La Zona Final...

"The crew took a vote, and she lost, so we traded her for two cases of beer to the first boat we ran into, about a hundred miles north of South Padre Island. It was a gang of shrimpers from Galveston. They were headed back to port... that was four years ago, and the girl is still in a state mental hospital somewhere in West Texas..." - Boat captain from Port Isabel

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - It doesn't take a week here before any visitor gets the idea that he can write a world-beater corrido to just about anything, from tales of failed romances, to thrills from a bloody shootout, to the soulful lament about a plate of bad beans at a hole-in-the-hole eatery.

Music, and we mean local music, feeds the ragged soul. That's the line in the streets and in the bars and in the motels and in the schools. This town loves a bad story.

Lately, the tune has been taken hostage by a strolling guitar player by the name of Juan Bob, an 80-year-old unemployed mechanic who loves Johnny Cash songs and does his best to ruin them with his 3-string guitar, a piece of crap someone threw at him back when he would sell the local newspaper outside City Hall. That was earlier this year, at about the time the Packers were winning the Super Bowl. Juan Bob, who looks strikingly like what the Olympic skiier Spider Sabich would look like at 82, takes tips for his performances.

One humid night last week found him strumming Patsy Clines' "I Go To Pieces" as a string of wandering locals moved past him along a cracked downtown sidewalk. He would stand tall, guitar held close to his upper chest like John Lennon liked to hold it back in the 60s, when The Beateles were fab, and plunk away, his songs always off-key and his guitar sounding like a moaning prostitute unable to find the lost chord. But he stayed with it, even as women urged him on and men told him to go kill himself.

Juan Bob is as Brownsville as anything could ever be, and he's tasted good and evil ranging from booze to local women who took him down and then forgot about him. They say he has 10 or 12 kids in town, none of them who even acknowledge his DNA. Another woman, who does his laundry and will fix a sack of flour tortilla tacos for his evening on the job, calls him The Last Picasso, a local treasure the town ignores with extreme prejudice.

We watched him put on his act under a full moon the other day. Juan Bob played all requests, including pretty sad versions of Proud Mary and Penny Lane.

But that's this bordertown, forever striving, and forever wanting to belong.

If there was an ounce of Bob Dylan in Juan Bob, well, we never saw it. He was playing an Elvis song when we drifted away, and the small group of night owls moving past him were likely thinking of all-night sex and not his music.

Music gets little attention here. It is low on the list of needs, far below tamales and condoms, although it is used to gauge membership in some sort of bizarre civilization where a few boos heard on the streets are also considered attention.

Juan Bob, beaten mercilessly by the people of his own town, threw his battered guitar across his back and walked off looking like a wasted boxer who'd somehow believed being back in the ring was as good as it had been in the old days. The booing followed him all the way home...

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