Amerique

Travels To The South of Texas...

2009-11-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

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

The Long & Winding Leg...

2009-11-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

"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...

2009-11-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

"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...

2009-11-04T07:07:00.000-08:00

"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...

2009-11-03T06:53:00.000-08:00

"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...

2009-11-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

"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 -

I Conquer The Caribbean....

2009-10-31T07:39:00.001-07:00

"...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter. " - Erica Jong

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

PALM BEACH, Fla. - Saturday nights were the best for me inside The Lizard Lounge here. Every chick looked like Lauren Bacall, wrinkled mavens from another era. I felt like a Cuban star from the 1950s. The ornate joint rested somewhere in the innards of the Chesterfield Hotel, magnet to the super-rich, the prostitutes, and my colleagues from The Palm Beach Post. I went there often, at times after swatting golf balls at a golf range across the causeway in West Palm Beach. When in paradise, you have to do things that are sort of parasidic (is that a word?). I danced and drank and fooled around with the older women. This was in the mid-1990s, so I was a bit younger and still invested in the game.

I'd been seeing this young reporter who covered the police beat and her idea of a good time was to buy a few bottles of Johnny Walker and go home. I can still see her throwing her shoes off to climb atop her bed to switch off the bedroom lightbulb. The daughter of the Dominican Republic wasn't even thinking about her future, in journalism or anything else. She liked to drink and drink hard, and after that she liked to do it all. The Lizard Lounge bored her, but she trudged along with me, 'cause I liked to see the old Geezers angle off to make their moves at the wrinkling broads. It was something to hear a Rolling Stones song crashing off the walls of the lounge while watching the crowd taking secret sips of Maalox.

Who knows what happened, but my petite friend went cold on me late that winter. She was in her early 20s, fresh out of the U. of Miami. I'd walk into the newsroom and she'd turn away. I didn't give a damn. My days were hard fuckers and my nights were fucking hard. It was life as a two-page chapter bridging into another two-page chapter. One day, I was walking back from the newspaper cafeteria when I saw her walking in my direction. She looked beat-up, a drinker's face, hanging and sallow. "Hidee, kid," I said from five feet. She tried to smile, but the crooked, hangdog look she threw at me seemed more painful than happy.

"I waited on you all weekend," she said laconically, her heart in her throat, her ass on a long rope.

"What?!"

"I wait and wait and wait...and you never show."

There was nothing else for me to do: We met after deadline at a seafood place and she talked herself all-out, letting go of whatever she had against me, most of which would never convict in a court of true romance. In the end, she said she hated The Lizard Lounge 'cause it was so fake and 'cause I seemed to laugh at everyone. "It's not Disneyworld," she would say. "It's people, people out having a good time..."

That was so. Disappointing women has been a strength of mine, not one nurtured, just one out there. When I left the newspaper, she asked for my mailing address. I gave her an invented one. It served as measure of my biggest strength - an ability to frickin' let-go. But it's also true: I'd like to see her again, tell her she was right about me, and kiss her for an hour. I like petite women, but only if they come with proportional breasts...

- 30 -

A Little Boy's Toys, A Big Boy's Toys...

2009-10-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

“There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention...” - Zelda Fitzgerald

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

WEST FORT WORTH, Texas - It is true: There is something to be said for the fizz in a Coca-Cola, as there is something to be said for the uniqueness of the onion in a hamburger. Most of the time, I find my little pleasures in romance, yet even I have to admit that there are a few aspects of Life that rest comfortably on me. My friends know of my battles with humans, with their failings, with their stupidities, with their lack of ambition. Wouldn't it be nice to already (this centuries into alleged civilization!) be able to move between galaxies, to mingle with beings from other planets, to face the absolute best of beauty and the horrible worst of ugly. If I die tomorrow, without having enjoyed the sexual pleasures of a woman from Outer Space, I will consider myself an utter failure - rivaling Gods mind-blowing efforts to create the perfect Human Being.

I have been thinking about a few things, perhaps because it's just a bunch of loose-ended tidbits of info that are finally coming together. I don't know for sure. I wish I did. The ancient Egyptians believed in horrific punishments after death. Hearts would be extracted from the body and fed to some beast. Why they did this is easily understood: the afterlife is about rotting, for all classes, an ending suitable for the rich and for the poor. The heart going to some beast was a certain notion of meting justice. I want my heart to go to the feeding of a flock of seagulls, maybe two/three harrier hawks. I know there will be no going to Hell for me.

There is no Hell. Hell is part & parcel religion. Without a Hell, religion would still invent one. I say Hell is right here on earth. The misery we have and experience in this world is monstrous. And, still, the church people arrive to pray and beat against Hell. But it is really the equivalent of the doomed Jew at Auschwitz praying for a bad supply of killing gas, some chemical unwilling to kill but quite able to draw tears. I could go on, yet it all strikes me as a waste of time, my time anyway. Churches and priests and nuns and believers can go to Hell. That sounds weird, me knowing that they already walk Hell's streets and alleys and towns and countries. Perhaps Lennon was right when he sang: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Only it isn't even a concept. That would mean someone put thought to it. Scientists and astronomers say there is no Heaven; scholars say there is no incontrovertible evidence of a God.

Something way deep in my brain tells me there likely is a creator, but it's not anyone in my image - irregardless of my long hair. As things stand, what with Christmas and the passing of the collection baskets on Sunday, there is too much at stake for a complete denial of a God. The masses, fearful tribes that they are, could not go on without believing. Yet, it too is fast becoming clear that something is coming, that this planet is gasping to its finish. How do I know that? Well, the list of telling signs goes for miles. I say, look around. And listen. And breathe. And look into the eyes of your woman. There is no chance you cannot see it for yourself, you being honest, of course.

For years when I was a youngster, my good mother would ask me what gift I'd want for Christmas. I'd say, toys, toys. And she would get them for me. If she asked me today, I'd again say, toys, toys.

But she would know that I'd be saying it for a very different reason...

- 30-

The Weight of The World...

2009-10-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

"The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home - will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children..." - Marguerite Duras

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

WEST FORT WORTH, Texas - It is in the first days after a romantic flirtation that I usually wallow in some sort of self-analysis. It isn't that I want to be critical of my words and my actions toward women; I simply fill a need to wonder away the Big Picture, this Life. If we are here to be human, to live and love, to work and play, to do and have done, then what I do in this regard is normal. I like to send women letters a year after the ending. What I write never explores the reasons for why things died; they are more notes about the state-of-things. How have you been and has your hair grown-out are two sentences. Somewhere in there, I throw in a thing or two about what I'm up to - my work, my play, my hair. Invariably I get a reply, always via the convenient E-mail, which is one of our many resignations to technology and distance. I agree with those who say there is a certain sadness in technology. I do wish I could ride a horse & buggy over to some woman's house and invite her to climb aboard.

There must remain at least one meadow for an afternoon picnic. But, who knows? Perhaps it is as the pop-sociologists say: that yesterday is gone. Is a cup of black coffee our last memory of another lifestyle. Do not think that I am reflecting on a better time. It's just that today's world is a hurry-up exercise in throwing things away - from women to garbage to traditions to culture. I can't remember meeting one Hispanic girl who talked to me in Spanish. Not in this God-abandoned country. And, for sure, not one would choose the horse & buggy over, say, a Lexus or a BMW at date's beginnings.

Sex is the last refuge of the traditionalist, the purist.

That same Hispanic girl would fuck me in the usual way, not one novel move in her body, and not one crazy demand. Even if she approved anal sex, you know she'd throw out some fake moaning and lies that they, for some reason, believe work in the sack, like, "I've never wanted to this before, because it hurts." Of course, with the proper lubricants, it surely cannot hurt as much as they would lead you to believe. That gorgeous slide-in comes as easy as a hot knife through butter. (Excuse me while I smile and take a sip of my coffee; I am so thankful, yes...) It's yet another false pain humans throw at civilization. Most of us reserve those thoughts and utterances for Sunday morning, when a trip to the neighborhood church reportedly is enough to cleanse something. I don't know. I feel cleaner after I bathe and at no other time.

Can there be something I'm not getting? I mean, about life and about relationships. It's not even a vicious world we live in anymore. There is no adjective for this mess. And forget about trying to explain the cheapness with breathing. It's a losing proposition, like smiling in a crowd of clowns.

Yesterday, a girl I met at the coffee shop looked at me, but did not approach. I thought it was strange, seeing that she had been friendly for a good two weeks. I hate mysteries in my life, at least of the human kind, so I walked over and asked about her stand-offishness. She said, coyly, with a look that told of fright and disappointment: "I...Googled your name..."

"And?"

"It said you're married to some woman named Elaine Benitez, a Central American..."

Well, there is an entry to that effect. But it's not true. I said as much, but drew nothing I'd consider progress. Her face had left me, taking a nice ass with it. It was the Ol' Internet Adios - a bitch of a growing hassle for Today's Man...

- 30 -

A Rose in the Rain...

2009-10-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

"I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding..." - Anais Nin

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

FORT WORTH, Texas - In one dream, I am born on a bed of cold cuts, there atop a thick slice of Salami and under a slab of Swiss cheese, doing my damndest to get the Hell out from my Deli moment as the light in the room is switched-on and I at last see my maker's face. He approaches and announces that my arrival is premature and that I must, at once, be returned to the great celestial incubator in the far sky. I say, in baby talk, "But...how can that be?" And I hear in response, "Your time is on the move, but it is as yet not here. My desire is that you wait a century or two." He goes on to promise that my wait will be worth it. I bawl and feel the cheese and hoagie bun fall back on me, the room's light fading to black.

In another dream, my woman is baking in the kitchen when I arrive from my job in construction to say I won a football pool and we can blow-off her dinner and make for our favorite Italian restaurant. She wipes her hands on the old apron and stares at me, saying, "I've been slaving like a goddamned Yugoslavian washerwoman all afternoon to prepare this supper for you!" Hmmm, I say in reply. She stands tall, points at my dinner on the dining table and waves her left arm in a welcoming manner. I nod and then watch her turn around to see that she is not wearing clothing on her lower body. The buttocks are familiar. I reach for my wallet and prepare to get the cash I'd won. She deserves it, my brain tells me. I eat like a guy who's been cracking sidewalks and digging ditches all fuckin' day. And then, after din-din, she takes me by the hand and trots me to the bedroom, where she fucks me so that I stay fucked. "Do I say it tonight?" she asks and I say, yes, of course. She says it in the dark: "Give me more, sir..."

They say a romantic can dream up scenes like a motherfucker. They say love does that to the human spirit, throws him and her into an emotional spiral that ignores anything else going on in the world. I know that to be true. I know it like I know the most accepted fact to do with humanity. My teachers in elementary school, supported wildly by nuns from our church, taught me that it takes extra effort to be a good person. My women have taught me that taking and not giving is not part of the deal. Dreams are great and some people say they have some however-loose meaning in your life. To that I say, Quien Sabe, mi amor. I wish I knew for sure. Goddammit, I wish that like I wish nothing else under the zillions of stars overhead. My dreams normally saddle me with a tremendous amount of guilt. Who knows? Perhaps they are based on fact, on things I have actually lived and experienced, on people I have known, hurt...and lost.

I remember one woman telling me she had one recurring dream: seeing a rose in the rain. She moaned and groaned that she had no explanation for it. I ran some things across my brain and couldn't come up with anything to help her. A rose in the rain? What in the name of Mary Magdalene could that mean? As a younger man, when I'd graduated from college and taken to my writing career, my principal dream was of me strapped aboard a falling airliner. The doomed fucker never crashed, at least not in my dream. My then-wife said she thought it meant I was about to leave my job. Who knows?

A rose in the rain. What the fuck could that mean?

I still do not know...

- 30 -

Such A Night...

2009-10-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

"I dance so that others may walk..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

NEW YORK - There used to be a club on the East Side here called Jukebox. It was a place for loud music and friendly patrons, so friendly that some called it a place to go and offer a bit more than a spin on the floor to a tune by, say, The Stones. I went there once with a friend and it was an okay time. We met this other couple, the woman being the more attractive of the two. Three beers later, the guy in the couple said he thought it was a good idea that we swap women. I said, sure. His old lady reached for my hand and off we went to dance. From the dance floor, I could see my friend in deep chit-chat with my dance partner's dude. I danced.

When we went back to the table all four of us shared, my friend said she was ready to split. It seemed odd, especially with me knowing she'd been wanting to go to this particular club for weeks. But I went along. What I had coming from her later that evening was worth the disappointment of leaving a lively joint. Outside, she ran her arm inside mine and held on as we walked the five-six blocks to her place in the frigid, wind-whipped air. The noise of this city's streets at all hours allows for forgetting the bullshit of any previous moment. I began thinking about making love to her, forgetting the spirit inside the bar. At the next intersection, she said: "That guy back in the club said you'd agreed to us swapping mates...for bed."

I coughed as if someone had bought it for me and stuffed it down my throat. The sound lasted a good ten seconds and it wasn't until we'd crossed the street that I managed to again breathe easily. I said: "Really?" I like that word, cause it's so deep and can be interpreted in a jillion ways. She said: "Was it true?"

"No," I said in all seriousness and she looked me in the eye. Who knows why women look into a guy's eyes. But she again held onto me as we kept walking. I had not agreed to anything, yet I wondered if she could ever believe me. It was one of those questions. I could scream my answer to the tops of the skyscrapers and I'd still not know if she believed me. The guy back at the club had me by the balls. I kept walking, signaled toward a coffee shop and we walked into the place to grab a hot cup for the rest of the walk.

I suppose I could have gone ahead and told her the swap idea would have been good for me. Good, I say, if good is a woman with a killer body - legs, breasts...and God's choicest morsel, baby. The Bedroom Trinity, en otras palabras. For me, it was like seeing my other local galpal Katie light the Menorah that night at her place. I don't know much about the Jewish religion, or why Katie did that, but I did choose to see it as Katie paying homage to something - me or someone better in her Big Sky. I remember this: we knew how to best end a night on the town.

There is, as that song says, a New York State of Mind...

- 30 -

An American On Venus...

2009-10-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

"I write and someone comes in to call it interesting..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

NEW YORK - I don't know, and I can say that as often as I have to. There are times when I just don't know what I'm doing and not doing. My stock answer for whatever criticism has come my way has been this: So what? Read that and add an exclamation. So what! It is my feeling that one moves across the planet in a singular manner. Noise from the curb doesn't bother me. The yelling is less and less as I roll across this great land, perhaps because people find other things to do, other people to annoy. In the case of woman and her moment with me, I like to quote from a Bee Gees song: "My eyes can only look at you..."

It seems to work. Women are too forgiving, is my feeling. And I say that knowing it is a damn good thing that they are, for to live in a world where women would be quick to club would be, well, painful - to the flesh and to the soul. Man, however, was built for rock 'n' roll, not for the waltz. A waltzing man represents too much of a give-up, an upright concession, a woman's idea of the malleable male.

There have been young women in my life, even recently. But it is the middle-aged model I cannot explain. When one writes about young women, it is writing fraught with promise and adventure. When one writes about older women, a certain pity pops in. I used to run from older women and tell friends I chose to do it for one main reason: They are always sick. A guy can understand a thing or two about why a chick might cancel a date, but tell him you don't feel well and, well, there is no bigger aggravation. Not that I haven't cancelled on a woman.

Dates are easy to make. In the case of a former lover, the reaction made me laugh. This one had gone out and shopped for a dress for our weekend date. When I called to cancel, I said something about a flat tire, only it wasn't about that as much as it was about some other chick coming forward and telling me she was available. My lover didn't tell me, but she called a good friend of mine and took her new dress over to his place, drank a bellyful of wine, and ended up in his bed. He told me. She denied it, but later fessed-up, as they say in westerns.

In the end, it was all about value. A guy assigns value as automatically as breathing. That one didn't mean all that much to me, although I'm sure I'd have gone out with her had this other broad not called. The maker/breaker: I thought this other one would be a better piece of ass. Simple as that, absolutely. It's true that one feels as good as another, but, for me, it's all about the view from behind. My decision was as silly and superficial as could be: the second chick had a rounder ass. And, yes, it is that roundness on the move that fuels my lust. Ridiculous? Sure. Odd? No, most guys would agree that it could be as little as an inch of better roundness that would tip the scales toward one or the other. I don't think it's just me, no. Life is a choice.

When I again saw my friend, after my friend had told her I'd cancelled to be with another chick, she asked the seemingly crucial question of the moment: "Was she worth it?"

"I don't know," I said in reply, which was true.

Guilt ambled in and was quickly dispatched. I don't have the "caring" gene.

But I was bowled-over when she came over on my birthday carrying five gifts, including a bag of golf range balls and an expensive watch I still have and enjoy having. I wish I knew more about the female brain, although my friends say I have it wrong, that it is about the heart, and that I just don't get it. Romance for me is a stage, not as in a step along a process, but as in a place to go act, up there under the lights, in the theater or in the woods. That's been the drug for me in this movie.

About everything else, well, I just don't know anything...I don't, and I'm okay with that...

- 30 -

The Last Picture Show...

2009-10-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

"He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

San Angelo, Texas - The crowd inside a beer joint called Blaine's here always pumped me up in a sort of rural way. You know the feeling; it's always one whoop & holler after another, even when the television set set on the wall behind the bar is offering something stupid like Judge Judy or somesuch bullshit. I'd sit at the far end of the bar, a long way from the front door, and wait on her. I'll call her Daisy, mainly because she still lives in this dusty, sleepy West Texas town and her name is, well, well-known. I waited on her as the afternoon dragged on.

Daisy worked for some bureaucratic outfit. I'd met her while working on a newspaper article. We'd arrived at the idea of meeting for a beer after one long session to do with the workings of the business that employed her. Tallish and rather atractive in the True West style, Daisy ambled in looking fine and proud, smiling and waving a hoot of a hell-o. I can be a cowboy if the movie's worth it, was my feeling. She drew the stupid out of me, for sure. Silly was more like it, but I analyze too much after the fact.

We would see each other often over the two-month span I spent in town, lunching and Happy Houring across Tom Green County, in her fancy car and in my SUV. Her old man travelled, or so she told me. When things shook-out, she knocked on my apartment door and asked to come in. I was okay with that, as I would've been with any woman arriving late at night in short shorts and a halter top. San Angelo goes through the usual summer scorch faced and endured by most of West Texas, so maybe the skimpy fashion wasn't all that out place. She said something about her old man getting a new vehicle and did I want to go for a ride in it? The goofy, dark backroads of San Angelo always sparked something in me. We left at midnight and she headed for a place called Twin Buttes, a sort of rendezvous hillside for lovers and other unfaithful rurals. Headlights moved in and out while we parked near a ledge of some ravine, looking out into the star-lit sky, talking silliness and angling fondlings that eventually brought the desire to drive back and go at it in the sack and not on a patch of dry grass and hardened dirt.

At the scene of the wanton sex, Daisy dropped her shorts and halter top quickly. It was all she wore. I smiled from my futon as she pulled my boots and jeans full-off. Shortly, she was showing me how the rural mouth cleared the land of Indians all those years ago. Then she angled over into the spooning position and I drove the herd home.

She called me in Dallas one day a few weeks after I left town. Something about meeting downtown for a sandwich or something. I said I'd do my best, but didn't. That afternoon, I waltzed over to my daughter's Fall picnic at her elementary school and enjoyed the Hell out of that, playing the clown in the dunking booth and all.

This is so true: things that may seem all-important in one setting don't quite work in another. Guys have a hard time putting that into words when talking with an unsympathetic lover, or when confessing to the wife...

- 30 -

Keep The Change...

2009-10-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

John Reed: "Louise, I love you..."
Louise Bryant: "Love? Love?!! No, you don’t love me, you love yourself! Me, you FUCK! When you’re not too busy fucking somebody else!" - Reds, 1981

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

Santa Fe, New Mexico - The record will show that I wrote a few articles for the Albuquerque Journal, really for its northern New Mexico section up here. Journal North, is what it was called. Not any of the work stands out as being great journalism; it was more the usual stuff to do with the lack of water, the mobs of annoying tourists, the high cost of housing, and the occasional festival - my favorite being the Weekend of Zozobra. That was when some city-sponsored outfit laid-out good cash so that someone else could build a 50-foot, white-sheet-clad puppet for burning. Thousands rode into town at summer's end to join in ridding Santa Fe of bad vibes. Music exploded from giant speakers hanging off a makeshift stage in the middle of the downtown plaza, where an evening dance culminated the torching. It was something to do.

We'd been standing by some tree outside one of the art galleries, watching people amble by when my friend Glenn, a business writer, made note of a woman mingling in the crowd of the small courtyard. She wore a black outfit and I recall I said something about perhaps it being Catwoman. It wasn't. We struck a conversation with her at some point and she told us she was a photographer from New York on assignment. Something about a feature on the outlying towns and their architecture. Anya was her name.

"Nice body, eh?" is what Glenn said when she excused herself for a visit to the ladies room.

"Catwoman for sure," was my lame reply.

This was a time in my life when having one woman at my side just wasn't part of the plan. Glenn's girlfriend, Beth, had left him and was, he'd said a few days earlier, now living with a Black musician in San Francisco. I say musician, but Glenn made a point of noting he was into Jazz. Anyway, we lost track of Anya until much later in the evening, when she walked back to say she was enjoying the Hell out of New Mexico. We knew the answer that would come from these outsider chicks to the question that was a normal part of a chit-chat with a tourist, but we asked: "I'd never been west of New Jersey," she threw back, predictably.

Who knows where Glenn and I ended up that night, but I was at my desk the next day when our receptionist came back with a note for me. It was from Anya and she had written something about getting our address from my business card and adding that she'd left a longer note in an envelope at her hotel. I passed it on to Glenn. He made a face that said, "Well, now..."

Later that day, we walked over to get a drink at Anya's plaza-front hotel. I stopped by the front desk and asked for my mail. Shortly, a woman came out and handed me the business-size envelope with my name on it, written beautifully. Glenn had grabbed a couple of drinks for us by the time I walked into the small bar. "What'd she say?" he asked.

"Taking the shuttle to Albuquerque at mid-morning," I said, reading from the note, adding that she was flying American Airlines back home. "Wrote this note and left a few pictures of myself for you. Hope you like the one of me in my skirt. It was so nice meeting you last night, and I do wish I could stay."

"Is that right?"

"Here," I said. "She takes a good photo..."

"Yeah, but Catwoman's one that got away, son." He laughed for a long minute and I sat there, staring at the lobby 'cause it was nearby and then lifting my Scotch & Water to my mouth, thinking, hey, that one's gonna come back one of these weekends. I never was one for believing Polaroids carried any lasting value, yet looking at Anya's photos made me realize that art is art. And if a frickin' $40 Polaroid camera can take a nice shot of a girl's sexy legs, well, then, yeah, that's art in my book.

I kept her letter and photos atop my desk under a paperweight given to me months earlier by a woman who was making those things out of desert rocks and metal string and thick coats of red and yellow paint. But I never heard from Anya again. The woman from the paperweight enterprise would stop by our office from time to time, walk up to my desk and look to see that I still had her gift right there where I couldn't help but see it everydamned day.

Women are funny that way. All I know is I could've used some cat food that week...

- 30 -

Laid For Lunch...

2009-10-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman..." - Anais Nin

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

Brownsville, Texas - Those who study such things say men can see something interesting in just about every woman, whether a salsa smile coming from behind the counter of a taco stand, a fleeting glimpse at a friendly leg inside a beaten bar, or a fine-sloping back carrying some semi-attractive woman across the international bridge - one of those utilitarian backs quick to allow for concentration on the essence of a meaningless sexual encounter. It is something to behold. I reel at my times here all those years ago, when my border adventures included a few flawed beauties willing to fall for Rome. This is not to say that they will go under-appreciated on my ledger; it just means that I can expect notes of gratitude from the Holy See in my book upstairs.

Ruth was her name and she worked downtown, answering phones and filing paperwork. I was the guy who moseyed in pretty much every day, looking for morsels of news to pass on to the crippled, under-achieving local masses. My job at the newspaper kept me busy, but there were free moments for the rest of life's booty. Much of what happened during those months rests at the bottom of a suitcase-load of dusty, yellowing papers and news clippings. Was it worth it? I used to wonder about it, because it all ended up costing me my marriage and the love of a woman who, I think, did love me. Ruth came and went, followed by some other fanciful sweetheart out for a good time. That one lasted a roll or two or three, maybe four. It was easy to be stupid back then, much easier than it is now. Perhaps it was the music of the times. Maybe it was just me being stupid. Or it could have been me being stupid in a herd of stupid people. This town can - and will - drag you down to the gutter in a jiffy, as they say in peanut butter.

Ruth would come to my apartment and stroll into my bedroom, ask about the bed-sized flag draped across the mattress, and then proceed to undress, the flower-draped nylon dress floating down to the ugly, shag carpeting. It was noon and a quickie was all we had at hand. In the more-physical evening romps, we would end things with a cup of coffee in bed. I always wondered what women think when they go back to the office after being laid for lunch. Do they answer the phone while lipping sperm off the sides of their mouths? Do they think about the thrusting while jamming paperwork into the files in the file cabinet? They should come clean.

Still, Ruth was a strong chick. I say strong, meaning it in a sort of "spirit" way. She only cried once, and that was at the end of things when she told me she would be marrying a guy from Matamoros and I said something about that likely being the best thing for her. When I'd see her in her office after that, she would smile and shoot a soulful look at me, the all-too-human message easily understood. To her great credit, she never fucked me after telling me she would be marrying. I drifted off to some other woman down the hall, corkscrewing later to one working on the second floor.

And then the emotional wars ended. Things were shakin' in my life. Packing came with the knowledge that someone else would take my place in town. One fine morning, my black Scirocco roared out of town, gears and tires in a scream and my window to Brownsville closing by the second behind me. They also say you can never say goodbye to a woman you've known intimately. I dunno, I dunno...

- 30 -

When Women Write...

2009-10-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

“Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country...” - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

TAOS, New Mexico - In the many nights he had been with her, rough sundowns and lovely evenings, he had always thought she was sort of special, not in a wild and fantastic way, but more in a clear scene that forever brought her to him aboard what he thought was a celestial cloud. Most of his women had come from the world of the mediocre, lasses with asses, and little else. When someone at a party had asked him what he looked for in a woman, he said: "Sparks...coming off the brain, not the crotch." And then he'd met Marcelline.

"I would like you to write me a two-page love letter," she'd instructed at the end of their first date, which, as it turned out, had been to an outdoor dance at someone's ranch. "If you move me with your words and writing, then we may be able to proceed." Proceeding threw images of gung-ho love all across his brain. She had, he could see, the legs and breasts to give him a tumble. "I can do that," he'd said.

Three days later, when he walked up to her front door, he knocked and then knocked again. He got no answer. A peek inside through one of the windows told him she was not home. He took his assignment and slipped it in the mail slot. He could wait on the grade. He could wait. It wasn't something he was used to with women. They usually took him at face-value and either fucked him or told him they had better things to do. Life, was his reasoning, came by way of the 50-50 proposition. He turned and walked back to his truck. Then, he drove to Tiny's Lounge and ambled in to hear a song by .38 Special he liked. The bar was empty, and he drew on a line his old man had always told him about empty bars: "Drinking alone ain't you, son." Nope. And so he was glad when an old guy and his old lady walked in, laughing as if their government check had come in on time.

The afternoon moved along. He was about to drop his boots to the floor and head on somewhere else when his cellphone rang that familiar message tone. He flipped it open to see: "I like the way you think, but your grammar is pitiful..."

He read it again, wondering if an immediate reply was in order.

Nope, it wasn't.

A mile down the old road, he reached for his phone and poked at her number. Saying it would be more his style. He waited on her to pick up, heard her educated voice in full-power, and then said: "Tell me this: If I told you my dick is a bit crooked, to the left and not exactly your normal tube-like thing, would you wonder about the fucking you'd get from me?"

"Touche," she shot back...

- 30 -

So This Is Love...

2009-10-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

"Long for me as I for you, forgetting, what will be inevitable, the long black aftermath of pain...” - Malcolm Lowry

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

CENTRAL CITY, Colo. - On the phone, Marguerite was speeding through the story of how some traveling salesman from Houston had dated her best friend, and how the guy had gotten drunk and peed on her face. "She's in the bathroom, scrubbing," is how Marguerite put it in the long-distance call. I said something about almond scrub likely being the best commercial product willing to do battle against a gallon of urine. The side-of-the-road soaking had been complete, according to Marguerite, who threw out details of the sort you see in Mexican obituaries. Was she filing charges? "No, don't think so," Marguerite said. Why not? "The frickin' salesman flew back home," she went on. "And, apart from that, Leigh Ann says she never told him to stop."

Noise has swirled from coast to coast about how the American woman isn't what she used to be as recently as 100 years ago. I couldn't imagine any man peeing on Annie Oakley or Amelia Earhart or any of Al Capone's girls. Why was it happening now, here at the tail-end of the first decade of the New Century?

It was easy to call it an isolated incident in the Age of the Internet, a newfangled era when everyone came out to play the fool. Leigh Ann was a pretty 33-year-old divorcee who'd once worked for Frontier Airlines. As she told it, her superiors always put her front & center on those advertising posters. Leigh Ann was the one with the big smile, the fluffy golden hair and the nifty, pointy breasts under a tight, white company blouse that came with one of those colorful, unoffending rah-rah ties. There was no way I could form an image of that pretty face fending off a beer-powered stream of male pee. I wanted to ask questions, yet the idea seemed out of place in a conversation that called for some semblance of sympathy.

"She'll be fine by morning," I said, picturing a nod from Marguerite on the other end.

"What is it with you men, anyway?" she threw back. "What makes a grown man want to do such a thing?"

I said I had no idea and she said oh, I'm sure you do and I said no, really, that's off my map and she said that map is so ragged I could see you peeing on someone's face. "You could?" I said in my defense. "You think?"

"Oh, I know," she said...

- 30 -

The Pear in Romance...

2009-10-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

"Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there..." - Jacques Lacan

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

CENTRAL CITY, Colo. - Morning had come after a long night of conversation that came and went and sailed away and sailed back. You could tell the air in the cabin had gone stale, the best of the whipped oxygen now clinging to the ceiling, up there with the spiders and bugs deep inside the weathered logging that made the roof look comfortable. Marguerite had disappeared into the bathroom and was refusing to come out. My way was to angle over to the ancient wooden door and say, in a low voice, that I'd be preparing bacon for breakfast. A guy is ahead of the game if he's cooked for his woman; it's the most natural of relationship bridges. Nothing came back at me from where Marguerite bunkered. I pictured her standing directly in front of the old sink, staring at the old mirror, but not looking at anything in particular, the last of the Mascara now but a speck of gray-black at the bottom of her chin. I suppose she pictured me being stupid, going on with the show, and fully believing a warm breakfast of Canadian bacon and eggs would smooth everything.

The feelings raged ragged that morning. How we 'd got to the point of destroying the moment remained the mystery to me, although it should be said that a man is the last to know when he's hurt a woman's feelings. I recall one of my theology professors saying something about how Eve had gone for the apple after hearing Adam say he'd be waiting for the pear. That one had drawn laughter from the women in the class, guys in the crowd merely looking at each other in what had to be a show of we're-fucked unity. An apple, a pear, an orange; whatever, was my feeling. Lord knows, I rose to say in class, the fruit-of-choice should have been the frickin' banana. Is there a better fruit to play the part? Well, other than the suddenly-popular veggie in the bedroom - the goddamned gourd.

"Scrambled?" I asked in a loud voice sent in the direction of the bathroom.

Nothing. The fluttering of a hawk's wings startled me, so I walked to the kitchen window and watched the graceful climb of a gorgeous harrier. That guy is as free as a bird, I told myself before thinking, Dang, I know hawks hate being called something as a queer as a bird. It's the law of the wind for anything with wings. Hawks know who and what they are; birds are still thinking about it. I reached for the marmalade.

"Ready in five minutes!" I threw at the bathroom. My ears strained for sounds and, for a second, I thought I heard what sounded like a woman wiping her face with some washcloth. Perhaps she was getting over it. Marguerite was too cute to cry. Sobbing was not in her jeans or genes. I waited and then turned to crack two eggs into the hot skillet. My two-burner stove was doing its job. I set the table while the eggs cooked, placing the orange marmalade alongside the silverware. Marguerite loved orange marmalade. I'd asked her about that, but hadn't really cared all that much. It was chit-chat. Then I had thought to think there likely was a good story behind it. The sound of the batroom door opening came next.

"Coffee?" she asked and I nodded, motioning her over to her chair.

I didn't speak. Someone had once told me that women are turned-off by a man's voice early in the day, except on Sunday. Who knows? I liked to take things as they came, some to be ignored and some to pay attention to - like most guys. I was, however, dying to ask her about the moment she'd left me alone in the sack. I waited, moving to place the scrambled eggs on both of our plates. She ate as if on vacation, slowly and looking out the window. I slopped my toast with gobs of butter and marmalade, refueling.

"What's to do today?" she asked, finally.

"Whatever you want to do," I said in reply, beginning the make-up.

"Oh, okay..."

- 30 -

The Land of Enchantment...

2009-10-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

"…to all those lost souls who have forgotten to believe in the immensity of love." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

TESUQUE PUEBLO, New Mexico - Her first name was Vanessa. I'm sure she told me, but I forget her last name. All I know for sure is that she'd come to New Mexico from Vancouver and was staying here with a friend of a friend in a walled compound not far from my favorite restaurant, a place called El Nido. She's the one who would send me roses. The girls upfront would take them and then walk them back to my desk in our small newsroom.

Notes accompanying the flowers always took me into the world of arriving romance, only I wasn't all that interested in her. Her friend actually seemed more appealing, although who really knows about women. You can walk in the rain with a plain-looking chick and have fun and, yes, you can take a pretty one to dinner and find she has no skills with silverware. You have to put them to the test, although her geography will tell you much about a woman. But Vanessa would come to my place.

Dinner was followed by a walk back in a shiver. This part of northern New Mexico is up in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, so just about every night is sweater weather, the winter months requiring a bit more wear. We'd get frisky in the sack and she'd say no, don't do that and I'd see she wore no panties and I'd keep going and she'd say, "Here, let me read to you..."

Music's always helped me sleep after drinking. Vanessa would sing to me a bit. She wasn't a bad singer, but I never knew her songs. Taste is funny that way. I'd keep going.

"No-ooooo-ooo-oh!" she'd let-out when I'd stick myself in her. "Oh..."

Careless whispers swam into her ears while she readied and then began that special, willful embrace...

- 30 -

Love As An Anecdote...

2009-10-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

"And once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be...or lose that person completely. Because, sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been. And remember the person you were meant to be. The person you wanted to be. The person you are..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

SANTA FE, New Mexico - "Hurry," she said as the late-hours moved and I made my way into the bathroom. "Brush that alcohol off your breadth." There was a strong aroma, yes. Darlene was an educated woman who had some sort of standard for her bedmates. About my hair, she did - or said - little. But she liked to have me wear clean shirts and some semblance of a cologne.

I flipped the bathroom light switch and reached for my toothbrush and a tube set on the small shelf above the old sink below the cracked mirror. Outside, the snow fell in neat thin and thick blankets. My heart raced while my brain threw images of gorgeous love-making from wall to wall inside my grass-whorled skull. Doing Darlene seemed the thing to do in the middle of a snowfall. I walked out of the bathroom.

"Kiss me," she said, and I did.

"Ummmmmm," she shot back, laughing. "Nothing like a Brylcreem kiss in winter."

I never again left that tube of Brylcreem alongside my tube of Colgate toothpaste. Alcohol forgives pretty much every damned thing...

- 30 -

How To Romance A Smart Chick...

2009-10-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

"She was meant to be there for a season only, and to teach you a lesson...the one that’s suppose to spend a lifetime with you is still out there waiting...see it that way and don’t bleed...you don’t need tender loving care from one special person. You can get that from the people around you too. I’m pretty sure you’re well taken care of..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

HOUSTON - The come-on came at the end of a day covering some international business conference at The Woodlands north of here, when Diane let-out that she felt wasted after the previous night's wine-drinking. The words coming out of her mouth seemed sexy enough. I said let's get some dinner and she said she'd love that. Elsewhere on the star-crossed planet, reporters in the field walked toward their cars to head on back to the newsroom, to write the day's news. I'd filed mine via a Radio Shack portable computer, as had Diane, a business writer for The Houston Post, our employer. Of course, I'd known her for a few months, although we'd never lasered eyes at each other. Still, she was friendly.

We ended up at a place called The Jockey Club, which was a popular bar with the Houston press. A newfangled electronic dartboard drew players like flies. We sat along the far wall, watching it all, taking in the laughter and the competition and the rowdy mood. Diane had a reputation for being a very good writer, although when we went out she would call me The Post's "Star" reporter, perhaps because I was forever being dispatched to this and that disaster. Such lingo spurred me onward. We drank and then we walked out about midnight, where I said, "I'll follow you," and she said, "I hope so..."

At her house, I ran into her pooch, Hawthorne, who barked up a storm as I made my way to Diane's bedroom. She excused herself and walked-off toward the kitchen and then returned with two glasses of red wine, my second addiction. I climbed onto her bed in my jeans and socks; she drifted off to the bathroom. Shortly, Diane ambled in wearing an untied nightrobe, her visible high-thighs one ahead of the other as she moved, a radiant thick, goldish pubic patch ready for its due.

I'd always thought she was Jewish, because that's what my colleague Steve Olafson had said about her. When I mentioned it, and I don't even know why I did that, she laughed and said, "No, I'm Lutheran..." She could throw her hair backwards nicely, like a javeline-thrower, when laughing. I liked that, as much as I loved seeing her ass as she angled up toward the headboard. My itinerary in the sack always begins with cowboying-up for a blowjob. Diane was okay with that. She went at it as if an expert, running her tongue up and down my shaft, licking, and then taking my cock full into her mouth. It takes me about a half-hour to want to do anything else, yet fucking her dog-style had been the initial attraction. She took that nicely, moving with me as I rode the Sweetheart of the Rodeo, her ass coming and going dramatically before my alcoholed eyes.

We would see each other often, with me sometimes arriving unannounced and finding her ready for sex. She lived alone, in one of those Leave it To Beaver houses in nearby Bellaire. I don't think either of us saw it as love, or anything near it; it was just two people looking for warmth. Later, when I'd taken a job with The Boston Globe, I came back to Houston to work on a story and I called Diane from a bar in Montrose. She drove over and we retreated to my hotel after a long chat and a string of drinks. Our relationship was like a Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton thing, always a happy time complete with plenty of smiles and thrusting. She left before dawn and I left for San Antonio the next day. Diane would move to Colorado.

I called her once when I was up that way, but we couldn't get together on a time to see each other. I think it was better that way. Our entanglement, brief as it was, carried a distinct Houston flavor. I was okay with that...

- 30 -

The Patrick Alcatraz Affair...

2009-10-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

"Smart and coy, a little crazy

The kinda face that starts a fight

Let me tell you 'bout the girl I had last night

Piercing eyes, like a raven

You seemed to share my secret sin

We were high before the night started kickin' in..."

- Survivor, High On You

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

FORT WORTH, Texas - There was something youthful and neat about how she would say I hurt her feelings. It forced something in me, somewhere down where I am alleged to have a heart, but hearing her say the word and sounding it as if saying "fillings" made me laugh. Lucia never stood for laughter when wishing to discuss the merits of our relationship. But it was much worse when I'd do it on purpose, just so that I could hear her say it in that lovely South American accent she'd throw at me. My mother always said I had something of a grasp on what made me happy. It was that, she would go on, that told her she'd not have to worry about women hurting me. She was straight-out dead-on about that, absolutely.

Lucia was in her late 20s when I met her through a friend at my favorite coffee shop here. I was told she worked for the city water department, over at new accounts, where she helped people get service. Later, when I'd asked her about her job, she'd said it was okay, but that people always wanted her to make deals, which was something she was not authorized to do. Lucia would make a face when telling me about the poor people that walked into her office, he ones who always needed a break on the deposit or the first billing. I would listen and then shoot the chat over into something else. Most women don't really like to talk about their jobs, mainly because they are rarely interesting. As a young man, I had visited a Mexican bordello and had tried to engage a middle-aged prostitute into some sort of conversation. When I asked her about the many men she had to fuck, she said, "Are you going to fuck me, or are you going to bore me?" I let it go, unzipping my Jordache jeans like a schoolboy - fast and in a way that showed her I, too, could obey the Devil in the darkness of a dingy, utilitarian room.

In any case, Lucia was married when I met her. Her old man worked for one of the telecoms and was something of a grouch. I never met the guy, and, well, that always was par for the infidelity course. Lucia would come to my apartment near the campus of TCU during his work hours and we would eat something or another before heading for the sack. Why guys ignore their lovely wives is the big mystery for me. Lucia was a shaver when I met her, yet she pleased me by letting her pubic hair grow wild, which is something that drives me wild, perhaps because I've always liked to get lost in all my undertakings. A black patch-on-the-grow under a pair of black panties sends me there; there being the point between our galaxy and the one immediately to the north, that neat, dimly-lit spot in the universe reserved for lovers of the abused. I applied for that job a long time ago, yes. When I got it, I began hollering, "Yes! Yes!" And I've never lost it, inspite of notes from the landlord asking about those few serious romantic flirtations I've also enjoyed.

Well, Lucia wanted to get married and she told me that the afternoon her lawyer filed the required papers for divorce. As could be expected, I was taken aback, left only with this to say: "Well, I hope you know some other dudes." She took it not well. (I know that sentence could be written another way, but I like it, so lump it.) We nonetheless proceeded to go naked and climb atop my bed, where she moaned me to the other side of the moon, left me there a bit when she began to masturbate, and then went back for me when she curved her neck and upper torso to take my cock in her beautiful mouth. Watching a woman masturbate, for me, is like watching two dogs fucking. I get it, but I wonder about it. And so I found myself sliding in and out of precious Lucia, my mind kinda back into it, the side of my brain assigned this sort of task concentrating like a motherfucker. I would lower myself into her and Lucia would back toward me in a synchronicity reserved for pistons. I would retreat amid fast-surfacing bitchings and then she would climb on me and began to ride like the wind, as they say in westerns.

I love the sounds of unrestrained, fight-me sex in a small bedroom of a small apartment, places where the walls can do nothing but fuckin' take it and take it and take it until the volcano erupts. This one was pulling at my moptop hair as she went to full gallop, her eyes ablaze and her teeth clenched as if to miss the vaginal effect of one plowing would scratch the Hell out of the Buddy Holly record. I loved fucking Lucia. She had stored so much energy by the time she came to me. Sooooooooh much.

She was the one I should've gifted with a trophy of sorts...

- 30 -

Cold Sands of Winter...

2009-10-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

"I would say that if someone only has a short time to live and decides to spend that time sitting beside a bed, watching a man sleeping, then that must be love..." - Paulo Coelho

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

GALVESTON, Texas - She would laugh when I'd tell her stories about me being on the wrong planet, about me soon to be lifted off Earth for transport to my rightful world, always somewhere better and cleaner, and then she would reach for my belt buckle and work on removing my pants. That Winter, Kletha let me know she wanted to have sex with me, even as I befriended her cartoonist husband, Claude, a nice guy. We danced around the issue as if around a tree-sized mulberry bush, me wanting and not wanting to, Kletha telling me Claude would be okay with it. I didn't know much about her and I would pay for that in the end.

But for a few short and cold months, she and I playfully toyed with the idea of her, I thought, dreams. She'd meet me at the lounge of the Galvez Hotel, where Claude drew caricatures of tourists in the lobby. And he'd come in to have a drink with us, call us kids (he was much older than she was), and then say he had to get back to his drawings. We danced to songs like Billy Ocean's Caribbean Queen and Denis deYoung's Desert Moon, and then we'd walk out to the nearby beach to go for a late-night walk. It was during those times that she would get silly and ask me if I didn't have the hots for her and all that. I told her I did, and then I'd mention Claude being my friend, and she'd remind me that he'd given his okay. It perplexed me, cause he hadn't said a thing to me. But I played along with her, taking her by the hand or throwing my arm around her as we trolled for shells.

One day, a Saturday morning, she asked to me meet her at an eatery we both liked in the Strand Historical District, a joint by the name of Donna's Diner, where she loved the macadamia pancakes. We did that and then stepped out to the neighboring shops, where she bought me a Hawaiian shirt on sale and I got her a nifty blouse. Her apartment was nearby, so we booked it over there. She wanted me to see how she looked in the blouse. I walked into her bedroom and watched her lose her shirt and could see through her bra, could see a pair of good-sized nipples in full alarm. "What do you think?" she asked and I went ahead with the game. "Bra," I said and she slipped out of it with grace. The new blouse fell to the floor as we fell on the bed and I began kissing her. She was a petite woman with short, goldish hair, not an ounce more than her body could carry, and the sort of energy that built pyramids. She fit nicely, in other words.

We would make love most of the rest of that winter and she would come see me in Houston after The Houston Post assigned me to the State Desk. We'd buy take-out and hit the sack on most nights, me forever asking her to turn on her tummy so that I could enjoy her nice, round ass. From time to time, we'd go to the Caribana, a reggae club near Houston Baptist University, where we danced ten-minute songs and laughed like kids.

Then I took a job with The Boston Globe and left town. I'd stay there awhile before moving onto New York, where I wiote for the Post. Contact was lost entirely. I didn't hear about her until a few years later, when my Houston Post colleague Steve Olafson sent me a newspaper clipping telling of her death from cancer. She couldn't have been more than 33 years old at the time, damned young. Also in the mix was something or another about Kletha wanting to have a baby at the time she was seeing me. That would have been wild news for me. I know we never used a condom, but I also know that she never said anything about being pregnant. Who knows? I'm sure she could have contacted me if she'd wanted to do that. All I know is that she had a thirst for life, that whenever she was with me, she was upbeat and flighty and cute and dressed in short skirts that forever showed me the beginnings of her devilish thighs. All dolled up and everywhere to go, absolutely.

I have no way of saying this for sure, but Kletha is the only lover I've had who is no longer alive. I think. And I hope...

- 30 -

Romance in Gotham City...

2009-10-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

"They say when you look at some one walking away it means you want them to stay..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

NEW YORK - I heard she stayed a few more years and then went back to her hometown in Virginia. Who knows? We lost touch after that winter, when we'd met at the opening of the Cowgirl Hall Of Fame restaurant in Greenwich Village. Kathy had been checking-in coats and I had bopped in with my friends, David and Melanie Bartlett. Tickets had come to Dave somehow, perhaps through someone at The New York Post, where he and I worked. Saturday nights usually took me elsewhere, to places where the crowds threw guys on girls and girls on guys. Dave thought checking-in with the cowboy mob would be a taste of back home. I met them somewhere and we took the subway all the way down, stopping at the White Horse Tavern for a cold one just to get in the mood. I remember I wore a blue-striped shirt under a black sweater and my black trenchcoat, which I slipped out of to give it to the pretty girl handing out the claim slips.

Kathy was her name, one of those wholly American names for the sort of woman who wears her attractiveness well. She wore a scarf of the sort worn by stewardesses. I handed her my coat and looked at Dave and Melanie, making a Playboy's face, nodding like a teenager. Dave and Mel laughed, knowing my ways. We strolled into the large banquet room and arrived just in time to see Patsy Montana, America's last cowgirl, twirling a rope with the appropriate western soundtrack and a hundred or so New Yorkers yelping corny-as-hell yippees and yippeeee-kai-ohs. I kept glancing back at the coat-check girl and managed to grab her attention, me waving and she waving back. Patsy Montana began singing something or another and I leaned over and told Dave and Melanie I'd be elsewhere for a few minutes. In seconds, I was back with Kathy, chatting and getting info. People came and went and she would hand-out coats or claim slips. I thought she looked like a movie star, her long, radiant hair in place, face as natural as a baby's. When she asked about me and about my work, I handed her my card. In New York, a business card with the name of one of the newspapers is....well, gold with the chicks.

I called her two days later and invited her out to dinner. She agreed to come to our building on South Street near the Brooklyn Bridge and soon walked into the Post's newsroom, all frickin' eyes on her, the frumpy, big-nosed female reporters wondering what all the fuss was about. So much grace, was the phrase that stole my entire brain. Kathy would come over every now & then in the ensuing weeks. Once, Mike Pearl, the newspaper's grizzled police beat reporter, cornered me in the men's room, asking, "Man, how the Hell do you get all these pretty women?"

"I ask them out," I said.

"Gotta be more to it than that, shit," he shot back.

"Well, yeah," I returned. "Plus, with women, it's not what you say or do...it's how you make them feel."

He laughed and said something about Kathy looking like the actress Susan St. James and I said, "Yeah, I get that about her, too."

Kathy lived with a girlfriend in a small apartment on Hudson Street in the Village, a place at the end of a narrow hallway in one of those old buildings without an elevator. Actually, her apartment building was about three blocks from the White Horse Tavern, a place we later would go to often. She would walk the frozen airs nicely in her own black overcoat, looking patrician alongside a mop-topped guy in battered boots and ragged jeans.

She took classes at Hunter's College by day, majoring in Sex Ed.

And, yeah, when we finally hit the sack for love, she insisted on me wearing a condom. I hate those things, cause it's like a dog took my place, or somesuch imagery. But she was worth it. I've never taken a class in sex, but it seemed to me that whatever Kathy was learning was right up my alley. In fact, she was the one who introduced me to anal sex, and, yeah, I took to it as if some crazed addict after that, suggesting it, if not demanding it, when other women arrived.

It had nothing to do with Kathy, but I recall this other woman in Fort Worth hit me with this after she'd taken it up the ass: "It scared me, 'cause I liked it."

Any hetero guy who says he doesn't come away with something new & different after making it with a new woman is...either an idiot or some dolt unaware of what it is he is doing. And, absolutely, when Kathy would exit the cab in front of her apartment, she would look back toward me as I sat in the backseat...and I would turn my head to look back at her again as the car began to roll...

- 30 -

Suffering A Cold, Winter's Night...

2009-10-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

"In yet another annoying moment of mortality's sheer and relentless fight against me, I fall to a Goddamned flu. See you when I feel better..." - Patrick Alcatraz, Out of Sorts

Ann of the 12-Hour Days...

2009-10-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

"Take chances, take a lot of them. Because honestly, no matter where you end up and with whom, it always ends up just the way it should be. Your mistakes make you who you are. You learn and grow with each choice you make. Everything is worth it. Say how you feel always. Be you, and be okay with it..."

- Unknown

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

MEXICO CITY - We were busy dispatching reports of the horrible earthquake that day, when my Houston Post colleague Steve Olafson asked about our ride back to the hotel. I said I'd be going for a drink before that, availing myself of the bar on the top floor of the Foreign Correspondents Center. Thousands were dead and here, on our third day in the city of millions, we didn't really want to head back to the El Presidente Hotel in Los Pinos, mainly because of the frickin' after-shocks. Steve nodded and we walked up the stairs. I had another reason for needing a drink; I'd invited this reporter from Chicago to join me and she said she'd be there. Her name was Ann, a thin and tallish women in her late-20s with longish soft-brown hair. She'd been seated next to me in the part of the building where we'd been using computers to shoot our stories to our respective newspapers. She'd seemed friendly.

The bar was lit-up like some backyard outing in Hawaii, reds and blues and yellows, a colorful scene that went against the black & blue pain being felt across the monstrous city. A massive earthquake had struck Mexico City three days earlier just as the day had dawned, dooming many, many residents who'd been either getting ready for the day or in the shower. Life seemed to have floated-off elsewhere, and maybe that's why I thought feeling a little bit of it with this woman from the Midwest might be a good idea.

Our photographer Gary Thompson joined us and then Ann ambled in. I waved her over and she angled toward us just as we finished talking about the next day's reporting plan. We drank talking about what we'd seen and experienced, me having been at the morgue to see stacks of dust-covered dead bodies and Steve about his citywide patrol aboard a local cab. Ann talked about filing a story to do with the collapse of an apartment building, where she'd seen and talked with opera superstar Placido Domingo. "He was there digging for an aunt," Ann said, looking perhaps too sad for my eyes. We talked for about an hour and then we headed downstairs to look for transportation.

"Ann's coming with me," I said to my colleagues.

We caught a battered cab sporting some fresh dents (falling concrete, who knows?) and we rode back to El Presidente not wishing to talk too much, at least not about the disaster. I had a bottle of wine near my bed, really because the newspaper had booked me into the 33rd floor and, well, thoughts of dying in a skyscraper collapse had entered my tired brain. But we were tired, and so we went, and we rode the elevator to my floor. In the room, Ann threw her shoulder bag on a small sofa and said she'd be freshening up in the bathroom. I walked to the small sink and rinsed-out two plastic cups, pouring wine into both and walking them back to the bedside tables.

Ann popped out and said she thought we should take a shower.

"It would be one way to go," she said, smiling, but thinking earthquake. I said yeah, there's a certain need in me to feel clean, sure. I was getting out of my boots when I heard the shower water storm out of the faucet. She said something about liking it kind warm and I said that'll do. What we did in the shower was what a man and woman would do, especially a man and woman coming off a long, long day of chasing death and reaction to death.

The lovemaking on the big bed finished off the night.

I saw her off the next morning, after breakfast in the room, and she said she had my card and would be in touch. I didn't see her again, but she did leave me a note at the correspondents center. "My editors are pulling me back to Chicago," she'd written. "Good luck to you."

Journalism is all about the next edition. So, I have come to learn, is wheelhouse romance...

- 30 -

Evenings Along N. Collins Street...

2009-10-09T08:11:00.000-07:00

"Nothing stays the same. You grow up, make friends, lose friends, go to college, lose track of people, meet new ones and sometimes you ask yourself why. But all I can tell you is that every single experience you go through changed you in some way. Every new person who comes into your life changes you. Every moral dilemma or emotional experience you come up against changes you. It’s your job to decide how…" - Unknown

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

ARLINGTON, Texas - We met in Biology class during my third year in college, and that came by way of a glance over toward a beautiful girl with longish hair. Marcy was her name, a redhead from California chasing a job in the DFW metroplex. As things happened, I walked into this frickin' cavernous classroom, walked up the stairs to one of the middle rows and sat directly behind her, after a smile, of course. I loved to smile at girls back then, perhaps for myself, but some for them. Some days, I still do it.

In any case, the lecture was about amoebas or protozoa or some boring bullshit like that. After awhile, bored stiff, I bent over to say this to her: "May I see your breasts?" It was a line I learned to use often, mainly because it got me somewhere with chicks. Marcy turned around and smiled before asking, "Are you serious?" I nodded, thinking, well, yes, I am serious. "Not here," she said, sweetly. I sat back after smiling back at her before she turned around and gave the professor her full attention. The line was not unlike others used by my friends in school. My friend Paul liked to work reverse psychology, once telling a girl at a disco, "Not tonight. I've had too much sex this week." I'd never have said that, but it worked for him.

Marcy scooted-off that first day, and by the time I made it to the hallway outside the class, she had vanished. It was one reason I hated signing up for classes that registered more than a hundred students; it was Hell to get out. But two days later, I walked into the class a bit late, got an unmistakable scowl from the prof and made my way up the stairs. It was then that I spotted Marcy waving me over. She'd held a seat next to hers for me. The lecture dragged on. I rose like a champ after the session ended and asked her if she had time for a snack at the student union. We walked over, me hoping I'd not see any of the other broads I'd been seeing. I didn't, and so we sat and talked before she said she had stuff to do at home.

"Ok," I said. "...So...about the breasts?"

"I'm thinking about it," she said, laughing.

I watched her walk away, my eyes frozen on her lower back and ass in a sway.

It would be another week before she'd invite me to her apartment on N. Collins Street. She threw burgers on the grill out in her small balcony and then walked back into the kitchen to slice potatoes. I was taken when she sliced one in two and began licking it. "It tastes just like sperm," she said, laughing. We ate listening to music by The Marshall Tucker Band, which she liked, and then I made my move. Shortly, thanks perhaps to the cheap wine I'd brought along, we were in her tiny bedroom, Marcy losing her blouse and bra and me thanking God for the sight of her two luscious, supple, over-sized breasts. There was nothing for a Texas boy to do but approach and suck.

"Is this what you wanted to see?" she asked, coyly.

I slurped something out of the side of my mouth that I hoped would sound in the affirmative. That lasted long minutes, until she said we needed to move on to better things. I stepped back and watched her drop her shorts and then slip out of her panties. "Now you," she said, and I worked the same drill.

"Will you eat me first," she asked with all the faith of a lifelong nun.

"I will," I said, lowering myself so that my nose was where my hose wanted to be. "I love it," Marcy said in a soft voice while I worked the vertical tasting of God's choicest morsel. We would fuck many times more, doing it even on weekend outings to Lake Of The Pines in East Texas, where I loved to spend time at her father's cabin in the winter. I did well in the Biology class thanks to Marcy, but we split up after I met my future wife Narda in the school library near the end of that semester. The last time I saw Marcy was at a 7-11 on West Division Street. She was walking out with a bag of chips and some soda when she spotted my beat-up VW Beetle in the parking space in front of the front door.

We traded pleasantries and she said she'd seen me with a girl and I said I'd seen her with a dude and we both said well, it's good seeing you now. I went into the store after inhaling a deep breadth for the good times and Marcy disappeared into the night outside. Some books have heartfelt endings, is what I've said over the years...

- 30 -

That Year in Arlington....

2009-10-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

"A year went by…
- left me wondering in the corner
2 years...
- and I thought only time can heal
5 years...
- wondering for the answer
7 years...
10 years...
- question still unanswered
I guess it doesn’t matter anymore
It was just a moment of time
of pure innocence and laughter..."

- Anonymous

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

ARLINGTON, Texas - She would laugh uproariously, push her arm out to run her fingers through my moptop hair and then reach for her hamburger to bite it in a sexy, sexy way - all mouth, tongue sweeping her lips. I was in college - the year before I got married - and we were at a joint called Blossom's barely three blocks from the campus. Lillian worked her magic on me that last year, when her husband would leave her for days while he worked the traveling salesman act across North Texas for some pharmaceutical company. She had come to me.

Who knows how it came to pass, but Warren Zevon's song "Excitable Boy" always reminded her of me, or, well, that's what she would tell me when we met after classes, when we would walk over to my friends Bob & Darlene's house just down the walkway from the student center. She would wonder about having sex with me in the beginning in a stranger's home, and then she would dive into it with the vigor of a panther. I always thought her husband was stupid for not tending to her needs. Lillian was some three years older than I was at the time, the mother of two daughters under 10 years of age. Yes, I'd drive to her house in West Arlington, on Little Road off I-20, way after their bedtime and stroll in to find Lillian in her nightwear, folding clothes until we lit-out for the bedroom at the far end of the main hallway. Sometimes, I wouldn't even give her time to slip out of her thong. We were hot and we were going upstream.

But there was more. The student thing sat well with me. My broadcast class had me working a script for a 30-minute radio drama and Lillian had joined the cast. We recorded the damned thing during an all-nighter, and then she and I went at it out in the Communications Building parking lot. The title of the show was Western Brouhaha, a silly thing that also starred most of my friends in voice bits that drew genuine laughter while they recited insane lines like, "Rita, bring me muh jeans..." in the post-coital scene. Thrown in for more ridiculousness was a river of sound effects that included a protracted sound of rifle gunfire. It was college.

The times were okay with much of what I was doing. Women seemed plentiful in town. We rolled with the punches and the yesses and the nos. Lillian would drive over at every opportunity, walk up the stairs of my place and arrive tanned and ready in short shorts. Her auburn-gray pubic patch threw me to the ceiling, me playing the willing sexual lunatic - a hellbent fucker out to please. We were high before the blowjob started kickin' in, absolutely. I was stunned to see Lillian naked the first time, mainly because as a tallish chick, she wore her body well. Later, I'd let her fall atop my nakedness and let her do as she pleased.

Who knows what became of Lillian? I went after my career in Journalism, rarely came back, and never heard from her again. Life is funny that way. Me? I grew to see these things as different films to be acted out, as no doubt most guys do. It is when I line these women up on some mental stage that I see them standing there naked in their bushy triangle pubic patches, all prideful, some covering their breasts, others their crotch, a few smiling, none of them throwing the finger at me. What a time it was.

If only I'd have had them all on the same night, in line and smiling, walking up to do their part for Mankind...

- 30 -

Oh, Sweet Morning...

2009-10-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

"All girls really want

is someone to want them back..."
- Anonymous

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

NEW YORK, N.Y. - She would leave a note on my desk and say she would be stopping for shrimp at a bodega near her place on the Upper East Side, E. 85th Street, halfway up the block and across from a fire station, third floor. I grew to look for those notes from Kathy that year when I wrote some sensationalistic stuff for The New York Post - a tabloid newspaper most New Yorkers picked up on their way into the subway and threw away when they exited. I must say it was a fun time traipsing up and down crowded Manhattan, with friends and new faces - all the possibilities imaginable.

I'd call her from the newsroom and ask, "Wok, right?" and she'd say, "Yep...you bring the wine."

She worked as a copy editor in the Features Department of The Post. Katie had come to me by way of a copy editor friend on the news side, David Bartlett, who'd walked over to introduce himself to me as a fellow Texan my first week on the job. I went on to write about wild Mafia murders, hit men on the loose, boozing teens in neighboring New Jersey, etc., etc. After deadline, we'd usually hang out at some bar. Katie would show-up sooner or later and we'd chat, always somewhat cooly. One night, David called from Greenwich Village and said he had tickets to a Willie Colon concert and would leave one at the door for me. I popped out and took the subway all the way down, walking into the club to find it filled with smoke and tough-looking Puerto Ricans. David and his wife Melanie waved me over and we grabbed a few beers while waiting for the music to burst out.

I hadn't seen her walk in, but a half-hour later, Katie was standing next to me, poking me on the shoulder. I turned to see her smiling. The music was savagely great, inspirational and making me want to work the whole night. Clubs in NYC do not close at 2 Ayem, so that always was an idea to think about. She wore a fashionable black leather jacket, thick sweater, short skirt and ankle-high boots. I watched her when she walked off to the bar and knew this one would be a fighter in the sack.

Katie's Jewishness included a certain joy for life. Her apartment was no bigger than a North Dallas closet and her bed was a futon she folded out out at night time. We took a cab back to her place, me kissing on her exposed legs right above the knee while the cabbie whistled some annoying tune. The walk up the stairs and down the hallway that led to her apartment was lost in the anticipation.

We were making love 15 minutes later, going great guns after the fondling and the groping...when the fire station alarms across the street tore at the silence of the cold, winter night. In a way, I grew to like those fire response interruptions, perhaps because it elongated the pleasure...

- 30 -

My Affair With A Hugger...

2009-09-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-25T07:14:00.000-07:00

"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....

2009-09-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

"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 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..

2009-09-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-09-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-14T13:24:00.001-07:00

"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...

2009-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-09-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-07T06:30:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

"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...

2009-09-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

"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....

2009-09-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

“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...

- 30 -

NAKED LUNCH...

2009-09-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

Deconstructing The Valley Brain....

2009-08-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

BIRTH OF A NEWSPAPER...

2009-08-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

CAMELOT GONE...

2009-08-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

His Collection of Afternoon Ballads...

2009-08-24T19:27:00.000-07:00

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....

2009-08-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

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

2009-08-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

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...

- 30 -

The Corner of Tenth & Hackberry...

2009-08-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

MEET THE FOKKERS...

2009-08-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

"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...

- 30 -

She Came In Through The Kitchen Window...

2009-07-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

"Yeah, I could eat a horse..." - Rey Guevara, at the Mexico City earthquake, 1985

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - So, I'm having a bummer of a humpday when things turn gorgeously interesting: city police find a body in a shallow ravine a block from where I sleep, which excites me. And then my friend Carrie calls out of the real blue to say, yes, she'll take me out to lunch. The body can go to Hell (cops say it was a young, tattooed dude the killers merely dumped), but, if you know me (me being single and picky), you know of my titanic battles with deciding on what to eat and on where to go get it.

So, thanks to my fawning God for throwing the interesting murder story at my feet...and for making Dear Carrie grab her cellular telephone so that she could call me. What would I do without local crime and local friends?

[She's on her way. I'll finish this later today...]

- 30 -

Something ends, so that Something New Begins...

2009-07-29T08:17:00.001-07:00

One of those days...

- 30 -

The Comatose Newspaper...

2009-07-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

"Oh, sweet morning. Is your head not right? Did you hear my warning? This is the time of times..." - Badly Drawn Boy, The Time of Times

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - It's no big mystery: they call it shrinking the product while growing the bottom line. Fast food businesses know the concept well. That is why the patty in a Whataburger is not what it was 10-15 years ago. So, when you reach for the daily newspaper in any of your local racks, what you are getting is a thinner version of the same product you got for a quarter not that long ago. The McAllen Monitor is going through a weird time, lashings seemingly brought on by a slumping economy and the widespread belief that, well, American newspapers are dying. Is The Monitor dying? Only its owners in Southern California know enough to be able to say with some credibility. Rumors and scuttlebutt abound that Freedom Communications, owner of The Monitor, the Valley Morning Star in downrange Harlingen, and The Herald in poverty stricken Brownsville, is said to be in deep debt. Some clues have surfaced about where the company is headed and what that means to its many individual properties.

The Monitor is so skimpy on Mondays it carries no Editorials/Opinion Page. Today, it ironically featured a lengthy column written by its managing editor, my friend Henry Miller, recounting his battle against the annoying bulge. Miller writes he once weighed more than 300 pounds. The irony is that there was a time when The Monitor also weighed-in with more pages and, yeah, more news. Its recent losses have mirrored Miller's weight loss, so much so that many in town believe the newspaper not known for anything in particular will soon go tabloid and become a three-days-a-week newspaper - as did its sister paper in Mesa, Arizona earlier this year. It's all about cutting costs, or one would think. The Monitor, serving a local population of more than 100,000 humans, can't seem to get past reporting on meetings, chasing handy crime reports, and offering an occasional feature story that actually interests its fading readership. Nobody I know knows exactly where The Monitor is in its deathbed, or in its fight to survive.

Among the things I notice about it is its writing staff, not exactly a group of interesting people. Reporter Jeremy Roebuck seems to have a handle on what makes for a well-written, meaningful tale. But there is little after Roebuck. I suspect he feels like major leaguer Albert Pujols would feel if he played for the lowly Edinburg Roadrunners. That Sports Page is woeful. It begins with the sports editor and the sportswriters. The Monitor's sports-types just don't cut it. It is pedestrian reporting at its worst. There is something weird about publishing game coverage of UT-PA sports written by a UT-PA employee (Hell-o, Jim McKone Days), or with having employees of the area semi-pro teams write game reports. That is the mark of a smalltown newspaper, better suited for the hellholes of far West Texas.

Today, The Monitor published a story about small businesses and how they are battling the sluggish economy. Yes, that is a timely story. It is the story of all of us, absolutely.

But what about a story on what's going on at The Monitor? This newspaper works its revenue quota and then transfers large amounts of money to its corporate offices in Irvine, California. It has been doing that forever. Perhaps it's time for The Monitor to level with its readers. Will it? Not likely.

Newspapers have a long, long history of slapping readers with bad news related to their operation on the morning they are ready to do it, and not before. But something's up with The Monitor and the other Freedom dailies in the Rio Grande Valley. The three individuals shown above, Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen (in dark suit), mustachioed Editor Steve Fagan, and Managing Editor Henry Miller (goatee), have the info.

Just don't expect them to share it with you anytime soon...

- 30 -

SUNDAY EDITORIAL: Soundtracks...

2009-07-26T05:50:00.000-07:00

"Patrick, do you like to dance? could you twirl me around the dancefloor and keep me in that state of balance with chaos? i'm not always good at following, but that's often when i have the most fun. i'm distracted all morning now. lazy. thinking of sex when there are THINGS TO BE DONE. is this the spell that can cloud reality. the sun is bright and the air crisp and cool. a morning for robe and slippers. if we were to be together i would definitely want to please you." - Dallas, 2008

THE SONG:

If you could see me now

The one who said that he’d rather roam
The one who said he’d rather be alone
If you could only see me now.

If I could hold you now
Just for a moment if I could make you mine
Just for a while turn back the hands of time
If I could only hold you now.

I’ve been too long in the wind
Too long in the rain
Taking any comfort that I can
Looking back and longing for the freedom of my chains
Lying in your loving arms again.

If you could hear me now,
Singing somewhere through the lonely night,
Dreaming of the arms that held me tight
If you could only hear me now...

- Loving Arms, Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge

THERE...

2009-07-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

By Ron Mexico
Contributor

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas – Shorn of all recent memory and the desire to go look for it, Patrick parked his pickup outside a bar on the western fringes of this falling border town and walked in wanting – needing – a taste of the hard life. Things with Rachel had warped-off, and again he thought a dive into the unknown would be one answer. She was gone; the old bar by the side of the road waved him in. You could fall for the feelings men hate and go rot in some corner, or you could push it away, push it so hard that the imagery of loss would melt into the rising afternoon scorch. Patrick pushed his pickup’s door shut roughly, the bang of rusting metal coming together serving as metaphor for the fast-flashing finale that had been the end of his brief romance with Rachel. He thought he’d heard from one of her friends that she'd flown to Florida, to forget him under a cascading waterfall of booze to be found in nightclubs along the ritzy beachfront hotels, there with the wily Cubans. Patrick stepped into the bar.

He wanted to merely amble over to a table by the back wall, over alongside the dusty jukebox. What was it about the two-three days after a break-up, is what occupied his grass-whorled brain. He’d been running that question across his mind on the highway and still had no answer when he asked the arriving waitress for a bottle of any Mexican beer. First, he’d thrown an old Beatles CD into his truck’s dash player and raised the volume to the clouds. Then, he’d pushed the off button and sailed for miles watching images that really weren’t moving across his vehicle’s windshield: Rachel splayed all over his living room couch, him seated on an easy chair across from the ancient, wicker coffee table between them, Rachel smiling and then saying she would not cheat on her husband again, him throwing his legs and boots atop the coffee table and leaning back as far as he could go on the chair, Rachel rolling around before finding her seated posture, him asking the whys and what nows, Rachel declaring some freedom from lies and betrayals, him wondering if she’d be up for one last ride, Rachel saying she had to go, him nodding forlornly, Rachel popping up to her feet to blow him a kiss, him saying, well, it was a chapter, Rachel shaking her short skirt into place and then skipping toward the house’s front door, him holding his place on the chair, Rachel saying she was sorry, him saying, sure, that’s an ending.

“Glass?” the waitress was asking as she set the bottle down on his table.

“Nope,” Patrick said in reply.

“Snack? We have chips and salsa…burritos...queso dip...”

“No, but thanks.”

He watched her turn and retreat to the bar, where a lanky, high-throated dude sat on a barstool smoking a cigarette and bullshitting with a portly, mustachioed bartender who looked like a cross between a hog and a walrus. Rachel had to be drinking, too. The winds blowing in from the east carried a certain feeling. Patrick could think that she was drinking with him, only 1,000 miles apart. His idea of the perfect love affair always began with a long kiss, moved to the gorgeous warmth of evening loving, and forever ended with the bindings of ragged feelings that required a quick escape.

The waitress stared at him from the far end of the bar. She was not a pretty woman, more utilitarian than anything else, someone’s idea of a quick porking and, sweetheart, it’s off to the card game, that kind. Patrick usually took a week between women. He rose and turned a bit to front the battered jukebox. Then he scanned the song selections, settling on one after a minute or so. “Fuckin’ Phil Collins,” he said to no one in a soft voice, announcing his choice.

Love has no memory, he told himself. Not real love.

It flirts with the joy and the pain, the stretchings and the tugs, the ins and the outs, the mixture of arrival and departure, like a birth. Real love couldn’t stay. Like even the neatest song or the loveliest movie, it had its end.

Real love, he'd heard somewhere, forces you to be as a page that aches for a word which speaks on a theme that is timeless. Patrick knew that song like a sonofabitch, its lyrics played well with his rolling philosophy – the one that said all he could know was his own time…

- 30 -

NO HONOR HERE...

2009-07-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

"I have climbed highest mountains. I have run through the fields, only to be with you, only to be with you. I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." - U2, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

McALLEN, Texas - Gone for much too long, I returned to the Rio Grande Valley last winter with a great hunger for recapturing my youth, days in high school when everything seemed possible and everything seemed here. But what is here today? It's hard to connect it with my past. I see trouble. I see danger. I see unrest, and I see something foreign. The Rio Grande Valley, land of my ancestors, has segued into something Middle Eastern. A wall is going up where I used to go hunting for snakes, there just this side of a river that always welcomed my dives and leaps off that rope we set up off a tree at a state park west of Mission. What hath Valley Man wrought? This Border Wall, a fence to the distant federal government, has brought a scene out of some foreboding Kafka novel - a story of rape and pillage and plunder. How the local populace has allowed this to happen is the so-called $64,000 question.

Last night, I accepted a friend's invitation to go see The Wall, a documentary film quickly gaining support as a major work of journalism. The project of California director Ricardo A. Martinez, it is a moment-in-time put to film. It is at once informative and tragic. I am somewhat familiar with the wall, although having lived afar, it never really entered my questioning conscience. Geography does that you. The film brings a mountain of information every citizen of the RGV needs to know about this pitiful undertaking, from the shenanigans of the Bush Administration to the fight the government found in many area citizens and elected officials. The tragedy lies in the fact that perhaps there should have been more opposition, as in serious vigorous in-the-streets dissent.

The wall is up in some places along the northern banks of the passive Rio Grande, there in all its ugliness and wonderment. It isn't needed, not there dividing two countries with a long, long history of mostly-positive relations. That it is policed by more than 30,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents is the other aggravation. This is made painfully clear in The Wall, which drew more than 200 people to Cine El Rey here on a hot and humid Friday night. It deftly noted that the government counts barely 5,000 such agents along the longer Canadian border to the north.

The film is a compilation of both interviews and informatrion offered via charts and video clippings showing federal officials, congress folk and bureaucrats, doing their damndest to explain something that should never have been considered or constructed. It featured property owners aghast at the idea that a 50-foot monstrosity was being considered for their backyards, and it featured a fight by Brownsville resident Bob Lucio, owner of a golf course the government wanted to dissect with its fence.

The culture fights in this country are a big part of our history. We tend to want to divide ourselves from time to time just to show we can do it. If it hasn't been the Irish, it's been the Italians or the Poles or the Asians. At present, America is wrestling with the Hispanic - the undocumented immigrant and the accomplished citizen. It is not without reason that some in this country have made a career of stomping on Hispanic immigrants (former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo comes to mind here) and on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican by descent, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fear rules some of these people. Fear of seeing their English language become a secondary language, and fear of seeing Blacks and Hispanics and Asians rise to positions of power in the government. The wall is nothing more than yet another rallying cry for these insecure Americans. It isn't Jesse Jackson posing the immigrant threat, nor is it former Hawaiian U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye. It is another American fronting this fight, the racist. Everybody knows it, because their fear is being worn on their ever-ragging faces. Commentaror Pat Buchanan, a Republican, is a perfect example of this American. You can't erect the wall fast enough for the Buchanans, and it has been Buchanan who has been vigorous in trying to discredit Sotomayor.

So, it is for that reason that films such as The Wall are needed. Everytime it plays here or elsewhere, the ful power of the truth is brought to bear. I am proud of director Martinez, a graduate of the New York University film school. He has delivered a timely blow to those who would merely push a horrible piece of Nazi-like work on a population that has done much for this great land and that deserves better. This was brought home to me in a scene where a Border Patrol agent fires a shot into the head of a would-be immigrant in a dusty road running alongside the fence somwhere west of here. The gasps that rose from the audience last night was haunting, as much as was the video of that North Vietnamese having his head blown off during the Vietnam War. There is something wrong and awful in that. It speaks of a barbaric act sanctioned by us, the so-called last, great freedom outpost on a God-abandoned planet.

There is no honor in the building of this wall.

How that cannot be evident to every American is beyond me.

I suspect that the fate of this wall is the same fate that is meeting a similar monstrosity built by the Israelis to separate themselves from the Palestinians they hate: The long-oppressed Palestinians have taken to blowing-up chunks of it into the harsh lands they live in, chunks of concrete flying off into the desert in clouds of dust that seem to carry the entire weight of what it means to be civilized. This wall along the Texas-Mexico border should be torn down and its scrap metal sent to the bottom of the deepest ocean.

Let me repeat: There is no honor here...

- 30 -

Pulp Mango....

2009-07-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away..." - A Traditional Song

By Ron Mexico

Contributor

LA CHULA, Texas - "Had the love been real?" Rachel was asking as she fought back a king-sized desire to pull the trigger. It was almost dark and the silver-blue reflection of her pistol coming off the motel mirror threw a rather lovely light on Patrick's head. He wanted no part of dying, but now believed he'd likely go quickly, some brightened, blooming cloud of smoke being the last thing he'd ever see. Rachel pushed her arm forward and ran a hand through his tussled hair. It was an ending, Patrick was driven to say. This drew a snicker of sorts from Rachel, who then said, "I'm gonna hate not seeing that hair ever again." Her fingers worked his scalp and Patrick could only nod in agreement. It wasn't confirmation of her loss, no. He thought of the saddle he'd ordered for his horse, and how now who'd pick it up?

"Was it something I did?" he asked, moving his neck a bit to loosen the rope she'd tied around it and then to a chair where she had thrown their clothing. Naked and tied and having a gun to his head felt too-Cuban, he thought. But, then, Rachel had walked out of her jeans and panties and now sat at the end of the saggy motel bed wearing only a yellow halter top, her legs crossed but not so that he couldn't see her luxuriant patch of auburned pubic hair. She cleared her throat and he waited on her reply. Had anyone else been in the room and asked Patrick why he would ask such a thing, Patrick would have said, "I take it she's had me followed..."

"Nope," Rachel threw out.

"Then, what's this all about?"

"Just," she told him.

He wanted to ask, but he knew her well-enough to know that dancing around the Mulberry bush was Rachel's specialty, the one thing everyone in town would have said about her anyway. Instead of chasing a losing angle to a falling conversation, he chose to say: "Why don't you sing me a song?"

"You're naked!" she shot back, frowning.

There was little to make of that, and so he decided that perhaps silence would bring something telling, something he'd be able to assess and hash-out with her. Dying seemed a waste. Dying naked was crazy, not that he'd never thought of it, except that when he had it had been about perhaps dying while making hard love to some energetic young thing unable to satisfy herself before dawn.

"Do you love me, Patrick?" Rachel asked next.

He laughed softly and then said, "I love trick questions..."

Rachel cocked the gun and stared at him. Patrick smiled.

"No, don't smile," she growled. "Stop it! Frown! Stop smiling at me. It makes me want you..."

Patrick raised his head and back as high as they would go. Rachel stiffened her arm and kept the pistol inches from his head. Would she fire, he asked himself. There was little else to say here two hours into his capture. Patrick reached back far into the recesses of his brain for something from their past to maybe bring Rachel to her senses. She was a sucker for memories and, of course, he knew she could recall every little lovely thing he'd ever whispered in her ear.

"May I see your breasts?" he said and, at hearing that, Rachel lowered the gun...

- 30 -

When Love Walks In The Room...

2009-07-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Across my dreams, with nets of wonder, I chased the bright, elusive butterfly of love..." - Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

McALLEN, Texas – There’s a certain road most guys look for when the warmth of unexpected romance begins to fill the air. It is a quiet, unpaved, brush-lined road of the sort favored by birds and snakes and scorpions and lizards – personalities of the animal kingdom who know their place in the star-crossed universe. A duck wouldn’t be there, nor would a dolphin or a chicken. Those need the human touch. Birds know altitude, a definite presence in every soaring love affair. Snakes, scorpions and lizards don’t need humanity. They are rough-edged and generally heartless and okay when alone. It is that long and winding curve, dusty and gravelly and desolate, that allows for thinking of feelings such as those delivered by arriving romance – the male & female kind, I mean.

By now, you likely know what this is about.

I’ve met a certain woman I seem to enjoy at every turn. It is a remarkable occurrence, because I wasn’t looking for it and, I suspect, neither was she. What to say and, more important, what to do? I know it happens, but my history is more the traditional flaming meteor across the sky, the one that burns out fast and forever. I generally meet someone and sort of know quickly whether my actions around her will segue into something else, something that will show her I am freakin’ interested. Usually, that is me acting the angel, saying silly things and chasing conversations of the sort that maintain a certain linear element, basically to let-on that there has to be more to it than smiling or being funny. I can be funny, although I eventually bore myself. What I focus on is being a “good date,” which to me means having a free-and-clear wonderful time, whether at the movies, dinner, the museum, or my place. Life is daily; love is, at the very least, three or four chapters in a book you can’t put down for the first 100 pages and then toss after 101. Love has a beginning, middle, and an end – even those that last 50 years. I seem to specialize in those that last, at best, a year. But it is a good year, full of everything, fast as a falling star, the spark in the universe that flashes and then burns out. In the end, I wheel-out my favorite coda: “I’m not that kind of angel…”

I have no idea where this one is going, or if it’ll go anywhere. I would like it to come with me around the moon, but I’m just half of the equation. Something tells me she wants to, but what man ever knows about anything to do with women? I know that if she reads this, and she comes here often, she’ll know it is her I’m talking about, me being silly with, throwing something out into the open that perhaps she’d rather keep private for the time being. She is the proverbial spark I haven’t seen in any other local woman. I get energy from her even when we text. She knows it if her sentient messages are any indication. They make me want to steal a horse and ride across the range toward her side of town, in the heaviest of rains, yeah. My desire to kiss her is strong. I’ve said that to her, even as I know that her home life wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t allow it. The universe is funny that way – it offers and it denies. Just how strong is love? I used to know, when I was in control.

Seeing her today and tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-one hundred after that would be nice. A year would be better, five or ten or fifteen the Jubilee. I’ve always been inspired in my writing by the women around me and can say that a small group of them can find themselves in the pages of my first three books. Something tells me this one will inspire me to reach for higher ledges on the rocky literary mountain, perhaps even force me to reach the summit, from where I would proudly bellow a panther’s roar of the sort that would speak to great discovery: Love, love at last…

-30 -

News in the Time of Pain...

2009-07-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

In a flashing neon sign of the times, last week Freedom Communications Inc. shut down its one-reporter Capitol bureau for its three South Texas newspapers, The Monitor (McAllen), the Valley Morning Star, and The Brownsville Herald. "It's a cost-cutting measure," said Olaf Frandsen, regional vice president for Freedom, reciting the mantra of modern newspaper executives. "We had to look for areas where we could cut costs without significantly damaging coverage." - Austin Chronicle, Nov. 16, 2007

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ

Editor

McALLEN, Texas – It’s just 50 cents locally, yet the price of the daily newspaper is not – and never has been – the best barometer for gauging its value to society. We live in a free country, and it is true: the press theoretically and romantically serves as guardian of those freedoms, by exposing government corruption, excesses and discrimination. It isn’t written in stone anywhere; it’s just part and parcel of what we like to call a free republic – a place where civil rights are to be respected. When they are not, it is then the duty of the press to bring such things to light. Yes, there are sports to write about. And there is the Lifestyle Page, and the Business Page. But it is a newspaper’s work in righting wrongs that stands as the reason it is called the Fourth Estate in our form of government – there weighed equally alongside the Executive Branch (president), the Legislative (Congress), and the Judicial (courts). Together, they are supposed to make this the greatest country in the history of the world.

Yet, the premise is flawed these days. Gone are enough daily newspapers to wonder about their future. Up have come the Internet news outlets – some worthy and many not. The Internet – through legitimate news outlets such as TheHuffingtonPost.com and through some totally unreliable websites such as the Drudge Report - is in its infancy, however. This website is an example of what is known as a Blog. I see them as being nothing more than personal vehicles for personal assessments and opinions regarding issues of the day. Blogs have fans and they have critics. There is value in both.

Still, it is the local daily newspaper that the citizenry looks to for helpful and meaningful timely information. Here, The McAllen Monitor does its best to serve as newspaper-of-record. It is not The New York Times, and it is not The Dallas Morning News. It is a small town newspaper with ever-limited resources and a reporting staff that, to be fair, is aggressive yet largely inexperienced. Those of us in the business know newspapers such as The McAllen Monitor as providers of those needed first two-three years of journalism experience for rookie reporters, many just out of college. Is it a bad newspaper? No. It could do more on certain issues, such as crime in nearby Mexico or perhaps report a bit deeper on local banking and health care, but it, I assume, recognizes its limitations. What readers of The Monitor get, then, is equivalent for the local citizenry as the campus newspaper is to students of McAllen High School. There are in Monitor Editor Steve Fagan’s outlook no pretensions. He does his best with what he has, is what I’d say.

Hang around any public place in town, such as a coffee shop or a small café or even a bar, and what you hear is serious criticism against The Monitor. It is not uncommon to hear local residents say something like, “I wish someone would start a second newspaper.” That would be something. My take on this also has come by way of chats with the local business and advertising community. To a one, they lament the rough economy environment playing from coast to coast and how that is affecting the Rio Grande Valley, but they side by the idea of seeing another daily walk into town. “Competition is what the Monitor needs,” said a good friend here who has long-wished for a competing publication.

There are a number of small weeklies and monthlies, such as RGVNation and a few magazines such as RGVMag and Social Life. The first two are meek attempts at news reporting if the story selection and writing are any indication. Social Life is a gushing of photos appealing to the vanity of McAllenites. So, no…there is no competition for The Monitor. Along with its sister newspapers in Harlingen and Brownsville downriver, they, well, have a monopoly on crippling mediocrity. What kills me is that all three of these dailies, owned by California-based Freedom Communications, are forever accused of siding by one segment of the area population, namely the Anglo community. And, about that, nowhere does it manifest itself clearer than when these newspapers publish stories about how certain illnesses, usually awful ones, afflict the Hispanic community more than other ethnics. The same road-tired angles to stories about welfare and housing woes are popular with these editors. Never have I seen a story in any of the three RGV newspapers that tells me, say, it is the Anglo community that suffers more than any other when it comes to Erectile Dysfunction, bad debt, or the receipt of welfare benefits. When The Monitor publishes a story about welfare, as it did this week, it is a handful of Hispanics interviewed at the local welfare office. Yes, the majority of residents here are Hispanics, but a little extra legwork, seemingly never a strength of Monitor reporters, might have yielded the name of an Anglo getting needed government aid. I say that is a disservice, and I continue to contend that the people of McAllen deserve better, more honest journalism.

The thing is that many staffers of its Editorial Department, including reclusive Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen, hail from elsewhere. Their outlook and allegiance is to a white-bread culture that does not take into account the unique culture of the Texas-Mexico border. It is for that reason, I believe, that many, many people here tolerate the newspaper, yet they would jump aboard another newspaper if they only had the choice.

Times are tough for everybody these days. The community needs an active newspaper out gathering serious, accurate information. The Old Way of holding fort in McAllen should have died with the end of former hard-edged Mayor Othal Brand, a man who many here say treated Hispanics with all the propriety of a coonhound. But The Monitor did not do that. Instead, the newspaper has turned its back on stories that either are published by other news outlets (The New Yorker on local health) or are simply ignored, like the lingering troubles at the McAllen Independent School District. Only the administration of The Monitor knows it, but many here believe it does not shake the health industry or school district tree because it garners a tremendous amount of advertising revenue from both. A Sunday edition of the newspaper is one gauge: invariably, that particular issue is fat with medical and school district advertisements. Lost, then, is the public’s ability to know what exactly is going on in town. Who knows? Maybe Editor Fagan thinks his young reporting staff is not up to tackling serious issues, or maybe Fagan would like to tell me that the order for "hands-off" comes from above.

In the end, what readers get is really nothing more than a daily exercise in “putting out” a newspaper. Most days, it is thinasthis, especially the Monday edition, which, if the newspaper would be honest, ought to go for a nickel. For me, The Monitor’s indifferent attitude to the goings-on in nearby Mexico is mysterious. These are fantastic stories, fraught with crime, corruption and blood – staples of most daily newspapers. The professional sentiment goes: if you get any of that, you go after it doggedly. The public deserves to know much more about the criminal activity on the southern side of the Rio Grande. Why? Well, because it is serious stuff when a country dispatches its army to man its border against its own misguided citizens – citizens even The Monitor knows are thugs and murderers. Yeah, maybe The Monitor thinks it’s too dangerous to send its reporters across the bridge to report on the disarray in neighboring Reynosa, a town that has a long, long history too close to this side of the river to be simply ignored. Still, one look at any of a dozen newspapers and news magazines published in Reynosa would show The Monitor that things have deteriorated beyond belief. For a newspaper that covets journalism prizes perhaps more than credibility, The McAllen Monitor would do well to improve its lot in town by bringing the stories home, as they teach in journalism school.

Perhaps there is still time…

- 30 -

Secrets on the Telephone...

2009-07-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

EDINBURG, Texas – Every now and then I amble into the 107 Café here for my breakfast, most-always a plate of warmish Huevos a la Mejicana chased with hot, black coffee and the morning newspaper. The small eatery, like many in this sleepy, backward town, the county seat, is usually full of law enforcement types - city cops and deputies and, at times, a covey of uniformed state troopers and agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. I like to think they like the food in these places, although I always wonder how their schedules, presumably watching over the bad guys, allows them to sit for long hours while nursing a cup of coffee. You see them at area Starbucks, as well. I know it’s long hours, because that’s how long I hang around.

Fighting criminals is a full-time job. And, yes, I grant them a shot at a pot of coffee if that helps get some miscreant or wife-beater off the streets or off the backs of local defenseless women. Law enforcement has a place in this country’s hurry-up culture. If an idiot hits a laundromat, well, I want that fuck-up arrested at the most a block away. When I see a cop writing a ticket off to the side of the road, I tell myself he’s doing his job, although, yeah, I say it quicker if it’s a White person in the detained vehicle. Damn me for that, but know that I wrote about open racism against Blacks and Hispanics in the South for The Boston Globe. Those horrific images are seared in my usually happy brain. Also know that I have good friends who are of the Anglo-Sax persuasion, including one whose new friendship I already treasure. But they know me, and they know that I am opinionated, yet fair. It is a balance; that’s how I look at it.

So this morning, when I was watching network television, I caught-up with the mess that is our Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Really, the story on MSNBC – never on right-wing extremist Fox News – told about how the agency had been lying to Congress since 2001. You remember who our president was back then, don’t you. If you don’t, well, I’m not going to tell you. I do suggest that you take your ignorance to your local newspaper, where it will be duly matched. How novel! An intelligence agency lying to the people it theoretically answers to, in peace and during war. Pathetic and criminal is what it is, absolutely. The day is coming, I pray, when these outlaws in charge of the country’s agencies face the music while doing the perp walk. Bastards!

George W. Bush, the former president, should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity, for plunging the country into an unjust war, with marching young soldiers to their death in the hot, sandy geography of a country that did not attack us. His vice-president, the suck-ass Dick Cheney, should also be jailed. Vincent Bugliosi, a former district attorney in Los Angeles and the man who sent mass killer Charles Manson to prison for life and beyond, has written a book demanding a trial for Bush and Cheney. I agree. Until we resolve that mess, we can rightly be lumped in with rogue countries that do rogue things, like the Russians or the North Koreans or the Israelis or, lately, Mexico.

The CIA lives a secretive existence. A bit of darkened life is expected within its functions, but it must be truthful before Congress. That is the proverbial checks & balance we reportedly live under. I say reportedly because Bush turned it into some domestic spy agency that just doesn’t fit the idea of freedom to speak on your cell phone without the conversation going into some data bank recording inside the CIA’s building in Langley, or believing that you’re making hard love without some infra-red scope looking into your bouncing bed. It happens. And if you think it doesn’t, well, keep reading your hometown newspaper.

The crazy part of the CIA story for me is that it was current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who headed the agency during the soiled George W. Bush administration. Current CIA Chief Leon Panetta says the agency started lying one year after Bush took office and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on New York City. Well, what does Gates say now?

One more thing: didn’t former Secretary of State Colin Powell mention the CIA as a source of the so-called Weapons-of-mass-destruction lies disseminated to the United Nations Security Council ahead of the American invasion of Iraq? Powell has paid the price. Bush hasn’t. Cheney hasn’t. And the height-challenged Robert Gates is still serving the country.

These are the people who tell you they protect you and your family and your peace-of-mind. Cops – local, state, national - are funny. Their business is apart from society out of necessity. Bob Dylan had it right, however, when he sang: “…the cops, they don’t need you…and, man, they expect the same.”

Obese, donut-scarfing cops aside, it is time to clean up this beaten country. What we have is shameful and, worse than that, it gets in the way when we want to tell other countries how civilized nations behave…

- 30 -

[Editor’s Note: Patrick Alcatraz holds humanity to a higher standard…]

He Had This Grand Vision...

2009-07-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

"Never been lonely. Never been lied to. Never had to scuffle in fear. Nothing denied to. Born at the instant the church bells chime, and the whole world whispering: Born at the right time..." - Paul Simon, Born at the Right Time

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

New York, N.Y. - Drained by this city's untiring energy and carrying the sweet memory of spending good time with my daughter, Gabrielle, I packed my duffle bag and rolled to LaGuardia Airport, bound for home and a print publication project I've nurtured a bit and now find comfortably on my lap. I have agreed to edit a weekly newspaper in McAllen, Texas.

Hell-o, great stories!

As I've said to many people and friends over the years, the Texas-Mexico border nearest the Gulf of Mexico is a veritable gold mine of gorgeous, meaningful news copy. Why the local dailies never made a national name for themselves writing-up a part of the country others elsewhere know little about is the mystery for me. There are stories all over the place, is my feeling. And we shall work them in the coming weeks, enough of them anyway to bring a new and novel noise to the Rio Grande Valley - a land that has for too long deserved better journalism.

We shall not pick sides, and we shall not serve as a voice for any one segment of the population. We shall strive to be loyal to the truth and the story, not to personalities, ethnic groups, or any advertiser. My approach is this: cover the news fairly and without prejudice, at all times ignoring no one. Our reputation will be earned, not demanded. It will be made from hard, investigative journalism offered with the authority of serious reporting.

I've been around the newspapering block, as it is said, cutting my teeth early-on in my career at The Brownsville Herald and then setting sail a journalism career that took me to the newsrooms of The Boston Globe, New York Post and The Associated Press in Denver. Somewhere in there I wrote a bunch of magazine stories and have to date written three novels. My letters to friends are never less than five pages, forever painted by about-to-be-jailed adventures, the color and stripe of new friends, the meeting of a new this-one-is-it female, the observations of my latest surroundings. This weekly newspaper will be "written," as we opt for magazine-style writing while saying adios to the so-called "inverted triangle" writing style favored by most daily newspapers. Our photography will shine in the same manner that Andy Warhol's Art brightened that world a few years back. But what our readers will quickly and readily see is a product that will write to their intellect, at times provoking a deeper thought to life in the RGV, and to the issues facing the region - troubled Mexico included.

So, keep reading this economic Blog for additional details. I am, as yet, not ready to divulge the name of the publication. Much work has been done, but much more remains between now and early August, when we expect to launch (get an invite to the pre-launch party!). It should be a new wind blowing across the harsh borderlands, winds fronting and trailing this journalism revolution from the outs of Rio Grande City to the sands of South Padre Island. McAllen and the rest of the RGV never have seen a publication like the one I envision. Buckle up, is what I'd suggest. Our stories will have depth and our opinion columns will be biting, yet insightful. Above all, this publication will be well-written. About that, you can be sure. I plan to read it myself.

Yeah, I can't wait....

- 30 -

Interview...

2009-07-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

"He said he was just going out to meet some dame, and, you know, that's the last we saw of him...Crazy as it may sound, now or ever, maybe he finally fell in love, in love..." - The Reluctant Eyewitness

Of Havana and France...

2009-07-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

New York, N.Y. - It's only a few blocks from the Havana NY restaurant on W. 38th Street to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, yet there is a neat disconnect between what you find inside both buildings. The eatery offered a hefty and thoroughly-enjoyable plate of Ropa Vieja (shredded beef, white rice, black beans), while the library threw a bad dish of Nazi whippings in World War II France. It was a day for stuffing the tummy and, then later, feeding the brain. I love Cuban food with my history lessons.

Ana was our waitress. She's a peppy 20-year-old transplant from Mexico City by way of Los Angeles. Her lively, raven eyes alone are worth flying here from Texas, yes. Petite is in when the day's activities include checking out anything French. Miguel, the bus boy from the Mexican state of Guerrero, chatted nicely about living and working in The Big Apple. Ana was up for flirting, but as it so happened, I was dining with my daughter, and she does not like to see her old man in the hunt for romance.

In any case, we had our usual lunch treat in what is becoming my latest Culinary Tour. Twenty-nine dollars and change for lunch. I paid, my daughter Gabrielle left the tip (her Old Man does not believe in tipping, forever noting that it lets restaurant owners off the pay scale hook). So, that done, we bid farewell to Ana and her lovely, lovely smile and walked back out to W. 38th before walking toward Fifth Ave.

The New York Public Library is many things to many patrons. It was hosting an exhibition of All-Gayness on the third floor. We hung around the first floor, where we popped-in to check out a spectacular display of French and German memorabilia being offered as "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation."

Right up my alley, I know, I know.

And so we hung around for more than hour, looking at and reading the many elements of the free exhibit. There were great black and white photographs, sad, sad letters and a collection of notebook pages from manuscripts that later became great books - like "The Lover" by French writer Marguerite Duras, a favorite of mine. The book was made into a movie, and that one, too, is worth the time and money.

Yet, the collection sent a singular message: life for writers under Adolf Hitler was no looking out a window for inspiration. Many Frenchmen, including writers, fought with the resistance even after the Germs invaded and conquered France. There was the writing, but there also was courage from book printers and publishers who took to the underground to make sure France would not be seen by the world as merely cowering to the brutes from Berlin. A handful of diaries also are on exhibit, as are now-grainy films made during the Nazi invasion and the resulting occupation. In stirring accounts (translated on accompanying wall mountings), the French writers told of being forced to leave their creative comfort, easy travel, freedom to say or write anything. In a series of bombings and tank asaults, those freedoms vanished from one day to the next. The Winter of 1943-44 was especially rough, with food being rationed. Travel was reduced to forced travel: prisoners being led to concentration camps erected by the occupying Nazis. Censorship cropped-up, as did a paper shortage. France's writers could only inhale and hope for an invasion by the Allies. Many of them took up arms. The story of writer Robert Antelme, Duras's husband, is particularly wild. He survived, but only after being held prisoner. As love would have it, his wife later divorced him and took up with his film director friend. But, yeah, what else is new? Even in the worst of times, well, the heart must be fed. Marguerite Duras fought off loneliness in her own way - in the arms of her husband's friend.

Still, she wrote this to Antelme when she was told he had survived the camps: "You are alive! You are alive! I, too, am coming back from I know not where. How long have I remained in this Hell? ...Be prudent. No alcohol, not a drop. The weather's beautiful. It's peace. I think I would have died of your death."

Women are funny that way, eh?

The evening would fall fast, a cool breeze sailing in from the Atlantic. We were headed for The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village at sundown. It's all I needed to know. I was sure of this: Something nagged me about whether I'd rather have gone back to the Cuban restaurant for another smile from Ana, the attractive waitress, or perhaps spent much more time reading about French writers living in fear of Hitler.

I fully enjoyed both - like some Guy at a bordello taking two sweethearts and then having to choose one or the other with the last of the cash...

- 30 -

I Didn't See Her Today...

2009-07-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

"You don't send me flowers anymore..." - Neil Diamond

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

New York, N.Y. - The City that Never sleeps, it is said, holds a jillion stories - some naked. It is electric, and it for sure throws nutty stuff at you that you just don't get anywhere else. Today, it was a lanky, small-tittied woman in a plastic, see-through outfit moving on 42nd Street toward Times Square. I looked, as did a few hundred others moving along the busy, crowded sidewalk in front of the NY Port Authority building. Craziness is not all that rare, however, although usually it's lousy comedians, loud vendors, or the whistling NYC cops acting stupid. This is Color TV out in your face. I love it, but there are times the annoying win the game. Today's lunch at a cozy Chinese joint was marred by a Black guy talking much too loud, this in a tiny eatery where the tables are thisclose. I did my best to hold my temper; my daughter chided me for continuing to think that I'm the "only guy on the planet."

Anyway, my 23-year-old kid and I have been together quite a bit after not seeing each other for almost a year and a half. Gabrielle, St. John's U. Class of 2008, is a fine, fine dinner conversationalist. She likes to remind me of things I'd rather forget. I take it like a Man, yeah. She laughs when I say I find some things stunning and absolutely not believable. I say, "wrong guy," and she laughs again. We keep eating and she stares at me like a cop when I lift my tea glass for a refill when I don't even know where the freakin' waiter is, or may be.

A bit more enjoyable are those moments when we talk about her Mom, my ex-wife Narda. She, too, lives here, and, well, sometimes she goes out for a drink. She's in Spain, finishing a two-summer Master's program in lovely Salamanca. So, sure, I keep looking for her. But she's not there.

The photo of yours truly atop this installment was taken outside one of my ex-wife's favorite watering holes - an old, musty bar on the Lower East Side somewhere. Yeah, I e-mailed it to her, hoping her face will drop to the floor and think, "WTF is he doing there!"

I love this juiced-up joint...

- 30 -

I'll Be Home For Xmas...

2009-06-29T19:24:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

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

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

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

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

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

- 30 -

And Then He Was Gone...

2009-06-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

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

- 30 -

Wheelhouse Romance, Chapt. 15, Verse 22

2009-06-20T08:50:00.001-07:00

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 30 -

Ragging On Traffic, A New Sport...

2009-06-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

By Ron Mexico

Contributor

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

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

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

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

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

My friend said nothing more for two-three blocks.

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

We never saw - or found- the shoe store.

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

I nodded.

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

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

- 30 -

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