I'll Be Home For Xmas...

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

NEW YORK, N.Y. - First came the queers and the lesbos on Sunday, followed by the Yanks whipping the Mets four straight, followed by Bernard Madoff getting 150 years in prison for the most ridiculous Ponzi Scheme ever. Somewhere in there, in between jaunts to this and that cafe and bar, I fell back to my earlier Big Apple ways, of, yes, being aloof with a hundred million other Bozos coming here to be exactly that - zany and aloof.

Batman danced with Superman, in full costume, yesterday afternoon at Central Park near 59th Street, just up from Columbus Circle, where Trump Tower calls the shots. I was with this beautiful 23-year-old chick - my lovely daughter Gabrielle.

It's a start to my return to those halcyon days when the sensationalist NY Post paid my hefty salary and when deadline was followed by a cab ride to the White Horse Tavern in the Village where Edgar Allen Poe and Dylan Thomas drank their asses off, Dylan still holding the record for consecutive whiskeys - 18.

I'm behaving, being a father, but also being me, which is the dangerous part of the equation.

Tonight, we dined at the corny Gee Whiz Diner in Tribeca, where my daughter and I sat down for a long chat and a light din-din. Who knows what Bernie Madoff had for supper over the local jail...

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And Then He Was Gone...

"...you may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it's the same old place." - Barry McGuire

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McAllen, Texas - Someone famous once told someone a bit less famous that you really couldn't write about your neighborhood until you'd been elsewhere in the world. We've always believed that, and have generally lived by the sage advice. So, we'll again be away for a spell. Hopefully, the stories we file for this outlet will be of interest, or at the very least not boring. Vignettes from the road. Think of it that way. First stop is Big D and then it's on to the Big Apple, where my first duty will be a loving reunion with my daughter, Gabrielle. It's been a while since I've seen her, although we talk or text or email daily. Her Mom is off to finish a Masters program in Spain. I'll be sitting her apartment in this deal, which is a nice post-Father's Day gift. Thirty-first floor of some nice, old brownstone building, doorman and the like. In any case, feel free to enjoy yourselves while I'm gone. I'll be back with renewed vigor, for sure. So long, and thanks for all the nachos...

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Wheelhouse Romance, Chapt. 15, Verse 22

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McAllen, Texas - Maybe it was the soulful Nina Simone song coming from the dash radio, or maybe it was the longing for a woman who once was a huge part of my life ("Say Yoooooooge, Dad." is what my daughter Gabrielle says about that word). Rebecca is her name and that's her photo atop this story. She teaches Art at a university in the DFW area. We met at my favorite coffee shop in Fort Worth. One night, when I was footloose & fancy-free after my breakup with the lawyer Maria Isabel, this lovely woman smiled at me from across the room and I smiled back. What followed between us that winter is what makes for great wheelhouse romances - the best kind of love, in other words.

I've lost track of her since our goofy breakup - what? - a year and a few months ago, about the time of my mother's death and after she'd left her home in Dallas for a university sabbatical in Vermont. Confessions of the heart are not my cup of coffee, but I seem to have my reflective moments. I believe they come from my previous life, when I was a Catholic priest in Rome, when my last hat came in red and my name was preceded by the name of a well-known bird. Quien sabe, as they say along the Mexican border where I presently reside.

Anyway, Rebecca remains as the lantern of my last serious romantic encounter. Why we drifted apart has much to do with the dynamic of our great and sorry American culture. I was writing and she was doing her best with the visual arts - something about strapping a video camera on a cat's head and seeing what his world was like out in the neighborhood. It seemed funny to me, but she didn't laugh when I said what would come next, a string of homeless people eating spaghetti? She actually liked the idea, she said while I sliced celery and she worked the Wok we both loved like crazy those November nights in her kitchen, the moments we savored with our palate ahead of what we savored with our loins in the adjoining bedroom of her home in the Oak Cliff section of Big D.

I was, of course, antsy about a relationship that would come with an "exclusivity agreement," something cowboys used to the open road rarely chase, much less sign. In any case, Rebecca flew off to Vermont and I came down to the Rio Grande Valley. That was a year ago last March. A few months back she sent me a note via Email that read, "Where are you, darling?" I didn't reply, thinking something's died so that something new can begin. And then last week I shot her a note saying I'd be in New York next month. As is often found in the best of Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton movies, it seemed she, too, would be up there visiting a college friend. And so I'll see her again.

Where we left off was me walking out of her house at dawn on a frigid, wind-blown morning, when I readied my lungs for the frozen outdoor air after we'd both looked at each other with faces that said, "I may need a break from this..." I drove west to Fort Worth on desolate I-30, the old DFW Tollway, listening to Nina Simone sing Mr. Bojangles off a CD Rebecca had burned for me. I've always liked that song, but Simone does something special with it in the same way that Ray Charles sings America as if he owns it.

I think I loved Rebecca back then. Yes, it was great sex, but I saw it as meaningful. I mean, I didn't just climb on her back and go for a ride in the sky, as the song says. I kissed her a lot, and that, to me, is the difference-maker in any relationship worth a damn. If a guy doesn't kiss you a hundred times a day, he doesn't love you. That's carved in stone somewhere near the summit of Mt. Ararat, is what I've been told.

What I said to Rebecca in my Email was that I'd meet her outside a Gray Papaya's near the 72nd Street Subway Station in the city's Upper West Side, close to where I'll be staying. As for anything else, what she said was that we'd pretty much have to wait and see...

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Ragging On Traffic, A New Sport...

By Ron Mexico

Contributor

McALLEN, Texas - The woman was headed for a Payless Shoe Store somewhere in the north side of town, where she hoped to find a pair of red Liz Claiborne pumps on sale. The thing was she did not know if the store known for shoe sales even carried the popular brand. Up the street she roared, gunning the engine with each passing traffic light. Red, stop. Green, go. She was on some sort of female adrenaline, eager to get the shoes for a date that night with some Lothario she thought would appreciate the shoes. At the corner of N. 10th Street and Pecan, she fell in behind a fancy and expensive BMW. The light was red, but she had big plans for shooting around the car and moving on toward the store. She had no freakin' idea that it was even up that way. A girlfriend had said she thought she'd seen one over alongside a Target store near the corner of Trenton, behind a McDonald's and a Shell gas station.

The light turned green and the cars in the adjoining lane shot forward.

The Beamer in front of her, however, took its time crossing the busy intersection. That's when the shoe-seeking woman let go a string of profanity that would have made a Redneck or Pachuco cringe. Something about God was followed by something about something being damned, and then it was the F word accompanied by the pronoun known far and wide as one you use when addressing a guilty party, as in "You did it!" You in this case couldn't hear a damned thing. The late-model BMW with the Mexico license plates eased into the 30 mph range without a care in the world. My friend, meanwhile, was livid, unable to stop the cursing and the finger-gesturing and the ceaseless Italian salute to a miscreant.

"Bastards!" she threw out and the BMW seemed to lurch a bit faster, to perhaps 35 mph. My friend couldn't move over to the adjoining lane. That one was steady scene of passing vehicles, trucks and vans and buses and a motorcycle and a cab or two.

"Goddammit!" came out of my lovely friend's mouth. Bastard, three times. The BMW began rolling a bit faster and the moving vehicles in the other lane soon allowed my friend to pass. I half-expected she would inch alongside the Beamer and slow down just enough to flick the bird at the driver. She did, and I was somewhat embarrassed to see a very old lady at the wheel of the Mexican car. the woman appeared to be lost, neck in a discernible swivel as she read the arriving street names and, it appeared, the names of the businesses lining the drag. Shortly, we watched as she nosed into a strip mall where the largest business appeared to be a Chinese restaurant.

My friend said nothing more for two-three blocks.

Then it came, "There's too many out-of-towners in McAllen these days. All they do is fuck it up for locals. Can you believe that old, fajita-faced hag back there? Unbeeeeelevable!"

We never saw - or found- the shoe store.

When I saw my friend at the bar later that night, she was wearing a pair of leather sandals with strappings that wrapped around her ankles. She frowned when she caught me looking at her feet, but threw me no emotion when I stared at her low-hanging blouse packing her best side. Her date, she told me, was a high-necked dude from Oklahoma, and when I asked about his license plates, she said, "Oklahomans drive like freakin' maniacs, but I can live with that."

I nodded.

Traffic doesn't bug me. I'm oblivious to the everyday annoyances. Yep, I can put up with every sort of lousy driver out there, and it doesn't faze me one iota. No, sir. Not even a wayward 18-wheeler on a hellbent, out-of-control roll. Bring it. Kill me doing 95 mph. Ride me, baby. Who cares? It's high-excitement, a thrill, a roll, a brain-whipper, a leg-snapper, a throat-filler. The road don't bite is what Junior Bonner used to say, and I believe it. Hell, yeah!

What does loop me is finding pads inside a woman's bra...that and panties with a built-in butt. Uh-uh, no...

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[Editor's Note: Reporter Ron Mexico is a refugee from the War on Bad Marriages...]

Midnight In Mexico...

“Standing next to me in this lonely crowd is a man who swears he's not to blame.All day long I hear him shout so loud, crying out that he was framed...” – Bob Dylan

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas – A Starbucks coffee shop on North 10th Street here is hardly the center of political thought on all to do with today’s Mexico. It is a small business with a steady clientele largely interested in sipping a cup of Joe while reading the morning edition of The McAllen Monitor or while catching up with office work via laptop computer. Noise is minimal, the setting amplified only by the sometimes fighting rock ‘n roll music coming out of the overhead speakers. This is where I meet two gentlemen knowledgeable about the doings south of the border. Mauro and Teto, no last names this close to Mexico, talk as if on Talk Radio or some safe street corner where they can blast the politics and corruption of their native country without fear of sniper fire.

It is not with pride that they do it, however. Their anger is visible and comes with the full weight of two men looking to spread the news, and wishing that others would join them, as well. Mauro is in his 60s, Teto a bit younger. Both come and go across the dividing Rio Grande. Both will tell you they believe Mexico is corrupt from bottom to top, from the small town cop to the president. Neither pulls punches. They see things back home so out of control, so at the mercy of the drug cartels, that to say that they see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is to believe that tunnel is not a million miles-long. That large contingent of army personnel sent to the border by Mexican President Felipe Calderon a few months back? Mauro and Teto say it’s all “part of the show.”

“When the PRI (Mexico’s once-ruling political party) lost its first presidential election two rounds ago, the party released the dogs,” says Teto, a burly, balding man in his early-fifties. “The dogs were always there, but the PRI controlled them. Those dogs are now part of the mayhem spreading across Mexico.”

The mayhem he speaks about is largely the drug business. Mexico’s cartels used to be six in number. Today, because of disarray in political power, the number may be as many as a dozen. Deep in the mud of illegal activity, they both say, is the federal government. Corruption is a staple in countries south of the American border. Some of it is sanctioned by the powers-that-be, and some of it is allowed by the citizenry, but the idea that the administration of President Felipe Calderon, a champion of democracy to American politicians that includes President Barack Obama, is complicit has been mainly an internal assessment for the Mexican citizenry.

My entry into Mexican politics came when I traveled around the country while writing for The Houston Post in the late-1980s, when Mexico was another Mexico, when the PRI ruled without competition, when the country was known as a “trampoline” for Colombian drugs and not as a country where the richest drug lord grabbed a place atop Forbes Magazine’s Richest Men In The World survey. Mexico is No. 1 these days as a mover & shaker in the hemisphere drug trade. The infiltration has taken over towns, cities, regions and states. Drug moguls now communicate with political candidates, or so said a current candidate for mayor of San Pedro Garza - a suburb of Monterrey acknowledged as the richest city in Mexico. It is a tremendous flash-forward into the narco-business for a poor country that often boasted its income came from oil and from tourism. Today, the trafficking of illegal drugs reigns supreme. Mexicans fight to get into the game and many are glad to die while wearing wildly-expensive alligator boots and belts, their however-shortened lives at the very least coming with some “respect” from local authorities not used to paying such compliments to the uneducated and the uncouth.

So, when I ask my friends Mauro and Teto for more info, they hit me with this stunner at me: the wife of former Mexican President Vicente Fox is related to the country’s billionaire drug lord, a physically-eccentric dude known quite widely by his nickname of “El Chapo,” the same cat listed as a rich dude by Forbes Magazine, right up there with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a few others not exactly tied to the illegal drug industry. “Everybody knows that,” Teto repeats when I ask him to confirm what I just heard. Mauro throws out: “The Bishop of the region where he lives said it! He told the congregation he had no idea why Mexico was saying they didn’t know where Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was when everybody in town knows exactly where El Chapo lives!”

Wild, I think, throwing frames onto my brain that come with the sort of assessments about Mexico I’ve heard coming from Washington, D.C. Didn’t President Obama visit with Mexican President Calderon in Mexico City – what? – last month? Didn’t American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visit with Mexican officials in Monterrey, Mexico a few months back? In there somewhere was word that the government would be funneling still more drug-war millions to Mexico for continuation of that endless scrap. And I know I’ve heard Calderon characterized as being against illegal drugs and against government corruption.

That is when Mauro threw a book at me by a Mexican journalist by the name of Anabel Hernandez. “She has the balls male reporters in Mexico don’t have,” he said in a voice that rose with every word. “Read the book. You’ll see that what we’re saying is true. But there is more, much more!”

The book is “Los Complices del Presidente (The President’s Accomplices).” It is an eye-opening book that paints a different portrait of Calderon and his PAN Party administration. In its 412 pages, readers will find a mountain of examples of corruption and facts supporting allegations. The story of Calderon cabinet member Juan Camilo Mourino, then-Secretary of State, is especially touching, if that’s even the word. Mourino was killed last November 4th in a plane crash many said was mysterious. The government said the aircraft merely flew too close behind the wake of a larger airliner and its inexperienced pilot lost control. Mourino had been accused of okaying, as Secretary of Energy, more than 160 contracts with the country’s national petroleum company, PEMEX, for his family’s gasoline station enterprise, Ivancar, S.A. A government probe cleared Mourino, but the allegation gained footing with the citizenry to the extent that President Calderon is said to have felt the pressure of an independent review. In her book, Anabel Hernandez offers what look like copies of some of the contracts in question. They bear Mourino’s signature and government stamp. When all blame was removed from Mourino’s back by the government, Journalist Hernandez, through her book publicist, declared that it was “an example of the official impunity.” She noted that the contracts in question, said to be only 8 by the government probe team, was actually the more than 160 she later noted in her book.

It was, she went on, proof that the “government continues to sanction corruption and, even when there exist public denunciations, the same officials continue exonerating…”

An experienced reporter, Hernandez also is the author of earlier books that looked into the country’s presidency, the two being “The Presidential Family” and “End of the Party in Los Pinos” – about the presidency of Vicente Fox. Los Pinos is a section of Mexico City home to what is in effect the Mexican White House. Both took a hard line on questionable actions by the Fox Administration.

It is not a new thing. Corruption in Mexico is both historic and cultural. The Latino way of doing things lends itself to backslappings and glad-handing. Here, along the border, the “mordida,” or pay-off at the Mexican customs stations when one heads across is legendary. Jobs of any significance come only through long and discernible party loyalty. And, lately, the fact that Mexico’s economy now wrests on illegal drug trafficking has led to the enlistment of young people into the street-fighting fray. It is not uncommon for a cartel hit man to be a 17-year-old punk making more money in that capacity than anything earned by his family in the history of his DNA. Life suddenly is very good for anyone wishing to ally in the war, for the drug dealers especially. “The government stuff is just show,” Teto insists. “They don’t want to get rid of the cartels. What for? Some of these government officials are getting fifteen or twenty-thousand dollars a month to look the other way.”

And, he notes with a facial expression that says no shit, man, “Who do you think is building the schools and hospitals in Mexico? It’s the narcos! They seek free passage for their drugs and they’ll be asked for payment that sometimes may be construction of a school, or small hospital. They do it! They have the cash!”

The Texas-Mexico border this far south, from Laredo upriver to Brownsville in the other direction near the Gulf of Mexico, used to be a passive chunk of lands for both countries. The border crossings offered little if any delay and soldiers were as rare as a businessman in a suit. Those days are gone for the Rio Grande Valley where this sits. Today, it is an army of U.S. Border Patrol agents backing an army of U.S. Customs Service agents backing an army of immigration agents backing an army of local cops. That’s the obstacle course to beat when headed for Mexico. When coming back, it is almost like a funeral-in-reverse. The Mexicans have their own game. They ask the questions about where you’ve been and what you’re ferrying in your vehicle, but, on the Mexican side, it is a scene out of some action-packed war video game. Dour-faced soldiers in thick green uniforms walk the streets, right past sand-bagged, machine-gun bunkers with a soldier’s finger forever on the trigger. They don’t talk, they don’t smile. They stare ahead for long seconds before their heads then perform a slow swivel that allow them to see the rooftops and the sidewalks and the passing vehicles. They are there 24 hours a day, ready for gunfire that more often than not spills out into the seemingly laid-back landscape. It is not war-ravaged Baghdad or Fallujah; it is Reynosa, Mexico – a large border town once the playground of adventurous or bored Rio Grande Valley high school boys looking for a cold beer or a cheap woman on a weekday afternoon when they should’ve been in class.

“Today, even I don't take my wife across the river,” Mauro had told me, emphasizing the “I,” as if it was being uttered by a some tough guy who perhaps earlier in life wouldn’t have tolerated anyone telling him where he could and couldn’t go. It’s now a good idea to follow advice about where to go and where not to go in Mexico.

My conversations with Mauro and Teto took me back to my days as a reporter for The Post in Mexico City, when I would go for my morning coffee at the Havana Cafe near the national government complex. I recall it was abuzz with political chatter that often included assessments from the heady waiters. I remember a lot of the talk back then was about the possibility that the ruling PRI Party might lose a governor's race in the northern part of the country, a region with a history of political insurgencies. A governor's race. That sounds so silly today. The PRI has lost governor races in the interim, and many believe it is the loss of that full-metal hold that has left the country at the mercy of the cash-fat drug lords.

That's what my Starbucks friends meant when they said the dogs had been let loose in Mexico...

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[Editor's Note: It goes without saying that we do not offer this as a definitive, end-all report on Mexico. It is but yet another slice of the tale. We encourage discourse, but will end the "anonymous comments" feature simply because, to us, something stinks about "anonymous" writing...]

A Night For Shiraz....

"Well, I started out on Burgundy and soon hit the harder stuff..." - Bob Dylan

By Ron Mexico
Contributor

McAllen, Texas – It was a controlled mob that shuffled into Feldman’s last night, guys in suits and dudes in t-shirts and women in corporate wear and chicks in tight jeans and tighter blouses. Vintner’s Night brought out the, well, average, wine-hopping, eager-to-partake locals out for a taste of whatever…

I bopped in with my gal pal who shall, for now, remain anonymous, but whose initials are CM-O. We were late, as those already inside the well-known business barely a block north of Business 83 on the east side of No. 10th busied themselves sipping a variety of wines and gouging at the free cold cuts. A woman in a gray, striped pant suit, presumably just in from a day at the local insurance outfit or law firm, fingered the sliced pepperoni sausage off her plate, while nearby a balding guy in Hawaiian wear sat at a table facing the front door, clearly ogling the women as they stepped in from the 150-degree heat outside. It was, as they say in Hell, just another scorcher in South Texas – a day in June when, it was agreed, a nice, soft red or cooling white would soothe the palate. Bottles fronted a handful of show-off tables, where the vintner reps hawked their best. Somewhere else on the planet, soldiers carried out dangerous recon missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and somewhere else in the country, Americans mourned the death of a heroic security guard murdered at the Holocaust Museum in the nation’s capital by a racist white supremacist. It was time to get back to basics – to enjoying the best of civilization, especially with a lovely bottle of Shiraz, for me, and perhaps a Cabernet for the ladies.

The Texas-Mexico border around here is these days a veritable socio-minefield. That late-model SUV moving alongside you on any given street or highway could be carrying well-armed thugs ferrying serious drugs somewhere north. The waitress at the café may be a stool pigeon for the feds, out to finger this or that local Bigwig employing undocumented maids and gardeners. It is a Time for Freakin’ Reflection in McAllen, the City of Palms to locals and the Square Dance Capital of America to The New Yorker magazine. Can you stand it? Is this America, or what?

Anyway, we traipsed into the cold tasting room inside the cool wine section of Feldman’s shortly after 7:30 p.m., minutes after the Orlando Magic and Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers tipped off in Game Four of the NBA Finals. I reeled at the idea of missing the game in favor of a Minor League wine-tasting outing in a troubled outpost of this Great land. But as the say down here, “When in Rio Grande City, do as the Rio Grande Citians do…” I went in search of The Lost Grape.

Did I find it? Naaaaah. Did I have a good time? Sort of. I met two pleasant teachers from the PSJA school district who kinda conversed lightly with the Ol’ Cowboy, one a science teacher who had no idea how far it is from Earth to the moon. “That’s eighth grade,” she said, noting that she taught a lower-level class. I feigned humor, noting that it was farther, for sure, than it was from McAllen to New York, a point that drew laughter from her and her girlfriend, a woman who had told me she was the school’s principal. It’s not the setting for interrogating our local educators, I finally told myself as the wine kept flowing while the dog-ass Orlando Magic sank not far from Disneyworld…

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Breakfast At Mimi's...

"Please don't seat us in the whining section..." - A customer at Mimi's, Today

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McAllen, Texas - Carrie Manthey, my friend of - what? - four months, pointed at a booth downrange, just off the waiter's path to the kitchen and not far from where the road to the bathroom loomed like one of those tunnels from Juarez to El Paso. It was almost 8-thirty Ayem and we were meeting to knife and teeth through ham and eggs and pancaked potatoes, Carrie's favorite grub when not in Paris, Dresden or New Braunfels, Texas. I had called the meeting; she was calling-over the young waitress with the lovely doe eyes, monuments to someone else's evening pleasure no doubt.

Mimi's cafe, midway between uppity McAllen and the dusty, sleepy burg of Mission on westbound U.S. 83, is not the place to discuss international politics, tropical hair or well-hipped women seated at other tables and booths. Not with Carrie Manthey, former news anchor at once-powerful Channel 4 up the road the other way, over toward Brownsville and Cuba. She wanted to talk about our coming news website, which at present is as much of a dream as are my intentions when in the throes of Day Two after meeting a spitfire chick with cash and time on her hands. We're on it, but we're not yet on it.

Anyway, the waitress arrived and I agreed that regular coffee would do as the beverage of the moment. Manthey followed suit in known fellow journalist fashion. The coffee made its appearance and, yeah, it sucked. Too mellow, I said and Carrie concurred, noting its lack of fight. "Tastes like hospital coffee," I threw out and a woman seated nearby smiled back at me, looping me for a few seconds, making me think everything was possible with her. Order-up, I said next and the waitress, a birdie-sort of kid of about 20 years of age, wrote it all down on her pad, carrie going with the bizarre pancake potato.

We sailed into a range of topics and sipped coffee like two camels shade-bathing under a palm tree in the last oasis between Cairo and Bethlehem, me complaining evermore. The pretty waitress returned, asked how the coffee was, and I said. "I don't feel anything..." She smiled, threw a mini-frown at no one in particular, and took my cup, saying she'd go get some from the latest pot, said to be currently brewing. We kept talking about this and that, mostly this.

The cafe, a safe-looking, cookie-cutter joint seen elsewhere in this Great Land, had maybe three other customers, a young couple sitting somewhat next to us, but separated by a faux glass divider that really was cheap plastic. Carrie said something about the weather and I said it's out there, outside. She mentioned an angle to do with our website project and I said, "Yeah, that could work..."

Things went like this for about an hour, and when I looked down on the table, I noticed Carrie had eaten half the blueberry muffin we were sharing for dessert.

I didn't eat my half, believing in the fable put forth by Goldilocks that one must leave some sort of trail for others to follow. When last seen, the muffin sat in full melancholy there alongside a watted-up table napkin and the Splenda container. Carrie rose first from her place on the booth and I let her, thinking, "That's what a cowboy ought to do..." She said her friend Espi has a thing for cowboys. I asked about Espi's outward appearance, as I am wont to do with ladies, and Carrie's words forced me to say we'd be making a quick stop at Cavender's Western Wear on our way home. I did not repeat it, but whenever Carrie gets on me about my shallowness with romance, I always say, as I wanted to say this morning when she said Espi, the well-endowed Espi and her dreams of landing a religious fella, wouldn't go for a guy like yours truly: "I could never be a woman. I'd be playing with my breasts all day long..."

It's a line from the movie L.A. Story. Steve Martin delivers it with killer aplomb...

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Coming Home...

"You don't know what's going on, you've been gone for far too long...you can't come back and think you are still mine. You're out of touch, my baby, my poor discarded baby. I said baby, baby, baby, you're out of time..." - Rolling Stones, Out Of Time

By Eduardo Paz-Martinez

Contributor

McAllen, Texas - There is something to be said about coming back to where you lived your youth. You can almost hear the same sounds on the same streets you used to know well, and you can almost believe that there'll be the old face of someone you once knew as a kid just around that next corner. Coming home throws a distinct feeling on you, throws it over your shoulders like an old, winter coat of the sort your mother bought for you when the weather turned cooler, when the high school football games included gusts of colder-than-usual winds, when winter's cool rains fell across town as you scooted home for supper.

It's true: you can go home again.

But, for me, it's been almost - what? - forty years since I garduated from McHi and left to join the U.S. Navy, and then college. Much has come my way elsewhere in those years, and, yes, little-by-little one forgets things that made the younger years excitable - like skipping school, drinking in Mexico, going to The Green Flame over by the airport here, where we danced to local bands that played Big Time rock 'n' roll, tunes like Gloria and Wild Thing and an album of Beatles tunes. What a time it was.

I've been back since last Christmas, but have largely stuck to my work (finishing my fourth book). Outings have been with family, although there have been a handful of dates with women I doubt will be meaningful to me in the long run. Still, it's been better than I expected. It's the hot & humid climate of the Rio Grande Valley that annoys the Hell out of me. Given a choice, I'd rather be in the mountains of the West, Santa Fe or Western Colorado. But I'm here, and as Phil Collins said in that great song, "...and here I'll stay."

A few weeks back, I went to my old high school friend Charlie Zepeda's 60th birthday party. This may sound like a cheap joke, but as I told my daughter....I hadn't seen that much gray since the smoke of 9/11. I know that sounds cruel, cold at least, but it's true. I half-expected to see bottles of Maalox at every table, but was glad to see beer still flows through the veins of my old friends. In any case, it was fun. I didn't remember any of the old classmates present, but , then, they did not remember me, either. Life is funny that way.

I've heard from a few others since that party, thanks to the reunion committee. One of the members floated an e-mail to the membership about my being at the party and the next thing I know, well, email arrived at my busy box like a neat rain. I even had breakfast recently with one of the women, but more about that later.

For now, just know this: It's okay to go back in time, as heartless and cruel as that exercise might be, gushing hell-os and hugs aside. Who knows, you may even make a friend here and there - as I seem to have done...

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Welcome...

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McAllen, Texas - They say there are a million stories in the Naked City, that one being New York. But we believe there are a few hundred thousand tales of love, woe, and adventure in our piece of the world - here along the northern banks of the Rio Grande and across the international border with Mexico. And so we set forth this site as a home for those stories.

We hope you join us on this trip, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

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