¡Viva Mexico and all your sultry salsa parlors!

Mexico City... a place of passion.  A land of Latin languor.  Where figures clad in red dance a steamy salsa late into the night in an ardor of whirling and entangled limbs.  This was my Mexico!

But not in the way you might think. I learned salsa in what you might perhaps call an unconventional way.

It all started when I met Israel.  Israel is slightly on the portly side, with a wry smile rarely seen.  His sense of humor matches his smile.  For instance, in Mexico every calls Facebook Face and nothing more.  With this in mind, witness the following dialogue:

Me: Hey Israel, do you have Face?

Israel: Yeah.  It`s above my neck.

Me: Thanks wise guy.

Israel: Any time.          

But he`s not annoying about it; one rarely wants to kick him in the shin.  His sincere side balances out his sarcasm. He bent over backward to make me feel welcome in the city.  He is also a philosopher.  We met over coffee in the Condesa, a bohemian part of Mexico City brimming with youths wearing hip rectangular glasses that say ``I love to pretend to love reading theory and discuss Nietzche over coffee and to prove it to you I am wearing these glasses.``

Well... when in Rome. Israel and I talked about Nietzsche over coffee.  Only I didn't have the rectangular glasses.  And I had a beard.  And I was wearing tennis shoes.  Strike three you`re out.

Regardless of what pretensions I or anyone else might have had, Israel really actually digs the philosophers and has genuine and interesting reactions to their ideas.  We synthesized Hegel's dialectic.  We alienated each other over our opinions of Marx. We struggled to master Nietzsche's will to power. In short, we nerded out until we shorted out. Then we went for a walk.

We walked to meet Israel`s friend, Arturo, which I later found out was Israel's partner.  Arturo is  soft spoken, sensitive, and very genuine; the anecdote to Israel's sarcasm.  Arturo is a photographer and had just won a fairly high level prize for a portrait he took of a mechanic in Netzahualcoyotl, one of the outlying slums of Mexico.  The exhibition and reception was in a few nights and they invited me to come.  So I went (there were more rectangular glasses, or actually now there are some big honking roundish things that people wear that apparently scream I LOVE READING POSTMODERN THEORIES ABOUT PASTICHE AND LIMINALITY!!!).  But Israel and Arturo were down to earth... making fun of the pretentious photos, complimenting the ones they really liked; both cool but obviously proud of what Arturo accomplished.

Well I was getting to like these guys so when they invited me to come out with their Brazilian friends I went along.  Vinny and Marlu were a straight couple in Arturo`s photo class: Vinny a curly haired wisp of a thing and Marlu a little sprite that went around in pajama-like pants and slipper-like shoes.  We went and ate mole (pronounced mo-lay). We had scintillating conversations about Mexico City, about Oaxaca, about Brazil, etc.  We went and saw a movie (some overwrought French thing with an anguished love triangle).  We went and had coffee and spoke not a word of Nietzsche.  And then it was time for the nightlife.

We arrived at The Oasis. "This place is really great," I was promised, "especially when everyone gets to dancing!" The recommendation and the name together conjured for me a vision of a sleek bar with potted palm fronds and island beats with sultry beauties sipping margaritas and coyly batting their eyes at me.  "Oh boy," I thought.

When we walked in there was not a woman in sight.  Well maybe one.  There was one person I wasn't so sure about.  Instead were legions of mustachioed Mexican men, attired in tight pants (you just gotta cinch um), and licking their lips lecherously.  No one was dancing except for one biker-looking dude whose well endowed belly wiggled and wobbled out from under his midriff shirt as he performed supposedly seductive hip hop moves.  On the big screen Katy Perry`s California Gurls music video was being projected, only the lyrics were switched to California Gays and the visuals substituted for scantily clad and well oiled Californian surfer babe-dudes (it`s a toss up which version is worse). 

Well there was nothing for it but a stiff upper lip, a nice frothing beer and a close watch on my backside.  Things went well and I was able to forget my surroundings for a bit and chat with Israel, Arturo, and the Brazilians until that nice frothing beer started to pass through my system.  And I had to pee.  Bad.  I got up to go to the bathroom, the eyes of many in the room following my passage (the new guy, the blondie, mmmm).  I opened the door to find an appalling trough-like apparatus, without dividers, as exposed as St. Athanasius fasting in the Sahara desert, and occupied by several users.  But necessities trump prejudices, and so I huddled on the far end until my mission was accomplished, and then headed back to my friends at the table.

And that's when the salsa music started.  They turned off the infernal music videos.  Biker guy in his belly shirt cleared off.  The syncopation and tambors of the music made people bob in their seats.  And before you knew it those tight-panted mustachioed Mexican men were down on the dance floor, whirling and spinning, stamping and swinging, swaying those hips like there was no tomorrow.  Oh could they dance!  One man, slender and in a respectable buttoned-up blue shirt, was suddenly off in the wild flight of his dance, with beautiful flourishes and whorls and an intricate play of feet while his partner, larger and statelier in a suit, supported him with cool controlled movements.  Everywhere there was an intense focus, an incredible concordance of movement and will. 

I was just sitting in my chair in awe.  I wanted to learn how to dance like that.  What skill! What finesse!  Alas for my fear of dancing with partners, for the paralysis that overtakes me at the first studied steps of a dance with a female!  Was I to be forever exiled from this paradise of motion, this beautiful artwork of the human form?  Nay! said I.  So I accepted one of the many offers men were making me to dance.

My first partner was a dignified gentleman, maybe about forty, who respected my desire to learn the steps and was a able teacher.  From him I gained the first inklings of the steps to cumbia, to salsa, and to Durangense.  My second partner was a sweating and slightly oily juvenile who tried to dance too close (leave room for Jesus, as they say, which brings up an interesting question, what would have Jesus done in this situation?), but soon respected my space and helped me a little farther along my path to Latin dance enlightenment.  My third partner was Israel.  And with him I really begun to learn.  I already knew him and trusted him and so I knew he would have patience with me when I messed up and clumsily stepped forward when I should step back, or spun him round when it was not the right moment.  Good old Israel showing me how to move and shy Arturo silently cheering on my progress from the table so that one day I could go and win a woman with my sleek Latin style.
 
By the end of the night my feet were moving in approximately the right place, and my rigid protestant white boy hips that had hitherto only moved in straight line directions during cross country races began to show the first hints of a Latin sway.  As we all went out of the bar into the pulsing night my inner Mexican, shaken loose by the salsa, welled up and I shouted, "¡rrrrrrrraaah ha hi! ¡Viva México!"