ABSTRACT
Excess. Nothing works like excess. A few surviving photographs, part of a portfolio of Annie Leibovitz, show him as a Tennessee Williams type. He's obese, barefooted, dark skinned, and angry—in todays world, an all-American character, at once extravagant and immoderate. His pants are baggy, his hair jumbled, his belt overused, his thumbs inside his pockets, his facial gesture openly defiant. He personifies a proto-mestizo, what the early twentieth-century Mexican thinker and educator José Vasconcelos envisioned, in Nietzschean terms, as el superhombre de hronce: a Bronze Superman. Somehow he reminds me of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, as played by Marlon Brando. A Stanley looking for his southern belle, his Blanche du Bois. A dynamic, vibrant Stanley, annoyed by pretensions of gentility. A flirtatious yet angiy Stanley. Zeta is in his undershirt, elegant suit pants, excited but probably a bit worried about his ulcers, with pronounced lines in his forehead. He is thirty-eight. Although worn out, he still champions a mysterious aura.!Qué cábula! What a crazy 2dude, a vato loco! He is finally ready to put away his ghostlike identity to emerge as a recognized name in mainstream culture, a desire he has nourished for decades. It's 1972, and once the photo study by Leibovitz—whom Zeta would call, in his résumé and in brief bios, not without a hint of pretentiousness, "my official photographer"—has been taken, he will wait impatiently. Metaphorically, Leibovitzs lens is a mirror in front of which Zeta stands naked, contemplating the deterioration of his physical self. Has his life been plentiful? Does his entire existential journey make any sense? Has he made the most of his yo mexicano, his inner, south-of-the-border self? How has he been able to reconcile his rambunctious past with the future he hopes to achieve? How many more days are left in his private calendar? How many more LSD trips will he undergo? And where is he going now? He will survive only a couple of years more, no more. Nobody will be sure about his final fate. He will be involved in drug trafficking, and during a trip on a friend's boat, in June 1974, from Mazatlán, a resort place on Mexico's Pacific coast, to Southern California, he will disappear, strangely and without trace. (The back cover of the 1989 paperback edition of his two published books mistakenly claim his death year to be 1971.) A cksaparecido. Is he still entre nosotros, alive somewhere in the hemisphere? Maybe. Rumors surrounding his vanishing act, his big sleep, never stop. Some claim Zeta might have died of a drug overdose. Too much cocaine. Or too much LSD. Excess in excess. The very last we know about him is from a long-distance phone call on May 15,1974, at around 6:30 p.m., to his beloved son, Marco Acosta, now a lawyer 3and guitar player in San Francisco, who attended St. Johns College at Annapolis, Maryland, and is Zetas sole literary executor. Marco was fifteen years old at the time. "I was the last person, as far as I know, to speak with him," he told me during an interview "Moments before he got on the boat in which he was planning to ride back to the United States, I told him I hoped he knew what he was doing. He said he hoped I knew what I was doing with my life." Zeta also insinuated he was swimming in a pool of white powder. White dust. A bed of snow. Cocaine.
