To Hellholes and Back Read online

  With a movement that says, “I’m working hard enough as it is,” he bends down, fishes through a cardboard box beneath the counter, and drops a faded magazine into my lap. The inference is clear: Fernando prefers not to discuss work while he’s in the middle of it.

  The cover of the magazine features a good-looking blonde with an enormous bust corralled into a double-A mesh bikini top. The idea of sitting in a barber chair in Tepito thumbing through vintage Mexican porn while a crabby seventy-year-old cuts my hair strikes me as sort of cool, but it turns out the magazine is just about Mexican entertainment industry figures. No shaved women being cornholed by ethnic midgets, just a bunch of Q & As with ditzy actresses and male models from cologne ads about who they’re dating and whether or not they’re good friends or bitter enemies with their ex-lovers. The answer to this question is always “good friends,” but the magazine asks it often enough that you can’t help wondering if something else is going on behind the scenes.

  Fernando carries on in silence. Even when he spins me around and holds up a cracked hand mirror to let me survey the back of my head, he says nothing. But when I nod and say, “Muy bien”—don’t let anyone tell you that ninth-grade Spanish won’t come in handy someday—he allows a thin smile. Then he reaches behind a jar on the counter and with a princely nod hands me the sunglasses I’d set down when I’d come in.

  “No se olvide,” he says. Don’t forget.

  In spite of the good haircut and Fernando’s admirable stewardship of my Ray-Bans, I leave the shop feeling a spiral of depression sucking me down, this one far more worrisome than the brief monsoon-theory setback in Kerala. Mexico City is shaping up as a colossal waste of time on my tour of fear and danger. After a week in town I’ve got an alarming situation on my hands: I think I’m falling in love with this hellhole.

  Fortunately, I’ve already put in a call to the cavalry back home. Reinforcements are on the way. All I’ve got to do is summon back the dread that lured me here and hold on to it long enough to keep the whole damn operation from falling apart like an overstuffed taco—at least until the reservists arrive.

  9

  The Electric Shanghai Bob Margarita Acid Test

  In the early 1990s it was my misfortune to spend a year in a bland-as-tofu Japanese suburb called Kojima teaching English as a Second Language to highly unmotivated students at a newly opened branch campus of an American community college. As one might expect of such an academic outpost, the school attracted an eccentric and wildly inconsistent faculty from the global community of wayward ESL instructors willing to sign one-year contracts to live in a place even most Japanese had never heard of. For all concerned—students, teachers, administrators, bemused townsfolk, the school’s alleged Yakuza mafia bankrollers—managing the college’s rookie season was an intense, strange, troublesome, and impossible-to-forget experience.

  I survived thanks largely to a timely discovery of Bombay Sapphire gin and the companionship of a semidashing, heavy drinking, not necessarily warm-blooded American expat known as Shanghai Bob. With a reputation gilded by triumphant stops in various East Asian ports, capitals, and shitholes—China, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines—Shanghai Bob arrived in Kojima as a larger-than-life international rogue, rake, and raconteur. With the eternal look of a man in his midthirties, Bob wore sarongs in the evening, consumed brandy by the gallon—some dazzled groupie was always presenting him with a bottle—and whether haggling in waterfront vegetable markets or carousing in hundred-dollar hostess bars, moved with the authoritative White Man in the East bearing reminiscent of more privileged times for white men in the East.

  The school’s teachers were housed in a shoddy, cherry-tinted apartment complex known to chipper optimists on the faculty as the “pink palace” and to malcontents (whose ranks swelled throughout the year) as the “mauve mausoleum.” I lived on the second floor of the mauve mausoleum, two doors down from Shanghai Bob. Between us was a wayward Vietnam-vet-turned-English-teacher with a sweeping intellect and quasi-Victorian manner named Robert Glasser. The following anecdote offers a succinct view of the Shanghai Bob legend and the admiring if awkward position into which it sometimes thrust those of us in his orbit.

  You don’t normally get intimate views of your coworkers’ private lives, but several months after my arrival in Kojima, I was treated to more than a glimpse of Shanghai Bob’s turgid after-hours existence in the form of a late-night visit from a local legend named Krazy Keiko. A combustible community floozy in her late twenties with porcelain complexion, anime eyes, and knife-straight hair, her relationship with Shanghai Bob had begun in a yakitori parlor, where she fell quickly under the spell of his urbane magnetism.

  Krazy Keiko’s good looks, fluent English, and general state of lubrication were mitigated by numerous personal flaws, most of which became evident within five minutes in her hot, wet, clingy presence. She may or may not have had a husband; said husband may or may not have had Yakuza connections; once interested, she attached herself to men like a barnacle to a dock; she was so lacking in conversational discretion that right off the bat you couldn’t help but pick up that she was in most regards the female equivalent of a rutting mastodon. In other words, a live wire only men such as Shanghai Bob are equipped to handle.

  The evening in question had gotten off to a successful start with Shanghai Bob and Krazy Keiko conjugating verbs in his apartment down the hall and drinking like the day after Hiroshima. These informal personal-enrichment sessions with Krazy Keiko had been going on for a couple months. In the apartment next door, drinking gin and reflecting on our empty lives, Glasser and I were privy to their ecstatic conclusions, devastatingly audible through the tissue-thin Japanese walls. I had inside information, however, that Shanghai Bob was already getting tired of Krazy Keiko. Willing minx that she was, he’d been grousing about dumping her for weeks. Nevertheless, sometime around eleven o’ clock, Glasser and I heard Shanghai Bob’s front door close and the giddy couple lurch into the night in search of more alcohol.

  I had a last drink in Glasser’s apartment and went home to bed. Next I knew, stealthy footfalls were heading my way across the tatami mats in my darkened apartment. It was two or three in the morning. I had wakened with a vague awareness that someone had walked through my unlocked front door but didn’t gain complete consciousness until I felt, unmistakably, a warm body slither between my sheets.

  With the exception of watching the Red Sox come back from 0–3 against the Yankees in the playoffs, I’ve never been as startled in my life. I bolted up and hit the lights. Stretched out on the bed, completely naked, was Krazy Keiko—a little layer of that baby fat the Japanese like but otherwise looking as fuckable as a psychotic barnacle can.

  “Don’t be frightened,” she whispered, and once again I couldn’t help being impressed by her English. Goddamn Shanghai Bob, seducer of wanton beauties and A-list ESL teacher.

  “I’m here to do whatever you want,” Krazy Keiko clarified needlessly.

  Before I could respond, the phone rang. I heard Glasser’s voice bellowing through the wall next door a microsecond before it came through the receiver.

  “Krazy Keiko’s in the compound! She’s breached the wire!”

  “What the hell’s going on?” I was talking into the phone but looking at Krazy Keiko, who smiled back enigmatically.

  “She’s been trying to break down Shanghai Bob’s door for the last twenty minutes!” Glasser screamed. “Thank Christ, I got her out of my apartment. Shanghai Bob refuses to open his door. They’ve had some kind of quarrel.”

  I hung up and asked Krazy Keiko to leave. She demanded to know why I wasn’t already in the act of ravishing her. I told her this was beside the point. After several minutes of this sort of chitchat, she disarmed me by beginning to sob. I convinced her to get dressed, move to the couch, have a cup of tea, and sit still for some big-brother counsel—once again the whammy of a Christian upbringing leaving me too paralyzed by morality to seize a golden opportunity. Say what you
want about religion, it does a piss-poor job preparing young men to take advantage of those precious few occasions in life when insane young hotties offer themselves up for the taking.

  Krazy Keiko regrouped and recounted the night’s drama. Essentially, Shanghai Bob was through with her. No surprise there, but I pretended a little for the sake of decorum. I told her that getting back at Shanghai Bob by screwing his friends was certain to have the opposite effect of what she intended, that the sun would rise again in the morning, and that there were other sharks in the sea for her to cruise with. She sipped her tea, subdued a few sniffles, apologized, gathered herself anew, and stood to leave. And then, as unexpectedly as she’d slipped into my apartment, she pounced on me again, pinning my arms to my sides and kissing my neck like a spurned starlet in a 1930s melodrama.

  “Don’t you want to bone me?” she demanded, adding “daddy” to several more similar entreaties. If you want to find out what kind of culture America exports through Hollywood and hip-hop, pay attention to the idioms that roll off the tongues of town tramps across the planet.

  I grabbed Krazy Keiko by the shoulders and shoved her out of the apartment.

  “You must be gay!” she shrieked as I shut the front door on her arm. “You have a tiny penis! Fag!”

  Krazy Keiko lingered at Glasser’s door shouting, “Tiny penis!” before stopping to beat on Shanghai Bob’s door and scream, “I hate you!” and “Fag!” thirty or forty times before finally disappearing down the stairs.

  We saw Krazy Keiko only fleetingly after that, but I stayed in touch with Bob, crossing paths with him every three or four years to confirm that, if anything, his reputation as global ladyslayer was growing even more widespread. Years later, as a Maxim editor poring through thousands of responses to a sex survey conducted by the magazine, I came across a reply from a woman in California who revealed that her boyfriend had nicknamed her genitalia “Vaginasaurus.” I immediately fired off an e-mail to Shanghai Bob speculating that Krazy Keiko had finally followed her dream and made it to America. He wrote back: “Which Keiko are you talking about?”

  I thus consider it auspicious that as I’m prowling the Mexico City streets for harrowing experiences, Shanghai Bob happens to be in the midst of his biennial return from Asia, visiting family in the Midwest and already bored out of his gourd reacquainting himself with nieces, nephews, and Old Style beer. A few descriptive e-mails promising an endless river of tacos and at least one round of margaritas on the house are enough to lure him across the border. For Shanghai Bob, Mexico offers new turf upon which to lay his mark—vagabond of the East though he might be, the man has never been south of Arizona. For me, his arrival means I can finally stop harassing local writers, families, and strangers for advice, insight, and bored-guy conversation in my grammar-proof Spanish.

  Shanghai Bob’s reputation as an instant catalyst, a man whose rapscallion energy reliably attracts the socially sensational and morally unrepentant, reaffirms itself within hours of his arrival in Mexico City. At La Guadalupana, one of the city’s most atmospheric cantinas, a distinguished-looking older gentleman with his right arm tied up in a blue canvas sling beelines across the bar and introduces himself before we even sit down.

  Max is sixty-eight, a self-proclaimed artist who says he’s sometimes mistaken for Sean Connery. You can sort of see it. He’s tall, tan, and balding in a manly way.

  “My friends call me Crazy Max,” he says in fluent English, shaking hands with his left mitt while nodding at the sling. “This is a carpel tunnel injury suffered due to excessive painting. I have been unable to work for two months. It’s killing me.”

  Other than to establish himself as a member in good standing of the worldwide fraternity of bar blowhards, at first Crazy Max does little to justify his nickname. Stopping only to swig from the beer we buy him, he rambles at length about his extensive travels as a former photojournalist—Canada, Turkey, Thailand, Egypt, and Israel, where he covered ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts. Just when Bob and I are sending each other you-ready-to-shake-this-nut signals, Max breaks out his wallet.

  “I want to show you something,” he says.

  Max hands me a small laminated photo of himself wearing a full-on uniform of a Nazi SS officer, complete with swastika armband. I pass the picture to Shanghai Bob who promptly spits up half his Sol beer.

  “What do you think?” Max asks, like a proud papa showing off photos of a newborn.

  “Max,” I say, “you are the first person I have ever met who not only has a picture of himself dressed as a Nazi, and who not only carries that picture around in his wallet, but who actually shows it to people he’s known for less than fifteen minutes.”

  “I was invited to a costume party,” Max explains. “There was a prize. I wanted to win.”

  “Where was the party?” Shanghai Bob asks. “It sure as hell wasn’t Tel Aviv.”

  Max laughs like a choking hyena.

  “It was in Mexico City,” he says. “Not far from this cantina.”

  “Where the hell do you even buy something like that?” I ask.

  “I had it made. Every bit is custom stitched. Others came to the party in rubber monster masks or funny hats. I won first prize.”

  “Who came in second, Mussolini?” Bob says, earning another hyena chortle and brotherly slap on the back from Max.

  I tell Max I don’t think he should be showing people pictures of himself dressed as a Nazi.

  “Why not? Are you Jewish?”

  “No, but you don’t have to be Jewish to take the Holocaust seriously.”

  “Mexicans don’t give a shit about the Nazis,” he says. “All that happened a long time ago. Most of them don’t even know about it.”

  We get on the subject of U.S.-Mexico relations. Does the border fence bother him?

  “I couldn’t care less,” he says. “That’s for wetbacks, not me. But it will come down like the Berlin Wall because America needs cheap manual labor from the Mexicans.”

  Max insists that Mexicans are the hardest workers in the States, then adds apropos of nothing, “The Negroes are lazy. They would rather sleep than work.”

  “Why would you say that?” I ask. “Where do you form an opinion like that?”

  “I spent time in LA. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s a problem in your country. It does no good to deny it.”

  Now, besides having more ego than an NFL wide receiver, and aside from the der Führer photograph and the unsavory views on race, here’s the problem with Crazy Max and plenty of others like him. In person he doesn’t come off as that horrible a guy—more like a self-involved, politically outdated old coot. His friends no doubt consider him crazy but probably also entertaining.

  I’m not defending him, I’m just saying that having a beer with him isn’t as appalling as you’d think it would be judging from the outrageous statements printed above. As Dr. Bahr’s anthropology professor father once told me, “Nice is overrated.”

  “Nice may be overrated, but you can’t come off appearing to stump for a guy like Max,” Bob warns during Max’s third trip to the john. “And I’ll tell you something else. Old Loco Max didn’t get that arm injury from painting too much. He got it falling off a barstool.”

  When Max returns I tell him about my mission in Mexico City and mention the surprisingly easy tour of Tepito.

  “Tepito is nothing,” he says. “You go south of here to Santo Domingo. That’s a place you don’t want to go alone.”

  “What’s so bad about Santo Domingo?”

  “Cabrón!” Max waves a hand and sneers.

  “What’s cabrón?”

  “It means ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘motherfuck.’ It can also mean ‘goat,’ but it’s usually a word for something nasty.”

  “I wonder why I didn’t hear it at the Pumas game.”

  “Do you ever go into Santo Domingo?” Bob asks.

  “A year ago I went with a friend. We went to a bar. They put out two lines for me on a table. It was my first tim
e to try it. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Cocaine?”

  “Hell, yes, man! Cocaine!”

  Shanghai Bob’s ears perk up.

  “Could you take us to this bar?” Bob asks.

  “Why not?”

  “And you say there’s cocaine?”

  “But now I must go home to my wife,” Max says.

  With the promise of fairy dust in the air, we make an appointment to rendezvous at La Guadalupana the following afternoon for a guided tour of Santo Domingo. At the appointed time, however, Max doesn’t show and doesn’t answer his phone. Being stood up by Mad Max is the only outright act of discourtesy I experience in Mexico City, but, to be honest, I’m kind of relieved. We wait around for an hour and end up contenting ourselves with Sol beers and lunch at a stand selling deep-fried churros rellenos filled with molten caramel that are almost as addictive as blow, and probably twice as unhealthy.

  Having scouted out barrio barbers and she-child pugilists and read through half a dozen Mexico City books before Shanghai Bob’s arrival, I now consider myself qualified to lead him on a tour of local attractions. In a few days we hit all the biggies—the pre-Hispanic pyramids at Teotihuacán, the National Museum of Anthropology, Frida Kahlo’s “Blue House,” the Zócalo, and Centro Histórico. Each is worthwhile and there’s little I can add about any of the sights that can’t be found in the popular literature, although having Shanghai Bob along does lend fresh perspective. Gazing at the bravura Diego Rivera murals depicting the history of Mexico on the walls of the National Palace, Bob steps back from the images of native women being raped by Spaniards and fat-cat Wall Street bankers counting their pesos and reflects, “Like most leftist art, totally overdone. This guy really had a grudge against the papists, didn’t he?”