The Adderall burns in my nostrils and a few minutes later I can feel the buzz starting behind my eyeballs. My mouth goes dry and my sinuses open up. I get that jittery feeling of fake confidence. I can drive all night. I can outpace the cartels chasing me down. I can get to Tabitha, get to Mictlan, set the world on fire. Everything will be just fine.
I know it’s all bullshit. I have to remember that. Have to force myself. Confidence in this game is dangerous. The second I think I know what I’m doing, give in to that screaming Adderall voice and its promises, the euphoria, the confidence, I’m fucked. The Adderall focuses me, keeps me awake, but it’s a lying sonofabitch. Tomorrow I’m going to pay for it. Right now I need it.
The next five hours go by in a blur. I crank the volume on the one tape stuck in the car’s dilapidated cassette deck, a regrettable collection of Norte?o music I picked up in Tijuana. I can’t get the damn thing out of the machine.
Half the tracks are narcocorridos, songs glorifying the cartels, making them sound like fucking Robin Hoods instead of mass murderers. If I weren’t tripping balls I wouldn’t be listening to this crap. So I’m rocking out while I speed down the highway to Movimiento Alterado’s “Sanguinarios del M1,” a peppy little number where some narco in Culiacán goes on about how awesome it is to kill people. The accordions really tie the song together.
I pass small towns separated by miles of nothing. Truck stops, gas stations, bars. The terrain becomes more mountainous as I get closer to Mexico City, the population denser, the world more modern.
The magic changes, too. The taste and feel of the magic shifts based on location and people. New York doesn’t taste like New Orleans. St. Paul doesn’t taste like Miami.
My entire time here, the magic has tasted old, like dirt and clay and ashes. It’s peasant magic, mostly, spells that come from the earth, magic tinged with the wrappings of faith, either for the Catholic god or some of the older ones. The magic in rural America has a similar feel, if not as wild.
And not nearly so full of death. I’ve occasionally seen a few shrines to Santa Muerte on the road and in those areas the magic tastes off. Not bad, evil, or anything stupid like that. Those aren’t things that apply to magic. That’s like calling water evil.
No, it feels resigned, stoic. Like it’s given up. Magic takes on the characteristics of the lives around it. So much violence, so much corruption, I’m not surprised. And when I pass those areas I feel a surge of power. Death is death, and whether I like it or not, that’s what my magic’s tuned to.
That’s never bothered me before. It’s just something I accepted. But lately, especially here where the body count is in the tens of thousands, where there’s this much suffering, I’m not sure how I feel about it.
As I get closer to Mexico City the magic starts to feel more modern, colder. Steel girders and old world marble. Electricity and blood. As the seat of the Aztec empire before the Spanish came along there’s a lot of blood. It wants it. Demands it. The murder rate doesn’t compare to places like Acapulco or Ciudad Juárez, but it’s got a deeper history of it. Murder here has its roots in ritual and the city feeds on it.
Pulling in to Mexico City proper and the magic competes with itself. It wants to be ancient and modern at the same time. A constant back and forth struggle as the people embrace the future and cling to the past.
Everything about Mexico City has that same sense of old and new. Cobblestone streets and modern day traffic, glass-skinned skyscrapers and five-hundred-year-old cathedrals. The whole city is built over the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the seat of Aztec power before the Spanish came, while just to the north lies Teotihuacan, a city pre-dating the Aztecs by a thousand years. No one knows who built it. No one knows where they went.
It’s a strange city, even by my standards. Hell, a strange country. It’s easy to be swept up in this idea that it’s nothing but a murder party 24/7. But it’s not. There are people pushing back. People living their lives. When all you see is the fucked up parts of a place, you start to think that maybe that’s all there is. But most people aren’t really that bad.
All that goes out the window, of course, as soon as I start crossing the city toward Tepito. I sit in gridlock for more than three hours trying to go less than twenty miles. Makes Fridays on the 405 back in Los Angeles look like an empty four lane highway. This is not a city built for cars. Or people with anger management issues.
I finally manage to park the Cadillac a few blocks from Tepito proper. Almost the entire barrio is taken up by a massive open-air market and trying to get the car in there is an exercise in futility.