Wayne Greenhaw, Writer

Mexico Magic

Portales Allende, early August 2007 To this man's left was the location of the original La Cucaracha bar

From Secrets Behind the Walls: Growing up in Old Mexico

I. In the summer of 2007, forty-nine years after I first rode to Mexico on the train from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I spent most of my first eighteen years, I revisited old haunts.

Friday night, August 10th, I stepped into the doorway of Zacateros #22 where the present-day La Cucaracha bar is located. Last night, it was a riotous party with Mexicans mixed with gringos whooped it up, celebrating sixty years of history in San Miguel de Allende in the mountains of central Mexico.

The string music of Gil Gutierrez on the guitar, Cartes on the violin, and Lobo on the bass played modern jazz like few have heard it. They play the song of San Miguel better than any other group in this musical town.

I looked into the likeness of Chucho Chorea, the original owner of the original bar that was located under the Allende portales on the western side of the Jardin, or San Miguel's zocalo in the center of town.

The same faded yellow-tinted painting that decorated the wall of the Cuck's outer room hangs in the new Cuck. The same nude calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe hangs behind the bar.

During the early years of the 1940s, Chucho, a rotund gentleman with a thick mustache and dark, droopy eyes, worked as manager of the bar in the new Posada San Francisco. In 1947, he rented a space behind three arches of the hacienda of the Canal family. The arches faced the Jardin.

Into this cantina stepped the newly arrived veterans of World War II who came to town to live on the GI Bill and go to school at the art institute that the lanky young gringo from Chicago, Stirling Dickinson, directed in the old convent that later became the Bellas Artes at the corner of Hernandez Macias and Canal. Chucho welcomed the foreigners with open arms and an easy smile.

Jardin Cafe, near original Cucaracha

My friend Leonard Brooks, who still paints daily at his home on La Quinta, arrived later in 1947. He and his wife, Reva, who became a world-class photographer, became regulars at La Cucaracha. It was the only cantina in town where women were welcome.

Many intrigues surrounded the early Cucaracha. The artist David Alfaro Siqueiros came to town to teach at the art school. His class in mural-painting was mesmerized by the tall man with a thick mane of unruly hair and wild eyes and huge ideas. He started painting the mural in the nuns' dining room in the old convent. But soon the owner of the school, an attorney from Mexico City, refused to pay for more paints and declared that Siqueiros was teaching the ex-GIs communism. All of the students and teachers with whom I talked later said the artist never once mentioned communism.

When I arrived in the summer of 1958, rags and brushes lay on the floor of the dining room. The mural was less than half finished. Looking at the images, seeing where the artist stood only moments before he left San Miguel, gave me goosebumps.

Leonard Brooks, Wayne Greenhaw, Edmundo Aquino in San Miguel

Later, my friend Leonard Brooks told me the details about how he and Stirling Dickinson and several other teachers and their wives were rounded up, taken to the train depot in Comonfort and put aboard a train bound for Laredo, where they were systematically deported. A week later, Brooks called a general in Mexico City whom he had befriended on a trip to San Miguel. The general talked with the president of the country who rescinded the order of deportation.

Brooks and his wife went to their home country of Canada for a while. Reva wanted to stay. But San Miguel beckoned to Leonard, and they soon returned and lived here through the years. Reva died a few years ago. In November of 2007, Leonard will celebrate his 96th birthday.

Through the years many movie stars -- Mel Ferrer, Errol Flynn, Cantinflas, Robert Mitchem, the baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, who came to San Miguel to play in the movie The Wonderful Country with Mitchem, and many others -- sat in the outer room of La Cucaracha, sipped their drinks, and talked. The room was always filled with lively conversation.

One night while drinking hard, Mitchem borrowed his bodyguard's pistol and fired it into rafters. The chinks were still there when I arrived a few months after the wrap. One of the regulars pointed to Mitchem's "autograph."

It was there in 1959 or '60, during my second or third summer in this town, that Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg, and several other Beatniks sat and talked. They spent a week in town, enjoying themselves on the way to Mexico City to visit a friend. And every night they sat in the Cuck.

In the sixties, Arkansas novelist Charles Portis, author of "True Grit," "The Dog of the South," and "Gringos," lived in San Miguel and frequented the Cuck. He didn't talk much but sat and drank and listened.

In the seventies, Virginia native Gary Jennings, who grew up in New Jersey, sat in the Cuck and talked about researching and writing his gigantic novel, "Aztec," which became the first of a series.

The same furniture from the old Cuck's outer room sits in the new Cuck, where Chucho moved in the 1980s, after a group of the town's citizens complained that it was too close to the Jardin. To them, it was a disgrace.

To those who went there, it was a great meeting place. It was said among those who enjoyed it that it was the greatest bar in the world -- where everyone is bound to meet, sooner or later.

Another view, same portales

1. Dreaming About Mexico

When I was fifteen, more than fifty years ago, I lived in another world.

Diagnosed with scoliosis as a result of a light case of polio, the doctors said I would lose a year of my young life.

First, I was encased in a bodycast that started at the kneecap of my left leg, ran up my side and around my mid-section, leaving openings for bodily functions, and ended midway up the back of my head. Hard plaster cupped the bottom of my chin to keep my head stable, although I could move it slightly from side to side.

Soon after the cast dried, the smell made me sick and caused me to throw up and choke on my vomit. My mother saved me from drowning and cleaned up my mess. Two medical technicians cut a slit in the left side of the cast where they inserted a metal device they could twist to pry the opening wider and wider. Each day I was wheeled to a room where the device would be turned, the opening would spread, then I was taken to the x-ray room where pictures were taken.

It was explained that each day my body would turn until the curvature of my spine would be straight with the natural turn of my body. When the doctors were satisfied that it was as straight as they could make it, they would prepare me for surgery -- three or four weeks after the cast had been scupted to fit my ill-shaped body.

During the hours I waited I lay in the dull off-white hospital room with a soundproof-tiled ceiling dotted with holes. To pass the timel, I counted the thousands of dotes. In my mind, I connected the dots with lines, forming odd-shaped designs.

Finally, I read. I begged my mother to bring something other than the books of childhood that had consumed my previous reading world: the Hardy boys, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, summer adventures. I enjoyed them all enormously, but now I wanted something stronger, tougher, more real. I felt I was living in a very real world with very real pain, and I wanted desperately to learn more about the world into which I would step when I finally learned to walk again. The doctors had explained early in the process that at the end, after I'd spent months in the hospital, after two lengthy surgeries, during which they would open my back and weave live bone onto my spinal column to strengthen it, after recuperating in the cast at my parents' home in Tuscaloosa, I would learn to walk again. After so much time flat of my back, I would lose muscle in my feet and legs; my upright balance would be destroyed until I developed a new sense of myself. So now, I explained to my mother, I wanted good mature books from which to learn and to occupy my mind while I could still think, before I became so anesthesized and riddled with pain that I could not think.

Into my room Mother brought a stack of John Steinbeck: The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. I read the short books first, devouring them, loving them and crying for the human condition the author so brilliantly described. Then I got into Wrath, moved across the west from the blight of Oklahoma to the promise of California with the Joads, feeling the hurtful pain of the Great Depression and the generous spirit of this downtrodden but undefeated family as Rose of Sharon shared the breast milk no longer needed by her now-dead baby with the starving stranger. Mama brought Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and I became those boys growing up on the edge of civilization, and I yearned to move on to new territory with Huck. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and the simple but majestic story of Santiago the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea.

She brought them two, three, four at a time, but I did not allow them to linger. As they came in, I read them. I thought East of Eden was long and terribly complicated until she placed in my hands Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I balked at the sheer size until Mama, who was raised during the Great Depression, told me she read it in the original French under lantern light in a tent her father had fashioned in a wagon bed. The family traveled in the wagon from job to job around the South, where Granddaddy worked. In rural locations in Georgia, south Alabama, Mississippi, and back in north Alabama they lived in the tent unfolded atop the wagon while Mama attended school after school. As soon as she finished her story I dove into the sea of words and was soon immersed in the life of poor Jean Valjean for whom every twist and turn of storyline seemed doomed while the determined Inspector Javert remained on his trail. In my mind, Javert had the same determination displayed by my great uncle Baxter's redbone hound Lucy when she stayed with a coon throughout a long night in the west Alabama wilderness.

I was sucked into Willa Cather's My Antonia, my bloodless room transformed into the meager pioneer shack on the prairie, the friendship with the Bohemian girl four years older, their families all living the simple farm life, suffering, loving, laughing, and praying. I imagined sleeping on a straw palet on the dirt floor, feeling the bitter Nebraska winter, enjoying "the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting room" on Christmas Eve. As I read the final words I felt a sudden sadness. Once again I was leaving behind a wonderful, vivid experience, another life into which I'd become a part for a while,. then I saw the next book waiting and grew quickly eager to open the cover and peer inside.

Many years later I read Hayden Herrera's amazing dramatic biography of Frida Kahlo detailing her surgeries and her frequent bouts with horrendous pain in her spine and hips. As a result I became a great fan of her haunting torturous paintings as well as her emotional words written in journals kept throughout her life. Many times when I visited Mexico City I walked into her Casa Azul and stared into those painful paintings. I stood and looked down at her bed, and I remembered my own days of torture. In the summer of 2007 my wife Sally and I rode into the city from our home in San Miguel de Allende and climbed into the halls of Bellas Artes Nacional and studied her work displayed there in a special showing. Each time I looked into her self-absorbed paintings, I saw much of myself at another time in my life.

During the fall of 1955 in the children's clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, fifty miles east of our Tuscaloosa home, I developed a number of friendships among other young patients. One was a boy in a wheelchair who had been in and out of hospitals many times with deteriorating hip and pelvic bones. He brought to my bedside contriband magazines I would read and peruse from cover to cover. The contents of each varied but usually included bare-breasted women and true-life adventures. In a men's magazine called Saga I discovered an article entitled "How to Live in Paradise on $100 a Month" about artists and writers, soldiers of fortune and other colorful figures. As I read the details I became enchanted by a magical life on the cobblestone streets of a five-hundred-year-old town in the central highlands of Mexico called San Miguel de Allende. In my hospital room, I dreamed that I would study writing at the Instituto Allende, where I would work on my own novel. There I would learn to put words together like all of those writers I had been reading.

La Parroquia, early August 2007

As soon as the surgeries were finished, after I had lain in the bed at home in Tuscaloosa while my newly fused vertebra grew together, and after I finally learned to walk again, I wrote a letter to Stirling Dickinson, director of the Instituto, and addressed it to Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. I told him about my dream of becoming a writer.

A month later I received a reply. Dickinson was very courteous, saying he welcomed young students, adding that I needed to finish high school before traveling to Mexico. He enclosed a rustic but detailed catalogue that included a photo of the creative writing class on a sun-washed patio and a paragraph describing the writing center. I read and reread that paragraph. I gazed into the hazy photograph until I imagined myself sitting at the table beneath the shade of the umbrella, listening to the professor.

For three years I wrote Dickinson. Each year he responded in the same vain until my inquiry early in the spring of 1958. After I graduated from Tuscaloosa High in May I would travel directly to San Miguel. I had already checked the train schedules from Alabama to the heart of Mexico. I knew the timetable and the costs. If he could tell me where I could stay, I would make arrangements via mail.

Dickinson's letter was longer than previous correspondence. It gave the name and address of a family where other students stayed. It was an old aristocratic Mexican family that went back to the Spaniards of the Seventeenth Century. The room and board charge would be $4.25 daily, including full breakfast and comida, the afternoon meal. He also outlined basic tuition costs for the summer, $105 or $40 a month.

I hastily composed a letter to Dickinson, including a check for the summer, and mailed the Mexican family my plans to attend classes at the Instituto.

In mid-May, only a few days after graduation, my family took me to the train depot and I headed southwest toward Mexico.

Jardin, August 2007

Our house in hills: Casa Sally or Casa Naranja

To rent our house, Casa Sally, or others in San Miguel:
Contact Bob Latta at
http://www.casaselegantes.com