Que Paseo

Well, I’ve been blabbing about the Paseo Montejo over and over. I suppose I should show you what it’s like. This poses problems. It’s easy to characterize it simply as a big boulevard that runs north and south in the middle of Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, because it is. It’s also all kinds of other things, because Mexico. You’re bound to see most anything while walking down the Paseo, and probably will. Something unpleasant is pretty rare, but other than that, the bets are off. Let’s see if I can demonstrate what I mean.

Here’s what it looks like in general, from a pedestrian’s point of view:

There’s another sidewalk just like this on the other side of the street. There’s a median strip in the middle, too, filled with flowers and trees and people trying to cross without becoming pavement pizza. It’s a busy street.

There are bike lanes on both sides of the street, too. In the US, bike lanes are an urban ornament. Everyone votes for politicians who want bike lanes, who get them installed, and then everyone votes with their ass in their Chevy Tahoes to avoid them. It’s not virtue signalling in Merida. People really do bike in these lanes, and at the drop of a hat, the city closes down half the Paseo, and lets people ride on that all day, too.

The bottom (southern) end of the Paseo is called the Remate. It’s lorded over by a statue of the Montejo boys.

The Montejos were a father/son team. They were both named Fransisco, and there was a cousin named Fransisco hanging around confusing things further. Fransisco the younger was nicknamed el Mozo, which means “the younger.” Apparently conquistadors weren’t staying up late thinking up nicknames back then.

El Mozo is pointing north, and if you follow his directions for about forty minutes, you’ll be at the Port of Progreso on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s where his dad scurried, after the Mayans kicked his ass on the first go-round. Dad figured the Aztec-conquerin’ playbook would work in the Yucatan. He discovered that even the Aztecs thought better than to FAFO down there. El Mozo had better luck when he came back later, and he founded Merida on top of the mostly abandoned Mayan city of T’Ho’. It’s unclear why the city was abandoned. I suspect that the Maya ran out of apostrophes, and went back to the jungle to look for more.

Horse-drawn carriages, decorated with lights and flowers, are a popular thing on the Paseo. I didn’t notice all that many gringo tourists riding on them. Mostly Mexican families out for a lark. The neon sign on the right is the famous Cafe Impala. It’s been in that spot since 1958. If you’re wondering how it got its name, you won’t have to wonder long. There’s half a Chevy Impala sticking out of the wall over the awning.

People mostly sit outside in the evening at the Impala. There’s a legion of feral but tame cats that sit under the tables and perform janitorial duties. They’re completely unafraid of the diners, but it’s nearly impossible to touch one of them. Why do cats know exactly how long your arm is, plus three inches, but the arm’s owners don’t? It’s a dark and bloody mystery.

When you’re done eating at the Impala, you can wander up the street to the Dulceria and Sorbeteria Colon. It’s been thrumming with customers since 1907:

The cats either don’t like commuting this far up the Paseo, or don’t like ice cream, so you’ll have to talk to your family instead of making psss psss noises.

The street is lined with colonial mansions like this one. This was about the richest street in the world around the turn of the twentieth century. The Yucatan was home to henequen plantations. Henequen fibers made the best rope in the world, so the city got rich, and people lived like emperors in big mansions like this one. Then plastic rope turned the place into a ghost town. The mansions are mostly turned into banks, event halls, restaurants, upscale hotels, and…

Honestly, America is an infection at this point, not a country. The last thing Anywhere Mexico needs is an Eightbucks Coffee house. We could walk to four superb little cafes and coffee shops from our house to get cold press ambrosia for less money, and we did. But it was kind of amusing to walk by this place, and the mission-style McDonald’s and other anglo franchise places. Humorous like watching a four alarm fire in a law office, I mean.

Some of the conquistadors have fallen on hard times:

There’s still a fair bit of rubble in Merida. The city is about halfway to restoring all the old abandoned colonial buildings into fashionable homes, shops, and restaurants. The Montejo Palace Hotel wasn’t colonial. It was some sort of midcentury concrete monstrosity. The address was valuable, though, and they are building/rebuilding a ten story something on this lot. Most of the city is only one or two stories high, and it’s kind of a shame to see towers going in.

Across the street, there’s a new, swanky hotel called El Conquistador. When I said that you’re bound to see most anything while strolling the Paseo Montejo, I wasn’t kidding. Get a load of this new batch of conquistadors:

Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper takes on a whole new meaning in Merida, where the centers on the high school basketball teams are 5′-7′, or would be, if anyone played basketball here, which they don’t. I’m pretty sure I could have bopped all three of these fellows on the top of the head and gotten away with it. My wife said she figured it was a million to one against seeing Darth Vader on the Paseo Montejo.

I told her to never tell me the odds when I’m walking down the Paseo Montejo.

The River of Souls

We saw a river of souls. It flowed into the Parque San Juan in Mérida, Mexico through a stone gate barely removed from the middle ages.

I’ve never been in a crowd like that. It pulsed and vibrated and bellowed in and out. Roared and whispered. It processed us, nothing short of that, from one end to the other. We lost ourselves in it. Not in the mundane way that term is used. We were each a single cell in a new creature, buoyed on a tide of remembrance, leavened with optimism for the future, but somehow still a complete surrender to the here and now. Dancing on a billion graves, and billions more to come. Hell, our own.

Halloween? Halloween in the United States is a joke, a sad joke. It’s nothing but Stephen King pablum regurgitated into a sugar bowl, then consumed over and over like a holiday for house flies. It’s trivial. The Day of the Dead is joyous and silly and dead serious all at the same time. It means something, but the meaning doesn’t run roughshod over the simple enjoyment of it, or vice versa. It brooks neither sanctimony nor frivolity. It stares death right in its painted skull face, real death, Mesoamerican death delivered roundhouse, over and over, muerte doled out on the scale of a scythe in a field, while dancing in looping circles around it. Unafraid, not unaware.

And so trick or treaters are transformed into a river of souls, marching in no kind of step to music made fresh coming from all points of the compass. The crowd roars and shows their fealty with iPhone fascist salutes. The marching children hold candles that flicker inside little plastic shields, mimicking the lives they represent, protected only barely from being snuffed out by the motion of passing through this world. They are the dear departed, babies snatched from their mothers before they’re ready for their first breath, children boiling with fevers, mothers struggling to produce their ration of life, fathers who put one foot wrong on a scaffold just once in their lives.

The Jesuits told the Mayans that their soul is immortal. It cannot be taken and it cannot be given away. The Maya scratched their heads and said heavenly immortality is a poor substitute for walking the earth in the shadows forever. They nodded and smiled in churches built on the rubble of their temples, because it was close enough to suit them. Still they build altars that would make a bushido blush to greet the shades of their dear departed. The river of souls rolls on.

Paradise’s Waiting Room

You can’t keep us out of the Dzalbay. They can try as hard as they might, but a Victoria beer is about $1.75, and there’s never a cover. I’ll run out of liver before I run out of pesos.

Swinga Tu Madre was playing at the Dzalbay last night. They’ve added another quite capable guitarist to the crew who’s not visible in the video. The violin player puts down his fiddle when he gets weary of trying to saw all the way through it, picks up a trumpet, and teases some more Gypsy Jazz out of that. We geeked out a bit when they played this one:

They represented enough of a lifelong pseudo-ambition for my wife and I to call it a win. We’ve always wanted to walk to the local bistro and hear Gypsy Jazz. Of course we had hifalutin’ ideas about the where and when. We had visions of Paris and haughty waiters ignoring you while anorexic girls smoke greasy unfiltered cigarettes and drink wine they didn’t buy, accompanied by the dudes who did. That’s the beauty of being unable to do much of anything: You never have to settle for second-best of anything, because you can’t even hope to sniff third best. A Rolex and a Timex cost the same if you have no money.

So this was our ultimate flight of fancy for Gypsy Jazz in a bistro:

Not gonna happen. But we were just aimlessly wandering the streets of Merida last night. It was in the low eighties, and it was clear enough to see the sickle moon for the first time in weeks. I see the moon, and the moon sees me. The streets were quieter than a weekend, although the Day of the Dead events pockmark the city with jolly and morbid goings-on. It’s perfectly safe to walk anywhere around here after dark, whether people with skulls painted on their face are abroad in the land or not. The only danger is that you can’t remember the difference between buenas tardes and buenas noches fast enough when confronted with a friendly stranger. Just when you’re screwing up the courage to give it a go, they say, “Hola,” and your house of Spanish flash cards comes tumbling down anyway.

Entirely by serendipity, the Dzalbay loomed in front of us, the light slanting out into the street to compete with the alternating red and green dazzle of the stoplight. Like almost any event of any kind in Merida, Yucatan, it cost nothing to get in. It was a happy accident that a Gypsy Jazz outfit, Swinga Tu Madre (ya, believe me, I know) was performing.

It wasn’t paradise. But it was paradise’s waiting room, surely.

Spill the Wine, Take That Girl to the Dzalbay

Dear lord, that’s a smoove groove. The smoovest, I think. Eric Burdon is fun, but borderline superfluous to the proceedings. The backup band, War, eventually thought so too, and they had eleventy hits in the seventies after they left Eric out on the curb. Audiences generally figure that the band is just the singer, with some other mostly anonymous guys standing behind him. The other guys always resent that, but then again, if they could stand out front, they would. I’ve had an arena-rock caliber singer fronting a band I was in for a short while. We all loathed him, but he delivered the mail, so we put up with it. For a while, anyway. I’m not lumping Eric in with him. Eric might be a decent human being. How would I know?

Watch the video. We’ll skip right over the guitar player’s hot pants, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about Harold Brown on the drums. I owe him something. I’ll pay it now, in the humble scrip of my attention. I wanted to play the drums when I was a kid, but the school wouldn’t let me. They handed me a trombone instead, which everyone knows is plumbing, not music. When I got older I could do as I pleased, and I got a set of drums and set myself to learn. I learned to mimic this little drag beat from Harold, and from this song. It was already an oldie but goodie by the time I cannibalized it, but it’s a hardy perennial in the groove department.

When you hear a groove like this, you could easily miss something like the little flourish Harold is using to drive the beat along. You’d just enjoy the whole thing, and find yourself energized to hear it, maybe want to get up and dance without knowing why. We called it the drag beat. I’m not sure if it has some official name. It’s more of a knack than something you practice, like rolling your R’s when you speak Spanish. With your left hand (if you’re right-handed), you loosen your grip, and sort of skim or drag the tip of the stick across the snare drum head. It bounces twice, quietly, like a trill, and then you strike the snare fully on the 2nd and 4th beats that follow the drag. The soft drag is the equivalent of two grace notes, if you know what that is.

Anyway, if you see it done, you have a “light dawns over marble head” moment, and get it going pretty easily. If you’re simply listening to a record to learn it, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. I haven’t played the the drums in twenty years, but I bet I could do it right now, and play the little turnaround that Harold plays, too. You’d think I really know what I was doing, even though I didn’t then, and certainly don’t now. It’s like greeting someone in a foreign language with the correct accent. They start blabbing at you, and you have to hold up your palm and tell them you’re fresh out of ammo after shooting “Hello, how are you?” at them.

So what’s this all have to do with anything? Don’t worry, my disordered mind will sew it all together like Frankenstein’s monster, put my abbie normal brain in it, and put the electrodes on the neck bolts to animate the essay, I promise.

The video is a live performance from a German television show, I’m pretty sure. They’re all really playing their regular instruments and singing. If you doubt that, watch at 1:45 as the bass player reaches over with his right hand to turn his tuning peg a little. There were no electronic tuners back then, so you had to tune up your instrument, and match the other instruments, solely by ear. I’m sure I still have an A 440 tuning fork hanging around someplace to commemorate the process. I’ll bet the majority of the currently most famous musicians in the world couldn’t do it.

The point is, that teevee show was a stand-in for seeing people make music right in front of you. No gimmicks, no lipsynching, no auto tune, no recorded backing tracks. Even seeing bands like War live couldn’t compete with the teevee production, because they were popular and you’d look at them from row Double Z in an arena, a flea circus on a distant stage with more equipment than NASA needed to reach low Earth orbit. Performing live, up close, in a small setting like the video, is like tightrope walking. It’s immensely interesting to see people perform live like that. It lends an additional air of excitement to the musical enjoyment, because they might fail. Arena performances and recordings can never come close to it anymore. Milli Vanilli was probably less canned than Taylor Swift is.

So here it comes: My wife and I went to the Dzalbay Cantina here in Merida Centro last night. Went there with our friends last week, too.

It’s a really cool place. It’s been a cantina on the same corner for 80 years or so. A cantina in Mexico is like The Local in Ireland. There’s always one on the esquina and it serves as a convivial meeting spot for the neighborhood. Over the years, the Dzalbay morphed from a straight-up saloon-door bucket of blood into a live music venue. Mostly jazz and blues. I loved it, and got curious about it. Dzalbay?

It’s the Spanish approximation of two words in Mayan. Ts’al and bay.

“Dzalbay” roughly translates to “what is poured/spilled”, “the poured one”, or sometimes poetically, “something that flows or is spilled.”

So I went to the Spill the Wine cantina, and I took that girl, and we heard good musicians make wonderful music for us on the tightrope of a stage, with no electronic net. I simply held up my fingers to replenish our supply of cerveza succor when we ran low, and we paid with pesos like Monopoly money.

We zigzagged home, hand in hand in the moonlight, Venus and Mars, and I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie. With a drag beat soundtrack.