Dear Rara
I've been following the discussion concerning the
definition of Noir with much interest and found myself lost
in thought as people talk to me about other things. Sure sign
of someone who loves novels!!
For fun I thought I would enclose the essay I wrote as
an introduction to the Capra edition of Dia De Los Muertos. I
think it's interesting as I discuss the history of Tijuana as
"Sin City", as well as my POV on Calhoun.
k
________________________________________
April 2003
San Rafael, California
Dear Reader,
It's most unlikely we'll ever meet, that's the way it is
between the novelist and his readers unfortunately. We do
have a connection though, a marvelous and profound one,
however distant. You might be reading this even a hundred
years from now, but we'll connect here on these pages for a
moment and time and place won't really matter. I like to
think of all the places I'll travel in spirit, if not in the
flesh.
The novel you are holding is set in Tijuana Mexico. I first
past through that city when I was a child of seven in the
late 1960's. I was traveling with my mother's Guatemalan
family -- an aunt and two uncles --on our way to Central
America when we passed through by car. It seemed to me a
sleepy town that morning.
The Tijuana I first saw as a child had come to personify for
Americans by the 1960's, not only a corrupt and Godless
Mexico, but a corrupt Latin America. No small feat for a down
at-the-heels border town. The city's blighted reputation was
based on the fact that it was where Californians went to
indulge themselves in ways they couldn't back home, at least
not legally. Both gambling and prostitution--why people
wanted to go-- were legal enterprises in the city and
prostitution still is. (Remember this was before Las
Vegas.)
Illicit sex, I think was the really meaty part of Tijuana's
mythology. The notorious sex shows, central to that
mythology, were probably apocryphal. Real or not, they
existed in the salivating imagination of sexually repressed
American males in the pre-Playboy Magazine world depicted in
"Our Town" movies. Was it that Catholics were viewed as more
licentious? Who knows? Where did the Latin Lover idea spring
from? Why not a German lover? In short, according to a lot of
young American men in pre World War Two California, the word
was out: Sodom and Gomorrah, buddy, did exist and you could
drive there!
It turns out that all this weekend sin was on offer to
these bright eyed boys and girls from well scrubbed homes
by-- low and behold-- their fellow Americans! [1]"The Jockey
Club, Tivoli Bar, the Foreign Club, the Sunset Inn and Agua
Caliente Casino were all owned by Anglo-Americans and
employed mostly American workers." In fact the Yankees had
come as early as1885 and stayed and controlled the tourist
industry until the Mexican government ran them out in the
1940's. So ironically, it was not those Mexicans, (The same
Mexicans who had treated Davy Crockett so shabbily at the
Alamo. And, who said so memorably in bad English, "We don't
need no stinking badges!" in the movies, obviously a rough
bunch.), but Americans that were responsible for creating the
myth of Tijuana's as the city of sin. Contrary to the myth of
a corrupt Mexico, It was the Mexican government that put an
end to all that good-old fun. I've heard that the Cardenas
administration actually turned some of Am!
erican
owned casinos into schools. This transformation should
have put an end to the town's sinful reputation. But,
unfortunately, the city was, when I first saw it, only
resting up for a bigger show.
By the 1990's Tijuana finally surpassed it's own
colossal reputation when it became arguably one of the most
violent and corrupt cities on the planet. Both the country
and the city changed profoundly during those intervening
years, and not for the better. The Mexican government,
(formed by the Mexican revolution 1917), that had once been
responsible for cleaning up Tijuana, and building a modern
and relatively prosperous Mexico, was finally undone by the
illegal drugs business. Political Corruption was the order of
the day in Mexico, and hell was visited on Tijuana, which had
grown into a border megatropolis. Like so much in our modern
world even crime had industrialized. This is the city that I
write about in the novel. It's a frightening place.
When you first walk across the border from the United
States into Tijuana, there is a heavy old-fashion metal
turnstile used by pedestrians to enter the city. If you ever
go, you should enter that way, on foot. Someday they will
turn that old-fashion gate into something modern, something
slick, that marks nothing. But I hope you see that turn
style-cage. It's probably dates from the 1930's or 1940's.
There is something final about pushing through that gate, and
hearing it creak, feeling it's weight, and seeing a waiting
foreign world behind those gray bars. And there is something
both fascinating and surreal about seeing the city's begging
children (Always shocking), and mean looking taxi drivers all
waiting for another Gringo to "welcome". No
computer-turnstile could ever give you that moment.
I started going to Tijuana as an adult because I liked to go
to the bullfights. You get all the big time matadors there in
Tijuana in the summer. I love the music they play at the
bullfight. A small band is seated way above the arena in the
sun, trumpets glaring. Usually the musicians are older men
who look like they could use a meal. When they start to play,
it's to punctuate some drama below: Perhaps the bull
confused, bloody, is standing in the shade waiting for that
last assault. Or the sweating young matador, his black
slippers in the gold sand, finally exposes the killing sword,
before he rushes towards the bull and victory, or something
else. Something dramatic anyway spurs the musicians to play.
The bullring in the old downtown is the best one. (There's a
new one built by the sea.) The old ring is beautiful and
intimate, and for some reason I think of it as Baroque,
although it really isn't.
I used to go alone to Tijuana in those days because most
people I knew then found the place a bore, or hated the
bullfights, or both. I was working in Oakland at that time,
where I was shot at by feuding gangsters most every day. So
to me the idea of sudden death was very real. I could relate
to the bull and to the bullfighter completely. But now I
can't watch the end of a bullfight because it's cruel and I
know it's cruel. (Is an anonymous death in some dark
porcelain slaughter house any better? I know what I'd
choose.)
Sometimes I'd take the girl who would end up becoming my
wife. I remember her looking so sexy in tight white pants and
her long black hair. I remember the way she watched the
fights both repelled and fascinated. I remember her buying
French perfume at the fancy shop on Avenida Revolution after
the bullfights. I will always remember her surrounded by
other young Mexican women at the counter, all of them so
intent on the shopping and all of them looking so beautiful
and perfect in the late afternoon light, that in summer hits
the disheveled and raucous Tijuana streets and makes them
oddly sorrowful, golden and dirty-beautiful.
Sometimes I would drive down from the Bay Area with very
little money, as I was trying to become a novelist and was
living hand to mouth, which sounds romantic, but isn't at
all. I would have just enough money for a bullfight and a
decent hotel (the Hotel Arizona), and gas money home, and
that was it. And sometimes I went when I really shouldn't
have gone, as I didn't have any money at all to spare; but I
went anyway. I've never regretted that about myself. To be
any kind of artist is to be madly myopic I suppose.
It was when I was alone in Tijuana that I first started
"Dia De Los Muertos". I'd like to think that maybe I saw some
guy that was Vincent Calhoun, the protagonist, in the
restaurant of the hotel Arizona near the bullring. They had a
good lunch there and served it by the pool. All kinds of
people came to eat lunch at the Arizona before the
bullfights: gangsters, movie people from LA, young marines,
and just ordinary day trippers like me. I'm sure I saw
someone like him there because that's where the book starts
for me, by the pool, with the lunch being served by waiters
in starched white coats and everyone looking forward to the
bullfight.
What about the novel? For me it's about this man Vincent
Calhoun, who stands suddenly at the entrance to a very dark
alley--which if you want we'll call human consciousness-- and
hearing the band strike up, walks on towards where he knows
something important, (his humanity) and yet frightening (his
past), is waiting for him. He hopes to prevail. Don't we all?
I always thought his story oddly hopeful, but I'll let you be
the judge of that.
My original opening for the novel --the two paragraphs
below-- were omitted in the first edition. That publisher,
Dennis Mcmillan, was right and correct to do so. And the
story starts for me now-- and I hope for always-- with these
words: "It was Tijuana's knack at getting back at you that
worried Calhoun."
All the best,
Kent Harrington
Imagine Ross Perot French kissing Roseanne Barr with a
mariachi backdrop and you have the context for modern
Tijuana. The slick and the profane together in an
unimaginable and gruesome combination, all dressed very
badly. Honky-tonks and high-rises, the miserable and the
millionaires, the hustlers and the hustled as Entertainment
Tonight. Mercy, decency, fair play, as the hip-hoppers say,
were not in the house. It is the city of the fast buck that
is reaching the speed of light-- Coca-Cola and chaos. Dollar
dudes and busty dudettes with bad attitudes who don't fuck
with the small change. It's a town where razors appear
quickly. Where people go by street names like Morocco Mole
and Bob Wire. Where children don't officially exist because
no one filled out a birth certificate. No amount of modern
cosmetic surgery by the city's chamber of commerce can
convince you to relax. This is not a modern city as much as
it is something new, something truly unique and frightening,
the bas!
s line in
a NWA song--- a full color ad for the Twenty-first
century. Tijuana is the city of a million desperate crime
stories that are never told, but instead are lost, blown like
Mc Donald's wrappers into the surrounding desert.
The words tawdry, ugly and mean are pathetically
old-fashioned in the face of what you see on Tijuana's
streets. The experience requires brand new English words that
have yet to be coined but will certainly be cool acronyms,
perhaps something like: C.R.A.W.L. Cruel reasoning animates
world leaders, or P.A.I.N. People all in need.
---------------------------------
[1] San Diego State University web site : azatlan.sdsu.edu
(San DiegoMexican & Chicano history. )
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