Oh, no way is this going to be any good.

I have enjoyed the michelada in a Mexico City ice house that didn't care whether I was a tourist. The bartender shredded at least one whole lime, maybe three, into a frozen mug before drowning them with Modelo and a splash of tomato juice and black pepper. Makes a beer into a meal.

By the time Miller gets its recipe past the "taste engineers" and focus groups, I'm confident it will be the Taco Bell of micheladas. You simply cannot replicate fresh crushed citrus in a product that ships nationwide.

That's the beauty of crossing age 40: You've had time to earn your prejudices.

That bar—I wanted to turn around and leave the minute we walked in. Like everything in Mexico, it operated on razor-thin margins, hence the flourescent lights overhead. That's right: a drinking establishment lit like a hospital. The rest of it fit the standard Western Hemisphere tavern template: narrow and deep, tables on one side, bar running down the middle third of the other. All the male staff wore white shirts and black pants. I do not recall any waitresses.

We were in town for my best friend's wedding a couple of days hence. He took the four of us out for drinks in some crevasse of the city where we passed an outdoor market that had fruit and vegetables piled so high they looked ready to topple over. Unlike those near the capital, where signs in English warn that the products have not passed any kind of inspection, these stalls looked like Hollywood sets. For the first time visiting Mexico City, I felt charmed.

so it was momentum that kept me walking into the bar against my impulse to about-face. We found a table in the middle and ordered a round of micheladas, confident that although we were obviously gringos in this most parochial of foreign-city hangouts, there were four of us after all, so we could let our guard down a bit. That no heads had turned to follow our entrance helped. Then we began to get a funny feeling that we were being watched.

Clever use of the bar's mirrors allowed me to spot our surveillors before they knew we knew they were watching. Four girls at a table a few yards away were staring holes in us. First one, then another, then two at a time, before returning to a conversation that anyone could tell was about the well-dressed norteamericanos across the room.

I say "girls" because the drinking age in Mexico is 18. We were all 20-somethings, so it didn't matter. But their shamelessness surprised me, anyway. All I knew about Hispanic women was: None of them ever wanted anything to do with me.

Years earlier, a Chicano workmate had clued me in: "You got to speak Spanish," he confided, "else they won't listen to you." And he was right. I had never tested my fragmentary, college-credit español, and probably never would, it was so bad. But another honky friend had warned me the worst line ever to use with a Latin American woman was, "I've seen you someplace before," because she—having been reared in a traditional society—cannot ever acknowledge having noticed a strange man anywhere else. His girlfriend had the Phoebe Cates look and spoke only Spanish, so I figured he knew.

still, even though we'd made no overtures toward them, those four wouldn't take their eyes off us. I'm sorry to say our nerve and circumstances failed us, in the end. But what would we have done, even if we'd hit it off? A thousand miles was the least of what separated us. A cheap rendevous was out of the question, as we all shared rooms at the hotel and, frankly, we weren't the type. So, after a couple hours' telling each other tales over bracing, tart micheladas, we settled up and ambled out.

That marks probably the only time I've left a bar and the girls were the ones disappointed.

My friend, whose wedding we had flown in to attend, tells me I have lied in claiming I never tested my entry-level Spanish:

"Every time you got drunk you spoke Spanish. Every time!"

Yup. And the Spanish-speaking girls still wouldn't get near me.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 08:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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