TODAY’S HOGWASH:

        I was talking to a friend a few months ago and found he had just got back from running in something called the Badwater Ultra-Marathon.  It seems this race (on foot, I might add) is aptly billed as “the world’s toughest foot race”.  I should say so.  The race course is 135 miles long (That’s about 215 kilimeters for my limey friends and 215 klics for you military types.

        When this friend said, “Ultra” marathon, I was figuring something like 30 miles instead of 26 or maybe as many as 50.  Yea, fifty sounds pretty “ultra” to me.  A hundred thirty-five miles, are you kidding?  In the desert?  In summer? Are you kidding me?  No? Then I have to ask, “Are you crazy?  I’m not sure I could survive 215 miles in the summer desert in a car without air conditioning, a 30 quart ice chest, a case of Ozarka and 75 pounds of convenience-store ice.

        These jokers start out in the Badwater Basin and race to Whitney Portal, trailhead to Mount Whitney.  The basin is 282 feet below sea level in California’s Death Valley and Whitney Portal is 8360 feet above sea level.  Are you kidding me?  When I heard this, those guys who go skinny-dipping through holes they have to break in the ice up in Alaska on new-years day don’t seem all that crazy now.

        Skydiving and hang-gliding are crocheting and needlepoint to these Death Valley ultra-marathon guys.  They probably eat horseshoes for breakfast washing it down with boiling 30-weight.  My friend said the race was in July last year and was never run earlier than in June or later than August.  He said on the last run, temperatures reached 123 in the shade.  Are you kidding me? 123 in the shade?  What shade?  It’s the desert, right?  Doesn’t that pretty much negate the idea of majestic oak trees casting cool shadows over soft green lawns?

        Now, my friend Vicente isn’t a babbling idiot who thinks he’s a dog, howling at the moon and chasing parked cars.  Other than this Death Valley thing, Vicente appears to be as normal as most folks.  He wears pants and shoes when he attends church and he doesn’t foam at the mouth or anything.

        Okay, maybe he is a little bit weird.  He does make his own yogurt maker and he eats it plain.  He uses all sorts of herbs and poultices instead of Tylenol and Neosporin.  He squeezes lemon juice on cuts and scrapes and he chews mint leaves instead of gargling with mouthwash.  Vicente isn’t a bad weird.  He is honest, loyal, generous and hard-working.  Sadly, in today’s society, those qualities alone make someone odd.

        Some things about my friend Vicente: he speaks Spanish, English, Italian and German.  He sings like that bearded fat Italian guy that wears a tux and a scarf. You know, Praviati or something.  Vicente loves classical music, poetry and classic literature.  He knows more world history and current events than anyone else I know.  Vicente is fit, trim and as strong as most men twice his size and half his age.  He hasn’t got an ounce of fat on him but I was with him once at an all-you-can-eat buffet in a Chinese restaurant where he was ask to never come back after downing a dozen eggrolls and enough shrimp to feed some Asian countries for a week.

        Vicente Ledesma hails from Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico.  I met him almost 30 years ago when he left home to seek fame and fortune in the Narvana called El Estados Unidos (The good old US of A).  The silver mines of the Guanajuato’s had spent all but the hardest veins of their booty and adventure called from the north.

        At nineteen, Vicente arrived in Houston all bright-eyed, eager, tired and broke.  His cousin Julio, the one who wrote him of the wonders of heaven to the north, did not live at the address on Hogan Street that he had sent Vicente in his last letter.  Come to find out, Julio had been jailed for hitting his landlord in the head with a cantaloupe melon during some sort of altercation.  The story varied with the teller but the best I can remember, either, Julio hit the guy for no good reason at all, or, the landlord shoved Julio off the porch and down a flight of concrete steps first.  Either way, Julio was in the hoosegow and Vicente was homeless.

        As fortune would have it, Vicente was pointed toward a day-labor office and, come the next morning, I picked him up with three more laborers to move 24 cubic yards of bank sand from one place to another. 

        I was impressed with the kid’s strength and stamina.  Had I known he hadn’t eaten anything in four days, I would have been even more impressed.  I was using six or seven day-laborers to make up my crew back in those days and finding a guy like Vicente was a real piece of luck.  It didn’t take long before he was my crew leadman and a lifelong friendship began.

        I taught him English and he taught me Spanish.  I gave him a decent day’s pay and he gave me an extraordinary day’s work.  I grew to admire the man and love him like a brother.  Over the years he worked for me, he would take off mid November and return mid January to spend time with his family in Mexico.  He would stay at my house each January until he could afford to pay for a room close to work.  In exchange, he would tend my garden, clean out my garage or wash my cars.  He even taught one of my daughters how to ride a bike.

        As hard as it is to believe, he told me he was the black sheep of his family.  Black sheep? The guy sent more money back to his family in Mexico than he kept for himself.   One year, I helped him buy a set of dentist tools to take to his sister who was starting dental school in Guadalajara.

        He had one brother who was a brewmaster for Corona Beer and another who was a lawyer, but I never held that against him.  I used to say something to him about being a wet-back (or mujado) and he would tell me he wasn’t.  He’d say, “I’m no wetback.  I came into the country on a visa.”  Well, although it was true he crossed the border with a visa his brother got for him, it was only a three-day healthcare visa not a work permit and he always stayed 10 months and worked. 

        Alas, when immigration cracked down on undocumented Mexican workers, here in our part of the state, I sent him to work for a friend of mine in the landscape business in a small town away from the crack-down.  He ended up working as the assistant greenskeeper at the local country club and he works and live there to this day.  He asked me if I minded if he stayed there and though I missed him, I knew it was what he liked and was better for him.

        We used to see each other when he came to town for the Houston Marathon, a race he took 4^th in his age class a few years back and he used to call me every Christmas, but sadly, as it often happens, we lost touch.  Vicente still enters my mind from time to time and I just hope I enter his now and then as well.

        If a person is real lucky, they will have one friend in their lifetime like Vicente.  So, where ever you are, mi amigo, la buena fortuna, la buena suerte y va con Dios.

“That’s how I see it, so that must be how it is.”

PREVIOUS BLOG:

CURBY-

Back in high school, I had a friend.  Willie Taylor was his name but we in the gang (And by “Gang” I do not mean gangsters like the Crips or the Bloods.  It was more in the sense of boyhood friends living and hanging together in the same neighborhood).  There was me, Wayne, my best friend from about the seventh grade and eventually the best man at my wedding, Bill Maxey, the next door neighbor who had an aunt in New York working in a comic book factory who sent Bill these big boxes of comics, all seconds with miss-cut pages or misaligned print but readable treasures all the same, and Bill Taylor who we all called Curby.

        Curby was the least likely of the crowd to do something crazy.  He made good grades.  He lived with his mother, whom he adored, and he dressed like a first class Clyde. (Now, for you who were not around in the 1950’s, a Clyde, in cool hippy talk, meant, a square, a geek, a nerd).  But Curby only looked Clyde and acted Clyde around grownups.  Get the boy away from adult supervision and he was an animal.  As an example, the traffic lights in our hometown were timed so that if you drove exactly 30 miles per hour, you would have nothing but green lights all the way from First Street to Fifteenth.  Transversely, if one were to run a red light at First Street and drive that same 30 miles per hour,  one could, if they so desired, could run all six traffic lights on Main Street, an act Willie was apt to do any time he got the urge to do so and the urges usually came at night.

For another example of Curby’s craziness, let us look at the circumstances under which he earned his nickname. 

We were all out in Willie’s car one night, a white, unassuming 1959 Ford sedan to which Willie had added two extra high-beam headlights mounted, not on the front, just above the bumper as were the original headlights but on the back luggage deck pointed backwards.

        Why, pray tell? You ask, would anyone mount high-beam headlights pointing backwards in a harmless looking car with an under-dash toggle switch?  Well, I shall tell you.  Willie Taylor did not like people pulling up behind him who were so rude as to not dim their headlights from high beam to low.  Should some poor fool be so insensitive as to show Willie this discourtesy, Willie would reach down and flick on the switch to his special backwards headlights and blind the offender.  Nary a one continued his or her rudeness once Willie delivered his less than subtle hint.  As a matter of fact, it has been told that many of the offenders thought they were about to have a head-on collision with a vehicle suddenly heading right at them.  Can you say, “Soiled undies”?

        Okay. I realize you do not yet see the connection between these special lights and Willie’s nickname.  Be patient my friend and I will connect the proverbial dots.  You see, on one particularly dark night, Willie decided to demonstrate his special illuminati and his driving expertise by making his infamous red-light run completely in reverse.

 “How hard can it be?” he asked.  I have the headlights for it.”

“Can’t be all that hard,” we all answered.  They say there is strength in numbers.  They say there is wisdom in a multitude of counsel.  But, I am thinking neither idiom was meant to be applied to teenage boys and their cars.  The one thing we had all forgotten was that 30 MPH moving forward does not seem particularly fast and anyone with a little driving experience will keep in a straight line as much by trained reflex as by conscience will.  However, 10 MPH in Reverse feels like 60.  Willie had never driven more than a few feet in reverse before and the car was weaving all over the street but Willie was convinced (Though we rest of us were not) that he could straighten the car out and accelerate up to 30.  Willie was wrong.

        The car suddenly jerked to one side and careened over the rather high curb.  I could only assume at this point that Willie was trying to brake because our speed did not decrease, and this I swear to you, it seemed to actually pick up speed as we cut a swath through lawns, landscapes and fences.  We bounced back over the curb in into the street for a few second and hit the curb again sending us airborne, back down onto another manicured lawn and through another  fence or two, then it was over the curb and into the street once more for one final display  of Willie’s driving inaptitude.  He whipped the steering wheel into the direction of the skid as he had learned in Driver’s Education Class but he forgot that when you are traveling backwards, “into the skid”, is not the same as if you are traveling forward and we took another spin, jumped one more curb and came to rest, rather rudely, on top of a pile of concrete which, only moments earlier had been some sort of fountain or statue.  If my memory serves me right, I remember a dismembered concrete wing protruding from under the car. 

        After what seemed like an eternity, the four of us somehow regained enough composure to get out of the car and assess the damage.  Looking back over our 3 to 400 foot path of devastation, we could see track after track where we had jumped the curb, first onto the sidewalk and some distance later, back onto the street.

        After a few minutes of stunned silence, someone said, “Well, Curby, that was one heck of a ride,” and the name stuck.

        Curby somehow got the car running again and we drove off.  Well, maybe. “Drove” wouldn’t be entirely accurate.  The car had three flat tires.  The fourth was the right rear tire.  It was not flat but the tire, wheel rim and all were lying in the middle of the street a hundred feet behind us.  We managed to get the car around two corners before it finally gave up the ghost.

        Out of sight from the carnage on Main Street, we left the car and walked to the nearest payphone and called Buck’s Wrecker Service, which was owned by Lois Moore, the mother of my girlfriend, at the time.  She agreed to tow Willie’s car even though we only had four dollars and twenty-five cents on us at the time and wrecker’s wanted cash up front.  I guess Lois thought if she could trust me with her daughter, she could trust me and my friends for the other twenty dollars and seventy-five cents.

It’s been over 40 years since that night, so maybe you could cut me a little slack if I didn’t get every detail just right but the legend of William “Curby” Taylor is still being told in the coffee shops and barber shops up and down Main.  Thousands of men claim to have been in the car with Curby that night but only Curby, Wayne and I know the truth.  Bill, the comic-book boy had to work that night and missed out on the ride, so there are only three of us who can look back to that infamous night and say, “Boy, were we stupid.”