Dead End in Every Face...

The dinner with Oscar was a fiasco. I should had used my better judgement instead of thinking with my passions of the past. He arrived late with wife in tow.
Oh, a chaperon. How appropriate. I thought.

He wasn't the positive youth that I remembered since he washed all that paint and grime off of him from his job earlier that day. Life had not been kind - his face was lined and carried a paranoid petulance. There was hatred in those eyes - hatred at the world. He smelled of stale liquor and confessed in lurid detail on how he spent the previous decade incarcerated in lieu of drug trafficking and transporting illegals cross the border. Outside, I smiled and nodded and repeated "No importa" a million fucking times while his squat hoggish wife devoured her weight in tacos at my expense. On the inside, I withered away into a blackness I know too well.
He saw in my weary eyes that I didn't really want to hear this shit yet continued on in a rapid fire con man dialog. I wanted to get up and walk out. I felt so bad...in the past every time I made the trip over to Juarez, I always kept an eye out for him. In vain. A true reminder that the past belongs in the past and should never resurface. Pleasant or otherwise. Which, being a writer, is a complete contradiction. We bloggers, as I have recanted a million times or more, we suffer from our nostalgia.

After an hour of miserable chit-chat, we shook hands at the corner and I shuffled depressingly to a bar and drank and thought and drank myself numb. This is is. I stare out the pane window with the passerby passing and see a dead end in every face.

I spent the next days working on that stupid book no one will read. A couple of times in a tequila induced fury, I was to delete the whole damn thing. However, I had concluded that this will be my swan song...so I better get the fucker done and done right. Below is an excerpt. It is a very rough draft and will be prone to many revisions. It hails from the first chapter entitled Tijuana Bebop:

Tijuana Bebop

Hurtling through the stratosphere like a sparkler spurting Flash Gordon rocket, I hadn’t time to finish my complimentary bag of nuts before the pinch-faced transvestite flight attendant snatched them off my table with withered, spindly fingers.

   “We are landing now, prepare!” She snarled in telepathic pictographs. Her silver quaff scrapped the ceiling of the cabin.

   Screeech, engines died to a whine. Hustle into the San Diego International Airport - that mighty monument to modern technology - grab my shoddy luggage and bolt out into The City. The beautiful people whisk by with expressionless, hate filled faces - no one talks only via cell phone. A ticket bought. A red train boarded. I head south towards the Tijuana border. March with the bustling throng through the clacking turnstiles, past the bored gaze of the potbellied Mexican customs agent – eyes bloodshot and sick. Crossed the International line amid honks and the haze of exhaust.

   Although Tijuana is adjacent to the Control Culture of the United States, it is a great feeling when you enter Mexico - this timeless free uplifting feeling from personal impairment once you cross over. In fact, the farther south you travel away from the border, the brighter it is - as though the oppressive influence of the United States looms at the frontier like opaque, suffocating clouds.

   Lug my bags over the line - Indian women in squalid gray rags, arms always out hands grasping or barking their wares of counterfeit jewelry which turn black in an hour or plaster statues of obscene materials - their plump, dirty children wallow naked in pools of dust at their feet. Past the taco vendors - smell of seared meat and wilted vegetables mixed with beer and piss. Effervescent sounds bombard your ears, a cacophony of Latino Banda and hip-hop music interspersed with car horns and grating primeval busses.

   “Want pussy girl? Titty women?”

   “See donkey show?”

   “Bull fight?”

   I elbowed through the throng of taxi drivers all on the hustle and opt the most handsome I could find within that teeming mass of yellow shirts.

   “Hotel Coliseo, rapido.” Snap fingers. Chop-chop.

   Roar through broken streets dodging busses, kamikaze taxis and mad dashing pedestrians. We pass Avenida Revolucion - el Revu to the locals - all is what you expect: petulant, flabby tourists shuffle in the beating sun ignoring the barking of pitchmen squinting under that bright blue Mexican sky. Young pacheco kids clad in funky hip-hop clothes amble past arm in arm around a tired whore clop-clopping in her cha-cha heels, brown eyes drooping and gazing forever up at Guadalupe. The shop venders selling gold, silver, leather, liquor, sex - they scream unrelentlessly into the deaf ear of the sweaty tourist. Overpriced restaurants, massive discos, and farmacias vending Viagra with enough potency to kill an elephant, lost among fading whorehouses crumbling into time reflected in the sad eyes of the weary Zonky.

   Blocks are splashed with the primary colors of restaurants and consumer store facades of any other Mexican metropolitan city - the dust rises, the trash burns, police patrol by with young, hostile cops suspended off the sides of white paddy wagons - black rifles glistening and the mothers sprinting across the traffic with young flailing and babies wailing. Cervezas and guacamole - no matter how diluted with sour cream - still bring in the Mexican culture of memory to the old and young. Culture is life. Life is change. Change is culture - and change is the beauty of Tijuana, no matter how desperate - no matter how congested and overflowing, omnipresent as a McDonald’s baño.

   Spitting heat upon pale skin. Dust swirls, thick and ominous like mountainous fog, yet there is little silence among this thumping surge of sprawling land and sea convergence. It’s bright and it’s hot, alighting the nonexistent patterns as people and their many motors crush upon humanity and culture - their culture. It is their land; their noise and debris, their rising dust - churn into eternal heat, the rapturous signals, the stoplights and padding feet across cracked pavement before the next race of exhaust pipes flood the streets. Young boys stand in a 1950’s truck bed and the workingmen folding leathery brown hands in deep cooling shadows. Coronas, Pacificos, Dos XX and Sol bottles crushed down dirt side-alleys. Pass peeling paints of white, green and orange. As I sat in the back of the taxi, heat and the accompanying dust drew into the interior through the open windows that sucked like a famished mule.

   A dangling faded CD flashed in my eyes, as Jesus and Mother Mary spun from the driver’s rear view mirror. Through the dirty window, I watched my beloved Mexico and its culture, passing high-walled penitentiaries and catching the drafts of burning trash and piles of rubber. I breathed in, deeper than the previous, and as rusted tin and red brick turned to unfinished concrete with spikes of rusting rebar, the city-center approached.

   The Central Zone of Tijuana proper is sprawled out in a bowl shaped valley of mosaic urban decay. Polychromatic buildings, some new, some old, others downright ancient, some never fully completed with rusted iron scaffolding jutting into the smog-choked sky spread across a simmering landscape. Chipped and graffitied buildings are dwarfed only by blaring billboards announcing everything from cheap tequila to the cure for herpes. Surrounding hillsides are blanketed with the residential colonias. Vast multihued neighborhoods range from elegant haciendas to cardboard shacks – and always an unattended fire blazing day or night in the poorer quarters so that a choking grey haze hangs over the city.

   Burnt paper and smoky chemicals infuse the sea air until the salt purified the wastes. Suddenly, it froze. A culture - historic in its patternless flow of work, family, tradition, rice, beans, corn tortillas and cerveza, with terrified mother dodging traffic as she interlinks her arms of her five children, and the federales rolling in their crisp white '06 GMC pickup trucks and Ford Mustangs, fat signs and stripped lands of acres of sweating asphalt surrounded by cheap simplicities of blue and white, and orange and white, swallowing its environment.

   Then the abominable. Things and their monsters. They let loose to dilute the beauty of this original style of living and culture. Gorging, the corporations find their way as Mexico expands with the born faces of Wal-Mart and Home Depot. My heart pinged. It skipped a beat. Nevertheless, I drew another gritty inhale, observed the life around and continued to witness an unburdened Mexico thrive. Dust tickled my nose. I sneezed. It reached my parched throat. I coughed. How unburdened can a culture remain? I was about to find out.

   Taxi screeched to a halt in front of Hotel Coliseo – a monument to the depravity of addicts both of chemicals and flesh. The putrefied building decomposing from the inside, defecating its vile antiquity onto the sidewalk. Old man sat on wood chair by the door focused on me with cataract eyes and junky stoop as I paid the driver and enter the crumbling whitewashed building. The smell of sewage and feces filled the cavernous lobby. An obese transvestite sat on an overstuffed green velvet couch sucking a silver tooth as I paid the front desk cien pesos and made my way up to the third floor - old well-worn wooden stairs creaking.

   My room was painted olive green, paint flaking. Bed sagged to one side with graffiti scratched above wooden headboard, the toilet ran and I had roaches for roommates.

   The distant moan of a whore earning her rent mixed with the muffled banda music wafting through the acerbic and sinister halls.

   I showered in tepid water, got dressed, and left my key with the front desk. Stepping sideways through a group of six Amazonian transvestite hookers who guarded the lobby door; avoiding catcalls and clutching at my crotch.

   I strode through the choking night air, the klaxon of car horns and high decimal banda, the cries of cigarette vendors, the smell of scorched meat and sewage, vicious cops patrol and give me a sour eye. Queers passed staring and giggling and pointing at every bulging crotch. Sickly dogs sifted through festering trash next to their catatonic masters.

   A few blocks from my hotel was park Teniente Guerrero - by day an idyllic spot for lounging families amid sounds of romping children among swaying palms and colorful flowers. You look around and see happy smiling faces, the absorbed cancerous faces of police officers, you hear cantina music from across the park of candy-colored balloons and popsicles and shoeshine stands. In the center of the park stands a gazebo for performances - generations of mariachi playing Mexican anthems to honor El Gobernador.

   By night, the park procures its well-deserved sluttish reputation - a notorious hotbed of male prostitution and drug pedaling with sexual acts being wrought in the midst of darkened bushes and shadowy corners. When the heat of the day boils away and the shoe shine stands close-up, the boys come out. Every bench is occupied - the trees lining the sidewalk accommodate some nameless youth leaning with hip hooked and hands in pockets. Silent shadows beckon and the smell of sex vibrates through the park integrated with the whispering lusty grunts and sighs under a baneful moon.

   As I was saying, I located the park and most importantly, I located Saul. He sprawled on the cold iron bench like a lounging cougar, awaiting prey. Dark, curly hair cropped short, smooth copper skin, and a pencil thin moustache lined full pouting lips. His lean body jumped up and ran to me all smiles.

   “Hey, cabron!” He beamed. “You back?”

   “Sure as shit.” I say. “You know I can’t stay away from this place.”

   Several old queens prowling nearby slowly raise their heads like animals sensing danger.

   Short chitchat between Saul and I and with the heat rising we faded out of the park and materialized in my hotel room.

   Tongues probed, fingers poked, and erections were exposed. Saul always was proud of his lengthy penis and had no reservations about using it. Clothes were thrown around the room. The bed banged and squeaked as Saul fucked me hard and extensive and afterwards we shared a Lucky Strike. Then, he fucked me again. Showered and went downstairs for dinner at a corner eatery - Café Mimi’s. Music blared as the scrumptious food was served by a plump laughing woman - who cooked it, too. The plastic chairs were packed with happy, chatty, animated locals - the small café was affluent with life. A life which had been suppressed in the United States and one which will never resurface again.

   After tacos and agua limón, Saul and I decided to cruise around el centro; I needed to go shopping for some hygiene articles.

   As we walked through the congested streets, I was approached by two Mexican hipsters and asked if I wanted to earn $800 dollars.

   Suspicious, I inquired, “What’s the angle?”

   “All you hafta do is drive cross the border.” The short one smiled coyly.

   “Nah.” I declared, “A coyote I ain’t.”

   Saul expressed he needed some mota. Why not, I felt like getting a little high myself. We strut down into the Old Mercado past the come-hither hookers and cop a bag of weed from some Aztecan tattooed kid and repair back to my room. Saul is one hella roller - fat he makes ‘em. We sit on the bed listening to reggeaton and toking some amazing blunt - it was tasty. Half a bottle of Cuervo - reefer by candle light.

   I rode Saul for nearly an hour. Hair is pulled; sweat is licked off writhing, thrusting bodies. Slap-slap-slap-slap went the sound of his brown hips smacking my ass. We fucked in the rickety wooden chair as he came up with the nastiest of positions. Saul grunts filthy words too me in Spanish as he degrades my soul. I am seeing stars as that boy rams it home. Squirt! Squirt! Squirt! Our racket echoes in the halls as we both moan out in mutual orgasm.

   “Oh shit! Aye caray!” We gasp out almost simultaneously.

   Beaten, bruised and covered in sweat and semen, bed sheets on the floor and soiled, Saul and I lay there entwined like two snakes.

   My digital clock read 4:36am. As he lay beside me sleeping, I stroked his black curly hair, sighed and looked out the window at the shimmering yellow moon.

   I am home.

Let's do The Time Warp...Again?

With money I couldn't spare, I morosely lifted myself out of bed this morning, showered, dressed, and walked over to a restaurant I like for a hearty bowl of menudo and delicious coffee. The place was packed and I had to wait for a table, however the waitresses are so awesome and the food is good and cheap, I didn't mind.

I sat and stared out the grimy, dust covered pane windows at the Saturday morning people as they casually strode to and fro on their weekend business. I was feeling so utterly depressed. I believe it was on account of plowing through fourteen decades of miserable occurrences within my blog in lieu of cultivating entries for my new book. I do have to admit, it brought on shattering suicidal depression this past week.

Where does one go from here? Is there an up? I am mired in paranoid stagnation. I literally do not know what I am going to do on all levels. It is truly sad. And the sadness is showing in every face which passes my gaze. I feel if I am a diving bell, cables severed, settled onto the black sea bottom. If that makes sense...

I paid my bill and took a stroll through the Plaza. Watched several performances - it is some type of holiday - took some pictures. I returned to my flat when as I turned down my street, a person zoomed by on a bike. He hollered in Spanish, "Hey, you remember me?" Ominous words in my profession, Dear Reader.

I asked who the fuck was it and he smiled "Oscar!"

Oscar. OSCAR?! Holy fuck! I have not seen him in what? Twelve years? I have watched him grow from a tween who ran with the paint huffing gang in the Plaza - he used to bug me all the time. (But, he was too young. I ain't no lecherous pedo) I have seen him grow into a very handsome twenty-something when he would visit me on almost a daily basis over a decade ago and now he has matured into a very striking thirty-something - albeit he was covered in splattering of white paint in lieu of a house he was painting, he meekly confided. Both of us stuttered our pleasantries and he asked if I would meet him for dinner and drinks later this evening at seven. How could I refuse?

He sped off to work and I stood on that warped pavement with my emotions all muddled. Oscar was the last person who I had deep emotions for - back when I had emotions for people. I was the one who fucked it up and regretted it ever since. The petty occurrence had haunted and burdened me all these years. I even had written a book loosely based on our time together entitled Puta.

Such a positive entity. He was the only person in Juarez who would visit without ulterior motive. Never asking for any money or special favors. He simply, as he stated once, "Enjoy your company." A friend in the very definition of the word.

I sit here in this cafe writing this and my mind and emotions are in turmoil. I had come to the accepting reality that I would live out whatever length of life I was to have in abstract solidarity and depressed loneliness and now...the thought burning in my withered mind is: Does one get a second chance? Or a third?

Bummed out on Calle Noche Triste

I sat in the Plaza las Armas amid languidly sitting locals - all were accounted for: the shabby elderly, the outcast, the junkies, the lovers, the perverts, the vendors. I sat and vapidly listened to the preacher on with a megaphone dictate how all is evil and corrupt. I agreed.

I sat and watched a shoe shine boy scrub the frayed leather of a fat queen who sat on the concrete bench plotting to get the preteen lad back to his lair and suck the youth out of him. The fat queen's eyes met mine and fire flared out in defensive awareness that there was another homosexual in his immediate surroundings. I sighed. The kid's too young, you evil bastard.

Haggish woman approaches me as she made her rounds with outstretched dirty hand. "One peso?" I shook my head and she sneered away.

The depression was hitting again. The frequencies closer than before. Why am I here? Why am I still alive? There is nothing I want. Nothing that interests me. I want nothing. I said previously that I had a pleasurable apartment - how long will that last. The thought surfaces again in my mind that all I want to do is simply lay down and stop breathing. To go away. To simply stop.

Sigh.

Fractured Voices

My two weeks south of the border have been relatively a tranquil one. After paying rent, deposit, and purchasing a new bed along with basic needs, I find that I am low on cash this month. So, I have been collating entries from this blog for the re-publication of Borrowed Flesh. Instead of a strict chronology of entries as before, through using and manipulation of entries, the book will be told through both first and third party characters. I have spent the last three days scribbling notes on characters and situations. It will focus on homosexuality, sex, drugs, mental illness, forced prescribed meds, and the dumbing of a population through a police state under the mask of a fight on terrorism.

Example: In the first chapter title Tijuana Bebop, the story closely follows the first entries of the blog during my stay in Tijuana. It will be both a travelogue and a short romance with Saul. However, it will also deal with the evil expat queens and their paranoia of living in such a state. They use magic and telepathy to thwart others from their prey and unleash a made up character called El Puta - a diseased, alien looking faggot monster who sexually attacks and kills any other expat who becomes too popular with the other rentboys. 

The second chapter Even Cockjunkies Get The Blues deals with a third person character named John Poston who is an agent for a Dr. Pap whose job is to travel to different locals and liquidate defective agents. The deal is, the reader will not know if it is all real, simply fiction, or a psychosis of the characters schizophrenic persona.

I have sketched out the rest of the book. It will, I trust, be an interesting read of depression, hollow romance, paranoia, love, and hope.

I like the way the novel - though in its larval state - is coming about and forming. I realize, because of its subject matter in this highly over sensitized and politically correct culture, it will offend and disgust many, if any, readers - but, I want to read this. I want to write this. This is a book I am dedicating only to myself.

I hope someone else likes it. That - to be simply read - is satisfaction for me.

Juarez City Return

I darted around the chain-link fence which encircled the Rescue Mission - I was there in lieu of visiting an old friend - when I almost ran into a tall, skinny ruggedly handsome man in his mid-twenties. Scruffy and a few days shy of a shave, he wore the hobo uniform of well-worn jeans, plaid shirt, and baseball cap. Obviously he was staying in the camp of tramp's nearby, a ratty encampment of tents and discarded cardboard shacks.Two things I noticed about him was his stunning blue eyes and that he was brandishing a rather sinister looking knife.

As he ran past me, he blurted, "Lookout! That dudes gotta rock!"

Indeed, chasing him was a rather demented looking Asian man in his forties - he was clad in a dingy tank top and shorts - carrying a large stone and bleeding from a slash on his forehead. The Asian man stopped momentarily and lifted the rock to strike me. I raised my palms and stated, "I'm just going home, man. I'm not part of this." The Asian man grunted, his face contorted in fury and continued his chase of the white guy. As I quickly made my way up to the train tracks that lead away from the mission, I heard the white guy say, "That'll teach ya to steal!"

As I returned to my friend Marvin's house, I told myself I need to get out of this stupid, ignorant life of hobo's, thieves, junkies, and the deranged. And I did. I rented a quite pleasant apartment on the other side of the border in Juarez City. Again. In a quiet neighborhood, it was a single room flat with french doors which opened to a tranquil street and in the proximity of downtown. Only $130 a month, so I can't complain.

I took a stroll through the Plaza las Armas at sunset. Long shadows crept over broken masonry and piles of sooty garbage. Vendors cried out for shoe shines, razor blades, taxis. Lovers of both sexes strode laughing and chatting. Rentboys stood with hips cocked under streetlamps and sign posts. Various cha-cha music blasted from a thousand cantinas in a kaleidoscope of neon all under the sad eyes of the ever watching Virgin. After a decade of murder and mayhem, the pulse of life has returned to the city. 

The last few days I have been working on my new novel. The book version of this blog entitled Borrowed Flesh. It will be written in the way I always intended - inspired by the muse of the beats using surreal text and cut-up sections. I'm certain it won't sale, but it will be my most personal work.

I am quite content. After a year of disastrous events, its good to sleep in my own bed again. I was really losing it - both physically and mentally. I realize it won't last. Good things never do, only the bad seems to endure. Maybe this time I'm wrong...