on the kerouac trail

Every once in a while, it’s good to play Jack Kerouac in the shadows of his former haunts, except these past two particular weeks, it wasn’t until the end that it crossed my mind that this is what was happening. See, it all started in Mexico City, the city marvelous (with apologies to Rio) and led back up to the cold, cold north where there’s still snow and ice on the ground, a gritty little mill town called Lowell, Massachusetts, which just so happens to be where the man that started that little generation we like to call Beat was born, lived and died, in a handful of modest little houses on streets like Moody and Phoebe and in neighborhoods like Centralville and Pawtucketville. We did not meet Doctor Sax, but there was plenty that we did do. It was good.

Now listen here ye paranoid, ye ill of brain, ye chicken-livered – Mexico City is no more dangerous than New York. Would you take a gypsy cab in New York? If you do, you’re stupid. Would you ride the subway at 4am in New York? If you do, you’re stupid. Would you flash your cash in Times Square at midnight? If you do, you’re stupid.

If you do all these things in Mexico City, you may not die, but you’d also be stupid.

Let the scuttlebutt stop scuttling here – Mexico City, God bless it, is simply a big city, with big city problems. Reminds me of a little place I like to call New York, circa 1991. A big, wonderful, weird place, with a shitpile of socio-economic issues, some serious crime problems, but a surprise at every corner, excitement at every turn, and energy in every atom of every molecule of seriously polluted air.

Thousands of years of history have made this town what it is, so rich in past and in present – strolling downtown streets evokes Europe, but exciting. The architectural gems that crowd it’s crowded streets demand your attention, a stop, perhaps a picture of each one.

The Zocalo at any hour – by day, crowded with street vendors and good people on their lunch breaks, by night, lights dancing on the five-hundred plus year old Catedral Metropolitana – sagging buildings on smaller plazas, sinking in each year with the extraction of more ground water from the lakebed that sits beneath a large part of this city.

It’s time to talk about reclaimed land, one of the most defiant acts man has ever been known to commit. Mexico City. New Orleans. San Francisco. New York. Rio de Janeiro. What makes the human think it can defy nature forever? How long before whatever was reclaimed sinks into the swamp/bay/ocean/lake?

Mexico’s children are not really children at all – they are miniature adults, with bone-chilling lines on their tiny faces, so many pressed into adulthood before their time. Gorgeous little versions of all-grownups hawking this and that in the market and on the subway cars, the bright orange subway cars that roll along on rubber wheels where classical music peals from the loudspeakers.

The Zapatistas are here this week – marching around as if they own the place, stopping in for a little meeting with a little something we like to call Congress. Marcos did not show up, sending instead Esther, a commander in the EZLN to speak on his behalf. There’s something in the air – Mexicans are pleased that it has come to this for the most part, that Chiapas can now have peace, and perhaps the country can move forward.

But most people think El Jefe, El Presidente, His Honor, Senor Fox, talks too much. And he does, he’s the Mexican version of Bill Clinton, feeling the pain of all and sundry, feeling it a little too much. With all the problems facing the commander in chief of the not-so-free-world, (they’re trying to ban torture as a means of questioning) Fox is stepping all over himself trying to make promises that one Mexican expressed to me, “would take him twenty years to keep half of.”

It’s not that people don’t like his for-the-people style, it’s just that the more he talks, and the less he gets done, the bigger an idiot he’ll turn out to be and come elections, the man is out on his ass, back at Coca-Cola, or to a teaching post at Harvard. The more I read the papers, the more I’m inclined to agree. Although, each day brings more news of scandal in various departments of state, and with names being named and actions being taken, perhaps something is being done.

Meanwhile, the PRI is saying that ‘if President Fox feels like he needs more money’ (new tax scheme), ‘perhaps he should begin weeding corruption out of his government.’ Now if that’s not calling the kettle burnt umbre, I don’t know what is.

But enough politics, a stroll along the green Paseo de la Reforma, laid out in such grandeur as only the French can manage – and in record time too – the occupation lasted a mere five or so years, and a project of this stature would have taken anyone else twice that. The Angel statue, the fountains, the traffic circles that everyone goes around however they feel like it – it’s almost as if you’re somewhere off the North American continent.

And that’s the joy of this town, you really aren’t anywhere you’ve ever been before. Parts European, parts want-to-be-american, and mostly Mexican, it’s a perfectly unique sort of place. In the Condesa, there’s sidewalk cafes and restaurants crowding more leafy green streets, creperies and pasta bars, paella parlors, soda fountains and coffeehouses, the pierced masses darting in and out of tattoo parlors, the art cinema which costs $2.50 for a showing of Quills, parks and beautiful apartment buildings – it’s all so very, very un-mexican.

Which brings to mind the question – what is Mexico? Do Americans ever see beyond Cancun? Do we really? In Coyoacan on a Sunday, the square is jammed with thousands, music at each park bench, none of it Mexican, per se. It’s like coming to New York and expecting to only hear Country Music. How ridiculous!

That’s not to say it doesn’t exist. In the Plaza Garibaldi, you can still pay the men in black for a song, and the twirling whirling color menagerie on the stage of the Palacio Bellas Artes in lovely Alameda Park, the Ballet Folklorico, is still danced to largely traditional music.

But that’s a small part of it all. Here’s a modern, elegant, proud (and well it should be) but wholly laid back (there’s something wonderfully endearing about all those Mexican hipsters serving up cappucinos in the corner coffee bars), world-class city.

And at a quarter of the price of any other in the category, well, hey -- many happy returns.