Read Down and Delirious in Mexico City for Free Online Page A

teeth—rips open her left forearm in a splash of bottles. It looks as if she is bleeding buckets. She is rushed to a hospital. Two hours later, La Chimuela is back at El Jacalito, happily serving beers, her arm wrapped in bandages.
    Along the way, I meet Leti, seven years or so older than me, who decides to take me under her wing. Leti is Mexican, but my knowledge of what shapes her life is almost nonexistent. I know nothing except that she lives far from the Roma, and that she’d like to study gastronomy. Leti has short, spiky black hair and light freckles, clear blue eyes, and wears jangly metal bracelets all the way up to her elbows. I never learn her last name. She is a punk-rock Mexico City mystery, keeping me close by, hardly ever saying a word.
    â€œHere,” she says one night in El Jacalito, handing me a tiny, folded-up piece of white paper, and indicating the men’s room. Cocaine. Everywhere, in everyone’s pockets. On its way north from Colombia to America, it stops in the Aztec metropolis, fueling a million nihilistic bouts of rage, lust, and vanity on any given night. I was raised to view recreational drug use negatively, but four years at Berkeley have clouded my value systems. I find myself rationalizing. I see participating as a way to merge into Mexico City, for good or ill. I see no moral quandary on my plate, no endless narco war on the horizon. I see only the gathering of the senses. For the first time, I sample the devil’s dust. It seems so casually
Mexico City
to do so, part of the “local experience,” as a professional travelermight put it. Leti feeds me the powder as though it’s breakfast cereal. And then we dance.
    After the bars, we cobble together a spontaneous group and find our way to some stylish art deco building in the Condesa, across from the Roma. Both neighborhoods are still in the early stages of their eventual gentrification. We stumble up several landings of stairs and into someone’s apartment, where we indulge on a sumptuous spread of canned beer, cigarettes, and coke. I want to please Leti. I want to fit in. She coos to me in raspy Spanish. This is how it goes until the glare of sunrise catches the silhouette of the fifty-five-story Torre Mayor, then under construction, its unfinished top exposed in shredded angles of steel.
    Late at night, or sometimes in the morning, my head pounding, I return to the Colonia Zapata Vela, just a few miles to the east of Condesa and Roma but a world away from the scenes of organized hedonism. After a month or so with the family who first welcomed me to Mexico, I make a few connections and move into an triangle-shaped closet in a bachelor pad on loud and crowded Avenida Cuauhtémoc, between the Roma and Doctores neighborhoods, a few corners away from metro Hospital General. The roommates are two Scots and a model and musician from the city of Torreón, in the northeast near Monterrey. I am closer to the
News,
and also closer to achieving my
chilango
-fication.
    I never pause to take notes about these first nights out in Mexico City. That would be uncool, and Leti and her friends seem to me in 2002 to be the epitome of cool. Their tastes and values are radically different from what I have just left. At Berkeley, the accepted standards at the time consisted of musical acts such as the Counting Crows, maybe some Mos Def, and anything popular in the imagination of an idealized Berkeley of the late 1960s. In Mexico City the youth sound that I encounter is mostly electronic,a mashed-up, bass-heavy, dirty disco beat that I have never before heard. It sounds cooler than cool. My friends navigate the city effortlessly. I envy their confidence and sophistication. They hustle, they bargain, they drink, smoke, and do drugs. They wear mullets and fauxhawks back when mullets and fauxhawks are only just cutting-edge. Sexuality is fluid, negotiable, and often utilized as trap or trick on partners or potential mates. I am