Just Like Sweet Melinda’s Blues

after “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by Bob Dylan

She was a dark-skinned princess without a kingdom, though she had no shortage of suitors — myself among them. We just stood there smiling, posing, trying not to be taken for urchins in need of salvation. Why she chose me out of all the orphans from St. Anne’s Home for Broken Hearts, I’ll never understand.

I kept my distance from the women on the streets — yet I fell in love with her. She was a stranger from New Orleans and didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

There is a statue with a fountain in the center of town, a lady they call Sweet Melinda. Tears fall from her eyes, down over her breasts and legs, into the puddles of water at her feet. The nuns call her La diosa de la tristeza.

The men there walk in circles or ride motorcycles masquerading as horses. They are as white as the snow up on the mountains; some say they are ghosts from another time and place.

She was called Sara. She invited me to her room on Housing Project Hill, where we could sit in the window and watch the festivities. On that afternoon we made love all day, and then at 4 o’clock we heard a mariachi band begin to play as a lady’s voice rang out as if in tears…

De la Sierra Morena,
cielito lindo, vienen bajando,
Un par de ojitos negros,
cielito lindo, de contrabando.

A second group of musicians began to play as other voices joined in. We raced to the window to watch as a crowd began to dance to the music. We stood there leaning against the balcony, she draped in a white sheet with the top of her breasts exposed, and I on my knees just wishing I knew the words to the songs.

We threw on some clothes and found ourselves amongst the natives of Juarez just as the rain began to fall. It didn’t stop the party — we just held each other closer and danced a little bit harder.

We started with burgundy from a bota bag, then moved to the harder stuff — bottles of homemade tequila passed hand to hand. Beneath the overpass there was a table of local food the women brought out on trays. We kept dancing as long as the band kept playing. The tequila made me dizzy, so I drank some more until I found my equilibrium — the rain subsided, the clouds parted, and a white-hot sun came down.

The band began to play a familiar tune, to me at least, and we stood aside and watched as some locals performed a dance they must have danced a thousand times.

Don’t ask me how the night ended, because I only remember the time when I brought Sara to the fork in the road marked Fortune and Fame. The legend was that it was either one or the other, and neither was what it claimed. It was at that crossroad where I lost consciousness. I woke up in the local jail as the cops boasted that they caught me with a prostitute and a bottle of illegal tequila. I thought I would be in jail forever, but apparently someone — possibly Sara — blackmailed the sergeant, and he left his post. I was woken by a child with her hand out. I gave her a couple of coins, she smiled, and I slipped out of the unlocked cell. Sara was gone, and so were all the friends I thought would be there for me when the going got rough. It was then I took a bus ride to the hotel manager’s second cousin in Mexico City.

These days I play guitar in a small bar in Cuernavaca, and I have just about saved up enough for a one-way ticket back home to New York City. I don’t know if there is anyone there for me anymore — maybe Florence or Rosemary will remember me for who I am rather than who I have been portrayed to be. I have no mask, and I am simply revealed.

I never did see Sara again, although I hear she is a big shot in Juarez or Jalisco. Some nights I remember the way she held me as we danced, her dark eyes and skin, the way she looked with the white sheet wrapped around her. The temptation to go back and see her is strong some nights, but then I remember that some memories are best kept sacred and undisturbed.