Banned In Todos Santos


	photos by Howard Ekman

On Saturday, March 20, 2004, at the Hotel California in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, author Michael Mercer presented his new book of short stories, Bandidos; the book had been banned from the only bookstore in town just two days earlier, as later reported in The Gringo Gazette. The following is from his talk, which deals in part with the issue of censorship:

INTRODUCTION

Thank you. This is a book of short stories called Bandidos, a follow-up to Mexicoland, which many of you may have read. I don’t know if I’ll have time to read anything from the new book, or even if my reading aloud is a better experience than you reading it yourself. You may have heard some of the stories, or parts, at the open readings here in Todos Santos—some of them humorous, other pieces quite serious. I think most of you are familiar with my work.

Before anything I want to thank a number of people.

Thanks first of all to Debbie and John Stewart and everyone here at the Hotel California. I’m still amazed at what they’ve done with this place. Looks a lot different from the old days, when Don Henley and I were hanging out here writing songs. Thanks to my musician friend Billy Girvan for the use of the microphone and amp. I hope this isn’t too lounge-lizard.

I want to thank the artist Gloria Marie V., who did the cover of the book. We fought about this. She thought Bandidos perpetuated some sort of Mexican stereotype; I told her it was meant ironically, but she still said, “No way you’re putting some bandoliered Mexican with a moustache and pistols on the cover.” It was her idea to pair the word “bandidos” with the angel image, which is from a story about the religious painter Fra Angelico. The incongruity is perfect, because those two elements, the coexistence of good and evil, are basically what all these stories are about. Gloria has a show coming up, April 18, at the Galeria de Todos Santos, with some new paintings that you’ll really have to see—one of which is a bandoliered bandido with a moustache and pistols.

I want to thank all of you who read my first book of short stories, Mexicoland, and responded to it, whether positively or otherwise. I try to write with as little conscious intent as possible, so I always learn a lot from readers about what a story means at a more conscious level. I hope people will continue to share their thoughts about Bandidos. I want to thank Janet Howey, who carried Mexicoland in the bookstore here and sold many hundreds of copies, which put me in touch with a lot of readers, both locals and tourists. Thanks to Robert Whiting, who used to put the book on the bedside table of his guests at the Todos Santos Inn, and was very supportive of my writing. He still thinks the title story is based on him, though I’d actually never considered it.

DEDICATION: TWO ARTISTS

Bandidos is dedicated to two people in this town who taught me more about writing than anyone—and they’re not writers. One was Robert Saltzman, the famous photographer turned therapist. I don’t think we discussed writing itself that much, but through many hours of conversation about psychology and spiritual matters, I learned quite a bit that I applied to my writing, and still do. I know some people perceive a malicious intent in some of my writing, but in truth I’m very uncomfortable about hurting people. Of course not wanting to hurt people is a fairly common trait, but for someone writing satire it’s kind of an odd trait to have.

One story I wrote, “A Room Of One’s Own,” almost didn’t make it into Mexicoland. It was a take-off on a women’s writing group. At the time there really was a women’s writing group here in Todos Santos, led by the poet Annie Smith, and she had written a poem about her chaise lounge, which was a response to Lee Moore’s poem about her sofa. I remember thinking, “Jesus, were in Mexico, all this crazy stuff happening, and you’re writing about your furniture?” To which the obvious response is, “Go mind your own business, we’ll write about anything we damn well please.” Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story, including absolutely the worst poem I could write, entitled “Song Of My Footstool.” To make it more interesting, I made the two women bitter rivals, and I made the main character vain, precious, and comically myopic.

It was great fun to write, but having written it, I began to think, Is Annie going to be hurt by this? Is she going to take offense? So I talked to Robert Saltzman about it, and he asked, “Well, does she have reason to take offense?” and I said, “No, of course not, it’s not her, it’s a character.” I didn’t know Annie well then, but anyone who has spent five minutes with her knows she is neither vain nor precious nor comically myopic. But I wasn’t sure if she would understand what I was doing. I was still afraid of hurting her feelings. And then Robert made an excellent point:

He said you can leave the story out of the book if you like, but don’t think that self-censorship is protecting anyone or doing anyone any favors. In fact it’s the most hurtful thing you can do, and not so much hurtful to you as hurtful to them. Because you’re selling them short, you’re not giving them a chance to rise to the occasion and be their higher selves, if you will, to see the art beyond the literal artifice, to rise above the pettiness of offense, to display a good sense of humor.

As it turned out, I left the story in, and Annie sent me a very gracious note saying she loved the book, and that “A Room Of One’s Own” was her favorite story.

I had a similar experience at a reading in Cabo San Lucas at a meeting of the Tomatoes, that women’s group down there. I hadn’t been here very long, and I assumed the Tomatoes was a collection of sweet old ladies sipping tea and ready to hear something sweet from a nice young man like myself. So I left my harsher material at home, and brought a story that displayed my “sensitive” side.

I realized my mistake pretty much when I got there. The Tomatoes was less a ladies’ auxiliary club than a meeting of the local Teamsters. No tea, just a huge table with dozens of those big two-liter liquor bottles—vodka, gin, scotch, rum, tequila, you name it—and every one of those tough looking broads with a giant drink and a cigarette in her hand. I think it was 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon.

I read my sensitive story—what a painful experience, it seemed I would never reach the end—and they looked at me like, huh?

Some of my writing can be challenging, and not everyone reacts well. Sometimes people are offended. As Robert pointed out, they have a right to be offended, just as I have a right to offend. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t continue to write what I need to write. My readers are out of my control, and I am beyond their control.

The other person this book is dedicated to is the late Jack Smith, the painter. I did not hang out with Jack a lot, but every single time I saw him, he taught me something about writing, about the artistic process. I am probably fondest of his scatological railing against bad art, which he called “warm bath art,” or “airport art” or “mallard ducks landing on a pond” or sometimes just “fucking bullshit.” But he was also incredibly generous with his knowledge, a natural teacher. Always interested, always encouraging. I learned so much from Jack. He talked about a painter serving the painting, not trying to control it as it comes to life, and going where the painting wants to go, not where the painter wants to take it. Ultimately, he said, “the painter is merely the means by which the painting completes itself.” Applying this to writing, I learned how to listen as a character comes to life and finds his or her voice. I listen to that voice, see where the character wants to go, and then follow that character, not lead him or her to the place I had planned. And I do it in the voice of that character, using their language, which can be vulgar, or timid, or pompous, or whatever, just so it’s consistent, and true to the character.

Sometimes this takes me, the writer, into embarrassing places. In a story in Mexicoland called “Taller Ants,” a woman gets raped by a giant cockroach. I don’t know about you, but I find that a very disturbing image. What’s more disturbing is that it came out of my head. Does it belong in the story? Absolutely. And that’s why I left it in. It’s the story that matters, not me or my vanity, and the story doesn’t care whether I’m embarrassed or look foolish or crude for writing it. So what Jack taught me about painting was really a central, crucial tool for learning to write in an authentic, uncensored, unconscious voice.

In sum, I guess you could say Robert Saltzman helped me remove some of the obstacles in my path as a writer, and Jack Smith showed me a way to go down that path. Other people were suggesting I was really getting out there, that I needed to pull back, so I began to wonder, well, maybe they’re right? Each of these men, in their own way, assured me I really wasn’t that far out there yet. “No no, keep going” they said. And for that I am eternally grateful.

CENSORSHIP

I mentioned in El Calendario that my writing is influenced a lot by writing in the Sixties, the freedom of it, the openness, stuff I read growing up. For me, to open a book in the Sixties was to enter a special, private place where true things—the things that could never be discussed openly in polite society—could be talked about frankly. On TV a hundred WWII movies showed how heroic America was; one book, Catch-22, told the truth, that the war was absolutely crazy, absurd. As an adolescent I could open up Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, and see a chapter entitled “Whacking Off.” Anti-heroes abounded: Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, McMurphy. Characters did not have to be likeable; they could be outrageous, offensive.

Some of these books were banned. From schools, libraries; from whole towns. Some were bestsellers. Some were both at the same time.

Anti-Semites raged at Philip Roth; but so did a lot of his fellow Jews, for airing the family laundry, as it were. At one point a rabbi told Roth, “You have done more harm to the Jewish people than Hitler.” I can’t imagine the courage of Philip Roth, that he could hear such things—and no doubt be deeply hurt and troubled by them, have doubts about himself—and then go on writing. People like Philip Roth make me proud to be an American—not a sentiment I feel very often—and proud to be a writer.

Or Joan Didion, who skewered the whole women’s movement in a beautifully written, honest essay, and thus risked alienating about 80% of her readership. This is courage. This is writing in a true voice and not caring where the chips fall.

Getting one’s book banned is sometimes thought to be an advantage, a selling point. I don’t agree. For one, you’re cut off from readers. Some well-meaning defender of Christian values steps between you and the person who might want to read your book and says, “No, this isn’t a nice book. This is offensive. You’ll hate it. Trust me. I know what’s good for you.”

Second, for those who do read your book, the reading experience becomes skewed. People are looking for what’s controversial, instead of taking the story on its own terms. For years and years I never read Henry Miller because I wasn’t that interested in reading shocking writing about sex. A couple of years ago I finally read him, Robert lent me Quiet Days In Clichy, Miller’s memoir of Paris, and I was shocked to find how unshocking it was. It wasn’t about the sex, it was about the writing, which was magnificent. But somehow that got lost in the scandalous reputation all the bluenoses had burdened him with.

I think most people in America—and Mexico—agree that censorship is a bad thing. But it goes on. I saw it in the Sixties as a reader and I see it today, both as a reader and a writer. It happens here in Todos Santos. I’ve had my writing yanked from El Calendario—by people other than the editors—because it was “too negative.” I’ve seen the self-appointed town librarians, and the writing experts who don’t actually write, try to intimidate and shape what other people write, what other people are allowed to read. It’s petty. It’s small. It’s prudishness and PC dressed up in some rather thin moral clothing.

In Bandidos you will meet a character named Rodrigo. I don’t know if you read my piece in El Calendario called “The Shoe Tree,” about a spiritual con artist named Baba Rhum Gas. Anyway, Rodrigo is basically Baba cranked up to full volume. One person who has read the book described Rodrigo quite distastefully as “pure evil.” He’s actually one of my favorite characters, and it was a helluva lot of fun to be him for the few hours I was writing the story. He’s not pure evil, actually; he plays at being evil, he’s a cartoon, and that’s what’s fun about him. I don’t believe there are evil people, or good people. I think we all have both in roughly equal amounts. That’s what these stories are about. Evil is ordinary, it’s daily: evil is ordinary, intelligent people not rising to the occasion, living in fear, spreading fear, being ignorant, losing their sense of humor, shrinking from their better selves, choosing to be small.

A few years ago someone wrote an April Fools’ piece in El Calendario about homosexuals invading Todos Santos, under the pseudonym Miguel Blanco, and there was quite an uproar from the Town Librarians. I did not write the piece. I thought it was amusing, not homophobic, though it did make me slightly uncomfortable. I defended it rather stridently, not out of some abstract principle, but precisely because it did make me uncomfortable, and because I realized I hadn’t read or heard or seen anything in this town that made me uncomfortable, that forced me to think.

It made me realize what disturbs me about the open readings we have here in town. It’s not that the writing is technically bad—some people are just trying it for the first time, it’s amateur hour, that’s fine—it’s that so much of it seems timid. It’s safe. People read from their journals because no one could possibly take issue with subjective doodlings in a journal. People write nice things. People write in exactly the same voice, start sounding like each other. It’s fear of language. It’s fear of offending.

One big exception is Fran Hall. She thinks and writes and reads aloud whatever she pleases, often in unusual ways, and the effect is like opening a window. On the other hand, she told me of a more controversial piece—which sounded very interesting—that she would not read aloud. Another fine writer in this town recently told me of his “angry” pieces that he just files away; I said I wanted to hear him read them publicly, but he seemed afraid to. We are becoming a town of Stepford wives, anxiously smiling in agreement about how nice everything is.

The gringos in this town, if we have anything in common, is that we are nonconformists—which is an odd thing to have in common. Some of us came here from Santa Fe, or Taos, despairing that the art there had become commercial and conformist. We despair of the same thing happening here. How does it happen? We make it happen. A lot of people go on rather gassily about art and creativity, but when it comes down to it, what they really want is the same safe, predictable suburban hell they left in the States. Todos Santos: a gated community. They want to manage and pre-package the tourist experience, put all sharp objects away, all possibly objectionable art. They want the PG-13, Disney version of Todos Santos, where the gringos are just mildly eccentric and the Mexicans are merely quaint. They want Mexicoland.

I can’t stop them. It’s not my place to try to control the art and literature in this town any more than it is someone else’s. You can’t stop people from being small.

The people who live here, we’re all grown up, it’s Adult Swim. People here have been around the block; they can think for themselves. We are not stray puppies, needing to be rescued and inoculated from not-nice things. People here are tough-minded. I don’t think there’s really a danger that anyone’s going to listen to someone trying to tell them what they can and cannot read.

I see the harm more to beginning writers here, the people who read at the open readings, or to a beginning painter. If you’re a writer—or a painter, or any kind of artist—I really urge you to ignore the Town Librarians. Someone says, “you can’t write that,” or “you can’t paint that,” please: tell them to shut up and mind their own business.

And if you ever feel afraid that your art is getting too far “out there” just think of Robert Saltzman or Jack Smith saying “No no, keep going. Keep going.”