Why You Should Read Charles Bowden

By: William deBuys

“I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine; I insist on color.”

― Charles Bowden

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The following is a foreword introduction written by William deBuys in Charles Bowden's profoundly lyrical book—Desierto: Memories of the Future. I truly believe he’s one of the most important writers of the last 50 years. Read him.

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You might think, as Charles Bowden did, that the world is a down-spiraling mess, but that’s not a reason to read him.

The important thing to Bowden was not so much the direction of the spiral as the intensity of its motion. He wanted to feel the gyre. He wanted to see it, taste it, and report it in all its brutality and paradoxical beauty. He was a connoisseur of the actual mess we’ve made of our world, and he described its flavors meticulously.

That’s why, for almost a generation, people have been reading Bowden with amazement (Desierto: Memories of the Future came out in 1991), and that’s why people will still want to read him today. The wine hasn’t changed. It’s just aged a little. And the taste is even richer.

Bowden’s writing gives off heat. It’s the heat of the desert, the heat of sex, the heat of argument. He interrogated everything, following the evidence, hoping to “locate some kind of heartbeat beneath the modern world I live in.”

He was born in Illinois in 1945, moved to Tucson while still a kid, and was based for most of his life in southern Arizona. The desert that became Bowden’s natural habitat was not the ecological desert described as Sonoran or Chihuahuan but the cultural place straddling the life-warping division of the international border, a place inhabited by campesinos, artists, drug runners, fat cats, hunters, and hustlers: el desierto. The place got into him.

Bowden became the most mexicano of gringos.

He was a big, bluff white guy, but the spirit of the Day of the Dead, that weird Indo-Iberian decoction of morbidity and ecstatic celebration, sloshed back and forth inside him like a tide. I asked a mutual friend to describe him. The friend said, “He had an element of confrontation.”

While other gringos poked around south of the border finding seams in the landscape where they could move safely and unobtrusively, “Bowden would ask, ‘Who’s the most fucked-up person here? I gotta go talk to him.’”

And that’s what he did, hazards be damned. One of the ironies of his life is that, after decades of asking questions where a lot of well-armed, hard-eyed people thought he didn’t belong, he died in his sleep in 2014, having moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to probe the anarchy and carnage of Ciudad Juárez.

Bowden was drawn mothlike to the darkest flames, not just to feel the burn, but to tell the story of their kindling, the light they gave, and the ashes they left behind. His problem, as his friend explained, was the problem of the artist: “How do you get people to see what’s there? It’s nearly impossible.” But it becomes more possible in the dreamscape of Desierto.

Bowden gives no chapter headings, no hints of structure, only a collage of stories that mysteriously compound upon each other into a hyperreality of longing, fatalism, and apocalypse, of la problema, the violent nihilism of the drug trade, of the surreal greed and egotism of Charles Keating, impresario of one of the greatest financial calamities of recent history, of the mystical yet practical Seri Indians, listening to deer talk one minute and carving junk for American tourists the next.

Who is sane? Who is not? The boundaries blur. Cruelty and loss abide. Joy, fleeting, has to be tackled and held.

Follow the money: Americans import drugs, and in exchange they export anarchy, corruption, guns, and terror, not intentionally, at least not most of the time, but as a by-product of their appetites and careless wealth.

That’s one trail Bowden follows through the desert, an environment that sometimes “is just happenstance, a platform where looting takes place.” Other times, the desert is a thing to be obliterated with acres of swimming pools, negated by twining fairways, and denied by an unlimited stream of BTUs chilling palaces clad in Italian marble for the Medicis of today.

The present continually quotes the past. So will the days ahead, producing in Bowden’s phrase “memories of the future.” This is true also of la problema: there was always una problems.

People have always died in the desert for no good reason. People always will. The money trail is not the only one that Bowden follows; it’s not even the main one. He writes, “I have a need for visiting the battlefields of love.” The people of Desierto twitch with desire, they thirst and lust. Bowden watches them. He understands.

He sees life through their eyes. “The whole world is sexual to us, down to the very last stone.” Because of which, sometimes they kill, which means that many crime scenes conceal love stories and some of the most savage acts originate, far away, in moments of vulnerability and innocent naked hunger, in moments of tenderness.

It is the tenderness that keeps me turning Bowden’s pages. Maybe I have grown inured to the unending brutality of the borderlands, which is meted out casually in government policies no less than in fits of individual rage. What gets to me is the tenderness Bowden finds among the iron-bar realities of el desierto. I read him with a pencil in hand, so I can mark the moments:

No one remembers the reasons for his murder. That was years and years ago and the shrine now looks naked in the desert and wants paint and the visit of a fistful of paper flowers.

An image such as that one—and there are many in Desierto—halts me in my tracks. I read it again, looking for its magic: the visit of a fistful of paper flowers.

The tone is exact, the cadence complete, every word necessary. It had to be a visit—something temporary, which time will erase. It had to be a fistful, not a bunch or a handful, because of the slightly sweaty tension in the closed fist, the objection it embodies to letting go of the flowers, to accepting that death is death. A fist is also a weapon. It expresses defiance, if not to the will of God or to fate, then to the sunlight that still touches the face of the bastard who did this deed.

And of course the flowers are paper, whether their bearers are rich or poor but especially if they are poor, because nothing else blooms in this desert of loss or retains its beauty under the punishing sun. Paper lasts longer, but not long. A dusty wind blows over the brokenhearted gift. I can see the red crepe flutter.

Bowden reminds me of one of the least appreciated giants of American letters, a writer with an appetite for telling analogous stories from a similarly personal point of view.

Like Bowden, this writer worked as a reporter, but was more than a reporter. He styled himself a spy traveling undercover in unsafe territory, and he wrote long, edgy, booze-fueled riffs that brimmed with wild insight and sensuous detail.

He disdained the conventions of literary structure and refused to be contained by the standards of so-called journalism because he felt compelled to tell a deeper, wilder, and yes more sexual story about the workings of the world and the fragile, faulted people in it. His masterpiece was not the lyrical novel for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize but the sprawling, inspired, rampant creation that dumbfounded critics when it first appeared.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the Moby-Dick of American nonfiction, both in its history of initial rejection and ultimate canonization and in its qualities of omnivory as to subject matter and sheer brilliance of expression.

Of course I am speaking of James Agee, and I have no idea if Chuck Bowden ever read him, let alone liked him, but in the end they are cousins in style and appetite.

Their subject is the union of opposites, the angels and devils joined at the hip, the beauty married to the beastliness of life. Agee said Famous Men was “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”

Bowden might reject a word such as divinity, but not too fast. Like Agee, he saw the holiness of the quotidian, the hunger for transcendence and mercy, the pathos implicit in just carrying on: There are similar fiestas everywhere in Mexico for different Virgins, for various saints. They exist because people hurt, because work is hard, because women are desirable, because miracles are necessary, because few can stay sober without sometimes being drunk.

Agee would have extolled such observations. He understood the effort and openness, the compassion and years of seasoning required to make them. He was a critic as well as a writer, and his film commentary is as penetrating as his reportage. He died too young to see Chinatown, but he would have loved it, especially the final gut-wrenching denouement, when Jack Nicholson interrogates Faye Dunaway about a girl she’s been protecting. Nicholson is slapping Dunaway, trying to get the long-hidden truth out of her, and Dunaway, at the edge of incoherence, her head whipping left and right with each slap, is sobbing back at him, “She’s my sister, she’s my daughter, she’s my sister. . . .”

I see Bowden, under similar questioning, admitting another incestuous unity: “It’s the hunger, it’s the horror, it’s the hunger, it’s the horror.”

In Desierto Bowden ultimately confesses the paradox at the source of his fascination, the spark that ignites his fire, the two siblings that make a whole, each also parent to the other. And Agee would understand him, would make the same profound admission: “I am watching ruin, and yet savoring life. I am complete.”