D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March 2011
Vintage Bowden
A conversation with author Charles Bowden, a recent transplant to Las Cruces, whose next book is the autobiography of a Mexican assassin.
By Jeff Berg
The day I was working on a final draft of this piece, 18 people were murdered in Juarez, including eight at a place called Las Torres bar on the city's eastside. The news story noted that gunmen "stormed into the bar and fired, and that most of the victims were women" — possibly victims of the ongoing and neverending battle for a drug smuggling corridor between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels, but no one can say for sure. We'll never know, and worse yet most of us don't care.
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Bowden at the border in Palomas. (Photo by Molly Molloy) |
The article ends by dropping the statistic that 7,200 people have been killed in the city since 2008.
Author Charles Bowden, who recently relocated from Tucson to Las Cruces, is one of the few writers who has offered real and nearly indisputable facts and reasons about this carnage. Bowden's bottom line is that it's all about the money — all of it — no matter what other theories come forth; it is all about the money. And it is not just cartel money. It has to do with yours as well.
Bowden has worked in many different areas of the wordsmith profession, from daily newspapers to contributing-editor positions for publications large and small including National Geographic, where he raised the ire of North Dakota by pointing out that small towns are a dying breed. His pieces have been in GQ and Esquire and the wonderful 23,000-circulation High Country News. He has also authored or co-authored or introduced over 20 books.
He has teamed with others many times — fellow writers, photographers, artists and most recently a filmmaker — to tell the tales he wants to tell in his own terms, and certainly in the most truthful and sometimes blunt manner possible. He most recently teamed with fellow Las Cruces resident Molly Molloy, in co-editing a book entitled El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, which is due to be published in June by Nation Books.
With the book delivered, Bowden insists he is now taking a short break. "In the last two weeks I've been slowly gearing up to be a person again," he says.
But then there's advance promotion for the book. In recent months Bowden and Molloy, either in tandem or solo, have been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazerra and NPR.
When Bowden lived in Tucson, I first met him at a couple of readings and book signings. In 2006, I really got to meet him when he attended the Border Book Festival as a guest, and I was able to shanghai him into talking to me for a couple of hours as he sipped red wine and ice water in the shade of his friend's yard on a too-warm spring day. I always felt the article resulting from that interview was one of the best I'd ever written, but the magazine that requested it — a Taos-based publication, now defunct — butchered it into something unreadable and embarrassing. I've always hoped that he never read it.
My most recent meeting with Bowden and his latest collaborator, Molly Molloy, takes place over morning caffeine, where he would never receive a satisfactory answer from the Starbucks barista as to what the "Americano" he ordered really is.
As before, our conversation ranges widely. "I have no idea what is going on in Egypt," Bowden offers out of the clear blue, as he sits down with his first coffee — not an Americano — after the preliminary handshakes and such. "The only things that I know about Egypt are Steve Martin's version of 'King Tut' — satire is like poetry — and that they seem to admire dying over there."
From there, the four of us — Bowden, Molloy, my wife Sarah and I — partake in a lengthy discussion of current events including and especially the failure of those involved with providing utilities to the public, many of whom dropped the ball during Las Cruces' recent cold snap, accompanied by a whopping half-inch of snow.
In particular we talk about El Paso "Electric," which either didn't have any power to offer at all and had to buy it on the spot market or had some power stations up and running, but others froze up. Answers vary.
Says Bowden, "How do you fail when you only have one function?" Followed by, "Even socialism works better than this." A slight grin crosses his ruddy face. "I'll bet some lawyer is plotting a class action suit right now."
Satire is poetry.
Our conversation finally settles in on the subject that most people in this area ignore — one that Bowden and Molloy keep trying to bring to sea level: life on the border and the special things that accompany it.
While living in Tucson, Bowden was one of the first, if not the first, to bring to light the things that were taking place just an hour from where he lived and an hour from where many of us live. In his superb 1986 book, Blue Desert, he chronicled many things that are changing in the Southwest. In the narrative, after reading a story about seven Mexicans who died of thirst near Yuma while crossing the border, he decides to try the trip himself, with photographer companion Bill Broyles.
Little has changed in the 25 or so years that have intervened between then and now. In 2011, death continues to make headlines in these parts.
The subject of El Sicario is a former hitman who has since left that "profession" and turned to Christianity. El Sicario has also been made into an 80-minute documentary film that has played in European film festivals such as Venice, Lisbon and Rotterdam and is soon to be on television in several countries. (Thus far, efforts to get it screened in the US have been for naught, although Molloy and Bowden have offered to check with those who handle such things to see if it could be screened by the Mesilla Valley Film Society at the Fountain Theatre in Mesilla in the future.)
Bowden originally wrote of this man for a magazine article for the May 2009 issue of Harper's. The ex-hitman was also included in an award-winning 2010 Bowden book, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. For this new autobiography, Bowden got unprecedented interview access.
"He led a violent life and slept with guns under his pillow. But now he reads the Bible. Christianity offers nothing for him but an early grave," says Bowden in his usual straightforward manner. "The man has escaped nothing. By not killing, he stands an even better chance of having someone complete the contract on his life." That contract is said to be worth $250,000.
Reading the Bible might give him solace before he receives the inevitable and unenviable bullet in the brain.
Molloy puts in, "This man was a contract killer in Juarez for 20 years. After he quit, a filmmaker from Italy [Gianfranco Rosi] was in touch to see if he would sit for the camera. He filmed the guy for two days and got eight hours of tape which is now an 80-minute film."
When asked how he met El Sicario, Bowden replies, "A friend knew him and I called in a favor." I know not to ask more.
Bowden continues in his gruff but smooth voice, "No one listens to these people, and this is all in his own voice."
The opening line of the Harper's article is in Bowden's voice: "I am ready for the story of all the dead men who last saw his face."