WORLD VOICES IN MY COUNTRY OF BOB DYLAN
BY MATTHEW LIPPMAN |
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Mexico
I have this fantasy about Mexico, that I get down there and it's Ireland, I'm in Belfast, it's 1968 and Van Morrison has his flute out near a cow and everyone talks Gaelic, but it's Mexico City and there is marijuana and broken Coke bottles under the lampposts for everyone. I can't find a restaurant that serves tacos al carbon and my girlfriend's name is Lucia. It's taken me three years to get down here, to find a quiet place near Caba San Lucas, right on the ocean, to learn Spanish and drink milk from a conch. That's all I want, but everyone is Irish and it's kind of Boston but it's Sunday. I dated Margarita for six months and we had sex once or we had sex once and it felt like six months. In Mexico, I dream, the coconut trees will make me quiet, will make the whole world quiet and maybe what the globe needs is a very brown Mexican man named Juan to pretend he's the Bodhisattva and silence the blistered gangs in L.A. and the glass bullets in San Antonio, shut up the nuclear warheads in Arizona and then stand up on the t.v. to say, I told you, I'm nothing and I love you. Goodbye. Then he won't be pretending anymore that he's the Bodhisattva. He'll just disappear in his brown-ness and all the circuits will go dead. The bees will come back and so will the polar bears. They'll come back together and have bumble bee polar bear babies. But this is not my dream. My dream is to speak Spanish and watch Spanish television until four in the morning with no underwear on while summer nods off into the swell of dying cicada lung. My dream is to say, The wicked savages are all dead and the earth is perfectly blue, in Spanish, over and over, so it becomes a mantra, a monkish incantation of the spirit, and then it becomes true. |