That Time the Coen Brothers put out a Cigarette on my Head

The science fiction writer William Gibson once told a story about how during the composition of his famous book Neuromancer he went to see the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which was based very loosely on the novel Do Androids dream of electronic Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Gibson relates how disheartened he became as he watched the film, realizing that the ideas he was grappling with on paper were being presented on the screen, maybe in a form arguably superior to the work he was crafting. He dealt with his unease by getting up and leaving the theater halfway through the film.
Something similar happened to me awhile back.
I was at my last duty station in the Army, running out the clock on my contract at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bliss was in El Paso, flush against the Rio Grande and adjacent to Juarez, Mexico, where open bloodletting in the streets was a daily occurrence, and meant bodies being displayed on overpasses (sometimes sans heads) to send a message to rival cartels, and corruption leading all the way up to the general staff of the Army (maybe higher).
Juarez was off-limits for American military personnel, so naturally I turned all of my attention to the task of getting there. It wasn’t that hard. I talked to a cabbie I knew from on-post, and said I wanted to go to Juarez. He agreed to take me for a flat fee, said he knew the area like the back of his hand, and that if I wanted to get women or drugs all I had to do was ask.
We met at one of the dining facilities near my barracks, which was built like a blockhouse and stucco-walled, facing the hills on the Mexican side of the border that were upholstered in chaparral dense enough to look like barbed wire.
As we drove toward Mexico I told the cabbie all I wanted to do was see Juarez, and he nodded, almost sounding disappointed. “A lot of old gringos come down here to get drugs.”
“Drugs?” I was surprised. I figured the dope market would skew young.
We came to the border crossing, where dirty cars and open-bed trucks were waiting, and he said, “No, I mean drugs to commit suicide.” He explained that Americans who wanted to be euthanized could get their hands on phenobarbital in Juarez as easily as we could get a loaf of bread on the American side of the border.
Once in Juarez, my Spidey sense started tingling, like I was back in Iraq. My heart was beating fast, and I looked on in horror as a man (or maybe a woman) with the same disease as the Elephant Man staggered toward us, selling tempura paintings of the Virgin Mary and salted pumpkin seeds in plastic bags. His face looked like one massive goiter, fluid-filled pouch, or swollen testicle about to explode. I hunkered down in my seat, and we drove to a motel built in hacienda-style with steer horns over the entrance and white Christmas lights wrapped around the building. There was also a strand of yellow “Cuidado” tape cordoning the motel off, and as we ducked under the tape the cabbie explained that the place was run by his sister-in-law and that it had been robbed by masked gunmen the previous day.
“You said you don’t want girls or drugs, so I figure maybe I use this chance to visit her.”
I sat in a dining room with a floor done in beige tiles and a massive fireplace clad in limestone while the cabbie spoke to the hotelier in soft undertones at a saloon-style bar, where every other bottle seemed to be gold-coin-colored tequila. It was cool and dark in that dining room, peaceful as a grotto where a saint sits with his reliquaries, and I had no desire to see anymore of Juarez. The cabbie and his sister-in-law occasionally glanced up from their powwow at the bar, looking over at me and smiling. They seemed to think it was funny that the buracho blanco soldier was so scared, and I had the feeling that they interspersed some jokes at my expense between whatever other words they exchanged.
A few months later I was still stationed in Fort Bliss, and I was close to the expiry of my contract with the U.S. Army. Not only was I going to be a free man soon, but I had some prospects, and even a little hope that I might make it as a pro writer.
I had a ritual, you see, that I’d maintained every week for the better part of the last year. Most weekends I would get a backpack, put my laptop in there, and then head down to the local La Quinta hotel off-post. I’d write a story on Friday, edit it Saturday, and then send it out to the publisher on Sunday morning, before returning to the barracks. I never told anyone what I was doing, and for all I knew my fellow soldiers just thought I was hanging out at a girlfriend’s house.
I got a ton of rejection slips, of course, and even some meanspirited personalized comments from publishers telling me to give it up, or at least not to send them anymore material, but I also managed to sell a few stories here and there. The main publisher to whom I sold work was, incidentally, the publisher of my last novel. We’ve had a professional correspondence going on now for more than a decade without ever having met once, or even spoken about anything besides publishing. To be honest, his/her name is gender-neutral, so I don’t even know if the person who gave me my career is a man or a woman; I’ve never asked.
Anyway, I figured that since I had sold some short stories, and accrued the beginnings of a CV, maybe it was time to try to write a novel. This was before the embarrassment of shows and movies about drug cartels really started to the flood the market (to the point where oversaturation has reached the level of the vampire subgenre), so I decided to write about border wars around the Juarez area.
I’d done as much up-close research inside Juarez as I intended to do (you only have to have a guy with a massive scrotum on his face and pictures of the Virgin Mary in his hand staggering toward you once before your tourism instinct wanes), but I felt the place’s aura deep in my bones, and thought I could at least write something respectably noir or pulpy on the subject and maybe shop the result to paperback publishers.
And then Dunphy (as I call him in my fiction) took me to see No Country for Old Men, and my heart sank, as I imagine it must have for William Gibson all those years ago. No Country got the pace of life along the border, the local flavor and color, and that sinister air of ancient Aztec gods clashing with the white man’s law, that feeling of wildness mixing with corruption and brutality in which every side is evil, and it captured it all so well that I just shook my head and said Shit.
A few years later I did write a book that takes place in and around the area where I was stationed in Texas, called Rolling Country. The book deals with an over-the-road trucker who works with a Mexican human and drug trafficker along the border. This trucker also happens to be a serial killer and a man with a penchant for transsexual prostitutes (in other words, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiography).
Rolling Country got picked up by a publisher, and I sent it to a writer who I respected but had never met or even previously corresponded with. He replied that he thought the book was good, but added the caveat, “You know you’re inviting comparison with Cormac McCarthy with this thing, don’t you?”
I knew. The movie No Country for Old Men was based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and my book was nowhere near as good as the book or the movie. But it was a start. And though I squirmed a bit in my seat while watching No Country, at least I didn’t get up and leave the theater.