Gunslingers Don't Sing or Dance by Mike Marino (any book recommendations txt) 📕

After I freshened up I went next door to their room. Turns out it wasn’t what I thought. Jean-Paul ever the protector and gentleman would sleep on the floor while Isadora slumbered in the bed. Jean-Paul was not a voodoo sentry...he was Sir Galahad with a patois!.

I told them I was going to look around Vera Cruz and see what I could find out about buying three horses and a couple of mules. Other supplies for panning and cooking on the trail would be necessary as would some dried beans, sourdough, salted pork and other foodstuffs to feed the body while gold feed our quest.

I left the hotel with every intention of fulfilling the mission I had set for myself but was waylaid by temptation in the person of a Mexican guide who befriended me almost immediately and promised to show me the best Mexico had to offer a gringo such as myself.

I didn’t know at the time but this would be an afternoon and evening I would never forget.  

When the Spanish Conquistadors landed in the New World  they hoped to find gold and glory during their adventures in the Americas. They found some of that but they also found a strange  plant used by natives as a religious sacrament and revered almost as a god which the natives called "peyotl," or peyote.

Peyote is a small, spineless cactus growing in the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest. When properly prepared it is a small button like object which is chewed. The result is an artillery explosion of visions and hallucinations that would run neck and neck in a horse race against opium. We ate the buttons and within a half hour…I was already a high priest of some forgotten native Toltec sect  when I  walked through  the dust and  hot sun baked town. I felt  as dusty and tired as the old siesta men already asleep against adobe buildings. Mystical mandalas appeared as the peyote effects caused them to swirl in the air.

The peyote  massaged me  with gentle fingers of hallucination as the dust swirled at my feet as we, my guide, Gallego’s and I  entered the hotel cantina where I had a room and ordered drinks. Soon I felt as though I was  circumnavigating my  own private Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular explorations they were, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were. Those recesses, the corners, the 90 degree forks in the road, were illuminated in deep shadows pulsating and twitching in orgasmic release as the tequila I was now drinking in the cantina, had wormed it's way home to the grand nerve central station, exposing the masks of drunkards and dope fiends.

I looked around, my head spinning around and then...I stumbled, I tumbled and swore as I fell, face down passed out. Dreaming drunk, vivid and vibrant, I was outside my body watching myself as I walked the dog of Chihuahua through the desert of the same name. The desert, now deserted except for colors and  fragrances of night time, dreamtime  blooms. I could have been snorin’ in Sonora with a senora or senorita or two pesos, but instead travelled in suspended animation through  fields of  cactus cosmos astride a  white buffalo of lore and myth.

Soon I was assailed by the sounds of laughter and unfamiliar dialects, and in my dream state I walked outside, falling off a cloud into the center of town with the dust swirling like little dusty tornados created by little brown feet belonging to the little brown kids of the little brown Mexican village who danced delirious in the  dirt of the dusty plaza near the mission of Saint San Shit or something or other.

There was a band playing in my mind, a peyote  band in colorful dress, mariachi music was performed while a man in tight bullfighter pants danced a  flamenco with a flamingo of dubious gender on the table, the flamingo could talk when not drunk  on too much tequila. Then the trumpets, blaring out festive fiesta music with a serape serenade for sweet scheherazades, with wave after wave of music, like lyrical tsunamis crashing to shore, deep inland and further yet to reach the quiet coves and  caves. In my dream, or someone’s dream, can't remember now, I stood alone, with all the others, fixed in place fixated on all  the other prisoners of so many religions, where we were all surrounded by by anxious urchins, begging, imploring to fill the pinata with more peyote and tequila dreams.

I lowered the mache of paper to the dusty ground below, filled it, packed it like a pirates cannon full of shrapnel words, not in any particular or peculiar order of sentence or structure of any kind. Then it was raised by the numerous Pablitos by its frayed rope high above the blindfolded assemblage who couldn’t wait to swing a stick at it. Sticks swang and swung and swinged, wildly, no hits, until one connected with a direct hit as words, so many of them, fell from the punctured pinata complete with punctuation, like so many pieces of pretty candy flying out without wings in every direction. It was an explosive array of metaphors, verbs, and nouns. As a writer I marvelled at the cascade of the english language as it fell not to the ground, lost in the dust at first, but later found sanctuary on the  pages of a pulp western novel I would write.  Meanwhile, the children, the smart ones, not the adults, gathered up the little candy like words together, and together they spent the morning forming sentences and paragraphs until the no-sense finally made sense,.

Soon in my dream my eyes became heavy with drink and peyote and I had to rest. Gallegos and another fellow carried me upstairs and said they would meet me the next day to buy some quality horses and pack mules I must have mentioned we needed.

Then in the quiet of my room, I dreamed I laid the invisible book on the invisible table next me and was glad to sleep. The alcohol and peyote were wearing off as the plaza and the pinata began to fade from view and my reach. Voices disappeared too until there was only a loud silences. Then I doubled over and threw up….

Next Day

The sun rose in the east as I suppose it feels it has to, that is what we hired it for after all. It warmed my face as I sat up, refreshed in spirit with a hollow stomach. Sitting in the corner, quiet as a saint was Jean-Paul. He motioned for me to get up as it was time to head out. he and Isadora heard about my night from the hotel host and were now going to watch me like a hawk at night.

I had splashed rancid brown water on my face and grabbed my backpack by the bedstead and joined Isadora and Jean-Paul who both laughed at the wreck I must have been. We were looking for Gallegos as we walked through the sleepy village and down the sleepy road where even the dogs were too lazy to bark at us. Jean-Paul surprised me with a rolled stick of marijuana he had.

As we passed it back and forth I spotted Gallegos waving at us. “That my dear friends is Gallegos. He can get us fixed up with horses and pack mules.” To which Isadora replied “Let’s go meet him then….we have treasure to find!” Treasure, si...that would be nice. Right now...I needed a drink. I could see Jean-Paul read my thoughts...his look told me “the cantina can wait!”

Personal Journal Entry

Baxter Dooley - August 4, 1867

Our journey through the desert lands and sands of Mexico would become  that of two madmen and one mad voodoo queen with Mexican dreams of treasure. We were doomed in our quest without gravitational attachment to hold us on orbit in this mystic region alive with critters that skitter and ochre orgasms dripping  from the  skies, rainbows would arch and frame the desert, painting the  landscape with  colors..sunsets, orange and brilliant would fill in the empty spaces in between abodes of adobe  The bleached white of a mission jesus on a crucifix in the church of San Zen beneath the sky of azure, I assure you, is vibrant with cream clouds of mystic consistency and turquoise laughter.

The rocks are red, canyons and arroyos in muddy rio swirls with smokey old white haired mountains rising above fields of lava flows, ancient and old…their tops blown off. With grass and trees adding their colors of life to the harsh barren sides and images of black and white and grey suspended in the mind riddled by a Gatling gun firing stars as bullets to rip the flesh, meteors and comets racing through the void..looking to call attention to our deception and perception of reality..fade to black of night...the colors hide until sunrise…colors can be deceiving when hidden in a cloak of darkness.


The Mexican desert is alive with pastels  aligned in secret conspiracy while this macabre dichotomy of life-art rages quietly, it conquered the hearts and dreams and fostered schemes of cool conquistadores, including the king of cibola cool, Coronado and his quest for seven cities of gold. Later, in time, the region would become awash with the gringo’s with tall tales of lore and legendary figures  competing  in the open air market of Mexico City and it’s  madness and madmen and mayhem, ahem…amen……with the cowboys entering the saloons where soiled doves in can-can boxing matches and prostitutes racing in the streets for the sports as the players placed their bets on the naked runners…win, place or show more flesh.

Drunks, bad whiskey and worse, the crowd goes wild with approving applause and they can’t get enough of the wild west firing off mirthful salvos from a pearl handled six shooters with silver city bullets packed lethally with equal measure of angst and lead, unchecked and unbalanced, left handed, right handed, guns blasting away with the ferocity and velocity of Mr. Gatlings gun..letting loose an orgasmic ejaculation of hot lead and death.

This was the roadmap of the landscape ahead of us. Colorful and deadly. The desert is one and the same. We were ready to leave Vera Cruz now that we had purchased some fine looking horses and three pack mules that we hoped wouldn’t die on us laden with gold and silver. Gallegos who had arranged this also offered to go along as guide. I could tell he could smell treasure and not merely a few nuggets of gold panned from some washed out stream. We talked it over and agreed...It might not be a bad idea to have him along but to not tell him of the real reason for our quest until we were well underway.

We had the horses