Slow Day At The Airport...

"We are in a tunnel. It's been rather dark, and will stay that way for quite a while..." - Hugh Hefner, Playboy

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Well...it's still hotter than it is in the ritzy side of Hell. A-hundred and ten in the shade. Even the ants won't come out in the daytime. It's going to be a long, long night for animals. It was time to catch up on the horrible news playing down south. Mexico has its grip on disaster and the Rio Grande now moves in the color of Mexican blood. Air-conditioning is still the biggest luxury here, that and a playful City Hall secretary. No one is moving; everyone is simply eating and relieving themselves ASAP. Don't wanna carry anything all day long, not if you don't have to, no.

"Here, or to go?" asks a well-hipped waitress of a local punk.

"Both," he tells her in broken English. "I gonna eat it here, and I gonna take it with me."

It's that kind of a town. Everybody could make it big in comedy if they only went for it. Laughs are easy to find up and down the main drag and in the many bars. There was a sale on used mattresses all along motel row here the other day - Central Boulevard - and it drew the loudest laughter yet. Pachucos moved up and down Central that day, pointing at this and that bed they'd known well. Life is funny when it's three-up & three-down for long decades, as it is here. No other town in America has an edge on Brownsville. It is, by far, the worst fuckin' hole in North America, rivaled only by the cradle of bullshit some 55 miles west of here - lovely La Joya, home of the worst incest politics in the country.

Lately, laughs have come from an old ally of ours, the ever-victorious Dr. G. F. McHale-Scully, daily editor of http://www.browntownnews.com/, the city's official press organ. Mac, as he is known to street flunkies, prostitutes, bartenders and golf course attendants, has been shaking the social bushes with biting tales of unwritten history and blistering assessments of everything else. He is the lost missile in a bloody, undeclared war on a citizenry no longer interested in being whipped. As he explains his assault, there simply is no defense against good Journalism.

Yesterday, he informed the sleepy populace that one of the town's most revered Anglos - one Charles Stillman - was Gay, and that he may have enjoyed the pleasures of the meat pipe with one Francisco Yturria of the at-times prominent Yturria Family. Today, McHale-Scully threw out a piece about some long-forgotten Texas Ranchers who made a living hanging African-Americans. And then, he chased that with a big gulp of Jose Cuervo before writing that new Mayor Tony Martinez has sucked in his first weeks in office. Martinez, a roly-poly, little fat face kind of dude, is said to have taken ill at reading that and retreated to the bottom of his bed. Someone said they heard it from someone who heard it from someone else that the mayor had taken it out on a mangy stray dog once the property of the former mayor.

Brownsville is a town that ought to be spanked daily. Hard, and with a goddamned, educated cane from Borneo. Spanked and then loved and then put away wet. So they laugh, cause that's free and that's what they've learned to do in the face of work. No one talks much, other than to agree with what is being said. No one wants to beat the dead horse. Not Juan, and certainly not Maria.

Tomorrow is another day, and that's how they'll live it out.

Booze will flow at sundown. Rotting Cantina jukeboxes will explode when the poor amble in with their tales of being royally abused. Fearful women will flee the streets and men will settle in, fully believing it's up to the other guy to move this goddamned town forward. Brownsville - Outhouse By The Sea.

There are clues. It is said the trains back into this town and that birds always want to fly upside down. The last sale of a gallon of exterior house paint at the hardware store came in 1985. What you see is an an old and dusty portrait of something that died and never did know it...

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