Charles Bowden - Jericho

Also by Charles Bowden

Killing the Hidden Waters (1977)

Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions of Big-City Life, with Lewis Kreinberg and Richard Younker (1981)

Blue Desert (1986)

Frog Mountain Blues, with Jack W. Dykinga (1987)

Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions, with Michael Binstein (1988)

Mezcal (1988)

Red Line (1989)

Desierto: Memories of the Future (1991)

The Sonoran Desert, with Jack W. Dykinga (1992)

The Secret Forest, with Jack W. Dykinga and Paul S. Martin (1993)

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America (1995)

Chihuahua: Pictures From the Edge, with Virgil Hancock (1996)

Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, with Jack W. Dykinga (1996)

Jurez: The Laboratory of our Future, with Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, and Julin Cardona (1998)

Eugene Richards, with Eugene Richards (2001)

Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (2002)

Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground (2002)

A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (2005)

Inferno, with Michael P. Berman (2006)

Exodus/xodo, with Julin Cardona (2008)

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (2009)

Trinity, with Michael P. Berman (2009)

Murder City: Ciudad Jurez and the Global Economys New Killing Fields, with Julin Cardona (2010)

Dreamland: The Way Out of Jurez, with Alice Leora Briggs (2010)

The Charles Bowden Reader, edited by Erin Almeranti and Mary Martha Miles (2010)

El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, with Molly Molloy (2011)

The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey (2018)

Dakotah: The Return of the Future (2019)

JERICHO

Charles Bowden

FOREWORD BY CHARLES DAMBROSIO

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright 2020 by Charles Bowden

The Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust Mary Martha Miles, Trustee

Foreword copyright 2020 by Charles DAmbrosio

All rights reserved

First edition, 2020

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bowden, Charles, 19452014, author.

Title: Jericho / Charles Bowden ; foreword by Charles DAmbrosio. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045001 (print) | LCCN 2019045002 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2095-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2096-9 (library ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2097-6 (non-library ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Drug trafficMexico. | CartelsMexico. | Organized crimeMexico. | Narco-terrorismMexico.

Classification: LCC HV5840.M4 B69 2020 (print) | LCC HV5840.M4 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/33650972dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045001

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045002

doi:10.7560/320952

Foreword

CHARLES DAMBROSIO

I am dreaming.

It should be no surprise that death has something to say in Jericho, visiting the work with a voice of its own, but its a death and a voice that have nothing to do with the slaughter on our southern border, nothing to do with the body count in Ciudad Jurez or the sicario and their ongoing tally of torture and murder, nothing to do with that whole vast army of the dead and the dying who for decades marched through nearly all of Charles Bowdens heroic work. The death that finally came for Bowden was his own, and its that solitary death whose anguished and eloquent voice we hear calling to us in this somewhatwhat? What is Jericho, exactly? I balk at calling it a book, if only because this morning the word leads my mind astray, up a stairwell into the musty and forlorn stacks on the fifth floor of some library somewhere, all that dying erudition on shelves no one visits anymore. So if not a book, what? Forget the codex, whats the actual experience, I mean as an act of discernment, an attempt to see and say what is actually there? Because death had its day, Jericho still carries in its pages the vitality of a draft, the secret ardor of the messy desk at a certain hour, of the coffee cup and the ashtray and the warm glow of a solitary lamp, offering the reader intimate access to the mind of the maker in the agony of getting it down. The glimpse we get in Jericho is privileged. Its not that we intrude on a mans privacy, but we do play the part of bystanders in his drama, now watching as fragments are fitted in place and patterns form, now shuffling a stack of images and tilting them to the light for a better view, now reading though a sheaf of crumpled notes in which every half-thought and dim hope get a resounding stet only because time ran out. Theres a raw live edge to the accretion that gives the work a yearning, an ongoingness even though its author is gone, with Jericho caught now and forever in a state of desire, struggling to find a form.

Its not work meant for the easy chair, for the room at home where the lamplight is just so, the tea just so, the quiet just so. Any work whose mouth is full of fragments asks for a different kind of reader, one wholl dip a shoulder and join in a difficult labor, wholl divvy up the load with alacrity, accepting the burden and even taking on the heavier share. No essay or poem or novel can say what it needs to say alone, but in Jericho a kind of halfness reaches out, possibly for a reader, maybe for the touch of a helping hand, likely for something far more elusive. A hungry ghost seems to hover over these pages, but I didnt know Charles Bowden (Chuck to those who did). In the misguided belief that knowing the man might clear up a question or two, I read half a dozen of Bowdens obituaries, but only sank deeper into the riddle. Hes got the same meager bundle of biographical facts we all do, but people seem to identify with the man as much as the work. Between the lines, of course, you hear the low hum of hagiography, of a saint in the making, one of those dirty saints with the cigs, the booze, the women. I suppose if Bowden hadnt written a shelf of nonfiction whose fierce ambition is unequaled in American (not so) belles-lettres wed call him a barfly and be done with it. But he did write those books, books that are all one, continuous as a dream, laying out a tragic vision thats so noble and so singularly dedicated in its will to truth that it feels sacrificial. But before getting into all that, a curious fact from the obits did catch my eye, that Bowden walked out in the middle of the defense of his doctoral dissertation, ditching on the whole deal. This would certainly suggest a man who had the willingness and nerve to work without a net. Who does that? And dont we love him, instantly? In giving up pedigree you also forgo easy passage, perhaps for a lifetime, and at the height of the sixties, when demonstrations and protests were social, Bowdens was the boycott of a man who would go it alone. Never a normal life for me. By the early seventies hed bailed on academe entirely, and to my knowledge never taught again. Truly a free lance all his days, a condition he described in a bio for an early book as a free ticket to the asylum.