cuidad juárez

My foul smelling hotel room rests on the garbage cliff overlooking the poor Juárez barrio, tin shacks and white roofs of crumbling adobe, crisscrossed in dusty wire cables and television dish aimed up high with little dirty gardens down below bounded by the rusty metal wall and superhighway nightmare 20th century I-10. I stand on my garbage cliff under the setting sun rays of Huītzilōpōchtli and understand I am at the end of Mexico - the longing pulls at me, depression of a million nostalgic images inundate my withering mind.

The town is so noisy – dirty and trash laden, streetfulls of wild boys all night brandishing their erections under chino pants, drunken nacos in yellow Stetsons and sagging pot bellies, vulgar restaurants, nasty whore hotels, musicians, half American stores, jumping beans and tortilla concessions, Chinese Masonic lodges and barbers too. Big halls for hip-hop discos and ranchero music, painted crudely with monolithic donkeys. A portrait of a Chihuahua glares down at me donning Sante Fe style kerchief and bejeweled vaquero hat.

I light up a cigarette and walked through the border at night back to my sad, lonely apartment, a dead silent fairyland of U.S. dusk - deserted ghost streets and sad quiet air-cooled diners with white capped waitresses joking softly and no one on the streets.

A dream. We live inside a dream.

- handwritten jounal entry,

march 3, 1997