Evening In Tortilla Flat...

"I have never heard a better version of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. Both the sounds and the ambiance evoked visions of Woodstock..." - A sheltered Brownsville resident

By RICARDO KLEMENT
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Working the basic life impulse has never been all that difficult here, is what the waitress was telling me after she beelined past rows of aging, wooden tables occupied by fat Mexicans getting stoned on cheap, warm beer. "They breathe and then they go for their unemployment check," she went on, laughing as she threw her big hair back like a javeline thrower and then fronted me a rack so enticing that I forgot my next question. "Like you said, any hole in the wall can be the next big thing in nightclubbing."

To hear some locals, Brownsville is now very much Big D's Deep Ellum and Austin's Sixth Street rolled into one, with the added pungent smell of bad salsa being pumped in from every bar's kitchen. Throw in a blackjack table and this dusty, vulgar bordertown would see itself as the next Vegas. Of course, it isn't that.

But those who live here can do nothing but fire-up their lousy existence. Paste a sexy-sounding name on a new bar and then paint is as exciting as Trader Vic's or Antone's. It'll sell. Throw a South Pacific name on another and believe you are actually there. It's the joke of the day along the Mexican border, a land exceedingly good at making itself look - or appear to be - better than it really is, faking it being the singular talent of the grass-whorled masses.

The other night, a sultry one, I pulled into one of the city's new joints and was quickly bored to death. Amateur musicians playing rock 'n' roll standards in what was, well, mediocre style. It was me in Nicaragua all over again! There inside the Cantina Revolucionaria in lake-front Managua, doing the Funky Chicken with a woman just in from picking the beanfields in the unforgiving surrounding hills. Dump a few monster truckloads of dirt around Brownsville and imagine a killer mountain range. Have local women walk down from atop those hills dressed in their usual Big City copycat style at sundown and imagine an honest-to-goodness, thriving, fast-arriving party town.

As yet, Brownsville is not that, no matter what every swinging dick here says - newspaper reporters, bloggers and bar owners, especially. You want a Party Town, go to Austin, or to New Orleans or to The Big Apple. What you get here at present is nothing more than a Mexican mirage, one that comes with great publicity, but horrible actuality. It is the 50-cent cinnamon roll without the frosting, the enchilada without the cheese, the tamale without the meat. Something, but not everything there, in other words.

I've had better assignments in my long and storied journalism career. Brownsville is a lot of things, but it is not the next big thing in partying. For one, there are too many faded, gray-haired hippies parading as credible rockers when they look like they're two beers from the grave. Who wants to party with 66-year-old guys in pony tails? I mean, get real. That's "nursing home" material, if you get my drift. So, stay out of this town if you're in the mood for a genuine good time. And don't fall for the young beggars selling Pepto-Bismol outside these joints.

You hear someone say the Bob Dylan song being butchered onstage is the best they've ever heard and you know you're dealing with some genuine rubes...

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