When I met Julian he was halfway through a bottle of Tequila. It took a little while but any professional drunk will convince we timid sober eventually. The first shot went down smooth, so smooth that I mistook his bottle, draped in an opaque plastic bag, for rum. Julian confided that his fast approaching 30th birthday frightened him, but it was hard to tell where his English, broken and accented heavily in French, began, and where the Tequila ended.
Julian called himself an S+M “master” which somehow, in those circles, translated to a kind of fetish black belt. This was confirmed or at least corroborated with the tattoo on his left forearm, a yin-yang in three equal parts (all black) instead of two (black and white), which was some kind of symbol in that area. His other tattoo, on his arm above his bicep, was of a blonde girl done in the retro style you might see painted on an old World War II bomber. She was bent over, exposing a bear ass with a red hand print on the right cheek. Every time he went out for a smoke he’d roll up that sleeve of his shirt, exposing the girl, because he liked to gauge the reaction of the Mexico City locals.
By the third shot I was finished drinking, but Julian was far from finished with the Tequila and the conversation. He was short on money, and short on friends or family he thought would loan him money, he was, in fact, a short person as well, standing at maybe five foot six. About the only thing Julian wasn’t short on was cheap Tequila, which thankfully in Mexico, was still pretty good Tequila.
As it turned out Julian was short on one last thing, time. While another hostel patron and I had laughed off his fear of hitting the big 3-0, Julian was not adding more years, but subtracting from a pre-arranged total. Julian was diagnosed in France with Khaler’s Disease, which means the size of his hourglass formed before him, and he could see the sand tumbling, and hear the tiny scratching of the grains against the glass. It was a 50-50 shot he’d make it to 40, and the long dark would claim him long before 45. “I can die in a hospital,” he said, “or have fun all the nights.”
He wanted to find a bar to tend somewhere in Mexico City’s S+M scene. I have no idea how big a subculture that particular fix maintained here, but I know a city of this size is like the internet, whatever dark fantasy you could conjure is represented somewhere. I also knew, generally, the kind of people that could polish off an entire handle of tequila by themselves are the kind of people that would have trouble holding down a job, even one so suitable as tending bar.
We stayed up talking a while longer, Julian, pounding back shots at regular intervals, became harder and harder to understand. I don’t know what his particular diagnosis entailed, but it seemed that treatment would require something akin to chemotherapy and radiation, without much hope of success. And so he elected to take all his money to Mexico City and blow it, slowly, one bottle at a time. It’s hard to say what my reaction was to his story, certainly pity played a big part, but also a certain degree of disbelief and maybe even scorn. If I only had ten years left what would I do? What would any of us do?
Was he an alcoholic before he was diagnosed? Was the diagnoses even real, or was it just an excuse to be able to find solace at the bottom of a bottle every night? Maybe he was just running away, or maybe he was drawn here for whatever reason. I think the part that felt the worst was a lack of ambition in the face of mortality. For those of us with no hope of an afterlife, all we have is to break off a small piece of the world, stamp our name into it, and hope it helps someone else down the line. But there is seldom ever much good advice on a tombstone.
When I left Julian his eyes had glazed over, and I knew that look. It was the look of a man who would not remember a word of what we’d said over the course of four hours. Hours later, when he finished the bottle, I could hear him stamping up the stairs to his bed. When his head hit the pillow the day would vanish, he would not close his eyes and see the last traces of his action, the day would not linger over him, he had murdered the day, slit the throat of the sun and watched the black spill across the horizon until he knew its memory would never return to haunt him, and when he would rise from bed hours and hours after all the other travelers in the hostel had gone about their days of tours and sightseeing he would set about attacking the next day, by uncorking a new bottle.
In the meantime I spoke with a travel agent, and discovered that a domestic flight from Mexico cost exactly the same as a decent bus. Only the flight took two hours and the bus twelve. After walking to a nearby hotel to book my flight I wandered the streets of Mexico City’s central district marveling at the unbelievable cleanliness. This was not a Fifth Avenue, filled with upmarket shops catering to rich tourists, the central district housed thousands of little shops, bars, and restaurants, owned and tended by locals for locals (to some extent) and yet it was perfectly manicured, almost trashless, despite the rush of people ad cars in every direction.
The next thing that was impossible to miss was the huge police presence. I can’t remember ever seeing more police in a city, or even part of a city, minus some kind of major event like New Year’s Eve in Time Square. This was, apparently, partially the handiwork of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guliani. After his term as Mayor and during his failing bid as a Republican Presidential Candidate, Mr Guliani, rented his services as a “crime stopper” to foreign cities looking to curb high crime. He was credited with a major crime reduction in New York City, which “The Tipping Point” attributes to his policies of cracking down on Subway turnstile jumpers, and investigating broken windows, while “Freakonimics” says is mainly due to Roe v. Wade preventing a generation of impoverished children from being born. Many people in the boroughs simply attribute to a gross misallocation of Police resources away from the boroughs and into Manhatten. But I digress.
I don’t think many people would assume the first two adjective to describe Mexico City would be clean and safe, but that’s what I found in the Central District. The area was only made that much more enjoyable by the enormous walking streets that stretched across the district, filled with restaurants and cafes and curiously enough, bamboo. The walking streets were lined with oil drums, out of which grew twenty to thirty foot high bamboo stalks.
I spent most of that day moving from café to café, finding out just how awful my Spanish had degraded. When I returned to the hostel after dinner, a party had blossomed within its main area. The bartender was playing a mix of 90’s grunge, mainly Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, while the random assortment one usually finds in a hostel mingled and drank. For a while I spoke with an Austrian who had purchased an around the world plane ticket, expecting to head west from Austria, hopping from Latin America to Australia and Asia before returning to Europe. After a month in Mexico he cancelled his around the world ticket and was on his seventh month in Central America, spending a month here and there.
After the Austrian I spoke with a Brazilian painter from Sao Paulo. He was in his 40’s and a history buff, who spent most of his vacations exploring the ruins dotted around Central and South America from the Empires whose fatal flaw was not having an immunity to smallpox. The landscape of this small gathering was forever altered, however, by the intrusion of nine Columbians.
Eight of them were students at the same university, all history majors, and one of their Professors, who had organized the trip. This was highly unusual, even for a Columbian University, or so I was told. All eight of the kids spoke incredibly good English, and they took over the job of DJing almost immediately. I’ve already forgotten more about styles of music in Columbia than I imagined I’d ever learn. In the midst of this fracas was Julian, pouring every girl he could find shots out of his Tequila bottle. The Columbians had trouble believing anyone could listen to their music and not know how to dance to it. It took me less than a minute to shoot that theory full of holes a rhino could salsa through.
The bar was set to close sometime around ten or eleven but the bartender gracefully kept opening up new bottles and dispensing more beers to the mass of us. A taxi was coming to pick me up from the hostel at some ungodly hour of the morning, but after midnight came and went I was pot committed. (That’s a poker term for those unfamiliar) Eventually, the most talkative of the Columbian girls became the target of an increasingly drunken Julian, and was the first to go back to her room, choosing the path of discretion over that of confrontation, but later that night it wouldn’t matter.
The Columbian music continued unabated as five Belgians wandered in. They were a kind of theatre troupe that put on Avant-garde plays in Belgium. They were in Latin America doing research for their next show. I was curious what kind of research they were conducting in Mexico so we took our beers outside and they told me about the town in the northern part of the country they planned on visiting. They had read about a man who was hunting pterodactyl. That is not a typo. Apparently the man believed he’d seen a pre-historic flying dinosaur, and his life’s mission was to hunt the animal down and capture it. This story is made more interesting by the fact that the rest of this Mexican hamlet had agreed that they’d seen the pterodactyl as well. The man is a notorious figure in the town and the Belgians wanted to investigate whether this close knit community had thought they’d seen the thing or simply gone along with the ravings of a mad men, because he was one of their own, and they didn’t want to disparage him. To the playwrights, whether the dinosaur existed or not was immaterial, it was the psychology of a town who would agree to such a preposterous notion simply to appease the Don Quixote in their midst, tilting at pterodactyls. (Consequently, Tilting at Pterodactyls is going to be the name of my indie band)
While we were outside a sudden, torrential downpour began, and most of the people passing along the street stopped to take shelter beneath the hostel’s awning. A short, quirky Mexican woman asked me where I was from, and within thirty seconds proceeded to reveal to me that she was having an affair with a married man. Not really knowing what to do with this information I shrugged my shoulders, which she took as a sign to continue revealing personal information about how the wife of the man knew about it and they were locked in some kind of love triangle. This was further complicated by the fact that she was now seeing another man who she claimed was “famous” and it made her married man candy jealous. After another few minutes of describing the intricacies of her love trapezoid the rain let up and she disappeared, leaving me with the vague sensation of being Mexican punked.
When the Belgians and I went back inside the party was winding down. The bar had finally, officially closed but a few people kept on with shots of Tequila. One of the employees at the hostel, a laid back Mexico City native who told me he wanted to be a bicycle messenger in New York City, apparently took a shot out of Julian’s personal Tequila bottle. Why this set Julian off, as he’d been pouring shots for everyone he saw for the last few hours, will probably never be known to anyone, even Julian himself. The two got into a heated argument, consisting mainly of Julian screaming and the hotelier trying to calm him down.
In an effort to diffuse the situation the hotelier grabbed his bag and walked outside to go home, Julian, still screaming and yelling, pushing people out of the way, ran outside after him. When I reached them Julian was punching at the guy’s head, missing most but connecting with a few. Luckily for me, Julian was short and didn’t weigh a whole lot, and I grabbed him around the chest and pulled him a few inches off the ground and passed him into the arms of one of the hotelier’s friends and the Austrian, who’d known Julian for about a month. The last thing he said before leaving the hostel for the night was, “Tomorrow, you’re gone!”
And this quirky little Frenchman, fighting off cancer of the blood plasma and bone marrow with a daily regimen of Tequila, had quite possibly sacrificed his last friend in Mexico City, and the bed he slept in night after night, over a single shot. Once he was back inside the hostel he was still raging, and to my utter surprise they placated him by giving him more Tequila, which he drank from the battle while silently fuming in a far corner.
It’s easy for us to see that kind of drunk and look down, as I did the whole time. But there is a tremendous amount of courage involved in looking at a doctor, draped in all the certainty of Western science and medicine, listening to him tell you that you are going to die, but that these series of painful, invasive procedures can keep you going a while longer, and saying “Thanks, but no thanks.” Whether he came here to drink, or drinks because he came here, doesn’t really matter, that he hasn’t poured himself into a book, or some project that represents a lifelong ambition doesn’t matter either.
He is what any of us are, a scrap of partially malfunctioning genetic code, racked by the tricks of fate and composed entirely of decisions made and yet to make. In Julian there is a small, utterly incomprehensible piece of the world that will burn its own Julian-shaped hole through the fabric of time, while inside of his skin his body will begin decomposing and he will push back against the pain, sometimes with a fist toward his only friend, sometimes with the last traces of Tequila burning down his chest, his vision blurred, his footsteps heavy and wavering, his heart not pumping, but ticking, a metronome within a furnace, until that moment that the cosmos recollects a tiny piece of itself into which it breathed a slow, hollow breath.
