Twenty miles south of the American border there is a small town, outside the filth of Tijuana, the drugs and the murders; a charming town where you can eat lobsters on the beach while the sun sets over the pacific and beers sweat in the sand. In white linen pants barefoot in the sand with a striking dark tan and hair wafting in the western wind you can find a senorita; one with jet black hair and tepid brown eyes that clash against her white dress cinched in the waist by a red sash, the loose end dangling around delicate knees. There's a hombre playing a gut string guitar in soiled clothes, a waxed mustache that collects beads of sweat as they roll off his brow while old Fords and Cadillacs drive across dusty streets stopping only for horses ridden bareback. Your senorita is giving and placating, the whites of her eyes look up from her reclined position in the sand to mumble incomprehensible words of love as she cuddles around your arm and strokes the nape of your back with stop sign red nails.
That night you'll visit her sister in a small tin roof shack, she is violent and fiery, demanding and uncontrollable. You make love to her, she leaves ruts in your back with her gnawed, fragmented nails and bite marks on your shoulder; afterwards she smokes in bed and drinks tequila neat in a chipped glass on the opposite end of the bed while she strokes your lower lip with her big toe and squints with demonic countenance.
Afterwards you'll grab the hombre on the beach, drink Tecate out of thin cans while the sun goes down and write this song.
Marty Robbins left a troubled home at the age of seventeen and joined the Navy, during World War Two in the Solomon Islands he taught himself to play guitar. He married a sultry woman named Marizona Baldwin whose first named when uttered takes the wind out of my lungs and the blood from my head. He took the stories from his childhood Phoenix home and turned them into classical American masterpieces. He drove in the Daytona 500, has a star on 6666 Hollywood Boulevard, and added to the myth of the stoic gunfighter roaming through the great arid west.
Before children dreamed of becoming Covenant Elites, their eyes welded to televisions, fingers bloodied by plastic buttons made in Chinese sweatshops, they would listen to the radio with a cowboy hat on and draw on their mothers as the came into the living room. After a restless sleep they'd wake and spend the afternoons running around the yard with companions hiding behind bushes dreaming they were wooden slat doors of a saloon while horses drank cool waters and men sipped warm whiskey. Later when those children ate from the apple they dreamed of those bite marks on their shoulders surrounded by red lipstick, all the while Marty Robbins providing the soundtrack to their fantasies...and in the rare case realities.
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