By Douglas Bower
I was dreaming. I was eating Carnitas. They were very good Carnitas. The waitress was about to bring me another heaping plate of deliciously fatty, artery-clogging Carnitas when I heard tom-toms. The drums had a driving beat that if you weren't dreaming; the sound would make you want to murder someone to make them stop. You might even devise a hideous homicidal act in your head that, though you would never carry it out, would make you feel immensely better (I need therapy).
I wasn't dreaming anymore.
At 9:00 am, the two teenage boys across the alley were washing the family's car. They pulled the car out into the middle of the alley so its rear was only, COUNT THEM, inches from our bedroom window. They had the windows rolled up so they could, with much loud merriment and raucous gaiety, wash the car. They also had the car's radio turned up so high I am sure everyone within 4 miles could sing along. The song was something like "Aztec Music Hit Parade To Make a Human Sacrifice By" or "Sharpen Those Obsidian Knives, We're Going To War" or something similar. The music was, and I am sure you get it, so primitively pounding that it even made my wife turn to me in the bed and say, "Are you sure we can't kill them for this?" To which I responded, "No. But, this makes me want to go out and at the very least kill a pig and sacrifice it to appease a Vengeful God."
Mexicans have got to be genetically different from Gringos. I mean that in the nicest sort of way.
The only possible way of explaining the obsession with the volume at which they can tolerate music has got to be in their genetic makeup. It has just got to be so.
I've written about this before. You are walking down the narrow, built-for-burros streets in Guanajuato when you happen upon a small boutique or store that is just opening or having a sale. In either case, the Mexicans always think they have to find absolutely the largest amplifying speakers on the face of the earth--and they do--to announce their sale or store opening with music so loud, coming out of speakers the size of mini-SUV's, you can repel tank fire with the sound waves. And, here is the deal: If you wanted to walk into their store, you couldn't! The music creates a force field of Starship Enterprise magnitude. You would simply bounce off the invisible sonic shield that fills the doorway. At the very least, you would get a cacophony-induced brain tumor trying to get into the store.
When I say, "speakers the size of a small car," I am not joking. The only other time in my life I've ever seen amplifiers of this size was in Dallas, Texas, at an outdoor concert. These, of course, were used to saturate a concert field the size of the Orange Bowl, but I have seen these size speakers in small Mexican Barrios that have got the be the direct cause of building collapses.
Many years ago there was house here that fell off a mountain. Now, I don't have any proof, and it was officially blamed on the rainy season, but did anyone, I want to know, check out the loudspeakers in the Barrio to see if they all had the volume on "Kill Setting?"
That's all I am saying!
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