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from: Ed_Zeppelin
3/18/01
8:15:09 AM
172.169.143.36
I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but then I read in ARF that your Pappy "rode" with Pancho Villa. So did my grandpa. I swear on a stack of Roland owners manuals. (That's the closest we pentecostal preacher's kids will get to a Bible.)
My mother and her 13 brothers and sisters were born in Carrizozo, NM. They were such poor white trash in an all-Mexican town that even the coyotes felt sorry for them. All my aunts and uncles speak Mexican.
(I was raised on sopapillos for breakfast and real tamales for Christmas dinner. To this day I think of breakfast cereal as a rich person's food, a real treat.) Mom always made huge stacks of flour tortillas on Sunday and we kids would get burritos for lunch every day. There was always a pot of frijoles on the stove.
Since my mother refused to live in New Mexico once she got out of there, my brothers and sisters were all born in California. We would trade our burritos to the other gringo kids for tunafish or baloney samiches, and think we were in hog heaven.
Anyway, back to my Grandfather. He was a scumbag of the lowest order, and a genius. My Grandmother was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut photographer, Robert Nowell, who worked for National Geographic in the early 1900s. My Grandmother married my Grandfather against her parent's wishes, and he hauled her off to bumfuck, NM to raise babies. After their 14th child was born, he ran off to Columbus, NM to hook up with Pancho Villa as an engineer.
Reportedly, he could do damn near anything. Everyone agreed that he was an asshole and a genius. He designed fortifications and drove trains for Pancho Villa. While he was with Villa, he invented those old-fashioned revolving gas station signs. (Remember them? The big signs you could see from the highway, with the top that slowly revolved?) Anyway, he never patented anything.
After about seven years with Villa he tried to leave because Villa was doing a Jim Jones type ego-trip, and Pershing had started a fucking war with him. (Pancho Villa started out as a revolutionary, but wound up dying in a limo.)
My Grandpa, being the kind of cowardly jerk who would leave 14 kids to fend for themselves while he whored for a megalomaniac in the fucking desert, decided it was a little too hot for his taste and snuck out of camp with two other guys.
He made it back to Carrizozo, but his family wouldn't have anything to do with him, especially after one of my uncles stuck a pistol in his face. So he left. Two days later Villa's men found him in Las Cruces and shot him dead.
The point is, ah fuck ... I don't remember the point. My fingers have been whacking away again while my brain was out of the room. That's why I keep a cattle-prod and kleenex in my computer room. Oh, wait a minute, I remember.
As a result I have been exposed to "Mexican" all my life. Still don't understand much of it, but I can rattle off sentences like "Vaya con carne" (Go with meat) or "Los negros de collegio, nina pinta santa sangria" (?) or "Popeye-X los whacko gringo de puta pendeja chinga tu sheepo..."
Fuck, I guess there wasn't any point, other than the Pancho Villa thing.
When I was 8, my mother took us to New Mexico to see the "sights." At the Pancho Villa memorial, I got stuck in the achilles tendon by a cholla cactus spine and wound up in the hospital with a foot the size of a cantaloupe. That's what I remember about Pancho Villa. My mother told me all that stuff while I was in the hospital and then never mentioned her father again.
Thanks for letting me prattle.
ANTI POPEYE X FAN CLUB
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