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| El Paso Street, El Paso |
Today is a cool fall day here at Dry Creek. A blatant blue sky cuts a sharp, jagged edge above the juniper-blobbed ridge outside my front window, just across the field and creek bottom crowded with oak, maple and cottonwood. It's been a dry year, and there is very little color in the leaves, just a dry rattling reddish-brown rustle. The trees are moisture-deprived and are slowly dropping their rusty loads without fanfare.
I have a cold. My nose is stuffy and dry. My mind is dry also. It has been over two years since I went back to Texas, and I still haven't completed this book. To be honest, I just want to finish it up without fanfare, to shed any obligation of getting it right, to drop rusty memories like so many dead leaves, and move on to my next project.
I can't though. There's no use putting words to paper that don't engage the senses. The details must still leak out some color. If not, writing is a pointless endeavor.
I had wanted to write about George, my best friend in El Paso, and one of my best friends throughout my life. I made a good start. Something was missing though. I'm not sure what. Color? Life?
So, instead, I think I'll take a walk. Perhaps down Yandell and then across the freeway at Santa Fe Street. It is a walk I did often, gravity carrying me quickly downhill to a row of rundown, two story apartments perched on the edge of the freeway.
Though run down, I loved those apartments. They were old and adobe, with a very western-looking wood balcony running the whole length of the front, a black wrought-iron railing keeping the second story inhabitants from tumbling to the street below. The building looked like a prop out of an old western. I half-expected a bar on the bottom floor with swinging doors and to see gunfire coming from the balcony overhead as I walked by while some prostitute from the 1850's hung out the top floor window, waving her handkerchief, yelling out, "Hey big boy, it's awfully lonely up here. How 'bout giving a poor gal some company."
Instead, there was only the rattling-roar of the freeway amplified under the Santa Fe Street bridge. Then I was across that great raging divide and walking along the edge of the historic neighborhood, Old San Francisco. Though rundown when I lived there, the architecture was still clearly significant, dating from the early 1900s and comprising of old mansions and what were once upscale apartment buildings. I loved walking back into where Missouri came to a dead end at the steep embankment of I-10. I'm sure the neighborhood was once part of Sunset Heights, but cut-off by I-10, it became its own little secluded world. Although run-down when I walked the area, it is now upscale, as it is right next to El Paso's new minor-league baseball stadium, Southwest University Park.
And on I would walk down Santa Fe towards the border, after zig-zagging over to Oregon Street and stopping to rest in San Jacinto Plaza. It is there, I'd find a bench, usually in the southwest corner, near the Kress Department Store, which was still open then. I'd sit in the park, depending on the day, for a few minutes or a few hours, listening to the street preachers rant and rave and froth at the mouth about the wicked ways of the world, which of course, were accurate. Yet, it was still ranting and raving and frothing, for it was clear the preachers were caught in the same sins they wailed and gnashed so desperately against. Hypocrisy spewed out of their ravaged minds and pooled about their feet. It was also clear most of them had serious mental illness, and so it produced no anger in me or anyone else that I could see. It was nice they had a place to be, and I liked listening to them in the way I like listening to a football game on Thanksgiving, the sounds of cicadas on hot summer nights, or the brakes of busses pulling into San Jacinto Plaza to unload and reload passengers. I wasn't really focused on the words, but if the sound was suddenly gone in that environment, I'd miss it greatly.
And then I'd walk by the spectacular old brick Plaza Motel before cutting back over to El Paso Street, my route to Mexico.
El Paso Street is one of the most vibrant streets I've seen. Color and chaos beat from every rolled up metal shop door in a wall of commercial establishments that goes for six blocks, almost right to the razor-wire coils at the border: shoes, boom boxes, watches, alarm clocks, remote control cars, you name it. It always amazed me that with all that stuff I never found anything I wanted to buy, although I searched diligently. I always wondered if Mexicans think the the same about the tight alleyways of Juarez packed with Corona t-shirts, bright colored blankets, ponchos, and ceramic pots. Cheap useless crap nobody could ever possibly use. That's what I always thought about the stuff sold on El Paso Street. All of it comes from China, Korea, Singapore, and so on. The same is probably true of that great big clay pot "you got for a steal" in Juarez for your Spanish-tiled entryway of your home in Kansas City or the six matching sombreros you purchased for your grandchildren in Tulsa. Thousands of Mexicans swarm northward for bargain deals on electronics and clothing that no American would ever own, and thousands of Americans swarm southward for bargain deals on "hand-crafted" goods no Mexican would ever claim as authentic. It's great. Two dynamic economies spurred on by stereotypes of what the other country has to offer--and all of it, mind you, not made in North America, but rather in China.
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| El Paso Street: Headless Stereotypes of USA Welcome Visitors from Mexico |
In the mornings, I usually stopped for breakfast at once was the Hollywood Cafe on the corner of El Paso and Overland. By the 90s, it was no longer named that, but the building still had the old Hollywood murals painted on it, so that's what I knew it as. The building, though architecturally stunning, was run-down and the food was lousy, but I didn't care about that. Breakfast was cheap; I had little money; and most importantly, the place was loud with life. One half of it was a diner--if it could be called that--and the other half was a bar. That half definitely lived up to its name. It even lived up to the old west image that the 1800s San Francisco style Queen's Anne and Romanesque styled façade promised from the outside. It had everything the old western bar should have except swinging bar doors. It even had rowdy drunks regardless of the hour. I was always there for breakfast, usually around nine or ten, and the drinking would already be going strong. I hadn't reached that point in my life yet, and so I stuck to the burned bacon and cold, runny eggs, leaving the morning drinks to the hardcore drunks. The experience, however, was worth every penny. Although most of the conversations were in Spanish, and as I didn't speak Spanish, I couldn't snatch anything good for my writing, I loved the vibe and felt like a writer there. It was worlds away from the sleepy Mormon town I grew up in, and I felt like Hemmingway living in Paris.
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| Hollywood Café in the Merrick Building, 1975 |
The real Hollywood Cafe opened in 1931 and ran through the 1950s. It was a major restaurant and night club. The building itself was constructed in 1897 as the Merrick Building (El Paso History Alliance) and housed a men's clothing store on the first floor and the St. Charles Hotel on the second and third floors (Carpenter) and is one of the oldest buildings in El Paso.
After my less-than pleasing breakfast and some heartburn, I left with symphonies of mariachi music, clanking-dishes, laughter and Spanish conversations swirling around in my head, and me hoping that someday I'd be able to get it all down on paper adequately. Then I continued my march towards the boarder and the dusty calles carved into the foothills of the Juarez Mountains.
First, however, was the bridge. I had been drawn to the border ever since my brother and I were driving from Houston to Big Bend National Park via U.S. 90, and at some point, which I believe was in Del Rio, I looked over and saw the cars lined up at the border and some unspeakable urge pulled me south to the other side while our car continued northwest instead. I think Lloyd hardly noticed the crossing. His pull was towards the cliffs he knew we'd see when we crossed the Pecos River some miles ahead. But, I looked out my window. Many blocks off, not close, but close enough I could still taste the flavor in the air, I witnessed a vitality at the border. Even from a fairly great distance, it called to me. In my head it looked just like the rhythm and words to Steely Dan's "Do It Again":
In the mornin' you go gunnin' for the man who stole your
water
And you fire till he's done in but they catch you at the
border
And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your
feet
But the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the
street
You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back, Jack, do it again. (Steely Dan)
There was something in the vibrant, glinting, clanking chaos of the border that I needed. I didn't know what it was then, and I'm still not exactly sure what I found there. Yet, I do know living on the border changed me like no other place has. I was drawn to the border like a climber is drawn to Everest. The difference is that I'm not sure I ever summited the peak. I seem to have checked a box off in my cosmic Bucket list by the experience, yet I'm not sure what I gained in the process. Still, I do know this: a void would be there without those frequent marches to the border. Something that I needed to experience in this life was only obtainable there. I just can't name it. At least not yet. Who knows, someday as my mind crosses that bridge once again, as it often does, it will come to me, and I will say to myself, "Ah yes, that was it." Until then, in my mind, I will stand many times again in wonder at that concrete, wire, and cultural line drawn between two nations, where El Paso Street and Santa Fe nearly converge to meet Avenue Benito Juarez, suspended over a concrete ditch channeling the little thin ribbon of water known as the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo, depending on which bank you stand most firmly upon. There I will be, standing between the flags of two nations, looking for the right glint of light to ignite that ah-ha moment that I can always taste but never quite slide to the tip of my tongue to send out to the world in some meaningful way.
References
Carpenter, John W. Merrick Building El Paso.
n.d. 28 October 2020.
<https://jackncb.wordpress.com/architecture/el-paso-area/merrick-building-el-paso/>.
Steely Dan. "Do It Again." Can't Buy a
Thrill. By Walter Beck and Danald Fagan. 1972. vinyl.
El Paso History Alliance. HOLLYWOOD CAFE, 301 S.
EL PASO ST., ESTABLISHED 1931. 20 March 2016. 28 October 2020.
<https://www.facebook.com/elpasohistoryalliance/posts/hollywood-cafe-301-s-el-paso-st-established-1931the-hollywood-cafe-was-one-of-th/1343249935700511/>.
