An article by Fred Reed, who “bills himself as a curmudgeon, and one can only say he’s a man well suited to that role. He’s a keen observer with a unique style and point of view — that rare man who sees clearly what comes before him.”
For most gringos, Mexico is a place to retire. The Mexicans say, “The Americans come here to die.” Not exactly. It isn’t why they come, but it is what they do, there being eventually no choice. Everybody has to croak somewhere, so why not in the sunshine with little brown kids running back and forth and the street dogs lounging contentedly about? It beats, for some anyway, a wretched sanitarium and lots of tubes.
In the hills on the north side of town, where the nice houses are, you see aging couples like couples anywhere. It could be Lauderdale. They have each other and insurance and pensions and savings. In the bars you see the old single guys. They have close to nothing.
At nine in the morning they sit on green iron benches and wait for the cantinas to open. Little beyond white hair unites them in appearance. Some are thin, others fat, others whatever you can think of except moneyed. “Drunks” is not quite the right word for them. They are just old guys whose lives are spent and they sit around and drink beer and wait. It’s what they have. They seldom fall off stools or get into fights. They are anything but dangerous. They are just old guys with nothing, waiting.
Some would find them reprehensible. Why don’t they do something improving, learn to knit, or take up square dancing? This is harsh. What does a man do when he is seventy years old, his wife died eight years ago in Louisiana, and the trucking firm no longer wants him as a driver? Social Security and a small pension don’t go far in America. He comes to Ajijic and moves into the residential hotel, Italo’s, a block from the plaza and easy walking distance to the bars. It’s cheap and decent and the rooms come with kitchenette and the maids clean them. I’ve stayed there.
He’s seventy and tired, too old to learn a language and probably not of that bent anyway. He doesn’t want to learn to square dance. He is not looking for a cultural experience, not looking for much of anything. Women no longer interest him except as nice people, and anyway the diabetes doesn’t help in that department. So he talks to his friends. And he drinks. It takes the curse off. Besides, if he bothers no one else, it is the business of no one else — n’est-ce pas?
It is a mistake to think these men to be of no account because they are ending their days on a bar stool. They have had lives, traveled, drifted, worked, loved, had families or not, seen things and done things. Often they are intelligent and thoughtful. They are just through.
We live in a censorious age in America, an age of “Gotcha!” in which drinking looms loathsome, smoking is a crime to be punished, second-hand smoke a fearful threat to children and plants and wallpaper. Oh dear. We all must be vigilant for racism, sexism, and the rest. Psychologists call it “passive aggressiveness,” though I think that “the Higher Priss” does nicely. Well, I say, each to his or her or its own. Still, I have always found people who smoke and drink and do the occasional doob to be more interesting than those who don’t — certainly than the drab Comstocks of the current Carryan Nation.
So I’ll cut these guys some slack. You choose an exit door, or fall through one. They have. So will you.
Not all stay in one place. In Italo’s when I was there I met a guy well into his seventies who was about to get on a third-class bus to Guatemala, I think it was. He didn’t walk too well and moved as if he had sand in his joints. He seemed sad but was keeping his chin up. He knew a hotel in a nice town outside Guatemala City where the food was cheap and the young girls just so pretty. He meant nothing sexual. They were just pretty, like pictures. He liked watching them and the kids and Guatemala.
Now that’s rough, I thought. To be at the end of his days and bouncing around bad roads on a Guatemalan bus, alone, going where he probably knew nobody — that’s not the feather-bed route out the door. But he didn’t want to spend the winter in Ajijic. At least he was free. I wished him well.
Some drunks have other stories. There was a fellow, in his thirties I’d guess, who always wore a white cowboy hat and lied compulsively about what daring things he had done. This is common. It’s called “border promotion.” You know: “I was a SEAL team leader before I was an astronaut, between being a fighter pilot and president of IBM.” Sometimes it seems like half the gringo population used to be in the CIA.
Anyway, the guy with the white cowboy hat said he used to be a dead-end drunk, and had the tremor to prove it. But he was over it, he said, and in fact seemed to be. Then one night he got a ride home with somebody, pulled a pistol from somewhere, put it under his chin and blew the top of his head off. AIDS, or at least HIV. We make our choices. The consensus was that he should have done it somewhere else, where it wouldn’t have put a hole in the roof of the car and generally made a mess.
Sometimes one of the old guys will take up with a poor Mexican gal of twenty-five with four kids. They move in together. You could say that it was absurd, that neither knew the other’s language and he was a dirty old man and she a gold-digger. You could also try to exercise a little decency. Not everybody has choices. Usually he treats her well, puts food on the table, maybe gets her some dental work or insists that the kids go to school. It’s better than nothing. She cooks and keeps house and has a few years of security, and he leaves her whatever he can. I’ve seen such couples who seemed happy together. You play the hand you draw.
Things are different for those of intellectual resources, who take up photography seriously, fly ultralights, read, or keep on at whatever they did for a living at a reduced level. I’m not sure how different it is. They too are waiting. So are we all. But there were drunks before there were moralists, and I hope there will be drunks after, as they are so much less tedious, and closer to the human condition.
To read this article and others by Fred Reed (and others), go to The American Expatriate website.
This article struck me so I had to copy and share it. The viewpoint expressed here, as depressing as it might seem to some, is an honest portrayal of life. We seek out magnificence and immortality, fearing the simplicity and seeming futility of our life-long efforts within the greater macro perspective of humanity, past and present. We demonize those substances and lifestyle choices that may bring us (or others) closer to the inevitable end, even (or perhaps especially) when the end looms near. We freak out even when the ‘harm’ being done is on the volition of those partaking and in no direct way affects our individual quality of life. It may not affect us one way or the other, though it may bring some measure of comfort to those whose lives have gone awry or neared the end of the road, and yet we bitch. We bitch about lives we’ve never lived, realities we refuse to face, and assumptions we’re not in a position to make.
I’ve spent my time at bars speaking to the very types of people described in the article above. Hard-luck and aging men mostly, seeking peace and comfort in a bar stool with a bottle of brew and a pack of cigarettes at their favorite local pubs (usually the VA hangout and maybe a couple of other hole-in-the-wall joints). One of these hole-in-the-wall joints became my regular (and almost daily) hangout for roughly two years, so the author’s words in no way seem unfamiliar. But you don’t hear someone say these sort of things out loud now days in regular civilian society, outside of the bars anyway. You don’t typically hear the life stories of veterans who served in the Korean War, went on to become Teamsters, lost the love of their lives 8 years back to cancer, don’t hear from their adult kids much anymore, and who now drink in the afternoons and evenings to pass the time as they wait for life to wrap itself up. They tell their stories at their bars to the friends and acquaintances they’ve made and don’t usually make much of a fuss over the whole ordeal.
One man in particular comes to mind. Every once in a while the corners of his eyes would well up with tears as he spoke of years gone by, particularly when sharing about his wife and how she came to pass. He missed her so much. But he’d tell you he’s too tired and old to start over again, pushing almost 80 by the time I met him. He’d tell you that he’d served his country, worked his whole life, provided what he could, and is now content in just waiting the rest of it out. As a 23-24 year old at the time, it did strike me as so sad, but not because he was there sitting at the bar so much as that he was almost completely alone in this world. The buddies he made were those he drank with as many of his lifelong friends had already passed away.
He touched my life with his peaceful demeanor and stories from an era before my existence. Ol’ Roy, that’s what we called him. He wasn’t a saint and from his stories it sounds like there are a lot of things he wished he could go back and change, but he is just as valuable as the next person and has a right to pursue comfort of his choosing (obviously so long as it doesn’t infringe directly on the rights of others, which drinking in a bar does not). In Ol’ Roy’s case, it didn’t appear he had many choices to select from.
The alcohol helps numb the mind a bit, but it’s the companionship that brought us all out. Even if we didn’t speak to one another, it was better to be in a gathering than alone at the apartment with only your own thoughts to occupy the time. We sought comfort in numbers, knowing that we were a collection of lost souls brought together to cheer ourselves and one another, each with secrets and demons we struggled with. But we showed respect to one another by not prying and taking the time to listen. Some call it alcoholism, I call it therapy.
That’s not to say drugs and drinking are just dandy and everyone should drown their sorrows instead of facing up to the challenges of life. It is to say that we each have different ways of handling suffering and loneliness, and we could show more compassion to those who have already lived long lives. I took the time I needed to mend my broken heart and am young enough to where resilience is expected, but these folks aren’t necessarily in the same boat as you or I am. We could learn much from them, both the intellectuals and the blue-collars, if we cared to listen.
I’d like to continue on and explain how this sort of perspective of human nature fuels my understanding in relation to voluntary euthanasia, hospice care, our so-called “war” on drugs and victimless crimes, and yes, even prostitution, but I’ll save that for another time. I will say though that my Southern upbringing has everything to do with laying the foundation for my core belief that we have a social responsibility to live and let live (or die). While I realize it isn’t common for someone to claim these days that Deep South, USA, is where their inspiration for peace bloomed from, it’s one pocket where the rebellious spirit in the name of liberty and freedom continues to thrive.
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