Black Man's Tacos...

By LaCandrelle Jefferson
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Stumpy, short-necked batos say football is the sport of choice in this dusty bordertown, second only to drinking and getting stoned. Who knows? I've only been here less than a month, but it seems to me that the true Numero Uno deporte is the scarfing of the ever-humble taco.

Forgive me if I'm being too much like a newcomer. I'm going only on what I see and smell. I see everybody eating tacos everywhere I go, from the gas stations, to the fleamarkets, to the downtown streets, and all I smell is spicy hamburger meat and the burning lard left behind by crisped-over tortillas. Every now and then, the aroma of a fresh-cut tomato or lettuce sends me looping. What is it about the taco?

I was raised on grits and greens in my hometown of Plains, Georgia. Peanuts, too.

My new friends in this vulgar town tell me tacos are a sort of winter blanket this time of the year, that, when the temperature drops below 70 degrees, everybody heads for the corner taqueria to put away a dozen or so tacos - beef, chicken or pork. I swear I never heard of a fajita until I cruised into this town from my last job in Jamaica. My first taco encounter was a real trip, equal to that day when I first tasted sex.

"How do you hold it?" I asked a heavyset woman selling out of a battered, one-person stand on 14th Street. She glared at me as if glaring at a moron, frowned and went-on with serving a couple looking like they'd just left a saggy bed at the Alligator Motel on Central Boulevard.

Perplexed, I looked at the folded corn tortilla and decided to lower my head and stick my tongue between the folds, to get to the tomato and lettuce and the meat. It reminded me of oral sex as I practice it, but it didn't quite feel right.

The guy with the pouty, big-haired girl walked over and told me to pinch it in the middle with one hand and take a bite off the end. I did that, and then said, "Oh, I get it. Like a hot dog!"

His girlfriend looked over and smiled like some happy-go-lucky ox. She had looked uneasy when I was eating the taco my way, tonguing it. So, I ate my six taquitos and chased the street meal with a bottle of Big Red while the couple strolled over toward an ancient picnic table set not more than 10 yards from the order counter. I was thinking of heading back inside the nearby bar when a strolling mariachi ambled up and began playing a lot of trumpet stuff. The couple at the picnic table nodded as if wanting to keep up with the music. I could see the woman lip-synching the song while her man stuffed his mouth.

I stood there, thinking: "Reggae spaced me out in Jamaica, but this stuff is going to eat my brain."

Overhead, the moon rose cold and mineral...

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