The Mexican Years; a memoir in song and story

Plain Folk

I’m old enough to do have circled around the Gringo Trail before it became a ring of resorts and all-inclusive beach clubs. I’ve slung my hammock under palm thatched palapas on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, with no one around to care if you wore clothes or not.

One of these forays to the Caribbean coast, I ended up in Belize, shortly after it changed from British Honduras. I was looking for younger sister, who was staying in-country with some friends. All I knew when I left Montreal was that they were living near a place called Central Farm.

When I got to Belize, I discovered that Central Farm was a settlement in the centre of the country which was just a jumping off point for farms and fincas in the surrounding jungle. A nice lady selling plantains by the roadside told me that she had heard of some Canadians living near the appropriately named village of Ontario (pronounced on-TAHR-ee-o). I sheltered from the rain in a chicken coop that night, and set out along the rutted jungle track to Ontario the next morning

After walking all day and finding nothing in Ontario (one store with a coke machine), as sunset approached, I met a Mennonite on a horse. He was returning to his farm in the jungle from business in Central Farm. He said, yes, there were a few Canadian girls living a couple of miles past his farm on a finca carved out of the jungle. Yes, one of them had long red hair. I could spend the night at the farm with his family and go on in the morning.

As we walked through the gathering darkness, I held the bridle of the horse to guide me, as there was no light, and he alone seemed to know the path. The velvet blackness, the hush of the jungle broken by the hum and rustle of insects, was magical. I’d never felt so immersed in reality as I did then.

Ahead, a glimmer of lamplight through the jungle signaled the farm. We arrived to a quiet house, the family all having gone to bed at sundown. The farmer’s wife got up briefly and showed me a bed in a small room off the kitchen and gave me some wonderful nutty homemade bread (I was famished). The sheets were rough, but clean with smell of washing in the stream and drying in the sun.

The next morning, before daylight, about 4:30 AM, that farmer woke me as he and the family were going to the market in Belmopan, an all-day trip. They were all there, three or four boys and one girl, and his wife. They sat around a big table in the kitchen in the pre-dawn darkness as father made breakfast. Homemade bread toasted over the wood stove, fresh laid eggs, pancakes with evaporated milk, pork sausages from the pigs out back, lashings of hot black coffee, even for the kids.

The father prepared breakfast while seated in an old-fashioned banker’s wooden swivel chair, which he used to scoot between stove and table and water pump. It was a marvel of inventiveness and economy. Then, several years later, in Peter Weir’s excellent film Witness, Jan Rubes, as the Amish father, does exactly the same thing, scooting around the kitchen in a swivel chair preparing breakfast. Did Peter Weir visit Belize? Do all Plain Folk cook in swivel chairs? I’d appreciate an answer to this conundrum.

After breakfast, the family packed the cart with produce, hitched the horse and set off for Belmopan. Leaving me in their house. Which had no locks. Plain Folk.

I headed off further into the jungle and arrived at younger sister’s friend’s finca a few hours later. The house was a thatched roof with walls of chicken wire, a mere notion towards keeping the livestock out. Colourful Mayan blankets hung where walls would be to block the wind. The house was set right in the middle of the vegetable garden, the better to keep an eye on it. The owner (homesteader, in those days in Belize) was a vegetarian and wanted to grow all her own food free of pesticides.

Two jungle lifestyles, both equally unadorned and purposeful. I found both of them idyllic (for a while, of course, you’d want your stereo and flush toilet eventually) but I think I prefer the Mennonite farmer’s set-up; he had the hi-tech solution of the swivel chair working for him.

Oh, and younger sister? She had left, moved on to the coast. More on that adventure later.

The Long Road South

I’ve lived through 11 presidents, Eisenhower to Obama. Right in the middle was Jimmy Carter, naval officer and peanut farmer. I got off the long distance Greyhound in DC and walked to the White House. It was late the night before Jimmy’s inauguration, and the hustings were built, the stands erected and the bunting draped in front of the White House. There was no one around.

I climbed over the fence around the CBS booth, which was right across from the Presidential Reviewing Stand. I sat in the chair Walter Cronkite was going to occupy 12 hours later and smoked one of my last joints. I left the roach under Walter’s chair, and headed back to the bus.

I had started in Montreal that morning, and was bound for Mexico City, by way of Laredo, TX. I was on my way back to Mexico after returning to my home in Quebec for Christmas. This was during the two or three years in the late 70s when I was laying low in Central America.

I had a job to return to, being the manager and director of an expat theatre company in Cuernavaca, a garden city full of ruins, human and stone. Before that, I had spent a winter on an island off the coast of Belize, close to the barrier reef and with great diving. I started out slinging my hamaca from a pair of palm trees outside Tony Vega’s Far Inn, the traveller’s hostel on the beach..

This was the cheapest accommodation on the island, apart from living on the beach with no anchor at all, so to speak. Not that there was much more accommodation. Several rooms to rent in local houses were about all, besides Tony’s. Nowadays, this island is covered with condos and resort homes, and I don’t know what they do for water, for when I was there the small population could hardly make it on the rainfall.

I eventually graduated to a room in Tony’s, which I shared. I paid for that by painting an attractive swinging sign for the Inn, etched in the kind of font you’d see on a Grateful Dead concert poster. Tony loved it.

Tony was a middle-aged Belizean, nut-brown and wiry, with a little terrier called Chip. His invariable greeting was “Chip! Bite their ass Chip!” Tony had to go to Miami for a couple of months to deal with a family matter (his divorce, I think) and he left me in charge of the Far Inn. Not much to be in charge of, it was a ramshackle two story beach house with rainwater cisterns and that was about it.

The delight of the island was the Barrier Reef, just offshore. Still unspoiled and mostly unfished, the reef was an accessible wonderland of marine life. Riotous Parrotfish, glowing Red Snappers, glowering Groupers, Conchs, Hammerhead sharks. I had a spear gun, a mask, snorkel and fins. That was all the hunting gear one needed for dinner. That winter, I met a fellow with a dive shop on the island, who would take us out for twenty dollars, two tanks, buoyancy compensator vests and all the gear. No training, no certificate, just a twenty dollar bill. Fun.

When spring rolled around, I headed north into Quintana Roo, which was still a lawless wilderness then. In Mexico City, they talked of Quintana Roo like it was the Amazon. It was where the gangsters from Veracruz went when it got too hot on the Gulf Coast. My destination was the Mayan temple city of Tulum, now a feature on every tourism poster of the Mexican Riviera, but back then, largely unknown and little visited.

The most romantic white sand beach lies at the foot of the cliff Tulum is built on, and it stretches for miles. A couple of hundred yards down the beach from the temple was a collection of palapas, palm thatched huts, which were rented out for protection from the sun during the day at the beach. I stayed there, with the beach to myself, regular meals at the restaurant in the car park, almost always empty, and explored the ruins at moonlight.

That part of the Yucatan peninsula is covered with ruins. It’s said that flying over the Yucatan in 1000 AD would be like flying over southern Ontario today, farms and villages everywhere. Years later, while driving the coast highway, I pulled over to pee. I walked a few yards into the jungle for modesty, and bumped smack into a tiny temple, split by a tree. In the shelter of the temple’s door and remaining roof, there was an exquisite fresco of an ascending god, still brightly coloured. This would have been the centerpiece of a modest museum’s collection, here it was forgotten in the encroaching jungle.

I bypassed Cancun (then, just being developed, and mostly a construction site) and ended up in Merida, Capital of Yucatan state. Merida is a graceful colonial city where the men dance with each other and wear glittery sandals. There is an old palacio off the Zocalo that is the grandest rundown hotel I have ever stayed in. Twenty foot ceilings, beams, tiled floors, a central atrium open to the sky, it was built in the 17^th century and hadn’t been renovated. The windows, tall and arched, swung open on the Zocalo and the warm scented air. I stayed in Merida for longer than I should have. 

Nearby was another palacio, this one still occupied by the decayed remnants of Merida's colonial ruling family. Tours were available, and I took one. Decrepit furniture, dusty ripped tapestries untended since the 1800s, and the owner, a tatty aristocrat manqué who wore his tie outside his sweater, hovering around the edges of the tour, as if to make sure the silverware (of which there was none) wasn't taken.

Next stop was Palenque, in Chiapas, by bus. I got to the village of Palenque late, and was expecting to head out to the temple complex in the morning. Fate intervened though, and a Mexican staying in the hostel asked me if I wanted go with him, he was going tonight. We took his motorbike up the long rutted road into the hills. He stopped in the dark and said there was a guard at the gate, we should get off here.

We parked the bike and followed a path up a river under the moonlight. There was an opening in the jungle ahead and all of a sudden we burst out into the plaza in front of the Palace, all alone in the temple complex. The white stone of the buildings and the ball court gleamed in the moonlight and the effect was thoroughly magical.

Just down the road from Palenque lies another magical place, Agua Azul, or Blue Water. And it is BLUE. It’s a river flowing down from the hills and across a large flat plain. There’s a park. The river is about 200 feet wide and about a foot deep in most places. The bottom is composed of the cleanest white sand imaginable, and the water, through some mineral effect, is bright blue. Just sitting in the river on the sand bottom, wiggling your toes, is enough to make you laugh out loud. It looks like what rivers must look like in heaven.

I hung my hamaca between two trees in the tall silky grass at the edge of the river, and slept like a baby. It wasn’t until I arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, up in the mountains the next night that I realized I was crawling with ticks. I had to enlist the help of a fellow traveller to pick them from the places I couldn’t see. Visit Agua Azul by all means, but don’t camp there.

After San Cristobal, buses took me further south, to Guatemala and El Salvador. My money running out, by this time I was living on buns and avocados, which sold for about a nickel. I climbed Mt Atitlan, Guatemala’s highest volcano, in shorts and a t-shirt, and spent the night in a steam vent, soaking wet, but warm. Avocados fueled that climb. The temples (each town had one, somewhere) got smaller and cruder (I never saw the splendor of Copan) until it was time to turn around and head north.

I made it as far as Puerto Arista, a nasty little beach town right at the bottom of the Mexican Pacific coast. One unpaved street, a couple of cinder block cantinas with ratty palm thatched tables and that was it. The beach dropped off about 10 feet off shore and there was an undertow that almost killed me. The waves were short and sharp and made swimming impossible. I was sick with amoebic dysentery and my money had run out. I was stretched too thin and needed an angel. He came in the form of Capt. John Yancey, USMC



Puerto Arista

Busted, broke and beaten

In a beach town in the south

It was something I had eaten

I was taking nil by mouth

Puerto Arista is a bad place

One rutted highway long

Cinderblock cantinas line the beach

And the undertow is strong

A dirty beach town on the southwest coast

Arista was where I’d come to lose

I could stay there a week, a month at most

Before they got the news

No palms grow in Puerto Arista,

The beach is pebbled and brown

The only people who stay here

Are the ones who come to drown

I was sick as a dog, out of money

Couldn’t eat to stay thin

My partner left when the going got funny

Couldn’t help me, the shape I was in

Six days in, I was getting sicker

Still eating nothing for bichos

The only thing I could hold down was liquor

Sweating through my skin and my clothes

I met my guardian angel,

My savior in a bar

Captain John Yancey, US Marine Corps (retired)

And he had a car

John had served in the Navy,

Won a Navy Cross or two

That was in the Pacific

In the middle of World War Two

He enlisted again in Korea

Charged the hill at the Choisin Reservoir

Took three bullets in the face

Before he led his platoon home from the war

He fought segregation in Arkansas

Ran for the Senate on peace

But Orval Faubus defeated him

His ideals didn’t change in the least

He ran a liquor store in Little Rock

The most decorated man in the state

He looked like a ruined sculpture

With his bullet-riddled face

He was driving north from Guatemala,

Headed for Cuernavaca and the sun

He needed someone to help him drive

And he treated me like his son

We got to Cuernavaca,

Still a beautiful town

He put me up in a hotel

He introduced me all around

John saved my life on that dirty beach

And gave me a new one in town

I owe John a debt for that

And I thank him for not letting me drown

Captain John Yancey, US Marine Corps (Retired)

Died in Arkansas in ‘85

He has legion posts named after him

And he was the bravest man alive

A dirty beach town on the southwest coast

Arista was where I’d come to lose

I could stay there a week, a month at most

Before they got the news

Everyday Hero

I was stuck in Puerto Arista, a nasty little beach town in southern Mexico on the Pacific side. It was late 1978, and I was broke, out of ideas, out of places to go, and I had amoebic dysentery, or “los bichos”. Puerto Arista was a terrible place to be broke and sick. One main drag, unpaved, lined with tin-roofed cabanas and a stony beach. No shade, no palm trees and a couple of thatched cantinas. That’s it. The beach was rocky, and there was a wicked undertow a few feet off shore, where the bottom dropped out. I almost drowned the first time I tried swimming there. The short lethal waves would break over your head before you could draw a breath, and leave you tumbling in a vortex of bubbles and sand.

I’d come with a friend, and he’d had the good sense (and the money) to leave. I couldn’t afford to. My salvation came in an unlikely form. I met him in one of the cantinas one morning.

Capt. John Yancey, USMC (Ret.) was a retired liquor store owner, and Arkansas’ most decorated war hero. He had earned his first Navy Cross in WWII, along with a battlefield commission to Lieutenant, and then joined up again for Korea at the age of 32. He and his company of 270 men attacked up Hill 1282 during the Battle of Choisin Reservoir. He took three Chinese bullets to his face, and ended up leading just 23 men back down the hill after taking it and being reinforced. He walked 10 miles to the medic tent. He won his second Navy Cross for that, plus 3 Purple Hearts. Many think he should have gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Come Vietnam, at the age of 45, he tried to enlist again, to lead a company of marines. They unfortunately wouldn’t take a man so riddled with holes. It was around this time he got involved in state politics in Arkansas, supporting integration. He ran for Senator on this platform against the noted racist and later Governor, Orval Faubus, and lost. He knew he would, but he had to do it. He’d served with too many good black soldiers.

Several years later, there he was, driving his 1963 Pontiac from Guatemala to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had an apartment and some friends. He stopped in Puerto Arista on the way, and needed someone to help him with the driving. Thanks be, he asked me. He’d pay the room and board for the trip. I tried, I really tried to drive that car, but it was a three-on-the-tree, and I just couldn’t make it work. Poor John ended up doing all the driving. John always wore a one piece overall with short sleeves and short pants that he had designed for himself.

We got to Cuernavaca, John turned in to his apartment and I booked the cheapest hotel in the center of town I could find. John spent the next few days introducing me to all his friends. They were a motley crew to be sure. There was Margaret, a dear middle-aged lady who loved square-dancing. Her ex-husband had been the CIA station chief in Chile in 1973, just 5 years before, when Allende was overthrown. She used to say “The colonels and the generals, they were so dashing, they danced so well. Especially General Leigh”. Air General Gustavo Leigh Guzman was the man who invented air-dropping dissidents out of helicopters over the ocean.

Then there was Bill, the ex-CIA spook, who seemed to have forgotten the “ex” part. He was always armed, and would often, late at night and drunk, accost innocent bypassers in their cars and force them to drive him home from the Zocalo.

The Zocalo, that’s where everyone met in the evening for café and drinks. The CIA spooks would share tables with the veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the former members of the Lincoln-Washington Brigade and its Canadian equivalent, the MacKenzie-Papineau Brigade. Blacklisted New York intellectuals would sip café express with crypto-Fascists and old OSS men, dedicated still to the downfall of Communism.

Once, sitting in the Zocalo, I saw a big black Mercedes drive through. In the back seat, clearly recognizable, were Henry Kissinger and the newly former Shah of Iran. Henry was gently taking him to his first exile, a mansion outside town. By the way, this Zocalo, unlike many more modern town squares, still had a classic Paseo every weekend evening. The boys in their finery would walk arm-in-arm clockwise around the Zocalo, while the girls, in their finery, would walk arm-in-arm counterclockwise. Everybody was on display, and many brides were courted. In the soft Mexican twilight, it’s the most romantic thing imaginable.

John introduced me to Ruth, an indomitable octogenarian from New York City. She and her husband had left the US during the McCarthy years and never returned. She was very active in the local expat cultural centre, where they had book groups, poetry readings and pottery classes. That’s another story, but I ended up building Ruth a theatre for her cultural centre and running it for her. We put on two dozen plays in two years, some in Spanish, some in English, some in both tongues. Our masterwork was a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat-Sade, with a cast of dozens. The church that was our landlord, took umbrage at the explicitly anti-clerical tone of the play and kicked us out. I left shortly after.

But I’ll never forget John Yancey, and I owe him a debt of gratitude. He literally rescued me at my lowest point, and gave me a new purpose. He died in 1986, and has a statue in Fayetteville and a Marine Reserve company in Texas named after him. He didn’t look like a hero, with his white cotton short-short onesies and his collapsed face and the tiny automatic pistol in his shirt pocket, but he was. A real life everyday hero. Semper fi, John.

Cold Warriors

It’s nine o’clock on the zocalo

The romantic paseo goes down

The socialists, spooks and cold warriors

Are buying another round

Veterans of the Spanish Civil War

Both sides, loyal and not

They all gather and drink together

Because each other is all that they’ve got

They sit with the retired case officers

From the CIA and the OSS

Men who pursued them for decades,

Now looking for a place to rest

There’s Margaret, who loves her square dancing

Once married to the station chief

Who looked after our interests in Chile

When Allende was the El Jefé

She said “I remember the generals,

They were all such handsome men,

They danced just like Astaire in the movies,

Especially Gustavo Leigh Guzman

Leigh it was who first thought of,

Then put into practice as well

The idea of dropping young students

Out of choppers into the swell

There was Bill, the old CIA man

Who carried a gun when he drank

He’d flag random cars in the zocalo

To take him home when he stank

There was my friend Captain John Yancey

US Marine Corps (Retired)

He had taken 3 bullets to the face in Korea

He was the bravest man alive

There were Ruth and Beryl Becker

New Yawkers to the bone

They had fled the US from McCarthy

For decades they called Mexico home

There was big gorgeous Gail from Tulsa

Miss Oklahoma 1965

She was one of my girlfriends

A beauty at six foot five

There were Kathy and Jean the twosome

No one could pry them apart

I managed to crack open Kathy

And she gave me a piece of her heart

There was Matt, my pal from the city

He knew all the hookers in town

We would buy our weed together

From a highway patrolman we found

One day alone in the zocalo,

Enjoying a lemon flan

I saw a Mercedes, Henry Kissinger in it

Escorting the Shah of Iran

Joni Mitchell was in town visiting

Charlie Mingus, who lived there

She was supposed to be recording an album with him

But she never came up for air

I escorted Ali McGraw around town

She was making a movie there

She hated her cast and crew and director

She thought I was a breath of fresh air

I had to leave that magic town

I returned to the cold of Quebec

But when it’s 9 o’clock on the zocalo

All my memories come flooding back

Kathy and Jean

I was living in Cuernavaca in the late 70s, a garden city south of the volcanoes that ring Mexico DF, a city full of ruins human and stone. The Zocalo was full of superannuated veterans of both sides of the Spanish Civil War, plus the retired CIA agents who had spied on them. They drank Café Mexicanos and fought the old battles together.

I was director of a bilingual expat theatre company, with a hall, and an enthusiastic membership of amateurs who did 4 or 5 plays a year for the local and expat audience. My role meant I got to meet most of the interesting North Americans in town, because my theatre company was nothing if not interesting. We did farce (James Rosenberg’s The Death And Life Of Sneaky Fitch”) and political theatre (Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade) and everything in between.

Kathy and Jean were both ESL teachers in town (what any young North American besides me was doing for a living there). They lived together in a charming garden apartment not far off the Zocalo, with an open air kitchen and a beautiful patio ringed by Bougainvillea. As an Aztec and Imperial resort town, Cuernavaca basked in eternal summer all year round, and walls were a matter of choice. The best casas were courtyard houses with roofs but no walls, just curtains. Indoors and outdoors were the same in paradise.

After meeting me at an audition, Kathy and Jean asked me to dinner. Jean was tall, ethereal, blonde with long hair like the Lady Galadriel. Kathy was not so tall, but intense, dark haired and wiry thin. They finished each others’ sentences and ate the same things. In college, six years before, I had known a pair of girls like them, Kat and Cyn. Kat was tall, ethereal and blonde, she pulled the guys, Cyn cracked wise, she got second pick. These pairs are hard to penetrate, they are closed biosystems. I wasn’t holding out much hope, but I thought Jean was the most beautiful girl I’d seen in years.

We ate and talked late into the night. Jean said she was going to bed. I said I should go. Kathy said no, I should stay. She took me to her room, and took her clothes off. “Are you coming to bed?”. It never works out the way you think.

Kathy was a wild lover, tense, excited and explosive. Neither of us carried much weight, and our hip bones clashed like battering rams, leaving bright bruises. I didn’t leave for three days.

I cast Jean as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, and she was perfect, a comatose angel. Kathy was the wild woman at the asylum of Charenton who attacks the superintendent’s wife. I have a photo of her still, in costume, rags flying and her face etched in fury.

Kathy and I were inseparable for the next year. I had a problem, though. I had a long term girlfriend in Canada, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, and she was accompanying my mother to visit me in Cuernavaca. The day of their arrival grew closer, and Kathy and I weren’t getting less close. By this time, Kathy had moved out of the garden apartment and was living in a hotel on the Zocalo that Emiliano Zapata had used as his headquarters in the rebellion in 1919. The brick walls were still pocked with machine gun fire. One afternoon, she looked close in my eyes and pushed me off her. “You’re mother’s bringing your fucking girlfriend to see you in a week, and you’re still here in my bed. Have some decency. Get out!”.

I saw Kathy around, but that was our last close encounter. I still miss her. The girlfriend turned out to be crazy, and I left Mexico several months later for good. I might still have been there, with mi senora Katerina, living la vida artistico if things had been different.

Kathy and Jean

Your city was a resort town,

Favoured by emperors and kings

You ran the local theatre

Right at the centre of things

All of the gringos and gringas

Who came through the city to teach

Would show up there to audition,

That was the extent of your reach

Jean was blank and ethereal,

Tall with long blonde hair

She looked like the Lady Galadriel

You’d never seen one so fair

Kathy was her sidekick,

Shorter, dark and alive

Not with Jean’s kind of stillness

But with her own kind of turbocharged jive

You cast Jean as Charlotte Corday

In a production of Marat-Sade

She was the perfect comatose angel

But Kathy got cast as mad

They had you over for dinner one night

To their garden apartment downtown

Bougainvillea spread over the patio

And the bright tropic stars shining down

You talked and you talked deep into the night

Until Jean said “It’s time for bed”

You said you might as well go then

“Don’t go yet” Kathy said

She took you into her bedroom

She took off her clothes in the light

“Are you going to come to bed with me,

or are you going to just stand there all night?”

Things never turn out how you think they will

You were sure you were going to score Jean

But the girl with the heart that you opened

Was Kathy, and she was your queen

You bounced off each other all summer,

Bruising your hips in the night.

She was mad, passionate and crazy,

And you loved her with all of your might

You were dealt a great hand of cards there

In that sunny Mexican town

But you let it all get away from you

When you let your chica bonita down

You had a long distance girlfriend in Canada

You hadn’t seen in a year

She said she was coming to visit

News you didn’t want to hear

Kathy threw you out one day

A week before the girlfriend arrived

She said you were shameful and stupid

That without this your love could have thrived

You left Mexico some weeks later

Dumped the girlfriend when you got home

But whenever you think of Kathy and Jean

You wish you’d never left them alone

You were dealt a great hand of cards there

In that sunny Mexican town

But you let it all get away from you

when you let your chica bonita down

Big Girls Don’t Cry

I hung out in Cuernavaca in the mid 70s, a time when Mexico was peaceful and prosperous. I ran a theatre company in town which attracted all the expats and backpackers passing through, teaching ESL to support themselves.

Most of them ended up in our plays. Amateur theatre in a foreign country is very liberating, it gives you chance to don a double disguise. One of the first plays I did, “The Death And Life Of Sneaky Fitch”, a western farce, had a lot of townspeople and supernumeraries; it was perfect to get started with.

A sidebar; a key moment in the play is when the villain, Rackham, has to cave in before the comic protagonist, Sneaky Fitch, and plead for his life. The man playing Rackham, our brilliant scenic painter, was a proud Mexican who made an excellent chilling villain in black. He told me later, in confidence, that getting down on his knees and pleading, even in jest, was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. I thought differently about the Mexican character after that.

I was the director, there were a lot of young women, single and otherwise, in the company, and I hooked up with most of them at one time or another. My best friend and lover, though, was Gail Anderson, who played the lead floozie in the farce.

Anderson wasn’t her real last name, that was the name of the man she was living with in town, pretending to be his wife, for society’s sake. He had a casita and a novia in the Capital, he split his time between his two households. I got Gail in her spare time.

Gail was gorgeous, in her mid 30s and about six feet five inches tall. She towered over me and weighed twice what I did. Despite her enormous size, though, she was beautiful beyond words and perfectly proportioned, quick witted, funny and smart. She had been Miss Oklahoma 1965, and while she didn’t grab the tiara, she made it to the show in Atlantic City with Bert Parks.

Making love with Gail was like climbing Mount Pussy, you wanted to yell from the peak when you got there. She was a fun lover and always had time for me. One day, we lay entwined in bed and watched the backyard pool slop its contents out into the barranca below as another earthquake hit Cuernavaca.

The gravel drive saved our dignity more than once. If you heard the car, you had just enough time to get into a bathing suit and then into the pool before the front door opened. I was living a Feydeau farce, with absent husbands, mistresses and wayward wives. All I needed was a window to jump through, and it almost came to that more than once.

I don’t know what happened to Gayle. She was a professional wife, and wasn’t really suited for much else. I sensed her man was slowly edging her out of the Cuernavaca house, spending more time with his novia in Mexico City. It’s a privileged life (or was) living as an executive’s wife in Mexico, and you can get used to it. The only record I can find of her is her name in the rolls of the Miss America Foundation. I wonder if she still dreams of the tiara?

Big Girls Don’t Cry

Born on the prairies, corn fed and tall

She was Miss Oklahoma, 1965

Gail was a beauty, she had it all

No one was more alive

She was just a pretend wife

Living it up in a pretend town

Sharing the married name of a man

Who wasn’t even her own

She was a big girl, a beautiful girl

And so full of fun

But by the time I left Mexico

Her best years had run

Her casa was one of the finest in town

Her flower arrangements were crisp

Her dinner parties were legend

She talked with a bit of a lisp

She was a sensitive lover, and grateful

And a challenge to love in return

All six feet five inches of her

Had passion and energy to burn

We spent long hours naked,

Sweating in their bed by the pool

Waiting for the gravel drive to announce

Brooke was back and we had to cool

Just time from the first crunch of gravel

To when he came in the front door

To scramble into bathing suits

Get all our clothes off the floor

Brooke was growing restive, tired of Gail at last

He had a chica he kept in the city,

Her time was soon coming,

Gail’s time was soon past

She wasn’t equipped for much

She was a chatelaine, not a wife

Besides parties, dinners and love

She wasn’t much good at real life

Miss Oklahoma, 1965

But she never wore the Tiara

She never heard Bert Parks sing to her

Never had tears smudge her mascara

She was a big girl, a beautiful girl

And so full of fun

But by the time I left Mexico

Her best years had run

If You Can Say It You Can Climb It

Mt Popocatepetl hangs over the Mexican city of Cuernavaca like a cloud over a sunny walled garden. Popo has been an active volcano for thousands of years, and occasionally belched during the years I lived there in the late 70s.

I was running an amateur theatre group for the local expat Arts Centre, and I was having fun. I knew all the Canadians and Americans and Britons in town, and most of them either appeared in our shows or attended them.

Cuernavaca was known as Cuauhnahuac when it was an Imperial Aztec resort town, and that is the name it carries in Malcolm Lowry’s seminal novel “Under The Volcano”, the volcano being Popo. Everyone in town had read the book, dined at the cafés mentioned in it, walked the parks and lived on the streets. In the book, the antihero, Geoffrey Firmin, is the Honourary British Consul in Cuauhnahuac, spends the Day of the Dead (November 1) getting historically and monumentally drunk and ruining his already tattered life.

That was not my experience of Cuernavaca. It was a city full of lovely people with a beautiful climate and thousands of stories. One day in the Zocalo, while sitting at a café, a saw a black Mercedes go by with Henry Kissinger and the newly former Shah of Iran in the back seat. Joni Mitchell was in town recording her album Mingus. Ali McGraw and Dean Martin’s son, Dean Jr. were in town filming Players, a tennis-based bodice ripper. As it turned out, I ended up escorting Ms McGraw around town for a few days, as she heated everyone on the film.

I had lots of girlfriends, and there were always new recruits coming into town to teach ESL as the ones I knew left, moving on down the continent along the Gringo Trail. There was Cathy, a guitarist who toured a very nice little one man Shakespeare show with me, playing ballads between me doing the chestnuts. There was Gail, the Amazon, six and a half feet of beauty and boobs. There was Kathy, wiry, skinny, intense and furious in bed. There was a girl so blonde, with eyes so green, and a Danish accent so perfect, and a body so tastefully sculpted and curved that I’ve clean forgotten her name. Life was sweet.

My buddies were mostly Matt and Simon. Matt was from Virginia and taught ESL. He wandered into an audition, and was amazed to find a fellow Deadhead in town running a theatre, of all things. He was solid, straightforward and my best friend. We shared our weed buys and our part-time girlfriends. He knew more about the seamy side of the country than I did, and his Spanish was faultless, unlike mine. He knew all the better hookers in town.

Simon was an austere Englishman, a remittance man if ever there was one. He was a commercial airline pilot. He had flown in Scotland for Caledonian Air, then he didn’t anymore. He never told me why. He was in Mexico trying to get a job with either of the national carriers, Aeromexico or Mexicana, but both airlines almost never hired non-nationals. He was in the process of getting his Mexican citizenship in the hope of filling this requirement. I got the sense that Simon had blotted his copybook so badly, there were few places that would hire him.  I’m not sure what Simon subsisted on but he had a little apartment where he lived alone and he dealt in that staple of the shadier side of the expat world, selling Scotch Whisky in bond to mature at the distillery in the keg which you (ostensibly) own. Most places, it’s a racket, and I think Simon might have been drinking his inventory.

Simon, Matt and I decided we needed to get out of town and challenge ourselves. Popocatepetl is the second tallest mountain in Mexico, fifth highest in North America, just less than 18,000 feet. And, as a volcano, it wasn’t a technical climb, just a tiring one. Here was a challenge we could accept. We loaded into Simon’s Renault 12 one morning and headed east from town into the foothills of the volcano. Our first stop was Tepoztlan, a unique Aztec village under the eaves of the mountain. Tepoztlan is a town where everyone still speaks Nahuatl, and the Spanish-speaking Mexicans from the Capital are the foreigners. Tepoztlan has been an important regional centre for more than 1000 years and is thought to be the birthplace, not only of the Nahuatl language, but of Mezcal as well.

We stocked up on food at the market in front of the church on the town square. This church had broad steps like a pyramid leading up to the doors. No one ever went through the doors, the ceremonies (in Nahuatl) were all performed on the steps, and involved rites and icons that certainly weren’t Catholic. The steps and the door of the church were decorated with corn dolls the day we were there. Tepoztlan is the Brigadoon of Mexico, existing completely in another age. We climbed the stone stairway cut into a cleft in the cliff that hangs over the village and looked out from the platform of one of the most ancient temples in a country full of ancient temples. Below was the village, and off to the east was Popo, now filling our field of vision almost completely. There was an idle drift of vapour coming from the crater at the peak, and some clouds lingered on the flanks. There was snow on the crest. We wondered if the jackets and sweaters (my entire warm wardrobe) we had brought would be warm enough.

The rutted road up the flanks of the volcano tested the suspension of Simon’s Renault 12, and we spent a lot of time walking along beside the car guiding Simon along the tops of the ruts. It was late afternoon by the time we got to the saddle between Popo and its sister volcano to the north, Ixtaccihuatl. This is a famous spot, for here it was that Cortés stood and looked down on the might of Mexico, the world’s largest metropolis, for the first time in 1519. There’s a village at the divide. We stocked up on bottled water and brandy in the village, got some cold beers, had dinner and headed out of town to camp for the night. It was considerably colder than we had anticipated (the saddle lies at about 10,000 feet) and no one slept very well.

This was just as well, because we were awake before dawn and ready to go. We packed our bags in the car and took just food for one day and lots of water (and our sweaters). There was a trailhead with a series of signs warning of dangers (cold, ice, landslides, eruptions) and the trail was already busy with hikers. From the saddle, the route up the mountain is basically a long spiral slog around the cone until the path gets to the brim of the crater. Becaue the path spiraled up the mountain, the pitch wasn’t too great, but it was much longer than the direct route.

After the first hour, we were exhausted, and we were barely one quarter turn around the cone. We paused, heaving for breath, and ate breakfast of fruit and hard-boiled eggs. We slogged on that way for 5 hours, getting to about the 16,000 foot mark. That was it. No mas. It was just after noon, and we had to get down the mountain and back to Cuernavaca. Besides, our tongues were sunburnt. This is far more serious than you might think. At 16,000 feet, the UV is toxic, and when you’re slogging up a mountain through crushed lava, your tongue hangs out. And when your tongue has third degree burns, you can’t talk or eat.

As anyone who has tried climbing up and down a Mesoamerican temple or a volcano, going down is actually more tiring then going up. On the way down, sun behind us so our tongues were no longer being toasted, I spotted something way down below the path, in the brush on the side of the mountain. It was round and bright emergency orange. Simon and Matt, exhausted, and in a hurry to get home, implored me to leave it, but it was too enticing. Emergency orange is meant to be seen.

I headed straight down the mountain towards the object, galloping through the loose scree. This was a much steeper descent than the path took and it got me to the tree line. When I arrived, I found a very expensive, very warm, very heavy duty Himalayan expedition down parka in stuff sack. Some serious mountaineer, not an amateur like us, had watched it bounce away down the mountain and decided it wasn’t worth his time retrieving it.

We got home late that night, sore and sunburned all over, but especially on our tongues and foreheads. We were crazy to allot one day to 8000 feet of vertical, to go as ill-equipped (I think I wore boat shoes), to have so little regard for our skins in the sun, and to have so little in the way of warm gear. After that trip, though, I had the warmest coat in Mexico. And, when I left the country later that year and returned to Montreal, to a winter that routinely challenged -30 degrees on the thermostat, I still had the warmest coat in the country. It saved my youngest sister’s life one winter when she managed a Montreal restaurant and had to cash and close at 3 AM every night, in -40 degree weather.

I kept that coat for twenty five years, and finally let it go just a few years ago, after almost all of it’s down had leaked out. The one little bit of the corner that had been exposed in the stuff sack on the mountainside had faded so severely that it wore out, and the coat began to leak down, barely stemmed by duct tape. The coat got shabbier and shabbier, still emergency orange and hard to miss in a crowd. It finally had to go.

Lesson s learned. Don’t climb big mountains for a lark. Do get off the beaten path if you see something interesting, you never know what you’ll miss.

Climbing Mount Popo In Boat Shoes

Three chavos leave Cuernavaca

Into the mountains, into the past,

Packed into a battered Renault Twelve

Losing the century fast

A land where no Spanish is spoken

Where the Old Ways still hold true

They passed a church draped in corn dolls

With doors no one ever went through

Climbing Mount Popo in boat shoes

It seemed like the thing to do

Climbing Mount Popo in boat shoes

They didn’t know what they’d go through

The ruts are deeper the closer you get

The mountain is candied with snow

They walked on the path to guide Simon

As he piloted the Renault

When they reached the Paso de Cortes

Where the stout man viewed the might

Of the empire he came to conquer

They camped and spent the night

Stout Cortes took a flyer

And burned his ships on the strand

Set off inland with his horses and men

To conquer a whole new land

He had 13 horses and 500 men

A creole mistress, a cannon or two

With this he captured the world’s greatest city

And we were Conquistadores too

The mountain loomed over us smoking

As we started our march to the plain

The women and children driven before us

And men just waiting to be slain

Moctezuma tried playing the long game

And he knew right away what it cost

His life was forfeit to Cortes,

His entire Empire was lost

Sleeping eluded the climbers

The altitude was too high

The headaches, and the ancient dreams

Turned them out of their bags before five

The path to the top is a long one

It curls round the cone like a snake

Taking fifteen miles round to achieve but four up

But the climb is too steep to take straight

They got as far as fifteen thousand feet,

Just three thousand feet from the top

Thin air, the cold, their sunburned tongues

Conspired to force them to stop

El Popo is one serious mountain

Fifth highest on the continent

They decided to climb it like children

No gear, no warm clothes, just intent

They were the Conquistadores of old

They’d burned their ships on the beach

To make sure the decision to return to the pass

Was one not easily reached

They knew now why the Conqueror

Had stayed in Mexico to grow old

He’s seen the greatest thing in the world

Heard the greatest story told

Climbing Mount Popo in boat shoes

It seemed like the thing to do

Climbing Mount Popo in boat shoes

They didn’t know what they’d go through

Pop’s Parka

The winter of ’63, which blanketed Northeastern North America with about 5 feet of snow, was prime playtime for me, not hell on earth. We had snowbanks 10 feet high along the driveway, into which my siblings and I dug tunnels and caves, blissfully unaware of the danger.

Winter was on everyone’s frozen lip. If it wasn’t misinformed grousing about climate change (“You call this global warming?”), it was wondering what everyone did before Canada Goose Parkas (I don’t have one, that’s not a plug). When it started getting seriously cold, around Christmas, I tried to find my parka. Bright green, I had bought it at The Bay in Banff on New Year’s Eve 1989. It replaced the bright emergency orange mountaineering parka I had found atop Mount Popocatepetl.

My wife and I had taken the Transcontinental from Toronto (one of the last departures to take the southern route through Banff and the Spiral Tunnel). I decided to travel light on the train, and buy my winter gear at destination. The trip was wonderful, historic, and uniquely Canadian. We stopped, train draped in icicles, in Thunder Bay, at dawn. I got up from our berth (we had a cabin) and watched the crew load crates of flapping trout, fresh from the lake, on the train, to be cooked two hours later for breakfast. As we rolled across Northern Ontario, the whole train smelled rich with the roast they were preparing for dinner. We got off to stretch our legs in Winnipeg at midnight to experience the sharpest, deepest cold I had ever felt.

Anyway, this stalwart parka, 26 years old and at the top of its game, had disappeared. And Toronto would no longer allow me to go out in a leather jacket, or a down vest. We were now officially having a Canadian winter, after having English winters for about ten years. We were now seeing the other side of climate change - the winters get colder as the summers get hotter.

I dug deep in my spare closet and saw a glint of nylon at the back. There was a serviceable olive green hooded parka back there. The memories flooded back…

1980, St. Catharines, my grandfather’s funeral. He’d died of old age at 87 after chain-smoking all his life. A cowboy in Alberta before the First War, he had learned how to roll a cigarette one handed on horseback, pouch and all. That impressed me most of all the things that were remarkable about him, but he had served in the Royal Flying Corps in WWI, as an observer in DH5A bi-planes, then gone on to serve in WWII as a Captain in the Canadian Army. He was a renowned naturalist and birder who had a birch bark canoe you could pick up with one hand. It’s in the Canadian Museum of Civilization now.

I had just gotten back from 3 years in Mexico, laying low, speaking Spanish and living in Cuernavaca, a town full of veterans of the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War, rubbing shoulders on the Zocalo every evening. I was underweight, broke, and suffering from amoebas, or “bichos”. I had no visible future, I was 26 and I was living at home in Quebec in a cabin under a butternut tree. And I wasn’t dressed for the weather.

The entire family drove to St Catharines for the funeral. My mother and her sisters were disposing of Pop’s few belongings. They came upon his parka, green nylon, with fake fur around the hood. My mother said to me “You’d better take this, you don’t have any winter clothes”. I took it gratefully and wore it all through the funeral and our stay in Ontario.

As we were leaving, I cleared out my pockets of the various napkins and Kleenex that had gathered there. Out of the inside pocket of the parka came a brown cash envelope. In it was $400 in 20s. It was Pop’s last pension cheque, he’d picked it up from the bank just before he died.

Up until that moment, I literally had no idea what to do next, where to go. An idea popped into my head. An old school friend rented a house in Toronto, the one place I needed to go to make it in Canada. And now I had a grubstake.

I got dropped off by my family on their way back to Quebec, and found myself in the big smoke with $400. It lasted for 6 weeks. I moved into a spare bedroom in the house. I got work as an extra in films, I started auditioning.  It was literally the start of the adult stage of my life.

That was 35 years ago. I’ve been through several careers, all of them interesting, but none of them might have happened if my grandfather hadn’t left me a secret legacy. And the parka? It’s very warm, and the hood is better than a hat. The cuffs and the collar are stained with nicotine, and it still has his name sewn in the collar, below the Eaton’s label. He was born in the 19th century and I’m writing in the 21st; that’s a lot of history in that parka.