The Pitiful & The Damned

"Well, I had to move fast, but I couldn't with you around my neck. I'd said I'd send for you, and I did. What did you expect?"... - Bob Dylan

By RON MEXICO
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Yeah, Baby, has anybody seen my love? Hit me, son. Absolutely, make it a double. I'm on assignment and professionals know how to tone-up the best senses with just the right amount of booze. What's that? Sure, I'll spring for a drink for that sweetheart. Anything for love, is what I say this late at night. She said what? Ha ha ha. I'm on it, son. You tell her Ron's there, all-in...

And so it went that recent night in this latest border den of unrestrained romance. There are sounds all over this town, some even chasing a neat tune. Love it! The air is full of excitement, goes the line at the downtown chamber of commerce, where dreams of resurrecting the falling inner city have circled like hungry buzzards for the last few years. Anything for love, yeah.

They want desperately to make this dusty, under-achieving burg into another Babylon, a place where men will again be men and women will again be for men, not like it's been since that drug war broke out across the Rio Grande in Mexico and took local dicks with it. Yeah, lads, men here are scared as hell to come out at night. And the sissies won't even cut a line across to Matamoros for a little strange, which, bless their hearts, was the national sport here for - what? - a hundred years? Get stoned in Brownsville and get laid in Matamoros. That was the town's party slogan for many, many years. I swear I once saw that written in a men's room at Hobby Airport in Houston.

But things went bloody and then limp when the drug cartels set up shop. Brownsville men were cut off! Left to play with themselves, is what my local source, Dr. G.F. McHale-Scully, told me in a 10-page telegram I got before coming to work this story.

"Bring your best goddamned boots," he went on after telling me that my old squeeze was now a city commissioner in town. No names. I'm not that kind of angel. McHale-Scully is the sort of journalist who chases the all-night brawl. He said, "You either get what Brownsville offers or you get nothing, and those offerings are a far cry from lovelies you used to take to the Ritz Hotel in Mata. Be advised. Times changed while you were messing with the Scandinavians in Amsterdam."

I'm hip.

Yet, I couldn't help but catch the loosest string of this new adventure in Brownsville. Clubs are opening in town and the bored bulls are clarioning the arrival of a new party era. I hear the tunes. They're rocking numbers. It's loud enough to drown out the machine gun fire coming from across the river, where the Mexicans play at hungry-for-power.

Man, I don't know. I don't know. It could all be a mirage. It's happened too many times along the border. Dreams surface and are presented as if the absolute can't-miss Next Big Thing...and then they do miss. Lord knows that many a resident has gone on to hard drugs just because of the disappointment. You can't dance the same song over and over and over and not get tired of the damned thing, even if you're hob-nobbing with a big-bosomed woman who just can't stop laughing. I love that in women. Laugh, honey. Laugh all freakin' night. Ronnie's here, love.

I leave the bar after dropping a $30 bill in the bartender's tip jar.

It's a fake bill I worked-up on my computer and printed before I came to Brownsville.

I mean, hey, we're faking our way through a fake story angle, so...

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