Nervous was I like Dr. Seuss in the sky, and then I’d drink coffee and really fly, but my mind had not been allowed to work freely in ages, and I saw once again the infinite transcendental landscape of the mind and how everything, even death, was aperiodically interactive in quasicrystalline symmetry and I lay on the hardwood floor or on that cracked black couch and watched the electric storms behind my eyelids and wondered maniacally about time and why if the eardrum is simply a single vibrating membrane like a tiny trampoline how it can discern every detail of every instrument in a symphony orchestra along with the old man coughing next to you.
As the drugs began to evaporate from my system the simple beauty of my surroundings unfolded: I savored the fresh air and the clouds and the sand under my bare feet, the cool-aired supermarkets with their acres of delicacies, the crackle of a freshly opened Racing Form, and no one looking over my shoulder or following me down a corridor with a syringe in their left hand. Never again would I take for granted a private bathroom, the choice to drive east or west without permission, or a long walk down to the beach at night to watch the caps and veins of foam in the curling faces of the moon-painted waves. Like a child, I was once again in awe of flowing water, disheveled movie theaters, sitting around the house naked with a freshly opened tub of Cool Whip, and never once answering the phone.
After two weeks off my meds I also began to get my telepathic powers back. Beatriz was often away, leaving no one to watch Carlito, so he hung around scowling and growling at my door, waiting for his opportunity to maul me, and I would’ve gotten him first if I’d had a fireplace poker, but as the heavy haze of boundless years of pernicious and addictive medicines lifted I realized that he was not the threat I had originally perceived.
To make amends, I invited him in. He wagged his tail and said to me in so many words, if you give me even as much as an old tortilla I will stay here and help to heal your mind.
How did you know I had tortillas? I asked him.
It is written all over you, he replied.
Your name is not really Carlito, is it?
No, I am not a Mexican dog.
You look like a big butterscotch sundae.
Flattery will get you nowhere.
From now on I will call you Sweets.
You are about the most pathetic human being I have ever seen.
That made me laugh for what Sweets said was true.
All I had were curly old dried-up tortillas, which Sweets preferred for their chewy staleness, but I didn’t have enough for his liking so I gave him some of the queso fresco, which he snuffled at because he said it gave him the runs. I fell asleep at noon in a patch of sun on the floor and woke up with the front door wide open and that big snoring orange-and-white brute piled into my ribs and I knew that he had begun to heal me. Later that afternoon, I took him swimming in the ocean, and on the way back I picked up a thirty-pack of Mission tortillas from Vons and set them out on the kitchen table to dry.
Freedom presented problems that I hadn’t had to worry much about in Mudville, chief among them money and sex. Without rent and not much interest in eating, I’d be all right financially for a while. Eventually I’d have to get a job or develop a gambling system or write a bestseller or something to that effect, but off the noxious psychotropics my libido was sharp to the point of an overload if not addressed. I knew no eligible women and did not want to compromise my situation or troll lucklessly in a bar, so I drove down to Tijuana, which had been transformed into a modern city since I’d seen it last. All my old haunts were gone. The Jai Alai Palace had closed. Agua Caliente, the preeminently fast and crooked llamadrome (cheap-purse track) that only ran on the weekends, had burned down twice before they’d finally closed it for good (horse tracks burn down at disproportionate rates, almost always by a vengeful hand). Most of the clubs and restaurants I’d frequented had assumed new names and facades.
I had never liked La Zona Norte, where the tourists and the drunken college kids rented their overpriced and diseased prostitutes, but my favorite whorehouse on Espejo had moved, and the Chicken Brothel on Avenida Revuelto was now a language school. I drove my truck until I couldn’t smell the river anymore, parked on a side street, and wandered into a bar where all the paisanos looked up at me as I came through the door as if I were an ostrich. Indeed, in the mirror I did look like an ostrich. I had a shot and a beer and listened to the cumbia on the jukebox. Some vaquero threw a firecracker under my chair which got me so rattled I almost laid him out as everyone in the confounded place laughed, but here I recognized was a test, which I decided to pass since if I were arrested in Mexico it might be my last act in the free world, and anyway I had come for love not war.
It is always best to go off the main track looking for whores. They are floozier on the fringes, cheaper, sweeter, more discreet. So I wandered down the street until I came to a little wooden two-story Moroccan looking hotel with dahlias and marigolds in big broken-mirror pots on the wrought iron balconies and six brightly dolled
