My Fourth Life: Mexico Diaries I

I traveled to Mexico a year or so after college and lived in a little town called San Miguel de Allende. I enrolled at The Instituto Allende, a school which specialized in arts and crafts and Spanish American Studies, where my time was spent learning about Mexican history, doing some autobiographical writing and printmaking. Disenchanted with school in general I searched out more interesting activities, which always included altered states of consciousness. I moved toward the precipice with precision.

It was not uncommon to find myself at 4am with my newest local friends, mescal bottle in hand, staggering arm-in-arm down some cobblestone street singing at the top of our lungs. In the morning I would wake up in a deserted house with a wicked headache. Light-sensitive and bedraggled I would pass the basket-sellers on the street, who perhaps had some compassion for the young, stupid American and would try to protect me in their way. "Don't walk to Cerro de las Tres Cruces by yourself". Don't die down here in a place you don't understand.

I learned only after I left that the railroad tracks outside San Miguel were the place where Neal Cassidy, four days short of his 42nd birthday, wandered in an altered state and died of exposure in the high desert night. I felt that I understood Cassidy's pull toward greater experience, even as it lead to death, and I recalled my last night in town, standing mesmerized, alone under a streetlight on a narrow cobblestone crossroads, gazing drunkenly up at what seemed like thousands of bats flying overhead. Head back, I watched them circle upwards and downwards in hypnotic patterned chaos, so much smarter than me. I knew, that night, that I must leave Mexico. My luck had run out and all that was waiting for me there was disaster.

A week or so earlier I swashbucklingly decided to CLIMB TO THE ROOF! after drinking for several hours in my jardin. Several precarious roof-crossings later I was delighted to find myself carousing atop neighboring houses in the deep night hours that I loved so much. I looked down at surreal green lime trees lit by moonlight in hidden gardens and I plundered unexpected barren landscapes housing goats and chickens, secrets in the middle of the city. With some strength and balance I traveled atop the architecture, and was allowed a new perspective of the world.

In my altered state I was infallable. I didn't see death drawing so near my soft body that its' delicate breath gently wound around my bare neck. I mistook it for the Mexican night breeze as my foot slipped from the narrow garden wall. When I landed it was flat on my back with a great thud on the quiet ground packed hard by animals. And with that impact time began to beat again and my vision cleared to a close-up of a hundred separate miniscule particles of dirt and flour and glass and bone that made up the unfertile earth beside me. A jagged thick metal pole, sticking a foot and a half into the air and solidly planted, stood inches from my torso, a marker for where I should have landed. A peasant woman with grey hair, her body wrapped in a rebozo stood looking down at me. Simply looking.

The night of the bats came soon after, and marked the end of my time in Mexico. I headed for the airport in Mexico City early the next morning with my bulging suitcase and my stolen artifacts, hoping I could get out of town before destiny caught up with me. I wasn't ready to sleep a long sleep in this country that was so well-fitted and alarmingly familiar to me.