In Search of Yankees October 22, 2022
We seem unable to find the Yankee game anywhere in town. I am informed that beisbol is not so popular once the Guerreros season ends, which it already has, prematurely, as usual. As there are no bars downtown that cater to Americans or their sports, I head north toward the tourist zone.
I know of one place off Calle Reforma that advertises in English and features loud rock-and-roll and NFL Sundays—“Guns and Beer”—so I march up Reforma toward Templo Santo Domingo in the rain and keep my eyes peeled for confederate flags.
Passing Calle Murguia, named after Oaxaca’s first governor, I hear familiar sounds approaching. To the west, the weary voice of a woman, or maybe a child, calls through a loudspeaker on a flatbed truck, in Spanish—“Bring out your mattresses, bring out your washing machines,” etc.—with a droning forlorn cadence reminiscent of Monty Python’s Arthurian “Bring out your dead.”
To the east, there are more canned voices, these coming from mooing dairy cows, accompanied by the incongruous beats of Cuban party music. Those new to the area crane their necks to see if the approaching truck is perhaps selling ice cream or cheese, but this is the soundtrack of the local natural-gas vender. Why the gasman announces his arrival with cattle calls has been a mystery to me for months. Perhaps the mooing is meant to denote methane emission, or the vapors of lactose intolerance.
Soon the towering old walls of Santo Domingo come into view. Within its ramparts is the city’s premier botanical garden, which contains some of the bigger agave plants on the planet. The church itself is the single busiest tourist attraction in the city, even on a rainy day, so I avoid it like the plague, leaving it to others to embellish the site, as the NYTimes did, in 1989:
“(Aldous) Huxley, like others before and after him, was especially impressed by Santo Domingo Church, describing it as ‘one of the most extravagantly gorgeous churches in the world’ and marveling that even after decades of neglect, ‘the baroque saints still gesticulate above the altars and the gilded plaster still writhes in a tripe-like luxuriance over vault and ceiling.’ That was in 1933, when restoration work at Santo Domingo was not yet completed, and the truth is that the church, which dates from 1575, is even more spectacular today, now that its original profligacy can be fully appreciated. Above the entrance is an elaborately gilded genealogical tree, apparently of St. Dominic, founder of the order that built most of the churches of Oaxaca. The main altar and cupola, like the lavish Capilla del Rosario to one side, are giddy visions of gold and cream, festooned with exuberant stucco representations of apostles, saints and prophets. Overall, the impression left is that of a birthday cake whose designer has spared no excess.”
One block away from the church is Guns and Beer, and I can already hear the Lynyrd Skynyrd as I reach the entrance. The place is packed. Naturally, there is no baseball game on TV. No one here has any interest in the Yankees. The feeling is mutual. I take my search in another direction.
My last chance of finding the baseball game is at a franchised sports bar called McCarthy’s. Oh, sh’God love ‘em, an authentic Irish pub in the heart of Oaxaca! Here I shall finally find a place where I can set my hat for a wee bit, and recall the old times around the burning peat log when cousin Eileen would sing “Galway Bay.” Glasses of Guinness will be raised in triumphant unison as Aaron Judge rounds the bases yet another time. And we all come home with him.
Only in Aldous Huxley’s dreams.