Guatemala exceeded our expectations. Marisa found another teaching job and I settled into my new position at the Guatemala City News. An aging woman owned and edited the weekly and the young dandy she kept as a lover acted as the advertising manager. Neither liked me. I was too common for them. I took my orders from the dowager and the prince, and didn't permit their curt attitudes to bother me. I gave her my best for four months until one day I encountered a message beneath the bar of my typewriter: "This is your last week. The bottom line wasn't there." During our stay there wasn't a corner of Guatemala that Marisa and I didn't visit, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, from Tikal to Antigua. After I lost the job, we packed our bags and pointed ourselves to the Panama Canal with some hallucinatory mushrooms that we had scored in Panajachel. We stopped at the El Salvador border. Marisa and I were standing in the immigration office arranging our papers when I remembered. "Where are the mushrooms?" "They're in one of the suitcases," Marisa gasped. The bus company had packed the luggage on top of the vehicle and covered the cargo with a tarp to protect the suitcases from a shower. We stood frozen as the Nazi-attired Salvadorean soldiers in their starched fatigues and black jack boots climbed the bus and sorted through the the baggage. We couldn't believe our good fortune when they descended empty-handed. At a San Salvador hotel we discovered that the plastic bag containing the mushrooms was among several laundered shirts in plastic wrapping. I had failed to make a positive impression at the News with my starched shirts, but my good intentions had saved me from imprisonment. Neither Marisa nor I wanted to defy the odds and we dumped the mushrooms in the nearest trash can and toasted our good luck with the safe high of alcohol. We continued south through Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica to Panama. Nothing compared to the magnificence and serenity of Costa Rica. We made friends in San José with whom we reconnected on our return north. I left Marisa in the capital and spent a few days in the surrounding mountains searching for more mushrooms. Upon my return I was back at the hotel working on an earlier version of enticing a woman into a sexual dialogue. For months I had been pounding Marisa with the same beat: "You want to fuck somebody else, don't you? Tell me the truth! You want to fuck somebody else." I was grooving to my usual tune when she upset the rhythm with a dissonant remark: "I fucked someone while you were gone." "You what?" "I fucked someone. That's what you wanted, right?" "Who the fuck did you fuck?" "José." "You fucked José in San José. That's goddamn poetic, ain't it?" It had been his suggestion that I accompany his amigos on the mushroom expedition. At the sudden realization that Marisa had fucked someone else, I rose from my huffing and puffing and slapped her twice across the face. The next morning we boarded a bus for Brownsville. From that moment we never lived together again although it took us a year to go through the formality of a divorce. The mother disowned me, but I remained friends with my father-in-law who collected tolls at the bridge. We were sitting at the Palm and after chatting about the Houston Oilers, he turned to me and with the saddest expression on his face said, "I had no idea that you and Marisa were having problems." I couldn't relax in Brownsville with my disintegrating marriage. I accepted a position as a sportswriter at the Laredo News. With the exception of an all-time great Boystown in Nuevo Laredo, I was literally living in a hot and dusty bordertown. I would walk out of an air-conditioned restaurant and collide with a wall of heat. These torrid conditions had me pining for tropical Brownsville. Six months elapsed and I decided that the tension between Marisa and me had subsided enough that I could return. The Brownsville Times, a weekly, was advertising for a jack-of-all-trades. A husband-and-wife team hired me. With the renewed prospect of exploiting my vast knowledge of every Brownsville institution, I wrote as many as many as ten stories in the 16-page weekly. I covered the city, county, port, college, school district, Matamoros and sports. I broke stories, filed features, wrote a weekly analysis of the latest political talk and added a sports column. "When are you going to do the story about the tons of food that the school district is wasting?" the husband would ask me as his dour wife stood scowling at me. He would ask me the same question once a week and I would reply that I was looking into the matter. I often wrote at home. I didn't see any reason to sit in the office when I could sit in my apartment and listen to music. They paid me a fair salary and I was giving them their money's worth. I studied the Times' past issues and I was more than doubling the output of previous reporters, but they couldn't accept that I wasn't in the office 40 hours a week. Once again I received notice that my services were no longer needed. "I've been fired," I told Barry over a burger and beer at the Palm. "About time. I suppose you need a job." "I was hoping that you would make me another one of your offers-that-I-can't-refuse." "You were?" "It looks like a rookie lineup to me. You need a cleanup hitter." "I need someone I can count on in the clutch." "I've always been productive." "Do you plan on staying in Brownsville or will you be leaving after a few months?" "I don't know. I don't have any plans. I want to work. Don't you think I was cranking out some good shit at the Times?" "You were doing excellent work. You were embarrassing me. You were breaking more stories than all my staff combined. And your column was causing more controversy than mine." "Why didn't you call me and offer me a job with a fifty-cent increase and five extra hours a week if you were so impressed with my performance?" "I knew you wouldn't last with old man Jones. You made him too nervous. And here you are as I anticipated." "And here I am in desperate need of money. I'm ready to start tomorrow. Besides returning to general assignments, I want to write a column. I want our readers to pick up the Herald every day anxious to read crazy Tamaulipas. I won't shirk my responsibilities, but I need to kick my writing up a notch and I can only do that writing a column where I can take some literary freedoms. That's why I loved sports. Column writing is where it's at." "Do you think writing columns would keep you home for a while?" "I have no desire to work my way up the journalistic ladder. I don't want to start at the bottom of a metropolitan paper covering crime and meetings. I want to write about Brownsville. I want to write about the border. Great writers concentrated on their own backyards. Here lies my inspiration. Why would I want to abandon what I know best for the pretense of working at a major newspaper? You and I have agreed for a long time that journalistically there is no place like the border. Let me write. Let me do my thing. I won't go over the top. You can trust me. I would never deceive you. You're my mentor. How could I mislead my mentor?" "And how many columns are you going to write each week?" "I don't want to overextend myself. I can do three. Maybe every Monday, Wednesday and Friday." "You're sure you don't want to do one Sunday?" "You're the man, Barry. I would never think of stepping on your turf. Let me be the singles hitter and you can clear the bases on Sunday." "And what is your goal?" "Eventually I want to write five columns a week and do nothing else. That doesn't mean I wouldn't write breaking news, cover a disaster or even sit through a high-school football game if the need arose, but ultimately I want to do nothing but write columns." "Can you start Monday? I'll expect your first column explaining to the public your new duties." "You're the best, Barry." Within two years I was writing my five columns a week with no other duties. And for the next 25 years I was La Voz de Brownsville.
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