Not long after that, Alicia texted me to say she wanted to be a subject in my ‘sleepy project’, as she put it. I spent a night at her apartment on the Calle de la Madera. As usual, I brought along a sleeping bag and pillow, to lay out on the floor in case I got tired. However, Alicia insisted that I should lie in the bed with her instead. By five a.m., I had taken almost two hundred photos. Alicia had shifted only once in the course of the night, turning from her side to lie face-up. Careful not to disturb the microphones that were directed at various parts of her body, I gently lifted the covers and lay down beside her. The bed was not large, and I inadvertently brushed her side with my hand. The warmth of her body triggered memories of my sister, from years ago. I imagined what would happen if Alicia were to wake and turn to me, or reach out her hand for mine beneath the covers. I found my heart was beating violently.
Mexico Drift
The last time I saw my friend Julian was the night we went to see Bret Easton Ellis give a talk at the London Literature Festival. Most of what follows I learned from a long, discomfiting email he sent me from Guatemala, out of the blue, more than a year later. I received that email seven months ago; I’ve heard nothing from him since.
The Bret Easton Ellis talk took place on a drizzly autumn evening two nights after Julian’s twenty-ninth birthday, which meant we were both still a little fragile from the effects of all we’d consumed at the riotous party that had doubled as Julian’s big send-off (he had quit teaching at the language school where I’d met him and booked a one-way flight to Mexico).
After the talk, over glasses of Leffe in a pub across the river from the South Bank, we discussed why seeing Ellis had been so dispiriting.
‘He’s the dead fucking end,’ Julian said.
His voice was strained. He was drinking quickly to become interested in where he was.
‘You know what I mean? Being totally nihilistic is exciting when you’re younger, you can get away with it then. There’s still pleasure to be had in the destructive work. You haven’t yet had to live in the ruins. Most people who’re like that seem to wise up and realise it’s like this fire they’ve set in themselves, and if they don’t put it out by a certain age, they’ll be consumed. All that’ll be left are the ashes. That’s the impression Ellis gave me: a man of ashes. He showed too keen an interest in the fucking void, and eventually it started taking an interest in him. He should’ve killed himself twenty years ago.’
I drank my beer as Julian peered into his glass. Memories reeled through my mind: Julian as the younger punk-intellectual, at war with everything, but winning the war and exhilarated by the fight; the acts of vandalism, all the fire-gutted cars and shattered McDonald’s windows. And later, the deepening sullenness, the first flirtations with far-right ideologies, the sneering disdain for younger advocates of the same radical leftism he had once espoused.
We got mildly drunk that night, but Julian never shrugged off his lethargy. We said goodbye at Leicester Square tube station and I took a bus home through the rain. Less than a week later, Julian flew to Mexico City, alone.
For his first few days there, he saw no one. He drank and wandered the streets, the city a choking carnival of noise and pollution. He hooked up with some punk contacts; vague friends of vague friends squatting in the city and playing in hardcore bands, angry and self-marginalised. An identical scene exists in hundreds of cities across the world, depressingly homogeneous and homogeneously depressed.
Julian left the squat one morning without saying goodbye. He took a taxi to the bus station and began travelling around Mexico: Guadalajara, Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez, where (he wrote) he hoped to witness a drug-war shootout, ‘or even be slain as an innocent bystander’. He found a dive bar in Juárez where he watched a gig, getting very drunk and taking speed given to him in the toilets by a young, almost effeminately beautiful punk, no older than nineteen. Julian’s Spanish was rudimentary but he befriended the Mexican and somehow explained that he didn’t have anywhere to stay that night. ‘No hay problema,’ said the young guy, ‘quédate conmigo.’ Julian didn’t remember getting home or into bed, but later he was woken by the young Mexican unbuttoning his boxers and taking his cock between his lips. Julian’s head spun as he ran his fingers through the guy’s curly black hair. He came into his mouth. The boy gently spat out the come on Julian’s leg and swirled his finger through it, like he was painting a spiral on his thigh. Then they kissed until Julian passed out.
He left the next morning and took a bus to another town on the edge of the desert, where he hung around for a few days, reading Alberto Moravia in cafés and walking out at the periphery. He had sex again, this time with a barmaid from a place he got drunk in one night. She lived with her sister and Julian could hear her snoring in the next room while they fucked. They didn’t use a condom. Later in the night, as Julian lay in the dark with his eyes closed, he heard the woman weeping beside him. He left in the morning. After drifting for another couple of days, he arrived at Caborca, a desert city where more punks he knew were squatting. One of these was Sebastian, a Mexican who Julian had known six or seven years previously, in Madrid. Back then, Sebastian was twenty-five and still ablaze with youthful idealism. Now, that fire had all but burnt out. The world had not changed like Sebastian had demanded it to, but had moved on without him, brash with sunshine and thoughtless laughter. Like so many punks past their mid-twenties, Sebastian had begun to re-channel the aggression of his fading youth into a world-hating defeatism.
The building that Sebastian and his friends were squatting was a crumbling four-storey block on the desert-whipped fringes of town. There was a large courtyard in the middle, hemmed in by the pale walls of the abandoned apartments. In this courtyard the punks would pass their days drinking, smoking weed, sometimes screwing one another, and playing music when they could be bothered to on battered amps, guitars and a rusted drum-kit, though their songs were all at least five years old and they seemed to spit out the rebellious, leftist lyrics with bitter irony (all of these punks were in their late twenties or older). The numbers fluctuated but there were usually around eight of them staying there. Mostly they were Latin Americans.
Sebastian’s girlfriend, Erika, was an Argentinian who said she’d never go back to that country, so vacuously obsessed was it with image and surface. Julian would watch her through the late-afternoon tequila blur, when the sun’s glare dragged all of existence out into the open, groaning, exposed and humiliated. Erika seemed strangely indifferent to Sebastian, who grew more sullen and withdrawn as the days and weeks piled up, loitering at the far end of the courtyard with his dark curly hair and his Misfits T-shirt. The couple had an open relationship, but neither Erika nor Sebastian ever seemed bothered to fuck any of the other punks, perhaps because the permutations had already been exhausted. After he’d been there for a couple of weeks, Julian followed Erika into the shade of one of the rarely used rooms, up on the third floor. There was nothing in the room but a bare mattress. They fucked for hours in the hot afternoon as Sebastian and the others drank in the courtyard below. Between bouts of screwing, while he and Erika took hits on a plastic bong, Julian could hear Sebastian’s voice, unnaturally loud, sometimes igniting into harsh and mirthless laughter. Then there would be silence for a while, the nullifying presence of the desert drifting over the apartment block like a cloud of sand or slow gas.