Veracruz, Mexico — 1974
Before starting on Pepe’s new tattoo, we decided to go to the bar downstairs for a couple of cold caguamas to bring back to the room. The place was a typical low-end Mexican dive filled with babbling drunks, alcoholic port workers, street hustlers, trinket vendors, beggars and car washers with their dirty sun bleached rags all blowing their sad wages on a collective hangover. As we walked in I could see some of the drinkers were passed out at tables littered with empty beer bottles. Others were drinking to beat the loud Mariachi band blaring from a dilapidated jukebox encased in a beat-up wire cage. The music was much too loud for the cheap little speakers, of course, creating an ear splitting distortion that rattled my eardrums. The tables of obnoxious quarrelsome drunks were all gesturing wildly and barking like dogs to be heard above the noise as they sat desperately drowning theirĀ perpetualĀ dockside sorrows and disappointments. As we walked through the dreary chaos, I spotted young Memo sitting at a bottle-littered table near the back, drinking with a group of stevedores in their shabby brown uniforms, a captive audience apparently to their incoherent drunken babbling. A look of relief came over his cherub-like face as he stood up to join us, obviously grateful for any excuse to get away from his bleary-eyed hosts.
Just as he stepped up to the bar beside us, I looked over to see some men at another table who were arguing loudly; one guy seemed to be defending an unconscious pal from the others. I thought I recognized the passed out one, then I remembered. I’d seen him many times making his rounds at the Portales where he made a living with the little wooden box sitting beside him. You’d always see the guy going from table to table there clicking together a pair of chrome tubes attached by wires to a battery powered transformer in his little contraption. His job was to encourage drinkers prove their machismo for a few pesos by holding the metal tubes in their clenched fists as he slowly turned up the electrical current with a dial until the shock was too much to bear. The customer would finally have to let go, cursing to the jeers or admiration of his amigos, depending on how long he could hold on to the tubes. These tests would invariably lead to heated bar bets and more drunken displays of manhood, earning the weird contraption’s operator more tips for his questionable services. He must have earned enough cash tonight to drink himself into a passed out stupor, I realized.
Now it appeared the poor fellow was about to have a taste of his own medicine as a couple of his drinking companions stealthily picked up the wooden contraption beside him and set it down on the table. Over the feeble protests of his tipsy defender, one of the troublemakers slowly slipped the wicked metal rods down his pants. Fascinated and horrified, we looked on mutely as another grinning weasel-faced rascal with evil beady eyes seated himself safely across the table from his victim. Then he reached over gingerly and turned on the current.
“Hijo de puta!” Pepe said grinning, nudging me softly. “Mira lo que va pasar ahora con ese cabron!” I guessed he’d seen this sort of sadistic practical joke before.
At first nothing happened, but as the weasel began to turn the knob, the unfortunate sleeper suddenly shot bolt upright from the table, knocking it over as his battery box and a dozen beer bottles crashed to the floor. With wild possessed eyes, he began swinging blindly at anyone within reach. Suddenly the whole place was a free for all slugfest! Tables turned over with the clattering of bottles breaking on the cement floor. I watched the evil weasel scamper out the door. Several other men tried to restrain the fiery-eyed box operator, but he was swinging furiously now like a punch-drunk prizefighter. A chair suddenly hurtled through the air. I saw the burly bartender coming from behind the bar with nasty looking steel pipe coated with black tape. More bottles crashed and I felt someone grab my arm hard. Wincing in pain at the shock to my bleeding fresh tattoo, I turned to swing on my attacker, but then I saw it was only Memo. He was gesturing frantically at the door as Pepe roughly edged us both out onto the sidewalk. Outside, we ran across the street together and stood watching from the ratty little plaza as an army of drunks scurried out the door like rats from an overturned garbage can. I could hear more bottles breaking inside. There was a lot of cursing and yelling. Suddenly a couple of shots were fired within. We ducked down behind a park bench just in time to see a platoon of black uniformed police soldiers, machine guns and batons at the ready, come running from the train station towards the dingy old dockside dive.
Copyright Jonathan D Shaw 2010.
Wow! Truth is stranger than fiction and Jonathan Shaw’s life is stranger than Truth. Awesome.