Town Girds For Prostitutes...

"Here's to woman!
Would that we could fall into
her arms without falling
into her hands..."
- Ambrose Bierce

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - In the lexicon of Big Time sports, next weekend is the Super Bowl of prostitution in this listless bordertown known for taking the worst of risks and living to pay the highest of prices. Charro Days rolls out its parades, its bands, its dances, its taco stands and, it seems, its wallets for a small army of prostitutes already on a forced march into town for the annual pro-Mexico celebration.

This year, the 47th in a string of Charro Days lore, the festivities arrive in concert with the town's fast-rising Blues scene, an astral synchronicity some say will magnify the evening action ten-fold. Men are salivating; cops are taking classes on restraint. It is at once the yin and the yang of life, the alpha and the omega, the rice and the beans, the arroz and the pollo. Cries for booze will compete with the yoicks for women.

"I am the city's harshest critic," said one local blogger known for his tirades against everything corrupt. "But Charro Days is our day in the sun. You won't get any legal stories on my blog during the entire crazy-edged melange. Viva Mexico! Viva!"

Wrote another, "Brownsville men save their change for Charro Days. Some of these well-hipped prostitutes will leave town with a few grand in their bras. The lucky ones will also carry the memory of being handled by panthers, by rough-hewn men with a rudimentary knowledge of what it takes to please a women. But, then, this is not about love."

It all kicks off next Saturday, the 19th, and ends on the 26th.

City cops are being coy, but everyone knows this is the week they stop hounding Central Boulevard motels, venues for what some argue is really the best parade in town. "This one has no fancy float or fat-boy Grand Marshal," said one resident who asked for anonymity, but whose name is Ben "Manuela" McLanahan, a fiddler for a local country & western band. "I was staying at the Alligator Motel last year and, man, I didn't sleep a wink. Brownsville men like to bang the walls and rake the shag carpeting. Those videos must be hot on the Internet."

A veteran clerk at another motel said the celebration may have its "Grito" honoring Mexico, but the gritos he hears inside his property's rooms are more lengthy bays and almost ceaseless neighings, a soundtrack he equates to sex-starved horses mating with unwilling coyotes.

"It'll be seven days in Babylon," said a woman at the library. "And more like Sodom & Gomorrah over in the poverty-stricken Las Prietas neighborhood. Sodomy is big over there, and I don't know how they feel about Gomorrahing. It is simply too-Mexican for me."

For the civilized Charro Days celebrant, the Noche De Ronda festivities are the essence of the festival, the so-called taste of the event. But for men, it'll be Night of The Iguana, blind obedience to the call of the wild, the walk to the edge of the cliff, the wide-eyed lust that accompanies God's choicest morsel onto a saggy motel bed, the endless battle between good & bad, up & down, fear & loathing, the one kill-me week of the year.

"It's Brownsville against civilization one more time, man!" crowed one resident getting a haircut he said was needed ahead of the annual orgy. This year, he'd opted for a military burr, explaining that "last year this woman I hired took me off-guard and dragged me by my long hair around the bed and then threw me up against the motel room's wall. I can't have that this time around, no sir."

He's laughing as the barber makes another plow run over his fat, round head.

Outside, the sun has knifed through passing rain clouds after a morning deluge. Streams of dirty water run down city drains. People are back on the downtown sidewalks, moving in and out of discount clothing stores, the look on their faces giving no clue to their thoughts, bodies not betraying aches and pain associated with living this far from the moon. This town will do its partying and hope another rain cleanses it when the festival runs its course. That's the news here...

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