In Brownsville, A Search For The Town's Top Gay Man...Clue: Everybody's A Suspect...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

Editor of The Tribune

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - We were done talking about bad minor league baseball in the Rio Grande Valey when Jerry McHale lifted his emptied beer mug and fired the damned thing into the nearby resaca as if to show how a fastball ought to be thrown. "I hate those lousy Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings," he roared after craning his head back like a javeline thrower. "If you've seen one pendejo strike out around here, you've seen them all. My maid can run the bases better than those stiffs!"

He's not interested in discussing the low-level of play in the Valley's contributions to the North American Baseball League; McHale, once a promising third baseman in his hometown of Modesto, California, said he went to a WhiteWings game in Harlingen up the road last year and was so disgusted with the awful level of play that he went to the men's room, did his business by way of a creative squat and flushed the commode 20 times just to tax the city sewer system enough to cover the game's price of admission.

McHale's out to offer a new kind of Journalism in his goofy, gossip-fueled community of some 140,000 legals and illegals who will sing a corrido to some brazen drug dealer for you inside a cheap cantina at the drop if a few pesos on the aging bar. He thinks the time has come to take the pulse of the town as it has never been taken before.

"I'm going to work-up lists that will put our luckless denizens in some sort of fuckin' category, so that we're not all lumped as bordertown idiots unable to dream a damned thing," he said as a fattened waitress walked by and he lifted his hand to show her two fingers.

"Peace to you, brother," she said, and he began screaming, "Two goddamned beers!"

The waitress loped off toward the bar, swatting at something or another on her butt as she walked. New Journalism has no time for the stupid, McHale went on, lipping a Bugler he'd rolled minutes earlier when the jukebox had exploded with a song by Jose Alfredo Jimenez and two skinny, high-throated guys had bopped-up from a nearby table to dance together as if popsicle-addicted pachucos.

The scene was telling, because McHale, in his new & improved blog BrownsvilleLiteraryReview.blogspot.com, plans to draft a list of the Top Gay Men in Brownsville. He's of the opinion that such a compilation will not only allow Gays and Lesbians a new status in the Extreme-Macho town, but also allow non-Gays to know where things stand sexually in Brownsville. "You could say it's about damned time, but, then, how long has that sentence been in play?" he asks as a seagull swoops in a steals the last of his tasty basket snack.

"Mas chips!" he hollers at the hefty waitress, whose name is Isidra and who earlier had said she understands Gay, but still needs her "number one Juan."

So, where will he begin, we ask.

"City Hall, where else?"

"Peedee?"

"Oh, hell yes! I know we have Gay cops. All you have to do is look at how they walk!"

"Politicians?"

"They love each other, so there's no mystery there. Is Mayor Tony Martinez Gay? I don't know yet, but I plan to find out. Is Sheriff Omar Lucio gay? Quien sabe, vato. Pero veremos, no? Is new commissioner Estela Chavez-Vasquez Gay? If she is, it's a waste."

He won't say anything about the local press, bloggers included, although he has in the past often criticized one blogger who is admittedly Gay. We ask: Is he on your list?

"Absolutely! Him and a few others who think they're in the closet. The closet in Brownsville is a huge sonofabitch, but Gays will talk. They're as shifty and gossipy as women. My advice to non-Gays is that you never piss-off a Gay. They're vicious as all Hell. Worse than Al-Qaeda!"

It's an interesting time along the lawless Texas-Mexico border. Crime is rampant. Jobs are few and unemployment is okay with the region's ever-slouching masses. Dreams travel here and, as with minor league baseball, die a warning-track death.

"Is State Rep. Rene Oliveira gay?" we ask as the sun begins to set and an outbound freight train blows its goodbye horn. McHale makes a clownish face, clears his sun-baked throat and says, without laughing,"The Plump Partridge? Maybe. He has the Gay walk, that's for sure."

It's a hot, humid day. We leave it at that after telling McHale we'll look for his story in the coming days. The revelations likely will not shock a town already used to being shocked. But it's a story, and stories are pretty much free around here. Comedy, on the other hand, and that is how the many Machos here chose to see the Gay lifestyle, comes along only every now and then...

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