Thirty years ago this month I was sitting at pueblo cantina with Nacho Mejia, who had worked at La Posada Ajijic some years before that and in the 1960s in Jocotepec’s La Quinta Inn. We were enjoying some nostalgia, including numerous tales of folks we know with a thirst not only for maguey juice and cerveza, but often for more excitement than they knew how to handle.
The second most brutal machete fight I’ve ever witnessed took place not far from where we were sitting, an altercation that began as an argument over what ranchero song to play on a cantina jukebox.
But most of our reminiscences were of a more entertaining sort. For one thing it’s hard these days to sit in a cantina very long without becoming an economist with a fine recall of financial benchmarks and critical eye for current trends. Nacho nodded wistfully as I recalled when you could set out with a 20-peso bill (a one-peso piece then was a big coin that still contained silver) in your pocket, knowing that if the inclination struck, you could get well wound up on beer and the very best tequila, buy your way out of trouble and then calm down with a good meal on the Ajijic plaza and still have change left.
Back when Nacho was the cantinero for La Quinta, hardly anybody I knew went to Guadalajara to kick up their heels. And bringing entertainment from Guadalajara to, say, the Posada, was generally out of the question — with the exception of mariachis — because in those days, long before the Eager family arrived to run things, the bar was on the Avenida 16 de Septiembre end of the hotel in a runty dark room that had a counter just long enough for four stools, with a kid behind the wood who tended to pour short and opened and closed the place without much of a schedule.
The best entertainment around was at La Quinta, where for some while a friend of mine played guitar on weekend nights. This well-traveled picker, Clay Jackson, was in Ajijic to become a writer, though what he was, of course, was a marvelously–gifted guitar player who liked to play and sing and party way too far into the morning to ever be able to rise the next day with a clear enough head to construct story plots, character development and narrative momentum and bring it all in under 1,500 words. But he knew more songs than you could throw a serape around. He always brought in a good crowd, folks who came over from Chapala and Chula Vista, mostly. There weren’t a lot of foreigners living in Ajijic then, though those who did and enjoyed good music showed up too.
The kid at the Posada’s stumpy front cell not only had a poor hand on the bottle, he also was afflicted by the delusion he could sing. The joint didn’t have a jukebox, so you couldn’t shut him up that way. Every time a foreigner showed, especially if there was a female in company, this adenoidal, fervently off-key voice would pipe up with stuff the boy bartender was sure would appeal to his customers while he poured them short drinks — bad versions of such well-worn songs as “Guadalajara” and “La Paloma” were his specialties.
So most of us did our drinking — in torn Levis, paint-splattered huaraches and bent-brimmed sombreros — in local cantinas. There was a fine billiard hall and cantina on the corner of Constitucion and Colon that served caballos for two pesos a hit. Caballos were about three and a half ounces of pure-silver bulk tequila poured from a five-liter garrafon that had no label. Some claimed it was tequila thinned out with straight alcohol. One afternoon, a gringo friend of mine tested the stuff by spitting some out the door into the charcoal fire a street-seller had going on the corner to roast cacahuates and huasanas. The stuff caused an explosion that scorched the white wash off the side of the building, knocked over the charcoal stove, scattering huasanas in every direction, and scared the street-seller so badly he didn’t come back for a week.
Finally, after months of talk, planning construction, confusion and trouble, the management at the Posada opened a new restaurant-bar on the beach side of the hotel and hired a manager for the room and three bartenders who had to wear white shirts and vests.
The bar manager, who was a friend of ours, started off on the wrong foot by telling everybody that the new place was only for “a better class of clientele.” This moved a number of us so deeply that a tall black painter of excellent caligraphically-oriented abstracts and I spent an evening at the center table in our most paint-encrusted outfits, ordering shots of brandy chased with Cerveza Corona Extra and smashing the shot glasses by stomping on them. “Keeping amused are you boys?” the manager would ask nervously when the noise got especially loud.
“You’re sure doing a good job here as a manager, manito,” we’d tell him. “You’re going to be the jefe of this entire place soon.” We’d pat him on the back and order another round. By the end of the evening we were in fine and rambunctious fettle and ankle deep in broken glass. We never heard much from him about a better class of clientele after that. And we never acted up like that again, either.