Paradise Lost and Found Revisited

by Rich Wright

This post originally appeared on NewspaperTree.com on 13 June 2008.

Juarez isn’t so dangerous. In a long line of bartending gigs I once worked a stint in a bar where the door guy was the Sergeant at Arms for the Bandidos. The heavyweights from the Texas Syndicate were our best customers. Some nights we’d have as many stone cold killers per square foot as TDC Huntsville.

Under those working conditions a person really develops his social graces.

Yesterday I took the day off work and went over to Juarez in search of fodder for this column. On the way over I wandered through one of those weird pawn shops downtown. I was trying to decode their costing system when I found out I didn’t have a pad with me. I had left all my notebooks next to my computer. So my first stop in Juarez was Papel-o-rama by the cathedral. I picked up a quad-ruled notepad for 19 pesos.

My closest favorite bar to Papel-o-rama is the Club Paraiso. Club Paradise is about halfway through a year long remodel after a new owner took over. Most of the kitsch is mothballed, but the tributes to the taxidermial arts are still on display, seven stunted deer heads and a Mexican eagle clutching a snake in its talons.

The Paraiso used to be packed with the stuff you might buy if you were shopping for gag gifts, or pick up rummaging through an attic. A blow fish, and an old railroad lantern. A brass Buddha. Replica firearms. That’s all disappeared now. Only the fauna remains.

Joints like the Paraiso, and the defunct Wildhare’s Booze & Adventure, are unique interior decorating opportunities. My personal opinion is that if you’re going to decorate a bar, you shouldn’t spend more than maybe a hundred bucks on the whole thing. Everything should be scrounged.

Frankly I was leery when the remodel began. But I have to admit, that when I went in yesterday, I could almost put a happy spin on the ongoing developments.

There are, mostly, two kinds of dive bars in Juarez. One kind, the cantinas, have men behind the bar and no pool tables. The other kind, which are called, mostly, bars, have women attending the customers and a pool table, or more than one. I generally prefer the cantinas. They’re just for drinking. The bars are usually clip joints, selling a watered down version of the same fantasy offered at strip clubs.

The Paraiso was one of the dinosaur cantinas, but the new owner has installed some women behind the bar while retaining a couple of the old school bartenders. So for now it’s a hybrid. And so far there’s no pool table.

Yesterday I got a good seat at the Paraiso. When I got there at three, the place was still packed from the one thirty botana. Like lots of places in Mexico used to, the Paraiso offers a snack for the afternoon drinkers. Some days it’s chicharrones, some days caldo de pollo. It all depends on what the cook feels like making, and probably what’s on sale. At half past one there’s usually not a seat at the bar.

I missed the botana yesterday, so by the time I got there I got a seat at one end of the bar, under the tv. It took me a little while to realize that everyone in there wasn’t staring at me. They were just watching some bikini contest on BET.

I sat there nursing a beer, scribbling notes in my new notepad, till some drunk started chatting me up and I had to put my notes away. He bought me an Indio, hoping, I suspect, to parlay his last handful of change into more drinks at my expense, but I pounded the beer and headed out the door. By the time I left, the crowd had thinned considerably.

Outside some federales, their Hechler and Koch G-3’s across their laps, ate cocteles at one of those dubious seafood stalls.

I took the shortcut down Mariscal. The retrograde progress on Mariscal renovation, stalled, for a while, by a lack of city funds, has lurched forward again. La Choca, the iron gym next to the gay bar, was a pile of rubble with a big excavator pawing the tumbled bricks around, kicking up choking clouds of mud colored dust.

I wolfed down a bean burrito at one of the kiosks at Mariscal and Mejia and headed for the drag.

I was the only customer at the Kentucky. It’s a hard time to be a bartender in Juarez.

Sipping my margarita, I started thinking about the remodel at the Paraiso, and the renovation of the Mariscal. I miss the old Paraiso. I miss its gritty charm. I miss its authenticity, its genuineness, its character. But maybe part of what I miss is also its familiarity, and maybe, in time, the new Paraiso will be familiar, too.

And maybe the renovation will turn out okay after all. Because no matter how they launch the renovation, the reality will be dictated by the marketplace. Whatever plans you make are out the window once reality rears its ugly head, and the bottom line doesn’t give a damn about your good intentions. So they’ll build the ship, and shove it off for some theoretical destination, and then the currents of the marketplace will take it who knows where. And we are the marketplace. We get to vote with our dollars.

Man plans and God laughs. The marketplace laughs, too. Plans are only good so you know what you’re deviating from.