“The best part is what follows, Cigano,” Maria begun, pinning me to the spot with her smiling brown intelligent eyes. They peered at me like burning lasers from her drug-ravaged face with traces of what was obviously once great beauty. Maria. An old lady at 24.

“They went up and cleaned out the guy’s apartment and found it was all full of voodoo stuff,” she drawled between jagged tobacco-stained teeth in her distinctive aristocratic gutter-goddess patois. “Hundreds of candles and plastic statues and shit, all kinda images of every fucking saint and entity in the book, all this crazy ritual magic stuff.

“Vigi Maia…” Maria crossed herself. The other hookers did the same. “…so they clean it all out, Cigano, slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls and rent the place again… now, would yabelieve…”  she paused a moment for emphasis “…not a month goes by… and the new tenant gets up one night and… chucks himself OUT THE WINDOW! Just like that! Boom-ba! Landed right on the hood of a guy’s car who was talking to Rosie who used to stand over there…”

“Sounded like a bomb going off!” one of the other girls chimed in. “Fucked that guy’s car up real good…”

“… didn’t do Rosie’s career much good either,” Maria said. “Blood and brains and shit all over her new white dress. Ugh! Remember she used to dress up all in white every night like some second rate suburban angel? Hah! After that, everybody kept calling her ‘the fallen woman’ and finally it really started getting on her nerves, so she stopped talking to anyone down here. Stuck up floozy…. then one day she was gone…”

“I heard she married a rich Gringo and moved to his country,” one said.

“Fat chance with the mug on her! Them big greasy eyeballs, man… she looked like a lonely old Chihuahua,” another one guffawed. “Some psycho gringo probably hacked her up and took her pussy home in his suitcase…”

They all laughed. I knew their tale-spinning session was just getting warmed up. The long night ahead was but a child for these girls. I was getting restless again. Finally I gave them a few cigarettes and kisses. Then I rolled off down the beach, knowing that if all else failed I’d be back around dawn to give little Shirley a ride home with a quick stop at my place. She wasn’t much to look at, old Shirley, but she liked to dress up like a schoolgirl. With those skinny pasty legs and rolled up white cotton stockings peeping out from the blue skirt, it always gave me an extra thrill to fuck her till dawn. She’d scream loud enough to wake up my square neighbors on their workday mornings. Good times. When we were done I’d always grin and hand her a few bucks for cab fare home. That was just our little private joke though, since Shirley lived only a few buildings down the street from me. Then I’d roll over and pass out in the rumpled sheets smelling of lust and cheap perfume and her cigarette smokey hair as the morning-birds darted to and fro outside my 6th floor window.

After a while I stopped thinking about whores and switched channels. I just sat there quietly by the beach, listening to the graveyard waves of approaching night, thinking about my recently deceased father, wondering how he was making out there in the afterlife. Salty old bastard. Maybe he’d even be proud of me, I thought, if he only knew anything about my wonderful life.

END

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010.

CHETUMAL
NOVEMBER 1974

Dear Doris,

Finally I decided to move on and I hitched a ride south. Since then I’ve been staying in an abandoned house with no roof on the outskirts of Chetumal. This is a real spooky old pirate town on a bay on the Caribbean coast near the border to British Honduras, the gateway to Central America. This is also a free port, so I’ve been eating imported cheese and drinking French wine for the price of a plate of beans and rice. I buy fresh shrimp from the fishermen for a few pesos and cook it on a small fire in my ‘living room’ here. The ocean is beautiful here to, emerald green in the morning, and even though it’s always hot and tropical (the jungle comes right down to the sea here) there’s always a nice sea breeze blowing in off the bay and I can hang my hammock between two coconut palms. At night it even gets so cool I have to wrap up in a blanket, also to fend off the mosquitos who are like a pack of invisible vampires, especially right around sundown. I’d like to spend a winter here, just to see what three meters of rainfall is like in one season. Judging from the construction of most of the houses here, the hurricanes must be pretty heavy. Some of the nicer old buildings which have seen lots of storms have window glass that’s half an inch thick. Most of the dwellings here in the jungle villages are made of bamboo shafts with thatched straw roofs. Since it’s mostly all swamp here, it’s hard for people to grow anything to eat, so most people seem to live off of canned goods from the free port of Chetumal, along with a sad little selection of vegetables trucked in from Veracruz and Chiapas. That and the usual red beans and rice and cheap maiz tortillas which are the staple of any Mexican meal. The mosquitos have put bites over every square inch of my hide here.

Today I’m gonna give myself a malaria shot before I go further south into the jungles of Central America to get to the ports there and look for work on a ship. You can buy the vaccine and needles right over the counter in pharmacies here, since doctors are pretty scarce in these parts of the world.

Love,

Jono

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TULUM

OCTOBER 1974

After I left San Cristobal I passed a few hours in a very small village in one of the little valleys in the hills and there was a big fiesta going on there that took over the whole town with a marimba band and costumed dancers with bizarre colorful animal masks, the whole country and people here are like magic to me. I got on the back of another truck just after dark and rode all the way to Palenque.

The road was very cold and I wrapped up in a blanket and lay on my back looking at the sky and I could see every star in the universe as the tops of the big pine trees whizzed by and just when I got to the point where it was so cold I thought I’d holler, the road suddenly began to drop and kept dropping for the next 100 kilometers and I sat up and watched the terrain changing right before my eyes and in less than an hour’s time we’d gone from the chilly high altitudes of frozen pine tree forests, down into eucalyptus groves and down down into a steamy hot tropical jungle, a primeval prehistoric rain forest with gigantic rock cliffs all covered with vines and creepers jutting out above us and out over the road with all kinds of jagged crazy palm trees and banana forests with waterfalls so I had the impression of being completely surrounded on all sides by this thick dense land and every so often the road would veer off through some little town of straw huts and I’d hear the distant marimba music blending with shrieks and whistles of great parrots and all sorts of crazy birds and animals from the trees, fantastic. I arrived in Palenque just before dawn and walked straight out to the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilization. After traveling all night, I wasn’t at all tired. My energy was redoubled and I watched in awe as the sun came up like a red ball of fire silhouetted against the great mysterious Mayan ruins surrounded by beautiful pristine jungle. I climbed to the top of the Tomb of the Inscriptions where I sat feasting my eyes for an hour until the tourists began to come in their pastel colored droves, spoiling the scene.

Finally, I ran off into the jungle and took a cool invigorating shower under a clear waterfall, then I hiked back to the road circumventing the ruins so as not to have to see their ugliness again, preferring to retain my memory of this magical place unsullied by the image of them swarming and gawking and squawking with their cameras and bratty kids. I had seen what I’d come to see, seen that great city almost as must have been before the Conquest and that’s how I would remember it.

I’ve been here a week outside the far south jungle town of Tulum. I feel like Robinson Crusoe, camping out in a coconut grove near the sea there, about 10 km from the ancient Mayan ruins dotting the coastline, all surrounded by thick tropical rain forest, and not a damn gringo tourist in sight, thank god! I’d been living on nothing but coconuts for a few days until  finally I hiked into town and splurged on some eggs and tomatoes. I cooked them with my little frying pan over a fire by the ocean and sat there eating that meal like it was a five-star restaurant meal, I sure had a five star view there, more like a five million star view. I never knew there were so many stars in the sky. The moon was full last night, so I wandered down the deserted coast to explore the ruins at night and it was some experience. I could almost imagine what it must have been like when that place was the center of a thriving advanced civilation thousands of years ago. All gone now. Nothing but ruins after the Europeans came to spread the bloody doctrine of Christianity. I can understand why you always hated the church so. The Catholic church has done more to turn people against God than any medieval devil ever could have.

Your loving son,

J

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SAN CRISTOBAL
OCTOBER 1974

Dear Doris,

I got the itch again, so I left Oaxaca and hitched a ride south about halfway to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec where all the women were exceptionally tall and wore long colorful gowns like gypsy princesses. It was very late when I got there. I was still several miles from the main town where the truck driver dropped me off. I was just walking along the road looking for a good place to lay my blanket down and sleep for the night when a bus came along. It was the first vehicle I’d seen since I got there and it just stopped. I told the driver to go ahead cuz I didnt have enough money for the bus, but he just smiled and shook his finger at me and said it was ok, that I could ride for free. I offered to ride on top with the crates and luggage but he wouldn’t hear of it. He even offered to buy me dinner when we got to the capitol and he wouldnt take no for an answer.

The busses in Mexico look like old broken down 1950’s schoolbusses with big racks on top packed with all kind of luggage, livestock and even passengers when the bus gets too crowded inside. It’s pretty common to have to squeeze onto a bus with like 200 people, plus another 50 on top or hanging from the rear standing on the bumper sometimes when it’s really full, and then you look up and see the sign above the driver saying CAPACIDAD 55 PASSENGEROS. These cross-country busses will stop anywhere along the road for anyone who wants a ride and puts their hand out. The drivers compensate for all the time they lose stopping for passengers by driving those beat-up old crates like they were race cars, disregarding the most basic principals of common sense or sanity even, pulling all sorts of suicidal kamikaze road maneuvers, like passing slow trucks at blind curves at breakneck speed along a stretch of highway called the Spinoza del Diablo (the devil’s backbone). The Mexican busdriver seems to conduct himself with an air of distinguished calm, reminiscent of a airline pilot or something. These cross country Mexican bus drivers are very respected and even have their own copilots, usually young boys who shift gears for them or steer the bus around the most perilous curves at absurd speeds while the driver casually lights a cigarette as if he was sitting at home or in a cantina. Needless to say, Mexicans have tremendous faith in God — especially their bus drivers.

In a village outside Tehuantepec, I spent the night in a jail cell. Often in small towns where there’s no hotel, travelers are kindly permitted to spend the night in municipal buildings in exchange for a few kind words to the mayor or his wife. I slept rather fitfully because the cell door stayed open all night. When I saw the ‘Jefe de Policia’, the Chief of Police, the next morning, he was a wasted old boozer who looked more like a janitor than any kind of an authority. I summised that my ”cell” probably hadn’t been used other than for him and his cronies to crash in for many years. I left Tehuantepec and woke up shivering on the back of a truck. I arrived freezing to San Cristobal de Las Casas in the middle of the night, where I am now. When I’d left that morning, the temperature had been a pleasent 90 in tropical sun. Now here I was walking the empty midnight streets of this place high up in the mountains. I couldn’t wrap enough blankets around me to keep warm, but luckily I found the best hotel in town (the cheapest) where the temperature in the room rose to about 10 degrees above freezing. All in all, not a bad deal for less than a dollar for the night, especially because I could avail myself freely of the fantastic steam baths with hot and cold showers right across a sleepy courtyard from my room. San Cristobal is a marvelous city not far from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, hidden snugly in a high valley way up in the mountains. Very clean and quiet and old-worldy. The population is 80% Indians here, and a guy told me the town was named after Las Casas, a fanatical monk who who was famous for his appeals to the King of Spain on behalf of the indians who, to this day, are treated like animals by the gentry. All the houses here are solidly built with red tile roofs, a very old town with many beautiful old churches scattered around from when the church was really really rich , as opposed to just filthy rich as it is today. Overall, the place seems more like a Swiss village high in the Alps than someplace in the south of Mexico. A very nice place.

Love

J

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OAXACA
SEPTEMBER 1974

Dear Doris,

Finally had my fill of idleness and solitude.  I packed up my little bag and hitchhiked a ride about 50 km south to Pochutla where the road goes inland to the capital, Oaxaca. I couldn’t get a ride out that day, so I spent the night right there by the side of the road on the outskirts of the town. I was surprised to wake up in the middle of the night to find the whole town was converted into one huge carnival fiesta with a ferris wheel and brass bands and what seemed like every drunk farmer in the state of Oaxaca with his family. I had a good time drinking with a bunch of traveling carnies and crazy Mexican flim-flam aritists. I stayed up all night with them and drank too much Mezcal, which is made from maguay cactus and sold by old ladies in gasoline tins and gourd bowls and coconut shells, costs like a half a dollar a liter and has definite hallucinogenic qualities, though by the time you’e had enough to really trip on, you’re too drunk to even notice, at least I was.

The next morning I picked myself up off the little cot I’d rented on someone’s porch, and with a splitting head, I started walking along the road leading back out of town. Finally a truck stopped. After convincing the driver I wasn’t carrying any mota (grass), cuz the federal cops are known to confiscate a vehicle if just one passenger has even a joint, the driver said he was going all the way to the capital and I could ride up on top. Some of the travelers I’d talked to in Escondido had told me not to take that ride as it’s over 12 hours along hairpin mountain curves on a bumpy dirt road and just too much to endure.

” Take the plane” they advised me. ”It only takes an hour and costs like ten bucks”.

Those well intentioned more well-heeled travelers didn’t know that ten bucks would be enough money for me to live on for a week, so I just ignored them and took the road trip despite their warnings. I clutched for dear life to the rack on the top as the truck sped off into the jungle and then suddenly started barreling straight up the side of a mountain till I was way up in the clouds. Within an hour, I was totally frozen and the road was curving like something out of dante’s inferno and not even wide enough for two vehicles to pass. I was just beginning to think about that possibility as the truck sped around a serpentine curve overlooking a 1000 ft precipice into the foggy cold darkness below, when the notion suddenly hit me, like a little voice telling me, ”just sit back and relax, you’ll make it.” And then I relaxed and looked around from the top of the truck and that’s when I saw it: the most beautiful awesome panoramic view I’ve ever seen in my life! Behind me, the ocean streached out as far and blue as infinity, and I could swear I saw the earth’s curve from up there. Up ahead, the road wound off crazily around another twist in the mountain, still climbing. Off to one side there was a giant rock cliff leading up the mountainside, and on the other side another cliff dropping down 5 thousand feet, straight down to this huge bottomless pit — and no guard rail! But above me there was the bluest sky with the kind of clouds you only see from airplane windows, so I just lay back again and looked up at the clouds and tried not to think of death. All in all, it was a most enjoyable ride. I made it here in the capital around 1am and set right out to find the cheapest hotel I could find near the gigantic open-air marketplace.

It seems like half of Mexico gathers in the Oaxaca marketplace on Saturdays to bargain, sell, trade, buy, barter, steal, look and generally engage in every form of commerce known to man. I sold a cheap little camera I’d brought with me and never used to a local hustler in the market for 5 times more than I paid for it in the States. With the money, I bought myself a new handmade hand tooled little leather traveling bag to replace my plastic valise, the one Grandma left in the garage, which was coming apart at the seams after traveling all the way across Mexico. My new traveling bag would cost a fortune up there in LA, so for a 5 dollar camera, I got a beautiful hundred dollar hand-tooled leather satchel. Since my travel bag is my only home now, it seemed like an important purchase. There’s so much beautiful stuff to buy here in Oaxaca, but I have to content myself with looking. Even if I had any money to buy stuff, where the hell would I put it?

Only a small part of the huge marketplace is handmade crafts though. The rest of the commerce occupies all these big old buildings, each one like a full city-block long, and on Saturdays, when the Indians come to town from their little pueblos all around the capital, they just lay all their goods down on the ground anywhere they can, and it all spills out onto the streets all around the indoor markets and tents until the whole place is so thick with people and all kinds of stuff that it could take you 20 min to walk a block. People are yelling and shouting and hawking and pushing and shoving and cursing and it’s completely impossible to pass without shoving or knocking someone down and walking right over their body as they curse and smack your ankles with their fists and your foot descends unwittingly on somebody’s face and then some bigger guy comes along and shoves you aside, and you barely manage to keep from falling into a big pile of sparkling red tomatos that some old lady has placed at that exact spot, only squishing one or two with your elbow as you fall, and she curses and calls you a son of a cow, and her raspy curses fade off in the distance as you’re carried off by the surging crowd of moving bodies. It felt like I was in one of those ant farms or something. Crazy. Somehow out of this whole unruly mess, the people of Oaxaca are paid and fed and supplied with clothing and food and all sorts of necessary items for another week.

I found the cheapest hotel right in the middle of this whole crazy marketplace, and I’ve been entertaining myself there ever since. The hotel itself is pretty comfortable, especially for only costing like 25 cents a night, but when I got here there was no private bathroom and they had a whole bunch of hogs living in the public shower stalls. My room had a huge crack in the thin wooden wall with a panoramic view into the next room where fat naked mexicans did unspeakable things. I finally asked for a room with a private bath for another 10 cents, cuz of the animals in the showers.  Now it’s another one of those deals where you have to sit on the john to shower, but it’s better than standing up in a shower with a bunch of huge pigs.

Speaking of pigs, I’ve never seen so much stuff to eat in one place as this market. The food is very cheap here too, even cheaper than cooking myself, so I’ve eaten very well the whole time I’ve been here. You can get three big black bumpy avocados and some nice red tomatos and a bunch of limes and cilentro, enough to make a big bowl of guacamole for less than a peso and you can eat it with your lunch at one of the lunch counters serving delicious hot homemade meals. One whole section of the market right by my hotel is like 40 or 50 of these little restaurant stalls all shoved together under a big long tent, and you can get two big chiles rellenos stuffed with meat, cheese, or chicken in a delicious sauce with rice and beans, and eat that with your peso’s worth of guacamole and it’s enough of a meal to fill you for the whole day, all for only about 40 cents. Oaxaca’s a fine place, especially for such a big town, a city really. I wish everyplace was so abundant, especially when I walk into some little off the road fly speck on the map and see a million flies all fighting over two half-rotten tomatos and a brown wad of limp lettuce for the price of three of these good restaruant meals here.

Well, things are different everywhere I go, but everyplace has its own special appeal and charm for me.

Love always,

J

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Goddamnit this port town, I realize, is just another Central American town where customs like the Holy Church are a straitjacket to the people or at least to me because I am very certainly an outsider and don’t have the background to deal with or get around the taboos and such here. Everywhere ya go there’s pictures of the Pope. That’s a problem I think. I dunno. Maybe it’s not that at all but maybe just a long terrible feeling of frustration after not having a woman for so long. These Spanish girls here just don’t move me though. And I just want to get good and drunk at night and indulge in sad fantasies and even recollections of dead girls back home. Maybe I was better off a crazed junkie in the madhouse of America. I mean, you only live once and it all just comes down to shit in the end.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

St Patrick’s Day
2010
Times Square

Fact: Saint Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland. Why then do they all come slither about on his day of honor?
Fact: Holy days are meant to venerate Saints. Last time I checked, vomiting at their likenesses fell under the ‘desecration’ category.

Now that we have the facts straight, this is how my day went. It all started because I found myself enjoying the uncharacteristically warm weather so much yesterday that, instead of descending into the 14th street station and taking the train to class, I followed the glistening sidewalk all the way to Midtown. Of course in my sun-drenched daisy-filled summer-lovin’ mind, I completely forgot the occasion. You know, that day where every asshole is the Irish kind.

Well, as soon as I hit 23rd street, my rose-colored glasses turned into green beer goggles. They were everywhere. I mean everywhere. Crawling out of the sewers, clogging the crosswalks, flopping around haphazardly in front of bars wearing Jerzees with names like McGillicutty across the back in big orange letters. Screeching poisonous renditions of Danny Boy and Kerrick Fergus from these greasy drooling hatches while laying belly up on the gummy dogshit pavement. It was horrifying.

This was some serious shit. Why was I the only person who appeared visibly shaken by the thousands of possessed green gnomes that had taken to the streets in vomit-inducing revelry? What exactly were they celebrating? Did they even know?

I slunk along like a wounded animal, trying to disappear into the bricks of the grime-covered midtown buildings all the way to my class on 35th street. Luckily by the time I got out of class, the revelers had slithered on back into whatever holes they called “bed.” I walked down through the shallow-breathing Chelsea streets back to my apartment, careful to avoid the river of corned-beef vomit that mixed with green confetti as it made its slimy retreat into the underworld– where it belonged, with other green things.

Saint Patrick, wherever you are, please take this as a formal apology on behalf of humanity.

Sincerely,

Alessandra De Benedetti