Alex Martin Reyes Salisbury, better known as Slim (or sometimes Tropo), was born at the San Fernando Hospital in Panama on March 17, 1971 to Laura and Ramon Reyes, and older siblings Ramon, Monica, and Danny. He spent most of his youth living first on Las Cruces Street in Balboa and then on Bahia Street in La Boca. The family later moved to Oleander Place in Balboa and then to Sibert Street in Diablo.

Slim attended Elementary School at St. Mary's and later Balboa Elementary. He moved on to Curundu Junior High, and graduated from Balboa High School in 1989. He attended Panama Canal College for 1 year, and then continued his education at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, Colorado, where he received his BS in Engineering in 1995.

Her returned to Panama in that same year. In 1997 he married Vivian Alvarado Arosemena and set up house on Bruja Street in Cocoli. They now live on Doucett Street in Albrook and have 2 daughters, Jessica born in 1998 and Vianca who arrived in 2001.

Slim has many fond memories of growing up in the Canal Zone. One of his favorites is of skateboarding down Balboa Road to attend high school football games on Friday nights, then holding on to the back bumper of a Chiva bus from Balboa Theater all the way up to Gavilan Road to get home.

Some of Slim's hobbies include basketball, yard work, home beautification projects, ultimate frisbee, collecting Canal Zone memorabilia, and, of course, music. Mom Laura began teaching him guitar when he was 10 years old. He later played with the choir at St Mary's Catholic Church, in Balboa. Some of his musical influences include Bob Marley and Roots Reggae, 80's radio, and Dave Seitz's 70's albums, especially the acoustic music.

David and Alex have been jamming together since 1988. They recorded their first songs, along with some jokes, in David's living room in 1991. They both had copies of “the tape” and were soon getting requests from family and friends for copies. It took them 3 years of writing more songs, polishing old ones, and saving up the needed money to begin working on their dream of making a real recording come true. The Life on Mango Street CD was recorded in May of 1995 at the music studio above Riba Smith supermarket on the Transisthmian Highway with the help of Jose Mosquera, and Rowland Folse who played bass for the tracks. The first 1000 CDs, with artwork by Dave Young, arrived in October of 1995. They were gone by Christmas time! The rest, as they say is history. More CDs had to be ordered, 2 more were recorded, Gone Platano in 1997 and Tird One in 1999. The 4th CD was released in late December back in 2006. There are songs ready for a 5th one, but it is hard to record when your partner lives on a different continent. Hopefully it will happen soon.

For Slim, Panama is “Paradise, it's the best of both worlds: back country and jungle, and modern western city. You can go to a big American style mall, swim in a quiet river deep in the jungle, lay on the beach on both oceans all in the same day.” He finds writing music about the Canal Zone and Panama very rewarding. He is sure that anyone from there, or who spent time there will identify with the music and enjoy it. Sometimes he sees something and thinks, “that would be a good song that a Zonian would like”, or he sees a series of things with the same theme and thinks the same thing. Then the melody usually pops into his head and he plays around with it until it feels right. The more emotional songs usually come from the inside and work their way out over time. Sometimes it's quick and easy, other times it takes a while until it works just right.

His favorite Shorty & Slim song is “Gold & Silver” from the Tird One CD. “For me it's a great song to pick, strum and sing. I play it by myself all the time. It's a deep song with a lot of meaning, a lot of conflicting emotions about a time when Panama was a wilderness and people from different backgrounds came to build something unbelievable and impossible; people who worked for a system that perhaps wasn't quite fair by modern standards, but each man got what he signed up for in the end, plus the glory of being a part of the greatest construction for mankind in modern history.”