BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK:...No Fun At El Rocinante As Things Go Haywire...

"I love Hell. I can't wait to get back..." - Malcolm Lowry

By MATS CONTRERAS
Special to The Tribune

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - My brother, Estanislado, wasn't going to take the bullshit he was getting from Jerry McHale. ElRocinante.com was down and Estanislado couldn't get it out of his head that his best-ever poem was gone - erased into Outer Space when his computer crashed. "We're freakin' down, man!" McHale had been screaming, his face reddened by the realization that his popular Blog had vanished from one moment to the next.

"That was going to be my masterpiece!" the 67-year-old Estanislado yelled back. "And I don't have any notes! Goddammit! - do you know what you've done?!"

Day had broken nicely, with the sunlight arriving via the eastern windows of the old office. Oralia Legumbre, the fake-blonde receptionist, had gone about her duties of brewing a pot of coffee, dispensing the pan dulce to the writers and setting the temperature thermostat on 78 degrees, as McHale had ordered soon after the last utility bill had popped-in bearing a charge of $456.89.

"It was to be titled Oedipus Chuco," Contreras said for the umpteenth time, to no one in particular. Across the room sportswriter Max Maxwell played with his pipe and then stuck his hands in the pockets of his dusty-gray sportscoat. He'd said little of the website's demise. Next to him sat Hassin Bin' Laid, the token Arab on the staff and a man who often wrote about how bad the Tex-Mex diet of tamales, tacos, enchiladas and menudo was for all Human Beings. "I was working on my first piece on Brownsville politics," he said now. "It was  a tale of love and betrayal, of sex with animals and more sex."

He was the one who had held Estanislado Contreras when Contreras had lunged at McHale out of full-out anger. Bin' Laid, a passive, bald man known to blow bubbles when in the office, had managed to stop the fight, but Contreras had landed an overhand right and McHale had gone down, perhaps his muscles remembering an earlier short-lived career as a boxer.

"I'm going home," they'd heard from Oralia at mid-morning. "Someone call me when we're back in business. There's a short dress I've been shopping for and maybe I'll go to McAllen, where they have nice clothes."

Maxwell had said his goodbye, as had Bin' Laid. Contreras ignored it all. He had his brain on the lines in his poem, fashioning some imagery from memory and making notes on a legal pad. His face showed the sort of disappointment only men with erectile dysfunction know. He sat back on the old swivel chair and mouthed a few of the words he remembered.

And then he lurched forward and slammed his greasy fist on the battered desk in his cubicle.

"This totally sucks!" he screamed at the ceiling, his chest blown-out like some guy who's gotten too much air during mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A blackbird landing noisily on the window sill outside startled him and Estanislado instinctively reached for his dictionary, flinging it through the glass and putting the coda on the well-hipped Oralia's slamming of the office's front door and the frustration that had filled the enterprise.

"Laters, bro," he heard from a departing Max Maxwell...

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