Zacatecas: A Review of Contemporary Word

It started in a college town, but I wasn't in school. I played drums in a punkrock band that couldn't play a single song from beginning to end. We just played the middle of songs, I guess. We were drunk all day long, every day. Some of us, like Bergie and Joe, were into coke and mushrooms but I was a straight whiskey man. Man? Okay, I was a boy. I was a whiskey boy.

Others of us -- Simca and Sunshine, namely -- were into girls, all kinds of girls, different girls every week: college girls and high school girls, punkrock girls and hippies, school teachers and junkies, married women and single mothers. That wasn't me. I laid low. I was the quiet one, but I was the drummer.

How long does punkrock last? Not long, if you're really punkrock. People grow up, get lazy, get jobs, get married. Your hair starts to go. The sun starts coming up earlier, and finds you leaving the house in a shirt and tie. And then, worst of all, you start learning how to play your instrument. Before you know it you're playing songs from beginning to end. From beginning to end. That's when it's over. Pack up and leave town. You're not punkrock anymore.

I sold my drums and moved back to my hometown in Gunnison. I married a girl I had gone to third grade with, and, to top it off, I started teaching art in that very same elementary school. My students were little versions of me and Maria, like I was some kind of time traveler. Twenty years later and kids were still obsessed with Star Wars and Winnie the Pooh, just around the corner from sex and booze and everything else. They had no idea I was still exactly like them. They thought I was a grown up, and that just proved to me that no one ever really grows up, you just deteriorate until you're dead. But when you die, you're still a kid.

Gunnison hadn't changed either, except for a few empty storefronts because of the Wal-Mart out on the highway. There was still just one diner, with the same menu, the same lousy coffee, and there were the same two bars where I used to drink underage. There was no coffeeshop, no pool hall, no shady dive where a punkrock band could play. And that was fine with me. Mostly I stayed home. Maria was ready to have a baby. "Whenever you're ready," she kept saying, like she was just waiting for me to drive her to the store. A baby. The thought of that kept me awake nights, staring at the stars through the curtains. I remember a feeling of something awesome and huge out there, in the night, coming out of the sky. I waited for it to come crashing through the roof, whatever it was, to land in my lap.

And then one Saturday morning I awoke to a familiar sound, the strumming of a ditty on an untuned guitar. I went onto the porch. There was Simca, sitting on the railing, leaning back against the post, strumming a battered old acoustic I hadn't seen in years. He grinned at me but didn't stop strumming and singing. But even more: my old drum set was on the porch, too. It was halfway set up, the bass and the snare and the high hat, and two drumsticks lay across the snare head. I looked long and hard, shaking my head. And sure, I was laughing, but I was also thinking about Maria sleeping upstairs.

"Fffffft!" Simca jerked his head at the drums, his hands jangling away on the guitar. I pulled my rocking chair over, sat down, and gave a kick on the pedal, a pop on the snare. My left foot found its place on the high hat pedal and then everything started up like an old machine that still remembers how to run. Within four measures I was on it, and we were jamming an old punkrock tune. Simca howled the chorus and I howled along, and the dog across the street joined in too. That's how my rockstar life came back to haunt me.

"Joe's in Japan now, teaching English." Simca and I are sitting in the Flying W Cafe over a breakfast of pancakes and tar coffee. He's giving me the rundown. "Sunshine's been living with her girlfriend for three years now, and they'd get married if they could, but, you know."

I nod, sipping my coffee.

"And Bergie, same old thing, he'll work for Wal-Mart till the day he dies."

"And you?"

Simca smiles, getting shy for a second. He looks out the window where all you can see is half a block of downtown storefronts, one or two people going by in the morning chill. "Me, I've got everything I own in my old jalopy, halfway along the road to wherever I end up. And I'm thirsty."

That word, you see, has a special weight. Thirsty. It means a lot more than you want a glass of water. It means that someone better chain the girls to their bedposts, and widen the gutters of the city, and throw all the doors open wide, because you're going to flatten everything between you and the other side of drunk. That's what thirsty means.

Result: We head back to the house with our arms full of booze. Whiskey, beer, red wine, tequila and margarita mix. It's only eleven o'clock in the morning and Maria is doing the laundry as Simca and I spread the booty across the kitchen counter and start scheming. A party is easy enough in a small town because nearly everyone I know lives within four blocks of here and no one has anything better to do. Maria stops in the doorway on her way down to the basement with a basket full of sheets in her arms. "Simca should meet Cora," she says, winking at me.

Cora is her best friend from high school who teaches modern dance at the college. She's always in black tights with her hair up off her neck and you'd have to be an idiot to think she wasn't sexy as hell. And God bless Maria for saying it and for implicity okaying the idea of the party. Because if she got all dark and broody and whispered to me about the neighbors or the mess I just don't know what I'd do. Just that comment--and that wink--makes it clear how goddamn much she loves me and how absolutely far she'll go to make me happy. I almost get the shivers, standing there wiping the dust out of the wine glasses, and it's something I should tell Simca but I have no idea if he would even hear what I was saying. I don't think he's ever had a woman love him in such a quiet and sturdy way. I grin at him. "You'll love Cora."

He wiggles his eyebrows. "Tell me more."

Maria and I take turns working the phone. We're calling people we haven't talked to in years. I tell everyone that my buddy from my old punkrock band is in town, and it's going to be a blowout. Maria's billing it as a pre-Halloween party. By about the fourth call we're telling people to wear costumes. "But make sure it's a costume you can dance in," says Maria. She's talking to Cora. "Don't come as a Rubic's cube or something. You have to be able to boogie, you know. There's going to be a punkrock band!"

Simca's jangling away on the guitar in the other room. He's overheard. "No!" he yells, "a Rubic's cube is perfect! Tell her to come as a Rubic's cube!"

We end up inviting nearly everyone in our address book. The principal of my school is coming, a bunch of fellow teachers, our real estate agent, some parents of my students, Maria's whole extended Mexican family, everyone we went to high school with who never made it out of town. And, of course, Cora. Otherwise Simca would be bored stiff.

We set the drums up in the dining room like we're building a doomsday machine. I stop halfway through tightening the snare head. "Where the hell did you find my drums?"

Simca grins. He thought I was never going to ask. "You sold them to that drummer for Bunny Genghis, remember, what's-his-name? Well, he had them in his house hanging on the wall over the fricking fireplace. Then he got busted for selling acid and I went over and bought the whole set off his roommate for a hundred bucks. So in fact, they're no longer your drums, pal."

"And what are you going to do when the dude gets out of the slammer?"

"He got ten years. In ten years I won't need drums any more."

"Aha. Are you planning on growing up?"

"Back off." Simca winks, grabbing for an unopened wine bottle on the coffee table. "It's almost noon, what the hell is the cork still doing in this bottle?"

Maria goes out to buy food with a wad of cash that Simca offers up. He insists on floating the bill, showing up unannounced like this and setting these wheels in motion. We agree to split it halfway. We used to pay for parties with whatever door money we made playing some show, and it was never an issue of whose cash it was: it was everybody's party.

Simca and I sip red wine from juice glasses. He looks around at the framed prints of botanical watercolors, the stenciled border of daisies and hearts circling the room at waist level, the hand embroidered doilies on the endtables. I see him smiling but he doesn´t say anything. I anticipate him. "It´s a step up from trash bags and tinfoil," I say. That was the decorating theme of the house we use to share, all us freaks. Black trashbags covering the walls, tinfoil molded around the doorframes and light fixtures. Simca shrugs. "It´s a step," he says. Then we're a couple glasses into the wine and Simca grabs the guitar and the next three hours are a headlong crash of halfassed tunes not played in years. But between the two of us we remember all the words, and most of the chords. He has some new tunes, too, and I tap along softly on the highhat as he strums and sings. It's astonishing, actually, to hear what he's come up with during this lost time. He's all jazzy and mellow now, playing real chords and singing more or less in tune. I don't even know where to begin laying down a beat for this kind of thing so I go grab a cannister of salt from the kitchen and just sit behind the drums shaking it softly back and forth like the sound of wind blowing though the curtains. "That's nice," I say, and Simca's actually playing with his eyes closed, strumming with his thumb so softly you can barely hear the tune.

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