I first heard about Vega Van Gringo in a cantina outside of Monterrey, a place where the floors were warped with beer and piss and the ceiling fans turned slow, pushing the heat down instead of lifting it up. I was drinking with a man who called himself El Pastor, though he wasn’t any kind of holy man I’d ever seen. His teeth were little gray stubs, his eyes like raw oysters, and his breath smelled like someone had left a pile of fish guts in the sun too long. He told me about a painter, a legend, who worked in fits and disappeared like a ghost.
“El cabrón don’t even remember painting,” he said, licking salt from his fingers. “You believe that?”
I didn’t, not at first. But then again, Mexico has its share of ghosts.
Vincent Gringo washed up in Galveston years ago, a boneyard of shrimp boats and ghosts of oil money. He had talent once. A painter, a real one, back when he was still sober enough to keep his hands steady. He could put a brush on canvas and make light bend, making people weep. But booze and pills took their cut, and what was left was just another washed-up American with an empty stomach and a head full of static.
He’d been in and out of rehab, in and out of motels. Some nights he’d sleep under the pier, listening to the waves slap the pilings like they were trying to wake him up. It never worked. What did work was the right mix—tequila, maybe a few crushed-up pills, a little coke to keep his heart from stalling out. And that’s when it happened. That’s when he’d disappear.
The first time he woke up in Mexico, he thought he was dead. The heat was the first thing, thick and pressing. Then the sound of flies. He opened his eyes in a room he didn’t recognize, white walls streaked with smoke, paintings stacked against them, wet with color. His hands ached, covered in paint. There was a name on the wall, scrawled in thick black strokes—Vega Van Gringo.
It wasn’t his name.
The paintings started appearing in galleries, then in the hands of collectors. No one knew where they came from, but they all carried the same name: Vega Van Gringo. Wild, violent colors, figures melting into each other, images that looked different depending on where you stood, how the light hit them. Some people said they were visions, others nightmares. No one could trace them. The dealers in Mexico City said they came from somewhere north, maybe Monterrey, maybe further. The signature was a ghost’s.
Vincent had no memory of painting them. One minute, he was in a bar in Galveston, watching the ice melt in his drink. The next, he was waking up in a different city, sometimes a different country, his body sore, his fingers stained with colors he didn’t remember choosing.
And then there was the money. Stacks of pesos, sometimes dollars, crumpled in his pockets. Dealers were paying for something he couldn’t remember doing. He tried to stop. He tried to stay clean. But then the withdrawals hit, and the only way through was the same road that led him back to the brush.
He would mix the right poisons, and then—blackout. When he woke up, the work was done. The cycle repeated.
I followed his trail through Monterrey, then Mexico City. Bars, flophouses—the kind of places where people didn’t ask questions. I found a man who swore he’d seen Vega at work. He said he painted like he was possessed, like something had climbed into his bones and was using him like a puppet.
“You ever seen a man fight his own hands?” the man asked, shaking his head. “He don’t know what he’s doing. He just moves, like he’s got no choice.”
The more I heard, the more I had to know. So I kept going, down through Oaxaca, through little towns where his work showed up in back alleys, on walls, in private collections owned by people too dangerous to name. I kept following, and then, one night, in a back room in Mérida, I found him.
Vincent Gringo was sitting at a table covered in empty glasses, his hands twitching and his eyes hollowed out like a skull. He looked up at me, slow, unfocused.
“You got a light?” he asked, voice hoarse.
I slid him a matchbook. He struck one and held it to the cigarette, shaking between his lips. In the glow, I saw the edges of something else in his face. Someone else.
“Where’ve you been, Vincent?” I asked.
He exhaled, smoke curling in the air between us. “Hell if I know.”
I stayed with him in Mérida, watching the slow unraveling of a man split in two. During the day, Vincent was wreckage—pale, shaking, the weight of withdrawal pulling him under. But as soon as the bottle tipped, as soon as the right mix hit his bloodstream, his hands steadied, and something else took over. Vega.
I watched him paint. It was terrifying. He moved like an animal trapped in his own skin, eyes wide, frantic, the brush scraping against the canvas like a knife carving flesh. He spoke in a language I didn’t recognize, half-muttering, half-chanting, sweat running down his face. The paintings poured out of him in hours, sometimes minutes, and when he was done, he would collapse like a puppet with its strings cut.
And when he woke up, he wouldn’t remember a thing.
I asked him if he ever felt like he was watching himself from the outside. He just shook his head. “Feels more like something’s watching me.”
By then, his name—both names—were spreading. Collectors were looking for him. Some of them wanted to buy. Others wanted to own. And some, I think, wanted to make sure he never picked up a brush again.
Then came the men in the suits.
They showed up in Mérida first—two Americans, clean-shaven, dark sunglasses, the kind of men who looked out of place anywhere south of Texas. They asked around, flashing money, asking about a painter named Vega Van Gringo.
Vincent was too strung out to see it coming. I tried to warn him, but he was already slipping again, the pull of the brush stronger than self-preservation. When he painted, he stopped being Vincent. But the world didn’t stop watching.
One night, he vanished.
No trace. No paintings left behind. Just the name, Vega Van Gringo, smeared on the walls like a ghost’s last whisper.
I kept looking, but I never found him.
Only the paintings, appearing in places they shouldn’t be, were sold for prices that made men disappear. And sometimes, in the right light, when the tequila hits just right, I swear I see him still—trapped in the canvas, watching me back.
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