Carlos Velázquez - The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories

A) Rise and Shine

The science of piracy was a ghost that had always lived in The Country Bible’s heart. Ever since she was a kid, riding around on a gallito in this trashy town. Home to bootlegging, to contraband, to treason imported from all over, from Sevastopol, Anchorage, Cardiff.

Ever since she bought her ticket to this world (at Ticketmaster), one of the young Country Bible’s better features was her attachment to tradition. Since she herself was a product of the Tetra Pak generation, she was determined to pay tribute to the Old School. That was, in fact, our heroine’s specialty: to conduct herself in the old ways.

We didn’t understand why she felt indebted to the Old Guard. It didn’t really come naturally. Even her parents, on a few drunken occasions (with national or imported brews), considered baptizing her Moderna Tenenbaum. They also considered Poliforma Multiforme, but in the end settled on The Country Bible, in honor of the sociodelic breakfast.

The Country Bible descended from a long line of fried-chicken vendors. Most recently, her grandfather, father, and siblings wore the obligatory apron at Henry’s Chicken. Since her dreams of travel were in check, she decided to place them alongside her aspirations to piracy and began to go to school.

The line that divides the client from the employer does not make them different from one another. The person who clerks at a record store, the guy who polarizes the windshield, and the server at the chicken stand are all spineless simpletons, incapable of rebelling.

Here’s the lowdown on The Country Bible: One of the reasons she stepped out from behind the counter was that her family, from the moment fast food came to the civilized world, had always been employed at Henry’s Chicken. Not a single relative, not even her grandfather, who, according to family lore, had been the most prosperous in their lineage, had ever managed to own one of the chain stores. Not one sad little franchise had ever come within reach of any of them.

So began the militancy, the dissidence of The Country Bible. I don’t think anybody indoctrinated her, or even invited her; she made her own decision to join the Communist Youth, with the same enthusiasm an adolescent has when they join a rock band. Influenced by what was trendy, she adopted the look of a typical UNAM student. When she wasn’t working, and in order to complete her militant presentation, she dove into required readings every time she bit down on an apple. She transformed herself into an encyclopedia of Latin American folklore. She furnished her room with Willem de Kooning posters and built a piracy laboratory, equipped with a tower that could burn twelve records at once and was also multifunctional: It could photocopy covers and had an inscription device to make copies of the text.

As a practitioner of piracy, The Country Bible tried to live covertly, like an infiltrator. She swung between the cool underground flavor of the marmalade of torture so that she could dedicate herself fully to the proletarian struggle, to her top spot serving breaded potatoes at the chicken joint. She stayed at Henry’s Chicken because she didn’t want to turn her back on tradition. But her revolutionary attitude began to cause her typical teenage problems.

The first sign of trouble came at work. Anxiety is expressed in three basic ways: random laughter, sweaty palms, and involuntary and inevitably absurd behavior. One boring afternoon at the chicken joint, The Country Bible was afflicted by the third kind. It was one of those days merchants call slow. At four in the afternoon, as a distraction, and with the wisdom of an indelible marker, she wrote nicknames for all the employees, manager included, on the workers’ punch cards.

The general discontent was over the top. The names themselves didn’t bother the employees; it was that they didn’t understand them. If only she’d written sly stuff like The Booger, The Flying Chimijuil, or The Pincher, then they would have tolerated it. Instead she designated the workers with names beloved to her leftist soul: Cienfuegos, John Lennon, Heberto Castillo, Lenin. Ever since The Country Bible had begun to express herself through protest songs, everybody said that she was distancing herself from the streets of the barrio. Every day she identified more with the Great Latin American Social Breach. But what neither the rechristened employees nor The Country Bible herself suspected was the split suffered by the fried-chicken vendor who would bring together the proletariat struggle and business interests in the events of October 2nd.

The following day, she received a notice from management. The workers demanded the traitor be burned. But they didn’t fire her. Because there was a superstition in the business that it was best to have at least one Country Bible at the counter to protect them from secondhand witchcraft. They suspended her for one week.

B) Sunnyside Up

She took advantage of her free time, with masterful use of forceps, to strengthen her ties to the Communist Party. Piracy, like LSD at the very beginning, was legal until the lunatics at the CIA decided that it wasn’t, that all those stoned adolescents shouldn’t listen to Violeta Parra all the time. They launched an attack they could have called You-Will-Cry against everyone involved in commercial piracy. So The Country Bible’s hobby changed. It transformed into something along the lines of Shit, dude, I didn’t bring the Serrat, but on this CD I have a Word version of the Communist Manifesto.

She became a wizard in everything that had to do with PCs and information. She was in charge of distributing copies of the CDs with instructions for the movement. From her post in the historic district, she would distribute records with covers that featured Paulina Rubio, El Viejo Paulino, Alejandra Guzmán, Polo Polo. In truth, they did not contain the hits of the day, nor poems recited by Paco Stanley, but rather specifications for a demonstration by the merchants from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas that would take place October 2nd.

The conflict had begun because of an uproar among peddlers. At the time, a kind of street market had grown around the merchants, but everyone gathered there had been rudely kept down by the cops. Sick of the abuse and ready for a fight with the Díaz Ordaz government, the merchants organized and subscribed to the PC.

During a march on August 31st, TV cameras captured a dramatic moment: A young woman wearing a chicken-vendor uniform joined the protest. The young woman was The Country Bible herself, who had decided to wear her yellow suit, fuck people’s retinas. Her only other option was to have gone as Chabuca Granda.

This would change the direction the festivities would take. From the burning of the Judas figure, to the costumes worn decades later in gay pride marches, to the celebration of goals scored on the field — every apotheosis would be affected, on its outside, at its core, and in all the places where anti-wrinkle cream is effective, by The Country Bible’s proposed innovations on that historic date. The Díaz Ordaz government, which had always looked upon the merchants with red-rimmed eyes, now rushed to support them, terrified of the idea that the merchants could affect the buildup to the next Olympic Games.

Life went on like a giant jar of horchata. In Tlatelolco on October 2nd the merchants and the army faced off. The events created a deep black hole in the history of Mexico. A myth grew about thousands dead and disappeared. The officials claimed the merchants had begun the shooting. It was whispered that a special group of peddlers, the Olympic Battalion, had infiltrated the soldiers and begun firing. That was when those up front let themselves go.