To Hellholes and Back Page 23
“This place is incredible,” prezapped Bob had shouted to me over the noise in Tenampa. “Why can’t Mexico City live down its reputation? When I told my brother I was coming down here, he asked me to get my life insurance papers in order first.”
It’s startling how certain themes keep resurfacing during my travels. Bob’s remark about Mexico City is almost the same as the one made in Harper’s about the Congo’s inability to live down its gruesome reputation.
Crime isn’t the only issue that dogs the capital’s name. Despite a widespread negative perception, for example, air quality in Mexico City is much better than it was a decade ago. In the late 1980s, Mexico City began shifting away from its manufacturing base toward a service economy, shedding most of the thirty-five thousand or so outdated factories that once polluted the city. Since the 1990s, all new cars in Mexico have been required to have catalytic converters; annual exhaust tests as well as restrictions on weekend driving in the city have also reduced emissions.
Of course, there are twice as many cars on the road in Mexico City as there were twenty years ago—the same devilment that’s at work in India. And there’s still smog. But the layer of brown I flew through out of Los Angeles looked no more toxic than the one I flew through coming into Mexico City. And I’ve seen the sky over Houston look worse than week-old horchata.
As for general filth, the city is far cleaner than I expected, light years ahead of India in public sanitation. In two weeks of roaming the city, I see exactly one rodent, a fat, nasty brute scurrying along the sidewalk in Zona Rosa. During any given two-week stretch of the time I lived in Manhattan, I would have seen an average of 27.4 rats.
One of my clearest memories from the near two years I spent in a street-level apartment on First Street in the East Village, by the way, is being serenaded to sleep each night by a concert of rats gnawing and screeching at one another while battling over garbage in the overflowing bins located just outside my door. One day, I complained to my pal Dave Malley, “I love New York, but whenever I end up leaving, the one thing I’m not going to miss is the sound of those rats fighting outside my door.” To which longtime New Yorker Dave replied, “Chuck, I’ve got news for you—those rats aren’t fighting.”
I’m sure, by the way, that millions of rats live in Mexico City, just as they live among all large human populations. I’m just reporting my experience. One rat. And not a single roach in my fifty-five-dollar-a-night apartment. My good fortune could simply be karmic kickback for those extravagant tips to Vinod and his buddy in Rohet Garh, but insofar as vector control in the Mexican capital is concerned, I have no complaints.
From misplaced fears of carbon inhalation to heroin-war crossfire, the news media rises once again as an easy target of blame. A New York Times story, published a few weeks before my arrival, on a menswear shop in Mexico City that specializes in stylish bulletproof suits and other garments for paranoid businessmen and fashion-forward drug lords includes the following paragraph:
“The rash of drug violence, together with a surge in kidnappings for ransom, has shaken everyday Mexicans. Ask a stranger for directions on the street these days, and fear is the first emotion that crosses the person’s face. He or she might recover enough to describe how to go this way or that.”
Never mind that the bulletproof haberdasher “scoop” is old news—the store has been operating for two years and peddles its wares at Harrods in scary London, as well—the line about jumpy chilangos is patently ludicrous. Because it’s so radically at odds with my experiences, I ask a number of locals about the notion of a public so frightened of others that they not only pay outlandish markups for bulletproof blazers, but cringe at the approach of strangers. My inquiries are met with universal disgust.
“Preposterous,” says the most offended of my interviewees. “This is the opinion of someone who knows nothing about Mexican people.”
The hyperbole of ambitious writers looking for a big story is understandable, and not just because competing for space with the Times’s other foreign desks is undoubtedly an ulcer-inducing task requiring of the bureau man a certain degree of imagination. It’s also reflective of a more basic human emotion. As one local tells me with pride and conviction, “The number of murders in Caracas in one month is equal to the number of murders in Mexico City in one year. Among the most dangerous Latin American cities, Mexico City does not even place in the top fifteen.” A nice point for Mexico City, but one that also perpetuates the scourge of Caracas—another place I’ve managed to escape without suffering anything worse than a mild hangover and regrettable purchase of decorative papier-mâché fruit.
Bob leaves a couple days ahead of me, taking most of the momentum of the trip with him. I spend an afternoon recuperating from his visit and, between bursts of sleep and efforts to rehydrate, nagged by the disembodied voice of Crazy Max telling me, “Tepito is nothing.”
Since I can’t go home with anything less than absolute certainty that Mexico City isn’t the turista death sentence it’s made out to be, I spend my last day on a sojourn to the villainous district of Iztapalapa. On the southern edge of the city, Iztapalapa has both the highest population—with as many as a million and a half residents, it’s among the most densely populated places in North America—and highest crime rate in the capital, making Max’s coke-riddled Santo Domingo a farting lap dog by comparison.
It takes almost an hour to reach Iztapalapa from my apartment in the city center. The first thing I notice when I arrive is the graffiti. A number of crown-of-thorns Jesus murals are drawn on concrete walls in the bold, comic book motif I associate with 1970s subway trains in the Bronx, but the most prominent style is that ubiquitous tagger scribbling that looks like something freshly curled out of a Chihuahua’s ass.
The worldwide bane of metropolitan aesthetics runs rampant throughout Mexico City, though to be fair it’s not half as jarring here as it is in other places. I’ve dropped my head in dejection at the sight of tagging while riding a gondola through the canals of Venice and been heartbroken by squiggles in the Rocky Mountains backcountry. No city on earth has been more uglified by this “art form” than Berlin, where I suppose the embrace of tagging as hallowed public expression has at least exacted some form of revenge against Hitler’s pristine “Germania” dreams for the city, even if it does make one of the most interesting metropolises in the world one of the most repulsive to look at.
Conditions in Iztapalapa are visibly worse than Tepito. Wandering past houses with address numbers spray painted on the sides of their cinder-block walls, I find windowless buildings and shards of beer bottles on sidewalks where children are playing. The filthiest little white dog I’ve ever seen comes scrounging for a handout. His curly coat of matted hair is literally the color of diesel exhaust—a dog so dirty he wouldn’t even lick his own balls.
Every house or business with something to protect is surrounded by razor wire and salivating Rottweilers, though there are few enough that are so lucky. An estimated 62 percent of chilangos live in poverty. Of these, 15 percent are considered “extremely poor,” a stat I might not have believed had I not seen Iztapalapa, which seems to go on forever. I spend four hours walking and probably don’t see a tenth of the place. As in Tepito, no one bothers me, though one Mexican tells me later, “Everybody left you alone because they saw those sunglasses and assumed you were a drug dealer.”
I walk until my arches throb—don’t let the kayakers and rock climbers of the world kid you; being a city tourist takes just as much out of you—finally winding up at sunset on the outer fringe of this outer-fringe neighborhood. From an overpass above the Boulevard Trabajadores Sociales, I look down on six lanes of stalled traffic. Two acres of dirt field abutting the road are overrun by a makeshift slum. Rows of one-room dwellings made of scrap wood and corrugated sheet metal list like boats on rough seas, the houses of the defeated and dispossessed as opposed to the merely poor, a colony of piecemeal shacks whose common walls lean against one another for support
against the storm.
Iztapalapa is far enough from the city center to provide a panoramic view of the high mountains that form the natural bowl in which the ancient city was founded. From the elevated vantage point of the overpass, I get my first true sense of Mexico City’s vast reach. The air feels thick and dirty here. Factories and warehouses are the only discernible landmarks. Below me, like the tail of a poisonous snake, an endless line of red taillights serpentines away from the hazy outline of the pulsing glob of a city that, from this distance, from this height, from this remove, you couldn’t blame anyone for not wanting any part of.
Part IV
Calamity
Walt Disney World
10
To Sneer or Not to Sneer?
It would seem the worst is over. With three monsters met and wrestled to at least a standstill, I know that whatever challenges may await in Central Florida, they won’t include twelve-hour flights next to inconsiderate wailing infants, exotic bacteria, civil wars between sworn ethnic enemies, territorial autorickshaw drivers, rampaging narcotics traffickers, or murderous political factions. For one thing, the next major U.S. election is still a ways off.
For what Orlando’s Walt Disney World might lack in physical adversity, however, it demands by far the greatest psychological effort of all my supposed hardship destinations. Despite the anxiety I’d felt about Africa, India, and Mexico City, preparations for each of those trips had been infused with the type of nervous excitement that comes before a blind date—while experience might tell you that the whole idea is a setup for disaster, in some corner of your soul an inexhaustible flame of optimism flickers with the understanding that beautiful things often come only after giant leaps of faith. As the departure dates had drawn nearer, I’d been able to channel my dread effectively enough to bury my nose in guidebooks, Web sites, and history texts. Like Sarah Palin cramming for a debate, I’d cheerfully filled the little cashew between my ears with as much information as it would hold on short notice about places I knew almost nothing about.
Nothing like this happens before Disney. No burst of ephemeral curiosity to know all things Magic Kingdom sinks its jaws into my frontal lobe and refuses to let go. No grand philosophical breakthroughs or halfheartedly culled Internet factoids—Walt Disney was an alleged FBI spy in the forties; the story that he was cryogenically frozen is an urban myth—fire my synapses.
The logistical hassle of visiting a “park” roughly the size of Honolulu is crippling enough for the average traveler to contemplate, but it’s the cultural dominance of Disney’s superficial piffle that has inspired a much wider sense of brand aversion and made me personally reluctant to embrace the putative world treasure known to boosters as The Happiest Place on Earth. Neal Gabler, whose doorstop bio Walt Disney is probably the most measured and readable account of the man and his legacy, sums up the case against “Disneyfication” as well as anyone. Disney was “a corporate vulgarian who coarsened the culture through commercialization and simplification,” Gabler writes. His company’s “faux environments and manipulated experiences would become a metaphor for a whole new consciousness in which…the fabricated was preferred over the authentic.”
Gabler isn’t by a long shot the only voice of dissent upon which the Disney basher can hang his rumpled mouse ears. The ballad “One God” from the outrageously undervalued catalog of The Beautiful South—defiantly British founders Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray are probably the best pop songwriters of the last twenty-five years—offers the following incisive couplets:
Thick lipstick on a five-year-old girl
It makes you think it’s a plastic world
The world is turning Disney and there’s nothing you can do
You’re trying to walk like giants, but you’re wearing Pluto’s shoes
Thick lipstick, indeed. I know Britney Spears is an easy and passé reference, but as the machine that created her, Disney doesn’t get enough blame for the direct line that can be drawn from the ex-queen of casserole country to the army of twelve-year-old slatterns her image has unleashed on the nation over the past decade. To say nothing of the subsequent celebration of such cultural touchstones as Ashlee Simpson’s nose job nor the depressing fact that I can drop the wildly ingenious spelling of her first name without having to bother fact-checking it. Unlike most low-culture critics, by the way, I’ve actually lived in both a duplex and a trailer and can lay legitimate claim to my patented man-of-the-people routine—but, Christ Almighty, how did Americans let an obsession with chubby white trash make the leap from closing time at Joe’s Tap into the mainstream?
The transformation of prepubescent girls into harbor trollops is, of course, an excellent reason to excoriate Disney, and there are plenty more; the most reprehensible from my perspective being the “Make Your Dreams Come True” sloganeering invoked like a profession of faith so ceaselessly across Disney’s corporate dominion that its recipients no longer seem able to distinguish between crude salesmanship and old-fashioned greed. If “following your dream” and “reaching for the stars” involves a payoff, financial or otherwise, that’s called ambition, not cockeyed optimism. The desire to become a movie star or a millionaire is not a dream. It’s an economic aspiration.
Dreams are entirely different and recognized by the fact that 99.99 percent of them are impossible to attain. Becoming invisible. Meeting a mermaid. Winning the lottery. A three-way with Carrie Underwood and Sofia Coppola. (I know, weird, but she seems supercool.) Being a Christian nation and invading a Muslim one, then expecting its grateful citizens to shove flowers in the barrels of your tanks as you roll through the streets of their capital. These are dreams. Things that might make one happy to imagine in the lonely hours of the evening, but delusions that no one with an IQ over eighty should ever believe will actually come true. Though one should always be ready to accept calls from Underwood and Coppola.
As the tourist embodiment of “follow your dreams” perversions, I’ve long imagined WDW as a gigantic torture chamber of spoiled children and accommodating adults, long distances and obscene parking fees, “real” cartoon characters pestering “kids and kids at heart” for photos, two-hour lines spent bumping shoulders with the endomorphic masses for the privilege of being carted past talking pirate mannequins and faded displays of hooray-for-America sanctimony, strategically placed eating stations pushing reconstituted chicken lumps deep-fried in lard batter—in sum, a forced march through a puerile temple of consumerism dedicated to the epitomic scourge of twenty-first-century American culture: cartoons and comic books.16
Though he didn’t start out that way, Walt Disney became, again according to Gabler, “the leading avatar of small-town, flag-waving America.” Which leads to another reason I’ve avoided WDW like a rectal exam. Even though I grew up in small-town, flag-waving America, I’ve come around to the realization that the recent mouth-breathing stupidity of small-town, flag-waving America has soiled the country’s reputation abroad, made possible the plunder of the public treasury for jingoistic corporate wars, and, worst of all, created a career for Ann Coulter. And, no, it doesn’t make me un-American to have assiduously avoided setting foot in a fabricated dream patch plopped in the middle of a morally rudderless state of bogus elections with a half-baked citizenry who think absolutely nothing of supporting an idiotic fifty-year embargo of Cuba or taking the Camaro with the slave-days flag decals to the corner market for a pack of smokes without bothering to put their shirts on.
So, Disney.
Impregnable as the mental fortress surrounding my abiding distaste for Walt Disney World has traditionally been, I nevertheless find myself in a bind as my departure nears. On the one hand, Disney is such an easy target to slam that doing so feels like a cliché. What’s the point of going someplace for a week if all you’re planning to do is sneer at it? Misgivings aside, as a seed-spitting populist, I feel like it’s wrong to look down my nose at an institution so warmly embraced by the masses. If that’s all this exercise is going to be abo
ut, I can stay home and watch Hannah Montana.
In addition to the “to sneer or not to sneer” question, there’s another issue to be resolved before I depart: to “do” Disney with or without children?
For most people, this dilemma probably seems like no issue at all. For most people, there’s no reason to go to WDW except children. Walt himself envisioned his parks foremost as places parents and their miscreant spawn could enjoy together. (Because I was one for almost thirty years and because my taxes help pay for their underperforming schools, I’m perfectly entitled to complain about children.)
My position is clouded somewhat by the fact that although I have no children of my own I am orbited by a small and devoted cadre of nieces and nephews. Though each of them might be overjoyed by a WDW vacation under the temporary guardianship of their illustriously loose-with-a-buck uncle, none of them suits my immediate needs.
Already of legal drinking age, Erik and Chuck 2.0 both attended college in Daytona Beach, where they diligently honed career-enhancing beer pong and poker skills—experience that makes them superb company between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., but unlikely participants in early-bird inspections of princess castles and stomach-churning thrill rides. Fall months mean freshman football for Dylan. Day-care stalwarts Carlitos and June are too young. Jacob is the usual seven-year-old handful. With five-year-old Grace currently in the midst of an appalling tiara and jewel-encrusted-scepter obsession, her duly enlightened mother would fillet me with a kitchen knife were I to push her daughter any further in the direction of Sleeping Beauty and Mulan. White Mischief lobbies like a pharmaceutical rep on Capitol Hill to ride along as my aide-de-camp and Disney guinea pig, but no cynic in the world is as unrepentant as a twelve-year-old hipster, the entire race of which comes equipped with an exquisite knack for detecting fakery. The last thing I need at Disney is his peanut gallery commentary competing with my own snide interior monologue.