Montezuma's New Revenge

Wanna Be Differently Drunk?

William Faulkner tells Malcolm Lowry,

"You know your prose is way too flow'ry."

"Mine is?  Bill, how about your--?"

"Il y a fleurs, et il y a fleurs."

"Sorry, I don't speak Creole.  Por que--"

"Spare me the Mexican.  You and this Corky

McCarmack--" 

                  "Cormac McCarthy, you mean?"

"Why won't you call a frijole a bean?

Anyway, your main problem was booze.

All of your sentences fairly ooze--"

"Mine do!  Bill, how about your--?"

"Mine ooze whiskey.  Yours, liqueur."

"Pulque is not a cordial, my friend.

Pulque would put you on your rear end."



The above is something I wrote a while back, along with other speculations in verse as to what might happen when various cultural icons, having gone on to Elysium, bump into one another there. For the past three days, I have been visiting  Mexico City, and now I see where I got the Faulkner-Lowry confrontation wrong. The characters of Lowry's maybe-masterpiece novel, Under the Volcano, are certainly drunk a lot and rendered drunkenly, but pulque, the traaditional Mexican potion that frequently crops up in the narrative, is not the rough intoxicant I took it to be. Far from rough, pulque's texture is comparable, I am now informed, to that of boiled okra, and you have to glug down mucho of it to get loco. The real devil-water indigenous to Mexico, which gringos are warned against in Under the Volcano, is mezcal. 
        Magical, mystical mezcal brings out the best and the worst of you, makes you drunk in a different way, say the locals. I took to it immediately.
        And I haven't had anything approaching a good night's sleep since. The first night, I couldn't drop off for hours, and when I finally did, I found myself in a sweetly gossamer world that seemed like it would never get over until it did, BOOM, and there I was in a hotel room. How many mezcals had I had? Two.
        Which might have led me to have three the next night, but I was prudent. I had one.
         The resultant nightmare was divided into three parts.
         Part One: Oh, I see, I am losing my mind. It had to come, and here it is. Well. I cannot . . . 
         Cannot finish more than about a third of a thought, and when I try to go back and pick the thought up again from the beginning and start over, the beginning is gone as well. What my mind was able to do was render its own degeneration visibly, with a pattern of dying lights. Blink blink bzzt blink . . .
         Part Two: Pathways in devouring mode. The sidewalks of Mexico City are in fact quite rough, partly because of earthquakes. But I hadn't realized that my subconsciousness was being struck by the prospects of voraciously dental sidewalks.
         Part Three: The verbal, or rather verbal-like, portion. Pweent. Qu'reakaii . . . Never mind. Can't spell 'em. That, perhaps, to an orthologically-centric person such as myself, was the real hell of Part Three. And mezcal knew!
 
        When Joan and I told friends we were holidaying in Mexico City, they looked at us as though they would likely never see us again. Be careful! they cried. In fact, Mexico City's streets are safe at night, unless you are frightened by cheerfully cool-looking people walking cheerfully cool-looking dogs. 
        Just watch out for the mezcal.  It doesn't recognize borders.