A FAREWELL TO SAN FERNANDO, Part I (with apologies to ernie hemingway)

He’d been drunk and he’d been sober, but he’d never been drunk and sober and he wasn’t now. He’d known a chap who was that way, sober, when he was drunk, and he’d admired it, though he didn’t envy him, and now he was dead. But he was not that way, he was just drunk. He wasn’t “pray to the porcelain altar” drunk, he was “sit up straight and think” drunk. But this was part of it …he didn’t much care if his thoughts made sense.
“I wish we could go down to La Pukadora,” she said and as she said it she sighed. It was the sigh that the hot wind makes as it slips under your tent flaps at night and makes your eyes burn hot and your throat dry and your skin feel like a lizards’s skin, a good skin and yet not a good skin …if you’re not a lizard. At times not altogether unlike these times she would think of those times and remember the times when the men were strong and the tamales were salty and the beer was wet and cold, like the nose of a good and faithful dog. (Not a hard dog like a Doberman but a soft and friendly dog like a Golden Retriever about whom it is said that the instinct to chase sticks is so genetically determined that they will do so up until the inevitable onset of hip displasia and loss of bowel control so common to dogs of large breed in later years but which may be delayed in some cases by large doses of affection and chondroitin, or so I am told) It was there that the girl had come to him with the winds de Santa Ana as he sat, where he was hurt in the war, drinking Spanada with the Chihuahua, the one they call “El Humpa” …out on the Veranda. He was built like a bull and the girl did not like it when he jumped into her lap. She would sweep him off. “Nasty little bull.” And she would sing to him in a haunting voice, like Slim Whitman. It was a good voice and not a useless one for it was said that with it she had once stopped the wild cameros as they stampeded down the Boulevarde Sepulveda. It was the voice that could descend from the clouds to launch a thousand ships whilst sinking ten thousand less seaworthy craft only to then reascend yet higher into the heavens transcribing ever-tightening circles until finally disappearing like a skyrocket shot into a low fog ceiling, up its own primary aperture. He wanted to touch her almost as much as he wanted to touch the plate of hot Menudo al Valvolina that Alonso had placed steaming before them on the table. He had seen it all before. He paused a moment to un-remember that barking heard earlier from the kitchen for Alonso was indeed a blade most keen and true. It was ugly, but not as ugly as the girl in her polyester toreador pants. And he felt lonely. He wondered if the bulls were ever lonely. Heed been drunk and he’d been sober, but he’d never been drunk and sober and he WASN’T now. If Herb Alpert said that bulls get lonely, he thought …then it MUST be so.