Kay visits a Mexican bordello

subtitle: The follies of youth

In the summer of 1962, Kay Sutherland was on an archeological dig in the desert near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, in northern Mexico. She was 20 years old and was an anthropology student.

Now, it's not clear whose idea it was, but some of the guys on the crew decided to visit a house of prostitution in Monterrey one Saturday night. Kay, having as usual made herself one of the boys, and being the person she was, wanted to go along, to see what it was like. She said, "why don't I go disguised as a man?" The rest of the crew--perhaps surprisingly--liked this idea.

The "disguise" is shown below. In the photo, they are on their way to the brothel. I don't know where Kay got the fake sideburns. The concept was that Kay would buy a drink and sit silently with a couple of others who were also drinking but not buying the favors of the ladies of the night. Thus Kay, as a good anthropologist, could observe first-hand, or almost first-hand, the culture of Mexican whorehouses. This whole thing was not well thought out, though. Sitting silently was not Kay's strong point, and also, I think she was the only one of the group who spoke Spanish.

Unsurprisingly, their plan went awry. The management took one look at them and raised the prices of drinks astronomically. My guess is that no one was fooled, and that everyone in the place thought the group was a bunch of American college students one of whom was a woman dressed like a man, and that in any case they were not going to be paying customers. Hence, high drink prices would encourage them to leave.

At this point the group had a problem. They had all already bought drinks and they realized with dismay that they did not have enough money to pay for them, which if nothing else indicates to me that my theory--that they were suspected of being a group that was gonna look but not buy--was correct. If they didn't have enough money after collectively pooling their pesos to pay for the drinks, obviously no one had seriously planned on paying for sex. Either that, or someone had been the victim of a pickpocket. (Unfortunately, I don't remember Kay's account of the origin of their financial woes, except that I remember it was complicated.) I am also surprised, looking at the photo, that they were allowed a tab.

But now they had this problem--they owed a debt they couldn't pay to some very tough customers in a very bad part of town. Big paunchy guys wearing black stetson hats and cowboy boots and big silver belt buckles, who seemed to have some employment capacity in the place, were staring at them and not in a friendly way. They decided to get up--nonchalantly--and move toward the door as the tall guy in the photo, who presumably could run the fastest, fumbled with his wallet like he was going to pay la cuenta.

As they got out the door and ran, he, too, bolted. Three of them ran one way and Kay and a guy who was with her ran another way, but Kay was wearing shoes that were too large and didn't fit, and the shoes kept trying to fall off, and she was soon left behind by her companion, so she was now all by herself running in a blind panic with floppy clown shoes down a dark alley in the red-light district in Monterrey, Mexico, trying to escape from pursuers she imagined wanted to beat the hell out of the skinny and pasty-faced boy she still thought they believed she was.

But, as it turns out, no one was actually behind her. No one was chasing any of them. The whorehouse proprietorship had sent no goons in pursuit. But the archeology crew only figured that out later, after they managed to reunite and return, safe and sound, but very late, to where they were staying.

The scrambling escape from the whorehouse must have caused a lot of merriment to onlookers, actually. People must have considered it worth the price of a beer.

Improbable as it may seem from the photo (or the story), several of this group went on in later life to become college professors.

Anecdote of the bull

My wife Kay died in 2002, and both Anna and Eve have expressed interest in Kay's diaries, which are hard to read due to her handwriting--not the best. So I have (very) occasionally been transcribing them. Each year she bought one of these little yearbooks with one blank page for every day of the year, to record her thoughts and the events of her life. Each diary has a good record of January, part of February, and a few entries from March--then nothing until Thanksgiving or Christmas, when she would write about the inevitable outbreak of holiday-season trouble in her large and tumultuous family.

The remainder of each of those years remains a mystery now, with only my hazy and imperfect memory to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, I just ran across this, and readers of my blog who knew Kay might find it interesting, a brief portrait of her as a girl, with maybe a clue of what she would be like as a woman. The entry is from 1989, but she is writing about something much earlier.

If Eve has helped me rediscover my childhood, Anna helped me rediscover my teenage years. She has a yearning to travel that I felt so strongly. "Mom, I just have to go somewhere." she would say, and I can remember saying it in that exact tone of voice with those exact words at exactly the same age. When I said it, at the age of sixteen, my parents, very wisely, found a Church of Christ missionary family, fundamentalists named Mr. and Mrs. Smith who were willing to let me come stay with them on Hacienda Huantepec in the small town of Pabellón, Aguascalientes, in Mexico. I was to teach their children and help with the driving. I had just graduated from high school and I wanted to be on my own so much that I was on the verge of running away.
I took the bus by myself and found the granja [farm], where they lent out their bull for breeding. I'm sure they performed other Christian services, but this was the most popular request. I dutifully drove a large truck with a bellowing bull to remote areas in the state, with Mr. Smith sitting beside me. Mrs. Smith stayed home with the children. It seemed a perfectly normal thing for a sixteen year girl old to be doing. On one occasion, it rained hard and we got stuck in the mud, Mr. Smith put rocks under the rear wheel, the bull bellowed and I gunned it and moved back and forth until I got us out. We moved forward through a rock bed creek after the road ended. We arrived as the sun came out into a place that I have, to this day, not been able to find on a map. The people were there to greet us, lined up in a row with English hymnals in their hand, left by a missionary who had visited them thirty years before. The hymnals were worn and they sang "a Mighty Fortress is our God" in strangely accented English as we walked up the slope with Mr. Smith bringing the bull and me following.

Needless to say, she later went into anthropology.

Kay as a young anthropologist

The tragic imagination

Five years ago today someone at work told me that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York, and that the Pentagon was on fire. This had little emotional effect on me. My mind was elsewhere.

My wife Kay was in the hospital having been diagnosed with acute leukemia 11 days before. I had just come back to work, and only during the mornings. The rest of the day, and the nights, I was spending at the hospital at Kay's bedside. She had just started chemotherapy. There was still a chance that she could die very quickly from the progression of the disease, before the chemo began to work, assuming it was going to work at all. She could also die from the chemo itself. It was kind of touch and go.

So, as I said, my mind was elsewhere.

I excused myself from work and went to the hospital. Kay had a TV in her room, which was--uncharacteristically--on. The twin towers were burning. There was some confusion as to what was going on in Washington. The TV talkers were frantically excited. The green sticky plastic reclining chair I spent so many nights in was beside her bed and faced the TV set, and I sat down beside her and watched.

It seems like we watched a long time, Kay and I. Days, maybe. Like anyone and everyone else. The only difference was that Kay was dying, although she didn't die that day, or during the next few days--it was 8 1/2 months later--and we were both trying to adjust that that possibility. Actually, possibility was the wrong word--near certainty was more correct. I had been doing some reading, and discovered that the oncologist, whose social skills were inversely proportional to his expertise (which is not as bad as it sounds, social-skillwise, as we were to discover WRT his expertness), had perhaps failed to be convincing in claiming Kay had a 50/50 chance of eventual recovery, because, in her case, those were not the true odds. The odds, in reality, were much, much worse than that.

I guess he thought it would make us feel better to lie, and it would have, had he been a better liar. He would probably have been correct in saying that Kay had a 50/50 chance of surviving the week, and in fact Kay turned out to be in the lucky 50 percent, that week. But we didn't know that in advance.

Anyway, this sudden threat of death, which had come out of nowhere, gave us an odd detachment as we watched people jump out of windows, some of them holding hands. We held hands as we watched. I think we both felt like we had a kind of empathy that other people did not. On the other hand, we felt distant from it, with our own very real worries.

We watched the fall of the towers over and over--like everyone else. But it was not my main focus. It's in the background, for me, in my memory of that day, and the days afterwards.

Though we did talk about it. It wasn't that day itself, but it was very soon after, that Kay began to feel troubled about the talking heads' use of the word tragedy. I remember her saying something to the effect that it's not tragic for America. Not for us. It's only tragic for the people who jumped, and who died in the buildings, and for their families. For people who knew them. Not for the rest of us. You are watching this on TV, for God's sake.

I think she sense an orgy of false emotion being unleashed, or being deliberately stirred up. It was terribly real, and it was also a media event. It was all very confusing. Still is.

In retrospect, I think Kay was wrong, in a certain sense. It has turned out to be America's tragedy, exactly to the extent that genuine feelings of horror and empathy--which legitimately existed in the hearts of those of us who watched only on TV--have been contaminated, polluted in some way by the media, and most of all, of course, by the Bush administration.

Those people have stolen what was a real and terrible catastrophe for 3000 people and their families and friends, and turned it into a different and needless tragedy for all of us. For the world. And they have done it without thought or remorse or shame or regard for the payoff awaiting those who are thoughtless and remorseless that always comes at the end of a classical tragedy. And I fear the play is not over.