Page Title

“Welcome to Lucha Libre Night at the Taco Bell Arena in Chihuahua,
Mexico. I’m Edificio Del Huevo, your color commentator, and I’ll be
assisted by six-time Mexican female mud wrestling champion, Rosita
La Chingada.”

“¡Hola amigos!”

“We’ll be reporting on the hugely anticipated grudge match tonight
between Mexican champion Comandante Marco and his American
rival, El Grande Bush. There’s a lot at stake in this battle for North
American supremacy, wouldn’t you say, Rosie?”

“¡Ooooh sííííí! Mexico has been pushing for a rematch since 1846,
when the malditos gringos cabrones put a gun to our heads and
made us sign over Texas and California. Now if we want to go there
for a vacation we have to swim through rat-infested sewer pipes, and
mutherfuckers telling us ‘Speak English! Speak English!’ I like English.
I luv it! But I don’t need no gringo mutherfucker breathin’ down my
neck.

“Anyway, if Comandante Marco wins the match tonight, we gonna get
back all our land and then we be telling you cocksuckers to speak
Spanish.

“I know the first thing I’m gonna do when we take over is to move into
the Presidential Suite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas and go
skinny-dipping in the Grand Canal. Show the mutherfuckers what a
real Mexican chocha looks like!”

“Sounds good to me, Rosie, but as they say ‘Don’t count your huevos
rancheros before they’re hatched.’ Remember, the norteamericanos
are not going to give up all that loot without a fight.

“And as we speak, El Grande Bush is entering the ring. He’s wearing
his trademark pink tu-tu, dunce cap and glitter mask, and they’re
playing his music, ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise.’”

“Hey, Bushie, Bushie! Can we get a word from you for our studio
audience?”

“Waal, I’d like to address my remarks to the brave men and women
fighting in Eye-Rack for the forty-second consecutive year. I honor the
sacrifice you are making in the war on terror, and I want you to know
that I plan to win tonight so that when you come home you’ll have a
home to come home to.

“The threat we are facing in this arena here tonight is whether our
western states will remain The Home of The Free And The Brave, or
are allowed to become an open-air taco stand like the one on
Alvarado Street in downtown LA, where the crackheads and stray
dogs hang out, behind the convention center.”

“How inspiring! What’s your strategy for fighting Comandante Marco?"

“I plan to shock and awe him with my lightning speed, twist his head in
the ropes and bite his knuckles.”

“Excuse me, Ed, cut out that shit. Here comes Mexico’s national hero,
Comandante Marco of the Zapatista Revolutionary Army of Chiapas.
He looks ready for battle with his headdress of quetzal feathers,
jaguar-skin tights and crocodile nose mask. His musical
accompaniment is the Mexico City rock band Molotov singing their
anthem ''Viva México Cabrones.' Every time I hear that song it brings
tears of pride to my eyes, especially the part where they sing ‘No Me
Llames Cerdo.’ When I was a leetle girl in the shantytown overlooking
the security wall separating Nuevo Laredo from Brownsville, Texas,
my mother used to lull me to sleep by singing to me from Molotov’s
romantic love song ‘Chinga Tu Madre’, where they sing:

Nos vemos Acapulco a la fin de semana
Mientras yo cuido à tu hermana
Chinga tú chinga tu madre
[Ed. See you in Acapulco
But first I fuck your sister]

“Hey, big boy! You got something to say to your fans?”

“Hola, Rosie. I dedicate my life to the glory of Mexico. After I win, not
only are we going to reconquer our lost territories, but we are going to
sacrifice El Grande Bush on the ancient Mayan altar at Chichen Itzà
by ripping out his still beating heart and feeding it to the pirhana fish
that swim in the holy cenote. The whole ceremony is going to be
filmed by Mel Gibson for his upcoming movie “Jews of The Jungle.”

“Sounds great, sweetie. Only how do you plan to vanquish such a
great warrior like El Grande Bush?”

“I plan to shoot him with a curare-tipped blow dart and then, when he’s
paralyzed, I’m going to stomp on his balls.”

“And there’s the bell! The two fighters are circling each other warily,
looking for an opening, and they are being watched by the masked
referee, El Misterioso, who is also wearing a mask. Ed, what do we
know about El Misterioso?”

“Only that he gained fame as the fiercest lucha libre fighter in South
America.”

“Wow! Now El Grande Bush leaps forward and head butts
Comandante Marco in the chest, but instead of falling onto the mat El
Comandante does a backflip, kicking Bush in the face. Bush goes
down and Comandante Marco sits on his face, locking him in a French
Butt Hold, squeezing the air out of Bush like an Anaconda python
between the steel vise grip of his powerful glutes.”

“With his last, dying breath Bush reaches between Marco’s legs and
manages to insert his two fingers in the man’s nostrils and flip him
across the ring like a slingshot. Bush jumps to his feet and delivers a
shattering roundkick to the head of El Comandante, who goes flying
into El Misterioso who, enraged, punches him in the face. Hey, he’s
not supposed to do that. He’s the ref!”

“Wait a minute! Now El Misterioso grabs a folding chair and breaks it
over the head of El Grande Bush.”

“The audience is going berserk. The mariachi band Los Tigres Del
Norte has started playing the romantic sentimental love song ‘Volver’,
I suppose expressing their wish for a return of Mexico’s northern
territories. Meantime, on the American side, Ted Nugent is shooting
off machine gun riffs from his guitar. Oh no, that’s not his guitar, it’s a
real machine gun! Now gunfire is breaking out all over the place and
bullets are flying.”

“Comandante Marco and El Grande Bush have recovered from the
surprise attack by El Misterioso, and they’re punching the shit out of
him in the corner of the ring. They rip off his mask.”

“Omigod, it’s Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, and he’s got
an oil gusher shooting out of his butt!”

“Well, let’s get out of here before the whole place explodes. Reporting
to you from Taco Bell Arena, I’m Edificio Del Huevo.”

“And I’m Rosita La Chingada…”

“Wishing you a big cuevo en el culo, cabrones!”

CHUCHA LIBRE

200motels POLITICS

Comedy

Tragedy

Nonsense

Bullshit

THEY GOT GAMES!

200motels BEIJING OLYMPICS

Comedy

Tragedy

Nonsense

Bullshit

CHUCHA LIBRE

200motels POLITICS

Comedy

Tragedy

Nonsense

Bullshit

THE SAN JUAN BAGELS
PARKING LOT (Fiction)

200motels WILDLIFE

Comedy

Tragedy

Nonsense

Bullshit

La Creta rarely left her office to inspect the plant premises other than an
occasional walk around the place. Trucks were forever leaving the
premises short one or more pallet of goods because she had neglected to
impart clear shipping instructions to her shipping manager, a dreadlocked
Rastafarian former boxer called King Bongo Rock, who had recently
returned to work after recovering from a gunshot wound received under
nebulous circumstances in East New York.

She herself had never been inside the huge walk-in freezer, which was the
size of a movie theater and kept at a frigid twenty degrees below zero, her
delicate Ecuadorian constitution precluding exposure to harsh arctic
temperatures.

Likewise, she had never been on the roof where the machinist, Nestor
Valenzuela, dwelt in perfect and contented obscurity among his drill
presses and lathes, away from all supervision, emerging only periodically to
demand a raise from Pato Gonzalez, a demand that was always coarsely
rebuffed, and Nestor would retreat to his rooftop hideaway to smoke dope
and plot his next campaign.

She never visited the parking lot either. If she was afraid of the freezer and
roof, La Creta dwelt in perpetual fear of the parking lot, which was two
doors away, separated from the factory by the Taliban shish-kebab garage
where resided the The Forty Thieves of the spicy halal chicken and rice
wagons which were ubiquitous around Manhattan, led by their boss, ZiZu.

The sidewalk was blocked by overflowing dumpsters and sundry, ripped
garbage bags overflowing with a universe of greasy food waste, rice,
chicken bones and wilted lettuce leaves covering the sidewalk and gutters
as gangs of pigeons gorged themselves on the rancid wastes, while crazy
Arabic men wielding large knives and pushing aluminum hot dog carts in
and out of the building at all hours, screaming hysterically at each other, an
object lesson in the futility of trying to transform a phantasmagoria of
chaotic nonsense like Iraq, incomprehensible to the occidental mind, into a
non-threatening, family-oriented theme park. And this was only the outside
of the establishment!

A visitor brushing aside the grease-encrusted plastic slats covering the
entrance penetrated the dank, sinister interior, blasting with Arab music as
swarthy, Levantine men with squinty, suspicious eyes and thick, unwashed
moustaches chopped up raw chicken parts, letting the guts and waste fall
to the floor to be infested with vermin and insect larvae. Anyone care for a
shish-kebab?

This mess was not helped much by the periodic flooding which took place
when the drains from the second floor of the bakery, directly upstairs from
the garage, regularly backed up and the stinking mess of sewage, filthy
onion and garlic waste mixed with vegetable-based machine lubricating oil
seeped through the cracks in the concrete ceiling to form unspeakably
nauseating pools of raw soup with lumps of chicken guts floating in them. If
the average attorney or paralegal working in the white shoe law firms that
line the Avenue of the Americas, who step out to grab a fast lunch of spicy
chicken and rice from one of the halal food wagons which surround his
building the way the thugees surrounded Calcutta's British garrison, had
any concept of the type of conditions under which that food had been
prepared, would he instead opt for a container of cottage cheese? I would!
(Would the cottage cheese prove to be any more sanitary?) The fact that
these unspeakable sewers remain open year after year goes a long way
toward denoting the true state of the hygienic oversight to which our food
processing installations are subject. Upton Sinclair notwithstanding, can
anybody assert that things have really changed since publication of "The
Jungle?"

La Creta avoided this pestilential horror at all costs, crossing the street to
avoid it. If she had any business with ZiZu, the proprietor of this mess, she
sent one of the male managers to execute it.

Likewise did she avoid the adjacent parking lot where the bakery's fleet of
trucks was parked, which inevitably had become a repository for every kind
of junk that Pato Gonzalez could buy at an auction, like shelves,
scaffolding, trailers and disused machine remnants; as well as useless
garbage that he refused to throw out because it had once cost him money.
Naturally, there were a few obligatory wrecked heaps of bakery trucks
which had long ago been cannibalized for useful parts to keep the
remaining trucks running, but Pato, in his mind's eye seeing them new and
shiny as they were on the first day he had purchased them, refused to let
them go, like the parent of a degenerate wreck who still sees a new baby,
full of hope.

These trucks now served as provisional homeless shelters and latrines for
the crackheads and other transitory elements of the quarter. Admittedly, we
are most of us only a few bad breaks away from living outdoors, so it's no
subject for levity. Nevertheless, the men and occasional women who
frequented this terrain had few favorable aspects to recommend them.
They were offensive and filthy. Even the most determined outreach workers
gave that lot a wide berth. The only aspects of humanity who assigned this
band of brigands any merit at all were the company truck mechanics, led by
Chino and his son Orlando, Nelson, Chantay, Milton and Pascal.

Hands blackened and scarred by multiple applications of battery acid and
forearms criss-crossed by knife wounds and razor cuts, Chino and Orlando
were as accomplished a pair of thieves and slackers as could be found in
any prison courtyard. Any pumps, wipers or circuit boards entrusted to
them for repair of the truck fleet could be reliably predicted to end up as
hot merchandise in any of the little hole-in-the-wall vehicle repair shops
that dotted the side streets of Hell's Kitchen.

Chantay, a black lesbian as swarthy and nasty as any of the men, once
emerged from working beneath a truck to find her whole box of tools had
been stolen from her in plain daylight. This resulted in a marked hardening
of her attitude towards the job, and a determination to recoup her loss at
any price to the company.

Pascal had an expensive drug habit to maintain. Half his time was
consumed fencing stolen parts and equipment and the other half chasing
around to crack houses and drug dens to fill up his head.

Since Pato Gonzalez was too cheap to employ a full-time supervisor to ride
herd on these idiots, they were left on the honor system. As a result, they
swilled quart bottles of Colt 45 all day and spent hours at a time repairing
signal lights and securing crooked bumpers to trucks with twisted bits of
wire.

The only real working mechanic was Nelson, an illegal Dominican immigrant
who happily broke his back for $7.00 an hour, covering everybody else's
fuck-ups. The way Nelson saw it, working with this bunch of losers provided
him with a measure of job security. He kept the whole fleet running
single-handed and never complained that the rest of the mechanics had
disappeared from sight all day. It wasn't unusual for him to turn in a time
sheet for 88 or 96 hours of time worked.
In fact, he hated to see anybody else touch one of his trucks, accurately
reasoning that their shabby work only meant more work for him in fixing
their mistakes.

In tacit recognition of Nelson's complete supremacy of the truck
maintenance function, Pato's kneejerk reaction to a mechanical problem
was, "Get Nelson to work on it!" without ever working through a reasoned
analysis of why none of his other mechanics ever seemed to accomplish
anything. None of them were being paid more than $8.00 per hour, so Pato
didn't expect anything out of them anyway. If anything, San Juan Bagels
was just a way station for most of them on their journey from one jail to the
next.

The parking lot had originally been a perfectly good factory building that its
owner had torn down for reasons of his own. It stood for a long time as a
terrain vague surrounded by a chain link fence until its new occupants, a
family of Dominican parking lot operators, rented it. Pato Gonzalez and his
manager, who was called Gringo Pendejo because he spoke fluent
Spanish with a lame North American accent, immediately started scheming
to get their hooks into it.

Acquiring the lot would mean that they would no longer have to park the
Company's three tractor trailers on side streets throughout Hell's Kitchen
and keep moving them around in a perpetual game of Three-Card Monty
one step ahead of the cops, who were always hitting them with massive
parking tickets and towing them away to the pound on West 34th Street,
obliging Pato to send down a Class A driver and four hundred dollars to get
them released. Also, the Company's delivery vans could be parked in the
lot, to be repaired on the spot, instead of having to ferry mechanics up to
the previous parking location on West 57th Street, where they would be at
all hours of day and night without supervision, in all kinds of weather and
doing whatever they want.

Using a combination of cold cash and unctuous charm, Pato and Gringo
Pendejo finally managed to get possession of the lot, but it stretched thin
the emotional capacity of Gringo Pendejo, whose job it was to deal with the
crooked, low-life Dominican lessees on a minute-to-minute basis. These
idiots eventually crapped out through a combination of their own greed and
incompetence. Thus, Pato Gonzalez achieved his goal the same lucky way
he had always gotten everything else in life, by focusing on a goal and
waiting for everybody else to fuck themselves up and crap out.

But once the Company had achieved possession of the property and
installed its trucks there a new set of problems arose. First of all, in order to
defray some of the very expensive monthly rent, Pato Gonzalez was
obliged to lease a portion of the space to ZiZu, the idiot owner of the halal
chicken garage, who filled up his part with beat-up food peddler's carts.

Then came the real challenge. Most of the employees of San Juan Bagels
lived in the outlying boroughs and suburbs. They all started scheming to
get permission to park their cars in the lot so that they could drive to work
and avoid having to take the train.

This process happened gradually and with much finesse, much the same
as the anaconda snake wraps itself around a capybara; slowly, squeezing
the breath out of it. Various night employees pleaded to Pato that the
subways were too dangerous in the early morning hours. They reasoned to
him that the lot would have free capacity since the delivery vans were out
after midnight making their rounds.

Then, many of the delivery drivers volunteered to use their own vehicles to
make deliveries, but with the condition that they needed to keep their cars
and vans in the lot before loading them to take out. Pato acceded to this
reasoning on the grounds that it would save wear and tear on his trucks,
most of which were held together bits of wire and tape anyway.

Various of the Company managers insisted on their right to park in the lot
as well, invoking a kind of droit de seigneur, most notably the loading dock
foreman, King Bongo Rock, who insisted that as African-American royalty,
he should not be obliged to ride in from East New York on the train like a
common worker, but access his cheval de guerre, a shining metallic
emerald-color Jaguar. For whatever reason, Pato Gonzalez indulged King
Bongo Rock on almost every point, provoking horrible screaming fights with
Frank Perdue, who became so wound up in his fury at this appeasement of
a manager that he considered a stinking, lying scumbag of a thief that he
put it about to the Spanish employees that Pato Gonzalez and King Bongo
Rock had to be engaged in mutual sodomy, this being the only excuse for
Pato's tolerance of the Caribbean man's laziness and substandard job
performance. This imagined buggery he expressed graphically with a hip
movement and a Bronx cheer, to the delight of the male workers.

Thus, the parking lot, which was to originally supposed to streamline
bakery operations, became a focal point for tantrums and time wasting.
Truck drivers would park their cars in the lot and then go off on their
delivery runs without leaving the key, obstructing people who wanted to get
in or out. Fistfights would erupt between employees, and sometimes
managers, about access to the lot. Arab chicken vendors would go berserk
about San Juan vehicles in the portion of the lot leased to ZiZu and his
employees.

It evolved into a situation where the San Juan delivery vans had to be
parked in the street, so many were the employees' cars parked in the lot,
plus the fact that Pato had designated the lot as a storage for any sundry
junk that would not fit in the factory or that he had picked up at auction.
The police continued issuing tickets like there was no tomorrow, at huge
expense to the Company.

Homeless people would break into the back of the tractor trailers and live
there, using the space between parked cars for their latrine. Rats, attracted
by the Chinese food take-out containers strewn about by the mechanics
and homeless residents, gravitated to the area as well, and were so
common that nobody paid them much mind at all, as though they were pets
or mascots.

The San Juan mechanics, totally at home in this ambiance, extorted tips for
acting as valets for the employees, moving the cars around so that people
could get in and out.

Gringo Pendejo, who was ostensibly in charge of order in the factory and
the parking lot, refused to get involved. The few times he had attempted to
intervene, the car owners had gone over his head to Pato, who for reasons
of his own (or to intentionally undermine his manager's authority in a
destructively egotistical little mind game that Pato indulged in for his own
sick gratification) had overruled his factory manager. A longtime
Manhattanite who did not share the American fascination for automobiles
and did not even possess a driver's license, Gringo Pendejo walked away
from the parking lot and its conflicts and applied his abilities where they
would be most effective, the administration of the factory.

The parking lot, which was originally procured to make business flow more
efficiently, now looked like Times Square at rush hour with employees'
heaps parked very which way, taking every available inch of space. Half the
time the bums couldn't even squeeze through to relieve themselves.
Nobody wanted to park in the back, because in order to get his car out he
would have to go into the factory and get five guys to come out and move
their cars. The calculations that went into getting a strategically placed
parking spot came to resemble the court machinations of medieval
Byzantium. Gringo Pendejo, unable to impose order because of Pato's
interference, washed his hands, saying "Fuck 'em! Let 'em drive their cars
up each other's ass!"

The most explosive element in this volatile compound of automotive
madness was Johnny Pato, who was Pato's brother, another Puerto Rican
Jew. But Johnny was more Puerto Rican than Jew. He called himself Johnny
Toro, which means "bull," but that got changed to Johnny Loro, which
means parrot, because when he got excited, which was all the time, his
voice went up an octave and it sounded like a parrot squawking. Finally, it
morphed into Johnny Pato, because of his brother and because "pato,"
which means "duck," is also Spanish slang for homosexual.

If Pato, with his round face and bourgeois corpulence, could be said to
have been born in the Year of the Pig, Johnny had every hallmark of the
Year of the Monkey. A short, thin man with slightly bowled legs, long arms
that seemed to reach almost to his knees and bony hands like vice grips
which ended in gnarled, disfigured fingernails that bespoke too many
exposures to degreaser and battery acid, Johnny was a rough, mean
character capable of spontaneous combustion at any minute. Though
illiterate, he was a reasoning, intelligent being and his violent outbursts
were all the more ominous for the logic and calculated reasoning that
informed them.

If logic and calculation were manifestations of the Jewish side of Johnny's
nature, the outrageous lunatic aspects of his personality could be
attributed to the Puerto Rican blood flowing through his veins like an
unstable and combustable compound of rum and salsa picante heated to
the boiling point, exploding out of his head like a ferociously overheated
double boiler.

Pato had fired Johnny and taken him back so many times that he got paid
for the times he was absent, with that time deducted from his pay. As a
consequence, he never took a vacation, all his off time being spent in court
or at anger management therapy sessions which Pato, who subscribed to
whatever politically correct theory of self-improvement happened to be
currently circulating, fervently believed in.

Johnny was already persona non grata in the office of La Creta, whom he
had tried to seduce in his own inimitable grease monkey style by telling her
up front, "Why don't you quit playing hard to get and admit that you want
me, bitch?"

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