Day of The Sombrero: How I Was Caught In A Historical Drag...

By JUAN JONES
Staff Writer

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The guy at the store counter said he couldn't break a hundred-dollar bill. He was saying it again here as I played with the loaf of bread, bag of tortilla chips and a banana-flavored moonpie I was taking over to my now-pregnant movida. Yeah, I'd asked her: "How pregnant are you?" She'd shot back: "About an hour..." Okay, I'd said. Okay, sure. Guess it was me. A hunnerd was all I had. "Can't do it, dude," the kid said again. "Company policy. See the sign: no bills larger than $20.."

I looked around out of some sense of belonging, but saw only the bad posture and fajita faces of the six others in line behind me, one man holding up a $10 for gasoline he wanted on pump 4 and a woman carrying three chicken tacos rolled in foil looking like she couldn't wait to get at them as soon as she stepped outside.

"Next," the clerk said aloud.

I took a step to the side and said, louder: "Hey, Bato! Is this America, or what?"

He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and made a "Bro, leave me alone..." face. A man in a $9.99 maroon Mervyn's shirt smiled, but said nothing. The guy behind him, wearing a three-day drunk, hangdog face half-covered by an ugly beard, laughed and then said, "Man, don't you know - this ain't Peoria..." I reeled at the insolence, at the sight of the asexual woman with the tacos, at the ugly shirt, at the goddamned weather, at the place, at the entire freakin' region.

"Gimme shelter," I roared to the false ceiling and guy walking in said, "Beatles, right?" and another guy said, "No, that was Helter Skelter" and the broad with the rolled tacos said, "Make a hole..."

Brownsville can scare you. Not in a physical way, but mentally. It is, I am now convinced, a town at the edge of the uiniverse, its longitude and latitude settings a Big Lie. How else would you explain a complete lack of motivation, of brains, of the barest of cash? Can't break a hunnered? That is the ultimate in sheltered dogshit. Where am I? Who are these Panchos? Is it all over for the species? How can any western town overcome this? In writing, it is called "writer's block." This is a variation of that, a certain immovable stoppage of progress, of human impulses, of civilization itself. I was both mortified and fearful. If I stand around here long enough, I become one of them, I told myself. If I stay any length of time, my ass is grass.

I whipped around and made for the store's door, stopped momentarily by a headline in the newspaper atop a metal rack that said: "City To Rub-Out Massage Parlors"

What the Hell is next, I asked, leaving the shitty, peanuts-smelling store and thinking my only hope for survival...a boat out of Brownsville. This isn't America, was my final assessment.

It is something else, something not easy to define, something mean and weird, something like Gak, like Play-Doh, like black lipstick, like one big mud mask that doesn't quite make the road-weary body feel better. It is a city flailing its way through space, rising like a flea aboard a world-size hog, sucking, sucking, sucking. I jumped into my car, switched-on the ignition, cranked-up the AC, slipped a Temptations Cd into the dash player, and ran my transmission to R, then D...

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