Welcome to “Maudlin week”! Part 1 is a pre-Santana-ed Rob Thomas and company banger.

On one of his business trips, my dad bought me a couple of CDs. He got a sampler from a label, it was called “Rocktober” and had a bunch of bands on it. I remember The Tea Party, Sugar Ray (with the rocker RPM), Talk Show (STP minus Weiland), and Matchbox 20.

I forgot about Matchbox 20 for a while until one sleepless night in ’97. Theresa was gone by then, back to Pachuca without a word of goodbye. Figures. It did haunt me for a while not knowing the reason as to why she had to just disappear. People chimed in as they wont. The answers I got were neither nice nor reliable, and I haven’t heard from her in more than 27 years, so who knows what truly happened?

So, rainy night in ’97. Can’t sleep and got a lot uni work the next day. Nothing on my CD collection entices me, so I turn on my walkman, which can no longer play tapes, but still has a serviceable radio. I trawl around the last remaining rock stations we had, and I hear Rob Thomas’ voice. It was a little before the last verse of the song, but I liked enough to wait for the station to play it again.

It’s odd. Whenever I went to Tampico, I would feel pumped and overstimulated on Saturday nights after the usual hours-long conversations between my mom and my aunt Tatay. They would end near 1 AM and I would stick around and finish watching whatever was on satellite dish. Then off to sleep to an early Sunday start for breakfast at the mercado. I couldn’t sleep until 3 AM, on the dot.

So when I realised the song was called 3 AM, I found it amusing. I was writing several novels back then, making a little universe with characters being protagonists in some stories, background players on others. I was fascinated by people’s changing roles I life.

One of those novels was set in Guadalajara, and was basically about a guy that came from money cut off from his family for reasons unexplained to the reader. The guy, called Tocayo, had to flee from Tampico in early 93. The novel was set in 99, parallel to another novel I had on the back burner. This one was serious, the other was a comedy. I’d write for each novel depending on my mood and I still do so. Both novels are abandoned because the ideas couldn’t hold for long enough. It was a good writing exercise though.

That “serious” novel title? 3 AM: The coldest hour. I initially had named it “Al sur del paraíso” (south of paradise), as Guadalajara is south of Mazatlán, which was “paradise” for a protagonist from another novel, who was a former friend of Tocayo.

It’s a bit Dickens, sorry.

The main motif of the novel was picked from parts of 3 AM’s lyrics, part from bad experiences I was going through, and some that I observed my friends were going through. I guess Tocayo was a gender-swapped Theresa, and wouldn’t you know it? The reason Tocayo leaves Tampico is (allegedly) the same reason Theresa left Pachuca. What a world, eh?

-Sam J. Valdés López