Prologue
Pulling into a gas station yesterday, I noticed a little girl, maybe six, hard at work on her mom’s truck windshield.
“Looks like they gave you the tough job,” I told her.
She looked back at me, brow furrowed, with an air of concern.
“I don’t talk to strangers,” she said. Gee. That’s the first time in my life I’ve been a “stranger.” I don’t think I like it.
South of the Border, Down Mexico Way
As a raft of new suppliers and products began flooding the market in the early seventies, there were a lot of ways a budding entrepreneur could take his business. You could stay with a poster store/headshop operation, which required less inventory and featured quick turnover, you could gravitate more toward a boutique with higher-end products, or, if space permitted, you could try some combination of the two, which is what we did with the Subterranean Circus and our later adjunct, Silver City.
In addition to the posters-pipes-clothes, though, we sold a lot of other things. Silver jewelry, leather goods, India print spreads (every Volkswagen van had to have one—or three). Underground comics and newspapers. Blacklights and fixtures. Candles. Incense. The whole enchilada. And, speaking of Mexican delicacies, we noticed that a lot of the stuff we were buying came from south of the border. If we were paying modest prices for these products now, how much cheaper would it be if we actually went to Mexico and bought in great quantities?
I had been to Mexico only once, with Gilbert Shelton and a couple of girlfriends, when I lived in Austin. We went to Nuevo Laredo for a day, which is a story in itself. But border towns are nothing like the rest of Mexico. The first trip was taken with second wife Harolyn Locklair. Harolyn even knew a little Spanish. This helped a lot when she was being kidnapped by a cab driver in Mexico City and she told him she was going to jump if he didn’t stop. It also came in handy when negotiating with merchants (and police).
We flew into Mexico City and took up residence in one of the better hotels in Zona Rosa (you guessed it—the Red Zone) in the middle of town. The quality of our digs did not save us from the interminable jackhammers, which blasted on throughout the night, making sleep impossible. We complained, of course, but the Mexican hotel manager seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable that construction work should be performed when the streets were clear. This was only the first example of cultural differences we would experience. We tried to segue into “Think like a Mexican” mode but you can’t begin to imagine how impossible this might be. Only after many trips and endless frustrations did we begin to get a clue.
Our first visit was to Taxco (tas-co), only about 80 miles from Mexico City but three-and-a-half hours by bus along winding, hilly roads. Taxco originally boasted some 400 silver mines scattered throughout its environs and silver was the order of the day there. We stayed in a hotel in the middle of town, across from the loudest bar in the universe, which never closed. As in Never. Closed. Nobody in the hotel seemed to mind (except us), feeling hey, why would you stay there if you didn’t love mariachi music. You can see already that sleep in Mexico was a rare commodity. In a later trip to Taxco, we stayed in a hilltop hotel as far from the main square as possible. No human music, just a beautiful chorus of hundreds of baying and barking dogs filling the night. Ay, caramba!
Business was good, though. After buying some very expensive and beautiful enameled silver necklaces from a shop on the main road, we asked the proprietor where we might pick up some inexpensive stuff. Naturally, he had relatives. We arranged to meet them at their home the next morning. When we got there, it seemed little busy. There was a line of older ladies extending out the door, around the house and down the block, all there to show us their earthlies. We went in and met the family. It took a couple of minutes to adjust to the pigs and chickens meandering through the place, but by now we were “Thinking like a Mexican.”
Each lady who came to the table had a little bag of rings, earrings, bracelets or whatever that she and her family made. Every family concentrated on one product. We bought a ton of stuff. And even though single items were priced from fifty cents to a dollar for the most part, our giant pile of multicolored Mexican money slowly began to diminish. We spent the better part of the day there, enjoyed a little dinner and left as the neighborhood began drifting in for the evening TV programs, our hosts being one of the few local families blessed with the magic of black and while television. We nodded goodbye to the wall portraits of Jesus and JFK and toddled home with our loot.
“No Jipis”
We had to fly to Oaxaca. It was in the middle of the mountains and any other mode of transportation was ridiculously long. When we got to the Mexico City airport and were directed to our plane, Harolyn started walking to a larger, more promising craft nearby. I pointed out her error.
“I’m not getting on that thing!” she protested, evil-eyeing the tiny nine-seater parked in the distance.
“There’s no alternative,” I told her, but she was unyielding. The captain and crew (of one) finally talked her into it, but I wasn’t sure she was wrong. Eventually, however, the thing took off and, like The Little Engine That Could, barely chugged over the mountains (we could see the tops real good) and into Oaxaca (wa-haca).
When we got to our hotel, the first thing we noticed was a large sign that said “No Jipis.” No hippies. There were several of them strewn about the landscape, Oaxaca being a sort of base camp for sorties into magic mushroom land. Fortunately, we didn’t look much like jipis, so we had no problems. I mean, hell, we even had baggage.
In Oaxaca, we wanted to buy peasant blouses. We sold similar ones in the store already and couldn’t keep them in stock. In other towns, most of the women sewed at home and sold their blouses either in stores or in the square on market day (different day in each town, once a week), but in Oaxaca there was a modest manufacturing plant where you could buy larger quantities. We told the owner how many we needed and he promised they would be ready the next morning (we were flying out in the afternoon). Ah, but we were not Thinking Like a Mexican! When we went back next morning to pick up our blosas, they were, of course, not ready.
We fussed and fumed at the manager about our schedule and lost business in the future, but he seemed to think the whole thing was no big deal. The Manana Principle. Well, how about this afternoon? He wasn’t so sure. But manana, there was no doubt. Not to him, maybe. After much groaning and gnashing of teeth, we got out of there two days later, but with an exceptional collection of shirts, as if the company were saying they were making the wait worthwhile. And this sort of thing happened all the time. Whenever you were ready to strangle somebody or jump off a cliff in frustration, the Mexicans would pull a rabbit from a hat and make you think, well, maybe it’s not so bad. Except for Puebla.
The Trip from Hell
They had onyx in Puebla, lots of onyx. Onyx pipes, onyx ashtrays, onyx chess sets, you name it, they had it in onyx (which, if you didn’t know, is a stone a little like marble, but more fragile). After much shopping around for the best products and prices, we finally settled on a family operation that featured beautiful stuff at comparable prices. While we had lunch, they boxed it up and dollied it down to the bus station. Things were going swimmingly. We were shocked at the lack of snafus. Not for long, though. The generalissimo of the bus station (he had the uniform of a military commander) told us we could not take all those boxes on our bus back to Mexico City. Why not?
“Not enough room.”
“How many can we take?”
“Uno,”
‘WHAT!!??!!”
“Uno.”
“What about the rest of them?”
“Each bus, one.”
We screamed about the inconvenience, the bad business relations, man’s inhumanity to man, all to no avail. It was still “uno”. There were no planes, the train situation was impossible and, obviously, the bus was out. What was a poor gringo to do? Maybe take a taxi.
The taxis in places like Puebla consist mainly of a sad fleet of shabby antiques with but one redeeming quality. They are sparklingly available. We negotiated a satisfactory price with one driver and began loading up, noting out the corner of one eye a policeman who seemed to be paying an inordinate amount of attention. As the trunk filled and the rear end sunk almost to the street, he began slowly shaking his head. The cab driver, fearful of losing his wonderful fare, argued, but to no avail.
“He says it is too heavy,” the cabbie told us. He was right. The cab, particularly with the quality of tires and radiator it probably had, would never make the two-hour trip. This was a job for TWO cabs, although Harolyn was very reluctant to ride alone, having nearly been sold into white slavery earlier.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “We won’t pay them until we get there.”
“You mean I’m not more valuable on the slave market than a few boxes of onyx?”
“We’ll keep you in sight. With all that weight in the car, I can probably catch him on foot if he tries to drive off.”
Halfway to Mexico City, Harolyn’s cab began to smoke. The driver pulled over and, there being no policia to disagree, we moved everything to the remaining cab. Eventually, by about 2 a.m., we made it to the airport where we commandeered half the lockers in the place and stashed the onyx. The airport hotel, however, despite our reservations, had no rooms.
“We thought you weren’t coming.”
“Of course you did.”
“We can get you a room in Zona Rosa.”
“Um…if you don’t mind…”
He got us a room downtown, away from the jackhammers. We got there about 3 a.m. Thank God, we can finally get some sleep. And we did. For a little while.
“Bill,” says Harolyn, from her stupor. “Do you hear music?”
“What music? It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“It’s very faint, but it’s music. Listen, it’s getting a little louder.”
And here it came, first far in the distance, but getting closer all the time. I got up and went to the window, and when I pulled the curtain back, there they were. Groups of nurses, boy scouts, bus drivers, etc., all crisp in their little uniforms, a new subgroup entering the body of the parade each time it circled the square. They were rehearsing for the Giant Independence Day Parade a week hence. Despite myself, I had to laugh. Only to us could this happen. Only here. Only because we forgot to Think Like A Mexican.
BULLETIN: Crimson Streak finishes second in his first start at Calder. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he crosses the track, impedes another horse and is taken down and placed fifth. They don’t write checks for fifth. But still…
To Sell or Not to Sell
Okay, here is the quandary for today. Following the race, another owner offers $20,000 for Crimson Streak. Not a lot as racehorses go, but still $20,000. This horse had worked as bad as horses work prior to racing. Our trainer, Larry Pilotti, told us he badly needed to be gelded, he was not paying attention to his work. We told him to run anyway, since we’d lose a month if we gelded him then. If he ran, he’d need a month off anyway. So he runs well and is scheduled to be gelded today. We expect him to run better once he is gelded, but who knows. In this race, he broke on top, ran second head-and-head with another horse and made up almost three lengths on the leader in the stretch, losing by a diminishing half-length. He would have to win two races to net back the $20,000 we’re being offered.
Bill says, keep the horse. Unless he is injured, he will always be worth the $20,000. Siobhan, just like a girl, says sell the horse and pocket the twenty grand. Who is right? Who is wrong? Return with us next month to see what happens in the next exciting episode of “As The Racing World Turns.” Don’t worry though. We’re keeping him for now.
Old College Humor Magazine Joke (from 1966):
A travelling salesman was stopped in a small Midwestern town for lunch one day when he heard a woman crying in the street.
“Schultz is dead! Schultz is dead” she lamented.
Her wailing was followed by the sobs of yet another woman who ran through the streets crying “Schultz is dead.”
More women followed and the salesman, curious about all the female grief over this Schultz, went to the town’s only undertaker to inquire.
“Let me show you,” the undertaker said, and he proceeded to open the casket in which Schultz was newly ensconced. The undertaker pulled the pants from the cadaver and the salesman viewed what must have been the largest human penis in existence.
The salesman, ever mercenary, thought this might be a valuable collector’s item, so he offered the undertaker fifty dollars to have it severed and placed in a large jar of alcohol. The mortician, knowing it made no difference now to the lifeless Schultz, eagerly complied.
Two days later, back in his California home, the salesman greeted his wife and then pulled the jar from his suitcase.
“Look, honey…you’ll never believe…
“OH, NO!” she screamed, swooning. “Schultz is dead!”
That’s all, folks.
