The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories by Carlos Velázquez

post-norteño condition on the streets of Manhattan, he thought.
    —Huncke, let’s go.
    —And the dealer, Juan?
    —I’m going to Mexico. To San Pedroslavia.
    —And the dealer? We’re not waiting for him anymore, Juan.
    —Huncke. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of here, because that dealer’s not coming.
The Definitive Dealer
    Written on a wall in an unorthodox script with El Oso shoe polish was, The only way to get drugs is to be the drug. Pedro Rodríguez, an expert on norteño music, was sleeping in his attic room on Coahuila Street. An occasional session musician who imitated Chet Baker’s norteño-ness, he had begun to shoot up heroin. His musical instrument was The Cowboy Bible.
    The phrase on the wall had been pirated from a little book of poems by Jack Kerouac, Heroin is for Pain. There was a Juan Salazar LP on the record player. With that voice that always seems on the verge of breaking, the Nuevo León native was singing Lights of New York. Pedro Rodríguez had resisted becoming his dealer. But his credit was worthless in San Pedroslavia. The only way to surround himself with drugs was to sell them.
    When the needle on the record player changed positions, it cut the drug’s sweet effect off from Pedro Rodríguez’s body. He immediately fell into a state of cold turkey. He opened his eyes and a pack of dogs like a roving mob showed up next to his bed. The vertigo he’d experience trying to get off the mattress made him much more anxious than the pain in his joints. The certainty that the dogs would tear him apart kept him clinging to the wall by his fingernails.
    Terrified, he brought his face over to the edge of the bed. He ascertained that the dogs were running around. Rabid dogs. More than a hundred of them. With fear in his eyes, and his eyes on the very rim of the mattress, Pedro Rodríguez emitted an extraordinary shriek, and then, one by one, the one-hundred-seventeen dogs jumped into his chest with all the contractions that foreshadowed a spasm. When he swallowed the last animal, it was nighttime and the Juan Salazar LP was playing over and over.
    Juan Salucita Salazar settled on Orizaba Street, #210-8, in San Pedroslavia. Huncke, who was an old hand at extraditions and had burglary charges pending, had decided to stay with Bill Garver and rejected outright the move to Mexico. Juan Salucita arrived accompanied by another Juan, John Vollmer, a beat poet. And a junky too. Metrohomosexual. The singer’s lover.
    It was no secret Vollmer was a fag. Ross Russell had revealed it in the unauthorized biography of the singer, Salucita Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Juan (an implosition) Salazar (Charterhouse, New York, 19—). It’s a common quality assigned to mythic characters. His legend has a place in eternity. There shouldn’t be any other readings of Juan Salazar’s genius, just those that reflect his revolutionary contributions to the world of music. Reputable critics such as Charles Delaunay, Ted Gioia, Joachim Berendt, and Leonard Feather have defended his sexual preference by citing the creativity of his norteño improvisations. The fascination with Juan Salazar, aside from his being a jazzman committed to amarillo, is the allegory that produces his art. The pride of the post-norteño condition is its violent, sexist, and senseless character, almost like hip hop’s. The allegory lies in the fact that, in a macho society, a fag would, under his lice-egg leather boots, wear pink polish on his toenails and still be the object of so much masculine admiration. Juan Salazar is a bebop norteño transgressor.
    San Pedroslavia coincided with the epistemology of bar stories. The healthy atmosphere surrounding the daily routine of heating up spoonfuls of drugs helped Juan form a new quintet with local musicians. The problem of the pistol remained—struck by a case of nerves, Juan Salazar couldn’t say farewell to it—but he had a possible buyer: Pedro Rodríguez, a dealer