Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

Also by Charles Bowden

Killing the Hidden Waters (1977)

Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions of Big-City Life, with Lewis Kreinberg and Richard Younker (1981)

Blue Desert (1986)

Frog Mountain Blues, with Jack W. Dykinga (1987)

Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions, with Michael Binstein (1988)

Mezcal (1988)

Red Line (1989)

Desierto: Memories of the Future (1991)

The Sonoran Desert, with Jack W. Dykinga (1992)

The Secret Forest, with Jack W. Dykinga and Paul S. Martin (1993)

Seasons of the Coyote: The Legend and Lore of an American Icon, with Philip L. Harrison (1994)

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America (1995)

Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge, with Virgil Hancock (1996)

Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, with Jack W. Dykinga (1996)

Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, with Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano (1998)

Eugene Richards, with Eugene Richards (2001)

Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (2002)

A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior (2005)

Inferno, with Michael P. Berman (2006)

Exodus/Éxodo, with Julián Cardona (2008)

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (2009)

Trinity, with Michael P. Berman (2009)

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (2010)

Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez, with Alice Leora Briggs (2010)

The Charles Bowden Reader (2010)

El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, with Molly Molloy (2011)

The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey (2018)

BLUES FOR CANNIBALS

THE NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Charles Bowden

FOREWORD BY AMY GOODMAN AND DENIS MOYNIHAN

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2002 by Charles Bowden

The Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust

Mary Martha Miles, Trustee

Foreword copyright © 2018 by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

All rights reserved

The first edition of Blues for Cannibals was published in 2002 by North Point Press.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bowden, Charles, 1945–2014, author.

Title: Blues for cannibals : the notes from underground / Charles Bowden.

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | "The first edition of Blues for Cannibals was published in 2002 by North Point Press."

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050181

ISBN 978-1-4773-1687-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1688-7 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1689-4 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Bowden, Charles, 1945–2014—Travel—United States. | Bowden, Charles, 1945–2014. | Bowden, Charles, 1945–2014—Political and social views. | United States—Description and travel. | United States—Social conditions—1980– | United States—Moral conditions. | National characteristics, American. | Mesquite—Folklore. | Cannibalism—Folklore. | Authors, American—Biography.

Classification: LCC E169.Z83 B667 2018 | DDC 973.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050181

doi:10.7560/316870

For my compañeros

Arturo Carrillo Strong and Chris Clarke,

who showed me the way to go home

after midnight.

They will never leave my side

so long as I stand my ground.

And I know no way to leave.

Look harder! After all we don’t even know where real life is lived nowadays, or what it is, and what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way—we don’t even know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and we are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring a taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Notes from Underground, 1864

Contents

Foreword

Cultural Instructions

Entrance Wound

1

2

3

4

5

6

Exit Wound

Coda

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Foreword

AMY GOODMAN AND DENIS MOYNIHAN

I understand dead white guys are out of fashion, but let’s be tolerant . . . they used to be somebody.

CHARLES BOWDEN, speaking at a Lannan Literary Program Event, Santa Fe, NM, December 15, 2010

Deep, lyrical, brutally honest prose thunders across these pages, casting an arc as wide open and at times as unforgiving as the western skies under which Chuck Bowden lived most of his life.

Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground is the second of six connected volumes that Bowden referred to as his Unnatural History of America. In an endnote to the third book, he identified what became the premise for each of the six books, that they all flow from a single question and a single hunger: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? Thus sown, his trenchant narrative unleashes a whirlwind, part memoir, part reportage, part ruthless criticism of everything existing.

We met Bowden in his role as one of the foremost journalists covering the increasingly violent Mexico-U.S. border and the war on drugs that fuels the misery there. Bowden would appear on the Democracy Now! news hour and describe in his gravelly voice the corrupt institutional forces driving the abject suffering of the regular people in places like Ciudad Juárez and Nogales. We’ve been at it forty years, he told us in 2009. We’ve dropped hundreds of billions of dollars. We’ve created the highest prison rate in the world enforcing these laws. Anybody that’ll walk out of the house knows drugs are more prevalent now. They’re higher quality, and they’re cheaper than they’ve ever been. This is a failed policy.

Chuck Bowden connected the extreme violence of the border to U.S. policy, to NAFTA. "What we’ve created, with foreign policy, meaning our free-trade treaty, is, one, slave factories all over the country, where nobody can live on the wages, two, generations at least of feral kids on the street. Fifty percent of the kids you call high school kids in Juárez neither go to school nor have jobs . . . Forty percent of the kids in Chihuahua, young males, want to become sicarios, professional killers, he told us in 2010. We’ve created something so bleak that crime and murder is actually a rational way to live."

He cared deeply for his brother and sister reporters, especially those on the Mexican side of the border, who suffer one of the highest murder rates of journalists on the planet. People ask me, you know, ‘Chuck, is it dangerous down there?’ It’s nothing for me. The Mexican reporters are being killed. The Mexican reporters are being tortured. And yet they’re putting out more honest news, in my opinion, about what’s going on in Mexico than the whole U.S. press corps.

Bowden described the case of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a Mexican journalist who fled his home country to the U.S., seeking asylum. In February of 2005, he published a tiny story in a daily in Chihuahua, reporting an incident where these drunken soldiers had gone into a third-rate hotel and robbed the patrons. For that, he was threatened with death by a Mexican general who’s in charge of the zone and told never to do it again. For the next three years, Emilio never wrote a story about the army.

In 2008, Gutiérrez Soto got a tip that he would be murdered, so he took his son and fled north, hoping to reach relative safety in New Mexico. He made it, but, as we write this, has not been granted asylum. Emilio is in limbo. He can’t get a work permit. He’s out of prison. He can’t get his case settled. And it’s a very important case, because hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexicans are watching it, and if he actually could get political asylum, it could open the floodgate of people fleeing the terror down there, Bowden told us in 2010.

In December 2017, Emilio and his son, Oscar, were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Jailed, they are facing deportation and, according to Emilio and over a dozen national press organizations that have rallied to their support, certain death should they be forced to return to Mexico. An appeal is pending as this goes to press.

Blues for Cannibals draws from Bowden’s journalism but takes us deeper into darker, more personal realms. He writes of the volume, I wrote it on my own lookout when I could snatch the time from earning a living . . . when I finished it, I pitched it on a shelf. And then once more the lean times came and I peddled it in New York.

Early in the book he describes his tenure covering sex crimes for the Tucson Citizen, admitting at the outset, I had no background in the business and I’d lied to get the job. The litany of brutality, the repetitive domestic violence, took its toll on Bowden. I would quit the paper twice, break down more often than I can now remember, and have to go away for days or a week or two and through violent exercise kill the things that roamed my mind. It was on these forced marches into the desert where he found an escape. His written reflections on these sojourns caused many to call him an environmentalist, a label he disdained.

He left that difficult crime beat after three years, and with it, the prospect of a career as a newsroom reporter. I still live in the same town and for me, it is studded with kill sites—lonely desert trees where a child’s bones were finally found, alleys where dawn found a woman naked and cold and cut to hell, he writes of Tucson. Until this moment, I’ve avoided remembering what became of me . . . I learn that whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or you.

Bowden takes us from scenes of infanticide to the death chamber, as a member of the press invited to witness an execution. Shorter than the book-length treatments by Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Bowden offers a penetrating account of the crime and punishment of the Poland brothers, Michael and Patrick. The pair was found guilty of robbing an armored car and killing its two guards. Capital punishment, Bowden writes, is not a deterrent (except to the man or woman killed), paralyzes juries, gums up the legal system with endless delays, and occasionally kills innocent people. And in a nation such as ours, riven by class and race and gender differences, it will never be handed out in a fair or equitable manner. But executions will be used frequently for the rest of my life. We demand this killing and we will have our demand met.

Bowden bobs and weaves, describing suicide and its painful reverberations, delving into almost-forgotten history of indigenous rebellion. Throughout, his narrative is resoundingly personal and emphatic. He died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of sixty-nine in Las Cruces, New Mexico, just miles from the border that shaped him. His sister, Peg Bowden, who lives not far from the Mexican border in Arizona, wrote a moving remembrance of her sweet, irascible, intense, tender, brilliant brother. She described a seminal aspect of his political development. "Chuck became involved in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, and was a member of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was on fire about the people he met and sat in Fannie Lou Hamer’s living room in 1967 discussing voter registration and nonviolent protest. Hamer impressed upon Chuck the relationship of racism, sexism, violence and economic injustice, and how all of these factors intersect to keep poor people down. She called him a ‘white cracker boy,’ and he was highly amused by her teasing. Chuck wrote me a letter at that time, pleading with me to join him, as there was a clinic that needed nurses and I was a recent graduate RN from the University of Arizona. I always regretted not jumping in my car and driving to Mississippi.

I believe that Chuck’s lifelong interest in those who are trapped behind the walls of racism, poverty, and our fears about who is getting a piece of the pie began in the living room of Fannie Lou Hamer. He told me she was almost totally blind from being beaten by the police while registering people to vote, and yet she saw this country more clearly than any other person he knew.

Chuck Bowden saw the worst of humanity but never stopped fighting despite it all. In Blues for Cannibals, he writes, My wounds kept me alive, my wounds, I now realize, were life.

He told an interviewer in 2003, I’ve been waiting for the arrival, not of a virtuous society, because they wouldn’t let me in, but of a sane society . . . A sane society, in harmony with nature. At the outset of Blues for Cannibals, he notes, There is something missing, some vivid touch that the cool computer screens we now all stare into at work and at home cannot deliver, as we are increasingly enveloped in a technological vortex on a warming planet.

Chuck Bowden died about ten months before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015. We can only imagine how Bowden would have reacted to Trump—to the relentless attack on the most vulnerable among us, to the overt racism directed at Mexicans and others from south of the border. Bowden prophesied Trump’s chest-beating insistence on building a medieval wall between the U.S. and Mexico, on Democracy Now! in 2010:

Mexicans are coming north because NAFTA in good part destroyed their economic base in Mexico. You’re not going to have a peaceful world if you’re making war on the poor. Now, I don’t have a solution to immigration, but I know one solution is nobody is going to stay there until they can make a decent living. If we destroy their living, they’re going to come here. You want to build walls for recreation, go ahead. They’re irrelevant. They didn’t work for the Chinese, either. They got a Mongol emperor eventually.

Those who knew him, those who have read his prolific work, know that Chuck Bowden would not have been silent.

I thought I had more time to say goodbye, and now it is too late for all the tender things I meant to say.

CHARLES BOWDEN, Tucson Citizen, June 27, 2003, reflecting on the Aspen wildfire that devastated the mountain community of Summerhaven in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The rebuilt community center there was renamed in his honor.

Cultural Instructions

Prosopis juliflora, velutina, glandulosa, pubescens

No more silence. Do not be confused by the simple words. The dust is now being blown from the throats, the sap rises in the gorge. There is nothing to be done about these matters since the seed has been cast, the moist earth licks the pods, and now the life comes on. The parts that seem familiar will turn out not to be familiar. Things have changed under the hand and grown new branches in their new settings. The stem lurks underground. Cut it down to a stump and it multiplies trunks. Cut a branch and gain twenty more. The pod of the seed lacks a suture and must rot off. The tree is made for hard times. The entire thing is rooted and now lives with deep hungers. The tempo has changed also.

As the tree grows, the roots sink deeper into the ground and the bone people are sucked to the surface, dead presidents, living dead artists, dead friends and men made newly dead by the force of law. Naturally, a living tree has a rhythm, the thing we call seasons, and this too is present and uncontrollable.

All this leads to an inevitable place, just as a seed contains within it the ancient tree with vast limbs.

Weather will be a factor. Watch for blue mists. Expect drought. Know the flood is coming. Read menus carefully. Open your mouth.

And be warned: Mesquite is yet the most feared and hated tree that grows, a menace that is every year extending its ravages, spreading desolation where once was wealth.

Entrance Wound

Come with me and we will sink into our pleasures. No, we won’t do a line or have a toke or open that bottle. Those things are nice but they never go far enough. The nose goes, the weed takes too long and the liver must be considered, don’t you agree? This time we will get ripped and it will not be an idiom or a metaphor. This time we will take a harder drug, one denounced by the authorities.

I have deliberately picked a room for our work. The room is very small and American sterile, it is the perfect room for exploring our secret places and stirring the strong juices that lurk in our bodies. Edward Hopper lived trapped in this room and painted it again and again. When I was a child in the years just after World War II, special years when people were grateful to have survived and yet wounded and numb, I lived in rooms like Edward Hopper painted, sterile, lonely rooms where silence reigned and yet an explosion of violence was always close by, perhaps lurking in that closet or crouched behind the sofa. My father took me one day to the Chicago Art Institute and I saw Hopper’s paintings, or so I remember, and they were among the first paintings I understood and felt. They were my world and my terrors and my loneliness.

So these matters go back a long ways with me, as I’m sure they do with you. And I am talking about the senses, about feelings, about the joy of song and the punch of death. Not certain types of feelings but being able to feel, and more important, being willing. I have been under siege, yes, I admit it, things have at times overwhelmed me. And you cannot deny that this has also happened to you. The sex crimes took their toll, so did the dying. We fled to the country and that was good but never enough. Besides, we could not stay. Country living is behind us, we can only visit or remember that part. The war came also. We felt love, we fell into the cooking, we worked very hard in the garden where we created a lover that rubbed us raw and drowned us in perfume. These things are only part of why I am talking to you from this small room with a cable television and fifty-five identical channels. The rates are posted on the door, plus the essential directions for escape when the fire comes to char our bodies. In this room, I can finally remember that it started with a tree. Come, we will go into the wood.

I met the tree long ago and have remained a slave to its song. And now it is bringing me back from the dead. My life is within the wood. Against the grain, but within the wood. I am an agnostic about God. I can believe in God but I can never trust Him. I waste no time on prayers, not a single moment do I spare for such a thing. It is not that I think prayers go unanswered, I actually have no idea. It is that I refuse to listen to such answers. They cannot be enough to explain what I see. I will not be cajoled into accepting the hurt. I refuse such blandishments. The hurt is real, and the answered prayers are not enough, not nearly enough. I can live the sin, aspire to the virtue, lust for grace. I am a fallen man and I know it, and I accept the torture of living this fact. But I will be damned—and they say I surely will be damned—if I will accept God’s answer. So I do not pray. Nor do I worship. I can love, I can comfort. I am the tree struggling in the hot ground of my desert. No bended knee and please no messages from on high. The messages must come from here, from the ground itself or away with them. That is what I learn from the mesquite, my brother-in-arms.

Do not be confused. We are not druids here or pantheists or fairies in a sylvan whirl of velvet and chimes. True, we sing, we have our song. But no chants, never chants. Or ceremonies. We believe in cells and protoplasm and sex, a great deal of sex, and stench and dirt and slime and screams in the night. We are not of the peaceable kingdom here, and we have little peace. We contain a great deal of anger and even more of violence, the hand reaches out at all hours for the throat. We wait for the moment to strike back and yet we struggle, struggle each and every second, to still that hand, to open that fist into a warm palm and caress the face. To not reach for that gun, cool, black, the barrel short, the action fully automatic, the rounds—nine millimeter—resting in a banana clip like so many fangs anxious to tear flesh asunder. We are not sinners in the hands of an angry god since we do not have that trust and do not pray, and when we see a burning bush, we put out the fire. But we can accept the storm, the pitiless sun, the rot and then the dust. And we don’t ask why, that is our wisdom, or at least the wisdom of my brother the mesquite and the one I reach toward every dusk and every dawn and sometimes in the blink of midnight.

Imagine this: a world of tongues and caresses, a constant touching of the genitals, a world hidden like the planet Venus from common view by the clouds of scents steaming off our desires, a world obscene with appetite and orgasm and strong spices and drenched in chilies. That is the world of mesquite. And it follows me everywhere because I am of the wood.

Recently I was in the city of New York to talk of the pope. They say he is senile now, but this I do not know. Anyway, I was not to speak to his mental acuity in his dotage but to his encyclical on the Culture of Death. This felt odd. I sat there in the Church of the Incarnation while the cameras rolled and a woman outside the eye of the lens asked me question after question about this pope and his fury about the Culture of Death. She was very quick with her tongue, a woman rich in agendas and welded to her cell phone.

The day before I had been hanging out with a United States senator as he wrestled with the wisdom of some war in the Balkans. I had followed him like a shadow for vote after vote, committee meeting after committee meeting, been allowed into the tent as it were while the elect, the hundred solons of the Senate, kicked the matter of war and peace around like a soccer ball and hoped for a goal. At night I stayed in a very good Washington hotel, one rich with old woods and marble surfaces, a place expensive and generous with fine meats and vintage wines. One evening I drank with a Frenchman, an oil executive actually, who had a grandfather driven from Belgium by the German onslaught of World War I, a father born as a refugee on the march as his grandmother fled the armies during the gore of August 1914, and this Frenchman, a Catholic naturally, believed two things absolutely: that this Balkan war must be fought lest the demons of European history break loose and run amok once again as they had in 1914, and that this pope was obviously senile. This second point he would give no ground on, no matter how long we talked, no matter how many fine bottles of cabernet we drank. And as we talked and settled gratefully into our drunkenness, images of that Balkan war played across the television screen like a sporting event.

Finally, after three hours, the Frenchman caved in, caved in I believe to the wisdom of mesquite, and talked of his chief passion in life, cooking. Like myself, he falls asleep at night reading cookbooks—that tongue wet with hunger again, always that tongue. He had just been out to Texas on oil matters and bought some fine chilies to take home to his kitchen in the south of France. He said I must come see him and his family, we would cook and let the world drift away into its madness.

The next day I left him and the senator and went to that church in New York for my meeting with the Culture of Death. They taped me for two hours as a gentle rain fell on Manhattan. I struggled to find words to connect the pope’s Culture of Death with the world as I know it and finally, just before we ended the session, I lost my temper and said that any fool can see what the Culture of Death means, see it in our uncaring faces, see it in the gluttony of our markets, see it in our denial of how most of the earth’s billions live or barely live, see it in our chemically charged and neurotic stabs at peace. I said it is not my fault that this demented old man in a dress sees this clearly, that this medieval mind grasps the true emptiness moderns ignore. Afterward I walked thirty blocks in the rain, workers hurrying past me on their way to dreams of a Friday night, and finally surrendered to a bar and wound up drinking until two in the morning. A few days later, the producers called and said the last few minutes of my taping were strong and fine and just what they needed for, well, maybe thirty seconds of airtime.

My best friend’s ashes lie underneath the shade of two mesquites in my backyard. He was a drinking man and, in his cups, a terrible thing to behold, a brilliant mind reduced by the bottle to rage and idiocy. He would in his moments of darkness lose a weekend to two or three quarts of cheap vodka a day, the body steeled to the work by grams of fine cocaine. Years ago, when he had gotten out of detox yet again, I threw him into my truck and drove for hours across the desert and plunged into a volcanic wilderness in Mexico before we came to rest. We camped by a water hole named Tinaja Emilia, the naming happening long ago when a strange Norwegian wanderer passed through and thought to honor some woman he knew back in the United States. The ground was studded with ironwood, paloverde and mesquite. Sleeping circles left by some ancient folk lay close by and the litter of thousands of years—stone implements, charcoal from long-dead fires—was scattered about. My friend began to breathe again, and when night fell he called out the constellations like a schoolboy. At dawn the brittlebush was in bloom and the black volcanic slopes were ablaze with yellow flowers. We started up the cinder slopes, very slowly since my friend was weak. Halfway up, we came upon I’itoi’s cave, his western house where he keeps one of his wives since she loves the sea and the Gulf of California swells nearby.

I’itoi is a largely retired god who was once quite popular in this area. His wife continues to live in the cave—after all, where is she to go with the old man now largely out of work?—and thanks to the volcanic tubes left by some eruption, she can hear the beating of the waves as she goes about her household tasks. A giant honeycomb hung from the walls, and the roar of the insects was horrible as we dropped down into the god’s dwelling. Prayer sticks left by the ancients peeked from cracks in the walls. My friend left a Marlboro Light as an offering. But then he was a praying man. We continued up, slipping and sliding, to the peak, and we stood there and could see across the gulf to the mountains of Baja. The change was electric, the life pulsed in him. Then we dropped down into the camp at Tinaja Emilia and the thorny embrace of the mesquite. He never went back. I think the singing was too much for him. He chose a different path and I could not stop him in his errand. I had done all I knew how to do.

Recently, I had four biopsies in an hour. The doctors were determined to discover what was wrong with me. I could not explain the deep sickness to them, any more than I could tell them of the cure, of the wood against my face. There had been a massive and sudden swelling on my neck, my fever rose, and I went to bed and waited for death. They thought cancer, since they are reasonable people. They also had me sign a form so that they could test me for AIDS. I did not agree with what I saw in their anxious eyes. I knew I had a soul sickness like the savages we watch on television documentaries and I knew the savages were not exotic or a distant and irrelevant part of my past as a homo sapiens but flesh of my flesh and that I was paying a blood price for what I had seen and felt and devoured like red meat. I knew the sickness was within me and so was the cure. I only had to remember. And so I did. And the swelling went away. I remember the first thing I did. I cooked and then I ate. Tongues.

They say mesquite will float but I do not believe this claim. I have seen it struggle in a desert storm, the waters coming angry out of a narrow canyon, then spreading against the soft banks of the arroyo snaking across the bajada, the air electric with energy and the light rich with a green cast of violence. I have stood right there as it came like a wall—the dreaded flash flood of our nightmares but a dream too often denied our waking hours—the waters four or five feet high, the brown face roiling and foaming, a sentence garbled by the fury of the statement, and the wind is down, almost a sick stillness in the summer afternoon, the core of the downpour is miles away on the sacred peak, one called Baboquivari, another place where I’itoi lives, the god of the people who knew the ground before my kind came, and I looked up at the rock tower now hidden in clouds and darkness, a blackness only broken by the jagged teeth of lightning, stood there staring: the foaming, licking the sentence fragments moving like a wall down the arroyo, the dirt banks here and there collapsing, falling with a roar like icebergs calving off a glacier, the hair on the back of my neck tingling from the currents of energy exploding off the peak and as I stared, I fell into the scene, lost all fear and succumbed to appetite. It took all of my will not to walk into that wall of water and merge with it and ride away with the flood. Then I saw it, a full-grown mesquite, one of the ancients that cling up above, a work requiring centuries of patience and sun and storms, saw it bobbing like a toy, totally uprooted now, a thing tired of waiting, weary of being rooted and now free to move and course hither and yon about the land.

I travel a lot, and when I travel I tell people it is for a story, but what I am really looking for is love. Not a woman for myself, but love on the faces of people and in their gait and in the smooth joy of their speech. I travel in the true desert. The Sahara, I believe, has more water than the modern world has love. I cannot easily explain this fact. Fornication seems to be operating at reasonable volume. But I sense this reality everywhere. I am in Washington having coffee with a Senate aide, an old hand who has spent decades on the Hill and came to town as a youngster, and I look at all the young women in the cafeteria. Washington is a city of people barely past their teens clowning around in suits, and I tell the woman, this old Washington hand, that they all look cold and empty, and I know this is not a nice thing to say of strangers but I tell her I am the true stranger here. And she says, Everyone here is lonely, this is a very lonely city.

Later I tell an editor in New York that I do not like the capital. He says he does not either. I jump on his statement and offer that if I lived there I would wind up killing someone. He says no, no, he would kill himself. But I want to make this clear: I don’t know if Washington is natural or unnatural. I am not a poster boy