Headpress - Caleb Selah

caleb selah / adventures with the headpress service engineer

Soap for ladies	“DR GRÖSS, WE MEET AT LAST” Bad crema in Guanajuato, Mexico by David Kerekes OCTOBER 2006. Together with business associates CALEB SELAH and BEN LAWMAN, DAVID KEREKES travelled with notebook from London to Cancún, the southern gateway to Mexico on the tip of Quintana Roo State. Primed with nothing more than the lonely gringo guide to Mexico and an agenda to keep moving, things started well enough in Cancún and Veracruz, but by the time Mexico City arrived the cracks had started to appear. THE STORY SO FAR: Mexico City. Our three errant knights are dumped in the deadly Tepito district after dark by an unscrupulous taxi driver and live to tell the tale. They meet American Mike, a mad architect desperate for Latino company. And Caleb gets his balls crushed by a curiously tall hairdresser with long fingers. Before they leave for Guanajuato a man from Colombia tells them the secret of the Pyramid of the Sun and nothing strange happens to the narrator. Now read on.
“Dr Gröss, we meet at last” Bad crema in Guanajuato, Mexico, by David Kerekes, is taken from Headpress 28. Click here to order a copy
A Guanajuato mummy	BUS TRAVEL is a risky business in Mexico. Air conditioning has been fitted in the better class of vehicle but everyone still leaves the bus terminal under a sign prohibiting hijacking and the carriage of rifles. A functionary with a camcorder (and no flair for his job) records the face of each passenger in close-up as the bus rumbles into life and Frosty The Snowman, the children’s Christmas song, begins to play on a loop. Somewhere around Arroyo Zarco on Highway 57, one of the passengers bangs upon the bullet proof box that contains the driver to protest. After all, it is not Christmas and no weather for a yuletide sing-along; in fact it is October and the temperature outside is high enough to trouble the bugs on a dead cobra with visions of Porfirio Díaz. The driver merely readjusts the hat upon his head and informs us, through the medium of millinery that Frosty is going nowhere but northwest, with us to Guanajuato, which is a hell of a lot of sleigh bells. Guanajuato is a university town built upon silver and gold deposits dating back to 1559, whose elevation is some 6,666 feet above sea level. The sprawl of twisting cobble streets prove challenging to modern traffic and so the bus stops about a mile away from the city centre, which gives Caleb, Ben and myself a splendid opportunity to observe the architecture of faraway buildings and the steep incline that will lead us to them. We haven’t been out of the sun very long when Ben falls sick. It takes hold in the middle of a conversation about Teutl and the best place to go to eat mole (pronounced mo/lay), followed rapidly by groaning and a sickly countenance that accompanies Ben to the ground. At first we take no notice because Ben often takes a siesta during the day. Within minutes of booking into the nearest hotel however, the Molina del Ray, we are perturbed to discover Ben collapsed in a heap on the floor of our room, having suffered a massive shitting fit. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° CALEB SELAH: If you remember the hotel we were in, again a very nice hotel. The hotel was set around a courtyard. It had an inner courtyard. An Atrium? Outside the room we had the kind of bench you’d see in a park. What I didn’t want to do is come bumbling into the room, especially as Ben was ill, making noise and just generally pissing everyone off. I just wanted to sit outside and see if I could get away with smoking a little reefer and just stay on the fucking bench until I felt relatively sane again. The bench wasn’t quite long enough for me and I knew the point I had to go to bed would be when I fell off the bench, which sure enough happened, about two or three hours later. I finally lost consciousness, fell off the bench and went to bed. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° IT IS ironic that Ben should be the one to fall ill. Ben is the most widely travelled amongst us, and has reminded us everyday for a week that he has visited no less than seventy two countries and fallen ill in not one of them. In Guanajuato he is laid in bed for thirty six hours, effectively the entirety of our stay in Guanajuato. Even the drugs that Caleb feeds him prove ineffectual and at Ben’s own suggestion he ensconces himself in a bathroom far away from our bathroom, down the hall to avoid contamination. “It ain’t happening,” he groans in a state of near delirium from behind the locked door, the words ringing through the empty hallway right up until the moment Caleb and I sympathetically leave to explore the Guanajuato nightlife. We deduce the problem is a chicken Ben ate from his lap on the floor of the Mexico Norte bus terminal in Mexico City, which even the cleaners considered dangerous before they moved him on. Ben has a voracious appetite and was drawn by hunger to a sore of an eatery called Pollo Pirate, the “chicken pirate” or possibly “chicken you escape.” Mexicans are really into crema, they consider the gloopy white stuff from a can “fancy.” Before embarking on this trip to Mexico I was well advised by my friend Michael Lucas to stick to the “sin crema, sin mayonessa” route. Ben’s pirate chicken was swamped in crema, far too much for the paper plate to bear in fact, it hung from the sides like terror-vines in a sci-fi nightmare. The crema seemed to be controlling him, forcing him to feed from a place on the floor of the bus station. Guanajuato is notable for things other than Ben’s sickness. Our arrival in the town coincides with a major arts festival named after Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish author of Don Quixote, Cal’s favourite book he declares. The link between Guanajuato and Cervantes seems an utter mystery to the townsfolk as Cal asks anyone within earshot what the connection is, no answer is forthcoming, merely enigmatic smiles. Yet each year in the month of October they hold a celebration in honour of the Great Knight and his humble, wise retainer Sancho Panza. The whole place is given over to musicians and painters, henna tattoos and small-breasted students in possession of juggling balls, whose siteswap skills are a gentle euphemism for life and how to avoid it. Need I mention the presence of the ubiquitous Pan Pipe types. No. After dark they roll into the Bar Fly on the Sostenes Rocha and avoid life further whilst bumming cigarettes and beer. A tramp at the entrance grumbles behind his beard while monitoring our progress towards him from across the street. It hasn’t rained in weeks and Guanajuato is far from the sea, but each step on the carpeted staircase that leads to the bar of the Bar Fly is soaking wet and stinks of fish. There is no good reason for the stairs to be such a foul pool, and when we ask the tramp about it he leads us back down the street to a karaoke bar where a group of young people amuse themselves to the words of a sad song. Our guide walks to the stage, takes the microphone from their hands and, without missing a beat, sings in perfect voice one verse to the song. He hands back the microphone and leaves. La vida no tiene valor (Life has no value) La vida no tiene valor (Life has no value) Entonces, voy a llorar (So I’m going to cry) y llorar (and cry) y llorar (and cry) Is Cervantes looking down, maybe even the eternally quixotic Quixote? Are they grinning or are their teeth hurting? The words to the old songs manage to squeeze a wry smile from our destitute friend, who pitches them perfectly at people like us that can’t sing for toffee and whose greatest sorrow is the wrong type of beer on tap. Ben knows nothing about such things, furthermore he is in no fit state to talk about anything that makes him shit any more than he has been doing, so we leave the disussion for another day, before forgetting about it altogether. Until now. CAL IS settled into an area of the Bar Fly where the murals begin and a jukebox plays a reggae version of a famous song by a band called Fabulosos Cadillacs. Above this is the sound of someone learning to play the bongos, and above the sick out of synch thudding of bongos rises the angry warlike cries of shirtless men playing table soccer in another room. If Ben was with us he would have something to say about it. He would call the clientele of the Bar Fly designer hippy twats and not young bohemians, as they might think themselves. There is no light in the black bathroom, so I continue up the stairs to the roof, through a door marked no entry, where I piss under a big sky full of bright stars. Mexican stars are big stars. It’s not twinkle twinkle little star, it’s — ker-ching! — WE ARE FUCKING STARS! My hand is up amongst them someplace whilst I struggle in vain not to piss on my trousers. It is at the Bar Fly we first meet Lío, a girl from Munich, who has freckles and blonde hair that goes long and straight down to her waist. She studied in Liverpool and plaits hair for loose change on the Plaza de San Fernando, a favourite haunt for ‘musicians’ and jugglers during the festival period. She has many friends and her hair is quite something and I would be a liar if I didn’t admit to at least once considering yanking it tenderly. Lío is the unwitting nucleus around which all of Guanajuato and ourselves revolve like bad science, or a bad penny, and the price on her head as a consequence is a hefty one. Lío is sweating out the reggae knees up, breaking occasionally for a bongo lesson from a Mexican Indian with tattoos. Her eyes are drawn to the corner of the room and our place as unshaven strangers within it. I place upon the coffee table one Indio beer and for Caleb two tall glasses, each containing as much tequila as will fit in the glass. The table rocks on unsteady legs and soon Lío joins us, bringing with her a girl called Bessie, who has unsteady legs and spills our drinks. Bessie may have been born in combat trousers. She won’t stop bouncing but what annoys me more is the terrible spacing between her eyes. She spills our drinks a second time then collapses onto the sofa. “Your friend is quite unstable,” I say to Lío, who replies with an accent that is Teutonic scouse. A voice from another part of the room beats out the phrase “It’s only rock’n’roll. But I like it.” Around Lío’s neck is a necklace of her own creation that strikes me as neither particularly good nor particularly bad, but I don’t really know about such things and I tell her so. This she takes badly and starts to cry. I arrange for Lío to plait my beard but this doesn’t hold much consolatory value when Cal offers to buy some of her jewellery for hard cash. Lío is crazy whatever the currency, and as a consequence of the plaiting arrangement I end up in an altercation on a side street the following evening with friends of Lío. Cal ends up in an altercation with her friends, too, following the procurement of jewellery and drugs. “It’s only rock’n’roll. But I like it!” says the voice, over the bongos and the reggae music. A deep throaty laugh follows. The attitude of the room changes when the Mexican Indian with tattoos lights an incense stick and waves it under our noses. He does this to grant Lío “safe passage,” and then Bessie chips in. “Look after her,” she says, which I take to mean don’t rape and don’t kill her and don’t leave her broken body at the foot of the mountain, which is a bit of a bloody cheek however you look at it. The rest is a blur because I fall into a strange and sudden quandary about my hands. “Is this a small bottle,” I ask Cal, holding up my Indio beer for all to see, “or have my hands got bigger?” Ever since the energies were drawn at the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán I haven’t been right. My hands have grown disproportionately large, and I suspect my feet will follow. This marks the beginning of the transmission that will continue with an exhibition of dead people under glass, whose flesh resembles tough leather boots, and climaxes atop the Holy Mountain some days later. SOME HEADS contain hair and some chins have beards and some men say that hair continues to grow in death. I cannot say if this is true, but the following day I encounter an elderly American in a lab coat in the street who explains that Guanajuato is famous for mummies. “The evidence in the display cabinets in the museum leaves no doubt, gentlemen,” says the man, who looks familiar, “hair doesn’t ever stop falling out.” He points a bony finger up the Av Juárez, the road one must take for the Museo de las Momias. There are places in the world where the natural phenomenon of mummification takes place; Guanajuato in Mexico is one of them. The discovery of the mummies happened a hundred years ago when bodies were removed from the municipal cemetery Santa Paula following the introduction of a cemetery tax that kinfolk were unable to meet. The bodies were in a remarkable state of preservation for reasons to do with mineral deposits or God, and as early as 1900 cemetery workers charged members of the public to see disinterred relatives stacked in the ossuary. They looked worse than the day they were committed to the earth but a lot better than expected. The stranger in the lab coat pulls at his beard. He considers for a moment the blazing sun and the men in hats discussing gas, he considers the children on their way to school who call him “Dr Gröss” and give him a wide berth. He considers the mummies of Guanajuato. “They are a link to the brink,” he muses with a sparkle in one wild eye. “Each one,” he feels, “has a different story to tell about their own death.” The Guanajuato mummies have gone toe to toe with the greatest legend in all of Mexico, the wrestler El Santo, along with several of his masked wrestling chums. This kafuffle took place in 1970 in the movie that made the mummies famous, Santo Versus the Mummies of Guanajuato. I pick up a pirate copy on DVD at a market stall not far away (there are no legitimate DVDs or CDs in Mexico). I discover later that the disc suffers from pirate incompetence and a scene near the end is locked in a groove, replaying endlessly the moment one masked wrestler steps from a car and walks up a hill to meet the mummies of Guanajuato. I don’t recognise the hill but I am on my way to meet the mummies, as guided by the doctor, who waves from down in the Plaza de la Paz that I should follow the road. The museum of the mummies is located behind the Santa Paula graveyard, on the outskirts of town, which is a poor area, a far cry from the affluence of the town centre. Families here are faced with the humility of the cemetery tax everyday, and in a cruel twist try and sell picture postcards of their loved ones to passers-by to help recover the debt. I take from one woman a postcard of a corpse wearing one sock when she tells me it is her grandfather. Upon an open plot of land a retractable barrier has been erected that leads to the entrance of the museum, suggesting a considerable queue of visitors at the height of season, whenever that might be for mummies. I would guess not October, as I am the only one in the queue. The barrier continues into the museum itself, down an unnecessarily long corridor to where three functionaries sit around a desk. They watch me carefully every step of the way and put me in mind of observers awaiting the demolition of a chimney. Sure enough, when I reach the desk and ask for a ticket they wait a devil’s interval before pointing with smug satisfaction back down the corridor. “Señor, aqui es donde usted compra su ticket.” “Señor, that is where you get your ticket,” one of the men says. “Way, way, alli atras.” “Way, way, back there.” It is a procedural irritant that is well practiced. I walk back up the long corridor, buy a ticket for $50 pesos from a booth that is hidden and walk back down again, handing my ticket over at the desk. The skin of the mummies is too loose or too tight, and the gaze of their rotten lemon eyeballs, which are sucked into lemon orbits, remain fixed on the last thing in life and nothing beyond or since. They don’t see me, but a grin is waiting in each room I visit. The rattle of an air conditioning unit marks the slow passage of time standing still, and while it helps to think that a grin is not a grin, a hollow space is not a mouth, the faces of death are what they are in life, retaining character and personality, if not always dignity. Many female corpses have their genitalia directed at the observer, with breasts flabby and frozen into shapes most women would care to avoid. I suspect this is the legacy of the cemetery workers who first discovered the corpses, providing a vicarious thrill for the visitors in the early 1900s. As if seeing a mummy itself was not quite enough. Of all the expressions of the dead, and here I slip into the white lab coat of the good Dr Frances B Gröss, there is nothing in the museum that has about it the finality of the child slumped with its head on its shoulder. In the last room is the tiny riposte to all the dead that have gone before, head on shoulder, all hope is gone, and with it the capacity, the will, to look alive. NOT FAR from the Plaza de la Paz are two markets. The first is a craft market for artists with hand printed t-shirts, beanie hats, and leather wristbands embossed with the word Slayer. The other is Mercado Hildalgo, a general market with hot food for sale that attracts big insects of an indeterminate species. A lady is given quite a start when one of these creatures hits her flat in the face. As in every public place in Mexico, the Mercado Hildalgo has a holy shrine at its centre. Near to this is a picture of Jesus peering out from between slabs of shaved meat on a butcher’s callejones, and near to this Lío from the Bar Fly on a stool drinking coffee with a friend. She greets me with a lively hello. I give her the news on Ben and she nods a nod of understanding before blurting out: “He is a pervert!” I am taken aback by this. She hardly knows Ben. Fortunately, it is not Ben who is the pervert but Lío’s landlord. In her mongrel accent she continues: “He comes into my bedroom when I’m getting dressed, always when I’m getting dressed. And then into the bathroom.” Lío is clearly strung out in more ways than one and I guess she hasn’t slept in days. “The guy sounds a real prick,” I say. “Why not simply move out and find somewhere else to stay?” “When I’m getting dressed!” she reiterates, as if therein lies the answer and the answer I should know when all is said and done. The landlord has a hold over the young people in this town. They all fear him the way that Lío does. Cal meets him in the Bar Fly one night, throwing his deflated Mexican peso weight around, and soon enough I meet him too. An old man laughs heartily over a newspaper. I say goodbye to Lío to search for a belt for the trousers that have been falling down since Cancún. The man with the newspaper has few teeth but he does have leather goods and belts. “Que piensa usted de mis pantalones, amigo? Se caen?” I ask him. “What do you think of my trousers, my friend? Are they falling down?” He leaves his newspaper to look for a belt that will fit, which is no easy task in a country where male accoutrement is designed only for the cart horse. The next best thing is a belt suited to girl hips with girl colours and a buckle to match. He says the price is $70 pesos. I feel duty bound to barter, in the spirit of sick and absent Ben, but have no motivation to try for much less than $60 pesos, which is ten pence in the world we left behind. When he attempts to short change me, the old man smiles the sign of confusion. He probably helped banish the Jesuits from Spanish dominions in 1767 for being smartypants. He then spends an inordinately long time deliberating over the coins in his hands before attempting to short change me a second time. When I have the correct change I fasten my new belt into place. “Perfecto,” I say. “Correcto,” he laughs, meaning I had him sussed back there. “It’s only rock’n’roll. But I like it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Among the leather belts and giant insects of the Mercado Hildalgo is a callejones whose wares represent the tradition of death and life in Mexico. This table contains potentiates in slim colourful sachets and an assortment of charms to ward off evil and others to bring it on. One of the sachets is labelled Autenticos Polvos del Odio Sachet (Authentic Powder of Death), while another is Legitimo Polvo de la Santsima Muerte (Official Powder of the Holy Death). Everything looks to have been printed and packaged thirty years ago. There is also a lot of soap on the table, each with its own exacting function. The box that catches my eye carries a crudely printed photograph of a 1970s man in a business suit, standing astride a woman who fawns in a nightdress at his feet. I open the box to examine the yellow cake inside; it has been crudely manufactured from the kind of chemicals they dump at sea with fumes potent enough to bring tears to my eyes. The inscription on the soap reads Jabon yo domino a mi mujer and, according to the instructions, it will turn any woman that washes with it into a loyal and obedient servant. I cannot imagine a woman who would allow such a foul thing within ten yards of her toilet. Flesh would melt like Hiroshima under a mushroom cloud on contact and your sex slave fantasy would become a burn victim nightmare in need of twenty four hour medical attention. The couple in charge munch distractedly on something from an old tin box. The sun is at its height when I encounter one of the friends of Lío on the narrow street that runs between 28 de Septembre and Av Juárez, the main drag in Guanajuato. I do not know her name but she cracks open beer bottles with her teeth and as a consequence has cracked teeth. With her is the Landlord, an overly dressed man who runs the young people in this town. He tells me to talk to him because he knows English and the girl with cracked teeth doesn’t know shit. He says this as he fixes me a stare as bold as a green car on a summer’s day. Behind me is a place called Sombreros Gonzalez; I don’t know what it is that lies behind the Landlord but his head is small and I do not wish to gain the approval of a man with a small head. In this respect, the small head, like the small town itself, becomes a metaphor for the constraints upon individual freedom, a shorthand for all that thwarts the young people of Guanajuato, whether it’s a sombrero or a place to stay where they can dress in peace. “I am a friend of Lío,” I tell him, stepping out of his way. He follows me and stands in my way. “Lío? What is this Lío?” he sneers. “I don’t understand this word, Lío.” The girl with the cracked teeth quaffs on a bottle of red wine. “Talk to me,” he says. “Talk to me.” No one understands the word Lío, which is a lie. The Landlord doesn’t understand it, nor the girl with the cracked teeth, and not, I imagine, the small group of people that hangs around in the back the way that some small groups do. Is there a secret handshake for the friends of Lío? Her name is spoken a collective eighteen times. A boy runs by in a t-shirt that has a picture of cartoon breasts on it. I think of a two pesos tip for a slice of pizza and Cal and Ben. After Tepito, Mexico City, we are afraid of nothing and nobody. I catch the Landlord with a hook from a big left hand that pops the side of his small head, and the penny drops. “Ah, Lío!” everybody cheers. Nineteen times. ARMED WITH authentic potions of death and jabon yo domino a mi mujer, I return to the hotel to find that Cal has packed each orifice of the room with bathroom towels and clothing to avoid seepage into the corridor. He opens the door in boxers and a new t-shirt bearing an image of Don Quixote riding a yellow submarine and pulls me in. The room is thick with a cloud of marijuana smoke and I can barely make out the bottles of tequila and sangria on the other side of it. “I’ve lost something and I don’t know what it is,” he says. “Any ideas?” The Hotel Molina del Ray in Guanajuato is run by a Mexican Basil Fawlty, a man duty bound to lock himself in his office, draw the blinds and turn everything into an affront against humanity. It is not a good idea to lose drugs in one of his rooms. In this instance two joints of grass. “Fuck me,” says Cal, throwing the blanket and the mattress from his bed. “I had them in my hand two minutes ago, when you knocked on the door.” Cal drags the sick Ben from the bathroom in the hall to help with the search. Wherever they may be, says Cal, they are most assuredly not hiding in Ben’s property or mine; particularly not mine, given my parapsychological adversity to any drug but alcohol and painkillers. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, Cal is ready to throw in the towel and begins to construct a defence opening with the fact that it is not illegal to possess two small joints for personal use. Ben will hear none of it and refuses to allow anyone to leave the room until the items are found. He reasons that the cleaner may find them. “Cleaners are an unknown quantity,” he says, paraphrasing judicial culture in his semi delirium. “Cleaners in Mexico may react badly on discovering drugs.” He then offers to extend the search to his own bed but Cal impresses on us once again he would never sink to hiding his narcotics on somebody else. Cal had two joints and now they are gone. Did he have them at all? he begins to wonder. Cal recognises the mild hallucinogenic effect of the dope and he knows paranoia can arise when someone or something hits the Random Play button. “Well, if we can’t find them the cleaner will never find them,” he determines in a wholly unconvincing manner. “That’s not the point,” responds Ben. The task of locating the two joints has become a Sisyphean task. Outside the window the sun is shining and the universe expands, but our light is a grim and static twilight in the beautiful days of mortal men. The more we look the less we find, until we find nothing but frustration and space and places that do not belong to Cal, places exempt from hiding and losing narcotics, as Cal keeps telling us. When every item in the room has been overturned and examined and re-examined many times I question the task. I turn to the exempt places and shake my head and shake down my bed. From my bed fall the two joints as thick as thumbs, bouncing to the floor without a sound. “Aw, man,” says Cal. “How did they get there?” It is a good day for Caleb losing things. In Mexico City he managed to lose his phone and by the time we leave Guanajuato he will have lost Ben’s phone, both his credit cards, two joints in the hotel room and his spectacles, as well as the charger for my phone, which proves impossible to replace in Mexico. So effectively he loses my phone as well. I am able to send a short, final farewell back home to Britain before my phone dies and all contact with the outside world goes the slow, agonising way of science without electricity. “THIS IS OUR LAST COMMUNICATION,” the text message reads. “WE ARE WELL. DO NOT BE ALARMED.” With that the phone is dead. AT A busy street I have stopped to look down at my feet when Lío taps me on the shoulder. She is on her way to meet Caleb, who has promised to buy some of the jewellery that so upsets her when I talk about it. She is very skinny and that’s not Cal’s scene. He isn’t interested in trying to pull her, but says it’s nice to chat to someone who’s been in Guanajuato for a while and might be able to score something to smoke. I give her an important message to pass on about dead phones, but she is late enough and is gone before I finish. NOW THAT our lines of communication are down I wait on the steps of Teatro Juárez, the bigger of Guanajuato’s three theatres, thinking about how it takes five or six years to become a mummy until Caleb happens to wander by, as I know he will sooner or later. “An afternoon with Lío and all she could come up with was a pathetic little bag of grass,” Cal says. He shows me the jewelry he has bought. “This was after we’d been buying drinks fairly liberally for just about anyone that asks. But the grass was excellent grass, proper Mexican grass.” At Los Lobos, a bar that plays music all night, I wonder how much trouble Caleb can find in the time it takes me to urinate. The gents’ toilet in Los Lobos is an unfeasibly large room, but it contains only one bowl tucked away in the corner. I am pissing in it when through the wall comes a very loud sound from Caleb, who is delighted to hear Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones on the Los Lobos sound system. Mick Jagger once said that Paint It Black had “sitars on it,” which is less insightful than another statement he made about the song being “like the beginnings of miserable psychedelia. That’s what the Rolling Stones started.” The Stones as black as night, reciting Joyce, that’s why the cheer from Cal. Now please wash your hands. In the short time I am gone the bar has filled with people, as if everyone was waiting outside for the right moment for someone to fall off the bench. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° CALEB SELAH: And we moved on to Los Lobos, which is fun and we started drinking… really getting off on the fucking music, you know. Hearing something like Paint It Black in Mexico at full blast begins to bring out the fucking party animal in me. So obviously the next quest is: Where can we get some fucking drugs? I sort of made eye contact with a few people, checked a few people out and I don’t remember how we got into the conversation, but I remember we were pretty inebriated. There were three relatively young Mexicans, maybe in their mid twenties, who were claiming they would be able to get me something. So I said, “Go away, hurry up, come back.” So they went away, came back and said, “Right, half and hour.” We very patiently waited twenty minutes and said, “Right, that’s half an hour. What’s going on?” “Oh, it’ll be here, be here, here.” An hour later I was getting pretty fucked off and very drunk. So I thought the situation needed to be dealt with and dealt with efficiently and with the necessary amount of implied brutality. So my instruction to you, if I recall, was something along the lines of don’t smile. Did I say don’t smile? “No, no you didn’t. I was grinning like a fucking idiot.” °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° CALEB HAS been entertaining tequila since midday. When Lío fails to show up with her drug connection he becomes irritable and turns to a guy whose long hair is slicked back over his ears. I doubt he knows much about the Rolling Stones. The guy places upon his head a hat as wide as his shoulders. “Espera cinco minutos,” he says. “Wait five minutes.” I look around the room through the drag that comes with alcohol. A guy seated across from us beneath a framed poster of the Beatles in their Yellow Submarine phase (happy psychedelia to the Stones’ misery) is studying hard the end of a cigarette. On his t-shirt is a big letter U. A shirt with the letter U. “Espera cinco minutes.” If things are going to go awry it should at least be to the measure of a good soundtrack, but the Stones being replaced by terrible records from the 1980s offends my keen musical sensibilities and flips my mind into despair, like the flipping of a circuit. I act upon this with a $50 peso bill rolled up in a napkin with a note upon it, “’60s mas por favour,” which I give to the barman. I nudge Cal because five minutes are up. Love Street by the Doors begins to play and the notion that we might leave makes Slick so uncomfortable he takes off his hat again and starts to make reggae moves with his hands and his hips. “I don’t like reggae,” I tell him. Underneath the Beatles are the Apple Bonkers and the Snapping Turks and the Blue Meanies and a yellow submarine, and beneath the yellow submarine the guy with a cigarette studies a cigarette. “We have to leave,” I say to Caleb. Mexicans have this habit of making you wait and Caleb is not the most patient person in the world anyway. “YOUR FRIEND NOT SHOW WE LEAVE!” Caleb announces, six sharp words of bare meaning so meaning won’t be lost on Slick. He hits his wristwatch too, which is short for time it is. Cal is well versed in this kind of thing, and he hits his watch once more, drawing a lot more attention than my yelp at Lynyrd Skynyrd and Sweet Home Alabama, which is fighting talk for Neil Young and will normally result in a predictable yarn from Cal. Slick flounders for something to say in English that might grip us in the absence of his five minute associate. “Meta amphetamine!” he cries out. “It’s good!” Cal considers this. The room considers this. Of the many nefarious substances Cal has tried over the years he has never tried meta amphetamine. (He is still struggling with the concept of metaphysics.) Slick’s head reminds me of the department store on the Plaza de la Paz where the only thing for sale is hair gel, a pyramid display of industrial size tubs of gel in the middle of the floor. Into the bar walks the associate with a handshake and I see the air and the sky in Mexico through the door that closes behind him. Caleb looks down at the two pills that have appeared in his hand, which is open like the centre of the universe despite the efforts of everyone to keep it closed and the universe nice, simple and discreet. “What’s this?!” he roars. “Berocca?!” The two pills don’t move, the man in the hat does. “No, no!” says Slick. “Meta amphetamine!” I saw a Mexican standoff two nights ago and it didn’t end in flowers. “Sounds like bullshit to me,” returns Cal, who hasn’t a clue but doesn’t blink. The gateway is open to the tune of Crossroads by Cream. Cal removes his glasses and from his mouth the plate that carries his two front teeth. “Look into my eyes,” he demands, leaning deeper into the table toward Slick. Not knowing what else to do or where else to look Slick looks into Cal’s eyes, a condemned man and his executioner. Cal’s eyes are the stuff of legend, and now that his mouth is missing teeth he’s a nightmare too. The Beatles guy in the big U t-shirt sides up, and with the carrier this makes three of them at least. “If these turn out to be Berocca,” says Cal, “I will kill all three of you.” The Mexicans fumble for a reply. “Nuh, nuh, nuh, man,” they say. “It’s good, man, it’s good. It’s good. It’s good.” “Promise me, Slick,” says Cal, “you give me your word. I’m holding you responsible. Not him, or him. You.” Cal now tells a shocking story of how he came to lose his front teeth and how he got the scar that splits his face nearly in two, which may or may not be pure fabrication but instils in our company the fear of the death god because it involves a foul drug deal remarkably similar to the present situation. Consequently Slick can no longer look Cal in the eye because the gringo is crazy. Cal slaps $100 pesos down on the table in payment for one pill. “Not for him,” he says of the other pill; there is no place for me with a pill. This completes the transaction and I take Cal by the arm before he can get started on any more knife stories and drag ourselves up Doblado, far away from Los Lobos. He peaks on meta amphetamine and in a bar called Lagardia he continues to peak for the next two hours. “Fucking hell, okay, ’spretty good,” he splutters, smilefully. Lagardia holds what remains of the night life in Guanajuato, mostly around one big table at the back. Men entertain Cal with tequila and heartfelt tales of old Guanajuato, while I luck out with a man of Chinese extraction from San Francisco who bores me with his Polish girlfriend and the work he’s doing in the Arts. Common courtesy obliges him to eventually ask what it is I do, and what it is I’m doing in Mexico. At this stage I’m not really sure beyond travelling through it. “A bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but without the lawyer,” responds the Chinaman, a smile at the brilliance of finding such a perfect truth. “We do have a lawyer,” I tell him. “He’s sick in bed at the hotel.” The night in Guanajuato ends on a bench in the Plaza del Baratillo, two figures in the middle of an empty town spinning tirelessly toward dawn and the rise. Nobody can know that we travel through Mexico destined for a place with only enough room for two of us and not for three, high on a mountain. Ben is sick. He won’t make it back down the mountain. The meta amphetamine that courses through Cal’s metabolism in short spiky bursts makes him immune to the cold that has fallen on us. It may also account for the tears in his eyes when he offers me last season’s Liverpool shirt off his back and I put it on because I am cold and he is not. “Man, I am so proud,” he says. “I wish I had a camera, you Manc git.” “If you had a camera I wouldn’t be wearing it,” I tell him. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° CALEB SELAH: I had a couple of missions. My mission number one was to try and find those three guys that I’d obviously misjudged, been very drunk and been very offensive to, and I wanted to apologise to them. So I was going around various bars looking for them. Couldn’t find them. So, then I went back to the Bar Fly, which was the bar we’d been in on the first night when we met Lío. I was in there and because I wasn’t with you and Ben I just sat at the bar, drinking sangrita and tequila in big half pint glasses as opposed to the little shot glasses. And this guy starts talking to me in English and he says, “What are you doing?” “Well, you know,” I said, “I’m just traveling around Mexico for a little while. Just a couple of weeks.” “What do you do for a living?” “I work in the music business.” It’s always a good thing to say. Instantly a connection can be made between the dodgy world of narcotics and that particular profession. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’m chatting away to him and he said, “How are you finding it?’ “I have to be honest with you,” I said, “I’m pretty fucked off.” “Oh, with this place?” “Well, not with this place necessarily, but kind of. I come in here for three nights and whilst I love the place, I love the music, I don’t like dancing, but, you know, there’s lots of pretty ladies dancing. You’ve got a beautiful bar here. I came in here this afternoon, having had a little smoke and sat on the balcony in the sun looking at your Don Quixote and Pancho Sancha statues just outside the bar and just had a really, really nice time, a really nice afternoon. So I dig your bar, but why can’t I buy any cocaine? What is it? What is wrong with me?” He says, “Ah, cocaine, my friend! For you we need the Wolfman!” “Right the Wolfman. Does he come in often?” “The Wolfman will be here.” “Oh, and how will I know when he’s here?” I said. “You will know when he’s here. He will find you.” Twenty minutes later, boiling fucking heat, even at night, this guy walks in, mid forties, pockmarked face, floor length leather trenchcoat. He looked like he’d been around the block a few times and then burnt the fucker down. Certainly not the type of person I’d mess around with in a disrespectful way. He said, “You’re looking for the Wolfman?” “I am indeed looking for the Wolfman.” “I am the Wolfman,” he said. “Follow me.” So we went into this thing that purported to be a toilet. It was a darkened room with a trough in it. And when I say dark, there really wasn’t much light in there. And he produced these little polythene wraps that were sort of little balls. They must have contained a third of a gram in each one. I looked at them and I said, “Mate, in England you get these lovely little envelopes and you open them up and there’s the powder and you chop it all out.” He bites the end off one of these little bags and, as you do with tequila, you put the powder on the little indentation between your forefinger and thumb, he did that with his coke. He just wacked it all onto this little indentation and went [sniff]. “Okay then,” I said to him. “Give me three.” So he gave me three. “[Sniff] That’s nice.” Other nostril, different bag. “[Sniff] Yeah, yeah, that’s okay mate, that’s good. I’ll take another five with me.” That’s about two quid each, and then he said, “My friend, now I want something from you.” “I’ve paid you. What?” They’re always trying it on, like, oh you know, the price is this, now the price is that. He said, “I want that,” and pointed to my Liverpool shirt, which I’d acquired the day before for the Liverpool vs Bordeaux match, in the Champions League. It was an out of date Liverpool shirt anyway, wrong sponsors. It was from the season before. But, you know, I liked his style. I said, “Sure, you can gladly have it, but it’s all I’ve got on so I can’t give it to you now.” “Well, when are you leaving?” I said, “We’re leaving the Hotel del Morina first thing tomorrow.” “Okay. What I want you to do is leave it at the hotel reception and say that it’s for the Wolfman.” “Okay, it’s a deal.” I shook his hand, had a few more drinks, came back, sat on the park bench outside the hotel room, did the rest of what I got, took a little bit of medication, chilled out, fell off the bench, went to bed. So that was the Wolfman. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° CAL PULLS out a map drawn on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. The map shows six houses in a desert and the word Wadley next to them. Nothing more. On the reverse of the napkin is a letter of introduction with an illegible signature, to present to whomever it is we find there. Cal acquired the map following a deal with an individual known as the Wolfman. I rub the bruise on my forehead, delivered not by loutish behaviour but a blow from the low doorway of the Lagardia that made me see stars. Big stars. I see from my bruise that the coordinates of our journey through Mexico are not on the plane of latitude and longitude. We thought we were headed north when in fact all along Mexico has taken us steadily upwards, many thousands of feet above sea level. (I looked down at my feet when I should have been looking up.) It is no accident that we are in Guanajuato with a map that has no directions to a place nobody has heard of. Six towns lead to Wadley, and Wadley comprises only of six houses, as shown in the map. With stars as information I am compelled to sing the words to one of the old songs and remove all of my clothes and run free through an empty town. “Todo nos hace reir como a dos tarados,” I sing. (“Everything makes us smile like two mad people.”) This is the price to pay for elevation. [NEXT in Headpress 29: San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas] [top]
“Dr Gröss, we meet at last” Bad crema in Guanajuato, Mexico, by David Kerekes, is taken from Headpress 28. Click here to order a copy