LA Mariachi

I was keeping it cheap and classy this particular evening. My buddy Fredo and I had been bouncin' from house party to house party, raiding the tables full of alcohol, getting drunk off other peoples buck. We do this on occasions when we don't have enough money to hit a bar. My goal that night was to glue my broken heart back together with various grades of alcohol following a drop in the stock value of one of my various emotional investments. I was dressed to the nines, sporting my torn jeans, leather jacket, and work boots that resembled the sad remains of a pair of burnt sausages on a discarded grill. We stumbled into a birthday party in the nice side of the city of Bell. I immediately felt the sting of their eyes burning even bigger holes in my already ragged jeans. I didn't mind the holes and neither did their free beer. With my lips locked around a bottle and a halfway grin, I toasted, "To the Birthday girl".

The party was a hand full of chicks lost in a cock forest, just like every other party that night. We tossed a few lines into the pond and managed to pull out a hand full of rejections. I mixed me up a glass of paint thinner and coke and settled in to the most comfortable place at the party, a dark corner. I was pulled out from another one of my pathetic drunken depressions that night by the sweetest thing I had ever heard. It was as if God himself pried the heavens open and spoke unto me saying,"Go on and get your rugged ass of that stool boy and listen here". The sweet sound came from the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen sing a mariachi tune. She led the all girl band with the authority of a General Washington leding his troops into Vietnam....

A pain stabbed at my heart as it does every time I see a girl who is to good for bum like me. Her eyes had a slight slant to them and her skin was as pure as carnation milk. Her golden brown hair was all done up like a gold tourniquet, highlighted by a single rose. Her elegant dress revealed a tight smoothness to her hips and the faint trace of muscle in her thighs. A beautiful creature with lips made out of strawberry cream and probably just as sweet. When a woman is that beautiful no amount of alcohol could drink her off your mind.

We hit the height of the transition ramp that connects the 105 and 110 freeway on the way home that night. From up their you can see straight across the south central LA ghettos all the way to downtown. All my beloved filthy streets full of broken hearts, crappy cars, and shattered dreams laid out before me. I gazed across the sprawled out bowels of Los Angeles in my drunken bliss and wondered what poor unlucky girl was going to answer my phone call at 3am,"Hey, momma, how you doin' ?"