Travels To The South of Texas...

"It's part of the creative journey. Sometimes, you have to disappear..." - Patrick Alcatraz, Colorado, 2004

The Long & Winding Leg...

"Sometimes I wish that I had never met you, so I could go to sleep at night not knowing there was someone like you out there..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico - We were in town to work on a story about Americans retiring to this lovely, mountain town north of Mexico City. Mike Boddy,a photographer for The Houston Post, and I were trolling for interviews, at the market, at the Instituto de San Miguel, where the foreigners studied languages, music, and art, at the downtown plaza, at the post office, at the cafes, at the hotel. They were everywhere, at the time said to be some 7,000 retirees and students from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Boddy went off on his own after the second day. I hung out with the man serving as consul for the American Embassy in Mexico City, the guy Americans ran to when they got in trouble with Mexican law. It was through him that I met a bubbly woman from California named Helen. She became my guide.

And so we traipsed across the old, Colonial town, and it wasn't long before a new friendship turned into a new affair. Helen had something for an underground piano bar, where she would go and sing along with the nattily-attired piano man. The name of the place was The Princess and it quickly became my evening hangout. On the other side of the plaza was a noisier disco - The Bull Ring. I enjoyed that one, but Helen would sooner or later steer me back to The Princess, which, truth be told, served better, bolder drinks.

She lived in a second-floor walkup some four blocks from the downtown shops, in a cluster of apartments leased by Americans. She had a small fish bowl on a kitchen table and two-three parrots in cages set along corners of her small living room. The bedroom was out of the 1960s. A beaded curtain took you in from the hallway. She had asked that the door be removed, is what she told me. I'd have guessed, going in, that she'd have a frickin' water bed in there, but it was just an ordinary post bed with a headboard she had adorned with paper flowers and more beads. It did look - and was - rather comfortable. I recall falling on the bed and bouncing nicely before she lapped-up to pull my boots off before going for my jeans. She was a bit older, something like 52, was my guess at the time. In short time, she made me quite aware that her age had not at all sapped her energy. She was tallish, leggy and used her physique as leverage when we eventually completed the coupling.

My stay that first time lasted two weeks. It would be yet another time when a female source for my stories ended up as a photograph in the newspaper. When I told her I was leaving, she took me out and sprung for a great dinner at an outdoor cafe known for its tree lightings and cackling flock of evening birds. I walked to the bar and picked out a bottle of good wine. We drank while talking our asses off, as if knowing this would be the last conversation between us forever. It was. On occasion, she would mail me a postcard with neat-sounding words and I would stick them in my desk at the newspaper. But I remember I cleaned out my things and threw most of that stuff into a trash can when I left The Post and headed East.

Helen likely stayed in San Miguel. Who knows?

I know this: Endings such as this one are common in meaningless flings...Que lastima, indeed...

- 30 -

The Lover...

"What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?" - Jacques Lacan

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

JAMAICA BEACH, Texas - This is the place to make love well-above ground. Most of the buildings are on stilts, there to perhaps fend off the whippings of a hurricane coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. You can see them up and down this beach-front town. Some are neat, weathered architecture facing the sea, and some are fading victims of the salty winds, decay, and abandonment. There was a time in the mid-1980s when I often hit a cowboy bar here, when my life was writing stuff for The Houston Post out of the Galveston bureau a few miles to the north. My drinking was a shared experience with a young chick named Carole, one of those nubile nymphs of the sort you meet in places near water, like Carmel, Fort Lauderdale, Provincetown, Mass., etc., etc. Carole was 24 at the time.

The time came and went. It's been a few decades now, and memory fades. But we danced inside that shitty bar, danced to songs by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rick Springfield, Dennis DeYoung, Wham, and the band Foreigner. As times go, it was just another winter chapter in a guy's life, full of boozing, laughing, and partying till the cows came home, as they say in Lubbock. We'd go out and then we'd chase something else back at my apartment, or, when the opportunity came, at a stilt home her parents owned on the southern end of this village, over on the road toward San Luis Pass.

She'd just come off a relationship, one I didn't ask about, mainly because I just didn't care. She was a tallish, outgoing cutey and I enjoyed waltzing across Galveston with her. Winter does that to you along the Texas Coast. I left for the East Coast a year later and lost track of Carole. Once, when visiting, she came to see me in Houston when I was staying at my friend Steve's apartment. We made love one more time and I recall it did feel as if something new. Life is funny that way. You can see a woman for a few years, go away, and come back to find that, yeah, there was something unique about her. At afternoon's end, she left and I never saw her again.

Endings can be quirky. Some you control and can write about, some you cannot. The end comes, and no matter how great of a tale you can spin off it, the story ends - just like The Bible...

- 30 -

Notes From A Rolling Manifesto...

"Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb..." - Franz Kafka

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

ARARAT - Because, well, because I am something of a nice guy, some people who meet me often simply have to ask about my religious beliefs. It always comes in this tried-and-true form: "Do you believe in God?" I can be buying someone a cup of coffee, or helping with a term paper, or merely voicing a political opinion, and, yet, there it rears its ugly head, as if religion is any sort of gauge of lifestyle, faith, or civility. It isn't. Religion in the context of our current times is just another fuckin' "divider," the so-called acid test of the New Century. It's no test on me; I rarely get past my initial response: "I don't believe in buildings or images..."

The other day I was telling someone that some of the greatest astronomers have said they have looked far into Outer Space and, Great Scott!, they have seen no sign of Heaven. Nothing. Not a huge, fluffy cloud with a celestial kingdom riding on it, not one angel on the wing, not a sprinkling of moon dust moving between here and there, not even what might be interpreted as a Giant doorknob presumably there to welcome believers from Earth. The Bible, say others, was written by Man, by someone who likely was the Stephen King of his time - a writer with one Hell of a wild imagination, a guy out to scare the Beejeezus out of everyone from here to eternity. Much of what's in the Bible deals with "faith," not fact. Facts and the Bible never meet. Who knows? Maybe Cain and Abel were really another epoch's Everly Brothers. And perhaps Mary Magdalene simply existed as a good-looking chick in a time of female ugliness, hence the immaculate conception.

I don't know. And that's my answer, I just don't know what to say to "believers" who would fall on a sword to prove their loyalty, their faith. When the times have called for prayer, I have prayed. I have prayed for help, only I know my words sailed out into the wind and nowhere else. But that's okay; it did relieve me of something, and maybe that's all religion can ever do - give you the false hope of expectation and of wishing it could all be true.

I understand that time is only something measured here on Earth, that the time of Space laughs at seconds and minutes and hours and days. Space goes forever and it has no time for the 24-hour day. When "believers" tell you that God created Earth in a week, well, that's funny. The only way you'd believe that would be if you agreed that this miserable, flawed planet is the way it is because God didn't take his time. Dammit! Just how close were we to being a perfect world society, free of pain and hunger and bigotry? How close! Goddammit!

I hate it when the Bible cannot answer my questions, yet I do love the crafty romance within the dogma. Of course, I know that much of my life and how I live it comes from learned experience, from seeing and reading and doing. There are, as far as I know, no instructions on how to make love in the Bible. Perhaps there should be...diagrammed at the very least.

- 30 -

I Save A Life...

"If you cannot work on the marriage or the woman is a moron, staying married and cheating makes the most sense because divorce is disruptive to the family life and your bank account..." - Al Goldstein

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

WEST FORT WORTH, Texas - When I was married, my friends would ask why I saw the need to cheat on my wife, especially since she was an attractive chick. The love I felt for her was real. Much of what happened fell in the category of sex-of-opportunity; that is, my travels often threw me up against women at a bar, a conference, or at an airport. One wink led to a drink and that drink led to something else. Eh, it didn't mean much, just another broad on the road. So, when my wife asked for the divorce, I did not fight it. She deserved to do whatever else she wanted to do with her life, was my feeling. I believe she's happy with the decision. Me? I endure my failings in my own crazy way.

Recently, a good friend let-on that he was having problems with his wife's disinterest in sex. It's not a new story for Today's Man. Many of them are living lives of sexual desperation, working their asses off to pay the bills and going home to be ignored. My marriage never saw any of that. I never prepared my own dinner and I never was told to go masturbate myself. My then-wife and I enjoyed sex, especially during a thunderstorm. Those sessions lasted for hours, forever a series of creative couplings and endless stroking. It is a huge part of being alive. My friend works like a dog, eats at fast-food joints, tends to the kids, makes his own sandwiches, and hits the sack knowing he won't be having his cock sucked or seeing the low back of his wife moving toward him and away from him during those oh-so gorgeous thrustings. I wasn't being asked for advice, but I did ask him what he was saying to his old lady. He said: "I want my wife back," that's what I tell her.

It isn't working, so I suggested he let-go of the intellectual approach and spell it out to her in clear words, something like, "I've had a long day at work, and what I really want for dinner, honeybuns, is to give you a good fucking." He says that sort of lingo will never work with his good wife.

I disagree: There are times in every woman's heart when she wants to be treated like a prostitute, when she wants to hear the lingo of the gutter, when she wants to be balled in new places, when she wants to be taken into the darkest part of the scary forest, when she wants her man to know, to show her, that he knows she is a woman. My friend said he was horny enough to try it.

I suspect he will get the fucking of his life...

- 30 -

The Man Who Loved Women...

"I don't think when I make love..." - Brigitte Bardot

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - What they say about romance is that it is, even at its worst, the best reason for living. Everything else is peripheral collateral, the job hunt, the social climb, the buying, the debt, the pain, the angst, and the stress. A friend of mine found himself caught in that soul-sucking web, and what he said there near the end was that he was leaving, that he'd heard about a place in the Pacific where everyone was on downers. There is something to be said for solitude, although I've never found it to be the answer for anything.

Women are the answer - for everything.

I am frickin' convinced of that. A woman is a certain refuge from the storm, in church, out on the town, in the bedroom. You travel with a fine woman and you should count yourself among the lucky. And, yet, even when I've been with a bad woman (it's all relative, I know), well, I've still felt the special attraction, the closeness to God, the power of salvation, the warmth of the ultimate shelter. Can there be anything to replace woman? No. Never has been, never will be, and you can look it up. History is strewn all across the ragged geography with tales of women and the role they played in the advance of civilization. We are a soiled planet from top to bottom, only imagine what it would be without women. I like to say I chase the weekend, buit it's really women I am talking about. I may get burned by shitty service at the post office, but if I run into a good-looking chick on my way out, well, that erases all the bad.

Once, I left a nightclub here with a woman I'd known when she'd been married. We headed for her place and strolled into the bedroom, where the undressing brought me a scene out of some horror flick: she had this weird, purple bruise halfway up one thigh. It sort of looped me, but this woman, as all of them down the line, from hopeful Eve, to partying Cleopatra, to betrayed Elizabeth Edwards, had the ready answer. She turned off the lights...

Passing moments never have been as emotional as the ones that followed, moving from anticipation, to pleasure, to the soundtrack of a woman sobbing softly, perhaps in answer to the pain, the divorce, the long-awaited arrival of what was at hand...

- 30 -