For most gringos, Mexico is a place to retire. The Mexicans say, “The
Americans come here to die.” Not exactly. It isn’t why they come,
but it is what they do, there being eventually no choice. Everybody has to
croak somewhere, so why not in the sunshine with little brown kids running
back and forth and the street dogs lounging contentedly about? It beats, for
some anyway, a wretched sanitarium and lots of tubes.
In the hills on the north side of town, where the nice houses are, you see
aging couples like couples anywhere. It could be Lauderdale. They have each
other and insurance and pensions and savings. In the bars you see the old
single guys. They have close to nothing.
At nine in the morning they sit on green iron benches and wait for the cantinas
to open. Little beyond white hair unites them in appearance. Some are thin,
others fat, others whatever you can think of except moneyed. “Drunks”
is not quite the right word for them. They are just old guys whose lives are
spent and they sit around and drink beer and wait. It’s what they have.
They seldom fall off stools or get into fights. They are anything but dangerous.
They are just old guys with nothing, waiting.
Some would find them reprehensible. Why don’t they do something
improving, learn to knit, or take up square dancing? This is harsh. What does
a man do when he is seventy years old, his wife died eight years ago in Louisiana,
and the trucking firm no longer wants him as a driver? Social Security and
a small pension don’t go far in America. He comes to Ajijic and moves
into the residential hotel, Italo’s, a block from the plaza and easy
walking distance to the bars. It’s cheap and decent and the rooms come
with kitchenette and the maids clean them. I’ve stayed there.
He’s seventy and tired, too old to learn a language and probably not
of that bent anyway. He doesn’t want to learn to square dance. He is
not looking for a cultural experience, not looking for much of anything. Women
no longer interest him except as nice people, and anyway the diabetes doesn’t
help in that department. So he talks to his friends. And he drinks. It takes
the curse off. Besides, if he bothers no one else, it is the business of no
one else—n’est-ce pas?
It is a mistake to think these men to be of no account because they are ending
their days on a bar stool. They have had lives, traveled, drifted, worked,
loved, had families or not, seen things and done things. Often they are intelligent
and thoughtful. They are just through.
We live in a censorious age in America, an age of “Gotcha!” in
which drinking looms loathsome, smoking is a crime to be punished, second-hand
smoke a fearful threat to children and plants and wallpaper. Oh dear. We all
must be vigilant for racism, sexism, and the rest. Psychologists call it “passive
aggressiveness,” though I think that “the Higher Priss”
does nicely. Well, I say, each to his or her or its own. Still, I have always
found people who smoke and drink and do the occasional doob to be more interesting
than those who don’t—certainly than the drab Comstocks of the
current Carryan Nation.
So I’ll cut these guys some slack. You choose an exit door, or fall
through one. They have. So will you.
Not all stay in one place. In Italo’s when I was there I met a guy
well into his seventies who was about to get on a third-class bus to Guatemala,
I think it was. He didn’t walk too well and moved as if he had sand
in his joints. He seemed sad but was keeping his chin up. He knew a hotel
in a nice town outside Guatemala City where the food was cheap and the young
girls just so pretty. He meant nothing sexual. They were just pretty, like
pictures. He liked watching them and the kids and Guatemala.
Now that’s rough, I thought. To be at the end of his days and bouncing
around bad roads on a Guatemalan bus, alone, going where he probably knew
nobody—that’s not the feather-bed route out the door. But he didn’t
want to spend the winter in Ajijic. At least he was free. I wished him well.
Some drunks have other stories. There was a fellow, in his thirties I’d
guess, who always wore a white cowboy hat and lied compulsively about what
daring things he had done. This is common. It’s called “border
promotion.” You know: “I was a SEAL team leader before I was an
astronaut, between being a fighter pilot and president of IBM.” Sometimes
it seems like half the gringo population used to be in the CIA.
Anyway, the guy with the white cowboy hat said he used to be a dead-end drunk,
and had the tremor to prove it. But he was over it, he said, and in fact seemed
to be. Then one night he got a ride home with somebody, pulled a pistol from
somewhere, put it under his chin and blew the top of his head off. AIDS, or
at least HIV. We make our choices. The consensus was that he should have done
it somewhere else, where it wouldn’t have put a hole in the roof of
the car and generally made a mess.
Sometimes one of the old guys will take up with a poor Mexican gal of twenty-five
with four kids. They move in together. You could say that it was absurd, that
neither knew the other’s language and he was a dirty old man and she
a gold-digger. You could also try to exercise a little decency. Not everybody
has choices. Usually he treats her well, puts food on the table, maybe gets
her some dental work or insists that the kids go to school. It’s better
than nothing. She cooks and keeps house and has a few years of security, and
he leaves her whatever he can. I’ve seen such couples who seemed happy
together. You play the hand you draw.
Things are different for those of intellectual resources, who take up photography
seriously, fly ultralights, read, or keep on at whatever they did for a living
at a reduced level. I’m not sure how different it is. They too are waiting.
So are we all. But there were drunks before there were moralists, and I hope
there will be drunks after, as they are so much less tedious, and closer to
the human condition.
