We had a drink and laughed. Even the word ILEGAL had become
illegal in the US . What next we thought. What were they so afraid of?
We loved the irony and drank a bit more. Underground once again.
We’d find a back door…

They drank pulque on Guadeloupe’s
feast day as she was the goddess of
maguey. They believed the rays of light
around her were spines of the maguey.

We smuggled it just after sunset on wooden rafts made from planking and truck
inner-tubes. The river was not wide, perhaps a half a kilometer, nor was it deep.
The boxes were passed from the banks, hand to hand, and in the twilight it was
hard to keep count. On the raft next to ours were televisions, on another a family
from El Salvador. Everyone moved quickly, cash changed hands. We piled on
and a shirtless figure slung a rope over his shoulder and began to pull the raft
across, wading deeper into the gray water, and then swimming, and then again
wading until we reached the Guatemalan side.

Once at the border you encountered competing deceptions, a series
of mafias, autonomous gangs that were unified by the one goal,
separating you from a part of your shipment. In the heat
and dying light they waited.

We live as fortunate foreigners and nomads,
having fled because the other choice was to
live within their language, their book, their
predictable, poisoned, pale and anemic
dream. We fled to carve out pockets of
sanity through meaningless scribblings of
rebellion and small parties that went
cascading into days of smoke and mezcal
and new friends piling into small rooms
where musicians met and someone was
cooking and busses and planes and passports
were forgotten. Always to make ourselves
feel better, fatalists making a last stand,
neo-nihilists believing only in small
decencies, keen to summersault backwards
as though we could turn back days to some
imagined smiling childhood . . .

I remember sitting in a cantina sipping a mezcal. The earthquake had been two
days prior and the air was electrically charged, bringing a silence to the normal din
of late afternoon. I watched the growing of a hushed procession passing toward
what remained of the church. Heads bowed and moving as one, they seemed
to float, all silent, facing forward so all that I could see was the parchment
silhouettes of weathered profiles. They are not here, I thought. These are
ghosts and saints and souls . .




I am seeing ghosts…

The Mezcal Bar

San Simón, Maximón, Boximón

“Where are you going, father,” She asked.
“I’m not really a priest,” I said.
She turned away from me and looked out the bus window.
We passed cane fields, smoke rising from the earth where it had been harvested.
She turned back to me. “Then why are you dressed that way?”
"Do you drink mezcal?" I said.

Café No Sé

What you had to understand was that laws as
you understood them meant nothing. Survival, preserving identity, meant breaking laws that
were not your laws. Bowing to them meant submission, and those who obeyed them
did not belong.