Houlihan's Wake
The title tips its hat to Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's novel in which a man comes back to life during his own wake. At the end, Houlihan intends to use the lifeguards' party to indulge his own feeling of being reborn.
On my first day in “Playa Chisme”, I noticed a man sitting in a yoga pose on the beach, hatless in the noonday sun. I asked about him, and learned that he had come to Playa Chisme to die, because he wanted to spend his last days in a really beautiful place. It is an extraordinarily life-affirming place, and last time I visited the yoga man was still there, though he now wore a panama hat and hugged the shade. Houlihan, too, is determined to die there, and finds it just as impossible.
First published in The View From Here.
Phoenix Mexico
I wrote this for the 2001 Biennale art exhibition in Venice. They set up a “Bunker Poetico” adjoining the exhibition space at the Arsenale site, where they displayed a selection of poems on the topic of peace, including this one. I was dead chuffed to be on view among the best of contemporary art, as I thought, but when I actually went there, it turned out that Venetian weather had taken its toll: summer rain had left most of the poems illegible. Fortunately, this one was included on the Biennale website, under the flag of Mexico. It is essentially a call to avoid romanticising the civilisations of the past. Their people deserved better; the survivors still do.
Murals
Mexico has a tradition of great mural painters, including Diego Rivera and Orozco. You can see some of Orozco's finest work at the Instituto Cultural de Cabanas in Guadalajara, a building which has been a lunatic asylum, a barracks, a jail and an orphanage holding up to 3,000 children. The best way to view the painting on the ceiling is to stretch out on a bench below them, especially if you're still suffering from jet-lag, which will make them seem more hallucinatory than they might otherwise appear: the human stain in all its gore.
First published in Dead Snakes.
Leaking Grail
The small, picturesque town square in Ajijic was under threat from property development that would drive away the tourists it was meant to attract in place of the low-income artists who had come to live there. Down the road, the town's main draw, beautiful Lake Chapala, the country's largest natural lake, was being invaded by water hyacinth and drained away to provide Mexico City and Guadalajara with water. The construction workers epitomised the destruction of the ground beneath their feet.
First published in Transparent Words.
Missionary
“Playa Chisme” is a fictionalised amalgam of villages on the Pacific coast of Mexico, some way south of Puerto Escondido. “Chisme” is the Spanish for “gossip”, which is one of the preferred occupations among those who live or sojourn there, as in countless small places. Latin men do tend to get bowled over by blondes, I guess because they seem exotic. “Elke” was easy on the eye and clever enough to let her body do the talking. In retrospect, I regret being influenced by the gossip, because adults can look after themselves. Nevertheless, she was supposedly there to look after disabled children, and I thought the way she made it clear how little that job meant to her revealed a colonialist attitude, so I lost respect for her.
First published in Dead Snakes.
Mazunte Jazz Hurts
Mazunte is a small town on the Oaxaca coast, south of “Playa Chisme”. Wonder of wonders, it has a jazz festival. Each # represents a number played by the band in which Hamish plays. I have tried to make him as much of an outsider as possible to highlight the unifying power of good music. It is, of course, a speeded-up coming-of-age episode in which the hero fails to get the girl (who does not fall for his musical success) but finds himself. Even I find it hard to imagine dark futures at an open-air jazz festival on the Pacific coast of Mexico!
First published in Pyrokinection.
Dolores
The story of the poem, Mazunte Jazz Hurts.
First published in The Camel Saloon.
Dog Day Sundown
The residents of the beautiful, relatively unspoilt bay that houses “Playa Chisme” are divided over what to do with their golden egg. There are those who would tend it, content to see their poverty recede year after year. A minority would smash it and sell the contents to the highest bidder. To make it attactive to the concrete merchants, they have first to get rid of the superannuated hipsters and the youngsters who have drifted there from five continents. Although they cannot round up the hippies, who are mostly well integrated into the local community and its economy, they can, and sometimes do, round up their dogs and dispose of them in a variety of reputedly barbaric ways. The sunsets are amazing.
First published in Dead Snakes.
Mushrooms
Most of the characters in this story are based on real people who live, or just hang out, on Mexico's Pacific coast. To preserve their privacy, I have turned them all into Bulgarians and changed their physical appearance. Like the long-stay foreigners I met there, they argue violently about trivial things, yet when a real emergency arises, they immediately wake up and band together, and hidden talents come to the fore. I have put some nasty, racist statements into the mouth of the narrator, Ivaylo. He says things about immigrants in Bulgaria that I often hear said about immigrants in Italy, where I live, and which, years ago, I often heard said about Italian immigrants in London. I hope, by moving them to a new context, to make clear both the inevitability and the stupidity of such statements.
Visions
Masonic ceremonies were advertised in a building in Guadalajara adorned with frescoes by Orozco. I imagine him taking a small revenge. A church next door harnessed more-modern art to repackage the old lies through which Orozco saw so clearly.
First published in Other Voices.
White Whale Island
The protagonist, Grace, is based on a young Australian woman whom I encountered in “Playa Chisme”. Her swim back to land and life, though, comes from the true story of a former student of mine in Angola. Despite being an Air Force helicopter pilot, which the Reagan régime had made a very dangerous occupation, he survived the civil war, became an air-taxi co-pilot, and crash-landed in the sea. He swam a long way to shore, the only survivor. He recounted how he had, several times, been tempted to give in to his exhaustion and let himself drown, but each time he had called up the image of his mother and of his daughter, and thus found the strength to go on.
First published in Eunoia Review.
A Whole Year Without Drowning
The poem of Houlihan's Wake.
First published in The Camel Saloon.