Nobody's Angel...

"Cuando tengo mucha lana
me pisteo con las buchannas
y cuando no tengo nada
me pisteo con las caguamas
si acaso es que ando borracho
Siete dias de la semana..."
- Grupo Montez de Durango, El Borracho

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - City police picked up Juan De Dios Morales for weaving, cutting through traffic and being a general danger. He'd been drinking at a nearby bar, a cheap joint with a Catholic-sounding name - La Casa de Mama. The owner, an orphan by the name of Beto Flores, knew Juan De Dios well. He knew Juan drank Bohemia, and he knew Juan always wanted his botana at his side. Beto also knew Juan's mother, Manuela, a woman who washed clothes for pay in town. In fact, Manuela washed Beto's clothes and even ironed his shirts. Sometimes, Beto would let Juan De Dios drink without paying. There was a Juan in every town along the rough Mexican border - men in their late-forties who no longer had a job and who lived on welfare extended by the state and federal government.

The policeman asked Juan one question: "Are you drunk?"

Juan, thin and lanky, shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. He felt the headache and thought it weighed at least a ton. Crap flew around his head, bugs, little gnats and big, fat flies. The cop walked around Juan and pulled at his arms, to cuff him.

"The hole?" Juan asked in Spanish.

"Back to jail, yes," he heard from the mustachioed policeman, a cop he knew from their days in junior high school. "One day you'll stop drinking, Juan. That day will be my best day as a cop. You know how many times I've arrested your ass?"

Juan shook his head. He didn't know. Alcohol filled his skull.

"Twenty-eight times, man," the officer told him, as he stuck his right hand under Juan's lower back and pulled at Juan's salsa-stained khaki pants to begin the walk to the backseat of the police cruiser. Juan cleared his throat and then spit out a glob of saliva mixed with bits of peanuts marinated in Tequila. "Twenty-nine now, twenty-nine, cabron."

Juan slid into the cop's car like a dazed worm and fell over on his side. He was sleepy, but that spin in his head sounded and seemed as if it was an old washing machine going gangbusters on its final spin cycle. "Don't freakin' puke in there, Juan," the officer said next. "You do that and I'll kick your ass."

Juan grunted and felt the bile rise to his throat.

At the city jail, two other cops came out to help get Juan into the booking room while the arresting cop called Juan's mother. Twenty-nine times, he told himself. My monthly quota.

He heard the telephone ring four times before he got an answer.

"Quien es?" the frail old woman on the other end asked, not knowing she was about to be informed of her son's latest arrest. "Que? Quien habla? Eres tu, Juanito?"

The veteran officer, schooled in the business of busting drunks and then dealing with relatives, raised his voice a bit and repeated his sentence, "Habla el policia Lionel. Hemos arrestado a su hijo, Juan."

"Que?"

The officer tried again, this time with his voice in full-volume. He knew she had trouble hearing and it hit him that perhaps it got worse for her late at night. When he finally thought she understood, he heard her say, "Pues alli me lo cuidan." Then she said she'd pay his bond in the morning. The policeman hung up the phone. He knew she had little money and none for bailing anybody out of jail. Her husband, a carpenter known well in town, had died a few years back, the cop knew. Juan De Dios did little to help his mother. He drank daily, laughed with his pals at the cheap cantina and danced with the low-class women employed by bar owner Beto Flores. In fact, Juan's reputation as a nifty dancer was well-known with all the women who danced for their living. He liked the taconazo and he could cumbia with the best of them, they said. Once, he'd done the Limbo Rock to wild laughter, his nylon shirt unbuttoned and his Beatle boots dragging the wooden floor like the heels of a club-footed man.

Nallely Davila, one of the younger dancers, and just in from Honduras, was one of Juan's favorites. It was Hilda who had noticed Juan shined his boots on Friday nights, the day she served as the bar's "Discount Girl," the dancer whose rate was lowered as weekend promotion.

In fact, there were rumors that Juan De Dios had fallen in love with the 26-year-old Nallely. Beto Flores chided him for arriving with a single red rose he quickly gave to Nallely on those nights. Juan later confessed to taking it from the front yard of a house in the nearby Southmost neighborhood. Nallely wouldn't say it, but another dancer had told Juan to forget any ideas he might have of gaining her as a lover.

"You're too old," one of them said she almost said to Juan on the night of his arrest outside the bar, out in the parking lot, when he'd made a scene after seeing Nallely leave with another man, a younger man who had looked at Juan De Dios and laughed uproariously.

When his thin-faced mother walked into the jail to pay his bond, Juan De Dios asked cops to let him leave out the back door...

- 30 -