Women and All-Talk Radio

Driving through Mexico with Ernest is like having All-Talk Radio going throughout the day and much of the night. He rambles on endlessly about the surroundings, the thoughts that wamble through his brain, his ideas, his history, his experiences. He is enraptured by a half sunken fishing boat in the lagoon near Alvarado. He wants to make a movie there with the boat as the central character; or he has already made a movie there with the boat as his central character; or he has already scripted such a movie there, boat and all, or has merely been thinking about making a movie there --- one can never be too sure.

While this monologue is going on, there are the accompanying commercial breaks. Women are Ernest's soul and life and heart. It makes no difference --- age, race, distinguishing marks, social rank, dimensions, or redeeming natural features: there are women he danced with, in the moonlight, "moonbeam" dancing; those with waist-length hair, hair he has loved (and combed)(and kissed); there are those who have those special breasts --- very very special, of a special luscious quality, great black casaba melons (one was black: Ernest is not only omnivorous but omniracial in his loves).

There was the girl that wanted to marry him, everything was set, mother, father, all at the ready: then Ernest ... disappeared. With another woman.

The women the women the women: the ones from Russia, from France, from California. The woman who reads, the one who sews, the eighty-year old woman who plays the sax and dances the Twist; the one who sang all day, the one who cried all night --- all of them passing like tea (Constant Comment) with us in our march through Central Mexico, all of them described in all too tender awe.

Women! He loves the way they walk, the way they move, the way they sigh, they way they think, are, see, grow old, love, laugh, die. They are to be taken to the beach, buried in the sand, then pulled from their warm graves and plunged into colorful warm oceans --- nixies in the sweet soft waters of the sweet soft sea.

Ernest is a Don Juan in the best sense --- he loves women because they are there to be loved. I regret that I did not fit our car with microphone and cassette, for our conversations, suitably transcribed, would go down as the Boswell-Johnson dialogues of the 18th, or the Miller-Durrell exchanges of the 20th Century.