They Will Not Walk This Way Again

Journalism as I knew it in the Rio Grande Valley from 1986 to the dawn of 2000 is dead and daily newspapers as a whole are following fast, stricken with the business equivalent of pancreatic cancer. Unsustainable business model. It’s just a matter of when.

Whatever journalism becomes, it won’t be populated the kinds of talented, usually flawed people who passed through the Valley before and during my time. Only a very few remain on the border. Many have fled daily newspaper business entirely. The others are either soldiering onward at distant papers or dead. We lived a lifestyle that anyone who wasn’t there cannot hope to understand.

I cursed it and wallowed in it, and now, at times, especially during a tedious string of mundane domestic nights, I long for it. This is not a story about the most fun I had in the Valley. Not even close. It’s not about the best journalism or writing I did there. Not even close. Shit lizards, it’s from my least favorite time – 1990-91 – at my least favorite of the three newspapers, the Valley Morning Star. But it sums up the kind of lifestyle that was not all that extraordinary for Valley journalists. Some were just colorful fuckups of limited ability, but others could be found on the front page, in the awards lists and occasionally in the police blotter. I certainly was not the first to lead it. It would make interesting reading, indeed, a list of Valley journalists who have showed up for work with Boys Town mud and piss on their shoes. Not all of them would be men.

Xxxxx

The greyhound track had just opened at Harlingen, and people like me, Gary Long, Tom Drew and Buddy Green would make a bee-line for it as soon as we could flee the Star. Tom had money. Me, Gary and Buddy were usually broke. Buddy and Gary were so notorious that dogs were named for them.

I was at the track waiting for a race with Rosie’s Image, a black dog that shared its name with a hooker I knew in Mexico City. It was equally reliable – not at all – but I always felt compelled to bet on it. I heard my name on the loudspeaker. Phone call. Go to the public phone.

It was Jerry Deal, the maniac Star city editor. Any efforts at cooperation between the three Valley papers ran dead against everything Jerry ever knew. The Herald and The Monitor were the closest papers, so they were the enemy, and he lived to beat them at everything he could, from briefs to big shit.

There had been a prison riot in Matamoros. Rival prison drug gangs. Bodies impaled on stakes in the courtyard. Now there was a standoff. It had been The Herald’s story. It was right across their bridge, and the Herald was knee deep into it. Julio Lozano, the notoriously murky copy editor at The Herald, was in telephone contact with one of the drug gang leaders inside the prison. There is a story best saved for later about Julio and one of the cauldrons from the 1989 Spring Break narcosatanico killings.

Jerry was never deterred by the obvious. He’d ask me to check around with U.S. federal people, since that was my beat. I found out off-record that the Mexican government was using U.S. Customs Enforcement phone lines to negotiate with the prisoners. The Mexicans didn’t trust their own. I had a good relationship with Steve Woody, the Brownsville Customs Enforcement chief. We were both good ol’ West Texas boys and hit it right off.

It was 9:30-10 p.m., near the end of the race card. Jerry was relaying a message. Steve Woody had called. The Mexican government was sending the federal attorney general into the Matamoros prison with a surrender or die ultimatum. Now!

Jerry had already assumed I’d drop everything and jump at a chance to beat The Herald, even if The Herald would probably (and did) get a story into print first. He had Allen Essex waiting at the Star with a camera, and we headed for Matamoros in the junker Pinto that Allen had sold me for $500 when I first got back from Mexico.

It had a house fan mounted on the dashboard and a rusted-out hole in the floorboard that you could drop your beer cans through. There was a big crowd outside the CERESO prison, which is square in the city, but we were the only U.S. journalists there. The Mexican media were everywhere. Zorros, Mexico’s elite federal tactical operations police, crouched on the surrounding rooftops with sniper rifles and machine guns.

People milled around opportunistic taco and hotdog cart operators. It looked a big block party with very strict chaperones. I bullshitted best as I could with the Mexican journalists and Allen, who spoke no Spanish, and drank a helluva lot of Pepsi.

About 5 a.m., there was a ripple through the crowd. The AG was coming out with the prison ring leader. The prisoners had surrendered. Tension tightened like a power line when the prison door opened, and the Zorros shouldered their guns. As the AG and drug lord descended the steps through a path of soldiers, one of the Mexican photographers snapped a shot with a very old camera, and the flash bulb exploded.

That’s where I thought I might die. Everyone ducked and you could hear moving gun metal, but no shots were fired and soon everything was over. Sunrise was near, and I needed to pee.

Allen and I headed back for the bridge, but I couldn’t wait. Somewhere near Blanca White’s, I turned into a neighborhood and found the quietest street I could. Nothing was moving as I went behind the Pinto and began flooding the street. Sure enough, headlights.

I was just ducking into the car, pants half zipped, when the Matamoros cops pulled beside us and ordered us out. Allen was useless.

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing, sir, nothing.”

“You were pissing! Come here! Look at this puddle in the street! You were pissing!”

“I’m sorry, officer, I had to pee really bad.”

“Women and children live in this neighborhood! You were disrespecting them! You were disrespecting Mexico! You were pissing on Mexico!”

“I meant no disrespect, officer. I would have pissed on Texas, but I could not wait. My companion and I are journalists. We were outside the prison all night covering the riot. I just had to pee.”

That gave the cop cause to pause and consult with his partner. Any run-of-the-mill American miscreant would’ve been shaken down and/or thrown in jail. He returned.

“Not because you are American journalists, but because we the police of Matamoros believe in respecting and cooperating with our American friends, we are going to let you go. Go home, and do not ever piss on Mexico again.”

Allen and I made it home at daybreak. I was staying with Wally Simmons, my longtime mentor and the Star managing editor. I slept until about noon, when Jerry called and told me to go back to Matamoros and tie up the prison story. The Herald was hitting the streets with its version, told after the fact by U.S. and Mexican officials, about the time I reached Matamoros and went to the U.S. Consulate. Some of the prisoners were Americans.

The consul was outside surrounded by U.S. reporters answering questions. Armando Villafranca, a Valley veteran who was working for the San Antonio Light at the time, kept fucking with me and my notebook while he repeatedly asked the consul, “Did you smell any fear? Did you smell any fear?” Pinche Armando then went and posed as a family member bringing daily food to prisoners, made it about 10 feet inside the door before he was busted, then wrote an “exclusive first-person account from inside the prison of death.”

I went back and wrote a blow by blow of the end of the siege, describing what I had seen first-hand and lifting most of the facts from the Mexican papers, The Herald and wire services. It read like a sports story, and the U.S. federal people ate it up. By the time I turned in the story, the dogs were running again out at the track, so that’s where I went.

I forget the race and the dogs’ names, but I nailed a trifecta for like $300. I could have gone to the titty bar out by the dog track, long a favorite haunt of Valley newspaper photographers like Bruce Lee Smith and Carlos Moreno and later Ric Vasquez and Larry Clubb. But Gary Long had turned me on to a sleazy topless place in downtown Harlingen that had a tiny stage and five or six dancers with no green cards.

(DETAILS SEALED UNTIL ACTUAL PUBLICATION: In summary, I ended up back at Wally’s with a stripper, liquor, weed and cocaine and made a lot of noise.)

Boss man Wally, whose wife was away in East Texas, stuck his head in the bedroom door about 10 a.m. as he was headed to the Star. The girl’s black hair showed from under the covers.

“Murray, I thought you were sick last night. I heard all that moaning, then I realized that wasn’t you and that’s wasn’t sick. I’m gonna tell Jerry you’re just going to your school board meeting today then filing. Does she have any friends?”

For many reasons, only a few of them good, days like those will not pass again.