Read Online Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez - Free Book Online Page B

toward the pounding beats of an electro DJ, and to the bars, where men and women in crisp black-and-white uniforms eagerly dispense free cocktails. Every few seconds a new camera is thrust into a random face or group of people. Everywhere you look, instantaneous modeling.
    I have never seen posing like this in Los Angeles, and people in Los Angeles carry posing in their DNA. Here, they pose in the gilded sitting rooms, they pose on velvet couches, they pose with their mouths agape and pose grabbing one another inappropriately. The energy keeps rising as the music does, as if there might be no other place in the world worth being at than this fashion party in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City with hundreds of familiar strangers—some Mexican, some British, some American, some a mixture of Mexican, and others of Latin American polyglot heritage. It feels as if a dam has broken, and it is only a Wednesday.
    The artist Miguel Calderón, whom I befriended a year earlier, keeps a stash of canned beer near a speaker and scours the room to find me a date. Vicky Fox, a towering transwoman with yellow hair and brown skin, hurls herself dramatically onto the floor and begins contorting about on the weathered tile when I ask to takeher picture. For the entire night, a small pixielike character with a bowl haircut and an all-white elfin outfit trails behind me, posing nonchalantly for photographs at any moment and rarely saying a word.
    A circle quickly forms and we decide it is time to go. I have lost Enrique and Denise in the drinking and dancing spree. A group of us glide down the stairs to the open street. We gallop over to the plaza in front of the Museo Nacional de Arte, brilliantly lit in the 3:00 a.m. chill. We—it is impossible to say whom with precision—pile into a cab and speed forward, destination uncertain. Crammed in the backseat with Vicky Fox, the pixie in white, Miguel Calderón, and a few others, I am so drunk and happy I become inexplicably furious at the driver. I demand he not drive us around in circles, running up the fare, as cabdrivers in Mexico City often do. In my delirium, I accuse him of cheating us even before we move a few blocks. I curse him and curse all cabdrivers everywhere in the world and on other planets. The driver wisely ignores me.
    We arrive at a cramped cantina in the lower Condesa, and I feel transported to, of all places, Paris, circa 2003. Echoes of a visit there. A dance floor, dim lighting, nothing to drink but beer, cigarette smoke, magically liberated young women who appear to inhabit other time zones and cultural genres—1990s rock, 1990s hip-hop, 1990s electro. The pixie trails along with us the entire time, saying barely a word. I do not learn his name until the morning after, Quetzalcóatl Rangel Sánchez, a fashion designer and half of the creative force behind the up-and-coming label Marvin y Quetzal. As the sun begins rising, Quetzal and I wind up navigating Avenida Revolución in Tacubaya, inviting ourselves into a new friend’s apartment at the iconic Ermita building, an art deco landmark. We watch daybreak from the high windows and marvel at the morning traffic roaring below us. The following day, we manage to makeit back to our respective houses. I had somehow lost a couple of prized homemade necklaces. Quetzal says we’d find ourselves online and be in touch.
    We talk that very night. We come to a solid conclusion: “We should go out again.”
    For a period in the mid to late 2000s, fashion is
in,
in Mexico City, and I feel compelled to cover every aspect and every minute of it. Mostly, this involves socializing and drinking every night of the week at sponsored parties. The Paola Arriola show is reportedly sponsored by a young party impresario named Rodrigo Peñafiel, a surname seen on millions of bottles and cans of mineral water across Mexico. I quickly learn how the parties work. A good amount of money is always behind the best