Lite skryt

Ibland får man mejl som gör en glad, som det här från redaktören.

"Andreas,
If I get hit by a bus or something, I just wanted to
say that these profiles are very, very good, and you
should do something along the same line in your
hometown when you return.
It strikes me that it is a just-this-side-of-cliche
series; profiling people around us, not the rich and
famous, necessarily, but folks who we are perhaps
curious about, or should know about, given their
stories. I recall a similar idea years ago in
Vancouver, with a man-on-the-street sort of format -
but I didn't do it, because, if I recall correctly, it
seemed too obvious. And yet it's not, at all.
I think any editor would jump at the chance of
publishing your stuff, and you are headed for a real
career as a writer, if you want that.
Anyhoo,
p.s. Just got a call from a reader - who takes the
donkey a carrot every day - and he said that your
subject was "thrilled" when he took him a copy this
morning. That's two for two, brother... I'll follow up
on when to meet later".

The sad man

He lives in Mexico City. His sons brought him here to Vallarta to help him forget, to get on with his life. But he doesn’t want to forget. He wants to remember everything.

Jorge García is 73, and he has loved his Juana for 54 years. For more than five decades he left her little love notes on the table before he went to work. “Juana,” they could begin, “you are the flower in the breeze, and the butterfly that rests upon it. Your Jorge”. Jorge looks down at the table, wipes a tear away with his hand. “The first time I saw her I was 18 and she was 17. She was selling flowers in the street across the university. I was one of those lucky ones to have parents who could afford my education. She wasn´t the type of girl everybody wanted, some of my friends said she wasn’t very pretty, but when I saw her, I never wanted anyone else.” From that moment, Jorge came back to her street every day to talk to her, to make her fall in love with him. “It was difficult,” he says with a little smile. “I tried to explain to her that we were meant to be. But she didn’t believe me, told me I was crazy and that she wasn’t interested. But I never gave up. The next day I stole her flowers, made her run after me, said I wouldn’t give them back until she agreed to sit down and talk to me. It worked.”

After that day Jorge and Juana talked almost every day, about life, about their dreams, about their hopes. Then one day while they were on the street talking as usual while she was selling her flowers Jorge couldn’t resist it anymore and grabbed her head between his hands and kissed her. It was an incredibly brave and perhaps crazy thing to do at that time, especially in the middle of the street. But Jorge couldn’t help it. “It was a force stronger than anything I had ever felt before,” he says “I just had to do it.” And he did, and she slapped him. Then he told her he loved her, and she slapped him again. But one week later Juana came up to him and gently whispered in his ear, “I love you too.”

While wiping away yet another tear from his face, Jorge whispers, “That was the day when my life begun”.

After graduation his parents sent him to work for an uncle´s company in Argentina. During those two years, he wrote Juana every single day. When he came back they got married, and just ten months later she gave birth to their first son, Alfonso, and then a year after that, Armando.

Jorge was an accountant, had his own firm. Juana stayed at home, took care of the family. “Every day, before I went to work, I used to write her a little love poem and leave it on the table for her. I wasn’t much of a poet, but the love I felt for her was bubbling so strong inside of me, I had to let it out some way. It just happened to come out as poems. It was a force I couldn’t control”.

Jorge retired thirteen years ago and left the business to his sons. He had a heart problem and for a while both he and Juana thought he would die. “She was so scared I would go before her,” Jorge says.” But he got better and they could go on with their lives again, spending time with their grand children. Even though he didn’t have to work anymore, he still wrote her a little poem and left it on the table every morning.

Until one day, that dreadful day almost a year ago, when Juana never woke up and Jorge’s sky fell down. He screamed that entire day, and the next day, and the day after that. He says that inside of him, he is still screaming.

Jorge still writes her poems. But now, instead of the table, he leaves them on her grave.

The donkey man

“Thirty pesos for a picture on the burro with your camera. Fifty with mine,” Juan Perez, 58, says patiently while the group of tourists tries to decide whether they want a picture with the donkey or not.

He has been standing there in the same corner in Viejo Vallarta almost every day for the last six years, letting tourist after tourist take pictures with his donkey. “He is my best friend,” says Juan and affectionately strokes the donkey behind its ears. ” His name is El Conejo, the rabbit.”

Juan came to Vallarta from San Juan de Abajo around 20 or 26 years ago; he´s not sure exactly when and says it´s because an angry woman hit him hard in the head with a bottle a couple of years ago. Since then he has trouble remembering things. “I´ve always had bad luck with women,” he says rubbing his hand over the bump on his head. “I´ve always lived by myself”. He has been working hard his entire life. Ever since his father met a new woman and left Juan’s mother alone with eight children. She died shortly after that. Juan was nine and had to grow up fast.

Juan used to be a brick baker, but the work was hard and the pay low so when he was offered to be an arriero, a donkey handler, and make a little more money, he jumped on the opportunity. He struggled hard with his donkeys bringing bricks, sand, and cement to the constructions in Vallarta. “They used to pay me one of those little gold coins for a trip,” he says. But then the modern world caught up with him and instead of using donkeys the companies started to transport their bricks, sand, and cement with trucks, and with the increased car traffic the authorities no longer welcomed animals in town. “Weeks passed and no job. I didn´t even have enough money to eat. I desperately needed to come up with something new. And then one day when I was standing with my donkeys on the bridge over there I saw tourists stopping to take pictures of me and my donkeys. Then I thought, this is something I can make some money out of”. So Juan got a friend to help him write a sign in English: “TAKE A PICTURE WITH MY LITTLE BURROW (sic). PRICE: WITH YOUR CAMERA 30 PESOS. 50 PESOS WITH MY CAMERA”. Business was good, but it turned out he had to buy a new donkey: “The other four were too wild for this. They were used to doing hard work and they were kicking and biting everybody. I couldn’t use them for this so I sold them and bought this one instead along with a saddle”.

El Conejo starts shaking his head. “He´s telling me has to go the river and pee,” says Juan. “We understand each other. He is the best friend I got. I never got married. It´s just me, El Conejo, and my dog,” Juan says and walks away with his dear friends El Conejo and the dog to the river.

The guy from the last post

When David Smith, 34, from North Carolina goes to bed at night, he thinks about his new job as a timeshare promoter. He thinks about how if he won’t get any couples to go to the presentations he won’t get paid, and if he won’t get paid he and his girlfriend won’t have enough money for food. He thinks about that a lot, he says.

David came to Mexico in April, about three months ago, leaving everything behind: his job, his house, his car. Everything. “Everything I have is in those boxes in that room there” he says, pointing at a tiny bedroom in the small house of his girlfriend’s sister. “It’s like a bunch of horror movies and my little digital studio so I can do some recordings, for my music and all that. It’s all I have”.

They live in the sister’s house temporarily, only until their own house just next to it is finished. David’s nephew is building it. Well, it’s not really his nephew but David and his girlfriend have been living together for so long that it’s just about the same thing, David says. The girlfriend is also the reason David left his North Carolina for Mexico. They met about six years ago when they both worked for the same pork processing factory. They soon fell in love and not long after that they moved together in David’s house. But there was a problem: she was in the country illegally: “She never got in trouble with immigration or anything like that, but we went to some immigration lawyers and they told us that after the 9/11 incident they changed the law. It used to be that if you were in the country illegally you used to be able to marry an US citizen and pay a fine and you would be legalized. But that stopped because of the terrorism. And we didn’t know. It was around 2006 when we started trying to fix her papers, and we couldn’t do it so… we just saved up what a little bit of money we could and we came here, just to keep her from getting into trouble.”

We are sitting in the village of Los Mezcales; his girlfriend is resting in the hammock while three of his nephew’s four children play on the dirt floor. Loud Mexican banda music coming from the neighbors.

Back home he used to be a bass player in an underground death metal band and says he’s thinking about starting another one down here, but that it’s hard to find musicians playing something else than Banda: “I love Mexico, but I hate the music,” he says.

After being here for just over three months he is still thinking about what he left behind, but he’s not ready to go back just yet: “Well… I’m still sort of going through that homesick stage. I think that when I go home, when I land in the united states, I’m gonna kiss the ground. I love my country, I’m just not very happy with the government. Especially with the immigration issues. It’s like they are targeting the Hispanics… I mean, how many Hispanic terrorists have you really heard of? There aren’t any. They’re just there to work. At least here I don’t have to worry about looking over my shoulder to see if immigration is coming to get my girlfriend. At least now we‘re free”.

But freedom has a price and David has to work hard on his new job as a timeshare promoter to make ends meet: “Most of the time I think about my job. You know. I’m just trying to think about… how can I perform my job. It’s a commission job. If I don’t get couples to go the presentations I don’t get paid. And if I don’t get paid,” he says nodding towards his girlfriend in the hammock, “me and her loose our bellies. I really think a lot about that.”

Cowboys and Indians

Hash Pipe

I know, I know… I haven’t written anything in a while. I blame that on the overall laziness down here, on the it’s way too hot to do anything-attitude. Cause it really is too hot. Way too fucking hot. Too hot to think, too hot to walk, too hot to… Well… you get the picture.

Went for a walk on the beach this morning, to clear my head and get some well needed exercise after all the food and beer I’ve been gobbling down over the last few weeks. I took about two steps before I heard “Hola amigo, want to buy a bracelet?” No Gracias, I said. Then he pulled out something out of his pocket and whispered: “Wanna buy a hash pipe?” No Gracias, señor. Another two steps and another salesman: “Hola amigo, wanna buy a rug?” No gracias. “No? How about some weed? It’s good strong stuff, amigo. Only five hundred pesos.” No gracias, señor, I'm not interested”.

I suspect there be something else than the heat behind all this laziness… And that would explain why there’s so much street food everywhere. Hmm… I think I might be on to something…

The most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in Vallarta: a tanning saloon. What the fuck!? Why would you need a fucking tanning saloon in a place where it’s sunny 360 days a year? I bet there's an American behind it.

Burro Burrito!

I was doing an interview with the owner of the donkey (I´ll post it tomorrow) and couldn´t resist being a real tourist for a while. But as soon as I got up of the old burro the man ran off to do some errands -- leaving me alone on the donkey! Let me tell you, those were some terrifying minutes... Thought the donkey would take off with me... Burros belong in burritos.