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Vol. 1 No. 3 |
July 2002 |
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--e*I*3-
(Vol. 1 No. 3) July 2002, is published and © 2002 by Earl Kemp.
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| GUEST EDITORIAL:
Outside Looking In By Lloyd Penney Canada has been a friend of America for a long time, and yet is always leery of what that most powerful neighbor will do. When the WTC was destroyed, hundreds of airplanes were still in the air, and Canadian air space was opened to all planes in need of some place to land. Aid and aid workers flowed from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and other cities to New York to assist with disaster relief. I know for a fact that one high-tech firm from Toronto immediately sent radar-imaging equipment and staff to create a three-dimensional map of the rubble pile. This allowed rescue teams to see below the surface to find air pockets, and allowed crews to safely bring in heavy equipment to take away the hundreds of thousands of tons of debris. Canadian troops were among the first to join US troops in Afghanistan to fight and destroy the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and we are still there, even with the deaths of four Canadian soldiers from friendly fire. Many other countries sent aid, workers, money, and sympathy. This horrible event was a blow not only to New York City and the United States of America, but to civilization itself. What has America's reaction been to this aid?
A couple of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the four planes that
day had connections to Toronto, so suddenly our borders are too
porous for the new levels of security America demands. No matter
that the rest of the hijackers had made it to American soil with
no problems… Not only now does America attempt to direct our
foreign and immigration policies, but is now trying to control our
military. The Bush administration has set up a Northern Command,
which will control the waters and skies all over the continent,
with little if any input from Canada and Mexico. Neither country
had any input into the Command's creation, why should America listen
to us in its administration? Little by little, America gnaws away
at our sovereignty and independence, financially, socially, culturally,
and politically, and I honestly fear for my own country's future. How does the rest of the world see America?
As the last superpower in the world and one that can do as it pleases,
it is seen as an interfering bully. This bully is rich, relatively
stupid, and ten times the size of any other kid in the schoolyard.
And now that someone has managed to give this huge bully a black
eye, he is striking out in rage at all around him, friend and foe
alike, without thought as to what he's doing. The bully also flaunts
his wealth, and while his accomplishments are admirable, the glory
and benefits are kept for himself, and not for those who may have
helped. And most recently, with its withdrawal from the International
Court of Justice, saying that such international cooperation would
impinge on the sovereignty of the United States, one could say that
the bully does not play well with others, and treats all others
as if they are completely inferior to themselves. Does being an
American somehow make you homo superioris? America is great, and has the capacity to be even greater. But, greatness does not necessarily come from strength against others, but from strength inside. Instead of all those billions to defense, perhaps one of those billions could go to education, to give the next generations of Americans the knowledge of the world to make informed decisions and opinions. America's strength also comes from its faith, which should recognize that an eye for an eye is more destructive than just. All that faith should recall the Golden Rule, to do onto others as you would have them do onto you, even if they don't. Setting the moral example will justify America's much-vaunted moral imperative. Have I offended with these words? Probably, but that wasn't my intent, which was to make you think and reflect. Remember the words of Robbie Burns…O was some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us. And then, do something about how others do see you. Doing that would make America truly great, restored in all the eyes of the world. #
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| THIS ISSUE of eI is
dedicated to my friend Forrest James Ackerman in hopes that it will
hurry his recuperation from surgery. And, at the same time I want
to acknowledge the passing this quarter of a fabulous fanzine friend,
Bruce Pelz, who has been of help to me many times, including with
this very issue of eI . I will miss him very much.
Besides the guest editorial, written by my Canadian friend and Memory Hole fellow inmate, Lloyd Penney, two other pieces in this issue were written by others as well. They are Jerry Murray and Gary Sohler, and a bit more about them follows below. As always, I need to thank my partner in crime, Bill Burns, of http://efanzines.com, for his continuing encouragement and cooperation in the publication and distribution of eI . Also, this issue, I have special thanks for Bruce Pelz and Robert Speray, and Elaine Harris and Dianne Murray who furnished some wonderful period piece Ajijic photos, and Jerry Murray for his wonderfully nostalgic video. These are the people who helped make this issue possible. It goes without saying that the balance of the issue, all written by me, is all part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs and, as always, I am looking for any corrections, extensions, illustrations, photos, drawings, jpegs, or anything else you would care to pass along to me at earlkemp@citlink.net any time. Thanks and please keep the letters of comment coming.
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| Living La
Vida Mota
There is a theme to the balance of this issue of eI , and that is the celebration of ordinary routine daily life in Mexico, and how it differs from the same thing Stateside. All of the articles, either imaginary or real, adhere to that theme alone. The first two pieces were written by a couple of my alleged friends in an attempt at embarrassing me. This type effort frequently turns out to be the best type for most situations. Jerry Murray is an old-time best friend of mine. He was also one of the better paperback porn writers of the late 1960s and early '70s. Besides that, he was my camping, woods-running, four-wheeling, boon-docking, off-roading, dope-smoking, howling, brother buddy. We cover a good many years and revolting situations together, and have survived them mostly intact. Gary, on the other hand, is more of a latecomer. I sort of inherited him from his dad, Stan Sohler, who was one of the early-days naked freaks. Stan was something like a roving ambassador for the American Sunbathing Association and a leftover from the era of sunshine and health nudist magazines. He packaged nudie magazines for Milton Luros at American Arts Enterprises in Los Angeles, then moved on to work for the Porno Factory out of San Diego for a while, also packaging nudie magazines. Stan had skin like rare Corinthian leather, whatever that is, brown and rather weatherworn, and he wore garlands of love beads made out of strung rabbit pellets. And he did everything he could at all times to get everyone around him to go naked. With a heritage like that, what can you expect of his son…? Gary came along a bit later, bragging about the things he could do with a camera, especially if he had a model to go with it, or at least a sheep. Naturally, it was up to me and Fate to bring the two of them together. Gary and Jerry were an explosive combo that blew away all the stops as far as fun and fantasizing are concerned.
Ironically, it was Gary's father who first touted me on many locations in Mexico for nude living. One of those locations was Portecitos, the Sea of Cortez beach colony with the hot-water springs just at the surf line, and another location was Canon de Guadalupe, Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. It was to Canon de Guadalupe, in September 1968 [exactly one month after the two-handed fishing photograph on the Colorado River], that I ventured with Gary and Jerry and a bunch of naked models to produce a book for Greenleaf Classics eventually known as Hang-Up Canyon (GP506). Gary and Jerry, together, were something like a cross between the Katzenjammer Kids and the Hardy Boys. You never knew if they were serious or just running on with the gag of the day.
They had worked together before, on a book named Winner Takes All (GP503) when Jerry was Thurlow Mortensen and Gary was F.P. "Jack" Pril, or vice versa. I couldn't even recognize the combined pseudonym of Wash Johnston that wound up on the Hang-Up Canyon manuscript. I tried to get them to write an article about that notorious trip, with all of us together there in the remote, idyllic, palm-tree filled Mexican desert oasis of Canon de Guadalupe. They pretended to have forgotten all about the trip and the book. As a second choice, I finally think I got them to agree to work on separate articles covering at least parts of the same event. This would be a test to see how far two people can screw up without really trying. I leave the results up to the reading public, as always.
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| The Devil's
Weed, Orgasmic Days, y Laguna Lust
By Jerry Murray, a.k.a. Sonny Barker, Ralph Basura, Lance Boyle, Drs. of Sexology Lance and Jill Boyle, Sam Diego, Wash Johnston, Ray Majors, Murray Montague, Joyce Morrissery, Thurlow Mortensen, et al.
While we were living and playing in Ajijic, a few miles outside of Guadalajara, I realized Earl treated all the writers in his stable as if they were specially favored, thus drawing out their best efforts and encouraging any special quality he saw in them. My special quality was reliability, an ability to deliver a manuscript on time every time, on any erotic theme he suggested. Reliability was a rarity among carefree pornographers like Johnny Poling, who wrote porn at the urging of his mother Linda Dubriel, the porno grandma, and the only writer in Earl's stable more prolific than me. Anyway, Earl and I were indeed good personal friends when he suggested that my wife Dianne and I go with him on a trip to Guadalajara, where several Greenleaf writers lived, and proceed on to the picturesque village of Ajijic, where he leased a house. The trip would be made in the luxury of the '69 Lincoln Continental that was part of his salary, and with us would be Earl's daughter Edie, his assistant editor Petie Dixon, and Gary Sohler, the young photographer whom I had very enjoyable working relationships with on several illustrated paperbacks, plus Dianne and I. She, Gary, and Petie spoke pretty good Spanish, I had very little and Earl even less, and heavily tainted with his southern drawl. We took off at a high rate of speed with Earl, an excellent driver, at the wheel all the way, and stopped in the middle of the night at the border checkpoint at Sonoyta, Sonora to show our travel permits. This was a time when people young and old, but mostly young, were traveling anywhere their fancy took them, by thumb or by car, so there was a long line of gringos ahead of us, and as we inched toward the Mexican authorities, we noticed large tufts of hair strewing the desert around us. As we drew closer, we realized the authorities were admitting no one to their country who looked like a hippie, so gringos were stopping at the side of the road and shearing their own hair off in order to get into Mexico. The authorities were also inspecting cars for contraband, such as televisions, kitchen appliances, booze, marijuana, anything not manufactured in Mexico, all of which was in Earl's trunk in abundance. But on top of it all, Earl had wisely laid contraband in the form of naked girlie magazines produced by Gary and published by Greenleaf Classics, which deferred further inspection and served as our passports through the border and into mainland Mexico. We traveled south through Hermosillo, Ciudad Obregon, and Cuilican in the Sonora desert, and stopped at a motel in Guaymas, where Earl insisted on renting unit No. 8 for our party, his reason being that he knew that a gecko was a permanent resident of that unit's bathroom, and ate all the insects that dared to enter the room. He also knew the way to a Chinese restaurant, where the food was good but the main attraction was a menu written in Chinese, translated to Spanish, and then translated to describe the dishes in hilarious English. We had showers in No. 8 as we watched our gecko at work, a stroll around town, and started to relax, but still eager to get to Earl's Mexican haven of Ajijic. Over some beers and some gabbing, we agree that nobody was sleepy and checked out after dark and headed south past the Tropic of Capricorn, and up through the jungly mountains to Tepic, the old cowboy town I had seen on my first deep trip into Mexico almost twenty years earlier, where Earl says he was getting very sleepy and needed a fresh driver. With Petie at the wheel, we are well out of town and into the mountains before he looks at the gauges and sees we're badly in need of gasoline, and he says we'll stop at the next Pemex. That's fine, except that the next Pemex is closed for the night, as is the one forty kilometers later, and as we crest a mountain ridge, the Lincoln quietly runs out of gas. It is very dark. The only lights we can see as we coast down this long curving grade on the two lane road are apparently from a town somewhere off in the distance, on the floor of this vast, shallow valley we seem to be dropping into. We can't tell if it's a town or a factory, if it's two or ten miles away, but on foot or by Lincoln Continental, we've got to get to it for gasoline. A couple of times Petie is able to start the engine and give us a downhill boost, but it always quits again and there's always a sharp enough curve so he has to tap the brakes again. Deceleration is slow and steady when we reach the bottom of the grade, and off to the left, the lights are appreciably closer, but they could still be ten miles away. So we coast, and we sigh, and we gaze at the distant lights, and when the big car silently moves along from a walker's pace to a dead stop, we see a dozen cars lined up facing us on the shoulder of the highway to our left. Their drivers are standing in little groups, bent at their waists to peer back at us in hopes the wallets and luggage of the Lincoln's occupants matched the value of their car. It is very quiet, and it is a warm night, so the car's windows are open, and now we catch a whiff of marijuana floating across the road, and Earl opens the back door and softly says, "Hi? Hola?" They hola back at him and make a move to cross the road, we all get out of the car to meet them, hands are shaken, courteous words are spoken, cigarettes are offered, the mention of gasolina is made, and the drivers point at the lights and start talking too fast for any of us but Gary and Dianne to understand. "Yeah, that's their town, about a mile away but everything's closed. These guys are all the town's cab drivers and those are their taxis-see how they're painted? One of their fellow cab drivers died a few days ago. He was from Tijuana, and his pals are waiting for the hearse to get here to lead the funeral procession back to his home town." Earl opened the Lincoln's trunk and we entered into the spirit of the occasion by joining the cabbies in an impromptu wake in the middle of the road. It was a pot luck wake, we supplying American whiskey, beer, cigarettes, and girlie magazines, them supplying Mexican reefers, beer, tamales, and gasoline until dawn, when the hearse appeared to head the parade and we retired to the Lincoln for a nap. I'm not sure what happened that next day, but I know we got to Guadalajara late at night, too hungry to go on to nearby Ajijic without sustenance. And lo and behold, there was a Denny's 24-hour diner. In we went and found ourselves in a charmingly raucous gay bar, which made us realize Mexico wasn't the puritanical bastion of Catholicism of its past. Leaving there laughing, Earl drove 40 kilometers more to Ajijic and gave us a midnight tour on the cobblestoned streets of the village where some 5,000 gringos and Mexicans lived in colonial comfort. As we passed by the plaza, Earl stopped and asked a Mexican kid, "Hay mota?" The kid said, "I sure do. Five bucks for a bag of really good stuff," and whipping out a fat bag of marijuana, told Earl to ask around town for Pepe whenever he needed more. Laughing again but too tired to do anything but crash, nothing about Earl's Ajijic house registered on us except its beds. When a late morning sun awakened us to a clear blue sky, we started appreciating Earl's captivation with his little corner of Mexico. Comfortably seated on the shaded patio, Earl greeted us with a serenely wide grin and glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and invited us to join him for coffee and pan dulce, freshly baked early that morning by the family of his maid when they heard-incredible grapevine-that Earl's Lincoln had been seen in town. She greeted us shyly as she arranged a platter of mangos, oranges, and melon slices in the open-air kitchen, and Earl said she'd start cooking our breakfasts whenever we were ready. His back yard held a manageably small expanse of thick green grass, nicely tonsured, surrounded on three sides by wide beds of tropical plants, banana trees, and a huge mango tree, all heavy with fruit, and beyond it a high whitewashed adobe wall. The house was laid out in an L-shape around the patio, with a large sleeping room at the short end of the L and the kitchen between it and the master bedroom in the corner of the L, next to a living room/den with a fireplace, and the double-doored entryway was next abutted that. A black wrought-iron spiral stairway led up to another sleeping room and a tiled sunroof that looked down on the cobblestoned streets and over the adobe walls that contained the privacies of Ajijic's other inhabitants. It was a typical vacation house for a well-off Mexican family, leased for a pittance in US dollars from a landlord who pre-approved any changes his tenants wanted to make, and Earl's changes included a lot of psychedelic and erotic posters and murals on the walls. He took us on a stroll around the town, past houses and little stores from which their owners sold groceries, booze, haircuts and shaves, shoes, coffins, underwear, meals, nostrums, shirts and pants, medical services, legal advice, dresses and stockings, baby clothes, anything a person needed to stay alive in a small town. None of the storeowners seemed to be doing much competing with the others, and most of them smiled at the newest gringos in town. We kept bumping into other gringos as Earl showed us his town, and they were always ready to tarry as long as we wanted to hear them tell anything from the way to the public library to the story of what brought them to live in Ajijic. Pete Peterson, Trudy Campbell, Peggy Neal, Mercedes Boone, Wendell Phillips, Stogie, that couple that lived by the highway and she used to play chess with me and try to get me in bed, the various artists, big blonde gringa Jan and big Mex Manuel that had the boutique, Margo whose son ran the Coca-Cola concession in Bogata, Colombia and could make original formula Cocaine-Cola with real coke, Neil James that had parrots throughout her magnificent gardens, the retired B-24 pilot, the old woman who wrote cook books and later got mugged and raped, Susie the wealthy divorcee who slept with her Mexican gardener, the ancient Russian ballerina Madame Zara with the colorful clothes that rode her horse around town, ultimate loser Hogan, the judge from Chi that got murdered, the bride of the blind man who murdered him shortly after they came to Ajijic, Susie Nissen, Red Raymond's mother Marge Bernardi (Official Supplier To The Grateful Dead!), so many others to remember. Plus the porn writers. Vivien Kern, with daughters Vickie and Nonnie and halfway husband Norm, Jim Brown, whose heroes all had "hairy dicks," S&M writer Vern Lundgren and Susie, his young blonde wife, Johnny Poling and Chonacki, the Gilmores, Les Gladson, that old cowboy writer Lee Florin who got his heroines orifices reversed, and on and on. Di and I met all these widely diverse characters in the course of three or four trips to Ajijic that preceded our decision to move there for a year or two. A factor in our decision was we were sick unto death of the Vietnam War and all the social turmoil that went with it, and another was that we were not getting along very well. Ajijic seemed like a splendid place to hide while we healed our marriage. I guess it was 1970 when we packed our new VW van with stuff and headed for Ajijic, where we rented a partially furnished two-bedroom house on Calle Juarez, with a patio and a deep back yard, a gardener and a maid for $85/month. As with most houses in Mexico, the front wall of the house was right at the sidewalk, and it had a deep back yard ending with a high adobe wall that was common with the property behind it. That property was one of the shops that faced on the plaza, where much of the village's daily activities were centered. The shops around the plaza included a small but complete corner grocery, where either Di or I shopped just about every day. I usually circled the plaza once or twice on the way to the store, chatting with people, finding out where the next party might be, or when one of our gringo friends would be back from a shopping trip to the States. Most of the stores were open-air, including the barbershop, where I always checked to see if Earl was back from one of his global trips for Greenleaf. While Di and I were full-time residents, Earl probably spent half his time in Ajijic and the other half was split between San Diego and on his book-buying trips for Greenleaf. On his return he usually strolled a few blocks to the barbershop and relaxed in the chair, greeting passersby and watching the lazy action in the plaza while he got the deluxe treatment for a few pesos and a generous tip. Seeing him there in the barber chair, I'd buy some cold drinks and relate the town gossip while he'd tell me the high points of his stops in Tokyo, Saigon, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Tangier, his favorite city, Paris, London, around the world in first class all the way, quietly searching the bookstores and private collections for erotic classics that had entered the public domain and thus represented big, quick profits for Greenleaf Classics and its competitors in the porn section of America's sexual revolution. On the corner next door to the barbershop was the town's jail, two adobe cells separated by a tiny office, with barred windows facing the street, so a guest of the sheriff could chat with his friends and explain things to his wife when she brought him lunch. The grocery store was catty-corner across the cobblestone street from the jail, and next to that was the town's most popular tortillieria and panaderia, which featured a pay telephone for making long distance calls in addition to freshly made tortillas and bread. Private telephones were extremely rare. Only telephone company stockholders could have phones to begin with. It cost Don Gilmore $3,000 USA in stock to get a telephone line installed in his house. Calls to or from there worked normally anywhere in the world. Since all long distance telephone calls were
routed through Mexico City, making a phone call to the states could
be an all-day affair, and usually a pleasant one. You strolled to
the tortilleria in the late morning and wrote down the phone number
and gave it to the baker. This was basically because of a practice traditionally followed in America's Wild West, which may have been imported from Mexico, and consisted of recruiting the cops for small towns from prisons. For example, Ajijic's sheriff was a murderer who, after five years of good behavior, was told that he, being very knowledgeable and unafraid of criminal behavior, could be released to be a small town sheriff until he misbehaved to the point of being returned to prison. His deputies were in for lesser crimes, and released to be kept in control by their murderous boss. I think our own Bat Masterson had his initial fame under this arrangement, but anyway, it worked with our sheriff, except when he and his boys spent the day drinking beer by the plaza. Sometime after midnight in one of those days, residents of Ajijic were awakened by a series of gunshots that sporadically roared here and there around the town. Next morning when we ventured forth from our casas, the bloody carcasses of dead dogs littered the streets. The sheriff just shrugged. "You gringos complained so much about the stray dogs that we drove around in the truck and took care of them. And now you complain about it?" Every now and then a frightening rumor would sweep through the gringo community. Having spotted every dope-smoking gringo in town, in a day or two their houses would be invaded and tossed for mota, and anyone in its possession would pay a big fine or go to jail. We all came to know it was just a rumor, but since the raiding party would be led by the unpredictable sheriff, everyone buried their dope in their backyards, and often in Earl's, and refrained from getting obviously high for the next few days.
Some of the dope was extremely powerful, and this was long before the days of carefully mutated marijuana. One day Gary Sohler came to our house with a pair of vacationing American Airline stews from New York City who didn't believe his tales of the potency of the locally grown weed. Di and I always had three varieties in our refrigerator, everyday, weekend, and holiday mota, and after explaining this to the young sophisticates, they insisted on smoking, not sharing, a joint of our best stuff. Half an hour later they didn't know where they were, couldn't understand who we were or why we were laughing at them, and wept in their need for someone to get them to the posada, two blocks away. Why did we smoke so much dope and drink too much booze and have so many parties? Because we were rich enough to be worse than the young men escaping the draft by going to Canada, and therefore escaping the ridiculous Vietnam War and the coincident turmoil around the world by getting high on the best absolute best pot and drunk on excellent dollar-a-liter Mexican rum and either host or go to any available party. But there wasn't any complete escape from the rest of the world. Earl often brought it home from his trips abroad. On one return he talked about having scheduled a few days in Frankfurt to shop for some books while he wandered the peaceful and interesting streets. And rounding a corner, BAM!, he found himself in the middle of a violently loud protest, in which the polizi, on horseback, used tear gas and truncheons on the rebellious kids-being led by "Red Rudy"-who had, for global publicity reasons, forewarned the press of their intent to disrupt the city as long and loud as possible from behind barricades.
Peggy Neal's parties were the best. She was a blonde, fortyish mother of two teenage girls, grandly but tenuously living on the government dole for widows of Air Force pilots shot down in the Korean War. Just meters away from the Posada, her rented hacienda was beautifully weary and filled with character, including wagon wheel chandeliers for cheap Mexican candles, whose dripping wax made some of the dancing steps exceptionally lively. At one of her parties the chattering guests were suddenly silent, captivated by the appearance of a young man in tight black trousers and a turtleneck, holding a matched pair of black police dogs on short silver choke chains as he posed dramatically in Peggy's front entry. As the silence turned into a buzz, it was whispered about that the stranger was named Hogan, who had been in so many scrapes in the States that his wealthy father was paying him $700/month to keep the hell out of the States. Since it was a different sort of story, we didn't care if it was a rumor or not. Di and I saw him around town now and then and met him at parties a few times, but hadn't much cared for him because of his rather braggadocio bearings. A few months later our interest was piqued by the news that Hogan was leaving for the state of Guerrero with $20,000 in cash to invest in enough Acapulco Gold to make him rich for the rest of his life. Next it was said that Hogan's cash had been exchanged for machine gun bullets that ended his life in the jungle, and this we believed when he came back to town in a coffin. Since his father still didn't want him back in the States, he was buried under a big black granite cross in a little cemetery along the highway to Jocotepec from Lake Chapala. A few months later, when the owner of some lakeside property wanted to build a hotel on it, the bulldozer on its way to clear the land took a shortcut through the cemetery, which resulted in only one coffin being unearthed, and of course, it spilled out its contents, Hogan, the ultimate loser, even unto death. Then there's The Clem Story. Clem was also a remittance man because he was such an enthusiastic and persistent alcoholic. None of his family could handle the thought of watching him so they paid him to stay out of the States. Clem was walking home from one particularly noteworthy Ajijic party-noteworthy because of The Clem Story-in the pre-dawn hours. When he reached his house he went into the kitchen and accidentally stumbled against his drinking water stand. This is a tall, metal stand holding an upended 5-gallon bottle of drinking water…a top-heavy fixture in every local kitchen. When Clem stumbled against his water bottle stand and knocked it over, it went crashing heavily against the hard tiled floor. The bottle broke open like a slow-motion flower lifting its bright red petals upward in offering. An offering Clem couldn't resist, in his stupor, as he fell onto that flower, guaranteeing its redness. They found him there the next day, just like that, shredded and all partied out. They buried him real close to Hogan. Earl may not have been in Ajijic at the time of the Hogan disinterment, but whether or not he was in or out of town, his house was the social hub of activity for his expatriate writers. And on his return he was always pleasant, always courteous, always ready to entertain at his house or anyone else's, or spend an evening of dancing and gabbing at the Posada. To illustrate his implacably pleasant nature, after having been entrusted to look after Earl's near new Lincoln company car while he was on one of his Asian trips, I all but totaled the big beauty one drunken night on the road to a night club party at La Pantera Rosa in Chapala. On Earl's return, he shrugged at the repairs we'd had made and said he was sorry he'd missed that particular party.
Why did we expatriates party so much, why did we drink booze and smoke pot every day, and why did we constantly compete with each other in juvenile adventures like shooting off hundreds of skyrockets as big as sticks of dynamite at the fiestas, and making globos-hot air balloons-that soared up and out of sight, and having affairs with anyone handy? The universal reason was escaping from the Vietnam War, and all the lies and stupidities and prejudices and politics that went with it. Contributing to this excuse on a personal basis was the fact that my time in Ajijic was the peak of the decade of freedom from responsibilities I had earned as a fiction writer after entering kindergarten at four and working, getting my first job when I was ten years old. Di loved life in Ajijic for a different reason. She often said she'd been born a hundred years too late, and should have crossed the prairie on a wagon train. After that year in Ajijic, I often found myself saying how I increasingly missed the reality of living in the States, regardless of all its faults. When I said I was going back, Dianne said good-bye. # Lively little Ajijic has undergone a change or two in the last thirty-five years. Luxury homes now look down from the mountains on the village whose gringos are primarily sedate retirees, paying over $1,000 a month for places like the one we rented for $85. The streets are still cobblestoned, but a great many new SUVs are parked on them now, and there's a supermarket on the highway, and though the Posada's bar and restaurant are still functional, the dance floor is gone and the hotel rooms are now condos. When I visit Di and walk around town, I try to ignore these changes and look for stores and houses that haven't changed much in the passing years. When I look in through the gates of the houses' high whitewashed walls at the gardens and see tuberous begonias three feet tall and blossoming with a brilliance you see nowhere else, I recall that the plant is indigenous to that one area in all the world. I think about lying in the shade of a stand of giant bamboo on a hot, humid day and hearing the bamboo grow-crack! Cr-crack-Crack. I remember ducking at the rustling sounds of overripe fruit falling down through the leaves of the huge mango trees. Passing the plaza I vividly remember a day when Earl and I and our visiting kids followed Pepe across the highway and hiked up the mountain, where our guide showed us the entrance to the secret cave leading down and back under the highway to the cavern under the plaza where Pancho Villa stashed a horde of gold during the Mexican Revolution. As we skidded down the steep and narrow tunnel into the cave, hordes of bats flew out countercurrent to us and our shrieking kids. On we went, guided by flashlights, the twisting, narrowing cave getting warmer and warmer until we got to The Treasure Room, where the treasure we found was a pool of warm and amazingly clear water, populated with a school of tiny blind fish. Fireflies entertained us every night when they were in season, and there was always a season in Ajijic, because Laguna Chapala was big enough to create its own weather system, so streaky neon lightning storms frequently lit up the night to entertain the whole town. There was also a dry season so interminably long that every leaf and twig of the lovely mountainous jungle around us turned a dreary brown. And when the long anticipated rainy season began, the streets were awash with tin cans and cigarette butts and dog turds and dust, which didn't stop the people from dancing on the cobblestones and watching the foliage turn sparkling green and their houses become white-walled and red-roofed once again. Sure, I appreciated all that meteorological and scenery stuff, as well as our little archaeological expeditions, but that was thirty years ago, when Ajijic's people were its really absorbing interest. Not until it was pointed out to me years later did I realize that Mexico had been quite a fashionable place in which to live. Towns like Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende were particularly fashionable because they were colonies of expatriate artists, writers, and other creative types…second-rate versions of Paris in the turbulent 1920s. Memories of the marvelously colorful and rebelliously talented people we knew in Ajijic remain so vivid that I could greet many by name if I met them on the street. Extremely unlikely, and I remain in touch with very few. Earl is retired and writing in Arizona, Gary manages commercial construction projects in Hawaii, and Dianne deals in Ajijic real estate. I'm a technical writer in San Diego, happily married to wife No, 3, and my "kids" who visited us in dear old crazy old Ajijic are older than I was then. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a favorite writer of the era, said in ending his novels, "So it goes." #
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| Disgracias Con
Diablo El Mismo (Misadventures with The Devil Himself) By Gary Sohler, a.k.a. Ralph Basura, Wash Johnston, F.P. "Jack" Pril, et al. Earl Kemp? Yeah, I know him. He almost killed me once. Actually, he almost killed me several times, all in one day. It was the late 60's, or maybe the early 70's. The sexual revolution had fully matured, and if you were in the porno business, which a few of us were, life was good. Earl was the editor at Greenleaf Classics, a San Diego publisher of mainstream print media smut that was good enough to make everyone at the company, including the contributors, very comfortable. If you have read Jerry Murray's (aka Lance Boyle) excellent article in this edition of Earl's ezine, you know that Jerry and I were Greenleaf contributors; Jerry as a prolific paperback writer and me as a semi-prolific magazine packager. In the course of business, Earl, Jerry, and I became, and still are, good friends.
The year Earl tried to kill me must have been a banner year for Greenleaf because Bill Hamling, the Greenleaf publisher, in a fit of magnanimity, gave all of his top executives-including Earl-a brand new gold-colored Lincoln Continental as a bonus. It was in this very same Continental that I almost lost my life. In his story, Jerry Murray refers to a drive from San Diego in the Continental to Earl's wonderful hacienda in Ajijic as taking place, "at a high rate of speed." There was a little more to the story than that. After reading a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog shortly before Earl got his Lincoln, I had given up the porn business, the fast lane, and L.A., and with my wife and two cats had bought a funky sheep farm in Oregon, grown a pony tail and had, to quote Dr. Tim Leary, "Dropped out." Jerry Murray and his wife and kids stopped by to see us on a trip to Washington, and his visit was very timely. After a year of rain, mud, sheep shit, endless backbreaking work, and vicious redneck neighbors, I was ready for any kind of relief. Jerry provided it by inviting me to accompany him, Earl, Earl's managing editor Pete Dixon, and "maybe some other people" on a trip to Earl's sunny villa in Old Mexico. The only word I heard in our whole conversation was "sunny." I signed up on the spot. Jerry picked me up on the return trip from Washington and I left my poor blubbering wife Gloria there on the farm with a list of chores and hopped into Jerry's car with my backpack. I felt like Tom Joad, Jack Kerouac, and Martin Luther King all rolled into one. "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!" A couple of days later we assembled at Earl's house in El Cajon, California and in much haste roared off toward the border in Earl's shiny new Lincoln. Besides Earl, Jerry and his wife Dianne, Petey and myself, the "other people" turned out to be Earl's (then married) daughter Edie.
We weren't over the border into Mexico 30 seconds before launching the hunt for mota. Weed. Grass. MariJUANA, cabron! We didn't dare cross the border through Mexican customs dirty, especially in a car that literally shrieked, "RICH GRINGOS, AQUI!" It's hard to believe now, but in those days you could actually-and we did-cruise the streets of Mexicali or Tecate, pull up next to any nefarious-looking Mexican gutter bum and blurt out, "Hey amigo; hay mota?" On the second try we got a "Si." We actually gave the guy some cash; I think it was $10 or $15, on the front, and waited in the car, somehow KNOWING that the fucker would come back, and with a bag of weed. Sure enough, not ten minutes went by before the guy resurfaced, slunk over to the car, furtively looked both ways, and quickly shoved a paper shopping bag into the car. This was a supermarket paper shopping bag, mind you, and the damned thing was three-quarters full. We were on our way. Pissing on prudence and better judgment, Earl immediately ordered Petey to start rolling joints, which he did, even before we got out of town and hit the highway. Sort of like just another day at the office while on vacation for him. We weren't ten miles into the Sonoran Desert before the passenger compartment looked like Cheech and Chong's Chevy in Up In Smoke. It was late afternoon and the air over the infinite desert landscape was preternaturally clear. The distant Sierra Madre Mountains were knife-edge purple in the fading light. Earl was driving. It occurred to me, in a wonderful somnambulistic fog, to look at the speedometer. It read 140 mph. Steady. I laughed. We were bulletproof. We were FREE! We were flying. We were rich motherfucking gringos with a Holy Mandate From God Himself to get to Ajijic, with all due speed, in His Golden Chariot of Fire. For most Americans a 24-hour non-stop drive through the vastness of a Western desert is a stupefying experience. The stoned and specious conversation in our car quickly ebbed with the onset of darkness. Finally, in the ominous silence of Carlos Casteneda's and Don Juan's mystical Yaqui desert, Earl blurts out the non sequitur, "Man, am I ripped!" Two grunts of acknowledgment from the back seat. Eons later, Earl figures out that he's in Mexico and amends his statement to use the Mexican pronunciation of "ripped" by changing it to "reeped." Somewhere between Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregon, exhaustion sets in and he abbreviates his exclamation all the way down to "Reeped." It is this, and only this, that we heard for the next thousand fucking miles. That and his frequent cackling laugh. If you've never heard Earl laugh, it sounds like the cackle of a Salem witch with an Arkansas accent, being burned at the stake and liking it. Unique. Inimitable. Irritating as hell. Despite utter darkness, we are still hurtling ahead at 140 mph with Earl at the wheel. This on a narrow, two-lane, blacktopped Mexican highway notorious for obstructions such as cows, chickens, drunk campesinos, rocks, bicyclists, dogs (dead and alive), vados (dips), unannounced construction, broken down vehicles in the lane, purposeless smudgepots, towns, shit- WHOLE FUCKING TOWNS FULL OF PEOPLE! But nothing stops us. We are a gold-plated $15,000 American Gringo Capitalist Pig Juggernaut with leather upholstery and probably insurance, though I didn't see Earl take any out in Tecate. Fuck it. We're rolling. "Reeped." Cackle. Thank You Merciful God; Earl finally gets tired and agrees to trade off to the next driver, who is Jerry Murray. For eleven hours we have all endured seemingly endless stretches of eventless light-speed travel punctuated by sudden horrific slamming brakes and vicious swerving to avoid sudden death of either ourselves or other mammals. Forget counting the desert rodents, birds, or coyotes. Devil take the hindmost. We continue trading drivers. And every fifteen minutes, like A Clockwork Orange, or Chinese water torture, we hear, "Reeped." Cackle. I begin counting my blessings as we pass through the towns of Culiacan and Hermosillo and realize we haven't encountered the ultimate Mexican nightmare; two semi trucks, one passing the other on a narrow, two-lane mountain road on a hairpin turn, coming our way. How have we avoided this penultimate disaster? I don't know. "Reeped." (Cackle.) Maybe we really are on a mission from Dios. Jerry Murray is prudence itself. He never exceeds 120 mph. Petey Dixon is a fucking maniac. Worse than Earl. He has a death wish, and I don't even look at the speedometer while he's at the wheel. In vain I petition to empty my bladder between towns in the slim hope that by making the car stop while Petey is driving I'll somehow make him drive slower on the next stretch. What a fucking fool I am. I piss onto the roadside and look up at the stars, thinking to myself that this will be the last time I'll ever see them until I ascend out of my horribly twisted and burned body to join God in Heaven. Next to me I hear Earl, (cackle) "Reeeeeeeeped." We don't even let Edie or Dianne drive. Killing six people in Mexico would look really bad on their driving records. They'd never get insurance. I take over the wheel somewhere in the early morning and, not wanting to appear the frightened young wimp with-everything-to-live-for that I am, I ram the Continental Titanic up to 110. Fuck it; that's my limit and I'm sticking to it. I'm 23 years old. It's pitch black out, we're in Mexico, I've got my whole life ahead of me, and besides, I've already started to bust some moves on Edie in the back seat. She and I have agreed that we'll very likely end up as charred corpses on the side of a Mexican highway, so we might as well fall in lust right now, but my fantasy hardon shrinks as I hear…Cackle, "Reeped." Long toward noon of the next day we finally rolled into Guadalajara and the jarring cacophony of roadside vendors, choking smog, thunderous traffic, and the urban nightmare of Big City Mexico. I think we stopped for some coffee and pasteles, just to keep body and soul together, then headed out on the south road from Guadalajara to Lake Chapala. The road from Chapala through Ajijic to Jocotepec is a two-lane blacktop "highway" with nobody on it. I begin to think that we have actually made it alive. Edie and I have been holding hands in our sleep in the back seat. I awake to see several hundred feet of one entire lane of the road crudely blocked off with simple whitewashed rocks and what turns out to be millions of inch-long silver fish spread out on the roadway to dry in the sun…charales. The local Lake Chapala fishermen catch this protein from the lake with unbelievably intricate nets, then haul them to the highway in wheelbarrows where they dump them out on the tarmac. Fat Mexican fisherwives in woven straw hats and colorful print dresses with stick brooms continuously rake and sweep these inch-long fish back and forth on the hot highway to dry them in the unrelenting Ajijic sun. Traffic in the "fish" lane patiently waits while our Sherman Tank of a Continental barrels down the highway toward the cool sanctity of Earl's hacienda. Earl's house is secluded, comfortable, and modern by Mexican standards, and his maid does our laundry every day, including ironing our underwear, which blows my mind. My wife doesn't even do that. Our stay in Ajijic was idyllic, pastoral, mind-blowing, restful, fulfilling, and everything we hoped it would be. More so because we all tacitly knew that we had survived a deadly road trip of Hunter Thompson proportions to a village already made notorious by Ken Keasey with his Kool-Aid Acid Bus tour. As I walked into the house and unpacked in my room, I thought of the stranded dead dried fish on the highway just a mile away, and thought to myself, "That could have been us." Miraculously, Earl stopped saying "Reeped" as soon as we got to the hacienda. I'm glad. I guess it was a road trip thing. Had he continued we might have killed him. No, not really. He made this, and Jerry's story possible. We had a misadventure with The Devil Himself. # Yes, over the next couple of weeks in Ajijic, Edie and I had a torrid affair right there in Earl's house, much to his dismay. Edie eventually left her husband in San Diego and I eventually left my wife in Oregon. Like Jerry Murray and maybe some other 60's and 70's porno carpetbaggers, we're out of the porno biz now. In fact I don't know anyone from those days who is still in the biz, but I do know that we all enjoy our memories and are very grateful to Earl for helping make some of them happen. I'm a construction manager now, 58 years old, happy as hell, still working full-time, and living in very comfortable circumstances on the beach in Kailua, Hawaii. I cherish every memory from that era and wouldn't change a thing in my life. Thanks, Earl. But mostly for not saying "Reeped" any more. #
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| "Marijuana
Por Fumar"*
Most gringos think the original sound-track recording for Mexico features a lot of choruses of "La Cucaracha." And, they don't realize the song is about marijuana, marijuana por fumar...to smoke; the gringo version of the song was politically correctly sanitized to be drug free. One would even think that pot...mota as they call it...was a Mexican creation, only that certainly wasn't the truth. Nonetheless, if you really looked for it, you could encounter it in one form or another wherever you roamed around Mexico...in abundance. That was true of Ajijic...like anywhere in Guadalajara...where you had no difficulty at all getting any amount of weed you might ever dream of wanting to have for any reason. It was cheap, too, going for around $10. USA a kilo then. It was commonplace, when being a guest, to bring a hostess gift; more often than not that consisted of a kilo of grass. It would be tossed among the other hostess gifts for the evening; the variety and flavors would be sorted out later. If it wasn't in brick form, it was fresh growing green. If your dealer happened to be out of kilos whenever you ordered, he'd simply substitute one six-foot-tall marijuana plant chopped into sections with a machete and stuffed into a grocery bag. An entire $10 worth of fresh green weed. If necessary, you microwaved it in a hurry. Or, you kept the stems and sticks and brewed tea with them later. Sprays of fresh green marijuana turned up in floral arrangements, centerpieces, and as hostess gifts. Total strangers would knock on your door and present you with sprays of pot. "Welcome to Ajijic," they'd say, and what a welcome it was once you got over the shock of the cultural differences and tried to think for yourself. The social scene was something really running out of control. Everyone was always having parties and as an occasional guest you were expected to occasionally entertain so you got to the point, if you didn't work at it, where every afternoon contained a cocktail party and every evening contained a dinner party. The booze flowed endlessly as did the pot from machine-rolled joints to frosted brownies. In one form or another, you were smashed out of your gourd most of the time. At least between hangovers. There was never any downtime between parties. If you committed to the scene you were locked in to endless running, endless drunks, endless hangovers, and endless highs. Some of these parties were quite elaborate and featured open bars with hired bartenders, catered food, extra servants, hired musical entertainment for mini-concerts...everyone trying to outdo everyone else. There was cocaine, too, at some of these parties, and various hallucinogenics, but most of us, by then, were die-hard potheads. One of the local natives who turned up as an invited guest at numbers of these parties was an engaging young man named Pepe. I have this thing about people's last names. In fact, these days I find I have quite a thing just remembering people's names in general. Perhaps I should be glad that I remember their first names at all; I know who they are and they know who they are and that's how it all happens. There was Hermalinda, who fed me wonderful tacos just off the town square for years before, accidentally, allowing me to know she welcomed me as a "local" person myself. There was Lupe, the hard-partying mechanic. There was Jesus, the barber, also just off the town square (and adjacent to the old church, naturally), who cut my hair once every week regardless of how badly I needed it. There were Maria and Lourdes, my two favorite maids, and Carmen who filled in at third place. Carmen's only problem was she tried so hard to get me into bed and I wasn't the least bit interested. There was Trevi, my very special house guardian and gardener. And there was Pepe.... I never knew Pepe's father, though I recognized him on sight. He was someone important, I knew that from the location and condition of his house, surrounded by greedy filthy rich gringos trying to gobble up everything in sight. I knew that from the respect he and his family were routinely shown around town whenever you would encounter them going about their affairs.
When Pepe's father died, there was one hell
of a funeral. It was so big, in fact, it inspired local Impressionist
painter John K. Peterson to immortalize the event on canvas. His
picture shows a street scene looking right down the middle of the
street to where, three blocks away, the Cathedral stands. From every
doorway the townspeople are pouring, as if on cue, and forming a
funeral procession down the center of the street to the church where
the ceremony in honor of the passing of Pepe's father would take
place. My house sits just on the right-hand edge of the painting
and one street over. Having this painting by John Peterson hanging
among my collection is an object of considerable pride to me. Besides
that, it constantly reminds me where...for however brief a period...home
was. # It didn't take very long for Pepe to make sure I knew him. He was an aggressively upward mobile native Ajijic resident possessed of much street savvy and general knowledge about how most people worked and where to get whatever it was they thought they needed from time to time. It was almost as if he was omnipresent behind the scenes of most happenings of any significance in the area. He was still a young man when I first met him, in his early twenties, and bubbling over with talent and enthusiasm and sure-fire ways of just somehow naturally skimming the best off the top of everything for Pepe. In his spare time he entertained in local bars and restaurants, playing his guitar and singing from a large repertoire of gringo-approved songs. I think I am making him sound like quite a pusher and a user, but he was certainly none of those things for me, ever. He was, in fact, my very first local native friend after I took the house in Ajijic on Lake Chapala, some 25 miles outside quaint, picturesque colonial Guadalajara (and my how times do change and always for the worse). Pepe enriched my life in many different ways and gave me much, much more than he ever received from me. He was a musician, in some respects an artist, and an accomplished ladies man. Pepe seemed to specialize in the young, frustrated, just prepubescent daughters of the affluent passersby. He seemed to know exactly what they wanted and how to give it to them. Once I asked him, foolishly, about the legalities of his messing around with what I thought of as being underage children. He assured me that, in Mexico, if you could get it in, she was old enough to do it and was completely legal. Pepe was also one of the best damned dope dealers in town. He was, however, never my dealer, though I sampled great stores of his produce as time went by. Pepe did deal to some of my gringo friends; it was through them that I met Pepe in the first place. Once, when I thought I knew Pepe well enough to ask a personal question, I asked him about his dope dealing. He told me it was more or less just something to do; he had grown up in the role. Everyone in town knew...most of all the police. Pepe told me that the best way to explain it
was to tell me it was like a game they
It was sort of like a kick-back; in the course of six months, Pepe sold those same policemen much more than $50 worth of weed for their personal use. Now and then I would encounter Pepe at various houses of my friends or at parties of mutual acquaintances. While Pepe loved to party, and who didn't in those days, he had a quiet, introspective side as well that occasionally needed exercising. Pepe lived with his family about two blocks down the street from my house and around the corner. It was a typical Mexican family of brothers and sisters and animals underfoot, of someone always shouting...and someone always singing. Music being softly played somewhere in the background...hand-made music...not a radio. I seem to recall a couple of brothers, one quite close in age to Pepe who was quickly following in his footsteps. The best times went something like this: It is a quiet time and I might even be alone
in the house when I hear a knocking on my front door. When I open
it I see Pepe standing there, a big grin on his face, a guitar under
his arm, and a very nicely rolled joint being held forward as if
in offering.
Pepe was still working on his English in those days. He knew how important it was for him to be able to communicate clearly with the gringos who were daily occupying more and more of his hometown; only in that fashion could he be sure they paid the going rates. And my Spanish was something really gross then as well, but we had no difficulty communicating at all. Pepe would sit down at the ecopali table in my patio bar and dump whatever he was holding that time onto the tabletop. And it all had a pedigree and a history and was all just a bit better than first quality. Sometimes it was some Indica he had grown himself on a family plot just down the highway toward Jocotopec a bit. Acapulco gold. Fresh, moist Oahacan mushrooms. Peyote buttons from his buddy the Ouichole. Red-hair Sensemia from Michoacan across the lake. Flake-off Afghani gold hashish. Opium-laced Thai sticks. Blotter-paper acid or occasional windowpane. Pepe was sort of like a living,, walking Amsterdam drug store. Whatever suited your fancy would come around eventually, if you waited long enough, and every bit of it would be significantly better than advertised. Pepe, after lighting that joint and passing it over, would pick up his guitar and just start playing and singing. He could go on for hours that way, it seemed, without once repeating a song, without missing a toke on the joint or the pipe or the.... So easy to understand how those were the best times of all. They even got better, too, now and then. Occasionally, after singing and playing and smoking nonstop for all that time, Pepe would take a break, and those were the best times of all. Pepe almost always had some kind of old car that was questionably legal and just barely usable. We would jump into that rattletrap and, between backfires, Pepe would take off down Constitution rumbling and rolling over the cobblestones, his bald tires (no spare) screaming in loud protests. At those times I always felt like I was in the presence of the King of the Hill. Wherever we went everyone knew Pepe and seemed to respect him and because I was simply with him some of that specialness rubbed off onto me. Pepe was important here, not me; most of them had never even heard of the King of Pornography. Tired from his smoking and his exertions, Pepe and I would rush off to visit Gorda. Of course she was fat, Mexicans don't waste much time with nicknames, and possessed of all the proverbial jolliness one expects. Professionally Gorda was a forger. She made fake authentic pre-Columbian pottery. As I would visit Gorda in this fashion, with Pepe, I was accepted as a warm friend and even shown the scrapbook of photos of Gorda's handwork in various museums and collections all over the world. She was so proud of her babies, as she called them. The ones in the Boston Museum, the ones in private celebrity collections like those of Kirk Douglas, etc. Gorda made these counterfeits out of authentic pre-Columbian pottery garbage. They looked authentic, they smelled authentic, and most of all they carbon-dated authentic...and Gorda was one happy, well-provided-for lady. With her accomplished potter's hands she could also whip out some mean joints, and fire them up and get them passing around.... Seated around one of her creations, a stand-alone, hand-formed fireplace complete with glowing, gently crackling fire, idly sipping at some Sauza Verde, smoking endless joints of incomparable weed and listing to two guitars playing and two voices blending into spontaneous song for hours and hours. And all the while I sat there being caressed by wave after wave of pleasure as my body pulsated and moved in rhythm with the music and my voice howled and ululated and somehow blended into the whole mosaic. My feet tapping one, two, three, four; one.... Mindlessly banging claves together in my hands. I was not only the King of Pornography, I was at the top of my form, performing at the very peak of my professional career... I was all of the Pips to their Gladys Knight. I was Naomi sensuously vibrating to their Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. And I knew all that bliss within the hands of God, while benevolently being watched over and protected by the God of the Lake, of Laguna Chapala, los manos de Irapahane himself. Sort of like another lousy day in paradise and ho-hum, so what else is new? #
Pepe never ever left my house, or me, without passing over an ounce of private-stash weed, or mushrooms, or.... He seemed to need to make sure I never ran out. Pepe did not sell me those drugs; he gave them
to me. In all the years that I had a house in Ajijic and pretended
to live there, I never once bought drugs from Pepe; I never once
had to. The necessity never was allowed to arise. Years later, even after I had given up La Casa de mi Corizon, Pepe moved to southern California. A time or two, at special parties, we would get together again and remember old times and do at least another doobie just for the hell of it. Years later still, during a vacation trip back into time to revisit Ajijic, I discovered that Pepe was also back in town. I was with my son Erik at the time; Erik had spent five of his most formative years growing up around Pepe. We rushed right over to Pepe's house and banged furiously on the font door like TV cops, loudly calling his name and demanding his "bad boy" presence immediately.... ...twenty five years later.
Pepe hurried to the front door and threw it open. He took one look and said, "I might have known it was you...come on in. Boy, Erik, have you grown...." We were only going to be in Ajijic for two days, just long enough to touch it and smell it and feel it again. Naturally we wanted some weed...assuming Pepe was still dealing. For the first time in all the years we had known each other, I insisted that Pepe take money for the weed he was giving us, and he did, at his price, $1.98 for the ounce, with a pack of Zig-Zag cut-corners thrown in for grins. It's awfully nice being back home again, even if you can't ever go there any more.
# - - -
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| Sima in Paradise*
Sima was playing "Simba, bitch queen of the jungle" again. The dumb cat never learned to speak anything but Siamese; to do so would undoubtedly have interfered with her divine task of ruling the world. She was a bitch queen, though, as any misguided roof cat could testify who strayed into her sovereign territory, the perimeter of the villa itself. The large rambling structure was marked on one side by the highway to Chapala, on a second side by the spectacular hacienda del Senor Robles, the architect, and the rest by Laguna Chapala itself, Jalisco's pride, Mexico's largest inland lake. Sima played the game almost daily with Cantinflas,
Dr. Espejiel's scraggly looking and peculiar parrot, and had for
over two years, except when Cantinflas had a bad fever and the time
Sima was accidentally locked inside the tool shed for three days. The jungle foliage, heavy laden with moisture, the air ozone fresh from the eight o'clock rain, the ginger and agave-even the coveted peyote patch-was easy to negotiate, if Sima moved cautiously enough and appeared to be sufficiently unconcerned. Her chocolate points had never fully matured, as Sima's growth had been stunted. A broken pelvis as a teenager had resulted in Sima's having been spayed before puberty, stunting her both physically and mentally. She was a capricious, talkative, permanently teenaged bitch. She was past forty, by people time, which carried some permission for bitchiness and arrogance. Her urinary infection didn't help any either, nor the necessity of frequent drinks and more frequent eliminations. She breathed the heavy intermingling fragrance of many blossoms and reached the start of the Abyssinian bananas and knew the lawn was just ahead, through the final plumes of exotic tropical foliage. She looked out carefully between the giant purple and green variegated leaves, searching the landscape. From side to side, she could see the wide expanse of green grass, each separate blade manicured to perfection by Trevi, the jardinero, and dotted here and there with large yellow and white umbrellas and white-enameled wrought iron lawn furniture with plenty of room leftover for the naked Tai Kwan Do lessons. There were isolated flowerbeds of erupting color and, just beyond the tree roses, the lily pond. Water was flowing hypnotically over the edge of the blue and white tiled pond. The sound of the trickling water reminded Sima of how thirsty she was. Nevertheless, her game had to go on. She spotted the parrot at last, down by the pier, flaunting his vibrant colors from atop the boathouse. Noiselessly, Sima slipped clear of the banana stalks then made a fast dash for cover under the dwarf lemons. From high atop his perch the parrot squawked
"_Chinga!" and dived down toward Sima, blue and yellow
and green and red flashing before her face. A hummingbird, startled by Sima's sudden appearance,
clicked audibly and zoomed away from a red-sugar-water feeder, leaving
a trace of fragrant roses behind. Sima, thinking the game was finished for the day, ignored the parrot with all her strength of resolve, walking out onto the pier and looking down into the mud-streaked lake water. It smelled fishy to her, as always. A fish jumped out of the water and looked her straight in the bulging eyeball, teasingly, before vanishing from sight. Far out in the water, some half-naked fishermen slowly passed a joint and a tequila bottle and lazily lowered a net over the side of their boat. Canfinflas flew down over Sima, one wingtip
slapping fur behind her ear, then swooped away, laughing and calling,
"_Chinga! _Chinga!" through the morning stillness.
Sima trotted back toward the house, stopping in the new begonia bed to urinate, then moving on to the lily pond. Treading cautiously through the mud, she drank from the overflowing lip of the pool. Now what? Sima mumbled audibly, almost all the time. The dumb parrot won't be back today. Only who can figure out what a parrot will do? Less than half an hour later Sima was sleeping, curled up on the cool tile of the patio and snuggled up against a well-used leather ecopali chair. She was dreaming of food, her favorite subject and her favorite dish, sizzling broiled fresh salmon steaks, right out of the microwave-the first in all of Jalisco. The aroma was tantalizing her nostrils and her mouth, salivating, was moving down upon the passionately pink delight. Cantinflas, watching Sima from well within the fronds of the huge old ragged-leaf fish-tail palm, wondered what the stupid cross-eyed cat was up to, playing dead most likely, trying to lure the parrot to within her fiendishly feline grasp. Well, Cantinflas would have none of that. The parrot eased itself free of the palm and spread its colorful wings, flapping up into the air. Cantinflas made a spiraling schondell down to the left and zoomed right under the red-tiled patio roof and, swooping down toward Sima, dive shat the cantankerous cat like a vintage Messerschmitt. The explosive glob of mingled whiteblack missed target and splattered on the brick red tile fractions of an inch from Sima's salmon-filled nose. Sima didn't flinch. No muscle of her dream-seduced body moved. Cantinflas, annoyed, swooped back out of the patio and into el jardin, climbing over the rooftop and, squawking "_Chinga!" he flew out of sight. # - - -
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| La Crema*
Trevi, the jardinero, sat on the hard cement bench in la plaza, the center of town. He was just opposite Cine Ajijic; a double bill was playing, The Bridges at Toko Ri and Rio Bravo; it was Thursday, gringo night at the movies. They always got the best movies, los gringos. Personally, Trevi preferred Santos. He missed the trees. If they were still there, he would be in the shade. The enormous old eucalyptus trees that had been on the square for as long as he could remember, finally falling to a fiesta promoter who wanted to erect a concession tent to sell cerveza where the regal trees once ruled. Still, it was nice without the barbed wire that used to be up around the rose gardens, the formal arrangement radiating outward from the ornate bandstand that formed the center of la plaza. That formed the center of most plazas in Mexico. The roses were especially nice, their virginal blossoms just opening and flooding the square with their fragrance. Hummingbirds darted here and there, whipping up the scents and sampling the nectar of the variously red flowers. Along with the trees, Trevi remembered La Crema that used to occupy the raised platform next to the cine, like some battle post, dominating the entire town square. It was a soda fountain dispensing ice cream, mostly to the pretty little gringa putas who would trip around, braless, their tits shamelessly bobbing about, their nipples clearly visible, evoking every old man's favorite dream. Aye, those were the good old days with the trees and the ice cream and the firm little breasts with the pointy nipples that you could hold in your hand, or lick or something…. # - - -
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| La Casa Sexo;
Noches de Amorissimo*
It was one of those things…Kismet…. The first time I saw the house I knew I belonged there. Don Gilmore, who located the house in the first place, had been holding it off the market just for me, waiting until I could fly into Guadalajara to inspect it, though he should have known that was completely unnecessary. All the way out from Guadalajara [25 miles], Don bragged endlessly about what a coup it was getting that house in suburban Ajijic, and at such a reasonable rate as well. The house was to be mine for five years for $45 USA a month. [I felt really ripped off, too; most of my neighbors had 20-year leases at $15 a month. Some bragged of 100-year leases at $10.] In that time I could do anything I felt like doing to the structure and there would never be an occasion, as long as I met my contractual obligations, when the duena [landlady] would expect entry into the premises. It had been empty and falling into dust and debris for a number of months. It was a house as desperately in need of me as a tenant as I was to be in it as one. The straw that broke the camel's back, so to cliché, was the three-foot-tall Mexican commercial pot plant thriving in the midst of the dead and dying landscaping. "Hey, man," it said to me, "this is the place; I been waitin'." # Naturally I had to do the routine gringo thing…make
the house over in my own image. The tenant just before me had done
a wonderful thing. He closed off the original main entrance to the
house with a solid wall of glass brick fronting directly against
the sidewalk outside [It was somewhat of a perverse thrill, standing
there naked taking a shower with normal foot traffic only inches
away]. Here he built a large, tile-lined shower big enough for four
to maneuver in what had been the original entry hallway dividing
the master bedroom from the living room. In fact, the entire hallway
was now a master bedroom closet/bathroom. Upstairs, someone had once begun construction of a second-floor bedroom then stopped just as quickly. I latched onto that immediately and hired a construction crew to complete that bedroom and install a spiral wrought-iron staircase from my patio floor up to the second floor. The balance of the second floor was given over to a tiled sunbathing deck. There were no houses anywhere close enough from which nude sunbathers could be visible. That rapidly changed, unfortunately. As I was expecting a large amount of visitors to come calling, I had as much sleeping space built into the house as I could. Three walls of the living room, facing the fireplace, all converted into sleeping space. Besides the master bedroom and the under-construction upstairs "guest" room, there was a huge dormitory [about 20'X30'] room for my children containing two double beds and two twins. There was a second bathroom for this room and, beyond that, a furnished maid's room. I joked with the construction foreman, who was also installing new wiring, wall switches, outdoor lighting, etc., about hanging a large, red glass lamp outside over the garage entrance that was now the only entrance to the house. He protested that he could not possibly do that because it would give me a bad reputation. I kept insisting, but he hanged that red lamp in the middle of my patio instead, where it couldn't be seen from the outside. After all the construction was done to my satisfaction, I began decorating the interior of the house. All the walls were painted flat Navajo white to begin with, disguising a bit of abuse from the past and a persistent amount of mildew that always won out.
For the master bedroom I constructed a huge wooden pedestal framework that contained Ajijic's very first one and only king sized waterbed. [It was my first experience buying Mexican cut lumber; you order 2"X8"X10' an that's exactly what you get. A real surprise.] That bed dominated that room like the throne of a true king. On the bedroom wall, my daughter Edith painted a huge mural of a Roman orgy. The painting was done entirely in fluorescing Day-Glo paints because the bedroom was illuminated only by black lighting…again the first ever seen in that tiny little fishing village. Besides the black lighting, there were strobe lights suitably arranged around the huge bed. Acoustics inside that house were unbelievable. It was totally a masonry house, constructed almost a century before I leased it, and filled with lots of beautiful tilework. All that solidness just grabbed sound and bounced it around and around you in minute, separate fragments without ever ending. Even a modest stereo system playing quietly anywhere in the house sounded a bit like the inside of a grand symphony hall. A sultry, Chinese-style hanging bead curtain hung in place of the only door separating the master bedroom from the closet/bathroom. The overall affect of the bed, the lighting, the curtain of beads, and the mural was rather formidable. Fire up some patchouli just for grins and…
Next the garden was ripped out completely and new topsoil brought in…and fresh landscaping began. [The only thing remaining of the past was a 30-foot-tall mango tree that dominated the yard itself. In season it produced an impossible amount of fruit.] My son-in-law Michael Buckner was a landscape designer and he took my garden on as a personal challenge. He spent two weeks touring all around the Guadalajara area checking what grew where and in what amounts and why. In no time at all he had my whole yard stacked full of "borrowed" cuttings and extra plants growing from the landscapes that most impressed him. I was well on my way to a world-class garden. When everything was in place, and the lawn seeded with grass cuttings, I hired a permanent gardener and a full-time maid. The gardener's name was Trevi, and he rapidly became a friend. I told him to treat the garden exactly as if it was his own, that all I wanted to do was to enjoy it whenever I was there and I always wanted it looking its very best. He did that and a great deal more for me. I never saw that garden when each separate blade of grass didn't look hand manicured. Trevi always beamed with genuine pride of workmanship. My first maid's name was Lourdes. She was with me for a number of years. I suspect it was perhaps boredom that eventually forced her to seek employment elsewhere. I know for a fact that Lourdes really enjoyed living there. She lived there all by herself for months at a time, some times, and at others one or more of my family would be in residence for six months straight, depending upon her for almost everything. But, she enjoyed the times most where none of us were there. Those were the times she gave guided tours to "La Casa Sexo." She would lead her relatives, random townspeople, or apparently anyone who asked, through the house when none of us was in residence. She would show the converted glass-brick shower and describe how four people could use it at the same time. She would demonstrate the use of the black lights, the strobes, and the waterbed. I was told that she said the bed routinely held as many as six people at a time. That bed astonished everyone who saw it, and some of them became brave enough to actually get onto it and feel it shaking and rocking beneath them. Lourdes would also turn on the luz rojo that branded La Casa Sexo with its notoriety, even if it was only in the middle of the garden. # It was La Casa Sexo…there was no denying that…el hogar de La Chinga Rey. At times it seemed there was an endless stream of visiting worthies rushing from my house to the nude bathing pools in nearby Jocotepec, then back to that fabled waterbed. Lots of writers and writers' friends and artists and artists' friends and even some agents (no friends) now and then partied there. For me, it was much more than that. Before I knew it, that Ajijic house had become la casa de mi corizon, the home of my heart. The house filled my body and my spirit and my emotions completely and became all consuming. I lived in that house regardless of where I might be physically located in the world. My dreams all lived in that house despite me as well. For years after I gave the house back to the duena, my dreams still tortured me because every dream would take place inside that house, even if it contained people who had never been inside it. I thought I would never be completely free of its hold upon me. Only time, and the actions of a lot of other people, allowed its power to slowly dissipate and release me from its grasp.
Looking out over Ajijic
from the mountainside. # Outside the house Paradise reigned. My friends the Gilmores in Guadalajara insisted that it was really Camelot, but I think they were wrong. It was much better than Camelot. The soundtrack was better also.
At that time, Betty Gilmore was coming into her own. She had two large, colorful coffee table books on needlepoint on the market and was working on a third. She gave me copies of her books as well as lessons in needlepoint. Betty assured me that it was really a manly thing to do. I knew that Rosie Greer, the retired jock, was into needlepoint and promoting it as a relaxing agent. In no time at all I was hooked. That's almost a pun, because at the same time I also began hooking rugs. I made many large needlepoint canvases through the years and they hang here and there all over the world in private collections. While I lived in Ajijic, I did several there in the house, in Mexican motifs. My Ajijic fantasy house was Constitution 14 (Catorce) and it looked like any other run-down fisherman's house in town. My next-door neighbors, the Lemons, had a huge lemon tree, heavy with fruit, painted across the front of their house. He kept after me all the time to refacade the front of my house like a respectable gringo. I told him I wanted it to remain anonymous and it did…I did nothing to improve the face of the house fronting onto Constitution. Eventually Edith painted a generic Aztec motif on the garage door, only it definitely wasn't gringo. The street, like most of the streets in town, was narrow and made of inlaid cobblestones. Walking in the street was hell for about two weeks, then you never noticed how difficult it was any more, your ankles had accepted the challenge and accommodated it automatically. It was my first ever experience with cobblestones, and with hundred-year-old hand-made adobe brick structures, and I loved every second of it. | |||||||
