My Affair With A Hugger...

"I hope someday, somebody wants to hold you for twenty minutes straight,
and that’s all they do.
They don’t pull away, they don’t look away,
they don’t try to kiss you.
All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight,
without an ounce of selfishness to it..." - Waitress

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

SANTA FE, New Mexico - Darlene carried a bag of hamburgers from a place called Bobcat Bite's, said to be the best place for such food in town. Bobcat's was a small frame building on the road in from the main highway that took you to Albuquerque. I sort of liked those burger, but it was seeing Darlene walking up the porch stairs that did it for me that year here. She would walk the bag to the small kitchen while I drew a pair of soda cans from the red fridge I had over by one corner of the small room. Eating came in between conversation, things about Darlene's flirtation with getting her paintings in some art gallery and me telling her about stuff to do with the harrier hawks, which fascinated me like nothing else except oral sex.

A Canadian by birth, Darlene put up with my eccentricities and would even kick me under a table when I flirted with waitresses. My boots helped there, but Darlene always brought it up when we ended up naked in bed. "You'd want to fuck that one, right?" she would ask, and I would smile as she bounced atop me, her longish auburn hair in a neat splay. "Well, it's not going to happen, sport - not while I can help it."

Darlene was one of those women who just loved to hug. She would reach for my arms and swing them over her shoulders and around her back, down to her waist, before demanding a long, wet kiss. I played along, knowing full-well that I was one lucky fool to have her in my life. Hugs came in bunches, like a rain that circles a town and takes its sweet time about leaving. She would hug on the porch, in the living room, in the small hallway, in the sack. Once I asked her if she'd been ignored by her parents as a youngster and she said, "You'd never know how much...too much."

So, I would hug her, softly and tightly, always sincerely...

- 30 -

Silly Love Songs...

"There is no remedy to love…
but to love more."
- Henry David Thoreau

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

FORT WORTH, Texas - I would pull into her driveway deep in that neighborhood off Arlington Heights High School along the city's western end of I-30, and, at hearing my truck pull-in, Janet would push the garage opener thingee on her living room wall and the garage door would rise slowly, to let me in. In many ways, that was the perfect metaphor for our romance that year when I moved awfully through a divorce I never wanted. Janet was a schoolteacher friend of my then-wife Narda, a healthy-looking woman in her own right, a woman I would wine & dine and, yeah, that, too.

Love is a wickedly lovely part of the human experience. It treats you and it whips you, the end result always either something beautiful or something best kept at bay. Bad love, Kris Kristofferson once sang, is better than no love at all. Who knows about that? In my case, bad love has been rare - even in those involvements where things faded to black in a hurry. In the case of Janet, a Greek woman who loved to laugh, well, our time was one of those fast-framed epics where the adventure served as a fill-in to something breaking apart. She would cook for me, and she would bring the wine, and I would sit there at her dinner table, eating and sipping, and wondering what it was this woman would offer that my lovely wife no longer wanted to give me. For weeks, I loomed lost deep within a thick forest of the sort found in Eastern Europe, uncharted lands full of danger and without escape. But I slogged onward, meeting women like Janet, women I knew would be nothing more than fleeting moments of meaningless love, sex especially.

At times, on weekends mostly, we drifted out of town to check-out places we'd ignored in our earlier lives. Wine in Grapevine was fun. She would tell me while breakfasting on a Sunday morning at a plaza-front cafe in Granbury southwest of Fort Worth that she'd once seen me there with another woman, and I'd wonder who that other woman may have been. "I was there with my parents who were visiting and you sat over there with this woman who kept laughing aloud," she would say, noting that we'd first met a year or so earlier, when I'd joined my then-wife at a school function to do with the school district's Adult Ed. program. I loved that cafe. It served the sort of thick bacon I can never get enough of when ordering a breakfast of bacon & eggs & toast & coffee.

Anyway, Janet and I lasted through that winter, me sleeping over and jumping out of her big bed before dawn to go home ahead of my morning shower for work. She would walk me to the front door and give me a big, wet kiss that came with some sexual innuendo bullshit for later in the day. I did enjoy spooning with Janet, no doubt because of her nice, roundish ass.

I have no idea as to how love walks into a man's life, or how it decides to depart. I just know it happens, and I'm fine with that unexplainable celestial design.

Last night, a woman friend sort of complained to me that I never call her. Well, all I could say was that I'm not good at that stuff. My response did sound rather lame, and this time even I knew it. Do I need this emotional tumbling? I know I do. Do these women understand the ways of a guy my age? Sadly, they do not.

But I did call Laura earlier today. It was morning and she was in her kitchen, preparing breakfast. What I said was that the call would serve as my way of evening things in my ledger with her. She laughed and said, "You're so deep in the red with me that it'll take you a year to get back in the black." Then she laughed again, this time in a neat, friendly way.

Lord knows...I try....

- 30 -

WINTERING IN GALVESTON...

"And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you..."

- Simon and Garfunkel, Kathy's Song

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

GALVESTON, Texas - I was very married when I met Kate that winter, when I first saw her walking into her office, which was next to my office. From the beginning, it was easy to see her as someone who would become important to me, and, as things turned out, she did become that, perhaps more than either of us thought was possible. Kate worked for the American Cancer Society and I was bureau chief for The Houston Post, a one-man operation that had me living the life of an island reporter, a guy asked to cover anything newsworthy, like oil slicks, hurricanes, bad politics, tourism and crime. Going to the office early was okay. I'd see Kate and we'd chat a bit before she'd spring back into her office and I went on with my duties. How we got together has much to do with my marital problems. It all started with a drink after work.

Both of us knew Post reporter Steve Solo-Olafson, the guy I'd replaced in Galveston after the newspaper bosses moved him into Houston. Olafson was a friendly sort, one of those laid-back guys who loved to write and could do it with grace. Anyway, it was Olafson who invited me - and then Kate - to lunch one day at some seafood joint. I recall most of my meals on Galveston were superb, mainly because I'm something of a shrimp addict.

At the time, after my wife had gone back to live with her Mom in Fort Worth, I moved into the Casa Del Mar hotel, which was a nice place. I leased a small apartment that came with a small kitchen and a sliding door out into the second-floor balcony that gave me a sideways view of the beach. The first time Kate came over, she brought sandwiches from some deli and I popped a bottle of wine. The first time we fooled around sexually is lost on me, but I do recall the bed in the tiny bedroom. Mirrors lined the walls on three sides and you got a full view of your hanging balls when you undressed to hit the sack. It would draw smiles from Kate and a few other women during my stay there. It was too cool to see Kate bouncing on me and then move my head a bit to the side to see her in the mirror at the foot of the bed - the same bouncing, but with a nifty view of her gorgeous ass and back.

Who knows if Kate remembers those days and nights. I do.

Winds coming in from the gulf on the colder days gave our evening goodbyes (she lived in Houston) a certain air of drama, especially as I would watch her walk to the end of the open-air walkway and head down the stairs to the covered parking. I loved the way Katie walked, with great confidence and as if carrying the memory of our romp in the bedroom. A visible moving radiance followed her hair from lighting overhead as she made her way. I'd stand there in my shorts, staring at her and waiting for her to look back at me one last time. It had taken awhile to get there, but when we went naked, well, it seemed as natural a fucking as I'd ever enjoyed. This lasted most of that winter, until I started seeing a girl named Carole who worked the hotel's front desk. I'd see Kate a few more times after that, some in Houston, but we drifted apart in the weeks before I took a job back east with The Boston Globe.

I still communicate with her from time to time via Email. She's married now, living in Houston.

There are women I miss. Kate is up there near the top of that short list...

- 30 -

NOBODY'S ANGEL...

"When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
You'll understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day..."
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Southern Cross

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

CENTRAL CITY, Colorado - Janie packed her suitcase and said something about having sort of enjoyed the long weekend and all, but wouldn't I just go ahead and drive her over to the bus station before the snow buried the roads. "That's done," I said in a nice, morning voice. "Been snowing all night..." She pushed one more piece of clothing into the suitcase and then folded it shut, running its zipper all the way to closing. Then she stood tall alongside the bed and made a face, which seemed a cross between disappointment and promise. The highway running back to Denver was closed. "So, what do we have left?" she asked next.

"The Nuclear Club at sundown," I threw over. "Happy Hour...free chili and corn chips...Johnny Walker Red for me and that Vodka for you." Janie nodded one of those really-saying-nothing nods. I proposed a quick breakfast and she said, yes, bacon and wheat toast for sure. "Marmalade?" I asked and she said orange or lemon. "Fire's on," I said, scooting off and heading for the small kitchen. There, the sound of the water coming out of the kitchen sink faucet seemed to bring sound to the snow falling outside the room's only window. Deep in silverware washing, I was startled after a bit by Janie's hands landing on my shoulders.

"I really thought I was ready to go today," she said in a soft voice, her lower body inching closer to mine. I wanted to turn full-around and grab her face and plant a super-sized kiss on her New Jersey face. There was a certain feel about her. I'd have said it had much to do with her recent divorce and a clear desire to try something new. We'd met on a bus ride north, from Santa Fe. Janie had been on her way to Cheyenne, where she hoped to hang out with an old college classmate who'd been moved west by her husband. Tiny Central City, tucked in the Rocky Mountains some 30 or so miles west of Denver, still retained much of its earlier history, a personality Janie had said somewhat pleased her. A pair of nights at the rowdy Nuclear Club, the last hangout for locals, had handed her that new scenery she'd needed.

"There's nothing like this in New Jersey," she'd said the first night, when a small group of out-of-towners had scrambled out of the nearby casinos in search of local flavor and stumbled in to buy a ridiculous string of rounds for the regular patrons. Rain had burst out of the darkened, late-November clouds in the mid-afternoon, quickly followed by snow when the temperatures dropped. We were laughing our asses off when Janie left the barstool and walked over to a passing waitress to say she wanted to buy her cowboy hat. I watched as she handed the chubby woman three twenty-dollar bills.

The walk home came in frames depicting two half-drunk fools boot-skating down the sidewalk and then up a small hill to the cabin where I lived. Three stairs up to the porch, Janie tugged her hat off her head and flung it in the direction of a line of antlers nailed to the face of the structure. "I'm never leaving this place!" she'd roared, beginning a windstorm of laughter that took her all the way to the small bedroom.

"What is that?" she asked when I dropped my blue jeans. "Haven't seen one of those in months..."

"Just a little linear treat," I offered, thinking ahead.

"You walk with it like that, all shot straight out?"

"My walking's done for the day..."

"Far out," was the last thing Janie said that particular night...

- 30 -

My Life As A Stud....

"Two of us sending postcards

Writing letters, on my wall

You and me burning matches

Lifting latches, on our way back home

We're on our way home

We're on our way home

We're going home..."

- Beatles, Two of Us

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

SANTA FE, New Mexico - The enveloping noise inside Club Alegria that night seemed as if it was coming from all directions, from Mexico, from Miami, from New York, from Los Angeles, and from, well, yes, that planet-sized jukebox in Heaven where all the tunes are the best of love songs. We were dancing our asses off, singing along when we knew the words, drinking, waiting on the end of the night. There's something about a first date at a hot club that sparks the sexual juices. I was out with Sandra Jean, the girl I'd met the previous weekend at a club called The Bull Ring across from the statehouse. She'd been there celebrating her sister Gina's birthday. Some band from Albuquerque doing a helluva job with Van Morrison's Brown-Eyed Girl kept playing it when Sandra Jean had asked me to tell them to keep playing the sonofabitch. I'd driven her home over to Rosario Street and we'd kissed like silly, pawing teenagers at her door.

On this night, all bets were off on such a kiss. The night had frozen twice-over, but she'd come out looking as sexy as some bikini-clad chick in Cabo San Lucas, some woman from New England looking for some dark meat. I can be that, of course, especially in the dead of night. Anyway, she and I walked to the bar and grabbed a bucket of booze. I'm not worth a damn as a beer-drinker, but I am something of a "date actor;" that is, I can go along with the hustle & flow, as they say in Rap. Sandra Jean lapped it all in. She sparkled under the goofy disco ball, and she danced as if on batteries. I was ready by midnight.

Who knows what becomes of a torrid love affair? Sometimes, they end with some semblance of mercy. On other occasions, when the devil steps in, they end in barbaric scenes full of screaming and that sort of pedestrian bullshit. Sandra Jean and I would make love every time we saw each other after that night, which was often because it was winter and winter does something to my loins. She was thin, but not skinny. Her long, black hair forever loomed radiant, even on cloudy days in the last, fog-gray weeks of the year, and her back sloped like the near bottom of a Bunny Hill at a family ski lodge. I would bring a bottle of wine to her place and she'd throw some steaks on the fire, a potato here and a salad there, and we'd sit and chow-down, deep in conversation about my work as a writer and her's as a painter.

And then we'd head for the sack.

Falling snow always works for me. Like a starlet from the 50s, all elegance, Sandra Jean would pull the thick drapes of her bedroom full-open and she would get on her tummy so that she could look outside while I mounted her from behind. I did my best to get in the rhythm of the growing winterblast. From a CD player on her night stand came the music of Don Henley and Patty Smythe, and then the ballads of Bonnie Raitt, and then Phil Collins.

In the morning, I'd open my eyes to see her coming back from the shower, naked and all-alive. She'd say she loved the way I smiled and I'd say I smiled because I was a lucky guy. "More, sir?" she'd ask, and I'd throw the comforter off me in a jiffy. I'd love to see her again, absolutely...

- 30 -

Coffee Shop Adultery..

"Anyway, my coffee's cold and I'm getting told
that I gotta get back to work
So when the sun goes low
and you're home all alone
think of me and try not to laugh..."
- Rod Stewart, You Wear It Well

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas - Maybe it was the overcast sky and the coolness of the morning, that late-in-the-year feeling that comes over you when something new is in the air. Who really ever knows? I was out for my morning coffee and there, to my right as I motored down N. 10th Street here, stood a new coffee joint - Ambrosia. It's an old refurbished frame house of the sort you see everywhere in the Rio Grande Valley - no great shakes, in other words. So, I stumbled in and grabbed a cup of regular and drove back to the house, disdaining, for one morning, my stop at Starbucks, where I am somewhat known.

I thought of it all this morning when I returned to Starbucks and was greeted by Jessi, my always-happy barista. "It's good to see you," she threw at me in one of those Nights in Rodanthe voices. I smiled and said, "It's been too long, I know..."

The coffee - my beloved dark roast - was brewing, so I walked over to my usual seat and waited on it. Marco, a new friend who talks too much about the problems in nearby Mexico, sat alongside, reading the morning edition of The McAllen Monitor.

Shortly, one of the girls behind the counter walked up with my coffee.

"Well, that's a new one," Marco said next. "I've never seen them bring coffee out to a customer."

You should know the rest of the story, I went on, beginning a sip. There's a moral to pretty much everydamnedthing under the sun, and the one for this tale is simple: you have to drink your coffee where they like you. I haven't exactly felt that come over me since my winter days in Santa Fe...

- 30 -

The Total Ruination of a Once-Good Catholic Boy

"The wind howls like a hammer,

The night blows cold and rainy,

My love she's like some raven

At my window with a broken wing...."

- Dylan, Love Minus Zero

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

LA JOYA, Texas - The harsh lands of this hellish outpost are for visions of a sun-parched highway seemingly floating off the ground in yet another summer scorch. I can see the road back to McAllen, but it is Jell-o on a crooked string. I'm out for a country drive of the backroads sort I enjoy out west. There's a can of cold soda within reach and, yeah, a bag of Ripples chips - my favorites. Running low to the ground always does something for me, although not as much as frickin' flying. I only wish the sight of mountains in the distance would come into view. It would do sooooooh much for my spirits. Things have been happening to me of late that I cannot quite explain. My approach to life is to look forward, never back there, where the bones of my past romances sink faster into the graves. I thought about Maria Isabel last night.

It was damned easy to picture her again, there atop the stairs of her townhouse in Fort Worth that cold night two winters ago, back before we broke up and I went away and she moved to Dallas to join a law firm in some highrise off busy, busy Central Expressway. Leggy Isabel stood tall in her white panties, one hand on the railing, the other one fingering the top of the elastic running full-around her waist. I was on the living room couch below, watching Judge Judy or somesuch bullshit, still wondering about our relationship, which I really wasn't into at the beginning. I turned around when she called me and stared at the black pubic patch beckoning, yeah. Her smallish breasts always alarmed me and I think it was the dark-dark nipples that sent me into quickfucks that forever satisfied me, but never grabbed me fully.

A half-hour earlier, she'd been sitting alongside me on the couch, first unbuckling my blue jeans and then, failing to find a hard-on, had left during a commercial and gone upstairs. "I want you to come up here and attack me," she said from the top of the stairs. I recall I went up, sat on the big bed and threw my legs out so that she could take my harness boots off. My cock was still somewhere between thinking about it and doing it - going on full alert, that is. I liked fucking Isabel. She had this bright, black, stringy hair I'd tug at when fucking her from behind and she was okay with long minutes of oral sex on me. But it took me awhile to get with the program with her. Who knows what that was about? Maybe it was my mind drifting toward some other broad, or maybe my God had me on "break" and I hadn't been told. I dunno, I dunno.

We did go low often enough for me to say I gave it a try. I did. I know I did.

The last time I saw her, at a coffee shop along Big D's fabled Greenville Avenue, she asked where I'd go next. I don't recall what I said to her, other than perhaps something like somewhere else. The day was a cold one and the last image I had of Dear Isabel was of her walking toward her car in that black winter overcoat that allowed itself to be blown by the bitter winds of a late-November evening.

I loved that woman...and I wish I'd said it to her at least once.

- 30 -

SEAFOOD I HAVE KNOWN...

"She said, "Whaaat?"

I said, "Ooo-oo-oo-wee"

She said, "All right!"

I said, "Love me, love me, love me..."

- Alan O'Day, Undercover Angel

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

FORT WORTH, Texas - I have maybe two good friends. Okay, three, perhaps four. Seven when I'm in New Mexico. Ten or so in Colorado. Many in Dallas. But the only friend who still wonders why it is I do some of the things I do is my college running buddy Paul Salvatore Infante, who as it so happens is originally from Brownsville down south, where I am at present. We talk, mainly about college, although he, like me, hates the Rio Grande Valley. "Get outta there!" he said again this morning, when he threw the name of Barbara Betts at me.

Barbara was a student in the U.T.-Arlington Broadcast Journalism Department who also dated the teaching assistant, a clown named Gary. She had this rather high back and wasn't all that attractive, at least not in the same league as our other class galpals Sarah Ramsbottom or Leigh Ann Hill. Those two were lookers. I played racquetball on campus with leggy Sarah and dreamed of dating Leigh Ann - a quiet, unassuming chick who perhaps knew she was frickin' beautiful. Pretty women know how to wear their beauty. It's not like in the RGV, where beauty is relegated to pictures in national magazines or some drag-ass woman asking me if I think her birth mark is sexy. Leigh Ann Hill put up with some tough, silly shit from us in class. Paul would sit in class waiting on his moment and then throw out, out of the frickin' blue, "Aw, if I could just climb that hill..." She would hear that and other juvenile inanities and always shake her head. I loved her handwriting, always attractive and in place - the opposite of mine.

Anyway, Paul was asking if I remembered the time he'd sicced Gary on me, when Gary had stopped by Paul's place to ask if Barbara had been by to see him. "Here, I'll tell you exactly where she is," he told Gary, scribbling the address to my off-campus apartment. I think I was watching my hair grow when the door knock rousted me from my boredom. I walked over to the door, opened it, and saw Gary standing in the rain. "Barbara here?" he asked and I, surprised as all Hell, said nope. He asked if he could come in and I said sure. Gary, who was something of an electronic equipment geek known to fix stuff for the campus radio and television studios, walked in, sniffed a bit and said, "Paul said she was over..."

"Not today," I said and he made a face.

The next day's laugh came from Paul. He confessed to sending Gary over to my place, adding, "I told him to sniff while he walked around your apartment after I explained that a guy has to know his chick's smell." I laughed, knowing that my place at the time usually smelled of fried catfish, mainly because my then-girlfriend Marcy worked at a seafood restaurant and would often bring me a plate of four or five filets after work. I still like the whiff of catfish when fucking, although that's a hard one for anyone in the RGV. Here, every chick usually smells like a pound of day-old beef fajitas, which conjures up different sexual enjoyment.

We don't know what became of Barbara Betts.

All I know is that there was that one after-bar-closings night on the toll road from Fort Worth to Arlington, when my mophead rested nicely, facedown, on Barbara's crotch while she motored my ass home. She would moan while shifting the car's standard transmission and later would tell me it was a quirky thing with her. I smiled at Barb in the halls and pretty much everytime I'd see her, forever remembering the smell of fish fondly...

- 30 -

The Black Coffee Chronicles...

"Now she's gone...and I'm back on the beat. A stain on my notebook says nothing to me. Now she's gone...and I'm out with a friend. With lips full of passion and coffee in bed..." - Squeeze, Black Coffee in Bed

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

SAN JUAN, Texas - I don't have an addictive personality. Things come and go with me, some quite quickly, and I'm fine with it. My feeling is things end so that others can begin. There have been times when I wished for a stronger connection to my human brethren, although, yeah, there are those other times when people let you down to the point of give-up. Yet, even with the struggle that is living in these times of bullshit, I do allow for some loyalty. Coffee is my mistress. It has me by the neck. I cannot begin a day without my black coffee. Sometimes, I end it with a cup or two. I don't think I'm the only one. Coffee has a killer stranglehold on this country. Just count the number of Starbucks stores in your town. And if you don't see one, well, just take to the highway. You'll see the familiar green signpost just off to the side, there mostly at the head of some humble strip mall, but there just the same.

There are many, many problems in today's world, even here in the so-called most civilized country. Americans are suffering the nation's bad economy. Marriages are breaking apart under the weight of steep debt or unemployment. Communities are cutting back on services. States are not dreaming. The federal government is whipping things around with the hope that something will spark things up once again.

At the local Starbucks, where I hang out most mornings, the usual cast of characters keeps coming. Some guy in a suit with his laptop computer over by the window. Six cops sipping as if dog-tired Geriatric Ward nurses. Elderly women chatting up scandals at the local sewing club over on the easy chairs. Others, alone and with friends, chirp away, like crickets brave enough to whisper something's happening to this once-great land.

I read the day's newspapers, finish my cup, and leave with a to-go cup for the road.

All is frickin' well in my world...

- 30 -

EXCERPT: The Scorpion's Son

"All I can know is my own time..." - The Author, 1994

By Patrick Alcatraz

Contributor

Chapter Five

...She had come from a small town on the banks of Lake Managua, to the north of the nation’s capital, some 50 looping miles away, in fact. It was known as part of the larger San Francisco Libre municipality, which wasn’t big at all and really it served as name for a sprinkling of poor pueblos trying like crazy to work together. Nallely’s family lived in a hovel of sorts on one of the dusty roads leading from the lake into the neighboring hillsides. They, and everybody around them, had no reliable electrical power, and it had been a German company pushing solar panels through world relief that had come to something of a rescue. Water came from the rain, and it did rain often enough to make that a steady supply. Her father had worked the usual local jobs, picking coffee beans and cutting sugar cane and, when that fell-off, some fishing in the big lake. It was, she had explained, a hard, hard life. There had been schooling, but there were the myriad of pressing needs that she had stopping going and hit the bean fields with her father and mother.

At fifteen, she had been whipped almost to death by her father, whose name was Nemecio, for flirting in public with a local boy. I had the info and could only re-tell it in boring, staccato style – fact after fact after fact. When Nallely had given me the brief bio of her family, everything had sounded like the falling of a house, the destruction of something that should have lived longer. Her voice is not soft by nature, not one you often heard. I loved its bit of anger, its fight, its specks of gravel, its hoarseness, its heaviness, its tough tones. And when she battled the English language, I was forever driven to smile, not out of mockery, but more out of feeling something for her. When she said “feelings,” it sounded very much like “fillings.” Yes, she had warned me. “Please don’t hurt my fillings,” is what I heard. When she said “money,” it sounded like “mawney.” It was a huge effort on my part not to go along with her pronunciation and say the words just as she said them, my thinking being that perhaps that’s how she heard them. I found it somewhat comical, yes, but it, too, was genuinely charming.

. . .

The curvature of her naked butt as she slid onto her side was immensely captivating, illuminated only so much in the darkened room by the flickering candle on the dresser. I had spent myself making love to her in the traditional way, not my favorite position, but I wanted to see that face as much as possible as I engorged myself in her over and over and over. This second version was about chasing the jillion layers of pleasure. Nallely moved more aggressively, her torso in a sway that was in rhythm with my own action. Eager eyes scanned her like a microscope. Both breasts fell away, the one closest holding its shape, the other one almost flattened by her weight. The left shoulder curved just a tad inward, toward her, with the slope of her back meeting the one for her tummy and the upper round of her ass there, beating against the current, as they say in literature, my own words closer to her butt in synchronicity with beautiful accelerating lust. Below, my manhood rivered in and out, taking all of me inside and bringing back the outer fold of her wet vagina in a warm cupping of short goodbyes. She was somewhere in the sexual neighborhood, I thought, almost fully with me. That would come in my favorite position. She moaned and then took me in a deft roll that had me exactly where I wanted to be – all-behind her, without the needed for withdrawal or slippage. I weighed back a bit and let her arrive at her comfort, thighs spread in an inverted V and roundish butt pushed back in full demand. Her left hand went full-under to cup my balls and then rake them softly as I plowed onward, both of my hands on the sides of her hips, holding on and giving a bit as she reared and bolted. The ancient bedsprings fell in, like some nosey neighbor looking-in, observing, commenting.

In rapid fashion, she would move her head from one side of her face on the bed to the other, and then she would lift it straight back, emit a sound of clear forevermore, pleasure and want and need, all editorial, and lasting barely seconds before she would throw her arms behind her back and have me take her by both hands, as if some stagecoach driver guiding the team of horses doing all the work. Sweat pooled itself on my back and forehead, gravity allowing for an easy roll from there, lubricating the man-engine, making me feel both strong and tropical – the proverbial ingredients to effecting a good coupling. There was a long road ahead. I was glad for that. There are times, I’d known; when the 5-minute lover goes out the door, when you’re called on to navigate the world. I had no idea how this would end. Nallely seemed to be exactly where she wanted to be, taking it and enjoying herself, without mere mention of anything to come. It had been a long time since my cock had found itself on a sexual map with few markings, little to tell you where to go, where to turn, where to gas it up, where to charge, where to fall-back, where to quit, where to land. This was like coming out of retirement. It was a pulsating dick on a forced march, no desire to take the beaten path, to go flaccid, to say this’ll do and tomorrow will be another day, to cheat anyone out of his or her due.

A thousand-plus strokes into Nallely in this rear-entry position and no sign of slacking. She was welcoming each of them as if there would be no more forever and ever following the last retreat. I stayed with it, championing the cause for the entire God-abandoned universe, future mankind included. Nallely, meanwhile, flew on automatic; she looked able to absolutely throttle skyward till dawn. In the middle of a machine-gunned stroking, she lifted her back to rest on her knees somewhat upright, hair and neck thrown back, never losing her grip on me below. We held that position ever-so-briefly, my hands now on her perspired breasts, while she caught her breadth. And then, after a pair of needed deep breadths, we again lit the afterburners, our brightened sky in thunderous battle…

. . .

What she had said about her hometown was that not even iguanas could stand it. The harsh arid climate of the region, endless rains followed by relentless sunballs, delivered a meteorological punishment known only by lost camels and shepherds traveling the unforgiving sand desert in circles. “My mother used to tell us, to me and to my sister, that we needed to find a man by the time we were 15,” she had said a week or so back. “I think that’s how it was that I got in trouble with my father, the fieldworker my father wanted to kill. He was 25 and maybe my father thought he had taken advantage of me. He didn’t, but no one believed me. His name was Juan de Dios. I forget his last name, but I wanted to believe that he was a good man, perhaps because of his first name. I never saw him again after that one time.” I had asked about that and then wished I hadn’t. It was something to hear her say the body tells a young woman when its time for sex has come. It was a frank acknowledgement. Back then, she said, sex had seemed the coming game, pleasure expected and eventually enjoyed, yet associated only with love, true love, the best kind of love. It was that reason that the beating her father had administered had clashed with her feelings. What had been so awful about smiling and talking and laughing with a boy? Her father had never offered an explanation. Nallely told herself she wanted love. The feelings had never left. They were, she believed, the best feelings she had, well, felt. It was mother who’d said what her father would not say. Then, she thought, it had sort of come clear. There was a way to fall in love and one not to fall in love. There was, her mother went on, a time for giving yourself to a man. That time, she lamented, never announced itself in any clear manner; it just arrived as if Heaven-sent, as if everything fantastic had fallen into place.

The rest of the year was spent working the coffee bean fields and because the family needed the additional income, she had been given the okay by her father to work the sugar cane harvest – a back-breaker of the first order. “My beautiful mother, who had suffered all her life, would say I was young and could endure it, but it was hard, hard work for very little pay,” Nallely had told me. “When she died, that year I went to stay with my aunt, we buried her in a grave my father dug-up near the top of one of the hills behind our house. He carved the initials of everyone in the family on her wooden cross, which he made, too. We asked him to paint it baby blue and I don’t know where he got the paint, but he did it. I used to love going up there to be with her, to just sit there on the ground and talk to her, pray for her, tell her we were all okay and that we knew she could see us from Heaven. I know she heard every word. I just know she did.”

Listening to every word was easy. The story was not one I was unfamiliar with, knowing what I knew about countries south of the U.S. border. She was a refugee from pain and suffering, clearly. The sympathy I had for such lives rested deep in my liberal bent, my matured belief that God also accounted for the world’s misery. How do you deal with seeing children suffering from sun-up to sundown? You could find their story in any of a hundred newspapers and magazines, perhaps because it allowed Americans to see just how fortunate they were, who knows? They say it’s easier to look at suffering if it’s across the fence, on the other side, in someone else’s backyard. I knew something about Nicaragua. Nallely was not the only one who’d suffered as she had suffered, which was, unfortunately, to the extreme…

. . .

She exhaled longingly and pushed herself off me, withdrawing in a soft, wet squishing that felt absolutely super, leaving me still erect, then hanging. The idea of a break seemed a good one, although I could have gone on. Anticipation has a long shelf life, I’d heard somewhere. As it applied to sex and that certain woman, it was nuclear and could propel you with ease to the other side of the sky and back. She fell forward; her ass lifted just enough to be dramatic. I held my position and looked down at her back and at her thighs and at her pussy as if looking at all of it for the first time. That pale-white skin before me in full alarm, looking barely reddish but reddish just the same, blood way near the top layers of her working skin. It was almost 4 ayem somewhere. Here, time had stopped and wasn’t interested in moving. She was not done. A tired guy knows.

“You okay?” I asked and she laughed aloud, making me feel stupid. Why do guys always ask that question in bed? Of course, she was okay. She was being fucked, for Christ’s sake. “I’m very, very, very okay,” she said after a few seconds, twisting and then rolling over to rest on her back, sliding back to where the pillow was and raising her upper torso to get her there. I didn’t move, still on my knees, except that I now sat back as far as I could, inhaling in careful measure, wanting her to think I wasn’t tired at all. For a moment, I caught her staring at my cock, which delivered a prompt erection. It was no mystery: she would give that a go for awhile. I steeled to the idea, wanting it, wanting Nallely to suck me until dawn, if need be.

“You have a nice cock,” she began.

“Thank you…”

“I mean it’s clean-looking, not crooked, and it is pudgy enough for its length. Personality, that’s what it has. I could look at your cock for an hour and never turn away. I am sure another woman has said that about it. Right? Have any of them said that?”

“Not that exactly, but something like that,” I replied, looking at my cock and then at her face. “Is it that out-of-the-ordinary, for you?”

She smiled and said that was a trick question, which it wasn’t. “Is it?” I pressed, and she finally said, “It’s the nicest cock I’ve seen, okay? So soft…clean. Attractively Catholic. That’s what I mean.”

“Okay. I’ll take that.”

The thing is conversation and penis erection rarely find common ground. Mine lowered its alert after a few seconds and I felt the need to drop down and slide alongside Nallely, to rest a bit and block her view of my cock as it went from jungle monster to withering grass snake. It was her breasts at my face I found, and I took the opportunity to play with them with my fingers and then with my mouth. They were not big breasts, but proportional with her petite body-type. She angled in and out of my fondling, her upper body reacting to the caressed intrusions, the roller-coaster pleasuring. There was no speaking. Neither one of us had the interest to steal into the mood, on the apparent unspoken synchronicity. My lips enveloped a nipple and Nallely inhaled. I tongued it and she exhaled, all of it sensually, as if to tell me I was where I was supposed to be, doing what she wanted me to do. In the sex act, breasts are the halftime show. It is the between-positions attraction. Men can play with them for hours if need be, petting, mouthing, holding, cupping, squeezing. I love breasts. Normally, I like them a bit fuller than Nallely’s, but these two still retained their fight, their youth, their vibrancy, their true value, their developmental peak. Here, she lowered herself a bit, kissed me before taking her left breast with one hand and dancing it in my face, drawing me in, rewarding me, and treating me to a part of her body not ever dispensed to every swinging dick in town. I tongued it, lifting my open mouth toward it when she retreated a bit playfully, knowing both us liked it. I ran my free arm down her tummy in a rub, to her crotch, and opened my hand to scoop her still-moist pubic hair, which yielded a mid-torso spasm from Nallely. Angled to allow for my next move, I cupped her vagina and slid my middle finger into it as far a sit would go. She smiled and then moved away from me just enough to get her in position to enjoy it fully. “Now,” she said next in a calling voice, turning on her left side, to spoon. I fell in, feeling the fullest of hard-ons coming on as her butt bloomed and her right leg lifted into position. My cock in hand, I went over. I held her left buttock as my dick found the mark, Nallely’s ass back on me and then gone with every stroke. The distance traveled by her butt on the out stroke was less than six inches, but it seemed as if she went as far as the eye could see, my poor cock left waiting on her return. Nallely did not moan any of the fake moaning women learn early-on in sex. She enjoyed the fucking and left it at that. My face told her the pleasure was being shared equally. My hands found her settled breasts and the love sailed onward, focused only on the moment, the fat of the mini-second. I was thrusting; she was enjoying the meat and the lingering effect of its offering. For an instant that felt like an entire week, I wanted her to say fuck me, Patrick, fuck me until you can no longer fuck me, fuck me until feelings evaporate from the planet, and fuck me until we vanish into nothingness. Fuck me for now and fuck me for the rest of my tomorrows. Nallely wasn’t a talker, however, not even to submit her requests. She, I decided, was – and had been – pretty sure I’d perform completely, bringing her the entire ball of wax, the apex and the apogee, the greater love and the meaningless side of sex. It is true: spent is not a word you entertain when making love to a woman you value. Soreness and fatigue would come later.

For now, we kept at it as if to stop would be to cheapen things…

- 30 -

[Editor's Note: The story is a reflective journey and love story of sorts. It is set in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a shank of harsh land that grabs at the snakes and scorpions and lizards as if to hold on forever....Mr. Alcatraz is the author of Half The Town and La Zona Final...]

Look Homeward, Angel...

"All I can know is my own time..." - Patrick Alcatraz, 1996

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McAllen, Texas - One of my friends says I have the record for shortest visit to the Texas-Mexico border. That came - what? - some eight years ago, when I spent a half-hour in Brownsville downriver and just couldn't stand being there. They never let me forget it, although I've been back and had breakfast and supper there, and even a few beers at my favorite bar, the 1-2-3 Lounge on entirely-elegiac 14th Street. But of course my friends do not know that it isn't just Brownsville or the RGV had spooks me. I once spent an hour in Albuquerque, ate well, and hooked it back to Santa Fe just because it struck me that a guy like me should never abandon the one town that always loved him. The RGV? It's love/hate with me, absolutely.

I love it because I have family here, and I hate it because it forever disappoints me.

I have been here since the Holiday Season past this time. Friends have risen from the sidewalks and from the tables in the back of the bar. I've heard much more shag-me border music. I've gulped down more than my share of booze and super Tex-Mex food in small restaurants from one end of the valley to the other. An occasional stop at some of the "local" eclectic gathering places, such as Sahadi's in McAllen, where it's okay to be well-behaved, has been in the mix. Stay with me. Don't get mad. I enjoy the RGV more than I dislike it. What kills me is that the roll of the region is all too slow, as in what can happen won't, or if it does it's always done in the manner that it's been done here forever. Aggravating, is what I'd say about that. As for the lovely humans here, well, as the song says, doo-doo-do-do, de-dah-da-da. What that means is that what I hear when they speak is gobbledygook, i.e. things said don't always mean what they would seem to mean. But one adjusts. I'm no longer good about returning phone calls or text messages, even though I never really was good at it. Voicemail is King here. I get a lot of that. One woman always in the hunt uses it exclusively. What a waste of Life, is what I say. But she's semi-cute, so I make allowances.

Family and the desire to write something new brought me back. I spend a lot of time with my family, and I try to write something everyday. But the inspiration stream here is too thin and it stays away a tad longer than what I feel, say, in my beloved Santa Fe, where the people are friendlier and forever eager to mingle. In McAllen, the calling card is a gun or a frown or, it would seem, the elusive letter of reference from a member of the family of a woman who may sort of interest you beyond the carnal exchanges. It is, however, yet another slice of humanity, civilization elsewhere, here along the hardscrabble Mexican border.

We shall see.

Things have a way of defining themselves, of molding the rough edges. Who knows? I know I've stayed longer than I thought I'd stay. I'll be gone one od these days. That'll give me an opportunity to reflect on my months in the Rio Grande Valley. Not that I admit to having a "Caring" gene in my body, but it'll be one test. What I fear is that I have the "Leaving" gene; that is, that I would rather depart than arrive. My history would indicate that to be more the case than not. We'll see. I'll be in touch...

- 30 -

The Time of Times...

"America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now. We can't fight alone against the monster..." - Steppenwolf, America

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas - The president of the United States is slated to speak to the country's schoolchildren this coming week in as wicked a moment-in-time as we've ever known. Suddenly, if one is to believe the racist, segregationist Republicans, America's children are in danger of being brainwashed by the president. The president! Do they mean brain-washing like what George W. Bush visited on them when he attacked Iraq? Can there be another example of disconnect better suited for these insipid citizens out to, Hell, simply be contrarian? I reel at the idea that these suddenly fearful Americans are going to bed thinking all is lost in their once-proud world. Where were these dumbasses when their own "leader" George W. Bush was speaking to children in Florida while New York City was being attacked? Yeah, where were these spineless Sonsabitches when Bush was sending soldiers to die - and kill at will - in Iraq for nothing?

These Americans need to be told they really should get with the national program. Their self-serving fights against the Democrats - immigration, health care, Justice Sotomayor - paint them as the worst of losers, stupid rabble-rousers. And to think that I served for this gang of infidels in the military. Shit, yeah Shit!, most of these fuckers never even served this great land: not Bush, not Karl Rove, not Dick "The Creep" Cheney, not Rush Limbaugh, not Glenn Beck! No, these shitbags have done nothing but mess the landscape and scream against people who are doing something. Doing something!

The noise against health care is so right-wing that it really is comical more than it is credible. All Americans are hurting. They may be the poorest and the dispossessed, but they are Americans - just like these same cocksuckers who hide behind laughable tea bag parties and the like. I say, Fuck'em! They had their ride during the eight years George W. Bush raped the national treasury by undertaking an unjust war that conveniently lined the pockets of his and Cheney's pals at Halliburton. May those two motherfuckers rot in Hell for as many years as the number of young GIs who died for their bullshit.

We live in strange times when most citizens are working their asses off trying to meet monthly bills and mounting debt. Who's got time to tea bag? When a president makes it his job to bring some of the war money home, when the time says perhaps it's time to help our own, when dreams are hatched to rebuild our roads and bridges and infrastructure, these Goddamned Republican fuckheads rise to scream a chorus of nonsense. If it isn't questioning the president's birth certificate, it's his inviting of "too many" Blacks to the White House. If it isn't a gang of Maalox-addicted, blue-haired Assholes arriving at these quirky Town Hall meetings to yell and soil the air, it is constipated Right-Wing television pundits spurting shit they should've said about GW Bush, but never did.

There are a number of Americans who see something ending just because Barack Obama has now been elected president. America will never the same again, they say. What these same Americans would want is a return to Yesterday, when drug store counters were closed to Blacks and Browns and Reds and Yellows, when local fire department hoses were quickly aimed at protesters who wondered why city swimming pools and barber shops, as happened in Corpus Christi around here, were closed to the same Blacks and Browns.

I'm through with that shit.

This morning, on some TV talk show, the former governor of Minnesota - Tim Pawlenty - was asked why he was so opposed to schoolchildren listening to the president's speech next week. Pawlenty, said to be a potential GOP candidate for the presidency in 2012, said the speech would be "disruptive" because it would come on the first day of school, when students are busy finding their classrooms, the principal's office and the cafeteria. If that isn't lame, then lame is not a word. Fuck Pawlenty and his ilk. Where was he when Republican Ronald Ray-Gun addressed the schoolchildren of his time? He was no doubt telling his neighbors how good he felt to be an American with Dutch in the White House. Dutch Reagan! He served the military as an "actor," never in combat, but always there for the propaganda filmstrips. Fuck Reagan!

So, let's get over the "united" dogshit to do with our country's name. We're not united and really never have been. Always, certain segments of our multi-ethnic population have been purposely ostracized. Japanese-Americans (citizens!) were marched to internment camps during WW II, but not German-Americans or Italian-Americans, the other two nationalities in the then-Axis of Evil. Whites loved it when Blacks and Browns were the coonhounds of the neighborhood. They hate it now that they feel a certain distance from the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital. I could feel their pain, but won't.

Fuck Republicans, and then fuck them again...

Obama wants to help Americans and not go kill foreigners...Jesus, what a fuckin' novel undertaking...

- 30 -

About That Winter Somewhere Else...

"Today my heart is big and sore, it's tryin' to push right through my skin. I won't see you anymore. I guess that's finally sinkin' in. 'Cause you can't make somebody see, by the simple words you say, all their beauty from within. Sometimes they just look away..." - Patty Griffin, Goodbye

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - This is the time of the year when I normally break out my black sweater, the one I love to wear with my faded blue jeans and weathered harness boots. It's September out west. I miss it like a sonofabitch, so much so that I am, well, melancholic these days - a frickin' rarity with me. I thought of Darlene the other night, my girlfriend that last gorgeous winter, when the temperature in Santa Fe would drop to the mid-teens and she'd bolt from the bed screaming something about me needing a better, warmer comforter. Darlene was Canadian (likely still is, ha ha) and when she said let's go get a thick blanket for the weekend, well, I went into town to get supplies while she headed to some store. When I got home, she'd laid-out this wine-colored comforter that absolutely saved the night that year.

Darlene still lives in New Mexico, working real estate or somesuch. I hadn't talked to her in years, but I could always see her lovely naked body sliding off my bed and then walking toward and into the bathroom, in a shiver, and then I at times hear her voice, a mapled thing of beauty that even when she was mad at me, well, it sounded like she wanted to make love all over again. I'm sure every guy has one of those kind of girfriends. They leave a certain memory along a special part of the brain. Most evenings, Darlene and I traipsed up and down Santa Fe's narrow streets in the cold rain and the wet snow. We'd leave the house and walk to the truck, then drive into town, where we headed either for the bar at Evangelo's or over to the fireplaced-warmed bar inside the La Fonda Hotel. I'd throw on a cowboy hat atop my moptop hair and she'd say take that thing off, adding something about how my hair was not suited for hats. She'd drink and I'd drink and then we'd bid farewell to our pals and the waitress and the bartender and then we'd make it back to the truck, both of us saying the other should drive.

I drove most of the time, mainly because I have this thing about liking a woman angled in toward me as I shift gears and dream of flying to the moon. Overland truckers know the feeling well, as did cowboys of the Old West forced to steer a wagon or stagecoach. Anyway, when we talked the other day Darlene asked about my whereabouts. I told her I was in Texas and she asked why. No reason, I threw back, and she laughed before saying, "You haven't changed..."

I haven't changed, no. I still enjoy new winters with new women, not that I am thinking I'll find that sort of cold weather wheelhouse romance this year. There is no cold weather here, and that blows it for tasting the best kind of love - loving late into the night, chasing the stars across the sky with every single stroke, enjoying the feeling that is making love, recording the soft moanings and pasting scenes of a woman's head bobbing there below full-out on the archived brain. Darlene was a spitfire. She could make love all night long, and often demanded it. A guy could turn to afternoon naps while waiting for a woman like Darlene to come over. Resting, yeah. I loved her so much. Think so anyway.

But then it ended. Nothing spectacular, no emotional fireworks. No parking lot anger. No other woman or man, as far as I knew. It just seemed the time for the ending, that's all.

Darlene cried too much when offering her deepest feelings, and I never did get that frickin' caring gene. Still, even the tiniest drop in temperature around here makes me wonder about winter elsewhere...

- 30 -

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FLEA...

"Someone's got it in for me...they're planting stories in the press." - Dylan, Idiot Wind

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas - We've always said that public service this far south always takes on a sickening and cheap, Third-World bent. Politicians who represent often-passive residents of the Rio Grande Valley obviously believe that election means coronation. They will do as they please and see who they please and answer only to themselves and their financial backers. Everybody else can keep working their stupid jobs. Yeah, we got better things to do...

U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, the proud-as-punch Democrat who represents U.S. Congressional District 15, apparently has fallen in with the caudillos best known for plying their brand of self-serving politics south of this border. Hinojosa has staunchly fended-off any idea of him hosting a town hall meeting to with the roiling national issue of health care reform. Indeed, he has said he wasn't about to do it.

But now he has changed his mind and will appear in a bizarre television Studio Town Hall meeting hosted by KGBT- Channel 4 of Harlingen a few miles downrange from here. We say it's bizarre because the studio audience - those who may or may not be allowed to ask questions of His Excellency Hinojosa - will number only 25, and how those 25 managed to gain seats is one mystery. The second one is why Doctors Hospital At Renaissance is sponsoring it (paying for the show by way of advertisements).

We have been looking at comments from citizens entered in response to the stunning news. In today's edition of The McAllen Monitor, someone typed this into the comments section of the story to do with the Studio Town Hall: "Solomon Ortiz, Henry Cuellar, Ruben Hinojosa, and Hillary Clinton all recieved $10,000 from the Border Health Federal PAC in 2008. Many of the doctors owning Doctor's Hospital have given a lot of money to Border Health Federal PAC. Dr. Lawrence Gelman, a vocal advocate against reform, has given over $3,000. Border Health Federal PAC is a PAC representing Doctor's Hospital At Renai$$ance. Doctor's Hospital is sponsoring this forum on KGBT Channel 4. Why are these doctors spending so much money to make their voices heard? Are they really keeping the patient at their best interest? Wake up, people. I think we should lobby Austin for increased liability on doctors & surgeons. They have been making way too much money off of us anyway. $250,000 is just pennies for them anyway. Besides, they are practicing "defensive medicine" anyway. Who really benefits from not passing the healthcare reform? If you want to see whose been donating to which campaigns, etc. go to http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/ Just type in name or business, etc."

Danged good advice, says this observer. But our beef with Hinojosa, a family member of a well-known meat packing enterprise, is that he needs to be told the meaning of representation; that is, he needs to know that the constituency wishes him to fight those who disagree with him, if that is what he must do. As it is, residents in his district do not know where he stands on this particular hot-button issue. It would seem that, being a Democrat, Hinojosa would side with President Barack Obama's plan to reform health care. Yet, Hinojosa's approach has been to play Little Boy Ghost in this debate.

Perhaps his recent mining of monetary contributions from the health care industry explains some of his slouching, do-nothing posturing. A looksee at campaign funds generated by his staff up until 2008 show that those monies did not come from health care providers. Since then, much has...

As the dominant culture down here would say, "Que pasa, Rube?"

- 30 -

[Editor's Note: A review of the televised Town Hall yielded this: Lame, lame, lame. Cuellar looked like some foreigner speaking as if to a gang of Pachucos drinking at some low-rent bar in Laredo. Hinojosa speaks as if on Valium. There is little in his speaking style to believe in. An expensive get-up does not a statesman make. Ortiz may better serve humanity as Third Base coach for some going-nowhere RGV minor league baseball team. In a word, the contrived show: Sucked. Ortiz, Cuellar and Hinojosa came off as a Trio of Empty-Suit Bureaucrats...]

GETTING REAL BY THE DAY....

“Freedom as a company - especially the newspapers in the Valley - will continue to operate as normal...” - M. Olaf Frandsen, publisher of The McAllen Monitor.

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - First, this must be said: filing for bankruptcy is not a good thing; it means you cannot pay your debts and are asking for relief from the courts. A newspaper, or news media company, filing for bankruptcy is not operating as if all is normal. Yesterday was a bloody bailout day for Freedom Communications Inc, owner of the Rio Grande Valley's three daily newspapers, The McAllen Monitor, The Valley Morning Star, and The Brownsville Herald. In all, 70 local employees of the California-based company have been laid-off in the past 18 months, according to a report in The Monitor earlier this week.

Unpaid furloughs have also been part of the New Deal coming from Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen's air-conditioned office over at the corner of Nolana Loop and Jackson Road here. Yes, it's not easy to see the pain being felt by the RGV's dailies. That Monitor's much-ballyhooed state-of-the-art building stands as if a monument to Wall Street greed. It is the largest, fanciest building in the neighborhood, there across the street from two well-known, much humbler convenience stores and a coming bank nearby.

Freedom Communications, the newspapers reported in this morning's editions, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization Tuesday in a Delaware court. The agreement will cut Freedom’s debt to $325 million, down from more than $770 million. "All Valley Freedom Newspapers will continue to operate as normal during the reorganization process, which is expected to last four to six months, Freedom’s interim chief executive Burl Osborne told company representatives in a teleconference Tuesday afternoon."

Frandsen, exhibiting the optimism of General George Armstrong Custer on the day before that fateful doomsday scrap against the Sioux in the Dakotas, "...said Monday that Chapter 11 bankruptcy would have no effect on Valley newspaper subscribers, advertisers or employees. “Freedom as a company - especially the newspapers in the Valley - will continue to operate as normal,” he said.

Oh, really?

Let's see: you feel the pain of a staggering drop in advertising revenue, you layoff employees, including newsroom employees, you furlough people for days on end without pay and you announce the filing of bankruptcy and you will continue to operate as normal? Gag me with another joke, Olaf. You cannot be serious.

The Monitor and its sister papers here in the RGV are part of serious, sometimes killing financial straits being faced by the newspaper industry as a whole. Newspapers are closing their doors. Senior employees are being given buyout packages. Hiring freezes are now in place from San Diego to Bangor. Editors are taking part-time jobs at bookstores and local colleges. It is High Noon across the National Newspaper Map.

And Olaf Frandsen tells his readers that all is normal? Talk about coming clean with the people you serve. The Monitor and every other newspaper the company owns in this area ought to tell it like it is. Area residents deserve that, especially since most of the dollars they pay to Freedom's newspapers here for advertising or subscriptions leave the RGV for the company coffers in Southern California. The product suffers and the people at the very least deserve to be told what's going on, and what they may expect if and when the days turn darker.

Everyone knows the Internet has walloped print publications. Newspaper executives such as Frandsen now acknowledge it openly. Where print newspapers go from here is anybody's guess. The RGV is unique in that it is far from any serious competition, yet a growing, better-educated community still expects its local newspaper to wage the fight against corruption, crime, silly politics, international disarray, and whatever else tends to soil the environment. Outsider Olaf Frandsen should keep that in mind.

You simply cannot keep gutting a product - trimming, trimming, trimming - and expect the readers to want to keep paying the three quarters newsracks demand from Monday thru Saturday and the $1.25 the daily sells for on Sunday. Yes, it is true that Freedom Communications has no daily competition in the Rio Grande Valley, but in terms of personal satisfaction, well, employees at all three dailies must be feeling the sort of agony only a parent who's lost a child can feel...mind-blowing & crippling, in other words...

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NAKED LUNCH...

"As with great sex, everybody also generally enjoys great food..." - Overheard in Edinburg

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

EDINBURG, Texas - Let me offer some free advice to owners, managers, and operators of the region's eateries: Throw naked women on the walls. In murals, I mean. That is the first sign of a civilized society, if Paris, Madrid, Rome, and New York City can be taken into account. Along the crocodile-skinned Rio Grande Valley of Texas, nothing would go better with the daily mood of these lands than a little female skin there at your back, there on the wall running past a string of dining room tables, tables where men and women and couples sit munching on their favorite fare. The photo above is the interior of a popular restaurant on New York City's Upper West Side. It's a mood-setter series of murals a patron sees immediately after entering the eatery. Smiles follow, the lecherous kind from men and of wonderment from women. An exposed, however-soft-brushed pubic frontal at a woman's back perhaps either assuages the day's pressures or excites them. I like to order something malleable when in a cafe featuring naked women on its walls, like pot roast. I see the beef, yes, but picture a nice, round, size 38B supple female breast. Calling me, absolutely. My mouth waters.

I hit many eateries in the Rio Grande Valley, mainly because as a single man I carry around a picky appetite few women can ever fulfill. You invite me to your pad and serve Lasagna or mutton and I'm out the door. So, it's fast food most days and an occasional trip to a top-of-the-line restaurant, although there are precious few of those in this sun-parched part of the woods.

As to those walls, may I suggest the work of Modigliani, the Italian maestro famous for his languishing naked women thrown on canvas with colorful reds and yellows and blues. Maybe a jagged chick of the Picasso-bent, nose out of whack, but looking, well, delectable in a flawed-beauty sort of way. But it could be any of a thousand local artists whose work one sees at the sprinkling of art galleries here in hideous Hidalgo County. Local women would work quite nicely, as there is something about wide hips and huge breasts that historically has soothed the beast in man. Indeed, I could see one of these painters taking a swipe at painting a pile of canvasses all featuring Border Women in a variety of sexy poses, in cotton underwear & bent over being my particular favorite. The Border Ass is nothing if not inviting, as are the thousands of roadside taquerias one sees from sex-on-the hood Starr County in the west to adultery-happy South Padre Island over on the east side. Yep, these women around here need to be glorified beyond write-ups in the local newspapers telling of beatings they get at the hands of their husbands or lovers or both. Their naked beauty ought to be honored, without frickin' question.

The animal must be tamed. And, here so near to wild and goofy Mexico, the daily happenstance that is crime might be assuaged with little thoughts of innocent sex there at the noontime hangout, when maybe staring at a Victorian nude might lead to dreams of lovely, non-violent evening romance and celestial love of the sort that brings attractive children into this God-abandoned planet.

I'm a sucker for that sort of action in the Ol' Sackeroo...

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