The Insufferable Gaucho

Jim

Many years ago I had a friend named Jim, and he was the saddest North American I’ve ever come across. I’ve seen a lot of desperate men. But never one as sad as Jim. Once he went to Peru — supposedly for more than six months, but it wasn’t long before I saw him again. The Mexican street kids used to ask him, what’s poetry made of, Jim? Listening to them, Jim would stare at the clouds and then he’d start throwing up. Vocabulary, eloquence, the search for truth. Epiphany. Like when you have a vision of the Virgin. He was mugged several times in Central America, which is surprising, because he’d been a Marine and fought in Vietnam. No more fighting, Jim used to say. I’m a poet now, searching for the extraordinary, trying to express it in ordinary, everyday words. So you think there are ordinary, everyday words? I think there are, Jim used to say. His wife was a Chicana poet; every so often she’d threaten to leave him. He showed me a photo of her. She wasn’t especially pretty. Her face betrayed suffering, and under that suffering, simmering rage. I imagined her in an apartment in San Francisco or a house in Los Angeles, with the windows shut and the curtains open, sitting at a table, eating sliced bread and a bowl of green soup. Jim liked dark women, apparently, history’s secret women, he would say, without elaborating. As for me, I liked blondes. Once I saw him watching fire-eaters on a street in Mexico City. I saw him from behind, and I didn’t say hello, but it was obviously Jim. The badly cut hair, the dirty white shirt and the stoop, as if he were still weighed down by his pack. Somehow his neck, his red neck, summoned up the image of a lynching in the country — a landscape in black and white, without billboards or gas station lights — the country as it is or ought to be: one expanse of idle land blurring into the next, brick-walled rooms or bunkers from which we have escaped, standing there, awaiting our return. Jim had his hands in his pockets. The fire-eater was waving his torch and laughing fiercely. His blackened face was ageless: he could have been thirty-five or fifteen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and there was a vertical scar from his navel to his breastbone. Every so often he’d fill his mouth with flammable liquid and spit out a long snake of fire. The people in the street would watch him for a while, admire his skill, and continue on their way, except for Jim, who remained there on the edge of the sidewalk, stock-still, as if he expected something more from the fire-eater, a tenth signal (having deciphered the usual nine), or as if he’d seen in that discolored face the features of an old friend or of someone he’d killed. I watched him for a good long while. I was eighteen or nineteen at the time and believed I was immortal. If I’d realized that I wasn’t, I would have turned around and walked away. After a while I got tired of looking at Jim’s back and the fire-eater’s grimaces. So I went over and called his name. Jim didn’t seem to hear me. When he turned around I noticed that his face was covered with sweat. He seemed to be feverish, and it took him a while to work out who I was; he greeted me with a nod and then turned back to the fire-eater. Standing beside him, I noticed he was crying. He probably had a fever as well. I also discovered something that surprised me less at the time than it does now, writing this: the fire-eater was performing exclusively for Jim, as if all the other passersby on that corner in Mexico City simply didn’t exist. Sometimes the flames came within a yard of where we were standing. What are you waiting for, I said, you want to get barbecued in the street? It was a stupid wisecrack, I said it without thinking, but then it hit me: that’s exactly what Jim’s waiting for. That year, I seem to remember, there was a song they kept playing in some of the funkier places with a refrain that went, Chingado, hechizado (Fucked up, spellbound). That was Jim: fucked up and spellbound. Mexico’s spell had bound him and now he was looking his demons right in the face. Let’s get out of here, I said. I also asked him if he was high, or feeling ill. He shook his head. The fire-eater was staring at us. Then, with his cheeks puffed out like Aeolus, the god of the winds, he began to approach us. In a fraction of a second I realized that it wasn’t a gust of wind we’d be getting. Let’s go, I said, and yanked Jim away from the fatal edge of that sidewalk. We took ourselves off down the street toward Reforma, and after a while we went our separate ways. Jim didn’t say a word in all that time. I never saw him again.