I relapsed. The Mexico City Motel Blues

I almost hit my dad. Fuck, it’s gone too far.

Actually, no. I would never hit my dad, but enough is enough, and I had to stand my ground. I told them I was not coming back, and I meant it.

I think I saw a little bit of fear in my father’s eyes as my mother screamed. He has changed. He has gone insipid. He is not willing to change, and neither is she.

What is it now? Three years I have had to change everything about myself? And I did have to, good riddance. New wine, new wineskin. I had to leave, and there is no looking back. I love them, but I hurt them more with my presence.

But enough about them.

My squirrel-feeding, fiending friend said this would give me more stories to write. I am a writer first and foremost. So, out on the streets with four backpacks, waiting for my New Zealandish philosopher friend. Is that what you call Kiwis? I don’t know.

Anyway, he got confused because of my bad instructions. I guess we aren’t off to the best start. But he arrived eventually as I kissed my house goodbye.

I am not going back. Not in one year. Maybe more. I’ve changed too much. Those walls, they are caving in. The huge T.V., the comfortable bed, the chauffeur, the sports club, those are control traps. I have to see past them.

Not playing the artist. I am the artist.

Mr. Philosopher Kiwi and I spoke well into the morning outside a pharmacy, white neon lights keeping us awake as I ate the ripe ciruelas he gave me. Delicious. I sat on two of them and turned them into jelly.

I got to count my money first off. Nine pesos. Shit. Shit. I am poor as shit. Nine pesos, and four bags with clothes.

Before I left, I showed my father the nine pesos and told him to look at what I was starting with. I’d make more than him. I regret that. Or do I? I don’t know. I am all confused in emotion, but I know I had to go, and they are wrong.

It will take them time to see, as it took me time to see past my addiction. But they will, or not. But my limit has to be I am not willing to put myself in that situation anymore.

And so I thought happily as I slept outside group by the volcanic stones with the four bag packs as my astonishingly comfortable pillows. Like a homeless man. Well, I guess I am a homeless man.

The police came, and I had to leave. Fuck the police, always with their shit. We don’t have a good rep, me and the coppers, even if they’re Mexican copers. I am not a delinquent, but free-thinking enough to cause trouble. Maybe I am just a jackass. A little of both, maybe as well.

Well, now you are all on your own, and you don’t even have nine pesos because you spent them all in spicy candy.

I went to the park. Two AA friends found me. They insisted I accompany one of them to sleep. I budged so they could catch a snooze. I went with the crystal-addicted gay guy in abstinence. He had a nice apartment. He gave me a room and sat besides me as he puffed cigarette after cigarette, chain-smoking.

Fuck. Fuck me, fuckitiy fuck, I feel the same way I felt in jail, sexually vulnerable next to a man. Fuck this shit.

So I left, carried my four heavy bag packs, and headed out to San Jeronimo at four a.m. and walked all the way to the group until my back was sore, but my spirit, well that one was stronger than ever.

I had made the right choice, I thought, as I smiled and looked at the road ahead. Good. I love this fucking city. It’s the best in the world. And I’ll be the king of it before this is all over.

Hey there, Julian, stay humble. Remember to stay humble and place God first before you lose yourself like you have in the past.

I got to the group and made a big, big, big speech about how I was never going back, and I meant every word.

Am I a brat? I guess yeah, but that comes with wealth and white skin in Mexico City. But, you know, as far as Mexico City brats, I ain’t that bad.

Anyway, big speech and all that. It went great.

And know what. Reached out to people. One guy answered. Moctezuma, from my Kingsford days. I always did love that guy. Good kid, good with the ladies and recipient of much jealousy. He has a heart of gold, as Neil Young would say.

The blonde old lady of the group who is rich and graceful, and I am really into, is helping me financially. No sex stuff. Just pure, genuine Christian charity and elderly generosity. I guess she had a hard time escaping the clutches of control from her family back in her time as well.

I wish I knew her when she was young. She must’ve been a sight to see. I’m gonna ask her next time I see her to see a picture of her in her youth.

Why am I always into old ladies. Oh hey, because I was always in the principal’s office.

Anyway, a few bucks in the wallet, and Moctezuma picked me and my bags up. We got to his house and watched Tarkovsky. I showed him Tarkovsky, and then we talked money and business. That shall be left unsaid.

But it has something to do with a woman with a red dress, which I kept telling him I wanted Luisa del Prado to play. I reminded him I always thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world physically;

emotionally, and spiritually I don’t know. Never really talked to her. Guess she doesn’t like me, you know, with the drugged-up hallucination messages and all, and my fat egg-shape face depressed post-jail stage.

Yeah, she never saw the best of me, but I can get really obsessive about women. It’s the one vice I began with.

Not a playboy. I mean a retired playboy, because I got injured. Pussy overdose. Ha. Being crass. Don’t want that life anymore. Nothing comes off it.

Saw a blonde I liked with her little sister the other day, asked her out. She didn’t answer. But she was nice, just not into me.

Good girls, Mexico City family white girls, not into me. Got too much of a past, I guess. But I like my past.

Well, Santa Fe with Moctezuma. We woke up and we hit the gym looking ahead at La Mexicana. We talked about making it. We will. In time.

I talked about marrying the Prado girl. I don’t even know shit about her. She could be plastic and not worth my time for all I know. But beauty, beauty goes a long way, and a man can be willing to go a long way for visual vivid vicious veauty. It’s what led me to jail.

Funny, she’s been writing me too, and I her. I love that woman. I think she loves me. We have a great relationship now. The sound of her voice, there is nothing like it.

With me and Helen, I will never truly understand, but I like that I don’t understand, and I just love purely. Nothing I can do about it. I didn’t choose that love. It picked me in the most extraordinary way. I’d marry that girl, and she knows that.

We shall see, but she is in another country, and I got to find a way to survive.

Visited Moctezuma’s uni in Santa Fe, just for fun. Accompanied him to class where there was a sexy black German girl and Donald Trump was talking about exterminating people. Good ol’ U.S.A. setting the example for us all.

Met up with a junkie friend. He is sober and happy but highly medicated. I saw him and realized he was going to make it and grow to be a great man. Suffering does that to you.

Y a great man doesn’t mean rich and famous, although it can coexist, and great men know that.

There are a few friends in group, but one stands out to me as a great man. His family owns the largest chain of luxury supermarkets. He looks like Wolverine, and he is just the most relaxed guy in the world. That’s a great man, with his usual smile and his black crop tops and white Lamborghini from the nineties. He has a character in my movie. He has to.

Went to Bible study and invited Moctezuma.

Again, there is one really good friend who I really admire as a man and as a servant of God. I was looking for his advice and subconsciously for a new dad now that I left my own. He told me it’s not about changing master, it’s about stop being a dog. He is right. I have to stop being a dog.

He got mad. He is going through some really tough shit.

A Pharisee sat next to us. Didn’t pay attention to him. His foreign girl pretty, never looked at her.

Then my other good friend who got falsely accused recently by a junkie girl so she could continue using. It keeps happening and happening, the false accusations. I think now most are false, but I gotta stop with all that. Not my problem, and I’m not a white pigeon. I am a sinner. I love to fucking sin.

Woke up and ran in La Mexicana listening to Kanye West and thought about a meeting I had recently about the woman with the red dress.

Have to work, but how if I don’t even know where I will sleep and there is no going back. NO FUCKING WAY.

Talked to a priest, he got angry. Well, he is human, and I am pretty stupid.

The next day I had to leave, and I went to Condesa with Jero who has his own huge apartment in Amsterdam. Jackpot. Selfish thoughts. I have to live here.

JPT also can give me a home for a bit, some place in a week or two. He just has to make sure of a few things first.

I love JPT. I also love Jero. He is a mind I will never understand but that I am fascinated with every time we talk. He loves computers and is pale as the moon. His heart is, again, huge.

I have great friends. This makes me happy. I have to thank God for my friends and the people who have stayed after the Georgia/addiction hurricane.

Slept in a mattress with nothing and organized a date for Friday from a girl I met in a clinic back in the day. Planned a jazz night. Went to group.

Jero’s mom doesn’t like me, so I have to leave, so it’s back to the streets again. Fuck, this made me really fucking angry. I yelled outside in the street. All my Condesa dreams gone, dead. Fuck.

Keep your spirits up, so we decided to watch a Jap animated movie, and then the thought crawled into my brain. Strippers. You are in Condesa. There must be some nice table dances here that can make you feel better late at night.

I fought the thought without fighting it because I really wanted to go, and I failed God as I walked out the door ready to relapse. No drugs. No alcohol. No cigarettes. No porn…

I went, and I sat, and I looked at all the flashing lights and the demonic songs talking about money and thongs and looked at the women.

HOLY FUCKING SHIRTBALLS.

They all looked like they had their tits done by the same surgeon, as well as their ass. It must’ve been a good surgeon because those were good tits.

I ordered a coke. They offered alcohol. I was going to relapse, but not with the alcohol or the drugs. With sex. My favourite drug. My greatest sorrow.

I looked at the beautiful women dance in the poles. They got all the way to the top. The strength they must have in their core to do that. And those tits.

I was sinning, and I knew I was sinning, but I loved every fucking second of it. Every fucking second as the music played and plastic big-assed Barbie danced. I can’t paint her with words, but my bone could’ve sure been used as a paint brush.

And that’s it. I chose the hookers over the date, and I knew it was wrong, but I loved it.

Anyway, like cattle they sold the women, and I picked the most beautiful one, a curly-haired Cuban, and paid the prize and took her upstairs.

I didn’t think about God, although I knew about the devil. I took off my sweatshirt and she mounted me and began to dance. She looked drugged up in her eyes. She was incredibly beautiful, and it was all so sensual.

I’m handsome. Hookers like me. It’s just a fact.

I treat hookers better than regular girls. I guess it’s the guilt, but all I want is a regular girl, but I keep going back to the hookers even if it’s years apart, and the regular girls, they never arrive.

It’s a sad thing. Maybe even sadder than the beautiful drugged-up Cuban hooker’s eyes devoid of soul. Sorry, no. Filled with a soul trapped deep beneath, wanting to be let out.

So I just looked at her face and she at mine. She noticed. My eyes too. They carry something as well. It was electric.

She took my dick out and gave me a handie. I didn’t come.

We said goodbye, and she went on to the next guy.

I slept my last night in Condesa, woke up and looked at all the fucking Americans. It made me sort of angry. Hypocrites. How do our people get treated in their country? I have lived it firsthand. Still, I will always love America. America is Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly. There is nothing like Grace Kelly.

But Mexico is and will forever be Anelisse, even if she is on the other side of the globe.

What is Mexico? Who are we as a people?

I left and visited the group like the homeless man I was. It usually goes the other way. Addicts using are homeless. Sober people in recovery aren’t.

Had to leave. Never doubt that for one fucking second. Things there are insipid, and they won’t change. They are too set in their way. Meanwhile, I am being the good Samaritarian sharing my good looks with Cuban hookers.

I went to church and confessed my sin to two old ladies who were incredibly supportive and gave me words of encouragement. This is all getting to be an adventure. Another adventure. That’s what I wanted, I guess.

After the old ladies, I spent the day on phone calls, and by nighttime the usual gang was there laughing our asses off about black dicks and the fact that I got a free hand job by the Cuban hooker after I only paid seven thousand. We laughed like businessmen in the fifties as they slapped their secretaries asses. ROARING.

Had no place to sleep. Went to a regular hotel, didn’t have enough money, so I had to go to a love motel and pay for what I could afford to sleep.

Woke up early and got to living, but I was so goddamn tired I slept in a bookstore’s attic on the cold hard stone floor with my Bible as a pillow.

I read two gospels and willed good.

Then a friend, without asking, gifted me money, and I got sick, and I started talking about hookers like an asshole in front of a girl that hates me (who knows why) in such a rude manner that, although it was English I was speaking and she doesn’t, she recognized the word pussy enough times to yell at me.

I knew I deserved it, but I was fucking taken by the idea of a hooker, so I went back to the hotel and ordered one.

She got here, and that is the Mexican woman. She was brown and small but beautiful, although her teeth were crooked.

We had sex, and then I felt like shit.

She told me I was the most handsome man she had met in the service, and I asked her about her life, and we spent the time naked looking into each other as souls, not people.

And we both agreed what we did was wrong, but at least there was some sort of charitable love.

I want to stop this before I lose control again, but she was incredible, and I love sex and woman, or am I trapped by it.

The room was blue, and so is Mexico City at night, and the hooker talked about God even though the devil had brought us together.

And I saw more of a soul in this poor hooker with the ugly teeth than in all the rich white woman of Mexico City I had met, and it all got me to thinking.

I gave her my number for friendship and a AA book as she said she thought she could be alcoholic, and I talked to her about it.

She had a red dress, but she wasn’t my woman with the red dress. Figuratively, it will always be Helen, but literally I haven’t found her.

She closed the door, and I showered listening to jazz, kneeling in the shower floor, warm water on my skin, asking God to rid me of this addiction and to let me be a plain God-following man.

But I think this woman found me at the right moment in her life and my advice will help her. I wish. Maybe I’m just guilty.

Give me strength, Lord, to be good, simply to be good, and to walk Mexico City at day when the blues though felt are still hiding behind the Periférico ring, and the hookers are just girls eating a meal and chatting away, and the drunkards aren’t drunk, and my parents aren’t fighting.

It is better to walk in the wake of day, but I am only ever truly awake at night.