The Undefeated:...Elections Honcho Roger Ortiz Holds County Judge Job In His Hands...Will it be The Lady or The Tiger, Or Cascos or Wood?...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor-In-Chief

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - So, we're at another of those border impasses, the Ol' Mexican Standoff. Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos, fresh off a stunning defeat at the hands of a recount, sits on his Republican cloth couch, awaiting finality. Lucky challenger John Wood, the surprise winner of the job Cascos has held in recent years, suddenly looms as the benefactor of something or another. How did it ever come to this?

Not with Roger Ortiz ramrodding the vote count! Roger Ortiz?

We remember Ortiz from our days - that lost year - at The Herald, when City Hall was our Beat and Ortiz our source at the tax appraiser's office he oversaw. At the time, I was dating his secretary, a woman named Ruth, and aside from being superb evening company, she often spoke about doings in the tax office. Ortiz, she would say, was a straight-up guy, a person averse to wrongdoing, to, say, cooking the books in favor of some taxpayer. I'd been working on a story about tax scofflaws at the time, which is why she and I spent a post-coital minute or two discussing it.

Part of the mess concerning the vote count in the Cascos-Wood fray will likely land on Ortiz's lap. Already, bloggers side with the idea that he surely must be at the center of a conspiracy that has former County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa pulling his strings, angling Ortiz this & that way, prodding him. Persuading him, so that, in the end, Democrat Wood will come out on top against the affable, but not as sharp Cascos. In Brownsville, where the count took place, and where the voting will be officially canvassed on Thursday, one move always leads to another - in sex, and in politics.

And so we shall wait.

If my former friend from that Winter of 1981 was correct in assessing Roger Ortiz as a man of high morals, well, the tabulation is on the up & up. But, then, it's been a few winters since '81. And perhaps Roger has been melded by the politics he has endured in the ensuing decades. It'll all shake out.

Ruth isn't around to give me an update, is what I hear. Too bad, for Ortiz and for me. All I know is that she seemed to be a nice Catholic girl who dressed well, loved her red lipstick and stayed in shape. I used to spread an American flag across my bed in those crazy days. For some reason, the imagery of that bedroom scene popped-up in my brain as I thought about her in the context of Ortiz's current perceived predicament.

I'd like to think that Roger did the right thing, yes...

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