“What does that mean?”
“It means that the energy behind the trick keeps going and that the person being tricked doesn’t merely come to the realization that things are never what they seem, but somehow, and this is the mystery of light, somehow an entirely new world begins to form out of the ashes of the old one.
“Betty and that whole ISLA LARGO thing are good examples. I don’t know whether Pinga set you up or not, but if Kiki had been alive at the time and supplying him with light, you probably wouldn’t have become so hung up trying to figure out if you had been tricked or not. Something would have allowed you to let it fall by the wayside so you could begin to see the true immensity of what was happening—that a gathering was taking place to celebrate your approaching death and re-birth.”
“You’re right: I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. It took me a long time to let go.”
“Luckily for you, the light eventually came. Pinga hasn’t been that lucky. Maybe he’s noticed that some of the energy behind his tricks has disappeared, and then again maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he thinks it’s because he’s not feeling well, or maybe it just stopped for a while—that shit happens, as you like to say. On the other hand, he may sense he has to do something.”
“Why don’t you speak to Pinga about this?” I asked Alice.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not the one saying what the problem is.”
“Maybe you’re not saying it, but you know it.”
She was right. But before I could say anything, she added, “It wouldn’t make any difference who told him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not ready to hear it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can feel it.”
“But how does he become ready to hear it?”
“No one knows. Some people call it grace, or luck, but whatever you call it, it feels like light—a very special light: one that opens all the doors. But it always
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arrives in its own time, and nothing you or I can possibly do will ever change that.
Only Pinga is capable of doing something about it. He has to begin leaning with his fate.”
Alice’s harshness startled me. I had never seen her be so cold. So what if Pinga had been a playboy of sorts? You could say the same thing about Betty Hagan letting herself become a drunk. But Betty had never received that kind of dismissal from Alice; in fact, Alice had embraced her like a long lost sister. There was something more to Alice’s feelings about Pinga than met the eye, and though I wasn’t quite sure what it was, something kept telling me it had more than a little to do with her ex-husband.
Yet I knew Alice was right, because I had faced the same crisis as Pinga.
Everyone does sooner or later, or maybe it never stops. It seemed to me, though, that I’d been luckier, simple as that. For some reason, I had begun to lean with my fate. If you were to ask me how or why, I’d have to tell you I really couldn’t say, but it was in some way linked to the fact that I had begun working with women. I think that’s somewhat natural for artists, especially those who see poetry as more than literature, who see poetry as a spiritual journey, as the way the soul speaks to us. So it made sense that I would become more attracted to women. Women are the keepers of the soul. That closeness gradually allowed me to find my way.
I remember a very early speaking I called “I Speak like an Indian. ” At the time, one of the phrases was a mystery to me:
When I was a boy,
I knew what the women knew,
but I knew it differently .
I knew the speaking was correct, but I didn’t know why. Its meaning eventually became clear to me as my speakings grew deeper, more unconscious. When that happened, they created a kind of psychic gateway for me, the kind that many women seem to have as a matter of course, simply by being alive.
It was at that point that I began to see poetry not as an end in itself, not as a form of literature, but as the way the soul speaks to us, and the way we speak back.
Poetry is a very special gateway to the soul’s world. It is the first and most primal gateway, one that reunites our conscious and unconscious minds in a way that is impossibly beautiful and impossibly true. It roots us. It tells us we belong.
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Chapter 32: Alice in Mexico
August 2005, Alamos
Alice had asked me several times about the possibility of meeting Joan, but I kept putting her off because I couldn’t face another grueling trip across the Sonora desert. As far as Joan coming to the states, from the look of her sparse, scribbled letters, it was highly unlikely. One day I said to Alice, “The only way you’re going to meet Joan is to go to Alamos; but I can’t take that bus ride and I doubt you can either,” and then I described it to her, including the splattered condition of the toilet at the rear of the bus, just so she had all the details.
“Why don’t we fly down?” she asked.
“Too expensive,” I replied.
“I have a son who flies for Delta Air Freight, maybe he can cook something up.”
“Use my phone. I have plenty of minutes.”
She hopped on the phone and began speaking to her son. “Hold on a second,” she said to the phone. “He says he can probably arrange something for us. What’s the nearest airport?”
“Hermosillo. We can probably have somebody pick us up there and drive us the remaining three or four hours to Alamos.”
“Hermosillo is the nearest,” she said into the phone, “Send me what you find by email, OK? I love you.”
The next day she called and said we could catch a freight plane to Hermosillo on Friday. “We’ll have to make a few stops and we’ll have to sit in those little seats the attendants use, but it’ll be free. Where is Alamos anyway?”
“It’s in Sonora, about 600 miles south of Nogales. Some of the Castaneda books are set in Sonora. It’s the ancestral home of the Yaqui Indians. Someone once told me two of the women in the books live just to the west of Alamos, near a small village called Minas Nuevas.”
When we got off the plane in Hermosillo, Joan was waiting for us like a Hollywood opening—five-inch heels, a long flowing black dress, and enough mascara to start a fire. It set her apart from everyone else at the gate. Everyone that is except Angel, her young, mustached gardener, who was standing next to her in an even more outrageous tuxedo de chauffeur outfit with black patent leather boots and a biker’s cap right out of The Village People. All five feet of him was grinning from ear to ear.
All I could think was that Joan put the outfit together and somehow talked him into it. You’d think Angel would have balked at the suggestion, but he clearly loved the whole act. Alice took the costume party right in stride. She said hello to
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Joan, gave her a hug, and then began speaking to Angel in Spanish.
“I thought you’d never visited Mexico,” I said.
“I haven’t.”
“How do you know Spanish then?”
“I learned it from Kiki. Well, it was Portuguese really, but they’re pretty close.
Portuguese is a bit more guttural.”
Angel couldn’t take his eyes off Alice. He had become used to Joan, but he wasn’t prepared for Alice. I could see him checking her out in the rearview mirror all the way back to Alamos. We spent five days at Joan’s. Alice couldn’t get enough of Alamos. I think the slow pace and simple ways of the town reminded her of her childhood in Arcadia. She spent hours walking around town and talking to whomever she met, which was not always an easy thing, as one look at her eyes was enough to convince some of them she was a bruja, a witch. That didn’t surprise me. It had taken the town a few years to acclimate to Joan.
They had never seen anything like Joan except in the movies, so it wasn’t any surprise that the neighborhood children began calling her La Estrella (The Star) and it stuck. They would hold their hands out for candy and scream, “La Estrella, La Estrella, mas dulce” (Star, Star, more candy) whenever she came out of her house, and now they were sticking their heads through the bars of the front gate asking if they could see La Fantasma (The Ghost ).
I should have charged admission. Unfortunately, one day Joan ran out of candy and when she tried to explain, in her almost non-existent Spanish, that she had temporarily run out of candy, “Por favor, No mas, no mas dulce,” she was pummeled with a furious barrage of tiny, high-pitched catcalls. So much for La Estrella.
Octavio Paz once wrote, “Everyone should have a Mexican childhood,” and from the exuberant, healthy looks of these kids, he was undoubtedly right. But he should have added as a cautionary postscript, “Hell knows no fury like los niños scorned,” because when we went out the next day, the kids were nowhere in sight.
Instead, scratched onto Joan’s very expensive Toyota, at precisely the level of a seven-year-old hand, was a very angry Gringa Puta (Yankee Whore).
Alice took one look at it, picked up a sharp stone from the street, and furiously scratched a large Fantastica right above Gringa Puta. Then she turned to Joan, who was absolutely dumbstruck, and said, “That’ll give the little devils something to think about,” and she side-armed a small rock down the cobbled street like she was skipping it on a lake. When it came to rest a block or so away, I could have sworn it was greeted by a little symphony of tiny, pursed lips sucking wind very, very slowly.
Decisive action impressed Joan to no end. She immediately elevated Alice to the 150 ALICE HICKEY
rank of El President and told her she wanted to talk to her about a number of things. There was a problem, however, as Joan spends most of her day lying in bed talking on the phone, or swinging a ring on a piece of dental floss. Alice solved that by simply lying down beside Joan and starting to chat. I think it startled Joan, but only for a moment, as she has a way of taking whatever happens to her—even Alice’s furiously scratched Fantastica—as something like a big birthday surprise, just for her.
Since there was no room in the bed for me, and I didn’t want to sit on the side like an attending physician, I left them alone most of the time and worked with Angel in the garden, or rather watched Angel work, as there was no way I could keep up with him. For most Mexicans in remote towns like Alamos, life is hard work and poverty, grinding poverty, both of which they seem to accept with grace and humor. But Angel must have also seen the languorous, fashionable Joan for exactly what she was: an extravagant, ongoing drama in search of actors. It obviously struck the natural actor in him because he signed on immediately and never looked back.
From the looks of Joan, she was her old self again: flamboyant, playful, and ready for anything. Her long depression seemed to have finally lifted, a change I could only attribute to Angel’s upbeat company. Although he didn’t speak any English, he had a smile that bordered on the devil, and he was so full of fun it was almost impossible to be in bad spirits when he was around. He had originally been hired to tend the grounds and garden, but as it turned out, he spent half his time driving Joan around town, which was a bit of an act because he could barely see over the dashboard. Yet Joan insisted he was fine, and there was no talking her out of it.
She was deathly afraid of being alone on the Mexican roads. She must have seen too many greasy bandito movies as a kid; I’m surprised she didn’t get Angel a rifle.
During my visit, I asked Angel if he liked wearing the ropas de chofer (driver’s outfit) and he looked at me as if he was amazed I hadn’t heard, “Si, soy famosa ahora, me llaman Angel Tuxedo, Chofer de Las Estrellas” (Yes, I am famous now, they call me Angel Tuxedo, Driver to The Stars). Joan told me that after she’d made him the chauffeur’s outfit, some of the wealthier gringo women in town had caught on and had also taken to having Angel drive them around town in his brother’s old black Cadillac. The Cadillac, which had been used for funerals, suddenly became a big money maker for both Angel and his brother Gerardo. According to Joan, Angel enjoyed a huge celebrity with both the Mexican and gringo communities . He’d even had cards made up: Angel Tuxedo, Chofer de Las Estrellas.
One evening, when I asked Joan for her impression of Alice, she told me she was stunned by Alice’s psychic gifts, but even more by the depth of her knowledge about psychic matters in general. “She must have read everybody in the world,
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and probably talked to them too,” was Joan’s chatty way of putting it to me. She also told me that Alice was very curious about me, not in a personal way, but from a psychic point of view, and she had given Alice whatever impressions she’d gathered over the years, “And I didn’t forget to mention your piggy spirit face either,” she added with a jab.
She told me Alice was trying to figure out why she was being continuously directed towards me, as it had never happened to her before. The direction was strong enough to convince Alice being with me was important, but that she was as much in the dark as I about what was going on. She said to Joan, “I don’t know if I’m prepared for what’s going to happen; I keep feeling I’m going to be blindsided.”
I really didn’t get a chance to talk to Alice at any length until we were headed back to Sarasota. I mentioned how surprised I’d been to find she was as puzzled as I about why we had been brought together. I asked her why she had never said anything to me about it. “I didn’t want you to get too scared. I thought it was better if you thought that at least the ground I was walking on was solid. But it isn’t. Patience is required. I know we will eventually understand why we came together, but,” and here she let out a small, hairy cackle, “it may take forever.”
Then she suddenly switched bases: “By the way, Joan is your anima; I can feel it.
She’s a bit like Kiki in the way she can open to the Stream as she calls it, except Joan is more selective, more of a dilettante.”
“Like a lazy gecko tonguing a fly,” I replied. “Once you know her for a while, you see she’s hunting all the time. But it’s very efficient. And quick. And very selective. She likes a particular curve of the Stream , one that’s rippling with creativity, artistic creativity, and she seems to know how to get to it, or as she said to me once, ‘I know how to let the Stream find me, but I can’t tell you exactly how I do that, I just open myself up. It’s a special feeling I’ve always known, since I was a little girl. When that happens, I can feel it moving through me, looking for somewhere to go.’
“She told me it was usually more fun to let it flow through to someone ready to use it, like me. But she told me that much, much later. She’s so laid back, I never even thought of associating her with some of my breakthroughs until I realized things seemed to happen whenever she was around, even if she wasn’t really doing anything. Sometimes she’d be collaborating with me, but sometimes she’d just be hanging out, grooving on God knows what. It’s only recently I’ve realized that’s exactly why things were happening: because she wasn’t doing anything. She was just there, letting it all come in. In a way, she’s a creativity junky, but a very effective one. Things happen.”
Alice nodded, “What she told you about ISLAUGGH representing your re-birth, and the myth being a new Bible was right on the money it seems to me. I know you want more details, but you’re not going to get them from her. In a sense she’s 152 ALICE HICKEY
a purist: she refuses to go beyond the immediate feeling and the immediate metaphor it gives birth to .
“We were talking about messages, visions, intimations, poems, that kind of thing, and she said something about trying to understand them that hit the nail right on the head. She told me she never went beyond that first feeling/metaphor
because they were the end of the road as far as she was concerned; to take it any further would be a waste of time, just speculation.
“Where we differ is that I don’t necessarily think speculation is a waste of time. After all, we have to at least try to make sense of what the psychic world is trying to tell us if it’s not immediately clear. But we have to understand that what we come up with may not be something we can take to the bank.”
“Joan’s position doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “I used to attribute it to her distaste for doing anything that involves effort, but she may be right. Going beyond the initial message can be a slippery business. The myth taught me that. Luckily, at least for me, her strength has never been in explaining things, but in her ability to hook into the Stream. The amazing thing is, and she’d be the first to tell you, she has no idea how she does what she does, or even, sometimes, if she’s actually doing it. But somehow, she’s always been able to hook into it and then somehow pass it on so I could go where I had to go, creatively speaking. I have no idea how that works, but it’s allowed me to do extraordinary things, things I had absolutely no idea I was going to do, like the myth.”
A few months after I’d returned to Sarasota, Joan called. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said.
“What?”
“Every morning now, young women are standing outside the gate, trying to catch a glimpse of Angel working in the garden. Like he was a saint or something. They call out his name until he appears, but when he finally comes to the gate, they’re always disappointed he’s in his work clothes and not the chauffeur’s outfit. I guess they expect him to be Angel Tuxedo all of the time.
“Angel always explains to them that when he works as a gardener he is Angel Mauricio not Angel Tuxedo, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. Finally, he made up a new set of Angel Tuxedo business cards with various photographs of him posed in the black chauffeur’s outfit. Real glam shots, if you know what I mean. He hands them out to the girls now when they come to the gate. They’re in great demand, like trading cards.”
“What does Angel think about all the attention?”
“He likes it, who wouldn’t? But that’s not what I’m calling about. Listen to this.
He says the girls think they’re coming because of Angel Tuxedo, but they’re really coming because of me, because there wouldn’t be any Angel Tuxedo without me, without La Estrella. He told me that even though he makes more on a weekend as Angel Tuxedo than I pay him for a whole month, he would never stop working in the garden because ‘ Esta como el Jardin de Paradisio’ (It is like the
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Garden of Paradise). He says it is the place where everything changed for him, that he would never leave it.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told him that was very kind of him, but as most of his visitors were young women I really didn’t think they were coming to see me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I was wrong, that he would show me tomorrow. So the next day when some of the girls came to the gate, he came running into the house to tell me they were waiting to meet me.”
“Did you go?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not. I told him I needed a new outfit ( Quiero nueva ropas) if he was going to parade me around as the owner of El Jardin de Paradisio. Besides, those little chicas can be pretty sexy dressers. I wasn’t going to come in second.”
“So what happened?”
“You know those new Kung Fu movies where the women fly though the air in those long flowing silk things?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I had Maria make me one. We rented a Jet Li movie so she could see what I was talking about. I don’t know where she got the material, but it was jet-black silk, the real light kind that takes a year to float to the ground. When I walk, it goes all over the place. It’s a real look.”
“What did Angel think?”
“He said it was perfect. ( ‘Esta perfecta para La Estrella, La Angel de Angel Tuxedo. ’) He had a grin on his face that was unbelievable. The next day, when he asked me to come out of the house to see the girls at the gate, I floated out the door in the black silk and the girls went crazy, I mean they were spooked. They immediately backed up about five feet from the gate, like they thought I was going to fly over it, or through it. It was quite a scene.”
“What happened then?”
“One of the girls calmed down enough to ask Angel if she could feel my dress, so I walked down to the gate to let her feel the fabric, and when I did, the wind suddenly picked up and my sleeves floated up in the air like huge black wings and they all started screaming ‘ Dios mio, Dios mio, esta veridad!, La Estrella esta La Angel de Angel! ’ (My God, my God, it’s true, The Star is the Angel of Angel!).
One of them had a camera and took some pictures. I’ll mail you a few. You’ll be impressed. The chicas sure were. Angel too.
“After the girls left, he said to me, ‘See, I told you. Everybody knows who you are. You are La Estrella, La Angel de Angel!’ I didn’t know what to say, but to tell you the truth. I liked being admired like that, especially after that horrible
‘ no mas dulce’ debacle. But it got to the point where every morning he was asking me to come to the gate to say hello. It was too much. It takes me an hour to wake up let alone put on my face and get dressed, so I told him I would only make an occasional appearance, as befits someone in my position. He said he understood, that I was right, and asked me if he could make up some picture cards of me he 154 ALICE HICKEY
could hand out.
“I had them taken by the photographer who shot Angel. I’ll tell you one thing. These people may be poor as dirt but they have a flair for the dramatic. The pictures really sizzled. They’re all over town now. Just like Angel’s. The best thing about it is I get offered the best fruit at the Mercado now, and at Mexican prices, which just doesn’t happen if you’re a gringo.
“But even better than that, the kids have begun following me around again, screaming “La Estrella, La Estrella,” just like they used to, except they don’t ask me for candy anymore. Angel says they don’t because it would be a sin to ask anything of La Estrella, La Angel de Angel. He says I am too important now. But that’s not the whole story. You know what happened a few days later?”
“I can’t even guess. By the way, are you making all this up?”
“Of course not; I’m far too lazy. You’ve said so yourself any number of times.
You’re not going to believe this, but Angel made up a name for the house all by himself: Casa de Luz (House of Light). He had an ironworker friend forge it in big black script and then Angel nailed it to the outside of the house, over the front door. It looks very Hollywood Mexican.”
“Are you sure it didn’t spell out Casa de Losers?”
“Very funny. It might have, if it was your house. But listen, there’s more. He wrote a little poem and had it painted on a ceramic plaque next to the door. It’s only four lines, but it’s beautiful. Do you want to hear it? I’ll translate it as I go along.”
“OK. Sure. By the way, how come your Spanish is suddenly so good?”
“It’s because of Angel. You know how he was always chattering away at me like I knew what he was saying except I had no idea? One day, don’t ask me how, I started chatting back. Go figure. Anyway, here’s Angel’s poem, I’ll translate it for you as I go along:
Casa de Luz (House of Light)
Esta casa nunca esta oscura. (This house is never dark.) Esta casa significa la vida.
(This house stands for life.)
Esta casa ve a través de la noche (This house sees through night.) Esta casa es una Casa de Luz. (This house is a house of light.)”
“Jesus. That’s a pretty good poem. You sure Angel wrote it and not you?”
“Of course he wrote it. He said it just came to him when he was working in the garden. He showed me the paper he wrote it on. But darling, you know how things work when I’m around. At least I hope you do. If you still don’t, go ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall. Ciao, Justino.”
A