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RE: Beethoven listeners
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
To have been flamenco, I suppose, Beethoven should have knifed the guy.
Had he done that, Beethoven would have qualified to be one of the "enforcers" in the Nogales brothels on the Mexican side of the line, which we occasionally visited when I was growing up in Arizona. They had reputations as pretty handy knife fighters, which certainly kept us on our best behavior.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Mar. 24 2014 17:07:22
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to BarkellWH)
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In south Texas in my youth, knife fights were seldom meant to inflict serious injury. Instead, the objective was to make the other guy back down. Serious injuries or death usually resulted from miscalculation or drunken clumsiness.
A rare, but generally fatal occurrence was when someone pulled a knife on a gringo armed with a concealed pistol. The gringo generally would see it as threatening death or serious bodily harm, and would kill the knife wielder, who might have been expecting only a test of nerves and bravery, if he were unfamiliar with the ways of the small gringo minority.
These incidents tended to occur more frequently while there were a large number of temporary workers from Mexico in Texas for the cotton harvest. Some few of the temporary workers might be hot tempered, likely a few more were unaccustomed to let an insult pass unchallenged, and had not yet received, or else ignored valuable advice from their co-workers.
Another volatile situation during the cotton harvest was at the Boys' Towns of Reynosa and Matamoros on the Mexican side of the river. There were sizable acreages of cotton on the Mexican side. Wages for harvesters were higher on the Texas side, so essentially all the available Mexican labor crossed the river. This left the Mexican growers to import workers from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, etc.
The summer I was 18 I worked at a cotton gin in south Texas. My shift was from noon to 2 AM Monday through Friday, noon to 10 PM on Saturday. When our Saturday shift ended we younger gringos showered at the gin, put on the clean clothes we had brought and headed south over the border.
The mix of alcohol, women, gringos, Mexicans and people from the Caribbean, in large crowds, was pretty volatile. On several occasions something that started as a bar fight developed into a full scale riot, as people chose up sides with their own ethnic group. When this happened truckloads of Mexican soldiers would eventually show up, people would be arrested, beaten or both, regardless of their ethnicity or actual participation in the fight, and eventually order would be restored.
The prudent person always had an escape route planned out, in case it hit the fan.
RNJ
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Date Mar. 24 2014 19:15:50
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
Simmer down there, lest you prompt me to tell the tale of the night I won nearly $50, most of a bottle of Bacardi Añejo, the companionship of a sweet young girl for the night, and a pair of big yellow shoes, laying side bets with a huge Jamaican guy, playing animales in Reynosa….and narrowly escaped the Mexican Army after the riot broke out.
True story.
Federales to the left! Federales to the right! Mexican army troops blocking the entrance! Back to the wall! What to do but grab the bottle of Bacardi in one hand, the Mexican maiden (his for the night!) with the other arm, and successfully run the blockade of troops. And the events of that night have been forever memorialized in corridas sung to this day by Mexican maidens playing guitars and singing of the dashing and daring Norteamericano who fearlessly outwitted and outran the Mexican Federales and army troops.
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Mar. 25 2014 15:09:16
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
Yeah tough guy? Tell that tale and see what happens.
Err...I mean please tell the tale, sir.
OK, since you ask so politely. Even at the risk of an offensive internet display of cameraderie among those who have met in real life.
As usual we left the gin in San Perlita around 10:20 PM, and didn't arrive at our favorite bar in Reynosa until a little after midnight. The place was packed, and all the desirable girls were taken, so I got a beer and walked up to the game of animales.
A woman of a certain age was seated on a chair set on a table top. She held a deck of cards about four times as thick as the usual 52 cards. On the cards were images, some from the taro deck like "The Ladder", "The Fool", and "The Hanged Man", others peculiar to the animales deck, as far as I know.
The players paid a fee to receive one or more pasteboard squares, maybe 11-12 inches on a side. The pasteboards were like Bingo cards, except with miniature images from the deck of cards instead of letters and numbers. For markers you got a pile of beer bottle caps. As in Bingo you could pay for more than one card.
The woman flipped through the deck of cards, flashed the image, and called out the name, often a slang reference rather than a real description. If you had the image on one of your cards, you put a bottle cap on it. First one to cover his whole card won the pot.
The woman shuffled, players paid for new cards, the game went on.
As it happened the guy I moved in next to was this huge Jamaican. He seemed to have been there for a while, because he was visibly sloshed. Seeing a probable English-speaker, he greeted me in a lilting Caribbean accent. Eager to maintain good relations with such a hulking specimen, I replied politely.
Soon my new friend was proposing side bets. Even if you didn't win, you could bet on who had the most spots covered at the end of the hand, how many rows or coulumns you had filled, etc.
I hesitated to bet. The guy was at a serious disadvantage. He was quite drunk, he appeared to speak little Spanish, the woman zipped through the deck at light speed, so you could only keep up if you listened to her patter and kept your eyes on your cards.
On the other hand he was persistent in his desire for side bets. I caved in and bet. He lost every time. I began to be concerned, but he was a very jovial drunk. He was betting me 50 or a hundred pesos at a pop, $4 or $8 bucks. He began to run low on cash.
He offered to bet a bottle of Bacardi Añejo against 50 pesos. To keep the peace, I agreed. Then he said he had a girl for the night, and bet her against 100 pesos. The correct fee was $20, so I upped my part to 250 pesos. Of course he lost. Then he took off his shoes and put them on the table. They looked pretty new, a light tan color, and practically glowed in the light that hung above the dealer's head. I demurred, he insisted. He lost his shoes, and declared defeat with a big smile and a thundering slap on the back.
I insisted on returning his shoes. He accepted and called the girl over. I was surprised that she was young and pretty.
In the 1950s Mexico still had attitudes that I found contradictory. There was modern industry and a strong trade union movement. The 1917 constitution was the first hard left socialist one, with collectivized land reform, state-owned industry, the whole bit, pre-dating that of the Soviet Union. The ingenious corruption of politicians and plutocrats in circumventing the law was the equal of any modern state.
Yet the attitude toward women could have been from medieval Andalucia. Young women were kept in social isolation. During the weekly paseo in the town square they were accompanied by a stern older woman. If a couple did receive permission to go out together, they were always accompanied. In the cultured city of Guanajuato, with its university and annual outdoor festival of classic Spanish dramas, I once walked up behind a courting couple strolling along the sidewalk, accompanied by her younger brother. He had a transistor radio next to his ear, listening to Beethoven.
There were very few young women working in jobs we gringos then saw as normal, such as bank tellers, department store clerks, etc. If a young woman worked in a stall in a public market there was always an older one keeping watch on her, ready to interrupt any male who tried to flirt. No female of any age wore trousers. Shorts were unthinkable.
As a result of these attitudes, any young woman who was known to lose her virginity before marriage was in very serious trouble. Elsewhere in Latin America or in Spain, she might be sent to a convent. The anti-clerical 1917 Constitution made all church buildings federal property, confiscated the church's vast landholdings, forbade the wearing of clerical garb in public, and prohibited monastic establishments. A few nunneries operated underground, but only the daughters of the wealthy might enter one of these as disgraced maidens.
As a consequence, in the red-light district bars of any Mexican city, and particularly in those lining the Texas border from Matamoros to Juarez, you might find a young, pretty girl, with a couple of years of high school, and a disposition that was still sweet, who had been thrown out of the house by her enraged and embarrassed father.
My girl turned out to be such a one. Lucky me.
We went to her room and chatted for a while. Before we got any further, a fight in the bar across the way spilled into the street and quickly flamed up into a full scale riot. The army trucks could be heard, the cries of the crowd as they tried to flee.
Then other sounds struck fear in my heart. You could hear people pounding on nearby doors, soldiers shouting, objections from customers being rousted.
The girl told me that sometimes when the soldiers chased someone into a bar, it really pissed them off, and they rousted the whole place, arresting just about any male they came across.
"What should I do?" I asked.
"Get in the bed," she replied.
"Under the bed?"
"No. They will look there. Get in the bed, under the covers, pull them over your head."
"But…"
"Now. Do it!"
She climbed in after me, shoved me up against the wall, and piled a spare blanket on top of me. Soon enough the soldiers pounded on the door, she told them to come in, it was unlocked.
The soldiers stomped in, looked in the wardrobe, looked under the bed and interrogated the girl. She pleaded, and wept. I never knew whether the tears were just an act, or whether she was really that scared.
At any rate, the soldiers seemed to be in a hurry and moved on. Eventually the ruckus died down, the street quieted, the trucks moved away with their cargos of hapless revelers.
It took us a while to get over our nerves, but we eventually found a way to pass the time pleasantly. The next morning I was invited to a nice breakfast with the rest of the girls. They complimented me on my escape.
I took away most of the bottle of rum, and almost $50 worth of pesos, which I changed at a casa de cambios before I crossed the bridge. I didn't have the shoes, but I never forgot their warm glow in the light.
Nor have I forgotten the sweet girl, and her generosity in saving me from the soldiers.
RNJ
I didn't even say anything about doorknobs….
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Date Mar. 25 2014 20:39:02
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to aeolus)
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My grandfather and I got along pretty well. He took me with him to Mexico City in 1945, when I was seven years old, along with his male secretary and a Mexican American nanny to look after me while he was occupied with business. We saw the Ballet Folklorico at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with the Orquesta Sinfonica and the fabulous Tiffany stained glass curtain. We saw the revolutionary murals in the Palacio Nacional and the Escuela de Agricultura. We watched the fast paced game of jai-alai at the Fronton Mexico, placed a few bets on the thoroughbreds at the Hipodromo, and dined on the famous mole poblano at the Cafe Tacuba, with senators and generals at the other tables. We breakfasted in the 18th century splendor af the Casa de Azulejos, and visited the Palacio de Chapultepec, where I heard about Maximilian and Carlota, and the cadet Niños Heroes, who jumped off the cliff rather than surrender to Winfield Scott and the U.S. Army in 1847--one of my grandfather's great-uncles a cavalry major among the invaders.
I returned many times afterward.
A long time after that first visit, the first time I was in Paris, there was a haunting sense of familiarity. Then the penny dropped: The lovely sweeping 19th century boulevards and the Baroque grandeur of the churches and palaces of Mexico City, back in the days when the sky was blue and you could see smoking Popocatepetl and snow capped Ixtacihuatl looming off to the southeast every day.
RNJ
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Date Mar. 26 2014 0:35:30
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to aeolus)
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Richard, I hope my little parody based on your story did not offend you. I certainly did not mean to offend you personally, but your story had elements of two of my favorite songs: "El Paso" by Marty Robbins and "South Coast" by the Kingston Trio, plus the sweet girl in the brothel reminds one of the "prostitute with a heart of gold" myth. Under the circumstances, I could not resist a little parody. Just my sense of humor breaking through.
Aeolus, it appears that you, Richard, and I have in common a deep love for and attachment to Mexico. If your great aunt knew Trotsky well, she must have lived in Coyoacan, the old colonial section of Mexico City, as that is where Trotsky lived until 1940, when Ramon Mercador (acting on Stalin's orders) placed an ice pick in his cranium.
In my case, my mother spent the first 16 years of her life in Mexico, as her father (my grandfather) was manager of the Santa Fe Railroad in Mexico. They all moved up to the U.S. after the Mexican government nationalized the railroads, the oil industry, and other foreign-owned elements in the 1930s. Bought what was the old Mexican consulate in Nogales, Arizona, and renovated it into a very nice residence. My father was in the Pacific for three years during World War II, and my mother and I lived in that house in Nogales until my father returned from the war when we moved up to Phoenix.
I still have my grandfather's photographs taken during the Mexican Revolution from 1910 on. There are interesting photographs of trains with armed troops in armored cars in front of the locomotive and at the rear of the train. And several photos of rebels from one side or the other who were hanged from telegraph poles and left there as a warning to others. We also have a "Certificado de Salvaconducto" signed and issued to my grandfather by Venustiano Carranza, which allowed my grandfather to pass unhindered within territory under Carranza's control. Very interesting and exciting times, those.
I have spent much time in Mexico and love both the people and the culture. (Or I should say "cultures," as they vary depending on whether one is in Sonora or Yucatan/Quintana Roo, or areas along the Pacific Coast.) Nevertheless, times have changed, and Mexico has changed with them: some for better, some for worse, but it's still always interesting.
Nevertheless, early on in my Foreign Service career I developed a deep attachment and love for Southeast Asia, particularly Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burnei, and the Philippines. When I was first assigned out there, it was like discovering and drinking a magic potion from a golden goblet. I never looked back, and in retirement I still pull consulting gigs lasting three or four months at a time for the State Department at our Embassies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Love the languages, Malay and Indonesian (a variant of Malay), as I do Spanish. Mexico, however, remains a close second to Southeast Asia in my heart.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Mar. 26 2014 13:48:30
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Beethoven listeners (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
Richard, I hope my little parody based on your story did not offend you. I certainly did not mean to offend you personally, but your story had elements of two of my favorite songs: "El Paso" by Marty Robbins and "South Coast" by the Kingston Trio, plus the sweet girl in the brothel reminds one of the "prostitute with a heart of gold" myth. Under the circumstances, I could not resist a little parody. Just my sense of humor breaking through.
Cheers,
Bill
As you no doubt deduced, I have used that setup for the story before. I thought your humor might just have helped it along.
It's the only time I have told the story on the web, but the oral narrative is still alive, at least among my generation in the south and southwest of the USA.
My son and his friends still have a beer, play poker, go fishing for a long weekend at the Gulf coast, but I think the extended oral narrative is not nearly as popular among them.
My father, grandfather, and several of my uncles and great-uncles were great story tellers, though there were the occasional taciturn ones among them.
A few years ago a friend in Huntsville, Alabama hosted a barbecue for nearly a hundred people at his suburban place with 15 or 20 acres of lawn. Huntsville is a center of space technology among the red clay hills of Alabama. Though it is modern, with a highly educated segment of population, it tends to attract people in the high tech business with a southern background. After midnight about a dozen were left, sitting in a circle, sipping a little Tennessee whiskey. People spoke for five minutes at a time, with drama, humor, and reminiscence among the assembled friends.
There were four people in the group under fifty years old. One was a young TV producer from the north, two were from the northwest USA, one was my Russian/Ukrainian friend. As we left around 1:30 AM, the TV producer said to me, "Talk about 'reality TV'-- that was the real thing--old southern guys."
RNJ
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Date Mar. 26 2014 22:59:09
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