Unsung Heroes

By Tom Nussbaum tomnussbaum005@gmail.com

(This article is intended to be the first monthly column spotlighting the working-class heroes among us, our Mexican neighbors who work hard, made our—we emigrés, expats, snowbirds, and undefined adventurers—lives more enjoyable.)

His name Flores means flowers and appropriately he works at a restaurant with a floral name, The Blue

Rose. He waits tables there. But he also bartends, an oddity since he does not drink. He is a complex man, a contradiction. This becomes obvious once one learns the story of his life.

Few of Juan Flores’ regular customers and fans, however, know the details of his history or about his courage and determination.

Flores, who was born in the Chapala area, is the youngest of his father’s 17 children. Although a naturally intelligent and curious person, Flores stopped attending school at 16. But he didn’t stop learning and the next level of his education took place in the United States. How he got there is a tale of a whim—some may say a foolhardy one—then persistence.

After leaving school, Flores flew to Tijuana where he tried to cross the border on his own to visit relatives north of Spokane, Washington. This was intended to be a short-term visit, an impulsive naïve teenager’s lark. But this attempted border crossing failed. “Then I met a kid who had an uncle who knew a coyote and we found him. So, for ten days or so I took care of a 15-year-old while we waited for an opportunity to cross,” Flores recalls. “I even had to save him from some older guys who were punking him, bullies.”

During that time, several attempts at crossing were made, but Flores, his youthful naiveté driving him, was not greatly concerned with the risk, danger, and legal issues in this endeavor. “I thought of it as an adventure. Besides, I was more worried about getting food and surviving a few cold desert nights.” While he did spend nights in the desert, he spent several in the “comfort” of basements to which he had been led by men who promised help in the crossing. But once in the basements, Flores and several other wannabe border-crossers, were locked in and they became aware armed guards were protecting the houses from police and military. The uncertainty of this situation, the true intentions of these men, and the risky situations were obviously scary, according to Flores.

The fifth attempt to cross was successful. “The 15-year-old and I crossed together with a group in a truck. When we finally saw the lights of Los Angeles, I knew we had made it.” Flores contacted an uncle who picked him up.

After spending a few days in L.A., Flores’ uncle drove him to Las Vegas, giving this small-town Mexican youth a first-hand impression of the US based on two atypical major cities. Once in Las Vegas, he connected with his brother who had driven from the Spokane area. Together they drove north and when they reached the brother’s Northeast Washington home, Flores began to help out in the family’s Mexican restaurant. This is where he began learning the restaurant trade. It was also where Flores learned the differences between the economic systems of the US and Mexico. His eyes were opened. His intended “visit” became longer than originally conceived.

Flores also began to learn English soon after arriving. This was done by listening to Americans in the restaurant, watching TV and movies, and taking classes at a nearby community college. Pay from his restaurant work was sent to his parents back home. Two years later, with English conquered, Flores moved to Spokane, worked in other restaurants, and had his first serious girlfriend. A few years later, his parents came north for a visit and a joyous reunion was held.

But before he knew it, Flores’ planned short visit, that teenage lark, had become nine years; four years had passed since his parents’ visit and Flores felt it was time to visit them. “After nine years, I thought I’ll go home for a vacation,” Flores explains. “But once I got there, I stayed because I realized my parents needed me. They were getting older.” He still lives with them on the family property near Chapala. He also has three dogs.

Since his return to the ChapalaAjijic area, Flores has bartended and waited tables at several eateries and has developed a loyal following. He also performs those duties at many private parties and events. Flores does not have much free time, but when he does, he runs and romps with his dogs, rides his bike, and goes to the gym.

Reminiscing about his adventuresome past, a more mature Flores says, “As an older, wiser man, I look back on what I did at 16, and I think I could not do that again.”

When one learns a bit about him, Juan Flores is not just a charming bartender and waiter and an attentive, detailed professional, he, as his name implies, is a flower, continually growing and reaching toward the sun. He is an intriguing person with a story and a past, as are all of our native neighbors.

Some of us occasionally forget this and take these hard-workers for granted, making assumptions about them and minimize how their contributions improve our lives. They make our existence here better, happier, and more pleasant. They, like Juan Flores, are interesting individuals, complex humans, who have overcome difficulties and survived. They deserve respect, appreciation and our thanks. We should never forget that.

Tom Nussbaum

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” —Allen Watts

Without a road map or a compass Devin never looked back, for littered along the way in the shadows of memory: the dead leaves of winter feeding a skeleton of roots, hot embers grown cold in the failing light of autumn, footprints in sand left to rip currents, the undertow of a wave of summers all stemming from the luck of the draw in the cutting of the umbilical cord. For an Irish patronymic poet Devin needed more than a turn on a carousel, and crossroads leading to the same conclusion—a budding lust for discovery beyond going nowhere was never enough.

The On Ramp: Taking the on ramp for Devin, an androgynous composite of a bard in search of a poem, turned seasons into years of long and lonely hours along a jumbled maze of interstates, expressways, freeways, and byways. The hitchhiker with a thumb to rival Robbins’ Cowgirl With the Blues, Kerouac’s Beat on the Road; stopping only when the daylight rides were mirages keeping their distance, and in the dark of midnight the headlights red cat eyes that streamed past a shadow hugging a gravel shoulder with an arm outstretched. At times, interminable times, the lone figure tripping on a pathway that gripped his soul was left spinning on a spider’s web, carried on a thermal rise without a solid connection, black ice on a winding road with no turnarounds, on an Al-Sirat journey spanning ocean to ocean, all the while old women sat on the shoulder of time spinning the threads of human destiny, predetermining who passes by, who gets the long ride. Devin never looked back aware waiting long enough something was bound to happen, the inevitability of a resolute star travelling on a one-eyed Ozark moon road weaving like the broken thread of the third fate in a fixed order of the cosmos, where destiny is responsible for everything.

The Open Road: On the long haul through gangs of neon roads, seeking out the hidden locations of Kennaquhair, hiking along the twisted strands of Saturn’s taillights vanishing into starless nights and Mojave skies, it was all about the music: Johnny Rodriquez “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico,” The Dead on a “Black Throated Wind,” Marvin Gaye on a “Hitch Hike,” from St. Louis to L.A., Joan Baez singing “The Hitchhikers Song.” For Devin there were no roadside love songs, no sad songs, no hallelujahs, only the vastness of the open roads that never stopped, like permanent migraines slipping into fog, forgotten roads, mother roads snaking around empty ghost towns of untold stories, promised lives left on dead ends, treacherous roads shaking like a wildebeest’s tail pointing everywhichway, roads where darkness approaches from all angles, roads that wander aimlessly like a child’s magic marker. All roads leading to a point of transition in time from one transition to another; through the final red hue of autumn leaves and the ascension of the ground hog, to the last truck stop and the next.

Thumbs Up: Devin evolved into a tiedye flower child dressed in beads and bellbottoms, at times Hermaphrodites playing the love of life and freedom scene. As life drove by wearing bumper stickers, “Make Love Not War,” “If it Feels Good Do It,” “Keep on Truckin,” Devin thumbed along through the fog of intimacy and passion, avoiding negativity; at times a daughter of delight, the son of raving ones, a psychopomp guide to the afterlife, a butterfly never to return to the cocoon, dancing down the rabbit hole searching for what would bury the unforgivable, finding temporary refuge in a side road diner, a truck stop sanctuary always with one foot on the ground. Devin experienced the intimacy of stopping now and then, stepping off the highway to explore the pleasures of fellow travelers, a reprieve of wanderlust, soaking up the sun on a playground of self-discovery, tasting a bear’s find of a bee hive, an inside view of the world looking out through a storm window— until—inevitably blinded by the headlights of oncoming with no intention to slow down, pull over and give the hitchhiker a second glance, Devin was going nowhere.

Thumbs Down: Thumbing America through spacious skies, amber waves of grain purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain here, there and back again, had a way of sugar coating the shame and pain. Devin, the Ó Damháin’ of wishful thinking followed the yellow brick road thru open Doors “like a dog without a bone,” a “rider on the storm,” thrown into the dark side of the American Dream, one foot firmly planted, head in the clouds, the white washed phantasm swept by amphetamine speed, no limit signs crystalizing as the fog broke down and cried. There was no turning around for Devin crossing over a bridge to nowhere— END OF THE WORLD billboards in cornfields, braille mile markers, neverending traffic circles and monochromatic stop lights flashing white. Devin stepped off loose gravel into a culvert of Democracy, a sad song, waiting for a caravan of nightmares to run its course, while the brotherhood of sorrows drove past on a trial of tears: a scourge of hatred, a denial of soul, a squander of caring, a wanting of understanding, a revulsion of empathy, a pandemic of greed, all offering rides to the nearest comfort station.

The Off Ramp: Daylight and darkness power played the fiddle while those at the top of the world fed on moon dust, while the children in the dustbin, the unlearned, scarfed on the hot air of burning rain forests, diddled in the ashes of a changing highway to heaven, for the laws of the road had changed forever, never knowing when the sky might break loose, and over mountains, out of the blue, a torrent of temptation and fury leaving him hiking for sanctuary. Having weathered frog stranglers, gully washers, post-holing in deep snow, left to the elements Devin had huddled under overpasses, train bridges’ hunkered downwind of sandstorms and snirts, heltered from burning asphalt hotter’n a blister bug in a pepper patch seeking the sanctuary and shade of a Joshua Tree, a fence post. The horizon under construction, Devin aimed to hitch a ride on a rocking chair on a weathered porch taking the off ramp with thumbs down, ditching the Rand McNally road map, and the cruiser compass in a culvert by the side of the road, settled in a trailer park in a bypassed town, off the vestiges of the decommissioned Mother Road.

Re-tired now with no place to go that Devin hadn’t left behind, satisfaction came with having gained a little wisdom with both feet firmly planted in the gravel of fulfilment for leaving the road travelled litter free for the next hitchhiker to thumb down the road.