| “Welcome to Lucha Libre Night at the Taco Bell Arena in Chihuahua, Mexico. I’m Edificio Del Huevo, your color commentator, and I’ll be assisted by six-time Mexican female mud wrestling champion, Rosita La Chingada.” “¡Hola amigos!” “We’ll be reporting on the hugely anticipated grudge match tonight between Mexican champion Comandante Marco and his American rival, El Grande Bush. There’s a lot at stake in this battle for North American supremacy, wouldn’t you say, Rosie?” “¡Ooooh sííííí! Mexico has been pushing for a rematch since 1846, when the malditos gringos cabrones put a gun to our heads and made us sign over Texas and California. Now if we want to go there for a vacation we have to swim through rat-infested sewer pipes, and mutherfuckers telling us ‘Speak English! Speak English!’ I like English. I luv it! But I don’t need no gringo mutherfucker breathin’ down my neck. “Anyway, if Comandante Marco wins the match tonight, we gonna get back all our land and then we be telling you cocksuckers to speak Spanish. “I know the first thing I’m gonna do when we take over is to move into the Presidential Suite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas and go skinny-dipping in the Grand Canal. Show the mutherfuckers what a real Mexican chocha looks like!” “Sounds good to me, Rosie, but as they say ‘Don’t count your huevos rancheros before they’re hatched.’ Remember, the norteamericanos are not going to give up all that loot without a fight. “And as we speak, El Grande Bush is entering the ring. He’s wearing his trademark pink tu-tu, dunce cap and glitter mask, and they’re playing his music, ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise.’” “Hey, Bushie, Bushie! Can we get a word from you for our studio audience?” “Waal, I’d like to address my remarks to the brave men and women fighting in Eye-Rack for the forty-second consecutive year. I honor the sacrifice you are making in the war on terror, and I want you to know that I plan to win tonight so that when you come home you’ll have a home to come home to. “The threat we are facing in this arena here tonight is whether our western states will remain The Home of The Free And The Brave, or are allowed to become an open-air taco stand like the one on Alvarado Street in downtown LA, where the crackheads and stray dogs hang out, behind the convention center.” “How inspiring! What’s your strategy for fighting Comandante Marco?" “I plan to shock and awe him with my lightning speed, twist his head in the ropes and bite his knuckles.” “Excuse me, Ed, cut out that shit. Here comes Mexico’s national hero, Comandante Marco of the Zapatista Revolutionary Army of Chiapas. He looks ready for battle with his headdress of quetzal feathers, jaguar-skin tights and crocodile nose mask. His musical accompaniment is the Mexico City rock band Molotov singing their anthem ''Viva México Cabrones.' Every time I hear that song it brings tears of pride to my eyes, especially the part where they sing ‘No Me Llames Cerdo.’ When I was a leetle girl in the shantytown overlooking the security wall separating Nuevo Laredo from Brownsville, Texas, my mother used to lull me to sleep by singing to me from Molotov’s romantic love song ‘Chinga Tu Madre’, where they sing: Nos vemos Acapulco a la fin de semana Mientras yo cuido à tu hermana Chinga tú chinga tu madre [Ed. See you in Acapulco But first I fuck your sister] “Hey, big boy! You got something to say to your fans?” “Hola, Rosie. I dedicate my life to the glory of Mexico. After I win, not only are we going to reconquer our lost territories, but we are going to sacrifice El Grande Bush on the ancient Mayan altar at Chichen Itzà by ripping out his still beating heart and feeding it to the pirhana fish that swim in the holy cenote. The whole ceremony is going to be filmed by Mel Gibson for his upcoming movie “Jews of The Jungle.” “Sounds great, sweetie. Only how do you plan to vanquish such a great warrior like El Grande Bush?” “I plan to shoot him with a curare-tipped blow dart and then, when he’s paralyzed, I’m going to stomp on his balls.” “And there’s the bell! The two fighters are circling each other warily, looking for an opening, and they are being watched by the masked referee, El Misterioso, who is also wearing a mask. Ed, what do we know about El Misterioso?” “Only that he gained fame as the fiercest lucha libre fighter in South America.” “Wow! Now El Grande Bush leaps forward and head butts Comandante Marco in the chest, but instead of falling onto the mat El Comandante does a backflip, kicking Bush in the face. Bush goes down and Comandante Marco sits on his face, locking him in a French Butt Hold, squeezing the air out of Bush like an Anaconda python between the steel vise grip of his powerful glutes.” “With his last, dying breath Bush reaches between Marco’s legs and manages to insert his two fingers in the man’s nostrils and flip him across the ring like a slingshot. Bush jumps to his feet and delivers a shattering roundkick to the head of El Comandante, who goes flying into El Misterioso who, enraged, punches him in the face. Hey, he’s not supposed to do that. He’s the ref!” “Wait a minute! Now El Misterioso grabs a folding chair and breaks it over the head of El Grande Bush.” “The audience is going berserk. The mariachi band Los Tigres Del Norte has started playing the romantic sentimental love song ‘Volver’, I suppose expressing their wish for a return of Mexico’s northern territories. Meantime, on the American side, Ted Nugent is shooting off machine gun riffs from his guitar. Oh no, that’s not his guitar, it’s a real machine gun! Now gunfire is breaking out all over the place and bullets are flying.” “Comandante Marco and El Grande Bush have recovered from the surprise attack by El Misterioso, and they’re punching the shit out of him in the corner of the ring. They rip off his mask.” “Omigod, it’s Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, and he’s got an oil gusher shooting out of his butt!” “Well, let’s get out of here before the whole place explodes. Reporting to you from Taco Bell Arena, I’m Edificio Del Huevo.” “And I’m Rosita La Chingada…” “Wishing you a big cuevo en el culo, cabrones!” |
CHUCHA LIBRE
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| OK, I killed myself after the Yankees lost last night, and now I’ve come back from the dead and I feel better. No use crying over spilt milk, but it drives me nuts to give so much satisfaction to the Yankees haters who inhabit bridge and tunnel-land. No point being sentimental over Joe Torre. He’s got his money. When you work for a creepy prick like George Steinbrenner, who is old and lost his marbles long ago even when he was young, you always have the Bat of Pericles hanging over your head by a thread. Unfortunately, the Yankees is also a business operating on a razor-thin profit margin. Steinbrenner kept Torre long past his expiration date even though the Yanks have been crapping out year after year in the playoffs. As Cleveland so pointedly demonstrated, the Yankees’ problem is concentrated in their pitching. How their management let it get to this point should be the subject for a Marx Brothers comedy (it’s too funny for today’s comedians, except for Leno). But what the Yankees demonstrated is that just being a New Yorker does not get you a free pass. You still have to deliver the goods. In fact, the fact that you live in New York is supposed to demonstrate that you manifest some god-like qualities. Here we got New York senator Hillary Clinton running against New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a possible challenge by New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. The rest of the country can suck wind, y’know what I mean? Bloomberg is moving closer and closer to Clinton’s positions, which means to me that he considers Giuliani and the Republicans to be flatter than last year’s beer and is setting himself up as the only alternatives to Hillary for people who approve of her positions but can’t stomach her personally. I can’t understand what drives these Hillary haters – she’s not any more obnoxious than anybody else. Bloomberg is probably right.Giuliani’s candidacy will certainly destroy the Republican Party before he himself fizzles out like an inflatable sex doll with a puncture hole. That is when Mike will make his move. The way he will put it is: this is an election, not a coronation. That’s why I am presenting myself as an alternative to Hillary Clinton, so Americans can have a choice. This is a good strategy, and if Mike decides to go with Arnold Schwarznegger for his vice- president a Bloomberg/Schwartznegger ticket would be the darling of the celebrity and business media, leaving Hillary The New York Times, The Nation magazine and such minuscule pockets of serious thinkers as exist in this society, sorry to say. But what it will do is invite comparison of Michael Bloomberg’s past performance as a public official with Hillary’s. New York is a city of interests. Sometimes Bloomberg’s expressed sympathies for the entrenched interests that dominate life here at the expense of the general population cast him in an impolitic light, which is the case regarding Consolidated Edison, the electric and gas utility, whose infrastructure is so obsolete that people’s dogs are getting fried alive as they walk them down the street. Some actual people have also died as well. Con Ed is really a comical presence in the city, with its trucks decorated with a big thumbs-up on the side with the motto “On It.” Yeah right, On It! It might be more appropriate to show the board of directors with the thumb up its butt and the slogan “Sit On It.” Not that it’s the fault of the repairmen. They are charged with keeping a rotting system functioning while its board of directors drains the company of its profits, some of which should be set aside for infrastructure upgrades, to the unbelievable tune of 10% yearly dividends for common shares, rain or shine. Meanwhile, whole neighborhoods go without electricity for as long as a week at a time in the summer. The utility defends this hemorrhaging of resources by stating that shareholders have bought the stock in anticipation of high returns on their investment and a reduction of dividends might result in a loss of share value. In fact, despite the rotten infrastructure and service, which might be compared to a seedy provincial city in the Congo Republic, for which New Yorkers are obliged to pay the highest electricity rates in the US, Con Ed has now applied for yet another rate increase, this one to pay for the damage caused by the system overload of the August 2006 blackout, which reduced all of northwest Queens to shambles for an entire week. During this charming episode, when grocery stores lost all their refrigerated food and people were dying from heart attacks from the stress of trying to get some sleep in their air- conditioned cars, Bloomberg, not even bothering to visit the blighted area for much of the week, much less sending ice, actually applauded Con Ed and its CEO for doing a fine job! This is the kind of myopic idiocy one could expect from a boss but not from the mayor of New York when hundreds of thousands of its citizens are reduced to a state of desperate crisis. [Of course, I don’t recall Hillary Clinton getting out there to pitch in and lend a hand either. And I personally avoided to going to Astoria as though it were a plague-infested medieval Italian village as well. Nevertheless, if anybody in this city would have had any brains, they could at least have sent trucks into the blighted neighborhood to distribute bags of ice] Nobody expected Mike Bloomberg to ride in like a cowboy and clean up Dodge, but his open endorsement of blatant corporate looting, as at Con Ed, or his perceived indifference to a disgracefully corrupt situation, as in the affair of the Deutsche Bank fire where, like a tragic Keystone Kops comedy, two firemen died when they turned on the hose and one drop came out because the mob contractors had disconnected the standpipe connection and fire inspectors were either paid or intimidated from inspecting the demolition site, could definitely come back to haunt him in a general election against Hillary Clinton. Clinton is going easy on Obama and Edwards, but she won’t be so gentle on Bloomberg, who might be perceived as representing a genuine threat to her interests. You can be sure that her catapults will be loaded up with rich New York mud and ready to fire at Bloomberg’s canary yellow Ralph Lauren sweater even before he announces his candidacy. New York is the worst place in the world to live – unless you count all the others. An electrical grid ready to burn out any minute; steam pipes bursting and scalding people, even as the utility demands another rate increase to be able to continue to pay its vigorish; the mafia getting its cut at Ground Zero and performing its usual impeccable workmanship and fire inspectors publicly stating that they didn’t bother to inspect the site because it was too much trouble for them to put on their protective equipment; a mayor who is content to let the universe unfold as it should and wants to do the same thing on a national level; one baseball team that goes into its last 15 games with a 7 ½ game lead and blows it; another baseball team that spends $200 million on salaries and yet can’t construct a competent pitching program; the Knicks, totally fucked! But New York is more than the sum of all its dysfunctions. People are still going to crowd in here no matter what.Where else are you going to live? Paris? No beaches. Miami? The jobs pay slave wages. LA? I don’t want to let driving interfere with my drinking. Forget it! |
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