Carnitas and Manic Mango Salsa

So far the only good and tasty "real Mexican food" in the Land of Dixie, is in my memory of some of the best music, cooked up in a melting pot on the front lawn of a rented house on "Avenida De Los Arboles" back in the day before I figured out it wasn't the worst thing in the world to be crazy.

When I lived in the Los Angeles area, I spent a great amount of time trying to remember if I was a criminal or not.  A bread crumb trail of hopes on the orange and green tiled floor so I could find my way back in the angst ridden fog of that dry San Fernando Valley spring.

Not all bad, those days, I used to love the smell of the hot spicy carnitas simmering in salsa over the wood coals in the back of Elena Consuela Alonso's neon blue and orange crumbling-plaster kitchen.

Cumin and green pepper aroma thick like a steam bath in the "Oahu Gentleman's Club," that invariably wafted through the room where we rehearsed Hawaiian party music in an actual "working band" called "The Udda Brown Boys."

I was the only "haole" playing slack-key steel guitar island tunes in a Mexican cover band, with two Mexicans, two Spaniards and a Brazilian, on that side of the San Diego County Line, and me? I lived day by day to get me a lung-full of air, free from tyranny and the mass conspiracy that kept me sleepless, and hunting sanity in the poetry of the great masters.

Ironic.

One day, after a particularly hot set, we sounded so much like the famed "Gabby Pahinui Band," the year they won the Moloka'i Folk Music Festival, that we all thought we had "what it takes." We'd make the top fifty Hawaiian pops, and turn the Polynesian music charts inside out without leaving the mild early-May weather in La Mesa, California.

Turns out, five Latinos, and a white guy, can't get many gigs playing Hawaiian folk music in East LA beer bars, and tattoo shops.  There were of course, a few birthday parties for the legitimate children of the rich Westwood business suits. Just a thin self-medicated line separated me and the entire world that was out to "get me," in those days, you know?

What we did have, sadly, was an ounce of good "Mexican Mayhem," in a bag, bought for less than "street."  What the bag had was a hole in it.

We left, much less high than originally planned, in a rusty back-firing stolen 1970 sun`dried blue grand marquis, a fine and noble automobile, with a trunk full of dreams and almost  enough desire to get anywhere but where we were that day.

I prayed to my darling Lithium, dear and sweet keeper of the gate, holder of the expansive plans to rule the world.  "Accept, then, my offering; the keep of my realities; my tithe and adoration, as I laud yet another random god while chasing a better wounded healer, and running from the one true God as fast as I could.

I had one question at the time, why did my doctor, a tall lanky cotton swab of a man, say "we don't know much about this thing we call a brain," when he was the expert?

He was more akin to a close-to-retired whore in the back pew of a Full Gospel Holiness Church.  He looked at me once and said, "take these pills three times a day," and then he added "we don't know how or why they work but they do," and then "call me asap, if you pass out, seize or go toxic."  At that point I both respected medical science and deplored it, but another random god was dead.

All in all, everything considered, that leaves me sitting here thirty years later, in blessed remission, deep in the forest of the Upstate, between two fall creeks, and lazy kinder gentler rebellion.

My medication now?  Carnitas and mango salsa memories, with baked pita bread chips, and a shot or two of tequila, rocking on the southern front porch.  Occasionally  a bit melancholic for that wonderful funky place in my ghost like past. A tiny greasy hole-in-the-wall located in the Valley of the Winds, just west of the heart of Los Angeles, called "Tico's Fine Mexican Food," with a nice tableside-made-fresh guacamole, and on holidays, some of the tastiest tamales, ponche and rosca de reyes ever made by anyone.

Memories sweet as the southern tea, as I lean back, and think of an old friend of mine named Miguel "Big Mike" Alonso, high on Negra Modelo, in an old cabin in the Big Bear mountains.  He sits down in my memory to play some nice Brazilian love songs on his hand made classical Spanish guitar personally signed by the great Jose Miguel Moreno.