In
our second year of college, our merry band of misfits discovered Nogales, just
across the Mexican border. Nogales featured
a twelve square block red light district.
It took us that entire school year of Saturday nights to explore all the
cantinas, dancing with all the lovely señoritas. By springtime, we began to tire of carousing
for a long evening and then heading back home at three in the morning. Surprisingly, John was the one to lead the
way in this regard. The rest of us had
pretensions of love affairs back in Tucson, none of which ever consummated.
John didn't. He wagered all his betting
money on Nogales and started spending Saturday night there.
John
was the only one with a car, so we had to adapt. For a while, we hitched rides back with other
college kids, but you couldn't depend on this and if you waited too long there
were no rides. John wound up with a
regular girlfriend, Lūpe. He treated her
with respect, and she took him home early Saturday night. If we decided to stay and go back with John,
we had to meet him at the Bull Fights on Sunday afternoon. This became a ritual. We would sleep in and have breakfast at the
cantina with the women we had gone to bed with the night before. Around noon, we would take a cab to the bull
ring. The partying was just beginning
again. We would take a table in the
plaza outside the bull ring and eat tacos and drink cervesas. John would show up about 1:30 and after
another round of beers, we would buy cheap seat tickets and enter the Plaza de
Toros.
After
having watched movies of the greatest Spanish bullfights at The Sinaloa Café in
San Francisco, these Nogales fights were bad.
This was a border town on the edge of Mexico, a million miles from real
bullfighters. If the Torero didn't wet
his pants running from an old cow, the crowd would cheer. We learned just how bad the Picadors could
be, mauling the bull and sometimes their horses in the process. Quite often the Toreros were boo-ed out of
the ring for failure to show bravery in front of uniformly poor-quality
bulls. It seemed like at least once each
Sunday the crowd would be cheering for the bull. And once, but only once in my life, I
witnessed a bull being set free after the Picadors failed to cut his neck
muscles and the bull fighter was so scared that he wouldn’t go in for a kill.
We
always left before five, by which time the ring was bloody and the noon-time
beer had worn off. I never got to see a
bull fighter go down in the late afternoon's hot sun, as discussed in Garcia
Lorca's "a las cinco de la tarde." [1]
Another
answer to John's staying over on Saturday nights was to get a car of our
own. Except John's, all our parents had
been wise enough to send us away to school with no cars and little money. In my third year at the U of A, I paid $50
for a twenty-year old, rattletrap 1939 Chevy coupe. There wasn't much use for the car except (1)
going out to eat along Speedway; this was a straight, flat road that had a dozen
cheap restaurants -no one ever went over 30 MPH, (2) going up to Sabino Canyon to try and get
laid -this never seemed to work out, but like mice in a cage, young boys never
stop trying, and (3) was going to Nogales and this always worked out.
There
was this one time when we[2] were coming back on a
Sunday, about eight or nine o'clock in the morning. I was driving and Vince, Rich, and Gus were
all asleep. Well, the problem was, I was
asleep too. I closed my eyes for a
moment and the next thing I knew, I was fighting the wheel as we had run off
the road to the right and were careening down into a ditch. I jerked the wheel to the left in an
automatic reaction and we veered at a 90º angle back across the road. If a truck or even passenger vehicle had been
going South at that time, it would have broad sided us something terrible.
We
went head on into a ditch on the other side of the road and slammed to a
stop. When everybody else woke up, got
out and looked at the underside of the car, we universally agreed that the car
was toast. The front tie-rod was bending
at a 20º angle, as were the right front tire and fender. Suddenly, an oversized truck with a Mexican
family of twelve appears and they all piled out to look at what happened. The men climbed under the car to assess the
damage. The kids scattered over the
surrounding countryside. The women
magically pulled out baskets of prepared food, chicken, salads, beer and cakes,
and set up a picnic. The men reported
that it was simple to fix; just pull out the tie-rod, hammer it straight again
and re-install it. This stunned us. We assured them that we had no money to pay
for repairs. They said that doesn't
matter, they would do it anyway. We ate
the food and played with the kids.
Amazingly,
they were successful enough that we were able to get the car back on the road
to great cheers from all. We limped back
into Tucson at four in the afternoon, having traveled at under 15 MPH for 60
miles. The car was emitting horrible
noises the whole way. I parked the Chevy
at Greenlee Hall with the keys in it, a note and the pink slip legally signed
and dated.
My
days of traveling to Nogales were over.
[1] A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.
[2] We were all nerds, non-fraternity types: Vince from
Las Vegas graduated in actuarial statistics and relocated in Hartford, Rich from
the south went into the priesthood, Gus went back to Kansas and took over his
dad’s Deere dealership, John from Fargo’s wheat fields married a librarian and
got his PhD in brain chemistry, I went back to get a Masters in computer
science then traveled the world with IBM.
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