If You Can Say It You Can Climb It

If You Can Say It You Can Climb It

Mt Popocatepetl hangs over the Mexican city of Cuernavaca like a towering 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 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, 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, I 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. filmed Players, a tennis-based bodice ripper, on the outskirts. As it turned out, I ended up escorting Ms McGraw around town for a few days, as she hated everyone on the film. 

One of the nicest ladies in my theatre group had been married to the CIA station chief in Chile when Allende was killed and the revolution put down. She used to talk of the Colonels: "They were such handsome men. And such good dancers. Especially Gustavo Leigh". Air General Gustavo Leigh was the one who invented dropping dissidents out of helicopters over the sea. Two old buddies who drank together in the Zocalo in the evening had been enemies all their lives. One was ex-OSS, dedicated to fighting communism, and the other was ex-Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, dedicated to fighting for Marxism. My good friend, Capt John Yancey, USMC (Ret'd) was a decorated war hero whose face had been smashed by bullets in the Korean War. He owned a liquor store in Little Rock, and campaigned against Orval Faubus for integration. These were just a few of the interesting expats I knew.

I had lots of girlfriends, and there were always new ones 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 Gayle, 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 Texas and taught ESL. He wandered into an audition, and was amazed to find a fellow Dead Head 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 introduced me to Little Feat and the matchless voice of Nacha Guevara.

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 expat society, 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, just less than 18,000 feet, and as tall as anything in North America. 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 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 village 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 god Quetzalcoatl, 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 white cloth 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 back road up the flanks of the volcano tested the suspension of Simon’s Renault, 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. The Paso de Cortés 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. We stocked up on bottled water and brandy, 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. We all suffered from altitude headaches.

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. Because 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 knows, 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 safety orange. Simon and Matt, exhausted, and in a hurry to get home, implored me to leave it, but it was too enticing. Safety 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 thermometer, I still had the warmest coat in the country. It saved youngest sister’s life one winter when she managed a Montreal restaurant and had to cash and close at 3 AM every night,  walking home in -40 degree weather.

I kept that coat for twenty five years, and finally let it go just a few years ago. The one little bit of the corner that had been exposed at the mouth of 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 safety orange and hard to miss in a crowd. It finally had to go.

Lessons 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 find.

Taxi From Hell

Taxi From Hell

This is one of my Mexico stories. I was living in Cuernavaca, a pleasant resort town south of the volcanoes that ring the capital city. The town had been the vacation resort of the Aztec Emperors, the Emperor Maximilian (the brother of the Austrian Emperor and Napoleon's puppet) and his bride Carlotta had a palacio here, and it had been Hernan de Cortes’ final home. Cortes’ palace is now a municipal building and is decorated with immense murals by Diego Rivera.

Emilano Zapata made the town his headquarters during the abortive revolution of 1919. When I lived there, it was home to a substantial community of expatriates and remittance men, ex-CIA spooks, and old socialists. They would drink together in the Zocalo at night, while the Mariachis played and the young men and women did the Paseo.

I was the director of a bilingual theatre group in town, subsidized and paid for by the local expat arts centre, which, for all I know, was subsidized and paid for bythe US State Department. We did plays with big casts, so everyone had a role. We played to ourselves, and our Spanish-language shows drew considerably from the poor corner of town where our theatre was located.

The driving force behind this was an indomitable octogenarian called Ruth, very New Yawk, who had lived with her husband Beryl in town since McCarthy had driven them out of the US. They were the kind of people who didn’t just know who Arshile Gorky was, they had known him as a friend. Ruth looked like a commanding toad, and wore muu muus. She was interested in everything and very up on modern culture.

One of my jobs was to escort Ruth into Mexico City from time to time to see plays at the bilingual theatre in that city, or attend shows at the university. The best way into the city was by bus; there was a modern highway that sliced up the mountains, over the top and down into the huge bowl Mexico is built in. The buses on that route were Primeros, First Class, with a hostess, cold drinks, snacks and a fresh doily on the headrest. A thoroughly pleasant experience.

There was another route into the city. That was the old Highway 1, which switchbacked up the moutains through the cloud forests and the mountain pines and the little alpine villages. It had twists, turns and vertiginous drop-offs, and the bus lines which used it, the Segundos, or second class lines, Flecha Roja, or Red Arrow, among them, regularly lost buses full of poorer Mexicans into the barrancas.They had the toughest lawyers in Mexico, and would routinely threaten the relatives of the victims into not suing.

Anyway, Ruth, and I, and my girlfriend, who was visiting from Canada (and interrupting a number of promising relationships) boarded the First Class bus one afternoon to go into the city to see a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, at the university, which was across Mexico City from the bus station.

Across the city sounds so innocent, but that meant it was on the other side of one of the largest, densest, yet most sprawling metropolises in the world. Twenty million people lived in that huge bowl, many of them below the poverty line. Traffic is horrendous, traffic signals are merely a notion, and every driver is a killer in waiting.

We got off at the bus station and hailed a taxi. It was the standard Renault 12 sedan. I got in the front and Ruth and Kristen in the back. We took off down the Periferico, which circles the city, as wide as a highway and as fast, but with traffic lights.

A man jumped from the centre boulevard into our lane, trying to get across traffic. Our driver didn’t even swerve. There was a bang, a double bump and I whipped my head around to see the car behind us running over the man’s lifeless body. Our driver paid no attention, and increased speed. I started yelling at him to stop. Ruth started hyperventilating in the back seat, and Kristen reached over the seat back and started to strangle the driver.

I reached for the keys, but he swatted my hand away. He was starting to lose control because of Kristen’s ministrations to his throat, when a car pulled up beside us on the driver’s side and started banging our taxi toward the curb. Every time he hit the side of our cab, our driver would scream at him. Finally, we reached a stretch where the sidewalk was bounded by iron bollards. Our savior gave one more shove and the taxi bounced off one bollard and became stuck between the next two.

The pursuing driver pulled up ahead of us, got out and wrestled open the taxi’s door, he grabbed the driver and tried to pull him out on the street. While this was going on, on the other side of the car, I was quickly pulling my two female companions out and hailing another cab. In Mexico, if there’s a traffic accident, the police throw everybody, victims, witnesses, offenders, in jail for a day or two to cool down, and I didn’t want that to happen to the ladies. Kristen was too angry to expose to the authorities, and Ruth kept saying she was about to faint (although she never did).

Another cab pulled up, and I hustled my charges into it. Our savior turned and started urging us to stay, as we were witnesses. I pretended I spoke no Spanish and didn’t understand him. We took off for the university.

The play was excellent and we had a good time, especially Ruth. She promptly forgot the death on the Periferico, enjoyed the play and probably slept well that night. I didn't really.

Stocks And Bondage

Stocks And Bondage

I’m a boomer, and when I was growing up the Dow Jones Average was a three-digit number. And it served purposes other than measuring the value of a basket of stocks. It’s said the ad agency for the makers of Colt 45, a malt liquor favoured by inner city blacks, bought the radio sponsorship of the daily closing Dow Jones Average. The client was dumbfounded. The last thing their customer base was interested in was equities. What was behind this? It turned out the Dow Jones closing average was also the “number” in the “numbers game”, the illegal gambling lottery played in every American inner city. It was the one radio hit that Colt 45’s customers ALL listened to.

I’ve had my adventures in the equities trade. The first stock I bought was a penny dreadful I bought on the Vancouver Stock Exchange (probably brokered by the legendary Murray Pezim). This was when I was working in the bush, prospecting and line-cutting. The stock was in a mining claim I had actually staked, which might yield gold. It was a true penny dreadful, 10 cents a share, 1500 shares, $150. A lot of money for me in 1977. The stock moved up a few cents, down a few cents. The assay results came in and they were inconclusive. I sold the stock back to the prospector who owned the claim for the $150 I’d spent on it. He had more faith than I, but he I think died poor.

In the mid-90s, I met a man in Alberta with the best business plan/hobby I’ve ever heard of. CN and CP were divesting short lines all over the west, spurs to grain elevators off the main routes. This was inconveniencing grain farmers no end, who now had to truck their grain farther and farther to the railhead. He was a ferroequinophile (a railroad lover, basically) from a railroad family.  He raised a stake from farmers along the short lines and made lowball bids to the two main railways, who were only too glad to get rid of the lines. He built a fleet of yard engines suitable for short line work and leased grain cars. He started to spread his operations across the grain belt, until he had lines in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He called his venture Western Central RR and had an appropriately art deco railroad script logo. He used to go to model railroad conventions, and when asked what gauge his layout was, respond "Standard Gauge, what's yours?".

I owned 100 shares at $15 each, $1500 worth. For a long while, I’d tell people (this was the late 90s) “railroads are going to be the railroads of the 21^st century”. I firmly believed the energy efficiency of railroads would lead to their commercial resurrection.

Western Central’s stock rose past $25 then settled back down to $12. I sold it at $15 when it got back there. Those two first ventures into the stock market were strictly get-rich-quick plays, and I swore to myself, next time I would invest for value.

Well the next time came in the dot com boom peaking around 1999. I owned Nortel. I bought it about $40 and watched it geyser up to $140. I sold it the day before the stock crashed. I made rather a lot of money on that, which I turned around and put into a magazine I was involved with. I got out of that with about half what I’d put in.

Meanwhile, all these years, ever since I got my first Macintosh Classic II computer, I’d been buying Apple stock. Warren Buffett says buy what you use, and nowadays everything I use except my razor is made by Apple. I’d buy 10 here, 20 there. I started buying at $12. By the time I got out of the magazine investment, I had about 120 shares, value about $45 each. I poured the rest of my capital into AAPL. I basically stopped trading at this point and slept on them.

The next time I looked, they were worth $450 each, ten times what I’d bought them for, and were climbing towards $600. If I had kept those shares (they split 7-for-1 a year ago and are now worth about $120 US), they’d be worth six figures. You’d think I was a very smart value investor. Too bad. You'd be wrong.

The financial meltdown hit my business hard, Market research is one of the first corporate expenditures to be slashed in difficult times. I was a freelancer, with a small number of clients, several of whom were in trouble too. I started selling my Apple shares to live on, even as they climbed in value.

The crisis is over, I have 35 shares left, and I’m holding on to them for now. After all, I’ve had them since Steve Jobs had hair.

Big Girls Don't Cry

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, there to teach 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 in the company, single and otherwise, and I slept with most of them at one time or another. My best friend and lover, though, was Gayle 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 Gayle in her spare time.

Gayle 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 perfectly proportioned, gorgeous, thick haired, and also quick witted, funny and smart. She had been Miss Oklahoma 1965, and while she didn’t don the tiara, she made it to the show in Atlantic City with Bert Parks.

Making love with Gayle 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 when Brooke was out of town. One day, we lay entwined in bed and watched the backyard pool slop its contents out into the ravine below as another earthquake hit Cuernavaca.

The gravel drive saved our ass 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 society wife, good with servants, place settings and flowers, and wasn’t really suited for much else. I sensed she was being slowly edged out of the Cuernavaca house by Brooke, he was spending more time with his novia in Mexico City. It’s a privileged life (or was) living as a foreign 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 dreams of tiaras?

A Fun Crowd

A Fun Crowd

I’m a Boomer, and, unlike hundreds of thousands of people my age, I had an actual ticket to Woodstock ($7 a day for three days) but didn’t go. I was 15 and I couldn’t get a ride (from my home a hundred miles away in Connecticut). I was full of regret at my friends’ stories of music, mud and marijuana (there wasn’t much sex, not enough privacy).

So, four years later, at 4:30 one Friday morning in July 1973, three friends and I piled into someone’s mother’s station wagon and headed off for Watkin’s Glen, NY, in the Finger Lakes, the former site of the US Grand Prix, and still an active racetrack. Our destination was Summer Jam 73, “to be held rain or shine”, featuring The Grateful Dead, The Band and The Allman Brothers.

We started to run into pre-show traffic around Syracuse, still 70 miles from the concert site. We’d all seen the film Woodstock. We had visions of hiking for a day to get in, and missing the show (it was a one-day affair, all Saturday and late into the night). We were going to be there a day early. So apparently, were hundreds of thousands of others.

We got through Watkin's Glen (the race track was on the other side of town) and parked in the increasingly dense fleet of cars beside the road. We hitched a ride with a caretakers’ pickup truck that had right of way right up to the back door of the concert site. Just like in the film, the chicken wire fence had been trampled and there was no one around collecting our tickets ($10).

There was a pop-top VW van, however, with a big hand painted sign on the roof saying “Grass - $10”. As we hadn’t brought any, crossing the border and all, this was very welcome. There was a guy sitting at a card table out front of the van filling baggies from a garbage bag at his feet as fast as he could, while a girl beside him took the $10 bills. Inside the van, they were pushing more garbage gags out the door. Business was brisk.

When we got past the fence and the van, we were in the field, at the top of a long slope leading down to the stage, with the woods in the background and a small pond hidden in the trees. We had a theory that the sound would be best by the mixing board, so we went to the middle of the field where the control station was and sat right in front of it. We basically didn’t move from there for two days.

OK, you’re thinking about toilets. So were we. They had learned since Woodstock, and there were probably a thousand well-attended porta-potties lined up at the back. The line-ups weren’t too long, and they were frequently cleaned, so it wasn’t horrible. What was difficult was making your way through 100 acres of packed humanity and then finding your way back. It could take an afternoon. I have no idea what people who didn’t have a reference like the mixing board to return to did.

By the time we got in and settled, it was drawing on evening, and the Grateful Dead were finishing their legendary three hour sound check - a major concert in itself which survives on (of course) a bootleg. I was used to the San Francisco Dead of the Workingman’s Dead album, scruffy, bearded, hairy, strictly civilians. But the Grateful Dead lined up on stage down there about 200 feet away looked like the Beach Boys. Haircuts, white pants, sports shirts, they might have been a boy band. Their music was anything but puerile, though.

We had missed The Band’s and The Allman Brother’s sound checks early in the day, but this was a concert worth the price of admission alone. The Dead were clearly into it, tearing off Tennessee Jed, Sugaree and others as though it was a headline show and they meant it. They were used to doing 6 shows a week, so this was probably not hard for them. We went to sleep (sort of) in our sleeping bags on the hard ground, after a dinner of trail mix and Caribou (red wine mixed with rye whiskey, the Quebec concert-goer's drink of choice).

The Dead opened the next morning about 11 AM, playing two long sets filled with classics. They were followed by The Band, who only got one set in before the clouds opened and a drenching downpour happened (apparently you can’t have a rock festival without mud). We didn’t bother sheltering, it was warm, and everything we owned was soaked. Kids around us were taking their clothes off and dancing naked in the rain.

The rain had driven everyone off the stage except big old crazy Garth Hudson, The Band’s keyboard player. He just stood there playing sweeping arpeggios through the rain on the Hammond B3. The Band released an album of the Watkin’s Glen concert, and this bit is called “Too Wet To Work”. When the rain let up, the rest of The Band slipped on stage and following Garth’s lead, slipped into “Chest Fever.”

The Allman Brothers followed The Band and played for hours, all their hits (and this was a banner year for the Allmans). At the end of the evening, the three sets of musicians jammed for another hour or two, covering The Dead’s show closers “Johnny B Goode” and “Not Fade Away”.

Six hundred thousand people attended, the largest population centre north of New York City that weekend. It’s said one third of all the people between 15 and 35 in the northeastern US were there. The worst thing that happened, besides the rain, was that someone who couldn’t abide the line ups tried to parachute in. His chute failed and he landed in the crowd, but he didn’t take anybody out with him when he cratered.

That was the largest audience for a concert in history until some time in the mid-80s, when The Chieftains played for a million people in Phoenix Park, Dublin. The Chieftains were opening for the Pope, though, and that's a hard act to follow.