Mexico Page 10
I like to wear a straw trilby hat and a Hawaiian floral shirt, with a good pair of jeans. I’ve usually got some gray stubble on my face, and these girls, looking at the photos you can see how wide-open their eyes are. We each had our own room, and I took one of those girls for a romp, while my partner did the same with the shorter, brown-haired girl. And, oh my god—the one who I had in my room. She was so frickin’ hot. She did all the moves on top of me. She took it all off, I didn’t have to even do much of anything. And that’s just the way it is, you know, for me. I’ve got to be in the moment. I’ve got to be taking it all in—everything, from the blade of grass to that mural of Che Guevara. I want it all.
While I was on the floor with my hands tied behind my back, I got to thinking what a dick I’d been. How it didn’t matter how hot those girls were. There was nothing exploitative about it. They wanted it just as bad as we did. But what kind of power relationship is that? I mean, doing it with some seventeen-year-old girl while my girlfriend was back in Mexico with a drug problem. That just wasn’t cool. That was pathetic. So I cried.
After I cried, I got to thinking that a person can justify anything. If I could justify sleeping with that girl in Havana, then why would one of those kidnappers feel anything bad about cutting off one of my fingers? They looked like assholes. They looked like trapezoidal thugs, but each one of them had a family—some mom and sister somewhere who they were probably sending money to. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a kidnapper working for a cartel is some kind of heartless, psychotic goon. They may not have gotten enough love from their mom when they were young, but in their mind they’re doing the right thing. Christ, Idi Amin thought he was doing the right thing!
—
I’m of two minds as to whether there’s a heaven. My logical mind says no way. I like the art in churches. I love the old wood cherubs painted with such bright cheeks in all the beautiful churches of Mexico. Those statues are incredible. But it’s some kind of make-believe Disneyland that’s just fun to look at. Whether there’s a plan for anything, I doubt it.
But something let me stay alive. And I don’t just mean the ransom money my mom sent, which, obviously, was essential. There are stories all the time, down here, of people who pay everything the kidnappers want, who follow every last instruction, and in the end they kill the person they kidnap anyway.
So the question is, what makes one live and another die? It could just be the luck of the draw, it could just be the way the dice tumble and fall. But I don’t quite see it that way. Or I see it that way, and a little more.
I think I have more to do. I think each person is like a plant—they have a length of time they’re supposed to live, like a tomato until it gets ripe. And my ripeness just hadn’t happened yet.
Those son of a bitches. They kicked the shit out of me. They came at 2 a.m. It was the same guys who’d cut off my finger, and two more guys. Not that they really needed four to kick the crap out of someone already sitting on the floor, tied up. But they came and took turns kicking me. I was half dazed when they did it, at first. They turned on the one bare bulb that lit up my room. There was gray peeling paint on the wall. The bulb shocked me, so suddenly bright, and I looked up at it and a boot came smack into my face. I swiveled my legs around trying to get one of them to fall, but he jumped out of the way. When you try to fight back with your hands tied behind your back, you mainly pull at yourself, tying yourself into knots. I tried in any case, and I was thrown on the floor by the force of the kicks. Some blood bubbled up from my lip and they carried me out, still trying to struggle with almost no force left. I think I got a good jab with one of my legs at one of them, though. Then it was pretty dark, my head blindfolded, but a little light seeped through as lights from the streets penetrated the cloth. You notice the smells at a time like that. The smell of old vinyl in an old car. The smell of upholstery in what’s probably a stolen car.
They dumped me in the middle of a street, Donceles, in the center of town, with my hands tied behind my back, my legs tied up with Azteca’s leash. It was like they wanted to remind me they’d killed my dog. They left the blindfold sack over my head. When they threw me out of the car, one of them said, “Hijo de puta—chinga tu madre!”
After fifteen minutes, I heard a street dog come up to me. There was a whole pack of them. They do that, sometimes, the homeless dogs of Mexico City running around at night. They come in all stripes, almost all mutts, but every once in a while a purebred gets stuck amongst the others, lost from its fancy neighborhood. I felt the dogs sniff at me. They put their noses up close against my crotch. They sniffed my shoes. They pulled a bit at my pockets. One of the bigger dogs tugged at the sack over my head and then I could see up, the face of a black and brown tiger-striped dog holding the bag in its mouth, the burning lights of a mercury street lamp shining like in a concentration camp, a small star in the sky in the infinite beauty and depth of the universe almost hidden behind.
—
The party was over. Everyone was gone. It was a month after the kidnapping, and I’d had all my friends over to celebrate the fact I was still alive.
There was the residue of the party all over the place, glasses and bottles. I’ve fixed up an apartment in the center of Mexico City. I bought it cheap, for thirty thousand dollars—in an old building from the seventeenth century—and even though the building, as a whole, looks like a dump, I’ve done a ton of work to fix up my apartment. I have high ceilings. You can see the old beams from the time when the Dominican monks and the Inquisition ruled the day.
The tranny brought up all the food, earlier. As always, I’d ordered too much. That tranny has been through everything. She’s been through kicks and shouts. Mexico’s a macho country, and it’s not easy being a transvestite. They cackle at you as you walk down the street. But I’ve never seen a trace of anger on her face. She’s got the height and slim hips of a man, but she plays up her freckles.
I ate one of the plantain empanadas that was left. The leftover tostadas looked like a mess, with the lettuce wilted and the tomatoes looking like they had sweated and over-ripened into the sauce. But the plantain was still just right, the filling inside good. The air smelled of smoke. There was still the smell of cigars, and we’d smoked more than a few short Cohibas I’d brought back from Cuba. I caught sight of my pinkie as I took a bite out of the empanada, or of where my finger should have been, where the stub ended with a raw skin wound.
I could view it as a wound or as a badge of promise. I could be tough like the trannies I admired. There was a lot more for me to paint. I went into my studio. I have two studios, one the one I was trying to walk to the night they kidnapped me, the other just off the space I’ve renovated in my old building. I pulled out a canvas. I put it up on the wall. I took out some spray-paint cans, which I sometimes use for background, and I put on yellows and bright greens. I shook those cans as hard as I could. I sprayed on thick the happiest colors I could think of. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to stay right here and plant roots. I spray-painted an abstract form of a tree with roots. I added a stone in the middle that wasn’t rolling anymore. I might call my ex-girlfriend in the morning. I had no intention of getting back together. We were through, but I wanted to call to check up on how she was doing, to make sure she was hanging in there, to be certain she was more or less OK.
THE PLASTIC SURGEON
I am a plastic surgeon, and down here in Mexico it helps that I’m tall and blond. I’m six feet two, I like to play basketball, and during the summer when I take a vacation up in Seattle, where I have a house and come from, I like to row on the rough waters of the ocean. I don’t spend that much time looking in the mirror. I spend more time looking at my hands, my tools, to make sure they’re smooth and in working order. But I care about my body. I like to feel sculpted. Like most of my clients, I think it’s important how we look. I’d rather my body look good via hard work. My nose is a bit long, and according to most standards of beauty it’s not beautiful,
but that doesn’t bother me because I think people looking at my body can tell I work out, can tell I do the hard work necessary to make myself look good and healthy. Others don’t have that kind of discipline. They might want an easy way to look fit, and while that’s not my way, I’m more than happy to do the work for them in surgery, to suck out those extra pounds of fat with liposuction, around the hips and abdomen, or to design what they think is a more perfect face. It makes them happy, which is reward enough for me, and every patient is a challenge, a raw tableau to shape, a goal to work at hard, like paddling from one end of a large bay to the other along the most efficient route possible.
Some patients are more challenging than others, however. Not everything always goes smoothly. Sometimes the best calculations go awry, and that’s what’s been preoccupying me lately. I had a patient die a week ago. I’ve been trying to calculate why and how he died, and whether his death is going to mean I have less time left to live.
The patient was Paco. That’s a made-up name, because I’m used to keeping the privacy of patients, and he has a long drug-cartel name in Spanish that means Lord of the Heavens. They called him this, in the Juárez Cartel where he came from, because he hired a fleet of Boeing 737 jets to transport cocaine from Colombia up to Mexico, flying in to municipal airstrips around the country, before sending the coke on to the U.S. through an extensive network he’d built up. Paco was one of the most wanted narcos in the country. It’s always hard to tell if the Mexican government really wants to catch its fugitives or not. After all, how else do you land your own 737s around the country, with drugs hidden in the payload, day after day, year after year? After Paco died, I heard estimates he’d acquired a fortune of twenty-five billion dollars. That’s a lot of smackers. But I can tell you, for sure, after the DEA came to visit my clinic, the U.S. authorities had been hell-bent on capturing him.
—
I’m not sure how Paco found my clinic. My office is one of the smaller ones in Mexico City, in the neighborhood of Polanco. It’s on a side street with shady trees, and the usual mix of private homes and guards and upscale apartments you might find on any street in Polanco. The U.S. embassy owns apartments at the end of the street, and there’s an OfficeMax supply store around the corner and a Carl’s Jr. hamburger place. I’m not one of the top plastic surgeons in the country, and as you can tell by my description, while the neighborhood is nice, and close to clients who can pay, the area is less chic than Las Lomas, where many high-end plastic surgeons have their offices.
Paco, I’m told by the DEA, had been running from the law a couple years by the time he came into my clinic. I don’t mean that’s when he began his life of crime. From what I understand, he was born into a cartel family in Sinaloa. Sinaloa is the Sicily of Mexico for drug mafias. It’s a bit in the middle of nowhere, on the Pacific coast two-thirds of the way up the map of Mexico toward the U.S. If you’re like me, these are just names—places of intrigue where Mexican narcos come from. But something changes, crystallizes, when one of the names that flits across the pages of the newspapers comes into your clinic and you’re expected to operate on him.
Paco didn’t announce who he was when he came, but he didn’t seem like a usual patient. My clinic is called Verde, or Green, and it’s meant to give off a clean, fresh spa feeling. Most of my patients come for routine Botox and collagen treatments, to add firmness to their lips and cheeks. I can do it all, however: blepharoplasty surgery for women who feel their eyelids are too dominant; rhinoplasty, reducing the thickness of a nose, adding an angular point, or reducing overprominence of the nose in profile; breasts can be augmented and shaped with silicone and saline implants or by reshaping the areola. Many women need breast reduction to reduce the pain and heaviness of large breasts and to create a firmer, more youthful look. Depending on the surgery, my two assistants can do most of the preparatory work; or, if the case is more traumatic, as with a burn victim, I take over from the beginning. Burn victims are complicated. The more surface area, the greater the risk without a full surgical hospital on hand, and unless the skin area is small enough, I send that kind of patient to the big hospitals, where they can get proper treatment.
Paco’s hair was long and uncombed when he came into the clinic. He had a six-inch beard and a thin face, and he looked like he had a brown lion’s mane around a face that was too skinny for all that hair. He had a long-sleeve, thick cotton shirt, his sleeves were rolled up, his hands dirty, and his jeans dirty, too, which made him look like a car mechanic or one of the homeless guys that sometimes live in the park along Avenida Horacio, nearby. I thought he might be lost and asking for directions, or wanting some change, when he walked into the clinic. He gave a fake name to the secretary and told her he wanted to speak to Dr. John Franklin.
“Right here,” I said to him in Spanish.
“We need to go into your office,” he said. He didn’t ask if I wanted to do this, he told me what was going to happen. He looked alone, when he first came in, but two others with mirrored sunglasses, dressed in plain clothes with similar jeans and shirts like him, holding AK-47s, came in. They told the secretary to clear out any waiting patients. Veronica, my secretary, is probably smarter than me. She has a way of sizing up every patient as they come in. She often guesses what a client is looking for, before they fill out the forms or have their consultation with me. She wasted no time telling two women, waiting in another room, that she was very sorry but could they come back tomorrow?
Fortunately, we’d only been open half an hour. It was 10:30 a.m., so no one was in the surgery room.
Paco refused to speak in the reception area. His guards surveyed the front door while he took me into my office. I have a photo of my girlfriend there—things haven’t been going well with her. I have a photo of my girlfriend’s golden retriever. I’ve been in limbo, never quite rooted anywhere enough to feel I can have my own pet. I take off, suddenly, to go sea-kayaking on the coast of the Yucatán. So I’ve never made the commitment to having an animal.
“I want a full makeover,” Paco said, when we were sitting in my office.
“I’ll be happy to do whatever I can,” I said. “But what, exactly, do you mean by a ‘full makeover’? That can mean a lot of different things to different people.” Some men ask for a tummy tuck or complete removal of the wrinkles around their eyes. Others want things plastic surgeons have nothing to do with—penis enlargement or cures for erectile dysfunction. Ninety percent of my patients are women, but I have an increasing number of men who want to enhance their body.
“What do you think a ‘full makeover’ means?” Paco said, sarcastically. “I want to change how I look so completely, even a master of disguises won’t know who I am. I want this beard gone. I want my nose changed. I want my face altered. My teeth. My stomach. I want to walk out of here a ghost no one can recognize.”
“That kind of surgery can take weeks of planning,” I said, “to do safely, to assemble the right team, to make sure you approve of the plan.”
“Do I look like I have fucking weeks or even days?” he said. “I’ve come to you because I heard you’re good—good enough, but not famous. They’re unlikely to look for me here. You’re a somebody but a nobody, and I’m telling you you’ll give me a complete makeover—today—or I’m going to kill you.”
By the look of the guards, I knew he wasn’t bluffing. If it hadn’t been for them, I might have thought he was a schizophrenic with fantasies. In Mexico, the surreal can suddenly become real. One minute you’re in your practice with Botox patients, the next a narco is threatening to kill you.
—
In the popular imagination, a plastic surgeon is a greedy guy who makes millions, who cares only about sucking money out of the vanities of his patients. The patients drive BMWs, they can’t accept they’re getting older, and they ask the plastic surgeon to give them a “boob job” so they can keep their rich husband, or the male clients want to get rid of the wrinkles so they can keep their CEO job and their sporty lo
oks. I’m not going to say there’s no truth to this. But in my experience, there are far more women who scrape together all the money they have to make one significant change to their body. They’re women working as teachers, secretaries, police officers, and in bakeries. They’re not hoping to look like the centerfold in Playboy, and they aren’t ditzy women or rich bitches, they’re women with souls, and hopes, and dreams, just like anyone, and often they had the misfortune to be born with something less than what society says is attractive. They didn’t create the norms of beauty. Society did, and judges them. And often they had fathers who told them, when they were growing up, that they weren’t beautiful, or, even worse, mothers who belittled them. That’s one of the reasons I choose to have my clinic in Polanco. It’s a place where I don’t have to cater only to the super-rich. It’s a place that feels more accessible to the full variety of patients. I charge different rates for different kinds of patients. I don’t tell them this, so they don’t feel like charity cases. I ask Veronica to use her judgment, as she watches the patients come in, as to what they can afford.
For me, plastic surgery is like any other medicine. It’s a form of healing. And often I’m healing psychological wounds as I reshape the body. I consider it vital to adhere to the Hippocratic oath—to do no harm. Sometimes that oath can be hard to follow, like when a patient is begging you to make them thinner, and they’re already thin. Sometimes, no doubt, some of the patients seem to have a frivolous sense of beauty or are unwilling to accept they’re growing older. But I try to guide them gently, following the oath, avoiding any violation of the promise I swore to uphold, passed down from the time of the ancient Greeks.