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MY INITIAL INTRODUCTION
to Juan Carlos' Iguana Bar came many moons ago with the Lo De Marcos
baseball team whe
when we split a doubleheader with Puerto Vallarta's hotshot city team.
We had collected on an emotional five hundred peso bet on the last game and
were celebrating a banana hacker's southpaw sinker. Juan Carlos was the
padrino to our third baseman,
Cate, and that made the Iguana Bar an inner city haven for a
village team of fishermen, jungle scroungers, family men, and macho bucks.
Plus me, one gringo second sacker.
A one-beer stop turned into an all night junket when some
Jalisco charro from a ranchero near Guadalajara boasted that he could
jump through lariats while downing shots
of Cuervo tequila. One of those green-eyed descendants of an old criollo
land grant family, he danced his traditional boot
heels through a twirling rope, skipping in and out of tight-twirled loops
that wobbled and
widened a little more with every quick snap of a shot to his mouth. With
shot number nine and the
brim of his sombrero drooping he got two ropes spinning to a chorus of
"Viva Jalisco," did a miraculous jig for ten seconds, and
then hogtied himself in a heap on the floor. When he could finally stand
to
the thundering cheers of the packed house, he downed one more free shot of
Cuervo, and Juan Carlos had to hustle
him off to a bed upstairs.
Reprinted with permission
from Something in Vallarta
Copyright © 1991
by Robert Richter
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Bibliography
