Mariachis in Love and Death of a State Poet

Summer 1995, Mexico City Mexico

It was sad leaving Tony and his family behind in Temixco and Cuernavaca, but I had Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning to visit Mexico City before flying back to Portland.

First thing on the agenda: check in to the D.H. Lawrence Hotel, start getting loaded with the half ounce I got from Tony, and then venture out into the city. You never know what might happen with a good buzz, some intense heat and millions of crazy desperate people.

I did some writing in the hotel room while I smoked a few joints. I thought about D.H. Lawrence living here, maybe in this very room, and writing about The Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl. This was the Aztec God which Hernan Cortes impersonated so well in 1521, somehow able to convince the locals that his flea bitten battalion of conquistadors were deities descended from the sky. I tried to feel Lawrence’s presence there, maybe his imaginings still lingered these halls, but his spirit had long since fled and the only thing I channeled was a splitting headache.
I rolled a couple bombers and then left the marijuana wrapped in a towel in the bottom right drawer of the desk. I was three blocks from the Zocalo, which was slowly sinking and tilting farther into the ground, and I heard there was an Anthropological museum showing a section of Tenochtitlan, the ancient city.
There was a room dedicated to human sacrifices and wax models of the priests who used the obsidian blades to cut people’s hearts out. The priests took a psychedelic derived from some plant, and they were tripping the whole time, up on the pyramid, bodies stacked around them.

There were a couple rooms dedicated to training birds of prey, a common thing for the nobles to have for hunting. Also, Tenochtitlan had a highly advanced canal system that served the people’s needs for at least a couple centuries, but then Cortes came with his fear of cleanliness and water as an agent of the devil and just paved over the whole thing. The big church in the Zocalo was also tilting and sinking, held up only by scaffolding and who knows what block and tackle system. Outside people lined up begging, a tent city was built to protest things happening in Chiapas, with vendors lining the alley on either side.

I went in to see the Diego Rivera murals in the government building and was planning to see his and Frida’s house in Coyoacan the next day, Monday. No one told me the Universal Truth that all museums are closed Mondays. I thought that was only barbers. So even though I went all the way out there on the bus, I only saw the outside of the house. The bus driver who took me back to D.F. was the first to explain the truth to me about museums and Mondays the world over.

I left the Zocalo and walked aimlessly through the streets. After about half an hour I came upon a huge plaza with pillars in it. I saw some scattered Mariachi musicians standing around chatting. A few couples were sitting together and being serenaded while others vicariously took in the songs for free, lingering in the park.

I walked on some more, the strains of Volver, Volver crying behind me, and soon came upon a big crowd of people. They were all gathered around a large building watching the coffin that was slowly, methodically being carried down the steps to the waiting hearse. Funeral music played and the widow cried. The crowd parted in front of me as I trained my camera on the procession. A man shot past me and his bodyguards brushed me aside, all captured in the photo. Someone said it was Mayor Cardenas, he had just given a speech at the Bellas Artes Building, eulogizing Octavio Paz.

Beauty and the Beast

Winters of 1978 to 1983, Nevada, Iowa

The first two llamas we bought were called Ozzie and Harriet, named after the famous 1950’s TV series. Harriet was pregnant, but Ozzie was not the father. Within a few months of bringing them home from the Chamberlain South Dakota Exotic Animal Auction, tragedy would strike and Ozzie would kill Harriet while she was giving birth to Andy.

My Dad was away on business at the time and I felt pretty guilty knowing Harriet was suffering on the hilltop while I was lying down with my headphones on a pillow listening to X Los Angeles or London Calling. The neighbor Bud, a sheep farmer, made the call to the Veterinarian but it was too late. Andy became our pet after that, and he often sat in the family room with us watching TV and humming, as all young llamas do.

After Harriet died, my dad wanted to recoup his $2,000 loss by finding another female and breeding her with Ozzie. If the baby were female, a one in four chance, then he would be on the right track. Meanwhile it was just Ozzie and Andy, two orphans ruling the pasture where horses had once run free.
One of my weekly chores was to feed Ozzie. During the winter, with the dirt road iced over or the long driveway blocked, it was easier to just cross over the pasture, take the bridge over the creek and climb the hill to the barn. Only problem was that Ozzie would be there waiting at the top.

I had to take a large stick with me and wave it in front of him or whack him in the face with it so he wouldn’t trample me down. He was a good 300 pound spitting machine with hooked teeth like a serpent, wielding his dragon neck at me with bulging eyes, hissing stinky fire. I usually could hit him squarely in the balls a couple times and he got the idea until I went in and closed the door to the barn.
We find out later that Ozzie had been raised by humans too, bottle fed just like we were doing with Andy. He imprinted humans as natural enemies, and his aggression came from being coddled by some unwitting children in a petting zoo. Andy got too big to come inside anymore, so we put him back in the barn with Ozzie. The Veterinarian told us he died of heartbreak.

The Weather of Oz

Spring 1979, Nevada, Iowa

There was a video camera in our Geology class, and the teacher told us we could make a video for our final project. Whatever we wanted to do, as long as it had a theme, like Rock Formations, or Volcanoes or something, and actually explained things about this topic.

I, along with Randy McHose and Mark Stefani, jumped at the opportunity. We had already made a couple videos in Ms Haas' class, doing skits from Saturday Night Live, Cheech and Chong and Steve Martin. In one, I was John Belushi, in like a lion and out like an African Tapir on Weekend Update. We reran it and watched endlessly as the white line ran down the black and white screen, Jay in glasses and a suit, flying over the makeshift table clutching his heart in a mock Belushi cocaine heart attack.

Me and Mark just figured we’d make Randy the star of The Weather of Oz, as we were now calling it, having chosen our theme. We knew Randy wouldn’t sit and do any actual writing or planning of the characters or scenes, but he would be the best actor for the lead part, and ham it up. He would still be called Randy in the video so no one would have to remember a new name. Instead of Toto we had a bean bag frog named Clyde. Mark and I would write and direct, but I did not want to appear.

So Mark and I went to his house to brainstorm and write down some ideas. Mark’s Dad worked for the CIA and Mark said he didn’t know for sure what his Dad did. I only saw him once. I remember we listened to Ummagumma a lot and a couple times we even made pipe bombs to blow up tree stumps.

I did most of the actual writing, I felt Mark was going off on tangents, not sticking to the point or being realistic with the time limit, the people's acting abilities, and the equipment we had. In the end, we decided that Randy and Clyde were to be undercover environmental agents trying to find out who was responsible for the recent, sometimes deadly, weather disturbances in the area.

An unusually long drought had caused corn and soybean crops to fail for the first time in thirty years, dust devil tornadoes were wreaking havoc on once peaceful small town life, and the coldest winter on record had made people think the end of the world was near. After a sudden air inversion over Des Moines during the six o’clock news, which caused the fatal crash of a small passenger plane, this one carrying the African Agricultural Ambassador, a few insiders thought something more sinister was happening, something the public was not fully aware of.

Randy and Clyde, the undercover environmental secret agents, had to go on foot to the weathermens’ castles and find out if which of the two men was the evil weather changer. Then when they found out who it was, they could infiltrate the TV station and pull the plug during the six o’ clock news, announcing to the viewers that all was well, right there on Prime Time.

Our good friend Kendra was the wicked witch, explaining tornadoes to the camera as a mini Lincoln Logs cabin spun on a string in front of Camera Two, eventually crushing her. Of course we edited this part. We filmed a close up of the polka dotted Barbie legs sticking out from under the mini log cabin as Kendra moaned in the background.

The Munchkins became The Doldrums, and we filmed three friends from above as they knelt and sang We are the Do Oldrum Winds, the Do Oldrum Winds, or some such thing I had written in a flurry.

Other than that, the script and story board weren’t very worked out until we got to the point of filming, and then we improvised scenes over a three day rigorous shooting schedule after school. Through the forest, by the river and along the sea went Randy and Clyde, meeting people and strange creatures along the way.
Randy and Clyde see Hal Jacobs, played by Mark, creating some strange weather pattern in his castle and realize he is the evil weatherman. They bust in and catch him redhanded as he is brewing up a crop damaging hail storm over Central Iowa.

After much debate, we decided that the evil wizard Hal Jacobs would not be caught by Randy and Clyde, but in the end the Wizard makes himself disappear, vanishing in the breeze left by Randy’s clutching arms, a trick of the video. We wanted to leave it open to a sequel, Mark's performance practically outshining the unfocused Randy.

Also, in the wake of the evil wizard's sudden disappearance, Clyde the frog is sucked up into a High Pressure stream, blowing up on camera with little Black Cat Firecrackers. We had to film this when the teacher was gone, and open the window afterwards. Randy didn’t like the way Clyde didn’t blow up so good, so he put some Ronson lighter fluid on him and lit him on fire for the grand finale, saline tears running down his cheeks as he announced to the TV audience that the evil weatherman was gone for good. By the time it was all done, there were eleven weather phenomenon explained in detail and 90 minutes of video and we got an A. I wish I still had that tape.

The Hustler

Fall 1976, Nevada, Iowa

I was partly raised in bars and pool halls. On Bald Eagle Lake we stopped into a little bar almost every day and I’d get a Tom Collins with extra cherry juice, shooting pool on tiptoe while my Dad gave me little tips. We had a pool table in the basement in Ames, before Nevada, as well as a ping pong table and horseshoe pit and batting net out back. We always went to gambling night at the Elks Club where I found the pool table alone on the second floor for many a practice session while the folks played roulette or blackjack.

Going from Ames to Nevada meant I had to make new friends. At first I tried to integrate the two groups, the Ames crowd only 15 miles away, and had a bunch of guys over one day to play bumper pool, regular pool and ping pong in the new acreage my folks bought in Nevada. I felt like I was going from a big University town to a little backwater, but from the Suburbs to the country, so you could see the paradox. My city friends didn’t like Hicksville, and my country friends didn’t like the city slickers. They never really mixed and I kind of forgot about my Ames friends.

Besides the new junior high dynamic, I had to get used to a little crowd downtown and driving around the Loop. I could drive legally when I was 14 with a permit, and was the tallest kid in school until the girls passed me up in 8th grade, so no problem with the police going around the Loop in the Galaxie 500, Econoline Van with tinted windows, the yellow Fiat deathmobile, or the Lincoln with tilting seats.

The streets in Nevada are A to Z and 1 to 100. I think there’s a 121st and MM street now. The grid system, just like the furrowed soybean and corn fields being encroached upon with every unwelcome settler. Downtown was small, one main street with all the bars, shops and restaurants. When I first moved there, the main center for the youth was The Head Shop, selling bongs and other paraphernalia out in the open. And there was a pool table so I started to spend more and more time there.
Mind you, I didn’t do drugs yet. I was a drinker, sloe gin in the theater making out in the back row, whisky in the Econoline, yard surfing in the Fiat, first and last at the kegger party at the cool parents’ house. The Heads had their own thing going on, I thought they were more like hillbillies with no future. But there was a pool table at The Head Shop, so I had to mingle.

Being tall and husky, I was used to older guys picking fights, but I usually managed to stave off any violence, at least after turning 13, through my wit and eloquence. And in my pool game. In The Head Shop, regular clients hung out, pinball machines clanging and pool balls clacking, bleary eyed patrons scattered in wooden chairs, looking at no posters on the walls. There was no overhead fan like a Bogart movie, but the jukebox had the classic rock songs that served as soundtrack to our meager lives.

The daughter of the owners ran the place. Jean Ackerman. Even though I may not have known it at the time, she was a lesbian, but like one of those corn fed tough lesbians, trapped in a virgin sixteen year old body. Every time I went in there she gave me some grief. One thing sticks out in my mind for some reason. I was playing pool with one of the regulars and using the pool cue as an air guitar, jamming to Since I’ve Been Loving You. She leaned her elbows on the top of the glass case with the paraphernalia, watching me for a while.

Then she said You think you’re pretty cool doncha? My air guitar became less animated but I didn’t stop moving around the table. After less than a year in this little backwater I was at a crossroads, all The Heads looking on. So I pushed up my chin and nodded affirmatively, saying Yeah I DO think I’m pretty cool, but I’m just whistling through town honey!! I scratched on the eight ball and Jean was vindicated.

Marie Laveau´s Grave

Time of the big Mississippi flood, the whole Midwest was under water. I was riding AMTRAK All Aboard America, and made a three week stop in New Orleans.
I didn’t have any money, but I had my banjo. I already made up four songs in Berkeley, playing in front of Cody’s bookshop and eating out of a can. This time I had a room in exchange for odd jobs in a hostel on St. Charles.

I found out later one of the rooms was site of a grisly arson murder, a woman setting her husband and children on fire in the early 1980’s. I mowed the lawn, changed beds, folded sheets, whatever needed to be done in the morning with horrible humid heat. In the afternoon I went exploring and playing my four banjo songs in and out of the French Quarter for spare change.

I visited the Voodoo Museum and was invited to a Voodoo Party by the Voodoo hippy chick who worked at the front desk. Inside the museum, the wishing stump was all dusty, and the altar to Exu looked kind of kitsch, but all in all it was a good diorama of the Yoruba syncretism with Catholicism. I learned a lot, but I didn’t go to the party. One of the things I learned was where Marie Laveau was buried. You could even make a wish on her grave.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, closed after 9 p.m. due to drug trafficking. All the graves above ground in crypts, some empty from looters or conjurers. Marie’s grave is full of offerings, bottles of rum, flowers, food, white candles, pictures of loved ones, you can’t miss it, even though there is no name. The headstone is filled with red X’s. The tourist book said find a piece of red brick, turn around three times, make a wish and then scrawl three red X’s on the headstone. I did it and wished for a job on my next stop, Austin, Texas. In three days I was working for a house painter and had a nice wad of cash for going back up the Mississippi to the Twin Cities.

Star Search

Various Early Years, Ames and Nevada, Iowa.

My Mom Darlene and Dad Jim are music lovers all the way, and they know a lot. They went to see Harry James and Count Basie back in the day, dancing ballroom style in Washington, D.C. My Grandpa Dave, from Darlene’s side, when he wasn’t working on the railroad, played the organ on a live Minot, North Dakota radio program twice a week during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Not without some notoriety in the area, he played small dances with a combo that kept him on the road some weekends.

The first sign of me having any musical talent was singing with the family around the Wurlitzer in Grandpa’s basement around 1969 or 1970. My Grandmother Luella saw what was happening to me, with my eyes fixated on Grandpa’s fingers, singing out strong. She held my hand one day on the sofa and told me the life of a musician was no life. She had spent too many nights alone with Dave out on the loose, living and drinking hard.

Jim and Darlene were the kind of people, especially my Dad, who would bust out into a song if someone said something which reminded them of that song. Jim was a catalogue of partial song lyrics, always singing under his breath, not humming so much as brr brrriinggg through his lips like he was doing a trombone or trumpet sound. Around the house or outside while working in the yard or in the barn, he jammed out big band stuff mostly, but of course all the Sinatra, Dean Martin and Ink Spots hits filled the air, as well as the classic country of Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash and George Jones. Or Darlene would suddenly do a quick dance move and sing some old time number from Rosemary Clooney or Ella Fitzgerald from the Cole Porter Songbook. Lots of fun.

We also had a babysitter named Cheryl Costal, a neighbor on Bald Eagle Lake. She sang John Denver, Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, and other popular folk songs to me and my sister out in front of the lake. We had great sing a longs, and I got a plastic guitar one Christmas, which I didn’t stick with. Not like the real thing.

Despite what Luella said, my folks were always trying to get me into music or acting. In second grade, just after moving to Ames from Bald Eagle Lake, the music teacher Mrs. Busch made a special call to tell Darlene that I had a great singing voice, and wanted me to do a solo at the next school concert. I wasn’t ready, at age eight, to get up in front of an auditorium alone. Instead we did a jubilee quartet singing Sloop John B. and Dem Bones.
Later on by popular demand I did do a solo in class for my classmates, singing along with George Harrison Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth), the first record I ever bought. I still can’t get that song out of my head.

After a couple years of chorus and singing at Guitar Mass in Saint Cecilia’s, it was time to take up an instrument in fifth grade. The plastic guitar had long been gathering dust. Jim decided I was to play the trumpet. I refused for some reason, he wanted me to be the next Doc Severinsen and also because he quit band when he was young so he didn’t want me to make the same mistake. We discussed the matter across the pool table in the basement one Saturday afternoon. He was explaining why playing a musical instrument was such a pragmatic thing to do, could be a money maker too. I wouldn’t budge. Occasionally we would lobby over a ball to the other person’s side in the midst of indecision and urging. When he finished preaching the benefits of the trumpet, I firmly said no, that I would decide once all the prospective students met in the band room the following Monday to choose instruments and do a tryout.

At the tryouts, It seemed to me that people split into groups based on personality or who was already playing a certain instrument. It wasn’t necessarily because they liked that instrument, there were many factors involved in the mind of a fifth grader, mostly forced into playing in the band, getting up two hours earlier than everyone else in school to practice.

In a full concert band, there is everything except strings. Gertrude Fellows Elementary had an extensive collection of instruments in a state of the art band room. That Monday, about sixty of us were assembled in the band room, taking turns at different instruments. At first I wanted to play the drums, but when a couple of known bullies went to the top riser and started beating the tympani, I shrunk back to the winds once again. The sax was out, mainly because you had to sit in front. No flute, thank you, even though some of the prettiest girls were in that section. I didn’t want to play a big instrument, like Tuba or Baritone, too much to carry. Piano was not portable, you had to buy one for the house, and trombone was for people with the same intelligence as drummers. So I was left with Trumpet after all.
I was first chair trumpet from day one, playing lots of concerts in fifth and sixth grade, even little quartets and competitions in other schools. I was already getting in with other musicians and meeting lots of girls at the band clinics and weekend retreats. Being in band was fun, my Dad didn’t tell me that part.

When we moved to Nevada in sixth grade word was already out about the hot trumpet player from the big city coming to town. I sat in last chair on the first day, just out of respect for the other players, but by the second rehearsal it was apparent I should take first chair, just in front of Chris Abbott and Robin Richards. We became the best of friends, listening to Dizzy, Louis and Miles all the time, playing in the jazz band doing all the great tunes. Band directors came and went, but our section was always swinging at the basketball games and other pep rallies at Nevada High School. We won a lot of awards in Iowa and went to Florida to compete, Chris won outstanding soloist and I got a second place. So that’s where I learned how to swing.

At some point people tried to get me over to the swing choir. It was enough for me already to wear the pastel shirts and matching black vests in the stage and pep band, but in the swing choir they did dance steps, but really cheesy dance steps. Jazz band was more my style, no uniforms and we could decide what charts to play. I gave in to the new director’s request one day in choir and went to a try out with the swing choir at the beginning of the year.

The new director was really sexy and flirty and we had a pretty good rapport. Her husband came later after class sometimes, he’d silently come in and play the piano a bit as she got her things to leave. We all couldn’t believe she was married to him, he was overweight and pretty ugly.

She called me honey in a southern kind of way, including in front of the chorus during practice. At first it was kind of scandalous, but then everyone just realized it was playing, that it just brought us closer together to feel the love. I knew that southern attitude from my family, especially my Aunt from Alabama.

The new director was nice to everyone though and everyone liked her. So she urged me to be in the swing choir, and I relented. The singing wasn’t a problem, I could site read no problem. It took a while to get the dance moves, especially with smelly Mike Hathaway, king of the cheesy swing choir, showing me how it’s supposed to be done. I tried but couldn’t stop laughing and the new director was giggling too, at the same time counting off and playing the piece with great effort at the piano, sweat forming in the armpits of her pastel shirt. I got it pretty good in the end and it seemed like I was in. Mike left and she and I went into her office.

She smiled at me approvingly, leaning back in her chair. I was still laughing inside, unable to accept but unable to figure out how to tell her. She really wanted me in that swing choir, in a southern kind of way. I just couldn’t do it, I told her I couldn’t be in such a cheesy group like that, and kind of made her feel ridiculous. She got really upset, like she felt rejected, that’s the feeling I got. I snubbed her. Needless to say our relationship wasn’t the same after that. By spring we had a new director.

Personal tale

Head has left body no chance
For recovery of lost memory
Umbilical cord severed floating in space
The bus driver pulled over to the side of the road in order to take a nap.
The entire situation was a mess.
Swallows scatter like molecular bats
One or two shooting out the isotope connecting the houses
Overhead they swarm and hunt for night bugs
Choppy and scattered
Maybe that’s why I watch them

Mexican journal not so bad
Best kind of journal I ever had

All of the cement
Seeps down the hill
Into battlefields asunder
Skulls crossed with bones warding away interlopers
And non-believers

Stones in the palace
It is now so real
A distant constellation
Was once an ideal
I mention a name and the door unfolds
I put down the same steps
In the hills of Tepeyacac

Garibaldi square mariachis eyes look vacant cases closed

Only heard one small group playing the day looked over

Stuck in the hotel placating rituals denied.

Cuernavaca, Mexico, Summer 1997