Diary

Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan

We woke up this morning to another fabulous Mexico City morning, complete with the blue skies that no one in America believes exist here. The pollution and crime that are synonymous with Mexico City are certainly here, we just haven’t seen much evidence of them yet. Instead, what we see is color. We live in a bright peach-orange house, which Kevin, from Maine, and Mary, from Cleveland, thought they would never be able to say. And that’s nothing here. There’s a house around the corner painted a purple that grapes can only dream about. Our friend Mary Beth lives in an apartment with walls that are fireball red and egg-yolk yellow, with a ceiling painted Caribbean blue. It’s easy to lose your fear of color here. For us, after four years of living in Tokyo, where gray and beige together are considered an explosion of color, we feel like we’re living in a Monet. We had Sunday breakfast yesterday three doors down from our house, in a little Mexican cantina overlooking a cobblestone square and an old yellow church, sipping fresh orange juice and rich coffee from Chiapas on a clear and brilliant morning. Welcome to the pollution capital of North America.

We have also noticed that the secret may be out. Almost nobody visited us in Tokyo. But this place is a guest magnet. Our friends Kim and Claudia visited last week and couldn’t stop talking about all the clear days and sunshine. They said their friends back home in Atlanta, terrified by Mexico’s pollution, expected them to be all dinged up by falling boulders of dioxin when they returned. Mary’s sister Kathleen and her boyfriend Paul left yesterday, still marveling at how different life is in Mexico City from the image it has back home. Paul ran every morning and found the city not nearly as crowded and poor here as he envisioned. Of course, half the people we know here have been robbed at gunpoint and have chronic respiratory problems. We’ve been here only four months, the pollution season is really just starting, and we will surely have to eat our words eventually. But for now, about all we have to complain about is the roads.

Driving in this city is ugly. In New Delhi, it’s illegal to kill the cows that wander the downtown streets. If the light turns green and there’s a cow clomping across the intersection, you wait and wait and wait. Or risk arrest—and maybe a good stoning. In Mexico City, that cow would be hamburger. Nobody waits for anything. Not even stoplights. It seems to be considered rude here to obey traffic lights. We have sat at dozens of red lights while traffic on either side of us flows right through, and drivers stuck behind us lean on their horns. Their annoyance is clear: What kind of an idiot stops at a red light?

But the biggest road menaces are the local cops, who suck up bribes like a Hoover Deluxe. Kevin drove our kids to the park a few weeks ago, accidentally turned the wrong way onto a one-way street and met the kind of cop we’d been warned about.

With his B-movie dark glasses, gray teeth capped with gold, and a greedy grin, he knock-knock-knocked on the car window and delivered the bad news: Kevin was going to get 30 days.

“Thirty days of what? Jail?” Kevin said.

, jail,” he hissed.

“Jail?” said our 5-year-old daughter, Kate, strapped into the back seat next to her brother Tom.

“Never mind, sweetie,” Kevin said to her.

“Are we at the ponies yet?” said Tom, a 3-year-old in Power Ranger sneakers.

“Jail?” Kevin said to the cop.

, jail,” he said, grinning even more.

Thirty days in the slammer seemed a little harsh for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Even the word “jail” seemed a little out of place just then, a sunny and peaceful early Sunday morning in Mexico City, Dad and the kids on their way to a park with pony rides, stopped at a deserted corner of a (one-way it turns out) side street with the map book open, trying to figure out why Revolución had just turned into Patriotismo without any warning. (We should have taken Insurgentes.)

Mexico City cops are notorious for putting “the bite”—la mordida as it’s called here—on anyone who comes within range. The jail routine, of course, was just a shtick to solicit a payoff. Sure enough, eventually he got around to it: The alternative to jail was 1,000 pesos—about $110.

The negotiation began. We remembered what most foreigners here say: If the police try to shake you down, play dumb, speak English, pretend not to understand any Spanish, and eventually you will make yourself more of a nuisance than you are worth.

So Kevin began blathering in English. The kids kept asking about the ponies. Time was passing. Kevin kept asking for the cop to give him a ticket, making writing motions with his hand. The cop wanted to be paid, not to waste time writing a ticket.

The Gringo Defense worked. The cop sighed, gave our little family a stern look and said, “Be more careful. This is not the United States. This is Mexico.”

Amen. And we were off to the ponies.