“Every petroleum town from the Rio Pánuco south to Barranquilla has a Hotel Veracruz.”

Rodrigo Gomez P.E., 1904-1976

Hotel Veracruz

by

John Messina

1970

The first time that I stayed in a Hotel Veracruz was in Tampico, Mexico. It was located on a back street several blocks from the waterfront and fit our depleted budget. The rooms weren’t too bad but the bathroom was shared, men and women separated by a seven foot high wooden partition. Women’s voices could be heard as if they were in the same room. Tania and I had flown in, with Ramon and Sofia, on an aging Cessna 172 that we had rented in Houston. The four of us had been down to Chiapas visiting Mayan ruins and searching out Frans Blom, the legendary archaeologist. We met with Blom at Na Bolom, the house that he and his wife created in San Cristóbal de las Casas. He seemed frail and not well (he was to pass away several months after our visit), but he was gracious and gave us what time that he could spare from his research. I asked him if there was anything that he missed from New Orleans, our hometown and where he had lived from 1925 until 1943. He said that he missed his  library that he was forced to sell in order to pay outstanding debts before he left the States for good, and he also missed having a Pimm’s Cup at the Napoleon House Bar.

At the time Tampico and the hotel looked relatively good to us because we had been socked in with bad weather for the previous two nights in Minatitlán, an oil refinery town with sulphur in the air. That evening, after an excellent seafood meal at a small restaurant near the Plaza de la Libertad, we walked along the Malecón before returning to our rather dismal accommodations. I don’t think that we were asleep for long when we were awakened by what sounded like a woman’s wailing followed by a gunshot in the room just below us. We lay in bed expecting to hear some commotion from below, but all was silent. After a short while, I got up and peered out of the window thinking that there might be some police or emergency presence on the street below. Other than a stray cat, there was no activity.

The next morning, while dressing, I noticed a hole about the size of a bullet in the wooden floor. Directly above, on the ceiling, was another hole around the same size. Later, down in the small lobby while Ramon and I were checking out, I inquired of the same desk clerk, who had checked us in the previous evening, what took place here last night? He appeared puzzled by my question and asked what did I mean. I told him that we had heard a gun shot coming from the room below us. He responded with a deadpan expression, “No señor, I know of no gun shots.” I noticed that he was wearing the same soiled shirt from yesterday, and had not shaved, his face wearing an eighty-grit growth of dark stubble. Ramon nudged me, and at that moment, something told me not to mention the bullet holes in the room. In this country and situation, I knew that the less said is better. I returned the room key, and as he turned to hang it on a peg, I noticed the ivory handle of a revolver protruding from his side pocket. 

When we joined the girls at the coffee stand across the street, they wanted to know what I had learned from the desk clerk about the shooting. Before answering, I glanced across the street and through the hotel entrance. I could see that the desk clerk was now speaking to someone on the telephone. I told them “Just enough so that we should grab the first taxi we see for the airport. Vamos compañeros!”

MEXICO CITY 1961

by

John Messina

Jack Kerouac, in his 1956 seminal book for the pre-Carlos Castañeda generation, On the Road, tells that when he and his nonconforming buddies entered Mexico City after driving from the border, they saw “figures in the dimming alleys, doors leading to closet-size bars that you had to jump over a ditch in order to get a drink, places where coffee is mixed with rum and nutmeg, Latin music blared from everywhere and hundreds of whores with sorrowful eyes were lined along dark and narrow streets, and old men on corners were blowing trumpets.” Kerouac goes on to say that “Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp where on street corners old women sold tortillas served with hot sauce on newspaper napkins.”

      Re-reading On the Road I remembered my first visit to Mexico City at age nineteen. A couple of old high school friends and I departed New Orleans around seven in the evening in one of the guy’s new Peugeot, had midnight hamburgers in Houston and reached the border at McAllen, Texas at sunrise. A friendly Mexican immigration official in Reynosa cleared us with visas and an auto permit; we stopped in Ciudad Victoria, State of Tamaulipas for lunch; and in a suicide pact crossed the Sierra Madre Oriental at night after not having slept in a bed for the last thirty-six hours. Upon reaching the outskirts of Mexico City we saw hundreds of Indians walking on both sides of the highway on their way into the city for day jobs, the rising sun was barely penetrating the dust and pollution-caused haze.

      We drove through the morning traffic and came across a hotel that appeared inexpensive but not too risky, the Hotel Texcoco. After checking in, we slept until four in the afternoon then showered and dressed for a night on the town. One member of our group, an eighteen year old, somehow obtained the address of a whorehouse from the desk clerk. We followed it to a residential neighborhood of dark streets and ancient buildings. After circling the block several times we parked and knocked on a heavy looking wooden door.  A middle-aged Mexican woman opened it and bid us in. We found ourselves in a patio landscaped with potted plants and a small fountain. A caged parrot squawked at our presence. Above us on a balcony the width of the patio were around a half-dozen women mingling in their panties and bras. We were gaping up at them when a small Mexican man with a pistol in his waistband appeared on the stairway leading to the second floor and in a gruff tone said, “What do you want, gringos?” Somehow he did not sound affable or inviting. It was definitely not a “bienvenidos amigos” kind of message. So we just turned around and walked out of the house and back on the street and to our car.

      We found a small stand where we ate tacos, stopped at a super-mercado for a bottle of rum and drove around the city for a while before heading back to our hotel. The next morning we hightailed it for Acapulco and its legendary beaches where we flirted with Scandinavian flight attendants whose sunburned flesh resembled chicharrones and at night we drank Cuba Libres and danced to Salsa music with sexy chilangas.