9. Things didn’t just happen all by themselves
Things didn’t just happen all by themselves: they met several times, they talked about why they were going to do what they were going to do, was it was only to try to fuck up Uncle Homero, who had sued Angel, confiscated his house and fortune, and had in all likelihood tried to suffocate Egg in his namesake in a botched attempt to suffocate his nephew? My mother Angeles asked all this when she met the group in order to find out what she was getting herself into. Then she added: “Would you be doing this if you didn’t know Uncle Homero, if you didn’t hate him?” Yes! And that was Angeles’s first impression of the Four Fuckups:
She thought Hipi Toltec was disturbed, his eyes weepy because he had so much trouble falling asleep, which he did by counting Aztec gods instead of sheep, and because he lived within himself and his historical confusion: “La serpent-à-plumes, c’est moi,” but he had a strange notion of justice, clear and swift. At first she feared him, but eventually felt a tenderness for his mystery. She saw the Orphan Huerta pass from an unfocused resentment to a sensual enjoyment of the things that success brought when the Four Fs got famous for their renditions of Egg’s ballads. The first thing she heard him say was: “I don’t remember anything. I never knew my father or my mother.” The second thing she heard him say was: “We’ve only seen milk and meat in newspaper photos.” But after the success of “Come Back, Captain Blood,” the single was later reissued with the songs in the album Take Control and another single “That Was the Year,” and Orphan Huerta began to buy himself (wholesale) china-doll shoes, Guess jackets, and Fiorucci sweaters, calling them my china dolls, my Guess jackets … Angeles noted that Egg was observing his two comrades with compassion and understanding, although he reserved his glances of real tenderness for the invisible Baby Ba, to whom he dedicated his most loving expressions: precious girl, chubby girl, my lollipop with curls, how’s my little birthday cake today? and other cute expressions Angeles caught him making up in flagrante. Embarrassed, Egg would say things to her such as: “Children should be sin but not hurt.” Or, blushing furiously: “I’m not crazy, miss; every once in a while my mind wanders, see?” But she began to realize that he was looking at her more and more as he made his cute remarks to the absent Baby Ba, that the more he looked, the more quickly he would avert his eyes or look in another direction if my mother caught him in the act. Or he’d start talking to Angel, the Orphan, and Hipi in English:
“Where you going?”
“I’ll go in a while to the River Nile…”
“Have some fun…”
“Where’s fun in Makesicko ’91?”
“Madness is in the mind of the beholder”
“Madness is only a state of mind”
“Don’t let your feelings show”
“Reward yourself!”
The band’s first great hits emerged from this daily banter, and they went on to put together the thirty-million-copy-selling album That Was the Year in the same way. The Four Fuckups intended to debut the songs in that album at New Year’s in Acapulco, where, to lay the groundwork for their apocalyptic disorder plans, they had allowed themselves to be hired by the famous French Marxist chanteuse Ada Ching for her floating discotheque, Divan the Terrible. My mother noticed that things gestate in the same way I’m going to gestate: art or a child, drop by drop, the only hair on opportunity’s head is that long forelock we’re supposed to grab, and to think that this hit song began when Uncle Homero F. (?) locked the fat boy in the egg, and then it gestated to the rhythm of these conversations and the band’s comings and goings through the deteriorated city where only Angel had his own place but never invited his pals over so he wouldn’t make them feel bad about it or so that he wouldn’t bother his grandparents, who were by now quite old. The buddies had no place to live and no relatives, but Uncle Fernando lent them the living room in his house in Coyoacán and that’s why they ended up involving him in their intrigue against Uncle Homero (Don Fernando didn’t have to be begged, even though his mind was on the Indians up in the mountains and not on the tourists on the beaches) and with Benítez they planned their escape from Aca when … and with the Four Fs all the details of the destruction of the Babylon of Garbage. Angeles said nothing, Angeles only looked and tried to understand without compromising her language in the underground, carnivalized, cannibalized noise buzzing around her feminine mystery: like the Orphan, she had no past; like Hipi, she imagined herself unknown; like the Baby Ba, she thought she was invisible; like Egg, she feared she was mad; like Uncle Fernando, she aspired to be an instrument of justice, and, in her indignation at what she saw in Mexico, she felt like a composite of all of them, her comrades and friends (did she have others before? she didn’t remember). At the same time, she felt strangely alienated from the man she came to love and with whom she slept in a sexual uproar; my mother tried to guess the reasons behind the terrible act they were preparing to commit at year’s end in Aca. She listened to my father talk about the Sweet Fatherland, about the need for an exemplary act of cleansing, complete with biblical fury: Bye-bye Babylon, So long Sodom, Go, go Gomorrah, only a ninny could like Nineveh, So ciao to Baby, So, go, Ninny:
Babylon? You mean Baby Loan, since we’ve mortgaged our children’s future. Of Babylon nothing remains: she looked at Angel and understood that the entire situation prior to her arrival, the crisis, the impotence, the rage, the corruption, the past, the youth — all of it was forcing Angel (explicitly), Egg (a bit less), Hipi and the Orphan (intuitively), to exorcise the demons, to upset the order, to humiliate the king, sweep out the garbage, find (Angel!) the Sweet Fatherland: Angel the postpunk, romantic, conservative who went from disorder to anarchy to the sadism of underdevelopment in order to find the utopia of the spotless fatherland: she would see him plunge into horror in order to destroy it; or would they be destroyed, he, she, all of them, by the horror which was indifferent to them?
These thoughts transformed my mother during the Acapulco ape-pick (simian and marine) into the most cautious and taciturn woman in the world; at times she thought she was going to win the Johnny Belinda deaf-mute contest, and, frankly, she could not foresee that her participation in the extraordinary events of the month of January would prove to be so tranquil. She would participate from now on in a silent dialogue in the hope that all of them (the band of buddies) would be able to speak together afterwards, and that triangular dialogue would go something like this:
ANGEL: I WANT ORDER
(FULLY KNOWING THAT NO ORDER WILL EVER BE SUFFICIENT)
EGG: I WANT FREEDOM
(FULLY KNOWING THAT I SHALL FAIL)
ANGELES: I WANT LOVE
(FULLY KNOWING THAT LOVE IS ONLY THE SEARCH FOR LOVE)
and that’s why Angel marched toward disorder, Egg sought the commitment of the invisible by singing songs to the world, overcoming his inability to express himself fluently, and my mother Angeles kept silent in order not to reveal that perhaps she hated what she was doing.
“Besides,” my dad said to her, “if we succeed in fooling Uncle H., we might get the house of bright colors back. That’s where I spent my childhood. I love the place. I’m sick of having to see you just now and again in your Uncle Fernando’s house or in my coach house. I have to live with you all the time.”
He dressed her as Annie Hall (tweed jacket, man’s tie, blue jeans), while he wore faded chinos, a Hopi shirt, and love beads. Both put on wigs of long, thick hair for their visit to Don Homero Fagoaga’s penthouse on Mel O’Field Road. They were going to ask him if they could make peace and spend New Year’s together in Acapulco.