(Gregor) parked and we walked around a corner to find a crowd milling in front of a low-slung building with painted-over plate-glass windows. It looked like a converted car dealership. Also, outside, a dozen surly faced policemen huddled in the protective aura of two black paddy wagons. 

Small performance? 

“Let’s get out of here,” Gregor said. 

That sounded like a good idea. I followed him down a dark side alley to a rusty metal door. Two feral cats scrabbling on the dumpster lid turned from their scavenging to howl at us. The door was locked. Gregor pounded on it, each thud sounding like “mistake.” 

Finally, we were let into an industrial kitchen area by a harried woman who frowned at her clipboard, searching for my name. Ynez hadn’t told her about me. She looked at her watch and pointed us toward stage left. Approaching, I could hear the cadences of a speech. I didn’t bother to try to make sense of the words. Judging by the male monotone and ill-timed pauses, I wouldn’t have been listening even if I knew Spanish. 

“You call this a small group of friends?” I said to Ynez in a firm whisper.

She apologized. This venue, she explained, had been arranged at the last minute. There had been a surge in interest when rumors spread about a special guest who would be making a short speech. 

“You won’t know him,” she said, answering my question.

“How many minutes before we go on?”   

“Perhaps twenty-five.” 

A nervous energy pulsed through the audience. You could feel it from backstage, an energy that overcame the poor speech the crowd was enduring. 

I took the guitar from Gregor and tuned it, played a few muted scales, next to the gas range; backstage left spilled out into the kitchen. My assignment was simple enough: progressions of standard chords, rapid strumming ranchero style. I started pacing. I toured the entire backstage area. Backstage right, accessible via a hallway that contained the toilets, was the area by the bar, roped off for tonight. Here speakers looked down at their notes and moved their lips. A small troupe of Indigena dancers limbered up—our warm-up act. A small man sat on a cane chair back by the dancers, eyes closed, head bowed. Occasionally, he’d open his eyes and look around with a trapped and futile air, then close his eyes again, his foot tapping a wild beat. Our eyes met, and I gave him an encouraging nod. I’m nervous too, before I go on. 

I thought about storming out. Who would blame me after this crude trap? I didn’t want to look like the petulant Americano though. When you’re alone on the road, it’s a good strategy to fill your long nights with activities, the kind that won’t get you in trouble. Here, at this hall, an entirely different trouble loomed. 

  Now the stage manager—her name was Olga—was pointing her clipboard at the trapped man on the cane chair. She went down on one knee to consult with him. He nodded seriously in a yes-I-understand way. She left him, sitting by himself, looking small and lost. A minute later she was standing next to me, deep in her clipboard. “Ay, five minutes.”

“No, we have at least fifteen.”

“Please tell Ynez. We apologize. We have had to cancel one of the speeches.”

I knew whose. The small man’s shoulders were settled at a higher pitch now, like a sailboat that’s found some wind.

I nodded to him. “Doesn’t he have a right to talk?”

“Yes, of course. There are too many police. If he speaks, they will come in and stop us. They would say it is . . .” She didn’t know the right word in English, so she went poof with her lips while her hands exploded into upside down, wiggling fingers.

“Who is he?” He didn’t look at all like an Indigena. “He doesn’t look like a man who speaks in public.”

“No.” Then she reconsidered. “he does speak in public, but only with his art.”

“Like Mickey?” 

“This is him.” Olga looked at her watch for the third time in a minute. “The police are looking for him. That is why they are outside. They say he is a provocateur.”

“He should leave. There were no police at the stage door when I got here.”

“This is no longer correct.”

Mickey remained in his chair. Time to try out the results of my cram course. I went up to him. “Me gusto mucho su arte de calle.”

“Arte de calle,” he repeated, weighing the phrase. Didn’t he understand this was beginning Spanish? “I call it the language of the past. I paint it on the present,” he said in English.

No time for chitchat. The dancers were on stage now. We were on next. I gave Mickey an upturned thumb and said what I hoped meant “artists’ solidarity” in Spanish, forgetting he’d talked in English a minute before. 

Before we went on—Ynez was on stage making a few introductory remarks—Olga came up to me. “I am forgetting. We need names of all performers.” She brushed her hair away from her face, a harried, nervous gesture. I told her.

Ynez knew how to speak—anything would sound vital after the speech before hers—and she was building for introducing her band. The stage was low; the crowd standing before it, packed in. She ended in English with “a distinguished visitor from Los Estados Unidos.” 

It hit me: I would not be out there as Jim Shalabon, I would be out there as The American, no longer a person as much as a symbol, one whose significance I should have considered long before now. At what point should that have happened? The entire backstage sequence slid by like the moon through clouds.  

The main room was a large, low-ceilinged affair with booths along one wall. The small stage was only about three feet above the floor. The standing masses were pressed right up against us at about the height of our knees. Apparently this space was normally a kind of dancing parlor where you could bring your girl, or retain the services of one of the establishment’s many dancing hostesses. 

My job was easy enough, simple chords, a chugging rhythm. We finished the first song, a brooding ballad, to considerable applause. We had just started another ballad, when a commotion broke out to our left. Some shouts, a scuffle, more shouts. It was difficult to see from the low stage. The crowd noise got louder. We cut to the more energetic fourth song. Another soaring, soft-starting ballad would be lost in this building tension. Ynez and Antonio were determined to compete with the commotion. 

The lights came on, revealing the police. Many in the audience were shouting in outrage as the protesters—if that’s who they were—were dragged up the aisle. How had the police decided it was time to act? What was it about a mild protest that warranted such attention? I had to remind myself that I didn’t know the words Ynez was singing. 

We were still on stage. The lights went back down, the commotion over. The audience wanted us to continue, more out of defiance at the interruption than appreciation of the playing. We went for “La Bamba” because I knew it. The crowd was carried along with the beat and carried away from the recent police interference, its rhythmic joy fighting the anger that pulsed in the hall.

We tried to walk away, but the crowd wanted more defiance. We were out of songs, the ballads not right for the current edgy mood. 

“And now I would like to ask our guest from north of the border to choose a song.” Ynez said, careful not to look in my direction. 

For a long moment I thought about storming off, knowing even before I started that I was trapped. I tried to think of an iconic American song that had overtones of international entente, sympathy for the Indigena cause and, after the ballads, some rock and roll to it. In the end, and under pressure, I went for a quintessential American song about love, loss and sulky predominance, “It’s My Party.” And we could all cry if we wanted to. With apologies to Lesley Gore, I would do it Eyebeams style, with new words for the occasion. Funk it up; challenge Antonio to rise to an even more cynical level. Stand up there and take risks. Play intuitively. Sail on the thermals in the hall. I can’t reconstruct the words. I know I somehow substituted “En Tenochtitilán” for “It’s my party” and “el sol es mas fuerte” for “I’ll cry if I want to.” The sun is stronger. A nod to the fabulous story of Cortés and Moctezuma and the flamboyant drama of two alien cultures colliding in a clash of cymbals. 

Now shouts of mild panic, a few screams. Avoid the police at all times. How often had I heard that warning? Out of the corner of my eye I saw a truncheon coming down and the audience moving back. A stage door exit had to be better than out the front with the crowd. Except the stage door gave onto a narrow alley and I couldn’t remember if it dead-ended or not. 

Mickey sat in the same cane chair backstage, a death row pallor to his face. The police were rumored to have both exits covered. He would have to come out and into their hands. The absolute most boneheaded thing I could do now would be to help Mickey escape. 

Gregor had a knife. I cut off one of my shirtsleeves. Like a misbegotten rite, the three of us bloodied it up from cuts to our fingers and fashioned it into a headband. Gregor went on ahead, so he could get the car as close to an escape route as possible.

The general plan called for Antonio and me to lock the “wounded” Mickey under his arms and carry him upright, his feet flitting along the ground. Ynez would marshal other exiting attendees to come near us, ready for a diversionary commotion if we were stopped by the police. 

The crowd was less than heavy at the top of the steps. I think back and shake my head at what the scene must have looked like from the paved area in front of the theater. Enter the tall blond gringo and the bloodied dwarf.  

We came down the steps, ignoring the wild scene around us. All the while I was chanting internally, I am an idiot, I am an idiot.    

I pretended not to notice the cop motioning us over. We drifted toward the left margins of the assembled police. Struggling to hold the guitar case at my side in the crush of bodies, I resorted to using it as a partial shield, obscuring Mickey from view. Ynez brought her troops in from the flank—two people-clouds colliding into thunder. In all the pushing and shoving my new chant was Do not fall; you are not going to hit the ground. Not easy holding a guitar case in one hand and a street artist in the other. I did my best to look bewildered by the commotion, while devising my story, the part that started after I am a US citizen. International cooperation, man, simply helping an injured performer in the same way I would hope he would help me if the tables were turned. Mickey? Never heard of him. 

Engulfed in a small knot of pandemonium, we approached the police like a demented rugby scrum that wasn’t certain where the goal line was. We eased Mickey down, hidden in our midst. When the police separated us, he was gone. 

Two policemen and I stood eyeing the bloody sleeve on the ground. “No comprendo que pasa,” I said and walked away, and kept walking, turned the first corner I found and ran, quick marched, then walked again. I didn’t know where any of the others were. I was all alone in Mexico City. The streets were empty. If the police sent out an APB to all cops to look for a tall blond gringo, I stood no chance. 

I have struggled to assemble a credible account of that night. Yet there are many aspects that are clear in my memory but, any way I shift them, don’t fit into that account. I clearly see that truncheon coming down, yet even the protest leaders admit that the police action was restrained. That is borne out by the lack of wounded as we left the theater. My memory of my encounter with Mickey is as presented, and yet there are a few phrases that I hear him saying to me. I am here because sometimes a man must make a mistake for his soul. Those lines imply a longer conversation, but when?

Clearly the police were present, and in force, for a reason. But if they suspected Mickey was in the building, if they wanted him badly, they would have sealed the building, stopped the show and searched everywhere. 

And there is the guitar. I know I held the case in my left hand as I supported/carried Mickey with my right arm. I remember using it to shield Mickey from view. I remember carrying it away from the police as I made my desperately calm escape. But I didn’t arrive at the hotel with it. 

I never saw Ynez, Antonio or Gregor again. I guess I could have tracked them down easily enough within the Mexico City music scene. But by the time I could have done that, I had more urgent problems to deal with.