Recently I traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico with my friend Kyle for five days.
It was a brief whirlwind of a trip in which we met my other good buddy, Jesús Castillo, the famous poet of Puerto Escondido, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and self-described ‘sole intellectual’ of that lonely tropical backwater today populated by surfer bros, beach babes, and New Age babble. The term Puerto Escondido, as Jesús tells me, means ‘Hidden Port.’ The name perhaps provides a clue to that town’s peculiar emptiness, a place that contains no artistic scene to speak of, not unless you count pools of mezcal-fueled vomit as a form of street art, and no actual port—at least not in the traditional sense.
The town’s port, if it does exist, is indeed hidden, a strange and sudden portal to another world that opens once or twice a year, and not necessarily when Mercury is in retrograde or one’s chakra is charged with divine crystal energy. As far as I can tell, it opens when the swells of the south Pacific sweep north, concentrating the full weight of their Antarctic fury on the tiny picturesque beach of Playa Zicatela.1 On such a sunny, clear day, when the 30-foot bombs first begin to drop, many a restless seeker meditating in the morning breeze has found his or herself rapidly transported to another world in a beautiful burial gown of detonating white water.2
But my journey to the nightside of life proceeded through a different portal: the anus.
Looking back on the trip, from which I emerged deathly sick with E. coli, it seems fitting that the first thing I consumed upon landing in the dry, highland valley of Oaxaca City was an enormous tostada covered in bugs.
Tostada de Insectos, the menu read.
The phrase I uttered upon pronouncing my order still rings through my skull like a toxic omen: “Me gusta insectos!” As does the cheerful command the kindly Europeans who owned the overpriced Airbnbs we stayed at kept sending over WhatsApp. “Enjoy your holiday!” “Enjoy your holiday!” they’d write again and again after I confirmed we’d located the lock box, not adjusted the thermostat, and connected to WiFi. “Happy holiday!” I didn’t have the heart to tell these ebullient Belgians and Frenchman that we weren’t in fact English or Australian, nor was I even really German—this despite my last name Baumgart, which I guess means Treegarden in Deutsch.
No, our tax dollars had for four years gone to cover the hotel fees of Donald Trump’s children, fees paid for at properties they themselves owned and profited from.
We were Americans.
Real bootstrap boys. No free hand-outs for us.
And our time in Mexico was no “holiday,” not that fabled state-funded sojourn that each year keeps the white, European male just tan, lithe, light-hearted enough, and non-celibate enough to ensure he makes it through another winter without rolling into Ralph’s on a Tuesday in tactical gear and avenging himself upon several stunned strangers standing in the frozen food aisle with his AR-15.
No. But Kyle and I had an obligation to make the best of things.
A phrase of Jack London comes to mind, Kyle’s ex-wife’s favorite writer: “I shall use my time.” And that’s what Kyle and I intended to do.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days
trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
Rereading London’s ‘Credo’, however, it does sound a bit like a description of the remarkable transformation my bowels underwent by the end of the trip, turning my normally solid, staid stool into near-cosmic explosions of burning dark matter whose eruptions, for sheer volume and velocity, left me utterly bewildered.
But never mind that. Kyle and I had to improve ourselves—and our government was not going to pay us to do it. No civil law incentivized we minimize the spreadsheets and close out the apps. We were not going to be penalized tax-wise if we didn’t go flop naked on some beach overseas for five weeks. No, if we, as concerned citizens, wanted to seek health and refreshment—or whatever traces of it we might imagine scraping from the surface of Mexico in five measly days as we carved a broad but shallow path through the heart of Oaxaca—the burden fell upon us and us alone.
Five days, we’d decided was plenty.
Five days would provide just enough time to allow us to experience something like the novelty of travel before the looming dread of the work week drained all its pleasure and the sights and sounds flickering before us proved a meager consolation when compared against the eight months we’d now have to labor in order to recoup the cost of having potentially once enjoyed them.
Of course, there was no real time to do or see anything.
That’s why I ordered the Tostada de Insectos. Two nights in a city a thousand years old does not quite offer sufficient time to carefully peel through the many concentric layers of place. Instead, as I’ve learned over the years, you have to ram as much as you can into every tiny fleeting moment, even if it hurts, or feels a bit too heavy at the time, like the bounty of bugs dumped on my Tostada de Insectos—a thin, toasted corn tortilla that proved so heavily weighted down with bugs that when I tried to pick it up it broke in half.
A brittle rain of roasted grasshoppers fell clinking to the earthen ware plate.
“Shit. You’re actually gonna eat that!?” Kyle said as I fed what remained of the forest of microgreens, flowers, avocado, and burned meal worms to my face. Jesús and the woman he’d brought to dinner, a dancer he’d seduced among the windswept shores of lonely Puerto, visibly fidgeted as my lips closed over a cricket leg.
“Gross!”
The spiked armor decorating its shin bone tangled with my mustache.
“Dude, ew.”
They were both horny, had arrived two hours before Kyle and I, and were ready to start salsa dancing.
“You guys should just go,” I said, chewing. “I’ll catch up.”
I did not like the bugs, of course, had never even eaten any before, and I didn’t want them for dinner, but I’d flown two-thousand miles to spend two-nights in Oaxaca City. This wasn’t some “holiday” in which I could relax and enjoy and look back to one day fondly, the darkest of London’s winter months brightened each year by my memory of that remote little cove (Treegarden’s Beach the locals might have begun to call it) to which I’d retired each afternoon to bathe before the sun’s bounty in brilliant solitude. No, there was no damp English flat where I might sit and reminisce, a cup of Earl Grey in hand, warming myself on my memories for the next six seasons—that tranquil holiday in which I found the rest and refreshment necessary to carry on (AR-15 free), discovered that serene sunlit cove that became my haven, my home away from home, unveiling itself each day in a further shades of color, ocean odor, and blinding ardor as my passion for its wet sand deepened into something resembling love.
No, I would return to my apartment in Los Angeles in a matter of days, the apartment overlooking the alley in which the homeless meth head with carnival clown facial tattoos, Steve Finley, as I called him, set fire to the dumpsters each day. And my memory of Oaxaca, Mexico would be something like the fever dream of speed, a manic episode crammed with much walking and talking, driving and dining, a frantic race to the finish line in that hidden port on the Pacific where so many found themselves swept away to another, more watery world. The best you could hope to do, like any addict, was to crouch down, hold the flame close to the carb, and hit the the thing hard. I would rather be ashes than dust. Bite the Tostada and chew. I shall use my time. Do not savor, just swallow. Consume. Do not reflect. RAM. And at the end of it emerge with some mental scramble perhaps as messy, beautiful, and foul as that floral adorned insect disc I managed to suck down before Jesús and his lover left.
“Agua,” I remember asking the waitress, “agua por favor,” who in my lust for insectos, had mistaken me, possibly, for some kind of local…
“Agua,” Kyle said. “He needs agua. Tiene muchos insectos.”
Kyle and I had both started off the day severely dehydrated.
I remember staring out the window as the plane, a budget Volaris flight out of Tijuana International Airport, lifted from the rippling tarmac. Far below, before San Ysidro, the busiest border crossing on the planet,3 the uncountable cars stood stalled, like some great caravan finally come to grief, the horns and anguished howls of a million semi-trucks, Teslas, and shoeless orphans rising slowly over the earth, one great long piercing scream that seemed to echo inside the the plane’s engine, a metal drum just then floating outside the window as we slid through scrim of smog and the man to my left slammed the plastic window shutter. “Pinche madre.” Somewhere in the distance, I could hear my mother’s words yelled from the open window of a Nissan Murano as a parking guard waved her on with an orange wand, a final command carried by the jet fuel-scented wind: “Be sure to wash your hands!” That was another benefit of flying out of Tijuana—not only was it cheaper but I could also guilt trip Pam into dropping us at the border and thereby skirt the sixty-dollar Uber.
“Is that normal?” Kyle said.
He’d been up since 2:30AM with the kids. I followed his eyes, which looked like they were bleeding, toward the head protruding from the seat in front of us, one even balder than Kyle’s. A few bleak hairs protruded out from the bony outcrop, like a family of diseased cypress trees, devoid of leaves—their lives preserved in a picture of grim subsistence upon the diorama of his shimmering dome. A white fog swept the barren promontory.
“The gas?” I asked.
The bald guy raised his phone and snapped a selfie. Probably his first time flying.
“Yeah.”
My eyes, and those of the man seated beside me, clicked anxiously between his Gmail and the pale tendrils inching out over the cabin. I wasn’t sure which was more worrisome, the email he was crafting or the mysterious gas sterilizing our lungs.
A calm, recorded voice told us not to fear. The gas was for our safety.
“That’s what they always say before they gas you,” Kyle said.
Inhaling the antibacterial fog (sadly not enough to inoculate me), I stared in awe at the email open on the laptop of the man at the window seat. It was highlighted in long wide ribbons of blue and yellow, garish pinks and schizoid greens. The elaborate color-coding, which rendered the text fully legible perhaps only after a fatal epileptic seizure, reminded me of many of the public works projects I’d long admired around Mexico since my days as an arrogant young foreign traveler, particularly the four-hundred miles of cobble-stone gutter once painted white along the coastal highway from Tijuana to Ensenada in some inspired bout of municipal madness. Perhaps the man seated beside me, a bureaucrat in some Mexican ministry if one was to judge from the griffin insignia embroidered on his polo, received a certain bonus each year for every mile of digital highlighter he dragged across his documents—communications which no one read—and whose inscrutable color-coding served no purpose, just like the seaside gutters, none other than to remind whoever had commissioned their creation of the beauty, the glory, of Mexico… a glory I could taste myself, it seemed, long after the fog had ceased fumigating the cabin.
It was a certain acrid burning sensation in the back of the throat. A putrid taste less the result of the gas than the poverty of our imagination.
Neither of us had thought to bring any pesos on board. Hence we had no agua.
The flight attendant, when I’d tried to pass off an American dollar for my Topo Chico Agua Mineral had refused my funds. A flicker of pride shot through his eyes, a glimmer not unlike that shard of glory you might see rippling one day in the corner of Nezahualcoyotl’s iris if you ever stare long enough at a 100 peso bank note, a haughty aloofness derived, not least of all, from the fact that no white man will ever properly pronounce his name, but also from the certainty that he will never sell out since you cannot purchase anything of any real value with 100 pesos—nothing except a bottle of purified water, a product itself set to soon become the most valuable commodity4 on earth, assuming the origin of life is something one can safely monopolize.
I have become saddened, I grieve.
No longer you are here, no longer,
but in the region Where-in-Some-Way-One-Exists.
You have left us without sustenance on the earth,
for this I withdraw from myself.
— “I am Sad” by Nezahualcoyotl, circa 14505
I could see that hard shard of glory glinting in Nezahualcoyotl’s eye as the 100 peso note sat face up on the table tray beside the man with the window seat who went on pecking at his email, a fresh bottle of water stashed in his lap; a shard of light softening into a salty teardrop that threatened now to spill over into a bout of hilarity as every time I took the definitive breath with which to utter, “Mi pardon, senor, es possible…” I could not remember any Spanish nor bring myself to ask the man in English if I might borrow the Nezahualcoyotl note to purchase a bottle of agua.
Instead I glanced between the airplane window, then open, and the man’s Gmail window, always open, the former framing the deep blue of the Sea of Cortez, the latter unfurling a forever lengthening line of lilac highlighter, my mind musing all the while on some dubious etymological connection between American dollars, dolares, and the Spanish word for pains, dolores, while Kyle occasionally surfaced from unsettling dreams, bloody eyes wide as he scratched his balding pate, dry mouth mumbling about the uncertain fate of our foggy lives…
“Is the gas gone?”
“Yeah. It’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of gas was it?”
“Orgone.”
“Is that safe?”
“Don’t you live there?”
“Oregon?”
“I don’t know.”
And as Kyle’s exhausted face fell once more to my shoulder, I remembered the glorious bygone era, the end of middle-school, before the advent of the smart phone, when math was still easy and I had faith that eventually, when the time was right, when I needed it most, I’d learn how to meditate, make a million dollars, and eat a girl out. All the keys to a successful adulthood would eventually fall in line in good time. I remembered that year, in eighth grade, it was Kyle’s bar mitzvah. Me and his other gentile friends had placed bets as to whether there’d be a fog machine on hand when Kyle skateboarded into the ceremony with blue hair backed by the Blink 182 song “What’s My Age Again?” as he claimed his parents were going to allow him to do. They did ultimately, something like that, and there was ample fog on the dance floor—Kyle’s family having evidently transcended the ancestral trauma. I think they had Tony, Kyle’s father to thank. He had years before, in the mid-90s, invented a popular As Seen on TV product, the Misty Mate, a personal, portable cooling system that, through the use of a bottle, handpump, flexible hose, and spring-loaded clip, kept a fine aureole of refreshing, pale mist hovering around the consumer’s hyperthermic face. It was like you were on perpetual vacation—the eternal holiday—the informercials claimed.
Several years later, the Mexican army confiscated one of these pumps from Kyle’s car after pulling us over and planting drugs in his car. We had decided to spend a whole month—a proper holiday—driving 2,000 miles from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas and back. A summer vaykay during the college break. How confident we were that day, us freshman, how certain we were we had our whole lives ahead of us, and how coolly we declared it, repudiating the ripe brown wads of fragrant mota the machine gun-armed teenagers kept magically harvesting from Kyle’s driver-side floor.
“Naw, man. That’s not ours.”
“Naw, man. You put that there.”
“Dude. That’s your weed.”
It helped, too, at the time, that my brown hair was curly, unwashed, and the regimen of SPF-70 had so far preserved my native pallor.
“Frodo!? Frodo!?” the man-boys two or three years our senior started whispering after failing to arouse the proper terror in our hearts. “Frodo!?” Lord of the Rings had just finished its final run at AMC Fashion Valley and for years people had been telling me I looked like Elijah Wood. The resemblance was not lost on the impoverished Mayan boys charged with eliminating drug traffickers among saguaro studded wastes of Baja California.
“Si!” Kyle kept shouting. “Si! Frodo! Mi amigo es Frodo!”
Rather than getting sodomized, our throats slit, and bodies dumped at the outskirts of their roadside encampment, the men banded together, lifting me aloft like the game-winning quarterback to a scenic overlook high above the aquamarine sea where they chanted a character’s name from JR Tolkien, feeding me one Corona after Modelo after Pacifico as they did, until every soldier had a picture snapped alongside me.
A final group portrait followed.
I often imagine that photo surviving somewhere, lost in some toolbox stolen from an abandoned Mexican military garrison south of La Paz. A blurry photo of twenty camouflaged teens squinting into the punishing sun. At the center, grinning broadly in a black Tool shirt, stands a pale, shy hobbit. Beside him he hugs charismatic young jew, a man somehow, improbably, shorter than himself and whose face remains obscured by the Mexican wrestling mask the Federales found on the floor of his car and forced over his head. A pale plume of Misty Mate juice perfumes the air between them as the soldiers raise their rifles in a round of martial salute—a sharp crack, crack, crack dying out over the empty desert… rather meek tribute for Herr Frodo, the man who saved the world.
And still seated on the Volaris flight, listening to Kyle’s rattling snore, I imagined his ancestors in Poland dragging a metal hoe over the hard dirt for centuries. A thousand years of poverty and persecution. Then the gas chambers. Then suddenly Blink 182. Misty Mate. His dad for a moment a millionaire. And as I heard that hoe dragging in his throat, I watched the man rub his cursor across his interminable email, sowing long ribbons of asylum green all around his Gmail, and I wanted to ask him for a few pesos, anything for a sip of water—but it would have been too humiliating. “What’s my age again?” And I wasn’t on holiday, but a trip, five days’ frantic respite from my mediocre life, and wasn’t really those white gutters alongside the coastal highway in Baja California that the man’s interminable futile tinkering conjured—No, his yellow highlights, underlines, bold text bits, and italicized lattices suggested more my own own document, the book I had spent years working on, highlighting, rewriting, underlining, lifting commas like sacks of broken bricks, carrying them from one drab clause to another, a vast conspiracy of futility engineered against myself, erected to no purpose other than to wall off the possibility of glory ever entering my life. I shall use—
“Senorita, agua. Por favor.”
“Tiene muchos insectos!”
Later that evening, inside the restaurant in Oaxaca City, in my hurry to cleanse the wreckage of clay-kilned crickets lodged in my esophagus, I accepted the glass. Still dehydrated and starving from the flight, I took whatever was offered. Perhaps, in my lust for bugs, the waitress really did imagine me some obnoxious local gourmand, albeit one developmentally disabled, still struggling to learn the language. But a connoisseur of bugs nonetheless. Indeed, Los Pacos Oaxaca, “Alta Cocina Oaxaquena,” was supposed to have best.
But more likely, in my quest for consumption, my pale complexion, and piddling Español, the waitress saw and heard what actually was… another gauche gringo, crass Caucasian colonizer, an American miming passion as, approaching middle-age, he rammed it from the earth.
If this one loved bugs so much, why not give him the big one?
I grabbed the glass from her hand and drank, and in one single lukewarm wave of mild refreshment, the exoskeletal remains of hundreds of grasshoppers, crickets, and meal worms were flushed from my food pipe and deposited in the acid bath of my empty stomach—along with whatever insectos were alive in the local water supply.
At least that’s my going theory. Somewhere along the line, I drank the water.
Tomorrow morning a nurse from the City of Los Angeles arrives at my apartment to accept yet another stool sample, which she will forward to the county lab. A night spent in the ER after my return, complete with various body fluid tests, tipped the local authorities off to my buggy bowels. As it stands, I cannot return to work until my shit shows no more trace of los insectos pequeñitos y terribles: E. coli.
Two weeks and still no work!?
Yes. It is beginning to resemble a proper holiday.
Surfline, Mechanics: Puerto Escondido, Mexico. The science behind one of the world’s heaviest beach breaks. “This spot produces the largest surf in Southern Mexico—and oftentimes the largest and hollowest waves in the world.
Los Angeles Times, New Challenges for Zicatela Beach. “Vasquez said that about 10 years ago, 80 people drowned on this long stretch of beach, most of them non-surfing tourists who were swept to sea in a relentless rip current.”
Yale Environment360, “Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity.”
Wikipedia, Nezahualcoyotl was a scholar, philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian era Mexico.
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