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5.25 .06

In the Land of Xolotl

By Steve Finbow

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzz! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! No, that’s not Tom Wolfe knocking together a new armoire; it’s the sound of the builders in the flat below. Shit! Shit! Shit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! No, that’s not Charles Bukowski reading his poetry; it’s the language used by the builders in the flat below. Two weeks now and, apparently, it’s going to go on for another three. And it’s not just the noise or the swearing that’s slowly driving me insane, it’s also the dust that gets everywhere, and that the bastards constantly leave the front door open despite numerous vituperative reminders. I also have an ear infection – poor me – which isn’t helping my mental state. Therefore, I have turned to thoughts of death – mine and that of the five builders in the flat below.

 

By Nicholas Allanach

We live only to briefly illuminate and reify the nothingness that brackets our existence. We validate the void. We live our lives ignoring the one inevitable certainty – we will die. We may become rich. We may remain poor. We may have a third pint of beer at lunchtime. We may drink Evian water. We allot ourselves a personality formed by what we do.

Party. People are mingling. Holding drinks, they scan the room for
conversation. Man in a black Armani suit, brogues, light-blue Paul
Smith shirt, darker-blue silk tie, Philippe Starck glasses, approaches
a woman with long brunette hair, eyes to die for, she wears a turquoise
silk dress and gold strappy sandals with five-inch heels.

MAN: Hi. So what do you do?
WOMAN: Teach English. What do you do?
MAN: I’m a writer.

We all live neo-Cartesian lives. I write, therefore I am. I read, therefore I am. I collect Buddhas, therefore I am. The one truth is – I die, therefore I am. Death hobbles the My Little Ponies in your five-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Death sits on the crossbar of the bicycle you bought your seven-year-old son for Christmas. Death slips his hand down the panties of your girlfriend while she’s watching yet another slasher movie. Death pulls your cheek tight while you shave in the morning; his shadowy figure unseen in the soap-and-blood-flecked mirror. Death takes your grandmother grocery shopping. Death lights your grandfather’s final cigar on his birthday – he never did get to wear those black socks with the blue clocks.

No, I have not been reading the Bardo Thodol but I have just finished Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. A marvellous book and, despite the religiosity, truly catholic: embracing life, belief, fear, and death. This book is the seventh in my Mexican reading jag: The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, Old Gringo and This I Believe: an A-Z of a Writer’s Life by Carlos Fuentes, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, The Night Visitor and Other Stories and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre both by the excellent, neglected, and mysterious B. Traven.

Mexico fascinates me. In 1981, I bought Short Lives by Katinka Matson. I’m not sure if it is still in print, but look out for it; it is a collection of short biographies of painters, writers, musicians, and performers who died young: Antonin Artaud to Judy Garland, Stephen Crane to Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allen Poe to Elvis Presley. It was and is an influence; it introduced me to the work of, among others, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, and Yukio Mishima. The chapter that had the biggest impact was the last chapter, the chapter on Thomas ‘Tyler’ Bootman. Never heard of him? No, you never will. He was an ex-boyfriend of the author, a would-be poet and a beer drinker who attended poetry readings at St Mark’s on the Bowery and had serious medical problems – OK, this has only just occurred to me, that sort of sounds like my own life post-1988. I have not read Thomas ‘Tyler’ Bootman’s biography for at least 15 years and I do so now gingerly because the pages of the book are the colour of and as delicately powdery as a moth’s wing, the book’s spine, cracked in several places, opens up involuntarily on Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Sylvia Plath.

Bootman died in Mexico City on September 28th 1977. He was 36 years old. His mother warned him: ‘Don’t go to Mexico.’ This sentence has become my mantra. Semi-conscious in my hospital bed three years ago, my body in toxic shock, my life ebbing away, I somehow knew I wouldn’t die – after all, the hospital was in Fitzrovia not Tijuana. Stretched out on the operating table while surgeons fought to prevent poisons from my pancreas stripping down my arterial system, I knew it wasn’t the end because my doctor was Doug Whitelaw and not Octavio Paz. I have a theory: I will die in Mexico.

Mexico: the dark underbelly of the United States. The shadow of the western world. Our tenebrous unconscious. Drawn to it, I can never go. It calls to me, but I turn away. Mexico: from where Hart Crane sailed before he jumped to his death, where William S. Burroughs shot and killed Joan Vollmer, where the heroin-addicted Antonin Artaud took peyote with the Tarahumara Indians, the land of Ah Pook and Huitzilopochtli, Ix Tab and Xolotl. The Mayans and Aztecs knew death, revelled in it. Mayan and Aztec societies knew time – they invented calendars more advanced than our own. Time is death. Death defeats time.

Fast forward: the water gently laps at the sand rising up in languorous folds to the steps of a beaten-up beaten-down wooden shack. A half-eaten mango, the stub of an enchilada, and a jug of tepache on a rickety wicker table. Decay. Decay from the sea, from the sun, from the sand. A small bookcase holds Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and Patricia Highsmith’s A Game for the Living. Malcolm Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid lies swollen and rotting next to an empty tequila bottle. A spiny lizard snaps at clouds of flies rising from and settling on countless bottles of Dos Equis. Burnt scraps of tinfoil litter the room like broken mirrors, and the smell in the air is the burnt-chocolate of heroin. A man, somewhere in his fifties, sits in a rocking chair; he wears a pair of ragged Levi’s, one of his black Havaianas dangles precariously from a bruised and raw big toe. He wears Philippe Starck glasses. His eyes flicker. He tries to stand but falls to the floor. His body jactitates. He opens his mouth and says, ‘Will you shut the fucking door, please?’

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