I’m sitting in a cowhide chair at a cowhide table in the Mariachi Bar, just off Avenida Juarez, a block from the bridge. The Kentucky Club is closed by government order due to a well-publicized, regrettable, “reprehensible” (by their own admission) act of discrimination, but maybe the Mariachi is better anyway. The Mariachi is not crowded with fresas and louts, and as I sat down at this table to write, the kitchen kicked out some gritty (authentic!) corn chips and a cup of red sauce that makes stomach acids superfluous.
I’m drinking a Bohemia (original) and a shot of La Cava de Oro Extra Añejo that’s perhaps better suited as a topping for vanilla ice cream. When Maga comes by and I ask him to throw a shot of Cazadores on top of the dregs.
It’s 1:30, and I’m the only customer. The employees outnumber me five to one, but if I have another shot of tequila, I think I can take ’em. These days I like empty bars better. When I owned bars, I liked them full.
I’ve come from south of downtown, south of Diesyseis. I crossed at Stanton and walked down Lerdo to the Post Office. Then I wormed by way towards the cathedral, skirting the crowds of Calle de la Paz, stepping over puddles on Mina, drifting, west, and south, looking, casually, for Christmas presents.
I’m not a guy who shops. A durable good for me is a box of thirty beers, and it’s not that durable.
Downtown Juarez is the hub for the city’s bus routes, and the streets are crowded. A few cars creep around the puddles and potholes, sometimes bouncing on worn springs when they fail to negotiate a pit. The sidewalks are crowded.
Most of the streets south of downtown are given over to commerce. Tools and hubcaps, and exercise equipment previously seen only on late night infomercials. Antique cellphones. Bric and brac. The flotsam of a wealthier northern neighbor obsessed with consumerism spills out from the sidewalk into the street, eddying the flow of pedestrians as people stop to look.
They say you can’t step in the same river twice, and downtown Juarez has that same transitory quality. Ephemeral. Dreamlike. Like a conversation between strangers overheard in passing.
I stop at a menuderia I’ve never seen on a street I’ve walked a hundred times. Eager girls in aprons fish tripe and hooves from stainless pots that breathe steam in the front room. A cash register sits on a tall table in front of a stairway lined with a gallery of family pictures, fading, framed, young men in uniforms and brides and first communions. The milestone moments.
Juarez is a stratified society. The people who go downtown are the lower end of Mexico’s broad middle class. They, at least, have money. Mexico’s poorest live in a barter society. The government recently raised Mexico’s minimum wage and it’s still less than four dollars a day. Prices downtown are set accordingly.
I leave, then, and wander over to the start of this story.
And I’m sitting in a cowhide chair at a cowhide table in the Mariachi Bar.