existential angst

In 1972, I spent a semester in Guanajuato, Mexico. Guanajuato is the name of a state in Mexico and the name of the capitol city in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Guanajuato is a very beautiful, old city. Like many European cities, it has urban warrens where the passageways between houses are so narrow that cars don't fit. Plus it is a step city in some places, with lots of stairways.  A happy city tradition, at least in 1972, were callejoneadas.  A group of musicians and singers, dressed in fancy performing outfits like many associate with mariachis, lead long streams of people walking through the city singing. The cllejoneadas snake through the city, up and down public stairways that comprise the only public 'roads' in that stretch of the city.  Sweethearts hold hands. The pace is very slow so old and young are accomodated. 

Another tradition alive in Guanajuato in 1971 was serenading. Young men regularly hired singers to serenade outside their sweethearts bedroom windows.

The gringas in my college program all hoped to be serenaded in this way. Yikes, what a gorgeous practice.

All of Mexico goes crazy for Day of the Dead but Guanajuato goes even crazier. There is a cache of old mummies found in caves surrounding Guanajuato. There is a gruesome mummy museum. The little city goes crazy over mummies and Day of the Dead with a particularly energetic callejoneada.

Why shouldn't groups of people get together, bring instruments and walk and sing their way through their town or neighborhood?

Gosh, I lost track of what I was going to write.

I smoked quite a lot of marijuana when I lived in Guanajuato. Smoking marijuana was a major motivator in my decision to study in Mexico.  I went there my sophomore year in college. A friend, Mary Sue, heavily pressured me. I was planning to wait until my junior year and spend a whole year in Europe but she wanted to smoke a lot of dope. And we did.

We paid for room and board with a local family.  Our family's father was a dentist, with a homemaker om who had one full time maid helping her do everything. Those two women seemed to do house work and meal prep 24/7/365. The reigning beauty queen of Guanajuato was the eldest daughter who, perplexingly, did not live at home with her family. Her mom bragged about her constantly.  We asked, a lot, why she lived with relatives instead of in the house. Maybe the family wanted the income from us? There were three Americans living with this family. Maybe the daughter was packed off because they needed her room? The family was very mysterious about her.

Also, the dentist father did not spend all his nights at home. You know we American college girls wanted to know that story.

The oldest son in the family was a student at the national university in Mexico City. But he came home for a weekend visit as soon as the three gringas moved into his family's house. We were thrilled. We wanted to buy marijuana but were afraid to approach anyone. For some reason, we felt safe asking the son. Maybe he offered?  I don't remember.  He said he could buy us a full brick of acapulco gold for a price that seemed paltry to us.  I seriously think it cost us about twenty bucks. He took our money, went back to college and the next weekend, he gave us a brick of acapulco gold.

Acapulco gold, at least the stuff we bought, was gold-toned, the color if golden wheat. The brick was the size of a large, old-fashioned building brick, the kind of large stucco bricks used in Mexico homebuilding, not the smaller ones in brick houses in my childhood Chicago. The brick was about 8 inches long, three inches deep and four inches wide. The dope was tightly bound by wire. The wire had clearly been machine-packed. Whoever made that brick of marijuana ran a professional operation.

When we cut the wire, the marijuana exploded, quadrupling, at least, in volume. It looked like a bushel of marijuana.  We had heard fabulous tales of how good the high was on acapulco gold. Our acapulco gold was awesomely great dope. Plus the altitude in Guanajuato was high, and we were not yet adapted to the elevation so we got high very easily.  We smoked that stuff constantly, when we could. When you lived with a family, you can't light up a doobie in the living room. Where do you go to smoke marijuana when you can't smoke in your living accomodations? Looking for places to smoke was a perpetual challenge. Usually, we would walk to the edge of town, lighting up as we got to the suburban areas with little foot or vehicle traffic. In our part of town, the street kind petered out, drifting up a mountainside. We went down there to smoke dope, walking to the end of the bus line as we got high then hopping the bus downtown where all the action was. Action you ask? What action?  Just being around people, discovering the country and culture. And eating.

Gosh, I am so sidetracked. I'd almost like I am high and my mind is drifting. But I am not. I pretty much stopped smoking dope when I left Mexico but while I was there, I smoked quite a lot of marijuana. I also tried peyote.

The son in our family, after giving us our brick, asked us to give him some. We only wanted to give him a lid, which was an ounce back home. But he pulled out a bag that looked pretty big to us and helped himself to a huge amount of our dope.  He said it was only fair, his commission. He ripped us off. Of course, he could have just taken our money and completely ripped us off. But after he extracted that tip, we did not buy from him again. But by then, we had discovered all the college boys in town. Or, to put it more accurately, the local university which was almost all guys in 1972 (it was a university with an engineering focus, besides sexism in a more culturally conservative country), the guys had discovered the two stoned blondes that were always roaming around town.

There were sixteen kids in our college program. None of the others ever got high. All of them knew, of course, that we were stoned all the time. And our professors knew.  I am amazed we didn't get arrested. Two stoned blonde gringas with the munchies, and a trail of college boys hanging around. All the Mexican college boys thought all gringas were very sexually promiscuous. Mary Sue and I were both virgins, at least when we arrived. I don't know if she ever had sex in Mexico but I lost my virginity in Guanajuato.

After the family son took a lot of our dope, we bought from college boys, who were plentiful and all of whom were very eager to please us, hoping they would get lucky. No kidding. Mary Sue and I would stagger through the town every afternoon and evening and we almost always had a cloud of boys trailing us, waiting to wait on us.

During that fall, there was a major international cultural festival in Guanajuato. Performing arts from all over the world trekked to Guanajuato to perform dance, music and theater. And the prices were very cheap in 1972 Mexico. I am pretty sure the US dollar exchanged for about 66 pesos to the dollar so if a theater ticket cost 30 pesos, it was nothing to us.  We went to lots of stuff at the cultural festival.

In downtown Guanajuato, right off the town square, there is an elaborately baroque (is that redundant?) theater, a theater a bit like I imagine Shakespeare's Globe theater was like:  the main floor was not very big, the balconies rose straight up, with little booths like you see at the opera in movies. The higher up you went, the cheaper the tix and the poorer the view. The balconies of the booths had lots of gold paint, lots of elaborate paintings. And the style of the theater imitated European appearance, not Mexican.  It was an odd cultural experience. We were there to experience Mexico and then we went to that international cultural festival. Troupes from Russia, China, Latin America, Europe. I don't think there were any Middle Eastern acts.

We barely did our academic work. After we got high, we'd head down to the town square, which is where everyone seemed to turn up to check to see if there was any action.

There were a couple hotels on the square, one kinda fancy.

Oh, in those days, females could not go into bars. Only men. Except the bar in the fancy hotel. The bar in that hotel had a piano. Mary Sue was a fairly accomplished piano player. She asked permission to play there and the bar was happy to let her play. We would get high, go to the bar, she'd play and I'd hang out. In the bar, the men were older. When you are 19, blonde, American, slender and stoned in Mexico, men hit on your constantly.  Men in Mexico in 1972 were much more aggressive than I have ever seen men in this country.  I handled the attention in a fashion similar to how I deal with panhandlers in Berkeley, which are about as ubiquitous of men trying to get my attention in Mexico in 1972:  I blanked them all out. 

I talked to boys some but the main reason I wanted to connect with boys was to (1) have access to buying more marijuana (2) practicing Spanish, which at first was harder while stoned and then when I got more fluent, easier when stoned and (3) the boys realized we wanted to try other drugs and a group promised us peyote, which they eventually delivered.

I started this post to write about a moment in Mexico that I have never forgotten.

We always returned home every night. Our señora had made it clear that we could not stay out all night. She was convinced that staying out all night meant we were having sex. We did not get so intimate with her that we told her we were virgins. But we got the message:  we could not stay out all night. We pushed the limits. It was hard to drag outselves home when we were stoned out of our minds but we always dragged ourselves in, albiet often quite late.

One night, while very very baked (we did not use the word 'baked' back then!), we straggled in very late, maybe 2 a.m. The third gringa in our house, Miriam, must have had a very different experience of Mexico.What did she do all the time? She did not approve of our dope smoking. Did she study? Did she hang out with the other Americans?  I never figured out what the other Americans did. There were several African American girls in our program. They seemed to just spend all their time with their families. We never saw the other Americans around town in our partying. And Miriam? What the heck did she do all the time?  I'll never know.

We had a two room suite. Wisely, Miriam had chosen the inner bedroom. This worked well, since Mary Sue and I came in so late all the time. We could tip toe in and not disturb Miriam but the señora was like a mother hen and always knew when we rolled in. At breakfast, she would give us an angry stony silence, giving us the evil eye, signaling her opprobrium without saying much. She was not, after all, our mother. We were boarders, not even exchange students. A business arrangement. She was not the boss of us, but, in a very token way, we tried not to offend her too egregiously but we did.

So this one night, we come in. Mary Sue used the bathroom first. She always changed in the bathroom. We shared that tiny bedroom for about four months and she always changed in the bathroom. So I did too. Isn't that weird modesty? And she always went first. She was a sucky friend. In those days, I only chose sucky friends, friends who treated me poorly. I stopped choosing friends who treated me like they were doing me a favor to put up with me but used me. Mary Sue had pressured me to go to Mexico with her. She wanted a smoking partner. She turned me onto dope to train me for the trip. And she seemed to think she was in charge of us and I seemed to think so too.  Now I hae friends who act like they are glad I am their friend, like they like me, with one exception.  I have a 'friend' in my life these days who treats me in ways that remind me of Mary Sue. But mostly, I stopped choosing friendly enemies.

Anyway, we come in late, MS gets into her jammies and into bed and I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I would change in the privacy of the bedroom while she was in the bathroom. It was late. We were high and tired and had class early in the morning. And we wanted our breakfast and the señora would not feed us late.

I brushed my teeth. I was very very high. Instinctively, I felt fear when I would see myself in the mirror. I felt such fear. I felt drawn to look directly into my eyes in the mirror. Instinctively I tried not to look directly into my eyes but it was like a force field drew me in. I gave into the impulse and soon stared directly and closely into my eyes. I put my face as close to the mirror as I could and stared into my pupils, which, of course, were widely dilated. I stared into those black limpid pupils.

And I had a psychedelic experience, like a 'trip'. But I was only on marijuana.