the little darlings,. cried Dean, .but notice the old lady or the old man is always somewhere around in
the back usually, sometimes a hundred yards, gathering twigs and wood or tending animals.
They’re never alone. Nobody’s ever alone in this country. While you’ve been sleeping I’ve been
digging this road and this country, and if I could only tell you all the thoughts I’ve had, man!. He was
sweating. His eyes were red-streaked and mad and also subdued and tender - he had found people
like himself. We bowled right through the endless swamp country at a steady forty-five. .Sal, I think
the country won’t change for a long time. If you’ll drive, I’ll sleep now..
I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, through Linares, through hot, flat swamp
country, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on. A great verdant jungle valley
with long fields of green crops opened before me. Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow
old-fashioned bridge. The hot river flowed. Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country
began reappearing. The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and 1 was alone in my
eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or
Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would
finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic
primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from
Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the
selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the
Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls
of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the
World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of
silly civilized American lore - they had high cheekbones, and slanted f eyes, and soft ways; they were
not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind
and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in
the desert are they in the desert of .history.. And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-
important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was
the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of

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.history. and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will
still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all
began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I
drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.
Earlier, back at San Antonio, I had promised Dean, as a joke, that I would get him a girl. It was a
bet and a challenge. As I pulled up the car at the gas station near sunny Gregoria a kid came across
the road on tattered feet, carrying an enormous windshield-shade, and wanted to know if I’d buy.
.You like? Sixty peso. Habla Espanol? Sesenta peso. My name Victor..
.Nah,. I said jokingly, .buy senorita..
.Sure, sure!. he cried excitedly. .I get you gurls, onny-time. Too hot now,. he added with
distaste. .No good gurls when hot day. Wait tonight. You like shade?.
I didn’t want the shade but I wanted the girls. I woke up Dean. .Hey, man, I told you in Texas
I’d get you a girl -all right, stretch your bones and wake up, boy; we’ve got girls waiting for us..
.What? what?. he cried, leaping up, haggard. .Where? where?.
.This boy Victor’s going to show us where..
.Well, lessgo, lessgo!. Dean leaped out of the car and clasped Victor’s hand. There was a group
of other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy straw
hats. .Man,. said Dean to me, .ain’t this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It’s so much cooler than
Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?. he cried in Spanish. .Dig that, Sal, I’m
speaking Spanish..
.Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got ma-ree-wa-na?.
The kid nodded gravely. .Sho, onnytime, mon. Come with me..
.Hee! Wheel Hoo!. yelled Dean. He was wide awake and jumping up and down in that drowsy
Mexican street. .Let’s all go!. I was passing Lucky Strikes to the other boys. They were getting
great pleasure out of us and especially Dean. They turned to one another with cupped hands and
rattled off comments about the mad American cat. .Dig them, Sal, talking about us and digging. Oh
my goodness, what a world!. Victor got in the car with us, and we lurched off. Stan Shephard had
been sleeping soundly and woke up to this madness.
We drove way out to the desert the other side of town and turned on a rutty dirt road that made
the car bounce as never before. Up ahead was Victor’s house. It sat on the edge of cactus flats
overtopped by a few trees, just an adobe cracker-box, with a few men lounging around in the yard.
.Who that?. cried Dean, all excited.
.Those my brothers. My mother there too. My sistair too. That my family. I married, I live
downtown..
.What about your mother?. Dean flinched. .What she say about marijuana..
.Oh, she get it for me.. And as we waited in the car Victor got out and loped over to the house
and said a few words to an old lady, who promptly turned and went to the garden in back and began
gathering dry fronds of marijuana that had been pulled off the plants and left to dry in the desert sun.
Meanwhile Victor’s brothers grinned from under a tree. They were coming over to meet us but it
would take a while for them to get up and walk over. Victor came back, grinning sweetly.
.Man,. said Dean, .that Victor is the sweetest, gonest, fran-ticest little bangtail cat I’ve ever in all
my life met. Just look at him, look at his cool slow walk. There’s no need to hurry around here.. A
steady, insistent desert breeze blew into the car. It was very hot.
.You see how hot?. said Victor, sitting down with Dean in the front seat and pointing up at the
burning roof of the Ford. .You have ma-ree-gwana and it no hot no more. You wait..
.Yes,. said Dean, adjusting his dark glasses, .I wait. For sure, Victor m’boy..

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Presently Victor’s tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page of
newspaper. He dumped it on Victor’s lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod and
smile at us and say, .Hallo.. Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him. Nobody talked; it was fine.
Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper)
what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victor
casually lit it and passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling.
It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat. We held our breaths and all let out just about
simultaneously. Instantly we were all high. The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly like
the beach at Acapulco. I looked out the back window of the car, and another and the strangest of
Victor’s brothers - a tall Peruvian of an Indian with a sash over his shoulder - leaned grinning on a
post, too bashful to come up and shake hands. It seemed the car was surrounded by brothers, for
another one appeared on Dean’s side. Then the strangest thing happened. Everybody became so
high that usual formalities were dispensed with and the things of immediate interest were
concentrated on, and now it was the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on
the desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of
skins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world. So the Indian
brothers began talking about us in low voices and commenting; you saw them look, and size, and
compare mutualities of impression, or correct and modify, .Yeh, yeh., while Dean and Stan and I
commented on them in English.
.Will you d-i-g that weird brother in the back that hasn’t moved from that post and hasn’t by one
cut hair diminished the intensity of the glad funny bashfulness of his smile? And the one to my left
here, older, more sure of himself but sad. like hung-up, like a bum even maybe, in town, while Victor
is respectably married - he’s like a gawddam Egyptian king, that you see. These guys are real cats.
Ain’t never seen anything like it. And they’re talking and wondering about us, like see? Just like we
are but with a difference of their own, their interest probably resolving around how we’re dressed same
as ours, really - but the strangeness of the things we have in the car and the strange ways that
we laugh so different from them, and maybe even the way we smell compared to them. Nevertheless
I’d give my eye-teeth to know what they’re saying about us.. And Dean tried. .Hey Victor, man what
you brother say just then?.
Victor turned mournful high brown eyes on Dean. .Yeah, yeah..
.No, you didn’t understand my question. What you boys talking about?.
.Oh,. said Victor with great perturbation, .you no like this mar-gwana?.
.Oh, yeah, yes fine! What you talk about?.
.Talk? Yes, we talk. How you like Mexico?. It was hard to come around without a common
language. And everybody grew quiet and cool and high again and just enjoyed the breeze from the
desert and mused separate national and racial and personal high-eternity thoughts.
It was time for the girls. The brothers eased back to their station under the tree, the mother
watched from her sunny doorway, and we slowly bounced back to town.
But now the bouncing was no longer unpleasant; it was the most pleasant and graceful billowy trip
in the world, as over a blue sea, and Dean’s face was suffused with an unnatural glow that was like
gold as he told us to understand the springs of the car now for the first time and dig the ride. Up and
down we bounced, and even Victor understood and laughed. Then he pointed left to show which
way to go for the girls, and Dean, looking left with indescribable delight and leaning that way, pulled
the wheel around and rolled us smoothly and surely to the goal, meanwhile listening to Victor’s
attempt to speak and saying grandly and magniloquently .Yes, of course! There’s not a doubt in my
mind! Decidedly, man! Oh, indeed! Why, pish, posh, you say the dearest things to me! Of course!

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Yes! Please go on!. To this Victor talked gravely and with magnificent Spanish eloquence. For a
mad moment I thought Dean was understanding everything he said by sheer wild insight and sudden
revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness. In that moment, too, he looked so
exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt - some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain - that I
drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to
struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God. I was so high I had to lean my head back on
the seat; the bouncing of the car sent shivers of ecstasy through me. The mere thought of looking out
the window at Mexico - which was now something else in my mind - was like recoiling from some
gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend
inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once. I gulped. I saw streams of gold
pouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across my
eyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. I looked out the window at the hot, sunny
streets and saw a woman in a doorway and I thought she was listening to every word we said and
nodding to herself - routine paranoiac visions due to tea. But the stream of gold continued. For a
long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing and only came around
sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence like waking from sleep to the world, or
waking from void to a dream, and they told me we were parked outside Victor’s house and he was
already at the door of the car with his little baby son in his arms, showing him to us.
.You see my baby? Hees name Perez, he six month age..
.Why,. said Dean, his face still transfigured into a shower of supreme pleasure and even bliss,
.he is the prettiest child I have ever seen. Look at those eyes. Now, Sal and Stan,. he said, turning
to us with a serious and tender air, .I want you par-ti-cu-lar-ly to see the eyes of this little Mexican
boy who is the son of our wonderful friend Victor, and notice how he will come to manhood with his
own particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes
surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.. It was a beautiful speech. And it was a
beautiful baby. Victor mournfully looked down at his angel. We all wished we had a little son like
that. So great was our intensity over the child’s soul that he sensed something and began a grimace
which led to bitter tears and some unknown sorrow that we had no means to soothe because it
reached too far back into innumerable mysteries and time. We tried everything; Victor smothered
him in his neck and rocked, Dean cooed, I reached over and stroked the baby’s little arms. His
bawls grew louder. .Ah,. said Dean, .I’m awfully sorry, Victor, that we’ve made him sad..
.He is not sad, baby cry.. In the doorway in back of Victor, too bashful to come out, was his
little barefoot wife, with anxious tenderness waiting for the babe to be put back in her arms so brown
and soft. Victor, having shown us his child, climbed back into the car and proudly pointed to the
right.
.Yes,. said Dean, and swung the car over and directed it through narrow Algerian streets with
faces on all sides watching us with gentle wonder. We came to the whorehouse. It was a magnificent
establishment of stucco in the golden sun. In the street, and leaning on the windowsills that opened
into the whorehouse, were two cops, saggy-trousered, drowsy, bored, who gave us brief interested
looks as we walked in, and stayed there the entire three hours that we cavorted under their noses,
until we came out at dusk and at Victor’s bidding gave them the equivalent of twenty-four cents
each, just for the sake of form.
And in there we found the girls. Some of them were reclining on couches across the dance floor,
some of them were boozing at the long bar to the right. In the center an arch led into small cubicle
shacks that looked like the places where you put on your bathing suit at public municipal beaches.
These shacks were in the sun of the court. Behind the bar was the proprietor, a young fellow who

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instantly ran out when we told him we wanted to hear mambo music and came back with a stack of
records, mostly by Perez Prado, and put them on over the loudspeaker. In an instant all the city of
Gregoria could hear the good times going on at the Sala de Baile. In the hall itself the din of the music
-for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it
shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play
music as loud as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. It blew and shuddered directly at
us. In a few minutes half that portion of town was at the windows, watching the Americanos dance
with the gals. They all stood, side by side with the cops, on the dirt sidewalk, leaning in with
indifference and casualness. .More Mambo Jambo,. .Chattanooga de Mambo,. .Mambo Numero
Ocho. - all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like
the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming. The trumpets
seemed so loud I thought they could hear them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets had
originated anyway. The drums were mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the river
of Africa and the world; it’s really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom - oom-ta, ta-poo-poom.
The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were like great
gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongo
drums, on the great mad Chattanooga record, froze Dean in his tracks for a moment till he
shuddered and sweated; then when the trumpets bit the drowsy air with their quivering echoes, like a
cavern’s or a cave’s, his eyes grew large and round as though seeing the devil, and he closed them
tight. I myself was shaken like a puppet by it; I heard the trumpets flail the light I had seen and
trembled in my boots.
On the fast .Mambo Jambo. we danced frantically with the girls. Through our deliriums we
began to discern their varying personalities. They were great girls. Strangely the wildest one was half
Indian, half white, and came from Venezuela, and only eighteen. She looked as if she came from a
good family. What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair
aspect, God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw
down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually,
the idea also being to make us spend’ as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in
broad afternoon, she frantically danced with Dean and clung about his neck and begged and begged
for everything. Dean was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo. They ran off
to the lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting girl with a puppy dog, who got sore at me
when I took a dislike to the dog because it kept trying to bite me. She compromised by putting it
away in the back, but by the time she returned I had been hooked by another girl, better looking but
not the best, who clung to my neck like a leech. I was trying to break loose to get at a sixteen-yearold
colored girl who sat gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her short shirty dress
across the hall. I couldn’t do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored skin and a
dress that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A good twenty men leaned in
that window, watching.
At one point the mother of the little colored girl - not colored, but dark - came in to hold a brief
and mournful convocation with her daughter. When I saw that, I was too ashamed to try for the one
I really wanted. I let the leech take me off to the back, where, as in a dream, to the din and roar of
more loudspeakers inside, we made the bed bounce a half-hour. It was just a square room with
wooden slats and no ceiling, ikon in a corner, a washbasin in another. All up and down the dark hall
the girls were calling, .Agua, agua caliente!. which means .hot water.. Stan and Dean were also
out of sight. My girl charged thirty pesos, or about three dollars and a half, and begged for an extra
ten pesos and gave a long story about something. I didn’t know the value of Mexican money; for all I

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knew I had a million pesos. I threw money at her. We rushed back to dance. A greater crowd was
gathered in the Street. The cops looked as bored as usual. Dean’s pretty Venezuelan dragged me
through a door and into another strange bar that apparently belonged to the whorehouse. Here a
young bartender was talking and wiping glasses and an old man with handlebar mustache sat
discussing something earnestly. And here too the mambo roared over another loud* speaker. It
seemed the whole world was turned on. Venezuela clung about my neck and begged for drinks. The
bartender wouldn’t give her one. She begged and begged, and when he gave it to her she spilled it
and this time not on purpose, for I saw the chagrin in her poor sunken lost eyes. .Take it easy,
baby,. I told her. I had to support her on the stool; she kept slipping off. I’ve never seen a drunker
woman, and only eighteen. I bought her another drink; she was tugging at my pants for mercy. She
gulped it up. I didn’t have the heart to try her. My own girl was about thirty and took care of herself
better. With Venezuela writhing and suffering in my arms, I had a longing to take her in the back and
undress her and only talk to her - this I told myself. I was delirious with want of her and the other
little dark girl.
Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the counter and
jumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort. We bought him drinks. His
eyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn’t accept any, being faithful to his wife. Dean thrust money
at him. In this welter of madness I had an opportunity to see what Dean was up to. He was so out of
his mind he didn’t know who I was when I peered at his face. .Yeah, yeah!. is all he said. It seemed
it would never end. It was like a long, spectral Arabian dream in the afternoon in another life - Ali
Baba and the alleys and the courtesans. Again I rushed off with my girl to her room; Dean and Stan
switched the girls they’d had before; and we were out of sight a moment, and the spectators had to
wait for the show to go on. The afternoon grew long and cool.
Soon it would be mysterious night in old gone Gregoria. The mambo never let up for a moment, it
frenzied on like an endless journey in the jungle. I couldn’t take my eyes off the little dark girl and the
way, like a queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial tasks
such as bringing us drinks and sweeping the back. Of all the girls in there she needed the money
most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant/ sisters and brothers.
Mexicans are poor. It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. I
have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made
me flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same
unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same
reluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her
unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that.
At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his
face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and
finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.
Now Victor suddenly clutched at our arms in the furor and made frantic signs.
.What’s the matter?. He tried everything to make us understand. Then he ran to the bar and
grabbed the check from the bartender, who scowled at him, and took it to us to see. The bill was
over three hundred pesos, or thirty-six American dollars, which is a lot of money in any whorehouse.
Still we couldn’t sober up and didn’t want to leave, and though we were all run out we still wanted to
hang around with our lovely girls in this strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of
the hard, hard road. But night was coming and we had to get on to the end; and Dean saw that, and
began frowning and thinking and trying to straighten himself out, and finally I broached the idea of
leaving once and for all. .So much ahead of us, man, it won’t make any difference..

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.That’s right!. cried Dean, glassy-eyed, and turned to his Venezuelan. She had finally passed out
and lay on a wooden bench with her white legs protruding from the silk. The gallery in the window
took advantage of the show; behind them red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere I
heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic
hasheesh daydream in heaven.
We staggered out; we had forgotten Stan; we ran back in to get him and found him charmingly
bowing to the new evening whores, who had just come in for night shift. He wanted to start all over
again. When he is drunk he lumbers like a man ten feet tall and when he is drunk he can’t be dragged
away from women. Moreover women cling to him like ivy. He insisted on staying and trying some of
the newer, stranger, more proficient senoritas. Dean and I pounded him on the back and dragged
him out. He waved profuse good-bys to everybody - the girls, the cops, the crowds, the children in
the street outside; he blew kisses in all directions to ovations of Gregoria and staggered proudly
among the gangs and tried to speak to them and communicate his joy and love of everything this fine
afternoon of life. Everybody laughed; some slapped him on the back. Dean rushed over and paid the
policemen the four pesos and shook hands and grinned and bowed with them. Then he jumped in the
car, and the girls we had known, even Venezuela, who was wakened for the farewell, gathered
around the car, huddling in their flimsy duds, and chattered good-bys and kissed us, and Venezuela
even began to weep - though not for us, we knew, not altogether for us, yet enough and good
enough. My dusky darling love had disappeared in the shadows inside. It was all over. We pulled
out and left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us, and it didn’t seem like a bad
day’s work. The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks. It was all over. .Good-by, Gregoria!.
cried Dean, blowing it a kiss.
Victor was proud of us and proud of himself. .Now you like bath?. he asked. Yes, we all
wanted wonderful bath.
And he directed us to the strangest thing in the world: it was an ordinary American-type
bathhouse one mile out of town on the highway, full of kids splashing in a pool and showers inside a
stone building for a few centavos a crack, with soap and towel from the attendant. Besides this, it
was also a sad kiddy park with swings and a broken-down merry-go-round, and in the fading red
sun it seemed so strange and so beautiful. Stan and I got towels and jumped right into ice-cold
showers inside and came out refreshed and new. Dean didn’t bother with a shower, and we saw him
far across the sad park, strolling arm in arm with good Victor and chatting volubly and pleasantly and
even leaning excitedly toward him to make a point, and pounding his fist. Then they resumed the
arm-in-arm position and strolled. The time was coming to say good-by to Victor, so Dean was
taking the opportunity to have moments alone with him and to inspect the park and get his views on
things in general and in all dig him as only Dean could do.
Victor was very sad now that we had to go. .You come back Gregoria, see me?.
.Sure, man!. said Dean. He even promised to take Victor back to the States if he so wished it.
Victor said he would have to mull this over.
.I got wife and kid - ain’t got a money - I see.. His sweet polite smile glowed in the redness as
we waved to him from the car. Behind him were the sad park and the children.

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6
Immediately outside Gregoria the road began to drop, great trees arose on each side, and in the
trees as it grew dark we heard the great roar of billions of insects that sounded like one continuous
high-screeching cry. .Whoo!. said Dean, and he turned on his headlights and they weren’t working.’
.What! what! damn now what?. And he punched and fumed at his dashboard. .Oh, my, we’ll have
to drive through the jungle without lights, think of the horror of that, the only time I’ll see is when
another car comes by and there just aren’t any cars! And of course no lights? Oh, what’ll we do,
dammit?.
.Let’s just drive. Maybe we ought to go back, though?.
.No, never-never! Let’s go on. I can barely see the road. We’ll make it.. And now we shot in
inky darkness through the scream of insects, and the great, rank, almost rotten smell descended, and
we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Gregoria the beginning of the Tropic of
Cancer. .We’re in a new tropic! No wonder the smell! Smell it!. I stuck my head out the window;
bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly
our lights were working again and they poked ahead, illuminating the lonely road that ran between
solid walls of drooping, snaky trees as high as a hundred feet.
.Son-of-a-bitch!. yelled Stan in the back. .Hot damn!. He was still so high. We suddenly
realized he was still high and the jungle and troubles made no difference to his happy soul. We began
laughing, all of us.
.To hell with it! We’ll just throw ourselves on the gawd-damn jungle, we’ll sleep in it tonight, let’s

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