Dead to the ugly!

“Dead to the ugly,
to every single one who is ugly”
Cumbia by Wilfredo Vargas

On the stage of Barcelona’s auditorium Albert Pla sings, cries, dances... but mainly he laughs. At his country, at the powerful, at himself, at the universe in general and God in particular. “Up his ass!” He yells (‘por el culo!’), the crowd cheers and chants with him “fuck his heaven, his angels, up his ass with his divine graaaaaaaaaace!” He once was the enfant terrible of Catalan music. Now in his early forties (or so he looks) he doesńt seem to be mellowing down the slightest bit. Still sharp, still acid.

In a weird way, he makes me think of the friend I met in Puerto Vallarta a couple of weeks ago. We drove together to Guadalajara, his conversation centred largely on plastic surgery: his own and his friends’. Nose jobs, enhanced pectorals, nicer ass, tighter abdominal area. We’re talking about guys. Lots of them. After a couple of hours of mental pictures it started to crawl upon me the feeling that I’m living in a wold where everyone is getting fitter, faster, better. I recalled the numerous adds for men’s plastic surgery, the stories in magazines about Chinese getting operations to be taller, or corporate ladder climbers getting throat interventions to have a deeper voice (deeper throat?) and thus be more successful. I started to get the feeling of being left behind. I looked at myself in the rear view mirror, questioning which part of my face or body desperately calls for an intervention. After those hours of conversation in the highway, it sounded so innocuous, so innocent, so trendy.

But in the back of my head I knew that while I totally approve surgery on everyone else, on myself I would see it as a sign of insecurity. A better nose would be the permanent reminder of a low self-esteem. But maybe its precisely the plantation of my head the part of me that requires surgery, that corner of my brain where I keep so many questionable taboos.

But there again, tonight in Barcelona’s auditorium, Albert Pla keeps on singing. With his skinny figure, his grotesquely large and crooked nose... and his sharp, sharp tongue. He reminds me that no doctor can’t lend wit to someone who was born without one, no plastic surgeon can give balls to a man that doesn’t have. Sorry, it can’t happen. So I laugh along with Albert Pla, I laugh at the world, at beauty, at imperfection... por el culo a ambas! (fuck them both!)

Barcelona, 19 January 2007

Old traditions, new ring tones - in english

In between Guadalajara and Tequila there is a small town called Ameca. To get there, coming from Guadalajara, you take the same road that goes to Puerto Vallarta, but then you take the exit to Tequila. After an hour and a half the blue fields of agave give way to sugar cane plantations, we are on harvest time, so the air is full of ashes as the farmers simply burn the fields to get rid of the leaves and diminutive thorns, and then simply cut the cane, protected from the fire by it’s strong skin.

There isn’t much to see in Ameca. For most of you. For me, there is my sister Lili and her family (and a dog, that clean or not, always smells wet). They take me to a tour of the local college, where Paola my niece is taking tourism. The campus is outside the city, in the open field quite precisely (‘el campus está en el campo’ we would say in Spanish), with an impressive view of the hills. Later we all go to play video games to the central square and that’s where I hear first hear about ‘La Tehuacana’. A local personality.

Many years ago, ‘La Tehuacana’ used to have a very old profession. Or, to use old mexican terminology, she was “the one who wakes up late in the day”. But years have gone by and she is no longer up to that business, now she has a new occupation: she walks around the street selling the local newspaper “El Regional”. Let me correct that, she walks around the streets talking to everyone, finding out what’s new in their lives, giving them advise on relationships, decisions, job, school. And in between conversations she yells in her very peculiar voice “El regionaaaaaaaaaaaaal”.

Paola tells me that some kids went to her and recorded her announcement and started passing it around from phone to phone. Now that’s a very popular ring tone in Ameca. You’ll hear a few kids’s phone ringing here and there “El regionaaaaaaaaaaal... El regionaaaaaal...”

Ameca, Jalisco. January 13, 2007

The Fight Club

This is not my idea of volleyball. The beach is crowded, way too crowded, and mainly families, not a single attractive bikini in sight to make time bearable. I sip my tequila while waiting for my turn to play when my friends start to pick on one of the players they call ‘vampire’. Its hard not to notice his fangs. Naively, I thought it was a genetic defect. But soon I learn he got those implanted a few months ago. What the hell? The guy is almost 40, sounds a little too old to be playing vampire. He says he’ll take them out soon, and casually mentions “a couple of days ago, I was in a fight and I bit this pendejo in the arm, you should have seen him”.

That triggers something in my head, in the last couple of days I’ve heard a few of my new acquaintances mentioning getting in fights as a side comment. I have never, in my adult life, got in a fight. Not even a the pushing and yelling kind. Of course I’ve kicked some ass (and got mine kicked too) in a Tae Kwon Do or a Kun Tao dojo. But never out there in the real world.

And this guys, including Mr. Mexican vampire here, seem to do it routinely, with no noticeable negative effects in their life. I start to wonder if I don’t have it wrong. I wonder if this zero violence lifestyle is so abnormal, unbalanced and awkward as let’s say continuos sexual abstinence. Maybe our mammal instincts would be very satisfied if once in a while we got on casual fist fights with our peers. Nothing tragic, a bleeding nose, a black eye, the sound of your knuckles on someone’s cheekbone, the pain of a blow on the ribs. Once a month, perhaps, to release some steam and define more clearly your ranking on the pack... although in a city, these days is a virtual pack, but we still have one, we still compete and we still have alpha males. What if I’m missing out on one of the most important macho rituals?

Rather than just spit out my theory, I wonder if my friends had their own conclusions. So, I say, continuing Mr. Vampire’s story about biting someone’s arm:

- Funny, I don’t think I’d been in a real fight in my whole adult life.

The biggest response I get is one of my friends looking at me for a second and nodding politely. Everyone keeps on drinking their tequilas, watching the game and duly ignoring my comment. I persist.

- What about you? How long since you’ve been in a fight?

“I don’t know. 6 months” said one. “Two years” said another, proceeding to relate the story of the time he got ambushed by a jealous boyfriend and a couple of guys that beat the crap out of him... and then someone else started telling the story about using his belt buckle to whack the head of an opponent “it sounded like a bell! Ding, ding, ding!” I laugh, everyone laughs and I start to think if sometimes I think too much. My turn to play.

Puerto Vallarta. January 2, 2007.

It was only a kiss - in english

“How did it end up like this?

it was only a kiss, it was only a kiss!”
The Killers

I have been craving for this moment for god knows how long. Basking around in Puerto Vallarta, in my hand a bowl (chabela) of large, fresh and juicy shrimps on a hot and spicy soup with cucumber, tomato, avocado and onion. I’m eating my shrimps as if there is no tomorrow when something my friend says catches my attention:

- ...last evening, this woman kiss me right on the lips

I look at him, spoon in the air, quite puzzled. Since when a kiss has become such a big deal for him? In the last ten years I practically had no contact with these guys, since then there have been marriages, children, divorces, bankrupts, good fortune... Could these years have changed him so much? From careless womanizer into a hopeless romantic who has rediscovered the joy of little things of life? Could life experience turned this guy 180 degrees around into a someone who is moved by a single kiss on the lips?

- When exactly did this happen? - I ask

- Last evening, when we were in bed.

My theory about the new born romantic started to show cracks.

- Where you having sex with her?

- Of course!

- ...and you didn’t expect a kiss?

- Well -he says shrugging- I like her enough to fuck her, but not enough to kiss her.

I took a long sip from my beer, while in my head my short lived theory about rediscovering the simple things of life crumbled to dust.

Right then, as if invoked, his cell phone biped announcing a text message.

- ..And speaking of her- he says as he turns the phone to me so I can read the message.

It reads:

“I want to ask you a favour: could you at least fuck me with a little bit of tenderness? ...But anyway... today I’ll spend the afternoon shopping with my cousin. Bye”

Sex is not something Vallartenses get shy about. My friends seem to know everyone in the city, from the mayor to the whores, and for some reason every person we talk to manages to make a sexually explicit comment in the first minute of conversation.

Let’s say we stop to greet the owner of a burger joint. We do the Vallarta handshake, spill out our names and then we move to give way to a couple of black girls walking by the same sidewalk. He says, looking reflectively as they walk away: “what I don’t like about black girls is when you go down on them, the inside of their pussy is purple, really purple”.

Or my favourite one: we are having drinks at a karaoke bar called “the shower” (where I massacred Charly García’s “nos siguen pegando abajo”, the crowd cheered me out of pity), when a young guy with a carefully crafted regetton singer’s look joins us at the table. In the precise moment when he is sitting down I’m trying to recognise a woman’s perfume and I look around saying aloud:

- What’s that smell?

The newcomer looks at me for a moment, then he smells his hands and says

- That’s probably me, sorry about that, I was just fingering some girl.

Then he pours a bit of his vodka on his fingers, rubs them against his jeans and the conversation moves on without a pause.

While I ponder on the relativity of politically correctness, the speakers blast the latest Puerto Rico’s big hit, a dementedly upbeat song that says something like “your body is so hot that you are about to blow up like a Palestinian”.

Puerto Vallarta. Dec 30 2006.