The Gringos Are Coming!
In search of imaginary conversations and drugs, south of the border.
The tequila strikes hard and fast in the August heat after just an hour of perspiration from trampling the scorching Malecon. The humidity smothers each breath like those cheap Chinese disposable masks that deposit plastic particulates deep in your lungs.
Bar after bar, palapa roofs and ceiling fans, open to the great pacific ocean with its diving pelicans, but no relief from the summer of normal Mexican weather. The ceiling fans are too high to have any impact and definitely no air conditioning. “Definitely none,” the waiter confirms.
“Sorry amigo, but I have extra cold Pacifico to help with the heat.” The waiter wants me to stay. Maybe to move to a table after standing at the bar. “I bring a bucket with ice.”
Tired of walking and cruising pharmacies for the cheapest options of prescription drugs that can be snagged without a prescription I finally relent and park myself near a mahogany wood railing with the best view of the bay.
The United States is a failed state I keep telling myself on the flight south. A dozen calls to doctors and urgent care clinics for a simple refill of a medication prescribed in Poland, with a letter from a Polish doctor and not a single place in a large American city would oblige, even with travel insurance so they can overcharge the insurance company as many of those clinics do.
It’s not a matter of life and death, and it’s no great emergency, but it is a matter of liberty and common decency. How many scripts of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were denied by pharmacies over the past two years? How many doctors refused to even write a prescription for either drug at the request of their regular patients because the FDA told them they must let them die instead?
At almost every pharmacy I see boxes of both drugs available in Mexico, where they just give it to you if you put some pesos on their counter. No need to beg American assholes in white coats for permission to ingest what you want. American bodies now belong to the CDC, NIH, FDA, and the corporate death-accelerator industry. No amount of pesos will change that.
In some ways I’m grateful. I have an excuse to return to Mexico and decide to use it as a two-mission expedition: Stockpile drugs that no pinche American doctors will prescribe on demand, and a scouting operation on potentially relocating before the Polish winter heating bills come due.
The drug mission is as easy as I remember once I find the right prices. After a drunken first afternoon and evening, I arrive at a pharmacy with a hangover on the second morning. In front a display sign reads like a restaurant menu of drugs: VIAGRA - AMOXYCILLIN - IVERMECTIN - TRAMADOL - XANAX - PRILOSEC and twenty others.
Inside the Señora offers me steroids, HGH, benzos, pain killers, and antibiotics. Fear and loathing Mexico style, with no typewriter or mescalin. She pulls a laminated card from beneath the counter with dosages, tablet counts, and prices. I stock up on all the essentials and more for the coming hardships when the Chinese dragon flexes on western pharmaceutical supply chains, endangering the lives of tens of millions of Americans who will no doubt race south for solutions.
Aside from easy access to whatever drugs one wants, Puerto Vallarta has become something new since they locked down the world two years ago, or maybe everything and everywhere has changed forever, and there’s no going back.
The steak house with the bread rolls that melted upon the first touch of the tongue is gone. The daiquiri place with the brothers who played their flamenco guitars so masterfully every Thursday and Saturday afternoon is shuttered too. The waiter comes with my bucket of Pacificos on ice. I ask the waiter what happened to the daiquiri place with the flamenco brothers.
“Gone amigo. They had to close down. Covid.”
“Not covid,” I correct him before extending my new t-shirt from a souvenir shop down the Malecon which reads: Pinche Covid.
“Sí, pinche covid,” he confirms. “Pinche Covid,” he repeats shaking his head.
The other waiters confirm our confirmations with mumblings of pinche covid under their breath as they pace in circles waiting for a second customer.
The Gringos aren’t at this place, but they’re around, easy to spot, like me. The visitors are taking on new shapes, and different forms. They do not saunter with the same confidence.
A hesitation permeates everything, a second-guessing of comfort and safety that never existed in Mexico before. It’s always been a place where Gringos came to forget about second-guessing anything.
The tequila and Pacificos help, but everything has been shuttled into a new timeline that will need labeling. Our calendars will need new markings, just as with our world before 9/11 and after.
BC - Before Covid.
AG - After Gates.
Maybe one day soon we’ll get something beautiful to mark the transition between the two with…
SL - Schwab’s Lynching
The visitors are coming again, but they have morphed into something timid and passive in the two years since they stopped coming in meaningful numbers.
They unlocked their doors one day, when they sensed it might be safe, and peeked around their yards and found the flowers and trees to be prettier and more vibrant not viewed through monochromatic doorbell surveillance cameras.
They finally unlocked their doors again and peeked up at the sky and found it was still blue with clouds and chemtrails. But they’re certain the chemtrails aren’t barium and aluminum because the fact-checkers referred by Google Search said so.
They unlocked their doors and took baby steps across their driveway to see if danger was lurking everywhere as they had been told. Self-imprisonment for two years started out as two weeks because people they believed told them to be afraid and so they complied, got comfortable, and stayed compliant.
When they came out of their homes and were surprised not to see death and chaos as their television had told them they didn’t know what to do. So they went back inside where it was safe. And they stayed there day after day only peeking outside to be absolutely certain that harm was not lurking as invisible harm does.
Slowly they reacclimated to life, at first never venturing too far from the safety of home. Always masked inside their cars or on the streets, they knew that harm still lingered everywhere because that’s what invisible harm does.
A planet of agoraphobes soon ventured further and further from home, becoming more daring, sometimes forgetting to put their mask back over their nose and mouth after each bite of food at a restaurant. They felt alive and daring, tempting fate by not always adhering to the instructions of the experts who told them that harm still lingered everywhere because that’s what invisible harm does.
When they got word the airplane graveyards weren’t permanent and the airplanes would be mobilizing again, they started making plans in their heads. Thoughts of traveling, maybe out of the country, with masks of course, but only after the next booster became available.
After bailing out the airlines with $25 Billion so they could buy back their own stock to increase executive compensation, the people who finally decided to travel again were surprised to see so many cancelations and flight delays, so they went back home and got another booster and called the airlines who said the weather was the issue, but the pilot’s union didn't have the heart to confirm their lies.
I stumble from the palapa place with a belly full of warm tequila and cold pacifico and heavy with tacos del pollo. At the Plaza, the Niñitas play with whatever they can find. Mama yells at them to get back to their stations, selling expired packets of chicle. Others rattle a peso-filled cup to alert the despondent passersby that these girls have nothing.
“Por favor,” they mumble with performative sadness, looking down at the cobbles humbly before looking up to see if anyone cares.
At the edge of the plaza a faded pink and blue wall with paint chipping away from the crumbling stucco worn down by neglect and the salty breeze. On the opposite wall is a mural of someone important the people must revere.
Three years ago the street vendors yelled “T-Shirts Amigo! T-shirts! Fuck Trump! Fuck heez wall!” They assumed all tourists hated Trump or didn’t care to reexamine their business models to potentially cater to the hundred million gringos who did not and do not hate Trump. Now they all sell “Let’s Go Brandon!” T-shirts. What a difference a senile corpse can make in just eighteen months.
Two years after his engineered ouster, Trump probably still lives rent-free in millions of heads, even 800 miles south of the border. Soon the FBI will be living rent-free at Trump’s palace in Florida, proving definitively that he won the election in 2020. The FBI does not raid the homes of Presidents or their sons for whom elections are fixed by the criminals doing the raiding.
A month ago I wrote of their continued persecution of the elected President: “At this point, all Americans should plan on them prosecuting Trump to keep him from running again, and/or rigging the 2024 election against whomever the opposition candidate is.”
Not all banana republics are in Central or South America.
And not all corrupt Narco states have cocaine, fentanyl, or heroin as their products, some specialize in other deadly injectibles fronted by men in three-piece suits offering stock shares and lies.
The deeply rooted criminality and corruption are rampant on both sides of the border, it just gets legalized and decorated as “business” and “healthcare” on the northern side with the administrative state busily micromanaging the people's lives.
There are moments that define generations. Moon landings, or staged moon landings from warehouses in the Nevada desert, pick your conspiracy poison, the Niñitas selling chicle won’t judge you.
There are events that transform civilizations forever. Our events are mostly engineered or permitted to transpire with little resistance from the authorities who will benefit.
No benefits for the people, like the flamenco guitar brothers who were without a venue and income for a year or two, and the little street beggers shaking cups who went hungry with no Gringos around to toss coins of hope at them.
Pinche Covid.
Pinche Globalists.
Pinche Rigged Elections and Fading Empires.
The heavy suction sound of a pump-assisted breathing device, rising mechanically and depressing downwards with an ominous hissing. The new protocol for dying republics that don’t seem to want to pass on. They get put on ventilators and wait to die.
What will the government bonus payout if the republic’s death is labeled as a Covid death?
Soon they will prescribe remdesivir and that will be the end of the red white and blue kidneys. Who will remove all the national waste, mostly congregated in the District of Corruption?
Nightfall is nearing. The Pacificos and tequila begin their work on my imagination. I start to imagine a title for a dispatch of this sudden expedition: MEXICAN MELANCHOLY AND THE INFINITE SADNESS
I can use a Smashing Pumpkins video at the end. I begin humming Tonight Tonight to myself on a bench in the shade beneath a palm tree, like a mental patient.
My humming is interrupted by a little girl on the other side of the plaza who is alerting her father. I cannot hear what they say, in Spanish, probably. I make up their conversation in my mind.
She grabs her father’s arm and points north. “Papa! Papa! The gringos have no more freedom.”
“Don’t be crazy mi Hija. It’s America. They will always have freedom.”
“But Papa, I’m serious. They have no more freedom!”
I want to run across the plaza and hug the girl and tell her she’s right about the words I have imagined her saying.
The father pats his girl on the head and tells her to stop using the Internet when he’s at work during the day.
“You read too many crazy things mi Hija. You cannot talk like this at school.”
She looks at the ground in despair and shuffles off toward el Centro before doubling back to her father with more arm pulling and urgent conversation.
“The virus is not harmful to children Papa. Why are they injecting the American children?”
“To be safe mi hija. To protect their Abuelitas.”
“But it doesn’t work. I swear papa, the vaccines do nothing. Their Abuelitas can still get infected. The vaccines can kill them too.”
“Hija, I told you to stop looking up crazy things on the Internet. It’s not good for you.”
“When the injections come here for children, will you make me get one?”
“If you care about your family, you’ll have no problem protecting yourself to protect your family.”
I decided to call her Lupita in my drunken sweaty haze.
Lupita’s father has been watching too much CNN en Vivo in my imagination of imagining their imaginary conversation.
Beyond the palm trees that line the plaza’s perimeter, I see a commotion ensue. I know what they are saying because it’s what all Mexicans have been saying whose livelihoods depend on visitors from up north.
“The Gringos are coming! The Gringos are coming!” The chicle girls yell, pointing to an airplane flying low over the Bay of Banderas.
The excitement over new arrivals and their pockets filled with American dollars rile the crowd gathered in the plaza.
Lupita, so full of conspiracies and wild thoughts pushes her way through the mindless crowd and climbs up the statue of entangled dolphins, and begins to scream at the top of her lungs.
“You’re all wrong!” The crowd falls silent and looks up at the young girl. “The Gringos aren’t coming! The Gringos aren’t coming!” She screams.
“Those planes are not filled with Gringos. Those planes are filled with shots! We all have to take them or the IMF will not give any money to our Government!”
The crowd explodes with uproarious laughter.
Desperate to warn the people, she tries one more time to alert the masses gathered in the plaza.
“Listen to me! The Gringos aren’t coming anymore. They’re too afraid to leave their homes.”
More laughter from the crowd at the girl’s madness.
“The Gringos can’t come anymore because the Gringos are dying from the shots! There are no more pilots to fly them here!” Lupita yells looking around at the dumbfounded faces that turn to one another before once again producing a burst of collective laughter.
The young girl stares up at the jungled hills and begins plotting her escape away from the brainwashed people who think she’s the crazy one. She lists the essentials in her mind: Water, food, shelter, money, drugs.
It occurs to her that not all conquerors are sent by kings and queens, and new conquerors are coming to take her country through credit and debt and to sicken her people, and knowing that she is the only one in the plaza, in the whole city or even in all of Mexico who understands this makes her feel powerful.
Alone but powerful.
Pinche IMF.
Pinche Covid.
Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change, the less you feel
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This is me giving you a hug, as I stand somewhere between preparing to die on the hill and realizing the hill is made of ashes and just sitting down and sifting through it.
Hemingway lives again !
Thank you Good Citzen for this reverie of an essay.