Mexico City has a history of harboring interesting fugitives. On a previous trip with Jenny, we visited the house where Leon Trotsky was assassinated by an ice pick wielding Stalinist agent. This weekend I make a solo excursion to D.F. , where among other activities, I decided to track down the scene of another grisly event. This one involved William S Burroughs after he'd fled the US on drug charges. The place I wanted to visit of course was the bar where he accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken William Tell reenactment. I took a Primera Plus bus to Mexico City, and they provided apples in their snack pack. It's annoying that they're individually plastic wrapped, but thoughtful in a way, as though they'd anticipated my reason for visiting Mexico City and thought to include thematically relevant foodstuffs. Anyway, I began to conceive of a vague plan to photograph the individually wrapped apple atop my head.
According to the internets, the building is at 122 Monterrey and houses a restaurant selling enchiladas. I got there later than I was hoping to, having spent way too much time in the National Museum of Anthropology. (While I've already been to the museum four or five times, now that I know I'm leaving Mexico, it felt like the last time I'd ever visit). So after saying goodbye to the feathered coyote, the turtle with a man's head, and the mistress of the skirt of snakes, I found it was already getting towards dusk. This was worrying, as I sort of expected it to be a sketchy area (I don't know why).
When I got there I encountered a more existential sort of danger: There just wasn't much to see. It's a drab apartment building. There is a restaurant on the corner, but it had already shuttered for the evening. Looking for...something, I found a poster taped to a phone booth for a garage sale at the Woody Allen Cultural Center. While intriguing, it just didn't seem like the message Burroughs would send from the beyond. Maybe if the poster had been advertising half-human/half-centipede creatures or talking assholes. The door to the building was open a crack though, and I slipped in, under the suspicious gaze of a woman waiting at a bus stop. Inside the building, it was just a building. There were some people doing their laundry on the roof top.
The plan to photograph myself with the apple was also thwarted by my not having a camera. The above image therefore is a forgery, though it is authentically the apple provided by Primera Plus.
