Mexico Untitled #1

At the supply closet door one evening before my first class I noticed a new teacher standing contentedly to the side, waiting his turn. He stood solidly and offered a simple and amicable greeting. I could see he had a few years on me; he seemed unfazed about being in a new place. Ignoring all the reasons one might have to be nervous, he seemed to smile an acknowledgement of the awkward fact that he had appeared unanticipatedly. It was easy to say hello to him.
That same season a bunch of us guys and one lady ended up in new-level training together, which meant a lot of goofing off with the supervisor and making lude jokes in mixed English and Spanish. Once we performed a grammatical analysis of how the word for “asshole” could range in form across the various verb tenses. “Te estabas apendejeando” meant “you were being an asshole.” “Te habías apendejeado.” meant “you had been an asshole.” We all had a good time and around the middle of the summer I had a party. It served the ostensible purpose of celebrating some Cancerian birthdays, but any pretext that resulted in people showing up was adecuate.
Teachers, students and a few old friends from before my professional life showed up in numbers even before dark and patiently set to conjuring up the pachanga. I had not idea they would. They seemed only to settle in with each other and chat pleasantly to whatever music there happened to be; it was the time of evening for music in English, still. José Luis came with Mari, who was a funny girl and had been in one of my first classes. The early evening reached a peak just after sunset when everyone was standing and conversing excitedly; some people were singing. I remember José Luis threw his head back and laughed, returning to clap me on the shoulder and say how glad he was to have come. Later, once the drink was all being procured from a collective pool but before the hootinanny came the rock in Spanish. I’d heard it before. Some of the CD’s were mine but I had not quite caught on yet. A parellel universe of rock n’ roll existed and I had finally, inadvertantly pierced the veil in between. Understanding lyrics in another language sealed me in a surreal experience that seemed to doom my chances of ever having to lead a normal life again. I found my house inhabited by a spirit that was foreign to me, and it was content to be. José Luis said I should get with Sandra, a skinny girl whose braces belied her age. She was a great banda el recodo coach, dancing quebradito with me so that even our legs moved in unison. The party went on until the respectable hour of dawn.
José Luis had so much fun he said we should hang out more and I thought “cool.” After a session of training at the school once he even said we should take LSD some time. I thought “woah, that’s serious,” but realized I’d enjoy what he was suggesting. Running around the quiet cobblestone streets of Coyoacán, former site of Moctezuma’s aviary, seeing the organic nature of concrete and stone revealed. I said “cool, let’s do it.”

“It” ended up being a roadtrip south to San Pedro Tlanisco, which overlooked a valley, to the house of an old man. I remember the Mrs. offering a quiet greeting from the shady end of the room and my gentle reception of such, glad to receive it readily. His daughter prepared lunch and he brought out the morning’s harvest of mushrooms. It was a weekend, when trekkers ventured out from the city to trip. We chose the little jump-up pajaritos and don Nicolás said we’d be back by around four. I remember questioning his assessment.
We started down the hill, making sure to swallow every bit of what we ate, José Luis began to instruct me. It was my first trip with a guide. At the bottom of the valley we trounced through dry silt as the halucinatory effect took hold. I became tired and quietly frustrated so we turned back up the little stream toward a clearing, where José Luis bad me to sit on a rock. He sat on his and we closed our eyes.
I was in a gazebo made of distant sunset colors, perhaps of the same tones seen from behind an eyelid. Women, not of flesh but of soft light fell toward me as if fauning over me, and my fear was discovered and forgiven simultaneously as their hands came only close enough to affect me, but not to touch. Allow us to be women, they said silently, just allow us to be women. And when we opened our eyes I was calm. The sun neared its zenith, obscuring the rising land above and the Eagles’ Peak in white light. We stood in the clearing together but I paced, uncomfortable under direct sunlight and José Luis questioned why. It was a fair question, and it didn’t freak me out that he would ask, still I couldn’t respond. Not with fear but with acute nervous apprehension the present moment seemed to have me by the head. I craned my head against the sun as if it weakened me and stumbled around in the sand, aware of the futility of escape and still confounded at what to do with the present moment. It’s unsettling when one is suddenly abandoned by the comfortable distraction of the never-ending moment-to-come. I ended up on my knees wretching as if I’d eaten bitter cactus, but such was not the case. Yet I did perceive in the sand the arrangement left after the last rain. The grains remained where the water had left them, indeed where they needed to go as the water had been absorbed. It was not unlike a honeycomb, only more arbitrary, even like human development seen from the air. The larger patterns, such as would normally be obscured by atmosphere or cloud cover I saw here in the same, strange style of line-drawing utilized by the Maya and Aztecs. I felt to be in the land where the trip had been born, and had just pierced the veil, in the act of crossing the threshold.
José Luis, who had retired to the shade came back out after I finished wading in the stream and singing to the valley. Some former visitors to our clearing had arranged stones, in arrows and a winking smiley face. “Oh, that’s just like you wacky Maya,” I thought. “You clowns just winking and nudging the denizens of the next galaxy without a care in the world.”
I put my jacket back on and felt like a cartoon swashbuckler when I pulled my shirt cuffs out from under my sleeves and José Luis laughed. That was the second time in my life that putting back on a jacket brought me back to my self. I was well again, and at ease almost the same noonday sun. I welcomed its warmth on my head.
. The eagles cirlcing the valley and the peak named for them were visible now in the yellow light of afternoon, and my brother and I climbed like them, perching on craggy overlooks as we went. José Luis spoke of his wife-to-be and the house he’d build for her. I suspended myself over the path, back to one boulder and boots stretched out to the other, light enough to be carried on the wind.