Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  June 8, in the Year of Our Lord 2015

  Do not worry about hitting people with your car, says Sister Maria Esther. People will jump out of the way. But the sad dogs, they will just let you run them over. Some 150,000 strays run the streets of Juárez and most of them seem to be on the rutty dirt roads we’re driving around Santa Margarita. Sisters Maria Esther and Maria Rosario are letting me tag along on their daily rounds. Usually they walk but today we’re dodging strays in the car. They’re a dynamic duo of needling nuns, Rosario with big glasses on her round face and close-cropped silver hair, Esther with long silver hair and that slight hunch from a dozen years walking everywhere with the indigenous Tarahumara on mountain paths, another dozen years on these unpaved city streets. These sisters prefer denim skirts to habits. They wear matching silver crucifixes.

  Their order of nuns is charged with service of the poor. Being in service of the sacred heart is a lot easier than being in service of the poor, says Rosario. But they would not trade their work for any other. Alternative medicine was not something they learned in the nunnery. But some brought it with them to the city after working with the Tarahumara. Until 2008 their use of herbal remedies was mostly clandestine because of dogmatic priests. But once The Violence started, the nuns were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted. Their clinic for herb therapy grew and in 2011 Bemis showed up with needles. Since then their daily rounds have expanded, with folks from all five chapels in the parish coming to Santa Margarita for the needles, and requesting that the needling nuns come to them.

  We go to the homes for very sick people, Rosario says. If they can walk to the chapel, they should. It is easier to make people sit still in church. But not everyone can walk.

  We visit Antonieta Aguilar Alvarado, fifty-two, who cannot leave home because of vertigo. She has had many health problems over the years but one day the whole world just started spinning, she says. It always spins, Rosario reminds her. It finally made me dizzy, says Antonieta. Rosario pokes her ears once a week, enough for her to sit up and watch mass on TV.

  We visit Bacilio Hernandez, fifty-one, who is almost dead from liver cancer. His daughter Rosa and wife, Negrete, sit beside him on a bed in their house, which is one room with dirt floors where they live along with Rosa’s six children. The hospital will not treat Bacilio anymore. They say he is dead already but he is not, Rosa says. Bacilio rolls his eyes to communicate. When he tries to talk, blood dribbles from his mouth. The needles make him calm, his wife says. Rosario holds his bony hand and needles his ears and his eyes roll and the children outside scream as they chase chickens and Rosario prays. Bacilio’s eyes close.

  We stop and pick up Veta and her two-year-old granddaughter, Andrea. Andrea is our key. She is small enough to slip through the bars of the fence around the house of Graciela Salomé Mesa, forty-seven, who cannot open the door herself because of brain damage from strokes. Graciela cries as I talk to her, from the memories, she says. For many years Graciela helped Rosario and Esther stock and distribute their cabinet of herbs but she has not left home much since the first stroke two years ago.

  Graciela has albums of obituaries, funeral cards with pictures and brief eulogies pasted into the repurposed pages of her children’s old math textbooks. She wants me to look through them but cannot tell me why. Flipping through the book of obituaries and all the equations swirling around them, it’s clear almost all the deceased are old. Rosario looks over my shoulder, says, These are not the murders. Graciela, both before and after her stroke, has collected all the announcements of people who died of old age, friends, acquaintances, strangers. She tries to explain why she’s done this but can’t, and each time I pose the question in a different way she cries again. Rosario and Esther say she has always been a bit odd, a bit obsessive in this way. They show me a room of her house with towers of hoarded newspapers. Graciela’s albums of obituaries remind me of the scrolls of names Sister Betty etches onto the walls of Casa Tabor. Sister Betty meditates on lives interrupted. Graciela meditates on lives that have run a full course. Glued as they are atop pages of elementary equations, Graciela’s obituary collection seems the calculus of a mad genius; here is what it is all supposed to add up to: no one dead at the hand of another.

  We drive on and from the backseat Veta narrates the toll The Violence has had on all the places we pass. We have children, she says, but unfortunately children behave like they have no mothers. Esther says, The whole world is mothers. This is either a pun about Mother Earth or a pun about nuns because they all laugh. But something about it is exactly a notion that’s been dawning on me for a while, since I first visited Santa Margarita last year and the women were running everything. These clinics have spread to many chapels and the number of NADA practitioners has multiplied from a handful to nearly a hundred in the last year alone. And it is almost entirely women who have taken up the steel, who have done over thirty-five thousand treatments, poked over 350,000 needles into ears, well on their way to unleashing a million tiny daggers on the city’s side-intelligencers. I will not say the needles empowered them, because that maybe suggests the women in this city weren’t always the ones keeping it afloat.

  Before The Violence there was The Femicide, the notion that from the 1990s through about 2005 Juárez saw over four hundred mysterious murders of women by, as one researcher put it, “street gangs, organized crime syndicates, powerful families, a satanic cult, an underground snuff film industry, the police—or all of the above.” The story of The Femicide casts a long shadow over the women of Juárez, suggesting they’ve been powerless victims since long before the cartel wars. But Molly Molloy, a researcher at New Mexico State University, who has tracked violence in Juárez since talk of The Femicide began, says it is an unfortunate myth. “Female murder victims,” she told The Texas Observer in 2014, “have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women.” She says that 75 percent of those four hundred mysterious murders of women were solved, a rate exponentially higher than the number of murder cases that were closed during the subsequent years of cartel warfare. She says The Femicide is little more than a grotesquely sexual media narrative that obfuscates the complex social pressures that victimize all the impoverished, the vast majority of people, in Juárez:

  Some of the writing about these cases I find to be pushing over into the extreme and eroticizing the victims in a way that makes them appear a lot more helpless and powerless than women in Juárez are … I just don’t think that’s a realistic depiction of life in a place like Juárez. Many of the women, who do the work and are the only breadwinner, are quite powerful. Many of them are mothers, and workers, and take care of other people. They’re not the powerless people that some of the literature portrays them as. And I find that, as a feminist, to be counterproductive in the extreme.

  After a year of chasing the needles I still have no clear understanding of their medical value. I’ve collected many testimonials praising their power but just as many studies suggesting they are little more than placebo. Two years ago, The New York Times headline was “Ciudad Juárez Weighs a Neglected Notion—Hope,” and I wondered if it was true, if the needles were proof. But I suspect you could give Rosario and Esther, all the other nuns and all the other women who now practice NADA, pretty much anything, needles or moxa or herbs or handfuls of nothing but air, and they’d find a way to use it to ease the suffering of those around them, even just a little bit, just by showing up, just by coming together and making it clear that hope was never a thing they neglected. In this desert, there is no force greater than its women. You don’t need any amount of science or faith to understand that. Even our mountains are in their image. The Sleeping Lady, woke for good. Go: see the needling nuns. Be healed.

  July 31, in the Year of Our Lord 2015

&nbs
p; I meet Morgan Smith and his nephew in the parking lot of a Carl’s Jr. in El Paso. A Corolla rolls up next to us and an old guy named Art gets out, opens the trunk, shows us the haul we’ll smuggle down to the asylum. We all nod a bunch: it is a good haul. We load up and caravan to the Santa Teresa port of entry, across the border, and past the Border Patrol’s million-dollar pond and the Foxconn plant of six thousand Mexicans making thirteen thousand gadgets a day for Apple and Nokia and Motorola, the rear end of Art’s Corolla riding low to the road, nearly dragging because his little trunk is packed to capacity with wieners and buns and chili.

  Morgan is a former public official and lawyer from Colorado who’s been visiting the asylum for five years, bringing treats and snapping photographs and trying to help raise awareness about El Pastor’s mission. Art and his team are a group of Christian retirees who recently linked up with Morgan after hearing about the asylum on NPR and feeling called to charity. I’m tagging along with this group because Bemis has pretty much stopped visiting the asylum, decided to focus on places where he sees the most progress, the church clinics in Juárez proper. The asylum, he says, has more basic struggles. NADA is not exactly a luxury but it only seems to distract from keeping the people there clothed and fed and protected. And El Pastor can be a tough man to work with. He’s scrappy. He wants to know the monetary benefits of the charity he receives, whether that charity comes in the form of art classes or acupuncture or chili dogs. He wants it to feed his vision of the asylum by getting his story in the press and by lining up grants and donations to help him build Visión en Acción into an empire. This rubs some folks the wrong way, El Pastor always putting on the pressure for more help and more money, especially when, despite all the aid, the living conditions of the residents don’t seem to improve all that dramatically but fountains are being built.

  The new courtyard is much more developed since my last visit. Back then there were a few columns and one or two molds for busts of lions but now it is pretty well built out with about twenty-five concrete lion busts in varying sizes and two full-bodied lions guarding a fountainhead, which is an openmouthed lion through which water, when they have any extra water, flows. Right now they do not have any extra water. The fountain spouts nothing. Nada. The new courtyard is a rough approximation of grandeur, beautiful but oh so temporary. El Pastor isn’t here right now, but when he shows up in a few hours, Morgan’s nephew will ask him about the lions and the columns and El Pastor will talk about Ben-Hur, will talk about Gladiator, will go on and on like he does about his beloved ancient-Roman period flicks and I’ll see rising in the kid’s eyes the tide of uncanny, which will eventually break to worry as he struggles to make sense of a world so close to his own where a place such as this actually exists. The kid is headed to law school next year. He’s wide-eyed. The asylum is a complicated place.

  I track down Josué, rearranging the toothbrush wall that seems to have a lot less brushes than it did before, lots of names with no toothbrush hanging there. I ask him how he’s set for needles. We don’t have them, Josué says. They are good, the needles, but we don’t have them. We don’t use them now. You bring some next time and maybe we stick everyone again, but I don’t know.

  Art unloads over three hundred wieners and buns and sodas and fifty pounds of chili and twenty pounds of candy and Morgan stuffs a couple of cartons of cigarettes into his jacket and all of this is the treatment for today. The process swings into motion pretty quick, the dogs dumped into huge industrial pots and the chili heated in huge industrial pots and before I know it I’m arranging food on a rolling cart, Art having bunned the wieners and sent them down an assembly line of slopped chili and squeezed mustard, me at the end of the line trying to fit them two at a time on a three-level rolling cart and in an arrangement that maximizes the number of dogs on each level without smearing their chili, an arrangement that allows us to get the most possible dogs out the door in a single roll of the cart, out into the old courtyard. A chili dog for Yogi, who pets it before he eats it. A chili dog for Memo and Gaspar, who eat theirs in two bites as they pace concentric circles into the dust. Favela eats hers from the wheelchair, nibbling in a sophisticated way, smiling and showing off her manners. I carry two chili dogs around looking for Elisabeth, but she is not here. No one seems to know where she’s gone. She’s gone and no one knows a thing. I sit with Yogi and eat Elisabeth’s dogs.

  El Pastor arrives after everyone is fed, singing “I Believe in You.” He says, This is what I feel when I see you bring the dogs! He belts the song to the group of retirees in the kitchen as thanks for their generosity, messing up most of the words but powering through full-blast anyway:

  I don’t believe in Supermans

  Organic foods and foreign cars

  I don’t believe in expensive gold

  I don’t believe in growing old

  El Pastor says he loves the great country band Alabama, but I think he’s confused; the song was recorded by Don Williams and I don’t guess any band like Alabama ever covered it. Bette Midler did a cover for her ’95 album, Bette of Roses, and that should give you some idea of the song’s character, a kind of lounge-piano cabaret tune suffused with so much sappy sincerity and so outside the traditional Western ethos that it’s hard to believe it was ever at the top of the country charts. But it was, in 1980, with Don Williams, the Gentle Giant, meandering through guitar licks, just barely keeping his head above the molasses flow of that laconic groove, his throat rolling down past baritone in the chorus. El Pastor sings it just exactly like a show tune, loud and with a huge grin on his face, the butchered chorus echoing off the concrete walls of the asylum, twangy professions of belief in babies, love itself, and you. El Pastor believes in you.

  Morgan takes advantage of the distraction to distribute the cigarettes he’s smuggled down. He knows smokes might be frowned upon by the Christian retirees but he can’t help bringing them every time he visits. They get so little here, he says. One smoke won’t hurt. But still he carries around a bag of candy, delivering it in handfuls around the cigarettes to be a bit less conspicuous. He’s got to get them passed out and smoked up quick so El Pastor doesn’t stockpile and ration them. Morgan wants everyone to get a smoke all at once, right after the chili dogs: a communal activity. I take the two packs he hands me and go back to Yogi and Favela—one each and a light. Then a swarm of residents grab from the open pack and it’s empty. All around the courtyard the hundred or more residents have chili on their hands or faces and a lollipop in one hand and a cigarette at their lips. This is the antithesis of the needles. The asylum is quiet like it was the first time I saw the residents needled, only here it is not a handful of folks circled up in the multipurpose room, but everyone in the whole courtyard, mostly holding still and puffing and the smoke rising into the laundry hanging overhead. I wonder if this is giving up, the way our hospitals will pump people full of morphine at the end of their life. But here there is no morphine. In the streets of Juárez there’s booze to guzzle and paint to huff and crack to smoke and that is what lands most residents here in the first place—giving up and being given up on. But even though the needles aren’t around, everybody’s ears still look like inverted fetuses. And that makes me happy, though I don’t know why.

  El Pastor is still bellowing in the kitchen. I can’t hear the exact words but I know them anyway. I know the song. This isn’t the kind of tune I’d ever be caught queuing up on the jukebox at a honky-tonk but it’s the sappy kind that runs through my head whenever I get the sense all of life is a slow process of giving up but I’d rather not just now. El Pastor sings about heaven being everywhere, switching to Spanish at times—cielo, dios como amor—and it sounds alright.

  Yogi smokes with a fist, a full hand wrapped around the cigarette’s filter and his thumb and two fingers splaying around his face when he wants a puff. He hands it to me when there’s not enough left to fist and motions for me to smoke the rest and asks for another. He pets the new smoke and I light it for him. He takes my h
and and pulls me back to the northwest corner of the courtyard, to the cells like the one where Elisabeth spent two years. In this corridor are two cells, two men in each cell behind the rusted bars, men whose minds have collapsed from illness and addiction, men who have murdered, men who will attack other residents. If not for the cigarettes, the smell of feces would reign. This is the worst part of the asylum, there being no way to look around and come even close to justifying use of the word humane. These men are not dead on the streets, El Pastor would say, as they would be if left to the government or the cartels. But they are not exactly alive in here. These seem like conditions that would get any zoo or animal shelter in America in trouble. Just twenty miles up the road is the million-dollar pond at the border crossing and a string of multimillion-dollar factories making billions of dollars of American goods but there is not a single cent to spare here to preserve human dignity. They have none, crouching naked on their side of the bars. But I, staring in from the other side, have none either. We have none on our side.

  The only man in the cells in any condition to talk, the only one wearing pants, steps up to the bars. He’s known only as El Ratón—the little rat. He was in the asylum years ago, left, and last year was brought back by the police when they were cleaning house, destroyed and sick, El Pastor says, after years of being neglected in a Juárez prison. The police don’t know his name either so it was easy for them to drop him off at the asylum. El Ratón rasps through the bars, mostly asking without real words for a smoke. Yogi kind of pets El Ratón’s rasp in the air between us as if letting me know it’s okay to rasp back, though Yogi’s not about to do it if I don’t, but there’s no such thing as harmony in rasps. I pass the cigarette through the bars and El Ratón says, Gracias. His posture changes as he smokes, as he enjoys this base human pleasure. He stands up straight. I guess this is why Morgan always brings the smokes, five years of coming down here with volunteers and money and gifts and none of it can make things better, can never make things alright, but at least with cigarettes at their lips everyone has a kind of undeniable dignity, the primal mastery over fire that first made us human, the knowledge that we can do a thing even though it’s harmful and the will or ignorance or sadness to go ahead and do it. The choice. I’ve got two cigarettes left and El Ratón and me and Yogi pass them around, blow smoke at one another through the bars, we three masters of the primal inferno.