again to hotter altitudes. It grew exceedingly hot and strange. Neal absolutely had to wake me up to see this. “Look Jack, you must not miss.” I looked. We were going through swamps and alongside the road at ragged intervals strange Mexicans in tattered rags walked along with bolo knives hanging from their rope belts and some of them cut at the bushes. They all stopped to watch us without expression. Through the tangled bush we occasionally saw thatched huts with African like bamboo walls. Strange young girls dark as the moon stared from mysterious verdant doorways. “Oh man I want to stop and twiddle thumbs with the little darlings” cried Neal “but notice the old lady or the old man is always somewhere around---in the back usually, sometimes a hundred yards gathering twigs and wood or tending animals. They’re never alone. Nobody’s ever alone in this country. While you’ve been sleeping I’ve been digging this road and this country and if I could only tell you all the thoughts I’ve had man!” He was sweating. His eyes were red-streaked and mad and also subdued and tender---he had found a people like himself. We bowled right through the endless swamp country at a steady forty five. “Jack I think the country

25 February 2009

for work in the fields; they smiled at us. Neal stared at them with rocky eyes. “Damn” he said under his breath “Ooh! This is too great to be true. Gurls, gurls. And particularly right in my stage and condition Jack I am digging the interiors of these homes as we pass them---these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, and the mothers cooking up breakfast in iron pots and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the humble peasant and all that crap---and crap about greasers and so on---and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bullshit. I’m so amazed by this.” Schooled in the raw road night Neal was come in to the world to see it. He bent over the wheel and looked both ways and rolled along slowly. We stopped for gas the other side of Sabinas Hidalgo. Here a congregation of local strawhatted ranchers with handlebar mustaches growled and whooped in front of antique gaspumps. Across the fields an old man plodded with a burro in front of his switch stick. The sun rose pure on pure & ancient activities of human life. Now we resumed to Monterrey. The great mountains rose snowcapped before us; we bowled right for them. A gap widened and wound up a pass and we went with it. In a matter of minutes we were out of the mesquite desert and climbing among cool airs in a road with a stonewall along the precipice side and great whitewashed names of presidents on the cliffsides---“Aleman!” We met nobody on this high road. It wound among the clouds and took us to the great plateau on top. Across this plateau the big manufacturing town of Monterrey sent smoke to the blue skies with their enormous Gulf clouds written across the bowl of day like fleece. Entering Monterrey was like entering Detroit, among great long walls of factories, except for the burros that sunned in the grass before them, and the barefoot

24 February 2009

worse. These people don’t bother with appearances.” The first town ahead that had any consequence on the map was called Sabinas Hidalgo. We looked forward to it eagerly. “And the road don’t look any different than the American road” cried Neal “except one mad thing and if you’ll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City. See, it’s the only city in the entire land, everything points to it.” There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers that figure was over a thousand. “Damn! I gotta go!” cried Neal. For awhile I closed my eyes in utter exhaustion and kept hearing Neal pound the wheel with his fists and say “Damn” and “God what kicks!” and “Oh what a land!” and “Yes!” We arrived at Sabinas Hidalgo across the desert at about seven o’clock in the morning. We slowed down completely to see this. We woke up Frank in the backseat. We sat up straight to dig. The main street was muddy and full of holes. On each side were dirty brokendown dobe fronts. Burros walked in the street with packs. Barefooted women watched us from dark doorways. It was incredible. The street was completely crowded with people on foot beginning a new day in the Mexican countryside. Old men with handlebar mustaches stared at us. The sight of three bearded bedraggled American youths instead of the usual welldressed tourists was of unusual interest to them. We bounced along over Main Street at ten miles an hour taking everything in. A group of girls walked directly in front of us. As we bounced by one of them said “Where you going man?” I turned to Neal amazed. “Did you hear what she said?” Neal was so astounded he kept on driving slowly and saying “Yes I heard what she said, I certainly gawd-damn well did, Oh me, Oh my, I don’t know what to do I’m so excited and sweetened in this morning world. We’ve finally got to heaven. It couldn’t be cooler, it couldn’t be grander, it couldn’t be any-thing.” “Well let’s go back and pick them up!” I said. “Yes” said Neal and drove right on at five miles an hour. He was knocked-out he didn’t have to do the usual things he would have done in America. “There’s millions of them all along the road by gawd!” he said. Nevertheless he U-turned and came by the girls again. They were headed

23 February 2009

about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic either. “Think of these cats staying up all hours of the night” whispered Neal. “And think of this big continent ahead of us with those enormous Sierra Madre mountains we saw in the movies and the jungles all the way down and a whole desert plateau as big as ours and reaching clear down to Guatemala and God knows where, whoo! What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move!” We got out and went back to the car. One last glimpse of America across the hot lights of the Rio Grande bridge. We turned our back and fender to it and roared off. Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn’t a light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just then dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began to see the ghostly shapes of Yucca cactus and Organpipe on all sides. “What a wild country!” I yelped. Neal and I were completely awake. In Laredo we’d been half dead. Frank, who’d been to foreign countries before just calmly slept in the backseat. Neal and I had the whole of Mexico before us. “Now Jack we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks---and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us---they were here weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.” “This road” I told him “is also the route of old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you’ll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making his lonely exile gallop into the unknown you’ll see further…” “It’s the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Sonofabitch---Gawd-damn!” We rushed on. The dawn spread immediately and we began to see the white sand of the desert and occasional huts in the distance off the road. Neal slowed down to peer at them. “Real beat huts, man, the kind you only find in Death Valley and much

22 February 2009

mysterious Spanish streets. It was only Nuevo Laredo but it looked like Barcelona. “Man those guys are up all night” whispered Neal. We hurried to get our papers straightened. We were warned not to drink tapwater now we were over the border. The Mexicans looked at our baggage in a desultory way. They weren’t like officials at all. They were lazy and tender. Neal couldn’t stop staring at them. “See how the cops are in this country. I can’t believe it!” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m dreaming.” Then it was time to change our money. We saw great stacks of pesos on a table and learned that eight of them made an American buck, or thereabouts. We changed most of our money and stuffed the big rolls in our pockets with delight. Then we turned our faces to Mexico with bashfulness and wonder as those dozens of Mexican cats watched us from under their secret hatbrims in the night. Beyond was music and all night restaurants with smoke pouring out the door. “Whee” whispered Neal very softly. “Thassall!” grinned a Mexican official. “You boys all set. Go ahead. Welcome Mexico. Have good time. Watch you money. Watch you driving. I say this to you personal, I’m Red, everybody call me Red. Ask for Red. Eat good. Don’t worry. Everything fine.” “Yes-yes-yes!” squealed Neal and off we went across the street into Mexico on soft feet. We left the car parked and all three of us abreast went down the Spanish street into the middle of the dull brown lights. Old men sat on chairs in the night and looked like Oriental junkies and oracles. No one was actually looking at us yet everybody was aware of everything we did. We turned sharp left into the smoky lunchroom and went in to music of campo guitars on an American Thirties jukebox. Shirtsleeved Mexican cabdrivers and strawhatted Mexican hipsters sat at stools devouring shapeless messes of tortillas, beans, tacos, whatnot. We bought three bottles of cold beer---told at once “Cerveza” was the name for beer---for about thirty cents or ten cents each. We bought packs of Mexican cigarettes for six cents each. We gazed and gazed at our wonderful Mexican money that went so far and played with it and looked around and smiled at everyone. Behind us lay the whole continent of America and everything Neal and I had previously known