Pete Hamill - Piecework

Legalization wouldn’t be a license to go wild. Drug use would continue to be regulated, perhaps in a tougher way, with heavy penalties for doctors, nurses, pilots, train engineers, and others who have heavy social responsibilities. The Armed Forces could continue to forbid the use of drugs. Employers could insist that they don’t want drug-users working for them any more than they want drunks. There would be sad and tragic examples of people fallen into the gutter, as there have always been with alcohol. A few hustlers would work the margins of the legal-drug business, trying to avoid taxes and duties. But we would rid ourselves of a lot of hypocrisy. We would be forced to face some truths about ourselves, deprived at last of the comforting figures of those foreign ogres who are supposed to be corrupting all these poor innocent Americans.

Perhaps, along the way, we might even discover why so many millions of Americans insist on spending their days and nights in a state of self-induced mental impairment. Perhaps. For now, we just have to discover a way to get home alive.

NEW YORK,

August 15, 1988

For almost forty years, I’ve been going to Mexico. I’ve lived, gone to school, and worked there. It’s the country I know better than any other except my own. As a gringo in Mexico, I’ve learned much about the feelings of all immigrants: the initial strangeness of language, food, music, culture, the uncertainty of legal rights, the unfair legacy of historical stereotype. I’ve tried hard to understand the history of Mexico; I’ve made friends with Mexicans of varied trades and backgrounds; I’ve come to comprehend some basic Mexican myths. But whenever I return to Mexico, I remain a foreigner, a man standing on the margin of Mexican life.

Even as an outsider, I know that Mexico is part of me. Without the experience of Mexico, I wouldn’t be the same man. Mexicans have taught me much about work, honor, and pride, about courage, about the need to keep on going after common sense tells you to give up. In my attitude to the world, Mexican fatalism has been grafted onto the Irish fatalism inherited from my father; that mestizo fatalism tempers the American optimism that was so powerfully encouraged by my mother. As a writer, I’ve been enriched by the work of Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Monsivais. I get great pleasure from the poetry of Homero Aridjis. I have been entertained and enlightened by the crime fiction of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Where I live, Mexican folk art is everywhere, masks and surrealist altars and mirrors made from tin. My library contains almost 500 volumes on Mexican history, art, music, and culture. On the wall above my desk, there are showcards featuring the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s: Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendariz, and Arturo de Cordova. If they’d been French instead of Mexican, every critic in New York would know their work. Ní modo, as the Mexicans say. It doesn’t matter. Life goes on, and I’m still looking for posters of Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio.

On other walls, there are framed photographs by Agustin Casasola, the great photographer of the Mexican Revolution, and posters by such artists as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Alejandro Colunga. My friends think this is all very strange. Other people’s passions always are. But in my small part of New York, and in my consciousness, Mexico lives.

Obviously, these pieces can’t express my complicated feelings about Mexico and Mexicans; that would require a book. But I hope they make clear that at least one old gringo is thankful to the Mexicans for their grace and tenacity. As I write, ten years after the terrible earthquake, Mexico is deep into another crisis. This one seems worse than any other, because so many hopes and expectations were raised during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mexico, everyone said, was about to move from the Third World to the First World. Not in some distant future, but now. That didn’t happen. Once more, there are grave predictions that Mexico will plunge into bloody revolution.

Perhaps.

But I wouldn’t bet a centavo on it.

We opened the drapes in the hotel room and there before us in the brilliant winter sunshine lay the Z6-calo. Everything was in its familiar place: the great wheezing pile of the cathedral to the left with the smaller chapel called the Sagrario beside it, starlings and sparrows darting gaily around their somber rooftop crosses. On the far side of the vast square was the low, scalloped outline of the National Palace, a building begun by Hernán Cortés in the 1520s beside the ruins of Montezuma’s palace. To the right: the City Hall, from which the largest city in the Western Hemisphere is governed.

And directly below us was a panorama from the continuing history of Mexican surrealism. More than a thousand high school students in leotards were dancing to the sounds of “La Bamba.” The steel framework of a portable stage was climbing four stories above the ground, to be filled, in a few days, by hundreds of performers celebrating the Day of the Revolution. Over on the side, workmen were hammering together the numbered sections of a plywood pyramid. Three teenage boys, balanced precariously on an upper rung of the framework, perfectly mimicked the movements of the dancing schoolgirls. And at their feet, appearing from behind a work shed, there was a man gazing up at me and my wife. He was Mexican. He was holding a blanket. I backed away from the window and gazed at the blue roof of cloudless sky.

For more than thirty years of traveling in Mexico, I’ve been seeing the Man with the Blanket. I came here first in 1956, twenty-one years old and wanting to be a painter. I enrolled at Mexico City College on the GI Bill, and every month the Veterans Administration sent me $110 to pay for tuition, housing, food, and supplies. I was never happier. I just never could afford the wares of the Man with the Blanket. Still, in one guise or another, sometimes young and other times old, he has pursued me. When I came back to Mexico in the early sixties, my easel abandoned for a Smith Corona, he signaled to me from the darkness outside the Hotel Maria Cristina on Río Lerma. I saw him at the 1968 Olympics, appearing suddenly from behind the last ahuehuete tree on Insurgentes Sur. He trailed me for a week during the first giddy year of the seventies oil boom. He never says anything. Not a word. Just holds up the blanket, his eyes full of insatiable hope. A few years ago, after surviving a terrible car accident on the Toluca Highway, I retreated to my room in a fancy Zona Rosa hotel, soaked with rain, my ribs and back bruised and aching. I opened the blinds. And there he was. Eight stories below me on the rain-lashed street. Staring up at my silhouette in the small yellow rectangle of my room. The Man with the Blanket.

“Why does he look so sad?” my wife asked, gazing down at his lonely presence.

“Because he is,” I said.

And I lay down to rest, knowing I was back in the city I loved more than any other except my own.

It is difficult to explain an affection for any city, least of all for this great, noisy, dangerous, and polluted megalopolis that the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes calls “Makesicko City” in his latest novel. Here, in the largest landlocked city in the world, at an altitude of 7,350 feet above sea level, in a long, broad valley rimmed by mountains that climb more than 3,000 additional feet into the sky, some people are certain they have seen the shape of hell.

“Not one of us will spend a day in purgatory,” said my friend and driver, Ricardo Hernandez, who has been a resident for forty-seven years. “We have paid for our sins just by living here.”