hwrnmnbsol (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hwrnmnbsol) wrote2011-01-23 11:32 pm
hwrnmnbsol) wrote2011-01-23 11:32 pm
Four Days in Monterrey
I just spent four days in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. It’s been a full weekend. By ‘full weekend’ I do not mean that I had four days of magical, soul-enriching experiences that I can relate to my grandchildren someday. I hope my grandkids never find out about this weekend, especially if they’re girls. Because by ‘full weekend’ I mean that I have been in the presence of so much debauchery and dissipative living that Nero, were he along, would have begged out early for a quiet evening of TV and an early bedtime. I feel like I’ve just stepped out of a Rat Pack movie, if the Rat Pack were composed of actual rats. I have been in the presence of more drinking, womanizing, cussing, vomiting and all-around atrocious-being than most people do in their entire lives. And that was before we left the airport.
But despite that set-up, I’m not going to write about the actual badness. That might be fun for some to read, but it’s not what I want to write. Anyway, if you want to know what happened, just go and read some Tucker Max, or some Hunter S. Thompson. Nothing that happened this weekend would be out of place in the writings of those authors.
No, I’d rather write about some things that happened on each day of the weekend.
This wedding was the union of a lawyer known to me, and the daughter of a prominent family in Monterrey. We will call the lawyer ‘Zapata’ and his betrothed ‘Nanita’. These are not their actual names, but perhaps they should be.
My connection to Zapata is through my wife, Bonnie. She and a bunch of other lawyers went to law school together in Houston and have stayed close. A number of other attorneys and other professionals have gravitated into the group, because frankly this group has more fun than most other groups of lawyers. So, a number of friends of Zapata flew into Monterrey for this wedding event. The group we came in with is as follows:
• Captain Beefheart. What can I say about the Captain? Nice guy; terrific attorney; train wreck of a human being. Bonnie keeps her phone on her bedside every night for the specific reason that the Captain may call needing to get bailed out. He is a notorious whorer, drinker, substance abuser and not-give-a-fucker. He narrowly escaped detainment in Panama on various sinister, vaguely-defined charges. He’s had several heart attacks and has a DUI case pending. He’s 36. I fully expect to someday be asked to identify his body. I am equally sure that at some time in the next few years Bonnie is going to need somebody to help her, and Captain Beefheart is a lock to be there, because despite his faults he’s a stand-up guy and a long-time good friend to my favorite person in the world.
• Ace Frehley. Ace is the Captain’s wingman and constant companion in their quest to find women who will sleep with them on short notice. Direct observation suggests that their modus operandi consists of approaching two visibly unattached females, plying them with alcohol, and making a variety of statements including (in no particular order) generic compliments, assorted witticisms, and outright lies. Sometimes this works. Yeah, I don’t get it either.
• Ace Ventura. This Ace was introduced to me and Bonnie on this trip, and had the distinct disadvantage of being the second Ace in the group. As his real last name was too annoying to be remembered by people actively engaged in drinking a lot of alcohol, Bonnie quickly decided that he would be named ‘Bob’. This somehow morphed into ‘Mexican Bob’, because while Ace Ventura is of Mexican extraction, he was possibly the whitest guy there (except for myself). He spoke no Spanish, knew nothing about the culture, and just generally was a very poor example of a Mexican. Over the course of the trip he acquired a great many other names, including Cock-Blocker and Sponge-Bob Ripped-Pants (see below).
• Machete. Every group of travelers should have a Machete, a soft-spoken and bespectacled individual. Machete spoke the language fluently, was adept at making plans and arrangements, and generally did not mind taking care of the shit-work duties of the group, which more often than not involved rousting people out of bed who had chemical reasons not to want to get up. One might be tempted to write off Machete as The Safe One. One would be wrong. The first night there Machete had a lot to drink. I shall not write of his exploits here, except to say that Machete approached many women with romantic intent, had to be restrained by club security multiple times owing to his genial good-times-having, and ended the night sleeping in a shower. Machete was an ANIMAL.
There were many other guys there as well, but I don’t have time to write about the ongoing blood-feud between Osama bin Laden and El Cid, so I’ll just stop here and write about Thursday.
**
THURSDAY – TIO
On Thursday we arrived in Monterrey. Monterrey is both a beautiful and a disgusting place. It’s as if God created a beautiful paradise, with ridiculously scenic mountains and a winding river, and then said, you know what this place needs? More slums. Most of Monterrey is very poor, and we drove through sprawling barrios with cubic concrete-shell dwellings piled atop each other two and three tiers deep. Often these structures crumbled into themselves, or were built around billboards and cell phone towers, and derelict cubes were not necessarily cleared out of the way when new ones were built over them, roofed with scrap tin, and patched in with whatever loose shit might be found on the ground. It was a humbling experience driving through those slums, particularly for people who were really there to drink a lot and not have poverty jump up and be all Captain Bring-down.
But then we were into Monterrey proper, and into the Valle section of the city. The experience of driving from the airport to Valle was like this: airport favela favela favela favela Bel Air. We found ourselves staying in a posh hotel attached to high-dollar shopping, all surrounded on all sides by various clubs and restaurants. The transition from crushing poverty to uttermost opulence was so dramatic that there really should have been a border crossing marking the transition. But there wasn’t; in Mexico this yawning gulf between the rich and the poor seems to be accepted by all. Not that this isn’t happening in the USA; the difference is the magnitude of the gap.
On Thursday after we arrived and got comfortable, Zapata himself came and put in an appearance. He was going to get us over to a nice club, he said, and we were all going to have a good time. He also introduced us to Tio.
Tio was actually Zapata’s uncle, a fellow in his late forties. Tio was a seriously live wire. At no point in the weekend did I ever see him in anything approaching a state of sobriety. I also noted a certain preoccupation with rubbing his nose that suggested he might have been lit up in more than one way. Tio was a guy who tried to dress like a party animal; he had expensive clothes elaborately styled to give the impression of casualness; he wore rakish hats and cowboy boots. But he never really seemed to pull it off, possibly because a party animal needs to radiate a sense of cool, and Tio was working it too hard. You can’t be Joe Cool if you’re stumbling over your too-big boots, trying to be seen and recognized by everybody in the club, talking too loud and throwing people out of their groove.
Tio came with us to the club and on every other outing we had that weekend. He seemed to know every service person, every bodyguard in every place we went within Monterrey. Tio was clearly part of the nightlife, and although he was a weirdo, he was part of the landscape and he got doors opened. At the club we were frisked, a routine precaution in Monterrey. They then let us in to a very nice disco, with a separate bar for cigar-smokers, an amphitheater-style room with the band up high and the dance-floor down low, and absolutely no sense of a life safety code. If there had been a panic at the disco, nobody would have gotten out alive.
This was where Machete got drunkest, but for the most part his drunken activities were not bothersome to anybody (until the end of the evening, when he was rather epically ill). Tio, on the other hand, was obnoxious. He was especially obnoxious to the Captain and Ace, who were very busy trying to chase tail. What would happen was this: the Captain and Ace would identify several likely candidates for screwing, and like Marlon Perkins and the rest of the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom crew, would carefully approach the prey and prepare their nets and tranquilizer guns. (Figuratively. That I know about.) They would go about their approach in a cautious way, veterans that they were, not wanting to spook the game. But then in would swoop Tio, brushing up against the ladies, taking off his coat and waving it like a torero, and generally trying to be the life of the party. Full points to Tio for intent, because it was obvious that he was trying to help as some oversized kind of Cupid, trying to inspire the ladies to romance and help out his buddies Captain and Ace. But this had the opposite effect, and the women would melt back into the protective landscape of the club, forcing the hunters to start their stalkings again from scratch.
Bonnie had quickly pegged the flamboyant Tio as gay. “He’s like Agador from that movie THE BIRDCAGE,” she said. Indeed, there was something about the way he glided about in his clown-shoe cowboy boots that was very reminiscent of Hank Azaria’s flaming houseboy trying to relearn how to get about with something on his feet. I confess I pooh-poohed this talk; I took his wing-manning efforts as more lady-chasing of his own.
But we found out that Tio is, in fact, gay. He came out to his family a year ago. His family is very traditionally Mexican, and in that culture being gay is not cool. Like, at all. Other than his presence at the wedding, we discovered, the family has largely disowned Tio, has divested him of any connection to the family businesses, and just generally doesn’t want to acknowledge the shame of his existence. Even our friend Zapata has not been immune to this. “Captain,” he said, “I will pay you any amount of money to make Tio put his penis inside a vagina.”
Captain considered this. “How far in?” he wanted to know.
“All the way in,” Zapata answered sternly, always the shrewd businessman.
But this weekend, Tio actually drunkenly approached his friend the Captain. In his broken English, he made a clumsy attempt at a pass. “If you be with me,” he slurred, “I give you anything.”
“Okay, Tio, we’ll talk about it later,” said the Captain. The Captain’s generally up for anything, but I don’t think man-love is in his bag of tricks.
“Okay!” said Tio, and slapped the Captain on the ass as he staggered off.
The Captain wasn’t really sure what to make of this. The whole thing just makes me sad.
**
FRIDAY – PANTS
The Mexican people take their weddings very seriously. There is, of course, an elaborate Roman Catholic wedding ceremony, with mass, Communion, etc. But it comes as only one very small part of an entire pageant of partying, all parts of which must be committed to in full by the members of the wedding party. In the rare moments where we had Zapata hanging with his buddies, he moaned about how he had been kept in a constant state of drunkenness by his in-laws for basically the entire week. He was actively looking forward to an end to the drinking. Given that this is Zapata who we are talking about, a man who has targeted his liver with drink the way Stalin went after Trotsky, this was an eye-opening admission.
The Mexicans also have a problem with time, namely they do everything two hours later than everybody else. It’s as if they’re really on Pacific Standard Time but won’t admit to it. Lunch is at 2. Dinner is at 9. Going to bed before midnight means that Abuela called and wants to give you your balls back. In the case of the wedding, the ceremony started at 8PM, and dinner at the reception was at 11PM. This was hungry-making.
The reception was held around a giant dance floor with a huge band. “It is only a matter of time,” I predicted after seeing the size of the band, “before we are treated to a medley of Kool and the Gang hits.” I was, of course, right, although that was really a softball prediction. Wedding bands will ALWAYS play Kool and the Gang unless you threaten to stab them.
The tables at the reception were laid out in a semi-circle divided into two arcs. In one arc were the tables of Old People. In the second arc were the tables of Young People, of which there were many. Between the two arcs were two singular tables: the table for the bride and groom, and the table for the gringo lawyers. Us.
Dancing began early and did not let up until the festivities closed down around 5AM. (They served a second dinner at 2:30AM to keep everybody going.) I am, I must state now, not a dancer. I do not dance. Do not ask me to dance. Do not ask me why I don’t dance. I don’t dance. Bonnie, however, has been known to dance. This sometimes leads to Conflict.
Mexican Bob is very much a dancer. The man could not sit still. He was constantly shimmying whenever a song came on. Even when sitting down, Mexican Bob could not be prevented from chair-dancing, which is a problem when you have a bunch of hungry gringos closely grouped around a table and a non-skinny Mexican Bob wants to shake his tail-feather. But there was plenty of opportunity to dance on an actual dance-floor, so when Bob asked if he could borrow my beautiful wife for the purposes of dancing, I practically wept with relief.
Bob led Bonnie out to the dance floor and they began dancing to some rap song. At least I assume it was a rap song, because Mexican Bob was getting low during his dancing. Bonnie was not getting low, as she did not have a dress that would permit this without inviting the entire audience to perform a gynecological exam. But Bob was dropping it like it was hot.
This went on for perhaps thirty seconds. Then Bob went especially low and his eyes widened.
“Bonnie, we have to get off the dance floor,” he said earnestly.
“Why?” asked Bonnie.
“Because I just split my pants open.”
He wasn’t fooling around, either. The back seam of his pants had completely let go. Mexican Bob’s boxers were flapping around out there for everybody to see. They trotted back to the table with Bonnie concealing Bob’s wounded condition.
“I have to go back to the hotel. This is embarrassing,” said Bob.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll run down to the coat-check area and see if they have a safety pin.”
“I’ll ask our server,” Bonnie said.
The group went off in half a dozen different directions. Bob went and parked himself on the couch in the Men’s Room. Bonnie procured a sewing kit. “Go get Bob’s pants,” she said, “and I’ll try to get them fixed here in the Ladies’ Room.”
I got Bob’s pants. He looked distinctly unhappy about being stranded, pantsless, in a land where he did not speak the language and every hand was turned against him. I ran the pants to Bonnie and went back to check on Bob. In the brief interval of time where I had been gone, things had gotten ugly. The Youth of the wedding were very curious to know why some guy was hanging out in the bathroom with no pants on. Bob didn’t have any Spanish to explain himself, so the questions and the shit-giving were getting a little pointed.
I sat down next to Bob, folded my arms, and stared. I’m bigger than most people. I’m definitely bigger than most Mexicans. I look like a single Mexican who is in the process of undergoing mitosis and splitting in half to form two Mexicans. The youngsters who thought it was hilarious to taunt a single pantsless gringo now found themselves facing one pantsless gringo accompanied by a large, glaring gringo with a full pants-complement. The shit-giving became more probing.
“You guys like hanging out like this, eh?” one youngster laughed.
“Oh yes,” I replied. “We make this look cool.”
“You only wish you could hang out in the bathroom with no pants on,” Bob added.
“Why don’t you go home?” one fellow asked.
“Because they’d make him put pants on there,” I replied. “And we like it here. Without pants.” I gave our opponents a hard look.
“Then you should have your pants off too!” laughed the first guy.
I considered this. “All right,” I said finally. “One hundred pesos.”
This went on for some time. Eventually Bonnie - who was slow in her pants repairing because 1) she had drunk enough that threading a needle was a challenge and 2) she had to show the broken pants to everybody so they could be laughed over, photographed and posted to Facebook - did manage to return the pants to Bob. Bob now considers me to be the salt of the earth. “You find out who your friends really are when you have no pants,” Mexican Bob said philosophically.
That’s some serious wisdom right there.
**
SATURDAY – MANSION
The next day nobody was up before noon. This was par for the course for the wedding party, which as mentioned earlier had been hard at work doing exactly this sort of thing for a solid week. Bonnie and I got up, did a little shopping, consumed beers with the Captain and his bleary crew, and generally took it easy. But we couldn’t jump off the runaway train of wedding-partying just yet, because Nanita’s family had invited everybody over to their house for taquitos at 7PM. (an EARLY dinner.)
We were picked up at the hotel by Paco. That’s his real name. Paco was the driver for Nanita’s family. Nanita’s family is rich. If Monterrey were the Star Wars universe, Nanita would be a space princess. She is 24, very beautiful, and has lived her entire life with her family in Monterrey. Now Zapata is going to spoil all that by sweeping her away to live with him in Houston, where she knows nobody. I don’t know if she plans on finding a job here (she’s just graduated with an architecture degree) but I do know that her life with Zapata will not involve regular and unlimited credit limit shopping ventures, which seems to be a regular activity for her at present. Nanita looked very happy to be married, but also very shell-shocked and sometimes a little scared.
Paco drove us to the family house. The family house looks like an MC Escher painting. There are multiple jumbled levels visible from the outside, with a bewildering variety of exterior staircases, ladders and portals linking them together. From the inside, however, the house was airy, well-lit, with huge windows and artwork everywhere. We discovered that Nanita’s mom had designed the house and had also done all the paintings inside it.
That house was the bomb. Seriously, it wasn’t what Bonnie would choose (Bonnie gravitates more to the dark wood finishes and traditional layouts) but that house was right up my alley. The back door led out to a pool area with water features, a Jacuzzi and jetting fountains. Next to the pool was an outdoor kitchen where other household staff were cooking dinner, and a pool house complete with two restrooms and a bar. Looking over all this was an exercise room and many small terraces, ideal for sitting and gabbing.
Each of the kids, of course, had their own room. But really what they had was their own suite of rooms – a drawing room of sorts, and then a private bedroom and bathroom. That whole family could have lived their lives entirely separately from each other if they had chosen to do so, only coming down to get food. But that wasn’t how they were; that family was all over each other. Nanita and her two younger sisters (both beautiful as well; the Captain had to vow to himself not to soil them) were very close and were constantly going places with each other. The extended family in town was also large, with a near endless parade of aunts (never uncles) traipsing in and out, hugging people and making the Captain’s crew horny (as the aunts weren’t bad to look at as well). Everybody was just generally rich and nice and beautiful. It made me uneasy.
I loved their house, but something about it seemed a little off. It took me a while to put my finger on what it was. I realized eventually that the house was built turned inward upon itself. It had huge, high walls around it, probably twenty feet tall. The windows looked down on the pool area instead of out onto the street. Even the garage doors were built flush to the face of the wall that faced the street, effectively unrecognizable to casual inspection as being anything other than another stretch of wall. The house was meant to look in on itself, not out onto the city. And the house was also built, either symbolically or literally, to keep the city out. I think this clashed with the democratic principles that are built into the core programming of an American. My inner self chafes at the idea of a house that dares to keep the rabble out. But, given the fact that many of the views in Monterrey looked out upon squalor and misery, I had to wonder whether I really could find fault with them.
**
SUNDAY – ZETAS
A brief word regarding Monterrey’s history: Monterrey is one of the largest cities in Mexico, and for many years has been the most prosperous. Its proximity to both shipping and the corridor north through Texas has made it a hub for industry, and many large Mexican companies have headquarters there. When you’re in the Valle portion of the city, you have a view of a great many elegant high-rise buildings that are very picturesque; then you look in a different direction and see the slums. Jarring.
Because Monterrey has been so prosperous and has been the home to so many of Mexico’s richest families, it has until recently been spared from the violence that has consumed the rest of the countryside. In other parts of Mexico the various drug cartels effectively rule large portions of land, and struggles between gang members and police is routine. Monterrey, however, has been able to suppress the violence.
This changed about a year ago. One of the big cartels, the Gulf Cartel, had a falling out with one of their subsidiary organizations, the Zetas. The Zetas were an enforcement arm while the Gulf Cartel was the business end of the drug operations. Apparently some Zetas took out a hit on a prominent Gulf Cartel leader, the Gulf Cartel demanded that the guilty parties be handed over for some beheadings, and Zeta told the Gulf Cartel to stick it. The Zetas are now doing the business part of drugs as well as the enforcement, working in direct competition with the Gulf Cartel. There’s been a hot war ever since.
This hot war spilled into Monterrey last year. Some important Zeta leaders were picked up by the police there. As a result, the chief of police was assassinated. Since then there have been clashes not only between gangs but also with the local police. We saw a lot of police with M16’s standing around being menacing. As a rule, the local police have done a decent job of securing the richest, stodgiest areas of town; I felt very safe in the Valle area. But in outlying areas of town, police control is not good. We were advised to be very careful going around the outer areas of town, especially at night, especially especially alone, and especially especially especially to the wrong kind of club.
Because, you see, the criminal element really likes the wrong kind of club. There are whores there. There is also alcohol, and loud music. A gang member really digs the wrong kind of club. And that was very bad news for our little group, because the Captain and his pals all wanted to go to the wrong kind of club for the exact same reasons.
After the dinner at Nanita’s mansion, a group of us went to a right kind of club. But inevitably the Captain could not withstand the lure of the wrong kind, and so an arrangement was made whereby Nanita would delegate some of her less pristine single friends (aka The Expendables) to show the Captain and his crew around to a wrong kind of club. But they would be exceedingly careful and selective in judging the wrongness of said club, the hours of visitation, which women the Captain was allowed to approach, et cetera. So in the wee hours of the morning this plan was implemented.
A digression regarding the Captain: on this trip he chose to carry a knife. It was a folding knife with, I am guessing, a six inch blade. Not a trifling thing, I suppose, compared to most letter openers. And it made the Captain feel safe. But he was constantly smuggling the thing into places where weapons were forbidden. This cracked me up. He would slip it in his boot, or in his crotch, and waltz into clubs. The security there would pat him down, and without fail they would not turn up his knife, and the Captain would strut into the club feeling like he had accomplished something. Of course I have my alternate theory, which is that security felt the knife but didn’t bother with messing around with it. If a Zeta was going to come into the club looking to make trouble, he wasn’t going to be packing a goddamn puny-ass knife. The Zetas were formed when a group of special forces soldiers defected from the Mexican army, like the A Team gone horribly wrong, and if there’s one thing they know it’s how to procure and use weapons. If a Zeta came up against the Captain, there would be Glocks involved, and the Captain would feel pretty stupid with his weak-sauce knife.
The Captain and Ace Frehley went with Nanita’s friends to a naughty-ish club. They went in a rented car, which was valet parked, and they went into the club. There various activities took place that shall not be recorded here. The club was naughty-ish and that’s all you need to know.
At some point Nanita’s friends get uneasy. “The wrong kind of people are starting to show up,” they said. I have no idea how one successfully identifies the wrong kind of people; I don’t know if there’s a secret high-sign or a merit badge they wear or whatever. Anyway, the message was repeatedly delivered to the Captain that it was probably time to go. And in a break from the usual script, wherein the Captain refuses to do the sensible thing and gets himself into hot water, he this time allowed himself to be convinced that perhaps it was time to make a night of it.
They went outside to their valet parked car and found themselves in a quandary. The Zetas were in fact there. They had driven up in SUV’s with tinted windows and gone into the club. Now, the thing about Zetas is that they don’t follow other peoples’ rules. They don’t like rules very much; they find them irritating. Furthermore, it’s part of their attitude to intentionally violate rules so that people will decide they are badasses and will do whatever they say. So, when Zetas decide to go to a club, they don’t valet park their cars. They just pull up to the curb, behind the valet parked cars, get out, lock their cars (which have drugs and guns inside them), glare menacingly at anybody nearby, and toddle into the club to have a good time.
The valet parking guy was sweating bullets. The Zeta vehicles were behind the Captain’s car. There was a tiny gap between the SUV’s, but it was really too small and at too weird of an angle to even think about trying to bring the rental between them. And they definitely weren’t going inside the club to find the Zetas and tell them to move their fucking cars. They weren’t going to TOUCH those cars. Because in Monterrey, valet parking is not for just any chump. If you want to be a valet parker, you need to have a head on your shoulders and some mad valet parking skills. Because if you ding a Zeta car, my friend, it is your head on a plate.
The elite valet parking team convened an emergency strategy meeting to discuss the matter. Measurements were taken. Eventually it was agreed that there was a chance – a small chance, mind you, but a chance – that the rental could be driven between the Zeta SUV’s without mishap. The valet guys discussed this for a long time. Presumably they drew lots and one of them got the black bean. This fellow resignedly got in the rental and began the process of trying to extract the car.
This operation was approached with the gravity and caution of defusing a bomb in the Green Zone. Approximately a half hour was consumed in the laborious, agonizingly slow process of backing the rental a few inches, turning the wheel a few degrees, going forward a few inches, and repeating this over and over again. During each iteration sweating parking attendants hovered over the SUV’s, possibly planning on interposing their bodies if it looked like any kind of collision would happen.
The car was eventually extracted with only an inch to spare on each side. The relieved noble valet parkers were tipped into the stratosphere. The actual Zetas were never seen. The Captain and crew drove off into the sunrise (literally; there are pictures), having yet again miraculously escaped a probably justly deserved fate of death and dismemberment.
**
And that’s pretty much what happened in the trip. We all blearily made our way back to the airport (Paco was graciously loaned to us for this purpose) and discussed what we had accomplished, which mostly consisted of watching Zapata get married, consuming large quantities of food, drink and other, and assorted other disgusting and illegal acts which are not to be discussed in the civil parlors of society.
“We’re doing this again during the Superbowl. Dallas,” the Captain said.
“The whores will be in town,” Ace Frehley observed.
Bonnie and I will not be there. I have five years on the oldest of those guys. I can’t do the party until sunup thing anymore. One, I get tired. Two, I have acquired some dignity over the years, and I’d like to keep it intact. Three, while I have no problem with whores, I have no business with them and they have no business with me. But it was awesome and, in many cases, hilarious to live the crazy life again like when I was young.
I had a great time in Monterrey and I hope we can go back soon.
But despite that set-up, I’m not going to write about the actual badness. That might be fun for some to read, but it’s not what I want to write. Anyway, if you want to know what happened, just go and read some Tucker Max, or some Hunter S. Thompson. Nothing that happened this weekend would be out of place in the writings of those authors.
No, I’d rather write about some things that happened on each day of the weekend.
This wedding was the union of a lawyer known to me, and the daughter of a prominent family in Monterrey. We will call the lawyer ‘Zapata’ and his betrothed ‘Nanita’. These are not their actual names, but perhaps they should be.
My connection to Zapata is through my wife, Bonnie. She and a bunch of other lawyers went to law school together in Houston and have stayed close. A number of other attorneys and other professionals have gravitated into the group, because frankly this group has more fun than most other groups of lawyers. So, a number of friends of Zapata flew into Monterrey for this wedding event. The group we came in with is as follows:
• Captain Beefheart. What can I say about the Captain? Nice guy; terrific attorney; train wreck of a human being. Bonnie keeps her phone on her bedside every night for the specific reason that the Captain may call needing to get bailed out. He is a notorious whorer, drinker, substance abuser and not-give-a-fucker. He narrowly escaped detainment in Panama on various sinister, vaguely-defined charges. He’s had several heart attacks and has a DUI case pending. He’s 36. I fully expect to someday be asked to identify his body. I am equally sure that at some time in the next few years Bonnie is going to need somebody to help her, and Captain Beefheart is a lock to be there, because despite his faults he’s a stand-up guy and a long-time good friend to my favorite person in the world.
• Ace Frehley. Ace is the Captain’s wingman and constant companion in their quest to find women who will sleep with them on short notice. Direct observation suggests that their modus operandi consists of approaching two visibly unattached females, plying them with alcohol, and making a variety of statements including (in no particular order) generic compliments, assorted witticisms, and outright lies. Sometimes this works. Yeah, I don’t get it either.
• Ace Ventura. This Ace was introduced to me and Bonnie on this trip, and had the distinct disadvantage of being the second Ace in the group. As his real last name was too annoying to be remembered by people actively engaged in drinking a lot of alcohol, Bonnie quickly decided that he would be named ‘Bob’. This somehow morphed into ‘Mexican Bob’, because while Ace Ventura is of Mexican extraction, he was possibly the whitest guy there (except for myself). He spoke no Spanish, knew nothing about the culture, and just generally was a very poor example of a Mexican. Over the course of the trip he acquired a great many other names, including Cock-Blocker and Sponge-Bob Ripped-Pants (see below).
• Machete. Every group of travelers should have a Machete, a soft-spoken and bespectacled individual. Machete spoke the language fluently, was adept at making plans and arrangements, and generally did not mind taking care of the shit-work duties of the group, which more often than not involved rousting people out of bed who had chemical reasons not to want to get up. One might be tempted to write off Machete as The Safe One. One would be wrong. The first night there Machete had a lot to drink. I shall not write of his exploits here, except to say that Machete approached many women with romantic intent, had to be restrained by club security multiple times owing to his genial good-times-having, and ended the night sleeping in a shower. Machete was an ANIMAL.
There were many other guys there as well, but I don’t have time to write about the ongoing blood-feud between Osama bin Laden and El Cid, so I’ll just stop here and write about Thursday.
**
THURSDAY – TIO
On Thursday we arrived in Monterrey. Monterrey is both a beautiful and a disgusting place. It’s as if God created a beautiful paradise, with ridiculously scenic mountains and a winding river, and then said, you know what this place needs? More slums. Most of Monterrey is very poor, and we drove through sprawling barrios with cubic concrete-shell dwellings piled atop each other two and three tiers deep. Often these structures crumbled into themselves, or were built around billboards and cell phone towers, and derelict cubes were not necessarily cleared out of the way when new ones were built over them, roofed with scrap tin, and patched in with whatever loose shit might be found on the ground. It was a humbling experience driving through those slums, particularly for people who were really there to drink a lot and not have poverty jump up and be all Captain Bring-down.
But then we were into Monterrey proper, and into the Valle section of the city. The experience of driving from the airport to Valle was like this: airport favela favela favela favela Bel Air. We found ourselves staying in a posh hotel attached to high-dollar shopping, all surrounded on all sides by various clubs and restaurants. The transition from crushing poverty to uttermost opulence was so dramatic that there really should have been a border crossing marking the transition. But there wasn’t; in Mexico this yawning gulf between the rich and the poor seems to be accepted by all. Not that this isn’t happening in the USA; the difference is the magnitude of the gap.
On Thursday after we arrived and got comfortable, Zapata himself came and put in an appearance. He was going to get us over to a nice club, he said, and we were all going to have a good time. He also introduced us to Tio.
Tio was actually Zapata’s uncle, a fellow in his late forties. Tio was a seriously live wire. At no point in the weekend did I ever see him in anything approaching a state of sobriety. I also noted a certain preoccupation with rubbing his nose that suggested he might have been lit up in more than one way. Tio was a guy who tried to dress like a party animal; he had expensive clothes elaborately styled to give the impression of casualness; he wore rakish hats and cowboy boots. But he never really seemed to pull it off, possibly because a party animal needs to radiate a sense of cool, and Tio was working it too hard. You can’t be Joe Cool if you’re stumbling over your too-big boots, trying to be seen and recognized by everybody in the club, talking too loud and throwing people out of their groove.
Tio came with us to the club and on every other outing we had that weekend. He seemed to know every service person, every bodyguard in every place we went within Monterrey. Tio was clearly part of the nightlife, and although he was a weirdo, he was part of the landscape and he got doors opened. At the club we were frisked, a routine precaution in Monterrey. They then let us in to a very nice disco, with a separate bar for cigar-smokers, an amphitheater-style room with the band up high and the dance-floor down low, and absolutely no sense of a life safety code. If there had been a panic at the disco, nobody would have gotten out alive.
This was where Machete got drunkest, but for the most part his drunken activities were not bothersome to anybody (until the end of the evening, when he was rather epically ill). Tio, on the other hand, was obnoxious. He was especially obnoxious to the Captain and Ace, who were very busy trying to chase tail. What would happen was this: the Captain and Ace would identify several likely candidates for screwing, and like Marlon Perkins and the rest of the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom crew, would carefully approach the prey and prepare their nets and tranquilizer guns. (Figuratively. That I know about.) They would go about their approach in a cautious way, veterans that they were, not wanting to spook the game. But then in would swoop Tio, brushing up against the ladies, taking off his coat and waving it like a torero, and generally trying to be the life of the party. Full points to Tio for intent, because it was obvious that he was trying to help as some oversized kind of Cupid, trying to inspire the ladies to romance and help out his buddies Captain and Ace. But this had the opposite effect, and the women would melt back into the protective landscape of the club, forcing the hunters to start their stalkings again from scratch.
Bonnie had quickly pegged the flamboyant Tio as gay. “He’s like Agador from that movie THE BIRDCAGE,” she said. Indeed, there was something about the way he glided about in his clown-shoe cowboy boots that was very reminiscent of Hank Azaria’s flaming houseboy trying to relearn how to get about with something on his feet. I confess I pooh-poohed this talk; I took his wing-manning efforts as more lady-chasing of his own.
But we found out that Tio is, in fact, gay. He came out to his family a year ago. His family is very traditionally Mexican, and in that culture being gay is not cool. Like, at all. Other than his presence at the wedding, we discovered, the family has largely disowned Tio, has divested him of any connection to the family businesses, and just generally doesn’t want to acknowledge the shame of his existence. Even our friend Zapata has not been immune to this. “Captain,” he said, “I will pay you any amount of money to make Tio put his penis inside a vagina.”
Captain considered this. “How far in?” he wanted to know.
“All the way in,” Zapata answered sternly, always the shrewd businessman.
But this weekend, Tio actually drunkenly approached his friend the Captain. In his broken English, he made a clumsy attempt at a pass. “If you be with me,” he slurred, “I give you anything.”
“Okay, Tio, we’ll talk about it later,” said the Captain. The Captain’s generally up for anything, but I don’t think man-love is in his bag of tricks.
“Okay!” said Tio, and slapped the Captain on the ass as he staggered off.
The Captain wasn’t really sure what to make of this. The whole thing just makes me sad.
**
FRIDAY – PANTS
The Mexican people take their weddings very seriously. There is, of course, an elaborate Roman Catholic wedding ceremony, with mass, Communion, etc. But it comes as only one very small part of an entire pageant of partying, all parts of which must be committed to in full by the members of the wedding party. In the rare moments where we had Zapata hanging with his buddies, he moaned about how he had been kept in a constant state of drunkenness by his in-laws for basically the entire week. He was actively looking forward to an end to the drinking. Given that this is Zapata who we are talking about, a man who has targeted his liver with drink the way Stalin went after Trotsky, this was an eye-opening admission.
The Mexicans also have a problem with time, namely they do everything two hours later than everybody else. It’s as if they’re really on Pacific Standard Time but won’t admit to it. Lunch is at 2. Dinner is at 9. Going to bed before midnight means that Abuela called and wants to give you your balls back. In the case of the wedding, the ceremony started at 8PM, and dinner at the reception was at 11PM. This was hungry-making.
The reception was held around a giant dance floor with a huge band. “It is only a matter of time,” I predicted after seeing the size of the band, “before we are treated to a medley of Kool and the Gang hits.” I was, of course, right, although that was really a softball prediction. Wedding bands will ALWAYS play Kool and the Gang unless you threaten to stab them.
The tables at the reception were laid out in a semi-circle divided into two arcs. In one arc were the tables of Old People. In the second arc were the tables of Young People, of which there were many. Between the two arcs were two singular tables: the table for the bride and groom, and the table for the gringo lawyers. Us.
Dancing began early and did not let up until the festivities closed down around 5AM. (They served a second dinner at 2:30AM to keep everybody going.) I am, I must state now, not a dancer. I do not dance. Do not ask me to dance. Do not ask me why I don’t dance. I don’t dance. Bonnie, however, has been known to dance. This sometimes leads to Conflict.
Mexican Bob is very much a dancer. The man could not sit still. He was constantly shimmying whenever a song came on. Even when sitting down, Mexican Bob could not be prevented from chair-dancing, which is a problem when you have a bunch of hungry gringos closely grouped around a table and a non-skinny Mexican Bob wants to shake his tail-feather. But there was plenty of opportunity to dance on an actual dance-floor, so when Bob asked if he could borrow my beautiful wife for the purposes of dancing, I practically wept with relief.
Bob led Bonnie out to the dance floor and they began dancing to some rap song. At least I assume it was a rap song, because Mexican Bob was getting low during his dancing. Bonnie was not getting low, as she did not have a dress that would permit this without inviting the entire audience to perform a gynecological exam. But Bob was dropping it like it was hot.
This went on for perhaps thirty seconds. Then Bob went especially low and his eyes widened.
“Bonnie, we have to get off the dance floor,” he said earnestly.
“Why?” asked Bonnie.
“Because I just split my pants open.”
He wasn’t fooling around, either. The back seam of his pants had completely let go. Mexican Bob’s boxers were flapping around out there for everybody to see. They trotted back to the table with Bonnie concealing Bob’s wounded condition.
“I have to go back to the hotel. This is embarrassing,” said Bob.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll run down to the coat-check area and see if they have a safety pin.”
“I’ll ask our server,” Bonnie said.
The group went off in half a dozen different directions. Bob went and parked himself on the couch in the Men’s Room. Bonnie procured a sewing kit. “Go get Bob’s pants,” she said, “and I’ll try to get them fixed here in the Ladies’ Room.”
I got Bob’s pants. He looked distinctly unhappy about being stranded, pantsless, in a land where he did not speak the language and every hand was turned against him. I ran the pants to Bonnie and went back to check on Bob. In the brief interval of time where I had been gone, things had gotten ugly. The Youth of the wedding were very curious to know why some guy was hanging out in the bathroom with no pants on. Bob didn’t have any Spanish to explain himself, so the questions and the shit-giving were getting a little pointed.
I sat down next to Bob, folded my arms, and stared. I’m bigger than most people. I’m definitely bigger than most Mexicans. I look like a single Mexican who is in the process of undergoing mitosis and splitting in half to form two Mexicans. The youngsters who thought it was hilarious to taunt a single pantsless gringo now found themselves facing one pantsless gringo accompanied by a large, glaring gringo with a full pants-complement. The shit-giving became more probing.
“You guys like hanging out like this, eh?” one youngster laughed.
“Oh yes,” I replied. “We make this look cool.”
“You only wish you could hang out in the bathroom with no pants on,” Bob added.
“Why don’t you go home?” one fellow asked.
“Because they’d make him put pants on there,” I replied. “And we like it here. Without pants.” I gave our opponents a hard look.
“Then you should have your pants off too!” laughed the first guy.
I considered this. “All right,” I said finally. “One hundred pesos.”
This went on for some time. Eventually Bonnie - who was slow in her pants repairing because 1) she had drunk enough that threading a needle was a challenge and 2) she had to show the broken pants to everybody so they could be laughed over, photographed and posted to Facebook - did manage to return the pants to Bob. Bob now considers me to be the salt of the earth. “You find out who your friends really are when you have no pants,” Mexican Bob said philosophically.
That’s some serious wisdom right there.
**
SATURDAY – MANSION
The next day nobody was up before noon. This was par for the course for the wedding party, which as mentioned earlier had been hard at work doing exactly this sort of thing for a solid week. Bonnie and I got up, did a little shopping, consumed beers with the Captain and his bleary crew, and generally took it easy. But we couldn’t jump off the runaway train of wedding-partying just yet, because Nanita’s family had invited everybody over to their house for taquitos at 7PM. (an EARLY dinner.)
We were picked up at the hotel by Paco. That’s his real name. Paco was the driver for Nanita’s family. Nanita’s family is rich. If Monterrey were the Star Wars universe, Nanita would be a space princess. She is 24, very beautiful, and has lived her entire life with her family in Monterrey. Now Zapata is going to spoil all that by sweeping her away to live with him in Houston, where she knows nobody. I don’t know if she plans on finding a job here (she’s just graduated with an architecture degree) but I do know that her life with Zapata will not involve regular and unlimited credit limit shopping ventures, which seems to be a regular activity for her at present. Nanita looked very happy to be married, but also very shell-shocked and sometimes a little scared.
Paco drove us to the family house. The family house looks like an MC Escher painting. There are multiple jumbled levels visible from the outside, with a bewildering variety of exterior staircases, ladders and portals linking them together. From the inside, however, the house was airy, well-lit, with huge windows and artwork everywhere. We discovered that Nanita’s mom had designed the house and had also done all the paintings inside it.
That house was the bomb. Seriously, it wasn’t what Bonnie would choose (Bonnie gravitates more to the dark wood finishes and traditional layouts) but that house was right up my alley. The back door led out to a pool area with water features, a Jacuzzi and jetting fountains. Next to the pool was an outdoor kitchen where other household staff were cooking dinner, and a pool house complete with two restrooms and a bar. Looking over all this was an exercise room and many small terraces, ideal for sitting and gabbing.
Each of the kids, of course, had their own room. But really what they had was their own suite of rooms – a drawing room of sorts, and then a private bedroom and bathroom. That whole family could have lived their lives entirely separately from each other if they had chosen to do so, only coming down to get food. But that wasn’t how they were; that family was all over each other. Nanita and her two younger sisters (both beautiful as well; the Captain had to vow to himself not to soil them) were very close and were constantly going places with each other. The extended family in town was also large, with a near endless parade of aunts (never uncles) traipsing in and out, hugging people and making the Captain’s crew horny (as the aunts weren’t bad to look at as well). Everybody was just generally rich and nice and beautiful. It made me uneasy.
I loved their house, but something about it seemed a little off. It took me a while to put my finger on what it was. I realized eventually that the house was built turned inward upon itself. It had huge, high walls around it, probably twenty feet tall. The windows looked down on the pool area instead of out onto the street. Even the garage doors were built flush to the face of the wall that faced the street, effectively unrecognizable to casual inspection as being anything other than another stretch of wall. The house was meant to look in on itself, not out onto the city. And the house was also built, either symbolically or literally, to keep the city out. I think this clashed with the democratic principles that are built into the core programming of an American. My inner self chafes at the idea of a house that dares to keep the rabble out. But, given the fact that many of the views in Monterrey looked out upon squalor and misery, I had to wonder whether I really could find fault with them.
**
SUNDAY – ZETAS
A brief word regarding Monterrey’s history: Monterrey is one of the largest cities in Mexico, and for many years has been the most prosperous. Its proximity to both shipping and the corridor north through Texas has made it a hub for industry, and many large Mexican companies have headquarters there. When you’re in the Valle portion of the city, you have a view of a great many elegant high-rise buildings that are very picturesque; then you look in a different direction and see the slums. Jarring.
Because Monterrey has been so prosperous and has been the home to so many of Mexico’s richest families, it has until recently been spared from the violence that has consumed the rest of the countryside. In other parts of Mexico the various drug cartels effectively rule large portions of land, and struggles between gang members and police is routine. Monterrey, however, has been able to suppress the violence.
This changed about a year ago. One of the big cartels, the Gulf Cartel, had a falling out with one of their subsidiary organizations, the Zetas. The Zetas were an enforcement arm while the Gulf Cartel was the business end of the drug operations. Apparently some Zetas took out a hit on a prominent Gulf Cartel leader, the Gulf Cartel demanded that the guilty parties be handed over for some beheadings, and Zeta told the Gulf Cartel to stick it. The Zetas are now doing the business part of drugs as well as the enforcement, working in direct competition with the Gulf Cartel. There’s been a hot war ever since.
This hot war spilled into Monterrey last year. Some important Zeta leaders were picked up by the police there. As a result, the chief of police was assassinated. Since then there have been clashes not only between gangs but also with the local police. We saw a lot of police with M16’s standing around being menacing. As a rule, the local police have done a decent job of securing the richest, stodgiest areas of town; I felt very safe in the Valle area. But in outlying areas of town, police control is not good. We were advised to be very careful going around the outer areas of town, especially at night, especially especially alone, and especially especially especially to the wrong kind of club.
Because, you see, the criminal element really likes the wrong kind of club. There are whores there. There is also alcohol, and loud music. A gang member really digs the wrong kind of club. And that was very bad news for our little group, because the Captain and his pals all wanted to go to the wrong kind of club for the exact same reasons.
After the dinner at Nanita’s mansion, a group of us went to a right kind of club. But inevitably the Captain could not withstand the lure of the wrong kind, and so an arrangement was made whereby Nanita would delegate some of her less pristine single friends (aka The Expendables) to show the Captain and his crew around to a wrong kind of club. But they would be exceedingly careful and selective in judging the wrongness of said club, the hours of visitation, which women the Captain was allowed to approach, et cetera. So in the wee hours of the morning this plan was implemented.
A digression regarding the Captain: on this trip he chose to carry a knife. It was a folding knife with, I am guessing, a six inch blade. Not a trifling thing, I suppose, compared to most letter openers. And it made the Captain feel safe. But he was constantly smuggling the thing into places where weapons were forbidden. This cracked me up. He would slip it in his boot, or in his crotch, and waltz into clubs. The security there would pat him down, and without fail they would not turn up his knife, and the Captain would strut into the club feeling like he had accomplished something. Of course I have my alternate theory, which is that security felt the knife but didn’t bother with messing around with it. If a Zeta was going to come into the club looking to make trouble, he wasn’t going to be packing a goddamn puny-ass knife. The Zetas were formed when a group of special forces soldiers defected from the Mexican army, like the A Team gone horribly wrong, and if there’s one thing they know it’s how to procure and use weapons. If a Zeta came up against the Captain, there would be Glocks involved, and the Captain would feel pretty stupid with his weak-sauce knife.
The Captain and Ace Frehley went with Nanita’s friends to a naughty-ish club. They went in a rented car, which was valet parked, and they went into the club. There various activities took place that shall not be recorded here. The club was naughty-ish and that’s all you need to know.
At some point Nanita’s friends get uneasy. “The wrong kind of people are starting to show up,” they said. I have no idea how one successfully identifies the wrong kind of people; I don’t know if there’s a secret high-sign or a merit badge they wear or whatever. Anyway, the message was repeatedly delivered to the Captain that it was probably time to go. And in a break from the usual script, wherein the Captain refuses to do the sensible thing and gets himself into hot water, he this time allowed himself to be convinced that perhaps it was time to make a night of it.
They went outside to their valet parked car and found themselves in a quandary. The Zetas were in fact there. They had driven up in SUV’s with tinted windows and gone into the club. Now, the thing about Zetas is that they don’t follow other peoples’ rules. They don’t like rules very much; they find them irritating. Furthermore, it’s part of their attitude to intentionally violate rules so that people will decide they are badasses and will do whatever they say. So, when Zetas decide to go to a club, they don’t valet park their cars. They just pull up to the curb, behind the valet parked cars, get out, lock their cars (which have drugs and guns inside them), glare menacingly at anybody nearby, and toddle into the club to have a good time.
The valet parking guy was sweating bullets. The Zeta vehicles were behind the Captain’s car. There was a tiny gap between the SUV’s, but it was really too small and at too weird of an angle to even think about trying to bring the rental between them. And they definitely weren’t going inside the club to find the Zetas and tell them to move their fucking cars. They weren’t going to TOUCH those cars. Because in Monterrey, valet parking is not for just any chump. If you want to be a valet parker, you need to have a head on your shoulders and some mad valet parking skills. Because if you ding a Zeta car, my friend, it is your head on a plate.
The elite valet parking team convened an emergency strategy meeting to discuss the matter. Measurements were taken. Eventually it was agreed that there was a chance – a small chance, mind you, but a chance – that the rental could be driven between the Zeta SUV’s without mishap. The valet guys discussed this for a long time. Presumably they drew lots and one of them got the black bean. This fellow resignedly got in the rental and began the process of trying to extract the car.
This operation was approached with the gravity and caution of defusing a bomb in the Green Zone. Approximately a half hour was consumed in the laborious, agonizingly slow process of backing the rental a few inches, turning the wheel a few degrees, going forward a few inches, and repeating this over and over again. During each iteration sweating parking attendants hovered over the SUV’s, possibly planning on interposing their bodies if it looked like any kind of collision would happen.
The car was eventually extracted with only an inch to spare on each side. The relieved noble valet parkers were tipped into the stratosphere. The actual Zetas were never seen. The Captain and crew drove off into the sunrise (literally; there are pictures), having yet again miraculously escaped a probably justly deserved fate of death and dismemberment.
**
And that’s pretty much what happened in the trip. We all blearily made our way back to the airport (Paco was graciously loaned to us for this purpose) and discussed what we had accomplished, which mostly consisted of watching Zapata get married, consuming large quantities of food, drink and other, and assorted other disgusting and illegal acts which are not to be discussed in the civil parlors of society.
“We’re doing this again during the Superbowl. Dallas,” the Captain said.
“The whores will be in town,” Ace Frehley observed.
Bonnie and I will not be there. I have five years on the oldest of those guys. I can’t do the party until sunup thing anymore. One, I get tired. Two, I have acquired some dignity over the years, and I’d like to keep it intact. Three, while I have no problem with whores, I have no business with them and they have no business with me. But it was awesome and, in many cases, hilarious to live the crazy life again like when I was young.
I had a great time in Monterrey and I hope we can go back soon.