110 In The Shade: Brownsville's Angry Blogger Jerry McHale Endures...One Hard-Luck Story After Another...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor-In-Chief

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - In Jerry McHale's newsroom, there's always a half-stoned, dressed-to-kill doll at his feet near the computer, the comely sweetheart doing her best to stay quiet while he works another story about corruption, hideous residents doing nothing or yet another upcoming election featuring candidates better suited for a movie about the Mexican tamale industry or that country's 1910 Revolution. He has the best of characters and the worst of characters. And, absolutely, there's a dame in the picture.

She's in his mind, supple and naked and ready, as he types away, running the mental thesaurus on full-blast and grabbing at the best words as his brain speeds through his colossal vocabulary vault. McHale, shown in photo at right, is writing, but he may as well be fucking. That is how he writes, as if making love. The passion is discernible. His journalistic ejaculation will match what he delivers later that same night to his sensual wife. Every story carries the chemicals for life, or destruction of life. His fans, this entire community of 140,000 do-nothings, have come to expect vicious whippings from the man who stands as this bordertown's best writer. Hands down. When he gets a Journalism Hard-On, there is only one reporter in town, regardless of the compliments he pays others from time to time. McHale is like Muhammad Ali in his prime. Even Nixon was told to go to hell by the champ. Such is McHale's clout in this falling town.

Another time and he would have been Ghengis Khan's brother, Don. Or he would have been the man who shot Liberty Valance. Or, as the Italians might say, he coulda been a contendah. Or he may have been the fucka who chased down Lee Harvey Oswald that fateful day in Dallas. Or he perhaps could have been a sparring partner for Argentine heavyweight bruiser Oscar "Ringo" Bonavena. McHale is the sort of personality who can smell a scrap a block away. He's the bystander who urges two brawling broads to, not stop, but keep kicking. He's pro-wino, but not as it relates to his own bottle of whisky. A few decades ago, when a dusty bordello known as El Zumbido, drew men like flies to Matamoros, McHale was there to do more than take the midnight pulse of the dog-tired whores. You can still go to a piece of harsh geography on the road to the Matamoros beach where El Zumbido stood, stand there atop the rutted ground and say his name. From somewhere below, along some lonely fire ant trail burrowing to the center of the earth, would come the voice of his beloved prostitute Gloria, who would cough as he liked her to cough when fully-engorged in her mouth and then say, "Eres tu, Maclovio?"

Today's local reporters, and we include a mess of bloggers whose work pales against the editor of http://www.brownsvilleliteraryreview.blogspot.com/, cannot hold a candle to McHale. They try, of course, but they are traipsing down a path he created long-ago, chasing his place in local news, itching to be seen as he is seen, suffocating in his indomitable legend. Everything of note that has happened in this dusty burg has been studied and analyzed by McHale, often expectorated in Blog stories that come armed with the most graphic of porno and the cutting lingo of the bars, streets and darkened, active motel rooms.

That uppity mayor back in '80? He went to his grave wishing to wrap his hands around McHale's California neck. The southern newspaper editor who came to Brownsville from Alabama? She still hates his ass for that article he wrote in The Brownsville Times describing her as having a head too-small for the rest of her body. That county judge who got too big for his britches? He is said to fire his pistol at the ever-arriving big, fat, yellow moon he associates with McHale.

It's a life, is what he will say.

A little booze, some poon and a truckload of laughs.

What the Hell? Let the blogging pretenders type away. They're just rewriting his past, cruising story angles he carved a long time ago, breathing the fumes of newspapering he breathes even when ill. There is the legend of the porno-laden El Rocinante, his former blog - the longest-running artillery assault that came to be felt by anybody who wanted to be anybody in this poverty-stricken hellhole.

Not that he hasn't worked both sides of the fence. McHale is skillful at protecting his friends. Not a word came from him when his blogging ally Juan Montoya went blotto and was arrested on reckless driving and DWI charges late last year. McHale said nothing of consequence, alluding to Juan's stay in jail as Montoya's visit to the lovely retreat-sounding "county farm."

He covers for friends like local notables Ben Neece, a municipal judge, and Tony Zavaleta, a local expert on all-things-border and a current candidate for the city commission. The list goes on, and it stands as black marks outlined against every other bit of societal criticism he has lodged against his adopted community - the one that gave him, we understand, a zoo of loose women, several wives and a passel of kids. As a story, McHale's life could be seen as the life of a smalltown Norman Mailer. Where Mailer ran for mayor of New York, McHale sought the same job in Brownsville. Both lost, but what the Hell?

Studs Terkel would have seen a bit of himself in the now-balding McHale. Like Studs, McHale loves to color his stories with the daily struggle of the local citizenry, religious and otherwise. Too bad if the characterization, he might say, is a bit cartoonish. I see what I see, and I know what I know. You're an adulterer and dirtbag, and, yeah, I'm writing it?

So when a novice pol such as mayoral candidate Evaristo "Viro" Cardenas comes along, we are sure McHale's first impulse is to see if the youngun can take a punch. Same for political neophyte Roman Perez, who we think would shrink like a child on the spot at being asked to tip a few cold ones and juggle Gay jokes with McHale and his pals at La Palma Lounge downtown. Writers who have written a tapeworm of stories eventually get captured by the idea that they've seen and heard it all. It's partially true.

McHale, however, like the viejas at the cantinas on 14th Street, likes to hear the same one-note songs over and over and over. It is his favored, trusted soundtrack - that noisy and mindless accordioned Tejano tune able to send bar patrons to the outs of naked, back-ripping romance and the biggest of goddamned dreams. Hechale, vampiro!

McHale is getting old. His best journalism likely is behind him.

What he ought to do is get the Hell away from the local nobodies and write for posterity...

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