Channeling Tennessee Williams

Suddenly I feel dropped into a Tennessee Williams Play. I’m in a hotel room in downtown Mexico City. It’s quite nice for Mexico standards, a little seedy if compared to American hotels. Let’s just say that it has been well-used. The electrical fixtures were new in the 1960’s. The only outlet that will power my computer is in the bathroom. My window overlooks an airshaft that affords no view, and the light is muted; a twilight shade of grey.

Outside there is some kind of party going on. There are short speeches, songs, snippets of recorded music. Michael Jackson hee hees. Bass throbs and thumps and I can feel it in my torso. The air feels very still.

It is hot, not dripping Streetcar Named Desire New Orleans hot, but more like Glass Menagerie St. Louis hot. There is an electric fan in my room that seems stuck on one speed and has lost its will to oscillate. I keep it humming to move some air around the room. The lights are low, as if entertaining the thought of late night poker under a haze of cigarette smoke.

Outside the hotel, there are a lot of closed-up shops. A bijou beauty that lost its luster long ago looks glum as she sits with her marquee over the sidewalk in her faded silver finery.

The air feels heavy. The atmosphere rumbles with what? Airplanes? Trains? I feel indolent, isolated, like the washed-up hookers in rented rooms that populate Williams’ short plays. The lack of view out my window adds to this feeling of isolation. There’s a whole world outside this building, but I see none of it, and what I can hear offers more questions than answers.

“The sky sure is white,” says a doomed Williams adolescent tottering on high heels at the edge of seedy adulthood. “White as a clean piece of paper.” I feel that whiteness now, like the ceiling over my head. It is not quite suffocating, but it presses upon me willing me to go out.

Such a different aspect of the vibrant bright days I’ve spent in Mexico, filled with color and music and delectable juicy fruit. I think about Williams, living in a French Quarter room much less splendid than this one, tasting all the heat and humidity and sensuality of those streets and recording his autobiography over and over through narcissistic aging beauties slowly losing their minds, men who are brutes, and innocents who are destroyed by them both. It is not the way I tend to see the world, but in this hotel room, on this night, I can definitely imagine it.