of my life but I’ve heard that from every body coast to coast and I dont care generally and I dont care tonight and this is my way of doing and saying things.
A COUPLA DAYS LATER the S.S. Roamer sails away without me because they wouldnt let me get on at the union hall, I had no seniority, all I had to do they said was hang around a couple of months and work on the waterfront or something and wait for a coastwise ship to Seattle and I thought “So if I’m gonna travel coasts I’m going to go down the coast I covet.”—So I see the Roamer slipping out of Pedro bay, at night again, the red port light and the green starboard light sneaking across the water with attendant ghostly following mast lights, vup! (the whistle of the little tug)—then the ever Gandharva-like, illusion-and-Maya-like dim lights of the portholes where some members of the crew are reading in bunks, others eating snacks in the crew mess, and others, like Deni, eagerly writing letters with a big red ink fountain pen assuring me that next time around the world I will get on the Roamer.— “But I dont care, I’ll go to Mexico” says I and walk off to the Pacific Red Car waving at Deni’s ship vanishing out there …
Among the madcap pranks we’d pulled after that first night I told you about, we carried a huge tumbleweed up the gangplank at 3 A M Christmas Eve and shoved it into the engine crew foc’sle (where they were all snoring) and left it there.— When they woke up in the morning they thought they were somewhere else, in the jungle or something, and all went back to bed. So when the Chief Engineer is yelling “Who the hell put that tree on board!” (it was ten feet by ten feet, a big ball of dry twigs), way off across and down the ship’s iron heart you hear Deni howling “Hoo hoo hoo! Who the hell put that tree on board! Oh that Chief Engineer is a very funny m-a-h-n!”
2. MEXICO FELLAHEEN
WHEN YOU GO ACROSS THE BORDER at Nogales Arizona some very severe looking American guards, some of them pasty faced with sinister steelrim spectacles go scrounging through all your beat baggage for signs of the scorpion of scofflaw.— You just wait patiently like you always do in America among those apparently endless policemen and their endless laws against (no laws for)—but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you’re in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o’clock in the afternoon.— You feel as though you just come home from Sunday morning church and you take off your suit and slip into your soft worn smooth cool overalls, to play—you look around and you see happy smiling faces, or the absorbed dark faces of worried lovers and fathers and policemen, you hear cantina music from across the little park of balloons and popsicles.— In the middle of the little park is a bandstand for concerts, actual concerts for the people, free—generations of marimba players maybe, or an Orozco jazzband playing Mexican anthems to El Presidente.— You walk thirsty through the swinging doors of a saloon and get a bar beer, and turn around and there’s fellas shooting pool, cooking tacos, wearing sombreros, some wearing guns on their rancher hips, and gangs of singing businessmen throwing pesos at the standing musicians who wander up and down the room.— It’s a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it’s so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the South-west—but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues—you can find it almost anywhere else, in Morocco, in Latin America entire, in Dakar, in Kurd land.—
There is no “violence” in Mexico, that was all a lot of bull written up by Hollywood writers or writers who went to Mexico to “be violent”—I know of an American who went to Mexico for bar brawls because you dont usually get arrested there for disorderly conduct, my God I’ve seen men wrestle playfully in the middle of the road blocking traffic, screaming with laughter, as people walked by smiling—Mexico is generally gentle and fine, even when you travel among the dangerous characters as I did—“dangerous” in the sense we mean in America—in fact the further you go away from the border, and deeper down, the finer it is, as though the influence of civilizations hung over the border like a cloud.
THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING—I squatted on it, rolled thick sticks of marijuana on sod floors of stick huts not far from Mazatlan near the opium center of the world and we sprinkled opium in our masterjoints—we had black heels. We talked about Revolution. The host was of the opinion the Indians originally owned North America just as well as South America, about time to come out and say “La ti-erra esta la notre”—(the earth is ours)—which he did, clacking his tongue and with a hip sneer hunching up his mad shoulders for us to see his doubt and mistrust of anyone understanding what he meant but I was there and understood quite well.— In the corner an Indian woman, 18, sat, partly behind the table, her face in the shadows of the candle glow—she was watching us high either on “O” or herself as wife of a man who in the morning went out in the yard with a spear and split sticks on the ground idly languidly throwing it ground down half-turning to gesture and say something to his partner.— The drowsy hum of Fellaheen Village at noon—not far away was the sea, warm, the tropical Pacific of Cancer.— Spine-ribbed mountains all the way from Calexico and Shasta and Modoc and Columbia River Pasco-viewing sat rumped behind the plain upon which this coast was laid.— A one thousand mile dirt road led there—quiet buses 1931 thin high style goofy with oldfashioned clutch handles leading to floor holes, old side benches for seats, turned around, solid wood, bouncing in interminable dust down past the Navajoas, Margaritas and general pig desert dry huts of Doctor Pepper and pig’s eye on tortilla half burned—tortured road—led to this the capital of the world kingdom of opium—Ah Jesus—I looked at my host.— On the sod floor, in a corner, snored a soldier of the Mexican Army, it was a revolution. The Indian was mad. “La Tierra esta la notre—”
Enrique my guide and buddy who couldnt say “H” but had to say “K”—because his nativity was not buried in the Spanish name of Vera Cruz his hometown, in the Mixtecan Tongue instead.— On buses joggling in eternity he kept yelling at me “HK-o-t? HK-o-t? Is means caliente. Unnerstan?”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Is k-o-t… is k-o-t… is means caliente—HK-eat…. eat…”
“H-eat!”
“Is what letter—alphabay?”
“H”
“Is…HK…?”
“No… H…”
“Is Kard for me to pronouse. I can’ do it.”
When he said “K” his whole jaw leaped out, I saw the Indian in his face. He now squatted in the sod explaining eagerly to the host who by his tremendous demeanor I knew to be the King of some regal gang laid out in the desert, by his complete sneering speech concerning every subject brought up, as if by blood king by right, trying to persuade, or protect, or ask for something, I sat, said nothing, watched, like Gerardo in the corner.— Gerardo was listening with astonished air at his big brother make a mad speech in front of the King and under the circumstances of the strange Americano Gringo with his seabag. He nodded and leered like an old merchant the host to hear it and turned to his wife and showed his tongue and licked his lower teeth and then damped top teeth on lip, to make a quick sneer into the unknown Mexican dark overhead the candlelight hut under Pacific Coast Tropic of Cancer stars like in Acapulco fighting name.— The moon washed rocks from El Capitan on down—The swamps of Panama later on and soon enough.
Pointing, with huge arm, finger, the host:—“Is in the rib of mountains of the big plateau! the golds of war are buried deep! the caves bleed! we’ll take the snake out of the woods! we’ll tear the wings off the great bird! we shall live in the iron houses overturned in fields of rags!”
“Si!” said our quiet friend from the edge of the pallet cot. Estrando.—
