Charles Bowden - Mezcal

ALSO BY CHARLES BOWDEN

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

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Desierto: Memories of the Future (1991)

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

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America (1995)

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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)

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MEZCAL

CHARLES BOWDEN

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 1988 by Charles Bowden

The Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust

Mary Martha Miles, Trustee

All rights reserved

The first edition of Mezcal was published in 1988 by the University of Arizona Press.

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: Mezcal / Charles Bowden.

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, [2020] | The first edition of Mezcal was published in 1988 by the University of Arizona Press.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034592 (print) | LCCN 2019034593 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2024-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2025-9 (library ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2026-6 (non-library ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bowden, Charles, 19452014. | NatureEffect of human beings onSouthwest, New. | DesertsSouthwest, New. | Southwest, NewDescription and travel.

Classification: LCC F787 .B682 2020 (print) | LCC F787 (ebook) | DDC 979dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034592

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034593

doi:10.7560/320242

For Julian Hayden and Lawrence Clark Powell

two people who showed me the way to come home.

Surely I am more brutish than any man,

and have not the understanding of a man.

I neither learned wisdom,

nor have the knowledge of the holy.

Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended?

Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?

PROVERBS 30:24

CONTENTS

OPEN THE BOTTLE

I can remember the world before television. I am writing this sentence on a computer. I was born in an eighty-year-old Illinois stone house seventeen days before the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The stove was wood, the toilet a privy, and carp jumped in the creek. My father planned to be buried in the front yard. He sold the ground, for a great profit, and eventually the place was leveled and made into a golf course for local executives.

I moved to the south side of Chicago at age three, escaped to the Southwest at age twelve. For my entire life I have hungered for the smell of earth and lived on carpets of cement and asphalt.

I drive fast given a good car. Speed has always been my addiction, and the velocity of things has yo-yoed me across the continent. I will never live in a stone house or believe I can be buried in the front yard.

Millions of people have lives with a similar shape, the odyssey of the generation birthed in the last great war and shipped forward into the flood tide of post-war prosperity. For us Mississippi is more than a place, the sixties is a crucible, and the panting of the earth the cry of a lover scorned and yet yearned for. We are the song of the electric guitar.

We swallowed whole the resources of the planet and accelerated to new screams of speed. And found the experience irresistible and yet wanting. Our parents were, of course, always wrong. But we are no longer children.

In my schooling, I was told about Americas antiurbanism, about our pastoral dreams, about the machines in our gardens. I was told as a people we had a habit of trashing intellectuals and shrinking from the touch of modern ways. All this is well and good. I have spent my life in cities and am intoxicated by the fierceness of such places. And I have always felt something missing that led me back to empty, wild places. I have been told this is a romantic flaw in my character and the character of my countrymen. I disagree.

I think this is our character.

Sometimes I have this daydream. The Corvette is white and very fast and moves through the desert night, the asphalt singing beneath the wheels. The air is hot, the windows rolled down, rock n roll roars from fine speakers. I turn the wheel and careen off into the desert. She does not even raise her voice, she is a smile, the hair carelessly blowing in the wind, the eyes staring past me into the black velvet of the night. The car bucks and dives and then lifts off and flies airborne, finally burying itself in the sand and rock. The engine dies. I revive and there is the silence of the desert night spiked by the scream of rock n roll. I reach over to caress her, the lips are full. We undress and wait for a coyote dawn. This is not a nightmare. This book springs from within that idle dream.

I am almost incapable of regret. But I can reflect and think back at times. Then I drink mezcal, a cheap distillate of the agave with a worm in the bottom of the bottle. The liquor is yellow and smooth and powerful. And at the bottom, of course, is the worm, a slumbering, fleshy snippet of once living rope.

I always finish the bottle.

Charles Schmid is short, silent, muscular. He bends over the hand torch in shop class. During the test in gym, he did 500 sit-ups before being interrupted by the bell for the next class. The hair is black, cut long, a dwarf Tarzan. He flunks and repeats a year of high school. I see him hanging from the rings in the gym doing the iron cross. He is the star of the team. He is the outsider in the high school world of the early sixties.

I am working at a restaurant on Broadway. Susan is a waitress, her hair a huge black beehive. She is very alive, the moves quick, the laugh a bite of energy, and I want her. Charlie comes in after midnight trailed by young girlsthey look to be thirteen or fourteen. His hair is dyed an even deeper black now, makeup frames his eyes, and crushed tin cans in his boots give him a little more height. I am washing dishes and I come out front and there he is, whispering, giggling.