Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  There are good and decent arguments against legalization that go beyond the minor problems of embarrassment and humiliation. The most obvious is that the number of addicts might increase dramatically as legalization and easy access tempted millions of citizens to experiment. History suggests that this is likely to happen, at least for a while. One study shows that the number of drinkers in this country increased by more than 60 percent after the end of Prohibition, returning to the level reached before the noble experiment. Forty years after the British drug-dealers won the Opium War, the number of opium addicts in China had risen to 90 million. In laboratory experiments with cocaine, animals keep taking larger and larger amounts of the drug, until they die. Dr. Frank H. Gawin, director of stimulant abuse, treatment, and research at Yale University, said recently, “I would be terrified to live in a cocaine-legalized society.”

  Another objection is that nobody knows whether legalization would work — and if it drastically increased the number of addicts over a ten-year period, reversing the process might be impossible. So I’m not suggesting that legalization would transform this violent city into Pericles’ Athens. But all of us know that the present system doesn’t work. And if the tax revenues from sales of legal drugs could fund real treatment programs, if we treated drug addiction the way we treat alcoholism (as a health problem instead of a crime problem), if education more powerfully stressed that all drug abuse is the pastime of idiots, an experiment with legalization might be worth the attendant risks.

  Some of those risks could be covered by specific proposals in the new laws. Congress could insist, for example, that all law-enforcement money freed by legalization be used to attack the deeper problems of poverty, housing, family disintegration, and illiteracy, which make life in the ghettos so hopeless and drugs so tempting. With any luck, we then might see the number of drug-users decline as more citizens realized drugs’ heavy costs and as the young realized that it isn’t very hip to make yourself stupid. Certainly, as the huge illicit profits vanished, the level of urban violence would be swiftly reduced.

  The police who have been diverted to the drug wars could be employed against more terrible crimes. The strain on the courts and prisons would ease, leading to a criminal-justice system that guarantees more thoughtful prosecutions, fairer trials, and certain punishment for malefactors.

  Legalization wouldn’t be a license to go wild. Drug use would continue to be regulated, perhaps in a tougher way, with heavy penalties for doctors, nurses, pilots, train engineers, and others who have heavy social responsibilities. The Armed Forces could continue to forbid the use of drugs. Employers could insist that they don’t want drug-users working for them any more than they want drunks. There would be sad and tragic examples of people fallen into the gutter, as there have always been with alcohol. A few hustlers would work the margins of the legal-drug business, trying to avoid taxes and duties. But we would rid ourselves of a lot of hypocrisy. We would be forced to face some truths about ourselves, deprived at last of the comforting figures of those foreign ogres who are supposed to be corrupting all these poor innocent Americans.

  Perhaps, along the way, we might even discover why so many millions of Americans insist on spending their days and nights in a state of self-induced mental impairment. Perhaps. For now, we just have to discover a way to get home alive.

  NEW YORK,

  August 15, 1988

  PART III

  MEXICO

  For almost forty years, I’ve been going to Mexico. I’ve lived, gone to school, and worked there. It’s the country I know better than any other except my own. As a gringo in Mexico, I’ve learned much about the feelings of all immigrants: the initial strangeness of language, food, music, culture, the uncertainty of legal rights, the unfair legacy of historical stereotype. I’ve tried hard to understand the history of Mexico; I’ve made friends with Mexicans of varied trades and backgrounds; I’ve come to comprehend some basic Mexican myths. But whenever I return to Mexico, I remain a foreigner, a man standing on the margin of Mexican life.

  Even as an outsider, I know that Mexico is part of me. Without the experience of Mexico, I wouldn’t be the same man. Mexicans have taught me much about work, honor, and pride, about courage, about the need to keep on going after common sense tells you to give up. In my attitude to the world, Mexican fatalism has been grafted onto the Irish fatalism inherited from my father; that mestizo fatalism tempers the American optimism that was so powerfully encouraged by my mother. As a writer, I’ve been enriched by the work of Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Monsivais. I get great pleasure from the poetry of Homero Aridjis. I have been entertained and enlightened by the crime fiction of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Where I live, Mexican folk art is everywhere, masks and surrealist altars and mirrors made from tin. My library contains almost 500 volumes on Mexican history, art, music, and culture. On the wall above my desk, there are showcards featuring the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s: Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendariz, and Arturo de Cordova. If they’d been French instead of Mexican, every critic in New York would know their work. Ní modo, as the Mexicans say. It doesn’t matter. Life goes on, and I’m still looking for posters of Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio.

  On other walls, there are framed photographs by Agustin Casasola, the great photographer of the Mexican Revolution, and posters by such artists as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Alejandro Colunga. My friends think this is all very strange. Other people’s passions always are. But in my small part of New York, and in my consciousness, Mexico lives.

  Obviously, these pieces can’t express my complicated feelings about Mexico and Mexicans; that would require a book. But I hope they make clear that at least one old gringo is thankful to the Mexicans for their grace and tenacity. As I write, ten years after the terrible earthquake, Mexico is deep into another crisis. This one seems worse than any other, because so many hopes and expectations were raised during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mexico, everyone said, was about to move from the Third World to the First World. Not in some distant future, but now. That didn’t happen. Once more, there are grave predictions that Mexico will plunge into bloody revolution.

  Perhaps.

  But I wouldn’t bet a centavo on it.

  CITY OF PALACES

  We opened the drapes in the hotel room and there before us in the brilliant winter sunshine lay the Z6-calo. Everything was in its familiar place: the great wheezing pile of the cathedral to the left with the smaller chapel called the Sagrario beside it, starlings and sparrows darting gaily around their somber rooftop crosses. On the far side of the vast square was the low, scalloped outline of the National Palace, a building begun by Hernán Cortés in the 1520s beside the ruins of Montezuma’s palace. To the right: the City Hall, from which the largest city in the Western Hemisphere is governed.

  And directly below us was a panorama from the continuing history of Mexican surrealism. More than a thousand high school students in leotards were dancing to the sounds of “La Bamba.” The steel framework of a portable stage was climbing four stories above the ground, to be filled, in a few days, by hundreds of performers celebrating the Day of the Revolution. Over on the side, workmen were hammering together the numbered sections of a plywood pyramid. Three teenage boys, balanced precariously on an upper rung of the framework, perfectly mimicked the movements of the dancing schoolgirls. And at their feet, appearing from behind a work shed, there was a man gazing up at me and my wife. He was Mexican. He was holding a blanket. I backed away from the window and gazed at the blue roof of cloudless sky.

  For more than thirty years of traveling in Mexico, I’ve been seeing the Man with the Blanket. I came here first in 1956, twenty-one years old and wanting to be a painter. I enrolled at Mexico City College on the GI Bill, and every month the Veterans Administration sent me $110 to pay for tuition, housing, food, and supplies. I was never happier. I just neve
r could afford the wares of the Man with the Blanket. Still, in one guise or another, sometimes young and other times old, he has pursued me. When I came back to Mexico in the early sixties, my easel abandoned for a Smith Corona, he signaled to me from the darkness outside the Hotel Maria Cristina on Río Lerma. I saw him at the 1968 Olympics, appearing suddenly from behind the last ahuehuete tree on Insurgentes Sur. He trailed me for a week during the first giddy year of the seventies oil boom. He never says anything. Not a word. Just holds up the blanket, his eyes full of insatiable hope. A few years ago, after surviving a terrible car accident on the Toluca Highway, I retreated to my room in a fancy Zona Rosa hotel, soaked with rain, my ribs and back bruised and aching. I opened the blinds. And there he was. Eight stories below me on the rain-lashed street. Staring up at my silhouette in the small yellow rectangle of my room. The Man with the Blanket.

  “Why does he look so sad?” my wife asked, gazing down at his lonely presence.

  “Because he is,” I said.

  And I lay down to rest, knowing I was back in the city I loved more than any other except my own.

  It is difficult to explain an affection for any city, least of all for this great, noisy, dangerous, and polluted megalopolis that the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes calls “Makesicko City” in his latest novel. Here, in the largest landlocked city in the world, at an altitude of 7,350 feet above sea level, in a long, broad valley rimmed by mountains that climb more than 3,000 additional feet into the sky, some people are certain they have seen the shape of hell.

  “Not one of us will spend a day in purgatory,” said my friend and driver, Ricardo Hernandez, who has been a resident for forty-seven years. “We have paid for our sins just by living here.”

  A few years ago I spent two months in Mexico City without ever glimpsing the sky. Every day its more than thirty thousand factories and 3 million buses, trucks, and automobiles pump fifteen thousand tons of microcarbons, metal, dust, chemicals, and bacteria into the thin air. That winter (temperature inversions are most common from November to the end of February) more than two hundred birds fell dead one morning upon the manicured lawns of the Lomas de Chapultepec, killed by the poisoned air. Last April the environmentalist Homero Aridjis, president of the Group of 100, did laboratory tests on twelve dead sparrows found in the Alameda Park. Six birds had high levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium, along with pesticides, in their lungs, livers, and hearts. The immune system of one bird had been damaged by the high chromium levels. Employees of the American embassy are entitled to a hardship allowance simply because they have the unfortunate habit of breathing. Some Mexican ecologists estimate that thirty thousand people die every year of respiratory diseases caused by la contamination. It is sickening to see, worse to breathe, particularly if you were here in the fifties when the population was about 3.5 million and each morning you could gaze from a high window and see the volcanoes, Popocatéptl and Ixtaccíhuatl, framed against the blank sky. In those years, this was a great big wonderful city.

  When I’m here now, I still carry that beautiful lost city around in my head, and that helps explain my irrational affection for a place that I know doesn’t love me back. It also underlines my sense of horror. I know that the city now contains thousands of beggars; I know that some twenty thousand human beings make their living by picking through its seven immense garbage dumps, to which are added fifteen thousand tons of garbage every day; I know that, in spite of pollution and poverty and the ravages of the September 19, 1985, earthquake, hundreds of people still arrive from the hungry provinces every day, and that by the year 2000 the population could reach 30 million. The city now is simply immense, its more than one thousand colonias (neighborhoods) spreading thirty-five to forty miles in all directions from the Zocalo. It has spilled into the Valley of Mexico, where it has eaten what was once the richest farmland in the country. Mexico City is so large now that it actually contains a 535th Street.

  And yet I still feel a small tremble of a lover’s excitement when I get off the airplane, still love that first moment among Mexicans, feeling drowned in vowels, can still detect in odd drafts the old aroma of the city, that intangible compound of charcoal fires, tortillas, flowers, herbs. In some way, here I am always twenty-one: walking down the Paseo de la Reforma at dusk, when the paths were still made of hard-packed earth instead of tiles; listening to Cuco Sanchez sing “La Cama de Piedra” from the jukebox of that cantina on Melchor Ocampo; waiting for a girl named Yolanda in the Alameda Park with my hair freshly cut and my shoes shined and wondering why she is late.

  So I come here now and see the horror, and I can also see the city that has survived, the city that was here when I was young, the city that existed long before I ever walked the earth. The Zocalo remains the heart of that city and the very heart of the country of Mexico. All roads in the republic are marked in kilometers leading to this immense place — the largest public square in the Western Hemisphere. As it did in the fifties, the Zocalo still gives off the aura of a tremendous, inarticulate sadness. Once there was a park here, palm trees, a depot for trolley cars; today, when not occupied with the circuses of the state, it is a bald, paved plain, devoid of green, with a Mexican flag standing in the center of the emptiness. The reason for its denuding is unclear; the most plausible explanation involves the need for a clear field of fire for the palace guards in the event of revolutionary unpleasantness. One tenet in the military version of urban design is that you cannot hide a regiment behind a flagpole.

  But the bleak emptiness doesn’t fully explain the sadness. Wandering under the arcades along the side of the square, I remembered a passage in the brilliant 1957 travel book on Mexico by the Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Looking at the Zocalo, he spoke of the city’s “dark, ominous tone that gives us the sensation that something tragic is always about to occur — a murder, an earthquake, a revolution.”

  That tone infuses the National Palace, where soldiers spend their days directing tourists to the Diego Rivera murals and guarding that tiny fraction of the city’s 2.5 million civil servants who labor in the upstairs offices. The ominous quality exists primarily in the imaginations of those who read history. For centuries this building was the seat of secular power in Mexico. The sixty-three colonial viceroys ruled from here; poor Maximilian, the handsome and doomed Austrian, arrived here in 1863 with his Belgian wife, Carlota, to claim the throne of Mexico; Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian lawyer who fought and then executed Maximilian, issued his reforms from its balcony; the dictator Porfirio Diaz entertained British and American oilmen in its salons and sold them huge portions of his country; Zapata and Villa walked its halls; most of the revolutionary presidents of the modern era worked here. But Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the newest Mexican president, labors in Los Pinos on the edge of Chapultepec Park; except on days of patriotic ceremony, the palace is another empty symbol. In the midst of the worst Mexican economic crisis in sixty years, the ominous tone has receded and the tragic has increased.

  The Metropolitan Cathedral on the north side of the plaza is another matter. Begun in 1573, consecrated in 1667, and finished in 1813, it is built upon part of the old Aztec ceremonial grounds. For hundreds of years its bishops worked with the inhabitants of the palace to control and exploit Mexico for the profit of God and the distant Spanish throne. But for most native Mexicans in those days, Christianity was a calamity. There were, of course, kind friars and priests who fought for the rights of Indians and tried to preserve the pre-Columbian heritage; but they were exceptions. This cathedral was intended from the beginning to be a symbol of the utter triumph of the Christian god over the gods of the Aztecs. Its gloomy power can best be sensed in the interior, which is high, smoky, and dim. Indian slave labor carved and hand-fitted these slabs of tezontle, cantera, and marble. It is said that there are no nails in the cathedral, except in the hands and feet of the dying Jesus, no iron except on the doors. The place has five naves, fourteen chapels, and a jumble of styles.

  Begga
rs appear from the gloom, their glazed eyes a reproach; they are called pordioseros after the imploring Spanish phrase meaning “for the love of God.” You turn from them to examine the famous Altar of the Kings, and the mind teems with images of what has happened in this injured country for the love of God. Designed in 1737 by Jeronimo de Balbas, the altar is an operatic extravaganza, at once a celebration of death and a vision of heaven, clearly designed by an agnostic who must have hoped somehow to cure his doubts. Everything is gold. The baroque swirl of twisted gold columns, gold angels, gold flowers, gold sculptures, the golden visions of pain and ecstasy, the two dark, gold-framed paintings incorporated into the design, the polychrome statues, the opulent golden glaze applied over the Christian images of suffering and death: All combine to demand submission.

  The modern man flees.

  And in the bright, hazy sunshine, among Pepsi stands and trinket shops, he wanders down a street on the right called Seminario into the remains of the world the Spanish destroyed.

  There is the splendid new museum of the Templo Mayor. Part of it is an excavation of the Great Temple of the city the Aztecs called Tenochtitlán, part of it an exhibit that reconstructs life and culture here before Cortés. Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 on some islands in the midst of Lake Texcoco. By the time Cortés arrived almost two hundred years later, it had grown into a city of 300,000 inhabitants; fifty thousand white buildings, palaces, and pyramids; exquisite gardens; even a zoo — and a dense, complex civilization that encompassed both astronomy and blood sacrifice. From this city, the Aztecs ruled over an empire of almost 6 million subjects.