Letter from Los Angeles
(more of Linda's LA Women…)
By Linda Sandoval
Great. There's a dead dog on the road outside the Vista Hermosa and another dog is eating it. Oh yeah, dog eat dog. What I'm breathing in sure as hell doesn't resemble air so I shut my nose to it for as long as my intake allows. Blow out, then a quick gasp of rotted dog merged with chicken shit and wet papaya and something else, then hold it again under my bandana for another several rutted yards, then breathe again. Thank God it's only a dog and not a horse.
On past the dog is the village of San Juan now given over to the festival of San Juan that has been thumping and howling day and night since before I arrived and I'm about ready to accept the fact that it will never stop. I've spent days trying to shut out the reality of this fair and yet here I am getting up my nerve to plow through a crowd of drunken revelers. All for Elizabeth. She said she was going to stop here after work and I'm so fed up waiting for her all the damn time that I've talked myself into a little "pro-activity." Elizabeth's word, not mine.
A man wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat calls out numbers over a microphone while a mass of fiesta goers study little slips of paper. One of them shouts something and is given a blue panda bear. There is a creaking, unsteady Ferris wheel, jerking up, stopping, sliding forward. Little girls swing their legs up there in the air, careful that their shoes stay on. Even after all these years, the ear-splitting music is relentlessly disco. Firecrackers go off in dusty, hopeless bangs of sulfur. One pops off right next to me and singes my arm. A vortex of urchins keep swarming with their boxes of gum,
¡Señora, Señora! ¿Quiere chicle?
And why am I not surprised? Elizabeth is nowhere to be found. Crap.
I find my driver leaning against the side of the van having a smoke.
To the hotel, I say without the "h", and he nods and opens the door for me.
I have to keep the windows open because of the terrible heat but then there is the terrible dust plus the terrible dog. We both put our bandanas over our mouths. But the driver coughs out to me, pointing at an oncoming truck,
¡Áy Dios Mio!
Holy Shit! There's an elephant head in the bed of the truck. A trunk and all real elephant head wrapped in plastic and sitting in a mound of ice. The wrinkled neck drips with black ooze and the huge ears flap with each pothole. The sign on the side of the truck says
¡MIREN GIGANTE DE AFRICA CINCUENTA PESOS!
The head seems to regard me with alarm as it disappears to god knows what destiny at the feria and I fight an impulse to have the driver turn and follow it. But no, I'm tired of being alone. I want to find Elizabeth.
A few yards ahead the road turns and narrows through sugarcane fields. Fields still worked by the descendents of the indigenous peoples who once ran the whole show around these parts. We stop in front of the stone and iron gates of The Hotel Vista Hermosa.
Elizabeth told me, rather dramatically, that Cortez himself enslaved the ancestors of the local campesinos and forced them to ravage their own pyramids to build what was, then, his vast, walled compound and palace. A few hundred years later and Emiliano Zapata, raging for justice, tried to burn the place down, but the old stones held on in tall stacks and gutted rooms. Then recently the Mexican government restored the main hacienda as a resort offering Gringos like me a big swallow of "Mexico's Storied Colonial Past" and by now I've pretty much had my fill of it.
The walls of the hacienda soar forever, twenty feet, some even more, arcing into aqueducts that squander a timed rush of precious spring water splashing into large pools or snaking into rivulets that maintain the acres of acacias and roses and tabachines. These high walls eliminate any contact with the dusty poverty of San Juan, and for the past two weeks have kept me inside where I sit lolling about waiting for Elizabeth to get back from her duties with Las Amigas.
Breakfast, poolside, lunch, reading and endless waiting but I mustn't complain. She told me it would be like this, her at work and me with nothing much at all to do unless I was willing to go out on my own, which mostly, I'm not.
There was one day when I went with Elizabeth to her site at Sin Arboles, a scrap heap, unincorporated settlement in the desert without any water or electricity. But, thanks to Elizabeth and Las Amigas, the children of Sin Arboles will have a playground.
I had to ask, can't Las Amigas help subsidize water delivery or build some kind of generator?
Elizabeth explained that the organization is only mandated to provide in-kind services available from corporate sponsors.
Water and generators cost pesos, she said.
.
Oh, I see. So the kids can teeter-totter while they die from dysentery?
Dottie, Elizabeth sighed, sarcasm will someday leave you with no breath at all.
That was the last time I was allowed to accompany Las Amigas.
Sarcasm or not, I have to say that I'm grateful to Elizabeth. She's got a sort of important job, helping people, I guess. She's beautiful and confident. And, she was "Meeting Leader" that night back in L.A. The first one I ever had the guts to attend. She "gave counsel" as they call it there, and everyone listened to her and admired her but she seemed to take a special interest in me, and I really needed someone to take an interest in me. Interest had been very rare until Elizabeth.
In L.A. I can call her late at night and she does these exercises like,
Just say your name to me; say your name twenty times then hang up and go to sleep.
And where I had not been able to even think about sleep before, I am finally able to load in a few fitful hours because Elizabeth heard my name twenty times.
Those people in Sin Arboles with the new playground are probably grateful too.
I'm still wandering around the hotel trying to find her. She's not in her casita, so I check out the taverna. I hate to do this because it's in the dungeons and I mean real dungeons from the time of the conquest. They were probably some kind of underground escape system but there are cells where slaves were imprisoned and probably starved. Now the hotel has these cells dressed up like spook shows with mad scientists and sculls and black-light ghosts and wails and clanks and drips. I know its all corn but it still creeps me out. I have to twist around and around down here in the dark until I finally come to the taverna that is usually empty even though it has the only T.V. in the hotel.
Sure enough here is Elizabeth looking cool and graceful and sitting with some tall blonde guy I've never seen before. They're watching the Academy Awards in Spanish. Elizabeth gives me a dismissive nod when I come in, but hell, she can at least speak to me, so I go over.
Dottie, she says reluctantly, this is Nils Pederson. The film director. He's shooting a film in Mexico, in Spanish with Swedish subtitles. I think that's so brave.
Elizabeth's Spanish is fluent and she's translating the telecast back into English for Nils. He's watching to see if his cinematographer gets an award for some bodice ripping costume epic I dimly remember reading about.
I want to talk Elizabeth into going back to the fiesta with me. I still have a weird need to check out the elephant head but no way am I going there alone. She shushes me. Nil's guy loses and they turn off the television but linger together in an excluding sort of way over their beers. They're obviously flirting and I feel definite get-lost-I want to-screw-this-guy vibes from Elizabeth so I excuse myself.
More hours with nothing to do at the Vista Hermosa.
I hate the nights here. The scorpions come out. I have to watch every single step I take because they come out of the ground. After the spraying it's even worse because they leave their nests to get away from the poison and they're really crazed and aggressive for those last couple of stings. Elizabeth warned me that it's an instant trip to the hospital for the antidote.
These are the tiny desert scorpions, she said. And they can really do damage.
My room is garish and hot. The walls are red with hand painted bullfighters and there is a scummy little swimming pool in the crumbling outdoor courtyard that always has struggling buzzy things floating in it. I wouldn't get in if you paid me. The shower is the whole bathroom with not even a curtain so I sit on the pot and spray myself along with everything else. I put my shoes upside down on the bedposts to discourage scorpions from crawling in. They like dark places. Believe me, I always shake out my underwear.
The fiesta is going gangbusters out there. I decide the best way to distract myself from the din is by reading so I open up this book Elizabeth gave me called Borderline Personality Disorders. It's full of lists of symptoms. I must be the most neurotic person on the planet. I actually fit all of the various borderline "types" and I also fit the descriptions of people victimized by these disordered borderlines. I just hope that Elizabeth comes by later after she and Nils are done with whatever to save me from myself.
Finally, she waltzes in with a little secretive smile on her face. She sits by me on the bed and lights up a cigarette. I know better than to pry into the Nils sex. Too juicy to share.
How did it go at Sin Arboles today, I ask?
I thought I saw my grandfather there.
Elizabeth talks a lot about her grandfather, even though she never knew him. He died before she was born. Murdered in Cuba in the late fifties by some scumbags who were collecting on an unpaid debt. He thought he would be safe, hiding in Cuba, but think again. So now she gets these mysterious glimpses of him when she travels and she listens for his messages. The first time she saw him was in Greece on the same island where St. Somebody had his visions.
I know we are not alone, she says to me with that irritating sense of drama, the shadows can take form at any moment.
Well do the shadows have to be so fucking loud about it? I want to say this but don't.
The blasting feria ratchets up. The headboard is actually vibrating from the electric bass.
They had an Elephant head at the fair today, I say. Just the head. Pretty damn trippy, don't you think? I saw them drive it in on the back of a truck. I thought we might walk over tomorrow and see what they do with it.
Ah, the surreality of Mexico and lalala, she says. Don't tell me about it. It was your vision.
Yep, Elizabeth is really big on visions. At the meetings she always talked about them. Not made up ones or hallucinations but sort of luminous events in ordinary time and we must tune in and recognize when something extraordinary is before us that might help us on our journey. Like the grandfather deal.
Well in L.A. I have an efficiency apartment with a view of another efficiency apartment and a cubicle where I sell discount phone service to people who already have a phone service and they usually tell me they are perfectly happy with the one they have no matter how cheap I make the offer sound. In other words, I'm a little light in the vision department.
Elizabeth said to me one night after the meeting, have you ever been to Mexico? I mean the real Mexico?
I've never even been to the fake Mexico, I said.
So here I am. Not a dream vacation but a vision one.
The elephant head, she says, count yourself lucky.
She puts out her cigarette and leaves for her luxurious casita that is further inside the hacienda compound. Tasteful rooms with cool, white plaster walls, no fetid pool or scorpions and no noise of St. John's party to keep her awake.
In the early morning the fair subsides and gives way to a wild chorus of birds. It's like this every night. The birds bother me more than the fair sounds because their songs are so spontaneous and surprising that I am compelled to really listen. In fact, Elizabeth told me that the jungle birds of New Guinea do this also and the elders listen them to very carefully as the singing is thought to be the voices of ancestors come to comfort or warn the living. I have the uncomfortable feeling that these cacophonous ancestors don't belong to me but to the slain tribe who were forced to pile up those stones from their own pyramids and who were then starved and tortured in that spook show dungeon.
My only hope for sleep at the Vista Hermosa is in the lovely bottle of prescription hypnotics doctors like to push on travelers these days. The kind advertised with moons and moths.
The best thing is to fall asleep before the sun starts to rise. So I take the pill around three AM, so that I can stay asleep until I start to sweat, which is around nine. At nine all is quiet. No birds, other than typical day birds, and no disco until around two. Just the heat, another toilet shower and my long constitutional through the white washed hallways with those soaring walls that seem almost alive as they form rooms. Some with no roof, some with climbing trees so old they have grown into the walls and make their own roof of leaves over my head. The hallway abruptly tunnels again into real rooms that are large with multiple domed ceilings like honeycombs. At one turn the walls bend into a chapel, at another, a narrow bowling alley with only one lane and I'm told that in another direction there is a bullring and the actual Vista Hermosa. A place high up with this amazing view of the valley of Morelos stretching out forever.
Sometimes the walls open up into immense windows three feet deep. These windows are oval and give the impression of eyes watching with the pupil of the eye being whatever scene is beyond it, clouds or sunshine or flowering branches. Even stranger, some of these eye-like windows are bricked up like they can no longer bear to look.
At ten o'clock the dining room is usually empty. The Las Amigas bunch having already departed for the day, there will be six or eight waiters standing sadly by waiting for the chance to bring food to me.
Today though, I am surprised to see Elizabeth. She is with Nils, the director, and a group of equally tall, equally blonde people all heavily burdened with black leather bags and tripods. An actress stands among them with a kind of fifties costume on. Big skirt, tiny, cinched waist. Fantastic looker in a sexy bird of prey kind of way. A Spanish actress. Even I recognize her. Everyone is busy around her. Combing her wig. Bringing earrings and bracelets. Elizabeth is beside herself. She's flirting with the actress even more than with Nils. In Spanish, of course.
The hotel staff is majorly deferring to this film crowd and has opened up the large tiled grill that sizzles with shrimp and carnitas. It's even serving cafe de olla, a coffee sweetened with cinnamon syrup that is usually only available at the big Sunday Buffet. Elizabeth waves me over.
I won't be around today at all, she says. I've been invited to visit Nil's location in Tepoztlan.
Well damn, I want to go too! I don't want to be left waiting around here all day, but I can't make myself say this in front of the film director or the whatshsername movie star because why would they want to take me to a movie location? I haven't screwed anyone.
Don't look so lost Dottie, Elizabeth says. After all, Tepoztlan might not be safe. There are armed vigilantes roaming the streets.
Elizabeth has already told me about this Tepoztlan place, a mystical village in the mountains with witches and artists and flying saucers and Americans selling earrings. But also it just recently exploded into an insurrection. The Mexican government tried to build a water-wasting-suburban-sprawl-creating Club de Golf for rich Mexico City types and the village revolted and became an armed camp. I do find that scary, living as I do in the land of drive-bys and car-jackings. But I'm willing to risk it for the potential vision opportunities.
Nils says, don't be silly, Elizabeth. Tepoztlan has seceded from the state of Morelos and has no Government police force. It's the safest place in Mexico.
I would really like to see Tepoztlan, I say brazenly.
Come along then. There's room in the camera van.
I think I like this guy Nils.
Elizabeth shoots me a crabby schoolmarm look.
Well, if you want. But I can't watch out for you; I'm planning to have a meeting with the Citizen's Committee. Las Amigas may be getting involved.
Well whoopdedoo for Las Amigas, I want to say, but don't.
The camera van holds three jolly Swedes with tanned, golden arms and khaki shorts. They introduce themselves in perfect English but talk the rest of the time in Swedish. I don't care. I'm watching the strange, witchy mountains of Tepoztlan get closer and closer.
Legend has it that Tepoztlan is the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god also known as the Plumed Serpent. He's expected to return any day now and completely un-pilfered, totally intact pyramids stand ready to receive him. Even though these pyramids were once used for human sacrifice, harmonic convergence type hippies collect around them in droves. It's known for native witchcraft too. In Tepoztlan, Elizabeth claims, the witchcraft is white. But in the villages on the other side of the mountain, the witchcraft is black. It has to do with triangles of energy and special polarities.
The village is around me all of a sudden and there are no dead dogs, no throngs of people, no disco music, just a peaceful marketplace and central plaza where I am deposited by the camera crew.
I settle on a white iron bench next to an old man eating a slice of jicama with chili powder on it. I've been warned of the bitter consequences involving food from street vendors but somehow I don't care anymore and the jicama looks cool and juicy and it's peeled already, so I venture over to the little sidewalk stand and buy one and also a large piece of freshly roasted corn. The food is delicious. I buy a Fanta too, a kind of orange pop.
A group of citizens I guess, men and women, with some serious looking rifles walk slowly through the market. They smile at me in a don't-worry-we're-not- going-to-shoot-you sort of way. Oddly, I am not at all afraid of these townspeople with the weapons. It seems perfectly fine to me that they should be strolling around watching out for things, watching out for me, even.
Tepoztlan is pretty. Low, multi-colored adobes, the ubiquitous cathedral, boxes of geraniums, old trees with white washed strips at the bottom, and those mysterious mountains so close by and so high they are already sealing away the bright sun. I sit there in the plaza in a kind of heavy contentment for a long time.
A group of children come up with their chicle boxes and what the hell, I buy a package and they're very polite about it and move on. I actually chew some and it turns out much less sugary than the American variety.
Something is coming over me. Something like, I don't know, erupting joy. Like bliss only more alive. Like feeling full of the world and not hidden from it. I still know bad things can and will happen, but they, those bad things, can't stop me from doing whatever it is I want to do. This is a liberating way to feel, I have to say. And also if I don't know what to do I don't have to get all bored and pissed off about it because that doesn't matter either. So why stay on this bench all day? Why not take a walk around?
I like the looks of a store painted lilac with a green tiled doorway. Inside I see it is mostly a dry-goods place that sells towels and sheets and bolts of bright polyester. It must be some kind of hangout for the town ladies too because several greet me when I walk in. They're sitting in straight back chairs, talking and laughing. One of them gestures for me to sit with them. Another pats my knee. She's finishing a hem in a short tight skirt and when she holds it up to her hips, everyone whistles.
The woman behind the counter has a pan of herbal smelling liquid cooking over a hotplate. She pours it out into these beautiful blue and white bowels and gives one to each of us. I've never tasted anything like this stuff, thick and sticky and a little sweet and the first swallow burns like drain cleaner but after that it's as smooth as morning cereal. I drink down one bowel and then another and then I buy a towel, a green one, I don't know why. The ladies go quiet and watchful, studying me in a benign, encouraging way.
The sidewalk is beneath me but not. Floating, hovering, somehow inside the bricks themselves. The ladies wave and close the shutters. I'm outside. Dreaming away on my green towel. A blessed and coddled child, that's me. I understand perfectly. Those personal molecules spin outwards collecting and returning with other molecules more dense now like cosmic enmeshment and everything grows more solid with the furry warmth of the softening bricks. Fearless. Sleeping like a kitten in the sun. Oh, it's all good. So excellently good.
Someone helps me up.
Having fun, she asks?
My own language rising out of a wispy Indian sarong drenched with some heavy wooded incense from when I was a child. Albuquerque in 1976 or Sedona for sure. Was she there? Are we here? She guides me by the elbow.
This is her store. Paper fish swinging in the window and chiming bells and pottery and brightly painted furniture and earrings cascading with beads and gray, stone Olmec heads taken from their bodies and frozen in acrylic. They're sizing me up, these heads. Judging. This is not a good thought. This is an anxious thought and I want it to go away. She brings me a bottle of agua minerale and a big moon-sized tortilla.
Soak up the spirits before they turn on you, she says.
And now I'm sitting in a chair like my ordinary self. I'm wondering if I want to even know my ordinary self anymore let alone go back and be that ordinary self. I wonder if the American hippie storeowner has to claim her old ordinary self. Or if she is here because she didn't want to ever loose that ordinary self which wasn't so ordinary. So I ask,
What's it like to live in Tepoztlan?
It's powerful, she says. You should know. You feel it.
Oh yeah. I feel it and I like it.
It can trick you if you don't know how to deal with it, she says. I'm not kidding. Depression like you've never known. You will have to leave the power here or you won't be able to survive back where you're going.
She goes on about polarities that will crush a person anywhere else in the world. Outside of Tepoztlan I will feel nothing but apathy and foreboding. All of my old crap only much worse.
There have been a lot of suicides by ex-residents of Tepoztlan, she warns.
So what am I supposed to do, I ask? Join a cult and wait for the return of the plumed serpent?
Don't joke around about this. Find a yucca plant, turn your back to it; spin around three times and say 'power go back'. Then you will be, more or less, back to normal. The cactus is tough. It can take it.
I won't be able to keep any of these feelings?
Who knows? Maybe some.
The anxiousness and anger flood in.
SHUT UP HIPPIE CHICK! I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF YOU BROADS AND YOUR LECTURES!
I want to shout this, but don't.
The mountains become bloody around me, the sun pouring color into them and they deepen to violet and then charcoal. The white iron bench is uncomfortably hard and cold. There's a vile, smoky breeze blowing in from the sugarcane fields. Elizabeth is walking towards me and I notice she seems even more purposeful than usual. She tells me to go back without her. She is staying for at least another day. Maybe she will stay for quite a long time. The lines around her mouth are frozen with their own gravity.
In the van I tell the Swedes about depression caused by accumulated power and they shake their heads in agreement because riding back we can all sense it building up, this feeling of pressure and creeping dread.
I don't know if the driver speaks English or if he knows already about the creeping dread, but suddenly he pulls off the rode by this giant yucca and we all jump out and yell "power return" over and over again in our various languages and spin around three times and stop and let the desert settle around us.
The pressure lifts. It has an actual shape, this power. We watch it move from our five bodies, interlocking into an oily vaporous lace as it drenches the roots of the cactus.
It's night again at the Hotel Vista Hermosa. I don't miss Elizabeth. I don't want to sit by myself in the dinning room. I don't want to watch Mexican soap operas in the Taverna. I don't want to join my new compadres on film crew as they get drunk and spy on the Spanish actress swimming naked under the aqueduct while she pretends she doesn't notice she's being watched.
Once again I'm facing those two enemies of "pro-activity". Not knowing what to do and being really pissed off about it.
I find myself following the straggly paths at the edge of the estate. I walk past dry, cracked fountains, a derelict badminton court, and a group of evil looking buildings poking up about five feet from the ground. They have thatched roofs and seem to have no way in or out and I imagine them going like a well down into the ground. Were people thrown in? Did they ever climb out? The ground seems to move under me with the breath of lost souls struggling in those wells, trying to escape.
The path ends at a tall iron gate tied closed by a rope but I can see through the bars. Below me is the bullring. And I know that beyond the bullring is the real Vista Hermosa. The great valley of Morelos with its mountains and lakes and scattered villages lit up in the darkness. Tepotzlan will be out there, glittering away.
And that's what I want. I want it now. It is my right to see this beautiful vista. It is my right to at least know where it is I am supposed to be. And I begin tackling the gate with its frustrating ropes and chains. I think I can climb it. My idea is to get over the gate, across the bullring and up to the far wall then I can see all of it and for as long as I want. I'm about to swing my leg over when a man steps up beside me and pulls me back by my waistband.
No one is allowed in the bullring, Señora, he says.
I'm startled and downright despairing and I cry out,
BUT THAT'S THE VISTA HERMOSA!
The hotel does not spray there and there are many scorpions. Also, wild dogs.
Dogs?
Yes, to keep people from climbing the walls.
People from the village?
Bad people.
The man is smaller than me and not young. His hair is graying and his eyes are so black it seems like the night is pouring through them from behind his skull. He's not one of the waiters or gardeners or drivers, but there is a familiarity about him, an intimacy that is almost sculptural. I know I want this man to stay with me. I don't want to be alone with scorpions and dogs and wall-climbers. But he's turning and I panic. I lunge at him and grab his hands, which are very rough but small as a child's. I pretend that I am only going to shake his hands and I start pumping his arms up and down. He laughs and places my own arms firmly to either side of me. I look into his eyes. He seems to be watching me from the depths of the earth. I have to find a way to keep him with me so I blurt out,
Hi! My name is Dottie! Dorothy. From Los Angeles. Dorothy Bradford. Or Dottie. Dottie is fine.
I can keep going, telling him my name forever, but he interrupts,
I know you are a guest here, Señora. Watch the path carefully on your way back.
He turns and disappears into the rose garden.
I'm left standing alone in the quiet.
Quiet. I notice that for the first time there's no noise from the fiesta. St. John must have finally had enough partying. And then I think again about the elephant head. All used up by now and given to the dogs? A sacrificial head, guilty of hemispheric dislocation. Well, better it than me. Bats swoop in silence. No bird calls. Lurid green spotlights illuminate the path. Green for go. The windows in the walls are blinded with bricks. Only the spirits watch over me as I walk along. Safe. All right, saved. Power come back, power come back, power come back.