Desolation Angels (35 page)

That night, back at their apartment, rain splattering in the courtyard, suddenly Laz had a fever and went to bed—Old Bull Gaines came over for his daily evening visit wearing his best stolen tweed jacket. Laz was suffering from a weird virus that many American tourists get when they come to Mexico, not exactly dysentery either but something undetermined. “Only one sure cure,” says Bull, “a good shot of morphine.” So Irwin and Simon discussed it anxiously and decided to try it, Laz was in misery. Sweat, cramps, nausea. Gaines sat on the edge of the sheeted bed and tied up his arm and popped a sixteenth of a grain in, and in the morning Lazarus jumped up completely well after a long sleep and rushed out to find an ice cream soda. Which makes you realize the restrictions on drugs (or,
medicine
) in America comes from doctors who dont want people to heal themselves—

Amen, Anslinger—

14

And that was the really great day when we all went to the Pyramids of Teotihuacan—First we had our picture taken by a photographer in the park downtown, the Prado—We all stand there proud, me and Irwin and Simon standing (today I'm amazed to see I had broad shoulders then), and Raphael and Laz kneeling in front of us, like a Team.

Ah sad. Like the old photographs all brown now of my mother's father and his gang posing erect in 1890 New Hampshire—Their mustaches, the light on their heads—or like the old photographs you find in abandoned Connecticut farmhouse attics showing an 1860 child in a crib, and he's already dead, and
you're
really already dead—The old light of 1860 Connecticut enough to make Tom Wolfe cry shining on the little baby's proud be-bustled brown lost mother—But our picture really resembles the old Civil War Buddy Photographs of Thomas Brady, the proud captured Confederates glaring at the Yankees but so sweet there's hardly any anger there, just the old Whitman sweetness that made Whitman cry and be a nurse—

We hop a bus and go rattling to the Pyramids, about 30, 20 miles, the fields of pulque flash by—Lazarus stares at strange Mexican Lazaruses staring at him with the same divine innocence, but with brown eyes instead of blue.

When we reach there we start walking to the pyramids in the same straggling way, Irwin and Simon and me in front talking, Raphael off to the side musing, and Laz 50 yards behind clomping like Frankenstein. We start climbing the stone steps of the Pyramid of the Sun.

All fireworshipers worshiped the sun, and if they gave a person to the sun and ate the person's heart, they ate the Sun. This was the Pyramid of horrors where they bent the victim back over a stone sink and cut his beating heart out with one or two movements of a heart-clipper, raised the heart to the sun, and ate it. Monstrous priests not even hep to effigy. (Today in modern Mexico children eat candy hearts and skulls at Halloween.)

Your Indiana scarecrow is an old Thuringian phantasy …

When we got to the top of the Pyramid I lit up a marijuana cigarette so we could all examine our instincts about the place. Lazarus reached out his arms to the sun, straight up, altho we hadnt told him what it was up there, or what to do. Altho he looked goofy doing this I realized he knew more than any one of us.

Not to mention your Easter bunny …

He reached up his arms straight and actually clawed for the sun for thirty seconds. Me thinkin I'm beyond all this but a big
Buddha
sit crosslegged at the top, put my hand down, and immediately feel a biting sting. “My God I been bit by a scorpion at last!” but I look down at my bleeding hand and it's only tourist broken glass. So I wrap the hand up in my red neckerchief.

But sitting up there high and thoughtful I began to see something about Mexican history I'd never find in books. The runners come panting that all Texcoco is in warlike rouge again. You can see all Lake Texcoco like a warning glittering on the horizon south, and west of that the huddled monster hint of a greater kingdom inside the crater:—the Kingdom of Azteca. Ow. The Teotihuacan priests propitiate gods by the millions and invent them as they go along. Two monstrous empires only 30 miles away visible to the naked eye from the top of their own flimsy funeral pyre. They therefore in dread turn their eyes north to the perfect smooth mountain behind the pyramids with its perfect grassy top where no doubt (as I sat there realizing) lived in a hut an aged sage, the actual King of Teotihuacan. They climbed to his hut in the evening for advice. He waved a feather as tho the world meant nothing and said “Oh,” or more likely “Oops!”

I told this to Raphael who thereupon framed his eyes with far seeing general's hand and looked at the blink of the Lake. “By God you're right, they musta shit in their pants up here.” Then I told him of the mountain in back and that Sage but he said “Some goatherd eccentric Oedipus.” Meanwhile Lazarus was still trying to grab the sun.

Little kids came up to sell us what they said were genuine relics found under the ground: little stone heads and bodies. Some craftsmen were making perfect raggedy looking imitations in the village below where, at dusk's
obscura,
boys played sad basketball. (Gee, just like Durrell and Lowry!)

“Let's investigate the caves!” yells Simon. Meanwhile an American tourist woman arrives at the top and tells us to sit still while she takes color photographs of us. I'm sitting cross-legged with a bandaged hand turning to look at waving Irwin and grinning others as she snaps it: she later sends the picture to us (address given) from Guadalajara.

We go down to investigate the caves, the alleys under the Pyramid, me and Simon hide in one dead-end cave giggling and when Irwin and Raphael come groping by we yell “Whoo!” Lazarus, tho, he's in his element stomping up and down silently. You couldnt scare him with a ten-foot sail in his bathroom. The last time I'd played ghosts was during the war at sea off the coast of Iceland.

We then emerge from the caves and cross a field near the Pyramid of the Moon that has hundreds of big ant villages each one clearly defined by a heap and a heap of activity all around it, Raphael deposits a small twig in one of the Spartas and all the warriors rush up and carry it away so's not to disturb the Senator and his broken bench. We put still another bigger twig and those crazy ants carry it away. For a whole hour, smoking pot, we lean over and examine these ant villages. We dont hurt one citizen. “Look that guy hurrying from the edge of town carrying that piece of dead scorpion meat to the hole—” Down the hole he goes for meat's winter. “Sposin we had a jar of honey, would they think it was Armageddon?”

“They'd have big Mormon prayers before doves.”

“And build tabernacles and sprinkle em with ant piss.”

“
Really
Jack—maybe they'd just store the honey and forget all about
you
” (Irwin).

“Are there ant hospitals underneath the mound?” The five of us leaned over the ant village wondering. When we built little mounds the ants immediately started the great state tax-paid task of removing them. “You could squash the whole village, make assemblies rage and pale! just with your foot!”

“While the Teo priests goofed up there these ants were just beginning to dig a real underground super market.”

“It must be great by now.”

“We could take a shovel and investigate all their corridors—What pity God must have not to step on them” but no sooner said than done, Lazarus in walking away from us back to the caves has left his monstrous shoe tracks in a straight absent-minded line across half a dozen earnest Roman villages.

We follow Lazarus walking around the ant villages carefully. I say: “Irwin, didnt Laz hear what we said about the ants—for an hour?”

“Oh
yah,
” gaily, “but now he's thinking about something else.”

“But he's walking right thru, right on their villages and heads—”

“Oh yah—”

“With his big huge shoes!”

“Yah, but he's thinking about something or other.”

“
What?
”

“I dont know—if he had a bicycle it'd be worse.”

We watched Laz stomping straight across the Moon Field to his goal, which was a rock to sit on.

“He's a monster!” I cried.

“Well you're a monster yourself when you eat meat—think of all the little happy bacterias have to take a gruesome trip thru the cave of your acid entrails.”

“And they all turn into hairy knots!” adds Simon.

15

So, as Lazarus walks through villages, so God walks thru our lives, and like the workers and the warriors we worry like worrywarts to straighten up the damage as fast as we can, tho the whole thing's hopeless in the end. For God has a bigger foot than Lazarus and all the Texcocos and Texacos and Mañanas of tomorrow. We end up watching a dusk basketball game among Indian boys near the bus stop. We stand under an old tree at the dirtroad crossing, receiving dust as it's blown by the plains wind of the High Plateau of Mexico the likes of which none bleaker maybe than in Wyoming in October, late October …

p.s. The last time I was in Teotihuacan, Hubbard said to me “Wanta see a scorpion, boy?” and lifted up a rock—There sat a female scorpion beside the skeleton of its mate, which it had eaten—Yelling “Yaaaah!” Hubbard lifted a huge rock and smashed it down on the whole scene (and tho I'm not like Hubbard, I had to agree with him that time).

16

How unbelievably bleak the actual world really is after you've dreamed of gay whore streets and gay dancing nightclubs but you end up as Irwin and Simon and I did, the one night we went out alone, staring among the cold and bony rubbles of the night—Tho there may be a neon at the end of the alley the alley is incredibly sad, in fact impossible—We'd started out in more or less sports attire, with Raphael in tow, to go dancing at the Club Bombay but the moment broody Raphael smelled those dead dog streets and saw the soiled uniforms of beat
mariachi
singers, heard the whine of the mess of insane horror which is your modern city street night he went home in a cab alone, saying “Shit on all this, I want Eurydice and Persephone's horn—I dont wanta go mudtrampling thru all this sickness—”

Irwin has a persevering grim gaiety which leads him on leading me and Simon to the soiled lights—In the Club Bombay are a dozen crazy Mexican girls dancing at a peso a throw with their pelvics tossed right into the men, sometimes holding the men by the pants, as an unbelievably melancholy orchestra trumpets out blue songs from the bandstand of sorrows—The trumpeters have no expression, the mambo drummer is bored, the singer thinks he's in Nogales serenading the stars but's only buried in the slums' slummiest hole agitating mud from our lips—Mudlipped whores just around the slimy corner of the Bombay are standing ranked against pockholed walls full of bedbugs and cockroaches calling out to parades of lechers who prowl up and down trying to see what the girls look like in the dark—Simon is wearing a bright tan sportcoat and goes dancing romantically with his pesos all over the floor, bowing to his black haired companions. “Doesnt he look romantic?” says Irwin sighing in the booth where we're drinking Dos Equis.

“Well he's not exactly the image of the gay American tourist living it up in Mexico—”

“Why
not?
” says Irwin annoyed.

“The world is so goofy everywhere—like you imagine that when you get to Paris with Simon there'll be raincoats and Arc de Triomphes of brilliant sadness and all the time you'll be yawning at bus stops.”

“Well, Simon's having a good time.” Yet Irwin cant entirely disagree with me as we roam up and down the dark whore street and he shudders to see the glimpses of filth inside the cribs, behind pink rags. He wont take a girl and go in. Simon and I are bound to make it. I find a whole group of whores sitting like a family on the doorstep, old ones protecting young ones. I motion for the youngest one, fourteen. We go in as she yells “
Agua caliente
” to a subsidiary hot water whore girl. In behind flimsy curtains you hear creaking platforms where a thin mattress's been laid on rotten boards. The walls leak oozy doom. As soon as a Mexican girl emerges from a curtain and you see the girl swinging her legs back to the floor in a flash of dark thighs and cheap silk, my little girl leads me in and starts washing unceremoniously in the squatting position. “
Tres peso,
” she says sternly, making sure to get her 24 cents before we start. When we do start she's so small you cant find her for at least a minute of probing. Then the rabbits run, like American high school kids going a mile a minute … the only way for the young, actually. But she is not particularly interested either. I find myself losing myself in her without one iota of trained responsibility holding me back, like, “Here I am completely free as an animal in a crazy Oriental barn!” and thus I go, nobody
cares.

But Simon in his strange Russian eccentricity has meanwhile picked out a fat old whore battered from Juarez on down no doubt since the days of Diaz, he goes in the back with her and we actually (from the sidewalk) hear great giggles going on as Simon evidently is joking with all the ladies. Ikons of the Virgin Mary burning in holes in the wall. Trumpets around the corner, the awful smell of old fried sausages, brick smell, damp brick, mud, banana peels—and over a broken wall you see the stars.

A week later poor Simon had gonorrhea and had to get penicillin shots. He hadnt bothered to clean up with the special salve medicine, as I had.

17

He didnt know that now as we left the whore street and just strolled up the main drag of beat (poor) Mexican nightlife, Redondas Street. All of a sudden we saw an amazing sight. A little young swishy fairy of about 16 hurried past us holding the hand of a ragged barefoot Indian boy of 12. They kept looking over their shoulders. I looked back and noticed the police were watching them. They turned sharply and hid in a dark sidestreet door. Irwin was in ecstasy. “Did you
see
the older one, just like Charley Chaplin and the Kid twinkling down the street hand in hand in love, chased by the big butch fuzz—Let's
talk
to them!”