Pete Hamill - Piecework

But there were irritations. In our hotel the prices of newspapers, aspirin, and candies were extortionate. At night the bands sometimes played at poolside; the acoustical setup was arranged as if our room were part of the walls of Jericho. The music in the hotel bars was the usual international soft-rock pap: watered-down Beatles, creaky Barry Manilow. Instead of the glorious, vibrant music of Mexico, we were greeted each evening by the dead products of Area Code 800.

“That is what the Americans want,” a waiter said to me one night. “It’s terrible, no? But they want this. They want to feel at home”

Far and away the worst irritation in Puerto Vallarta was the insistent, driven, obsessive selling of time shares. In the lobby of our hotel, on the beaches, in the streets, the time-share sellers came upon us like piranhas. Many of them were displaced Americans or Canadians, trying to look respectable; others were young Mexicans; in either language, their song was an infuriating hustle.

In the hotel, the Buganvilias Sheraton, staff members steered us to restaurants. We suspected that this was probably a racket, with the restaurant owners kicking back money to the steerers (you were supposed to hand over a printed “discount” card when you arrived). But on our first, innocent day in town, we tried one of the recommended places anyway, a seafood joint called the Andariego. The sound system insisted that we listen to banal versions of “My Way” and the theme from A Man and a Woman and, God help us, “Feelings.” The combination was so deadly that all additional appetite completely disappeared.

Among the ordinary Mexicans life was sweeter. We saw flowers growing everywhere: on the streets, on balconies, in small private gardens; a fragrant profusion of blue jacaranda, bougainvillea, jasmine, roses. There were wild orchids here, too, and in December, we were told, you can see African tulips. Scattered through the town we saw banana trees, mangos, papayas. The stalls of markets displayed a Tamayo-like profusion of all these and more: watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, avocado. Street vendors sold shaved ice, sugarcane, and coconut milk.

Not much of the Mexican past remained here. The cathedral dates only from the turn of the century, and in a land where brilliant artisans once worked with brick or stone it is made of concrete. No pyramids rise here, no ruins of the cultures that existed in Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans. There’s a small, badly lit museum on the island in the center of the Rio Cuale. We visited one afternoon and saw some fine pre-Columbian pieces and a few folk paintings by a man named Gilberto Grimaldi. But the place had an empty, forlorn feeling to it; nails in the wall marked where paintings had been removed, and I wondered if somehow the museum’s collection had been sacked while nobody was looking.

But Puerto Vallarta does have a vibrant gallery scene. The sculptor Sergio Bustamente has his own gallery. There are a number of other galleries, several antiques shops, and stores selling Mexican folk art. We spent some time at the superb Galeria Uno, on Calle Morelos, run by an American woman named Jan Lavender, who has been in Vallarta for more than 20 years. She features many of the best new Mexican painters, but for many American residents her gallery also served as hangout and communications center, a place for hearing gossip, making business contacts, and buying gifts for friends in the States. While we were there Lavender was excited about a new discovery, a young Mexican artist named Rogelio Diaz, whose brilliantly colored paintings combined power and draftsmanship in a style that could be called Mexpressionist. “This is the finest artist I’ve seen in years,” she said. “He is something else.” She produced cold drinks, smoked a cigarette, and talked awhile about Puerto Vallarta.

“First of all, it’s a street town,” she said. “Everybody is out in the streets. You see your friends there. You meet new people in the streets. The town is not social; it’s certainly not formal. It doesn’t have all those obligations. You can wear whatever you want to wear here, go as you want to go. It’s not like Acapulco. My friends come down from New York or Los Angeles and say, ‘Where are the parties?’ And I say, ‘There aren’t any.’ And there aren’t. God knows, they have a good time, but it isn’t a scene.”

Running an art gallery has made her even more aware of the uniqueness of Vallarta and of Mexico. “You can’t really capture Mexico in photographs or paintings, because they leave out two essentials, smell and sound. Here we’re used to air moving. We live open. In the States the windows are always closed and the air is imported and smells like cement.” She laughed. “Here the weather is always great. I go to New York, and it’s cold outside and sweltering inside. L go to Phoenix, and it’s blistering outside and freezing inside. But here the windows are always open.”

There were no real problems with crime. “Oh, you can get in trouble if you ask for it, like any place,” she said. “You know, going to the beach at four in the morning. But this is a street town. There are too many people around for there to be any danger.”

We never felt menaced while in Puerto Vallarta. There were no obvious hoodlums, no street gangs, no dope peddlers. We never saw the kind of homeless people who now collect on the streets of American cities like piles of human wreckage. Even after great expansion this remains a Mexican town built upon the hard foundation of the Mexican family. We did see poor people across the river in the area named after the Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. They live in dark, crudely built single-wall housing. You walk by and smell the rank odor of poverty. On the street called Francisco Madero we also passed a deep, wide, evil-looking high-ceilinged poolroom, the sort of place in which young men always find trouble in Mexican movies.

But the poor are not typical of the town. In the evenings you can walk along the seawall called the Malecón and see young men flirting with young women as they do in the evening in a thousand Mexican towns. The ritual is all eyes, glances, whispers; the private codes of the young. You can hear the growl of the sea. You can dine in the many restaurants, annoyed only by the garrulous flatulence of the public buses, throwing the fumes of burnt gasoline upon all who come near. One evening we sat at a window table in the second-floor Japanese restaurant called Tsunami. The food was good, but strolling Mexicans kept stopping on the Malecón and staring up at us: groups of men, fathers with children, old women with disapproving faces. Or so we thought. When dinner was over we crossed the street and finally saw the true objects of their scrutiny. On the floor above the restaurant was an aquarium, the tank filled with the gaily colored denizens of the deep; above that a disco; and in the window we could see dark-skinned girls in tight bright dresses, the gaily colored denizens of the Mexican night.

That is Puerto Vallarta to me. You can wander down to Le Bistro, on the island in the river, and hear good recorded jazz. You can pause in the restaurant’s garden beside the statue of Huston, which quotes from the director’s eulogy to his friend Humphrey Bogart: “We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him — only for ourselves for having lost him. He is irreplaceable.” Or you can have a good laugh at the restaurant called La Fuente de la Puente (The Fountain on the Bridge), where a statue of Burton, Taylor, and an iguana stands, carved from what seems to be Ivory soap but which turns out to be some kind of plastic. I wish Burton could have cast his caustic eye upon this masterpiece.

You can see these things or just watch a carpenter laboring with an artist’s intensity in a small crowded shop or kids pedaling tricycles down the steep hills or country people in sandals and straw hats gazing at the wonders of the metropolis. I carried all of them home from Puerto Vallarta, along with the sound of the rooster at dawn and the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea.