— It’s impossible to get rid of this thing, isn’t it?
— And to think you traded a typewriter for it.
Juan Salazar Pro, realizing that getting rid of the pistol was impossible in New York, decided to head to Mexico. Perhaps in San Pedroslavia it would not be so difficult to unload the gun. After all, what difference did it make if San Pedroslavia didn’t turn out to be the paradise he imagined and was instead just another ruse? I can always come back to nourish my post-norteño condition on the streets of Manhattan, he thought.
— Huncke, let’s go.
— And the dealer, Juan?
— I’m going to Mexico. To San Pedroslavia.
— And the dealer? We’re not waiting for him anymore, Juan.
— Huncke. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of here, because that dealer’s not coming.
The Definitive Dealer
Written on a wall in an unorthodox script with El Oso shoe polish was, The only way to get drugs is to be the drug. Pedro Rodríguez, an expert on norteño music, was sleeping in his attic room on Coahuila Street. An occasional session musician who imitated Chet Baker’s norteño-ness, he had begun to shoot up heroin. His musical instrument was The Cowboy Bible.
The phrase on the wall had been pirated from a little book of poems by Jack Kerouac, Heroin is for Pain. There was a Juan Salazar LP on the record player. With that voice that always seems on the verge of breaking, the Nuevo León native was singing Lights of New York. Pedro Rodríguez had resisted becoming his dealer. But his credit was worthless in San Pedroslavia. The only way to surround himself with drugs was to sell them.
When the needle on the record player changed positions, it cut the drug’s sweet effect off from Pedro Rodríguez’s body. He immediately fell into a state of cold turkey. He opened his eyes and a pack of dogs like a roving mob showed up next to his bed. The vertigo he’d experience trying to get off the mattress made him much more anxious than the pain in his joints. The certainty that the dogs would tear him apart kept him clinging to the wall by his fingernails.
Terrified, he brought his face over to the edge of the bed. He ascertained that the dogs were running around. Rabid dogs. More than a hundred of them. With fear in his eyes, and his eyes on the very rim of the mattress, Pedro Rodríguez emitted an extraordinary shriek, and then, one by one, the one-hundred-seventeen dogs jumped into his chest with all the contractions that foreshadowed a spasm. When he swallowed the last animal, it was nighttime and the Juan Salazar LP was playing over and over.
Juan Salucita Salazar settled on Orizaba Street, #210-8, in San Pedroslavia. Huncke, who was an old hand at extraditions and had burglary charges pending, had decided to stay with Bill Garver and rejected outright the move to Mexico. Juan Salucita arrived accompanied by another Juan, John Vollmer, a beat poet. And a junky too. Metrohomosexual. The singer’s lover.
It was no secret Vollmer was a fag. Ross Russell had revealed it in the unauthorized biography of the singer, Salucita Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Juan (an implosition) Salazar (Charterhouse, New York, 19—). It’s a common quality assigned to mythic characters. His legend has a place in eternity. There shouldn’t be any other readings of Juan Salazar’s genius, just those that reflect his revolutionary contributions to the world of music. Reputable critics such as Charles Delaunay, Ted Gioia, Joachim Berendt, and Leonard Feather have defended his sexual preference by citing the creativity of his norteño improvisations. The fascination with Juan Salazar, aside from his being a jazzman committed to amarillo, is the allegory that produces his art. The pride of the post-norteño condition is its violent, sexist, and senseless character, almost like hip hop’s. The allegory lies in the fact that, in a macho society, a fag would, under his lice-egg leather boots, wear pink polish on his toenails and still be the object of so much masculine admiration. Juan Salazar is a bebop norteño transgressor.
San Pedroslavia coincided with the epistemology of bar stories. The healthy atmosphere surrounding the daily routine of heating up spoonfuls of drugs helped Juan form a new quintet with local musicians. The problem of the pistol remained — struck by a case of nerves, Juan Salazar couldn’t say farewell to it — but he had a possible buyer: Pedro Rodríguez, a dealer famous for wearing a piteado belt with a steel buckle. He’d heard he could find him at the Laguna Coliseum, the old Sports Palace, a wrestling arena.
To get the drug, Pedro Rodríguez had to give up his Cowboy Bible. He traded it at a flea market. They tossed it into a corner with an accordion and a bajo sexto. He invested the money in heroin, which he hid in Nescafé jars between the dogs and the bed.
He began dealing by the balloonful, but that quantity was too expensive for junkies, who barely live day-to-day. The solution rested with chinches: single doses. But the profits were limited. San Pedroslavia is a City of Vice, and every three houses somebody offers you drugs. If you don’t want to bother, you can go straight to a shooting gallery where, for twenty pesos, you stretch out your arm, they apply a tourniquet, and the dealers themselves inject you. While the others dealt via windows, Pedro Rodríguez used the old mule system. He’d deliver the drugs straight to the home. His clientele were the addicts who didn’t want to move. They were few in number. Nonetheless, there were enough earnings so he’d never lack his own personal spoonful.
Pedro Rodríguez was a huge wrestling fan. Each Sunday, he’d go to the Laguna Coliseum. He was a rudo. His father had been a wrestler: The Blue Shadow. He lamented having lost The Cowboy Bible. The wrestling arena made him remember. It was there he found The Cowboy Bible, abandoned, broken, worn; a musician had stepped all over it after having traveled with it under a train seat. In the end, if they haven’t been destroyed, instruments should be pawned or sold to get drugs.
William Tell’s Corrido
— Thank you very much. Luis Ernesto Martínez on the saxophone. Dr. Benway on drums. Clark-Nova on the bajo sexto. Dave Tesorero on accordion.
— On the mic: Juan Salazar.
The Bunker, a blues bar, was oversold. The crowd could not accept that the band was not coming back for a second encore. Juan Juan Juan, screamed the pickpockets, always among the most passionate fans. Pedro Rodríguez had a seat at the third table. He knew the group wasn’t coming back onstage when he saw a tech guy approaching him. He got up to go with him back to the dressing room, but some staff guy said, Not here. Juan’s waiting for you at this address and handed him a piece of paper with directions.
The info on the napkin didn’t indicate 210-8 Orizaba Street. Instead, there were directions to a bar called The Other Paradise. The place was sordid, and the clientele was subdued. It was a junky bar, with a dirt floor and wooden tables. The bar was on the left. The curtain to the bathroom was made from long strips of matchbox tops threaded together. In the back, near the jukebox, a concrete stairway led to the second floor.
Pedro Rodríguez entered the bar and took a seat at a table facing the back. There were only three customers. Two at one table were getting ready to shoot up. The other guy muttered before a bottle of sotol. Ten minutes went by and the bartender still hadn’t offered him a drink.
He was about to order a Superior beer when Juan Salazar appeared at the top of the stairs. The bar lighting changed. Everything became a sandy color: the bar, the barman, Juan Salazar’s tie.
He began to descend the stairs, and time turned to rubber. Pedro Rodríguez sensed something different in his walk. He thought maybe it had something to do with the exaggerated care he was taking in coming down, but no. It was confirmed when he arrived on even ground. He was walking stiffly. Each step was in the form of a square. Every two steps, he’d change directions. He seemed more like a car trying to park than a man approaching his destination. He seemed indecisive. Pixelated. Yes, a pixelated Juan Salazar was nearing his table.