El Paso

Thursday, July 25 to Friday, July 26 - El Paso, Texas

Sign of motel I don't wanna stay at, no matter how much I'd like to use a microrfidge.

I love El Paso.

The Coral in Its Heyday

I ended up in a bungalow style motel from the 1950s (at least) called the Coral Motel. It's an odd choice of names. I can't imagine there was ever much coral in far west Texas. It doesn't seem to be a misspelling of corral. It was different in its heyday, of course. The interior wasn't designed for as many outlets as contemporary travelers expect. In one corner of my room, a small microwave and a half-sized fridge shared an old brown powerstrip to jack into the wall. The microwave needed an adapter so that its three-prong plug could work with the two-prong power strip.

Modern conveniences struggled to bridge a technology gap two generations thick. No one planned ahead for the future to show up at the Coral Motel. It just showed up one day, many days, one invention at a time, and the rotating cast of managers shoved things around to make room.

The Coral Today

Half the accommodations in the room looked jury-rigged; the room has been updated on a strictly ad hoc basis. The shower head had a bizarre looping design from the 70s. The brown power strip was from the 60s. The microwave was at least 20 years old; the television at least 30. The fridge was brand new. It was not a microrfidge. The wall paper pattern was a shout out to the orange and avocado 70s; the bathroom sink looked like it was installed at the time of construction. Nothing, apparently, was thrown out until it quit working.

The accommodations didn't matter much, actually. I wasn't going to spend time watching HBO. I had a narrow window to look up Friday's travel plans, find something artsy or cultural to do in El Paso, type out a couple of journal entries, and swap emails with my people. But my primary mission was to spend some time not on a bus.

El Paso, or at least what I saw of it, is clean city. It's small, but struggling to have an arts scene. I missed the "Last Thursday" gallery stroll, but caught a couple of jazz sets at downtown bars. I was directed to Cincinnati Street for the best restaurants in town. There I had my best conversation in El Paso. Her name was Mercedes.

I found a bar and grill on Cincinnati that looked sufficiently El Pasoish and took a stool at the bar. I chased two pepper hot fish tacos down with a pair slightly dirty martinis—house vodka, of course, cause I ain't no James Bond.

Mercedes manages the bar and grill for her brother, the owner. She has a striking face and silver-streaked dark hair. She carried herself with the casual manner of an artist—I later found out she's a painter. Our conversation stretched out over an hour and a half. Of course when you travel, you rarely talk to anyone for more than an hour. There's always somewhere else to be and something else to take in. I don't think I quite captivated her, but every advance in our dialogue was interrupted by yet another customer needing attention or a waitress presenting another problem.

Mercedes as manager wasn't the boss-type. She was more like the mama of the waitstaff and kitchen crew. She mothered rather than ordering her crew around. She solved their urgent problems with suggestions instead of solutions. Everyone was hurried, but none of her people were frantic. Her calm was contagious.

"So, your brother owns this place?"

"Oh yes. He brought me back from California to run it... and also to help take care of our dad. He's ninety and still sharp as a tack. But of course he needs help to get around and manage things."

"What's it like working with family?"

"It's really not bad. In fact, I treat everyone here like family." She smiled at a waitress bringing a cake out. Suddenly the whole waitstaff converged on one of the cooks and sang him "Happy Birthday" with real warmth, not the manufactured birthday songs chain restaurants bombard customers with. The whole restaurant applauded and in seconds the crew had dispersed back to their stations.

Mercedes seemed to glide from spot to spot about her restaurant, sometimes appearing without warning right next to me and picking up our conversation where we'd left off. She was ethereal, nurturing her workers to handle their jobs cheerfully, never issuing orders. In a word, it was feminine power, delegating from the center out, rather than from the top down. The crew worked together, not like a well oiled machine but like a river, surging and ebbing in waves to meet their purposes.

Her crew included her daughter visiting from San Francisco. "Whenever she comes down," Mercedes explained, "she gets to pick up a shift here and earn a little money for school." The verb stood out. She didn't have to pick up a shift, she got to.

Her current art project, she told me, involved painting a portrait of a baby-to-be on the plaster cast of a pregnant mama's belly. She kept steady eye contact without staring. She listened with her whole body. She rifled through El Paso's arts weekly with me, directed me to stay long enough for a free downtown concert Friday evening, the Alfresco Fridays music series. She wanted to show off El Paso, her El Paso, like she had nurtured it herself from its infancy. No, she said, she couldn't make it to the concert herself; she had to work Friday. She was so smooth and gentle about it, I didn't even realize until an hour later that she'd shot me down.

After talking to a few locals Thursday and Friday, I saw what a family town El Paso is. A small city trying to fill the geographic shoes of where a big city should be. They make up for their size by pulling together. One bar worker graciously recommended a different venue. The old buildings of old downtown stand proud and undemolished—shocking to a Houstonian. The low rung worker, a car washer, at the car rental place who drove me back to the Greyhound station talked with equal enthusiasm about the city's new Triple-A ball club and the old and new museums El Paso offered. It didn't feel like salesmanship as he described the new stadium under construction. It felt like family pride.