Deconstructing The Valley Brain....

"Maybe the night'll roll in, one of those New Mexico nights - all gold and red and blue..." - Poetry of The American West

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas - I stopped off at my favorite local coffee shop here this Ayem and chatted-up half-the-morning with one of my newfound friends, a woman from Colorado. She kept talking about how she loved watering the plants on her property, and how it sure looked like it was going to rain, and, well, she didn't like that, 'cause there would go the watering ritual. I listened and smiled, sipping my dark roast slowly and thinking about other things that moved through my brain. It's almost September. The call of The West comes around about this time when I am away from my beloved New Mexico.

The thing is I'm not a good listener of meaningless chit-chat. My friends say I use the "interrupt" feature of my annoying social skills to move the conversations along, to take them to something I care about. Rain arriving wasn't that big of a deal for me this morning. What I said to this woman in the end was that she could always go ahead and water her plants even in the rain. She looked at me sort of sideways, as if wishing I hadn't said what I said, like she wanted to slap me upside the head and tell me to get back on her wavelength. I tend to drift a lot here in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, mainly because I find excellent conversations skills are lacking in pretty much everyone I meet. The subject matter people around here select as topics of conversation is too pedestrian for me. I tend to note it quickly, and bail, which was the case at a social gathering I was invited to a few weeks back. The occasion was a fundraiser for a woman dying of cancer. I stayed maybe five minutes, after feeling as if in a coffin for the first four.

Perhaps the brain evolves into something somewhat final, a place in a life when it's damned easy to ignore, to avoid, to blow-off - a place where one decides the person, the chat, the project is simply not worth the time and attention. I have a jealous brain. It quickly and clearly tells me who needs me and who doesn't. Conversely, it always lets me know what I need and want. Such brains are rare in this part of the God-abandoned world. No, brains around here are of the Quick-To-Fuck-Up variety. Case in point: A married politician from South Padre Island, a woman at that, had a portion of her adult life splashed across the area newspapers today. The story had all to do with a messy divorce that included details of what sounded like dogged-out adultery she somewhat admitted, if admitting to date of intimacy is admission. Her alleged lover is an aging married man. Tell me, what sort of brain - a brain one would expect would know its expectations - gives the okay on something like that? But there are other examples. At the same coffee shop, I asked for a blueberry muffin to munch on while I drank my coffee. The pudgy, young clerk behind the counter instead threw a blueberry oat bar in my bag. I always get my pastry in a bag. My brain tells me that is how one should eat such things in a cheap-ass border town's coffee shop. I never did seek an explanation for the pastry foul-up. Looks of full-out stupidity piss me off even more, so why bother? But it also reminded me of an incident I'll call The Toilet Paper Caper.

That one came at a local restaurant and involved a heavyset, huge-breasted woman of about 40 who stumbled into me as I entered a men's room and she exited the adjacent women's room. The crash forced her to drop her rather large purse, and that's when the two rolls of industrial toilet paper tumbled out of the purse. I stared at her. She said, in a voice known to priests at Confessional: "Sir, I swear I got them at H.E.B." My reaction was to keep walking, to then shake my head all the while my hose directed my kidneys' contents into the stand-up urinal. What sort of brain goes out to steal a Tex-Mex cafe's toilet paper?

The Rio Grande Valley brain, with few exceptions, is pea-sized, which likely explains some of the insipid bullshit I can never quite understand...

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BIRTH OF A NEWSPAPER...

"People say I'm crazy, doing what I'm doing..." - J. Lennon, Watching the Wheels

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas - Those who know me know that things like these, adventures in paradise or walks down the ghetto's dark streets, generally spark something elegiac in me. I'm not one to look at the sky and say it is falling, nor am I the guy to say we must turn to religion. I'm more the guy who, at a black tie party, will jump into the pool and do an educated swan dive with great laughter. Absolutely, I love a mountain climb in the dead of winter, or a stroll into a spicy cafe on the hottest day of the frickin' year. In the case of my current project, it is surviving not only the usual South Texas summer scorch, but a sort of roll that has me wondering about today's human nature.

The Metropolitan, a news magazine of astral proportions, is my latest albatross. You'd think Jonathan Livingston Seagull's desire for the flock would be enough to get all aboard in some sort of even-ragged synchronicity. As Belushi might say, "But, nooooooooooooh..." You can, Virginia, lead a man to water, but he'll horse around. To back up: The Metropolitan was born out of a desire to create something new & different in the love-starved Rio Grande Valley of Texas - a shank of harsh land where people dream dreams considered easily attainable elsewhere. The Met is stubbornly pressing onward to its mid-September publishing date. Tabloids of America have never had a harder row to hoe. Talk about stuttering starts. Yet, we'll see if the mettle of a few diehards - Mssrs. Rovira, Young, Olvera, Wellersdick, Mounce, etal - is enough to get this DC-3 off the runway. I am wondering.

People have come to the manger and heard the editorial spiel, fallen in with the flock, and then bolted when the job exacted its demands. Such may be the personality of the Rio Grande Valley worker, perhaps yet another layer of this labor problem that so cripples this great country. But life goes on, and we shall throttle up and see whether Orville really needs his brother here at Valley Hawk, whether the right seat is filled, and whether the rudder stands the Gs of a steep climb. How ever does anything get done here? I am reeling. Still, even Sir Edmund took a break during his ascent on Everest, took a break to check on his Sherpa guides, to make sure they held to the mission at hand. Is it possible that the horse that is the Rio Grande Valley worker cannot be steered. I wonder in the same way that George Armstrong Custer wondered that fateful day in the hills of the Dakotas. The piercings are adding up, and the thorny crown now feels like a full-grown, needle-heavy chapeau on my head. What was The Last Temptation of Paz? That late-Spring day, when the project was first mentioned among the few, it was something no different than, say, posing the idea of perhaps buying a new car. It did shine-up the town.

So, we're still aboard The Pinta, meeting (see photo above) with people somewhat interested in joining the flock, in helping to push The Metropolitan down the fallopian tube, to fill the space that is that desolate, attention-seeking womb known as piss-poor RGV Journalism.

Who's gonna take that longshot gamble, as Seger might sing about here.

As of this neat, Columbia-blue Sunday morning, it is the proverbial tight fight in the late rounds. And, oh, once mid-September's days come along, check your local coffee shop or convenience store or courthouse newsracks for a publication that should startle you. The bad and mediocre are easy to find. You have to wait a bit longer for the spectacular...

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CAMELOT GONE...

"Many of us here have made it in this country in different ways . . . we have a special responsibility to give a little something back to America," said Joe Kennedy, II, surrounded by more than a dozen members of his family, including his uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - It was a cool mid-September day that year when my editor at The Boston Globe handed me a piece of paper with an address on it and asked me to go see what the fuss was about over at some hotel banquet room in downtown Boston. I took it, reached for my red scarf, and headed out while throwing my overcoat on and walking off toward the stairway that would take me out into the employee parking lot. I smiled when I reached the address and noticed that it was one of the city's better-known hotels. "What now?" I asked myself as I cruised for a parking space. The evening and night would turn much colder that day, but the assignment was one I still remember somewhat fondly: Joe Kennedy, II speaking to the press about his campaign for Congress.

In the crowd was a veritable who's who of Massachusetts Democratic Party politics. Joe had just won the party primary over a field that included a scion of the Franklin D. Roosevelt family and was soon to face Republican consultant Clark Abt in the main election. Young Joe would go on to win the seat, replacing the legendary Tip O'Neill in Washington, D.C. I was struck by Kennedy's energy. He spoke as if he'd already won the seat, and when his sister Kerry walked up to me to say that the family read The Globe religiously, it all struck me as one of those quintessential Massachusetts scenes where the Kennedy charm takes over the room.

It wasn't long before Joe also approached me and said he wanted to thank me for being there. It was a kind gesture I was sure he'd have directed at any Boston Globe reporter who'd have been dispatched to write the story. I grew to know that the Kennedys enjoyed a great relationship with The Globe and with other Boston-area news media. They were royalty, citizens of the Commonwealth known to be gracious and to exhibit class, so much so in this case that U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Teddy to the whole of Massachusetts, took the time to call Jack Driscoll, The Globe's editor, the next day to say a few nice words about my story. "He said to tell you he likes the sound of your name," my City Editor Kirk Scharfenburg told me whan I arrived later in the day. I laughed. My name was as foreign in New England as would be his in my native Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Still, it wasn't all that of the ordinary. New Englanders who read The Globe forever wrote-in to either compliment or criticize the writing staff.

But when my then-wife Narda and my two very young daughters would fan out on weekends, we would always look toward Cape Cod for a little vacation. I recall there was a neat bookstore in Hyannis, not far from the Kennedy compound, where we picked up a few titles and in general walked around enjoying the scenery and the friendliness of the people. I still say Martha's Vineyard is a jewel many Americans don't usually think about when looking for a different sort of vacation. It was always easy to find a smile there. Tourists streamed in aboard the ferry and the ice cream shops were forever busy. Photos we have of those days serve as reminders of the time we spent in New England.

Ted Kennedy died this morning.

I couldn't help but recall my days up there. And, of course, I wish to remember our stay in his part of the country. There was so much about that family all across Massachusetts (the JFK Museum sits on land near the Boston Globe Building) and it forever loomed as some sort of security blanket for the proud constituents who adored the Kennedys. They had their problems (Chappaquiddick in 1969 for Teddy, Marilyn for JFK and RFK), yet it also is true that the Kennedy boys (John, Robert & Teddy) inspired many Americans. They were mortals, but they seemed to care...and, well, that's been missing in too many of our national leaders lately. I can't see myself writing one kind word for disgraced Republicans George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.

Rest in peace, Teddy...

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His Collection of Afternoon Ballads...

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

Rio Grande City, Texas - "Why don't you ever call me?" Rachel was asking as the large truck carrying a full load of oilfield piping sped by. It was almost four in the afternoon as they sat on the concrete steps outside the LaBorde House, this after a long lunch that had come with all-out conversation to do with Daniel's lingering desire for a long, long kiss and Rachel's insistence that things take their easy pacing. In books to do with love, this was called the moment of not truth, but something more akin to opting for that crazy plunge into a darkened pool. It was the afterblow of the 18-wheeler that chased the rest of the outdoor chat.

"If you only knew how much I want to kiss you..." Daniel began, knowing he sounded stupid.

"Can't," is what he heard from Rachel. It was her look that perplexed him, cause it did say yes, and it did say it clearly. He bit into a small blade of dried grass and scanned the high sky. Way up there, a jetliner's contrail forced his eyes to follow its flight, headed south, perhaps to Rio or Buenos Aires. It was easy to think that such a place would yield a bit more romance. The land he walked-on didn't exactly throw the heart out into the streets. No, this was the proverbial best stage for gunplay, not love. Daniel cleared his brain of bullshit he'd kept there for moments like this one, a moment when he wanted Rachel to know, to feel, that he now needed to kiss her, and kiss her hard - one of those 30-minute fish kisses he'd invented. Women hated them, especially his last romance - a woman who'd invented "crying yourself to sleep." But it was his feeling that their complaints centered more on the mess he made of their makeup than on the pasting of lips. "I don't want Phil to find out," Rachel said next.

"I know," Daniel threw back. He was lifting his left arm to scratch at the upper right side of his back. It now served as handy commercial break. Rachel sat up and ran a hand through her long hair. For a moment, Daniel thought she was about to say something profound, some sentence to set things in order, perhaps even lead to some more talk that would lead to his understanding of things a bit better.

"I just don't want it to be a one-time thing," she told him.

Daniel nodded and inhaled deeply. He was hiking through the canyons of his brain, looking for the perfect reply, hiking and falling into ravines that held a pile of dialogue from previous relationships. It had always been easy to draw on conversations he'd had with his women. At times, they fit. Here, he didn't want to chance sounding like a bad a re-play. He played with his chin a bit and then turned to look at Rachel.

"It's on you," he said. "You tell me..."

Daniel thought he saw a glimmer in her eyes, but he wondered whether that wasn't just the bright sun bouncing light off the morning rainwater now evaporating off the blistering blacktop only feet away. Mother Nature played havoc with romance. If it wasn't a sudden rainstorm blowing it out on some picnic in a pastoral meadow, it was an ill-timed earthquake while walking into a movie, or, worse yet, a hurricane suddenly headed in, reports telling of 200-mph winds, just as they strolled into the beach-front motel. Daniel wondered if his fish kiss could withstand such winds. He told himself it could, without question, without a seawall, without fear.

Rachel was the first to get up off the steps. He followed her back inside the hotel. There were no bells ringing somewhere faraway, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the manner in which they made their way back to their table in the restaurant out back. One step followed another. A waitress moved in their direction.

The only soundtrack available was the noisy roll of large trucks headed west.

Rachel said something about having to get home and Daniel said something about needing to gas-up his car. She led the way out the back door. From the corner jukebox, what they got was a ceaseless scratching off a record fighting like crazy to rid itself of a stuck needle.

"They're playing our song," Rachel threw out...

[To be cont'd]

Of Place and Representation....

"I know about dreams, Julia. Didn't I wanna ride with the Younger Gang and they wouldn't have me? Muh feelings was hurt, but I 'cepted it..." - Jack Nicholson, Goin' South

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - You'd think that border politics, wild and predictable as they are, would be all you'd have to say. Still, this morning's edition of The McAllen Monitor backed into the fray associated with the ongoing national health care debate and, in particular, with the inaction of local Democratic Congressman Ruben Hinojosa. We do not know Hinojosa, but we agree with The Monitor on its point that Ruben should not have run from the idea of holding a Town Hall meeting allowing locals to participate in the white-hot national dialogue. Hinojosa should do it. He is not The Decider in this. But, worse than that, he comes across as a cowardly politician unwilling to defend his position on the issue. What's to be afraid of a little noise?

The Monitor backs into its call for action from the popular Democrat by noting that this particular health care proposal, nebulous as it is at present, "goes far beyond the scope of duties the country's founders ever imagined when they designed our system of government." That is laughable, hyperbole at the top of an air-conditioned newsroom keyboard - easy to barf, in other words. Worse yet, the editorial in The Monitor is of the unsigned variety - yet another stab at trying to make a serious point, but losing ground while doing it anonymously.

The Monitor should go after Hinojosa, yet it should do it with the name of peripatetic Editor Steve Fagan or reclusive Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen attached to it. Taking a shot at someone from behind the mask of anonymity waters down the criticism. Something is lost, and that something lets Hinojosa off the hook.

Hinojosa seems to believe that he is the elected official and his constituency the coon hound to be tended at arm's length. He is wrong. Hinojosa should schedule a Town Hall meeting as soon as possible. Perhaps he feels he'll only get noisy & stupid Republican Tea Baggers at the session. Maybe he's told himself he doesn't need the grief. But what's left behind as well is that he comes across as being fearful of facing ornery Old White people interested in a public fight.

If he can't handle it, Hinojosa should resign.

This guy's idea of representation is pathetic and damned embarrassing...

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NEWS BRIEF: Drugged-Out In Taco Town...

By Ron Mexico

Contributor

REYNOSA, Mexico - Hey,yeah, not to totally alarm you but drugs are now legal in El Mexico, okay? Here's how much you can carry, in public! (see photo of cache above) For "personal use," Dr. Gonzo: The maximum amount of marijuana for "personal use" under the new law is 5 grams - the equivalent of about four joints. You laboring sodbusters can now replace those cheap ballpoint pens in your cheap, Mervyn's shirt pockets with the above-mentioned joints. The limit is a half-gram for cocaine, the equivalent of about 4 "lines." (two for you and two for sex-starved Lola) For other drugs, the limits are 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams for methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams for LSD. Oh, and you can still get all the broads you want. So long, ahem, as you have the cash - dollars, of course. Mexico is my Disneyland...

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The Corner of Tenth & Hackberry...

"Everybody's somebody's fool, everybody's somebody's plaything...." - Connie Francis

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas – The weatherman tells us today's high temperature will be 100 degrees, with the expected high humidity spiking the Heat Index closer to a stunning 110 degrees. The phrase “bad chili” comes to mind; that, or tough tacos, baby. Achtung, indeed. On the blacktop of busy 10th Street north and south of Old Business 83, the hot asphalt will cut through town accompanied by hellish heat of the sort not seen since the eruption of Vesuvius that fateful, awful day many, many miles east of here. Heat & humidity: bane of the South Texan. It is one reason to get drunk or stoned, although there are others. This, however, is not about social screw-ups or yet another therapy clinic opening its doors. This is about a town drag that is getting to be, well, a drag.

North and South Tenth Street explodes every day of the workweek as if it knows the world will come to an end. Up and down they go, cars and trucks and buses and SUVs and 18-wheelers and mobile homes being relocated to Mexico and U.S. Border Patrol agents goofing off in puke-green vehicles – from the airport south of town to danged near state Highway 107 west of the passive metropolis of Edinburg, home of the lousiest college baseball program south of Falfurrias.

We have an idea whose time may have come. It is, after all, The Year 2009, so moves the locals forever believed to be unattainable are now quite do-able, as they say in bordello offerings.

It’s about tunneling a subway from that airport south of La Plaza Mall to the outs of northern 10th Street, a subway system that would allow for entering and exiting at various stations up and down the street, unquestionably the noisiest, busiest in the entire Rio Grande Valley. Why not? Is there no federal stimulus money left? Where is the city government of McAllen on this? Has Mayor Richard Cortez, recipient of – what? – 2,500 votes in his re-election a few weeks back (He was voted in by 2,500 citizens in a city that claims more than 100,000 residents. Can you feel his pain?), even thought about the Grand Dream for his community? Has the city manager, a relatively obscure fellow, been working on something spectacular? Who knows? It’s not playing-out in the local newspaper, from what we can see.

And it’s not as if the danged thing would have to be underground. Dallas has done fairly well with its above-ground rail system. I say, “Look into it.” What’s to lose? Every aspect of government has its contingency plan. The subway would alleviate traffic on 10th Street and likely make for more jobs: Hot dog and pretzel and tamale kiosks below and above ground near the entry stations, strolling musicians, ambulatory cops (ha, ha), perhaps a nurse somewhere below, custodians from H.E.B south to H.E.B north.

I can see it, absolutely.

Come on Cortez. Dare to be great…I'm stuck at the corner of Tenth and Hackberry, behind a battered station wagon full of brats, a two-tone El Camino just in from a Mexican drug film, and a truck carrying a load of oranges bound for the Big City. The guy in the flatbed has his dash radio on superloud, and, Jesus knows, I can't stand country & western crap...

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MEET THE FOKKERS...

"There's always some new stranger sneakin' glances. Some trigger-happy fool willin' to take chances. And some old whore from Browntown to make advances, advances on your spirit and your soul..." - Bob Dylan, Billy

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - After nearly drowning in an acid rain of complaints related to our continuing coverage of the failure by The McAllen Monitor to publish stories about the region's overly-expensive health care, we are obliged to, well, look at newspapering beyond our own geography. And so, beginning next week, this discount news outlet will review publications serving the Rio Grande Valley from edgy Rio Grande City to ever-gagging South Padre Island, garnering sentient resident interviews at all stops. Not that we submit to the crazed idea that we've picked on The Monitor for too long, or (egads!) unfairly, or that we have some sort of vendetta against its editor, Steve Fagan, or the Boys in the Newsroom. We, frankly, just see things and write about them.

But we're hip to reader requests. This roll across the valley, then, is our response.

Of course, we hope you enjoy our dispatches from the field. We are told that there is some good community journalism being practiced in the outs of the RGV. Let's hope we're not disappointed to the point of forgetting about the tour midway through our journey. Oh, and we hope to spice things up a bit by reporting on great eating hangouts in the respective towns, taquerias especially. haha

Round'em up, Rowdy!...Hey, Rita....bring me muh jeans...

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