I decided to finish writing the piece from last night in a setting where the storm would feel more immediate. I have explained in other pieces some of the more esoteric reasons that I enjoy spending inclement weather in liminal spaces but I should add that it is also conducive to creativity. I immediately think of a thousand comic strips featuring a beagle hunched over a mechanical typewriter on the roof of his wooden doghouse:
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
I actually ended up weathering the downpour in what is essentially a doghouse stretched out with Hesher on a fold-out sofa in our detached garage. The wind spurred the rain into successively more aggressive waves until an important line was finally severed somewhere in the outside world. We found ourselves sitting in the dark. I was writing about a series of internal storms that had impelled me to seek out shelter of a more metaphysical nature beneath the unlikely eaves of the Roman Catholic Church.
I wanted to add a caveat or qualifier to something I had written yesterday when I referred to the Body and Blood of Christ as “spiritual methadone”. I realized that this could be misinterpreted in a way that actually highlights one of my biggest issues with Twelve Step and Recovery Culture: that drugs remain the central focus of the self-described addict’s life, identity and lived reality.
For that reason I wanted to clarify that I was never thinking about heroin in the moment of receiving the Eucharist.
I was thinking about God.
The excesses of last night’s weather reminded me of the last occasion where I had to experience a deluge of comparable ferocity: the final night of the final baktun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. I was at the Rainbow Gathering outside of the town and ruins of Palenque, Mexico after having consciously decided to split off from Stephany so that we might each trace out our own path in a spirit unsullied by compromise.
We had planned the entire trip around the idea of observing this occurrence together but it turned out that the end of a world is a deeply personal thing. When a Sun must die in order for a new era to be born we all have to find our own way in the darkness. One wants to find one’s self in the surroundings desired and dictated by one’s heart: the one true center of the universe.
The time that I spent as Stephany Colunga’s roommate remains my fondest remembered era of platonic cohabitation but it placed us into narrowly defined and rigid roles – I roamed the Earth and she kept the Hearth. Traveling through Mexico together was probably her idea and it was a good one. It rapidly aged and matured our friendship like a musical training montage in a Sports Underdog movie.
We met a Mayan woman who lived in a hut outside of the entrance to the Ek Balam ruins and sold coconuts. It seemed like she lived in exile from the nearby village because she was a single mother and her son’s father was most likely involved in drug trafficking. He was going to be performing in a Christmas Pageant with his class from school and she invited us to come and see it and, more significantly, spend the night in a spare hammock as it wasn’t happening until the evening.
The culture of the Mayan Village appeared to be socially conservative and extremely insular. The only people who were friendly with our host were the other residents who based their survival around constant interaction with outsiders: some older cab drivers and a pair of young men who dressed and painted themselves like Mayan Warriors to take souvenir photographs for tips inside the ruins. Everyone else seemed to be preoccupied with maintaining the illusion that she didn’t even exist.
The Christmas Pageant was fairly similar to what you would see for a comparable age group in the United States or any other Christian country. Dressed in Santa hats the children played air guitar to Jingle Bell Rock and concluded the song by either donning sunglasses or posing with crossed arms to convey the “cool” nature of Rock Music – I can’t seem to remember exactly which one. Maybe it was both.
I had forged a quick friendship with the “Mayan Warriors” earlier in the day based on the camaraderie of working in the same business. For the past month I had been hustling up cash by dressing as Wolverine and posing for tourists with the other superheroes and costumed characters at Hollywood and Highland. I tried to give my new friends some pointers on how to more effectively drum up consumer interest but realistically my most successful technique wasn’t something they’d be able to implement.
You can’t bring along a Spider-Man when the archaeological park only tolerates your presence on the pretense of historical accuracy.
The Ek Balam ruins feature a cenote, or aquatic sinkhole, but they asked us if we might be interested in visiting a “virgin cenote” that had managed to elude being developed for tourism. It turned out that they owned a car – something Japanese and from the ‘80s like you usually see in the more isolated parts of Latin America. Within these closer quarters I noticed that one of them had an absurdly rudimentary tattoo of a nude woman’s torso: the kind of thing a Second Grader might draw on the wall of the bathroom – a curvy W with two dots for the boobs, an hourglass waist and belly button and a tiny v to represent the vulva.
The artist hadn’t bothered with afterthoughts like a head or limbs, I could easily draw up a facsimile but I wish that I had thought to ask Stephany to take a photo.
The cenote was a decent drive away in the middle of nowhere deep in the jungle somewhere. The water was black and dotted with bromeliads as well as probing roots and vines from the forest surface at least a hundred feet above. An ancient spiral staircase allowed a quick and relatively safe descent – some of the steps had rotted off and it was held together by auto straps and the metal buckles used to cinch them in place. I got excited and ran straight for the water leaving Stephany alone with our guides which she was justifiably nervous about. I feel like I’ve come a long way in situational awareness over the last ten years but I also have a tendency to just automatically assume that most people have good intentions – thankfully this turned out to be the case.
They were still in the body paint of their Mayan Warrior costumes and didn’t want to pollute the water and risk harm to the native fauna. I wasn’t in the water for very long as dusk was fast approaching. Just as we were getting ready to leave thousands of starlings came pouring out of the sky and plunged down to quickly skim the surface of the pool for insects or a drink of water before continuing on their way. You could tell that it was the kind of thing that must have happened every single day around the same time although I’d never seen anything quite like it and haven’t since – nobody commented on it aloud.
Back at Vicki’s (the coconut woman) we were introduced to the peculiar Mayan bedtime custom of cafe. The huts don’t have an actual roof and the floor is just bare earth compacted from habitual use so a fire is built directly in the middle of the room. Everyone gets a cup of instant coffee (not decaf) with plenty of sugar and a handful of animal crackers that dissolve in the hot liquid to create a kind of porridge that is eaten with a spoon.
The sudden consumption of caffeine, sugar and an excess of calories directly before it is intended to fall asleep does feel a bit odd but it wasn’t giving anybody insomnia either. The coals from the fire get swept underneath the sleeping hammocks to help keep the sleeping people warm.
I later came to know the makeshift devices used for illumination as “squat candles” but this was my first experience with the invention. It’s basically a coil of thin cardboard saturated with wax and placed inside a cylindrical container – either a coffee can or aluminum can with the top cut off. You can light it on top and it burns for a while without consuming the cardboard, you’re basically constantly recycling the wax. Vicki said a prayer to Ek Balam “dueño de la montaña” – in order that this entity would protect us from spirits, intruders, wild animals or any other threat.
Her son seemed like he hadn’t gotten to experience very much positive attention from adult men and was going to make the most of it. He dug out a photo album with a few rare shots of his father when he was still around and proudly showed me. It had dropped in conversation that I worked as a teacher and for some reason he had a copy of an old science textbook. It was hard to read by the fickle light of what weren’t exactly candles but we reviewed and discussed a page on the principles behind the type of compass that is used for navigation – that we lived on the surface of a gigantic magnet with static charges between the Cardinal Directions.
Stephany was starting to get sick, the way she remembers it we stayed in Vicki’s hut because of this development but it makes more sense to me that it was in spite of it. We definitely had a hotel room in Valladolid with most of our belongings in it that we had already paid for and had left that morning with the intention of returning by nightfall. Whatever the exact line of reasoning we slept in the hammock and she was mostly over it by morning. There happened to be a meteor shower that night – viewed through the open ceiling far from the polluting influence of city lights and under the protection of a God or Ancestral Ruler.
Stephany had travelled into Mexico ahead of me and we met up in Mexico City without a clear itinerary. I had packed my drum machine in the hope of playing some Bleak End shows but nothing was set up. Stephany was flying to Cancún with a cheap domestic flight and I hadn’t heard back from any of my music scene contacts so I came along. The moment we landed in Cancún I had a message that I could jump on a show in Mexico City but of course that didn’t work out. I’ve had bad luck with shows in Mexico almost as a rule – a few years earlier I was supposed to play in Monterrey with CAVE but they turned back when they couldn’t get insurance for the borrowed tour van.
After thoroughly exploring the Yucatán Peninsula we needed to decide where we were going next. There was a website for cheap long distance bus tickets called ticketbus.com.mx that allowed us to see all the options from any given city. In an Internet Cafe in Playa del Carmen we discovered a route to a city called Xpujil we had never heard of in the little visited state of Campeche. Playa del Carmen has a large modern bus depot but this particular coach was at a smaller one on the corner of Calle 20 and Avenida 12.
With the temporal theme of our entire trip the whole thing felt like kismet.
Xpujil is what I would call a “ciudad de carretera”, it basically exists as a swelling of the Highway that winds through it. There are Late Post-Classic Mayan ruins there where the temple facades had been carved to create a trompe l’oeil illusion of actual staircases. It reminded me of the classic book on architecture Learning From Las Vegas – almost as if it had been built as a roadside attraction before MesoAmerica even had roads or draft animals. Because it was almost Christmas the trees along the road had been cut into the topiary shapes of birds, animals and houses.
Across from the ruins sat Los Cabañas Don Jorgito. For only 80 pesos a night we stayed in a small pink stucco cottage surrounded with lush tropical vegetation. We hung around Xpujil for days, sneaking into the poorly guarded Mayan ruins at night and one morning when they sat blanketed in fog. I discovered a local dish called relleno negro created by allowing cooked pork to slightly ferment in buried earthenware jars. I figured out how to call the United States and talked to LaPorsha from inside an indoor plexiglass phone booth.
I wandered through the jungle until I came across beehive boxes that had been scattered and plundered by some marauding animal I didn’t know enough Spanish to learn the identity of. Maybe it was some kind of anteater or badger. My original Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind had disappeared during a hit-and-run bicycle incident a lifetime before that in April of the same year but I had gotten a replacement that hadn’t managed to break on me by this time. The machines feature a powerful rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery so as long as I could find an outlet I had a constant soundtrack wherever I went.
I was walking along a runway for airplanes that seemed to have fallen into disuse. The cement had cracked and given way to vegetation in many different places. I’m sure it still would have been completely possible to land an airplane on it – people probably did it all the time but I didn’t see any. I was listening to a mixtape that I’m not even sure who made it or how I got my hands on it. I hadn’t ever listened to the whole thing before.
Suddenly I recognized the voices of some of my Iowa City friends: Charles Free and Chouser and probably Sci-Fi, singing a sloppy cover of the Everly Brothers tune All I Have To Do Is Dream. Stephany and I had been discussing where we wanted to spend the end of the Thirteenth Baktun but we hadn’t come to any kind of consensus. I knew that she wouldn’t have been caught dead at the Rainbow Gathering in Palenque, it honestly wasn’t really my scene either, but I suddenly knew that I had to go.
We were at the Xpujil bus station waiting for some bus that would take us a little farther down the road so we could split up there. Kids were drinking Orange soda from little plastic bags under the flickering fluorescent light. We met a Haitian emigrant named Weston who was trying to make his way to the United States. I gave him a sparkly black sweater because he didn’t have anything for the weather. A bus was heading in the general direction of Palenque, all of the seats were full but the driver was willing to let me kneel in the aisle.
I decided that it would be better to just rip off the band-aid.
For the first time I was traveling through the night in Mexico alone, kneeling in the aisle of a bus and looking at the highway through the windshield.
The lights looked different. It all looked different.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 