Borderline
Every Sunday night I drove Dashiell down to La Jolla and surrendered him to his mother. Hugs and kisses for Dash. Overdue child support, acrimony, and fuck-you-too for Alison. It wasn't easy, saying goodbye to Dashiell; he clung to me, teary-eyed, as though I was going to leave and never come back. Alison blamed me. I'd been an absent parent for three of Dash's five years, working at faraway locals, and then leaving for good when she and I broke up. She said it was separation anxiety because he couldn't trust me. I said, it was because he didn't want me to leave him with her, because she was bitch.
South from La Jolla's ocean-view opulence, through San Diego's well-scrubbed middle; thousands upon thousands white republicans in running shorts and baseball caps, lower and lower, to crumbling Alamo stucco and down, down, to bordertown Mexico, Tijuana.
In my wallet: four hundred dollars and three fat joints. In my backpack, my Nikon with a 28mm lens, two Vivatar strobes and six extra AA batteries, an extra 9-volt camera battery and ten rolls of Kodak Tri-X, a small Ibuprofen bottle with four Vicodins mixed in, four packs of Kool Kings and six condoms.
In San Ysidro, a San Diego suburb hinged to the Mexican border, I parked in a large numbered parking lot and paid with enough quarters, dropped into a slot, for two days. I sat in the car and smoked half a joint, put a hundred and sixty dollars in my pants' pockets, and the rest in my socks. I locked up the car and went walking.
San Ysidro, at least the part going into Tijuana, was a kinetic mass of cultural mutts. Adverts on every surface: dog racing, jai alai, bull fights, dance clubs, Mexican car insurance. I stopped at a McDonald's and fueled-up with burgers and fries.
Two or three years back an angry man with an Uzi, a shotgun, and an automatic pistol, walked into a San Ysidro McDonald's and murdered twenty-two people. With little time to contemplate the enormity of his spree, the guy died when the San Diego Swat Team took telescopic aim and put him down. Could this be the same McDonald's? I imagined everyone in the place dead on the floor.
At the border crossing, long impatient lines going North, and all clear going South. One would be hard-pressed, to find an American who crosses any foreign border without feeling superior to the natives. Collectively we believe we are not just better, smarter, more sophisticated, but somehow more human; our pain sensors more sensitive, our cognition less abstract.
A corkscrew foot bridge crossed over to the other side, poverty and piss stink, bruised Detroit clunkers and yellow cabs bouncing through potholes, maneuvering around pedestrians. I donated my coinage to leather-faced old women, on bended knees, and tatterdemalion kids hawking papier-mâché piñatas. I knew better than to think I was here to improve living conditions, but still charity was soul cleansing and a pocketful of change was better than a rude gesture.
My first trip to Mexico was in nineteen-sixty-eight, when I was eighteen years old, and still had youth as an excuse. America was coming apart at the seams and while my political rhetoric called for Molotov cocktails and Bob Dylan songs, my contributions to the revolution amounted to not getting a haircut, not getting a job; shoplifting, drug usage and the constant pursuit of all things sexual. I had ditched Missouri for good and was bumming room and board from a friend in Santa Monica; not much different from to the way I was living now, nearly twenty years later; bumming from another friend in Santa Monica.
My friend, Kelly, and I, bored with loitering and panhandling on the Sunset Strip, decided to thumb to Yuma, Arizona, where we could bum off another friend, Steve, and cross the borderline to San Luis, Mexico.
I had met Steve a couple of times before, in Los Angeles, and, for me, it had been love at first sight. Not gay love; there was no lust involved. It was all about idol worship. I wanted to be Steve. Steve was dark and tall and thin with broad shoulders, long black hair, a beautiful chiseled face with the straightest and whitest teeth I'd ever seen. He smiled a lot. He rolled perfect joints with a twist at each end which he would bite off with an audible pop. He wore a Mexican serape, tight jeans and stovepipe boots. Steve was a desperado who smuggled kilos of pot into the US of A. He was the ultimate American anti-hero.
Our first day in Yuma, Kelly and I met Steve's best friend, also named Steve, who had just been released from prison where he had done nine months on a burglary and assault rap. Now he was partnering up with Steve as a marijuana sales and service rep. Steve the jailbird was big and ugly and scary.
Steve and Steve represented a great misconception of mine, of the times; they flashed the two-fingered peace sign and raised power-to-the-people fists. They were into acid rock and protest songs. Steve the idol, drove a funky 1949 Ford Woody Station Wagon with a bumper sticker advising LOVE IT OR LOSE IT! Steve the jailbird had a great droopy mustache and wore tie-dyed shirts and a fringed suede jacket. But, a year from now, Steve the jailbird would be back in lock-down with a double life sentence. Steve the idol would become a junky on the skids. His white teeth turned grey. This was the swinging sixties that I found early on, criminal intent and moral vacuity rationalized under a banner of peace and love. But I was still caught up in the romance when Steve the idol suggested we go to Mexico and smuggle a couple of kilos of pot back across the border.
That night we crossed the into San Luis, Mexico, in Steve the idol's Woody. Steve and Steve in the front, Kelly and I in the back. We went from two-lane blacktop to dirt and ruts and back through time down a main street of saloons and Mexican cowboys and poverty beyond any I had seen in my still somewhat inexperienced youth.
In Tijuana, nearly two decades later, I engaged my radar and walked through a gauntlet of black velvet paintings--matadors on tippytoe butchering bulls, naked Mexican maids with pink DayGlo nipples, a surprising absence of Elvis portraits. Three-walled stalls selling leather sandals, boots and jackets, ceramic kitsch. Five minutes of walking brought me to a red-light neighborhood of ramshackle discos and bagnios, garish in primary colors and flickering lamps. Whores, pimps, pushers, corruption and vice. The busy weekend foot traffic was mostly gone but business was still open and at bargain prices. Beautiful sad-eyed women hawked souls and holes from dark doorways.
In a small nondescript bar, I creaked a barstool, and ordered a shot of tequila and a beer. Other than the bartender, and me, the place was empty. He pushed a buzzer and, from a swinging door at the end of the narrow bar, a working girl came out. She sat next to me and we grinned at each other.
She scooted in close, rubbing her body against mine, and asked me, in Spanish, would I buy her a drink? We ignored the language barrier and communicated telepathically. I motioned to the bartender, who brought her a beer. We clinked containers and toasted circumstance. The low-grade tequila kicked and clawed all the way down. I gritted my teeth and held onto the bar.
The girl was young and cute and kind of shapeless. She wore a belted leotard with a ruffled flounce at the hips, and shining white tights. On her cheeks she wore round, red, circles of rouge like on a toy soldier. I inquired as to the price of an orgasm which she told me was a steal at fifteen dollars.
She led me to a small room with a single bed, a roll of toilet paper on the headboard, a couple of holes in the wall. I negotiated a photo session which she allowed but only fully clothed. I took three pictures, two of her standing next to the bed and one standing on the bed, her arms aerodynamically flat to her sides. I proposed sexual intercourse and took off my pants. She had snaps at the crotch of her leotard which she unsnapped. She fitted me with a rubber then, on the bed, on her back, she offered me her only exposed area. We had no-frills animatronic sex which didn't work for me so I used my hand to finish up. I tipped her an extra five, said adios, and took my leave.
In my youth, in San Luis, with my friend Kelly and the two Steves, going to a prostitute still came with bragging rights; it was what boys were suppose to do. Having their own business, marijuana smuggling, to attend to, Steve the idol and Steve the jailbird dropped Kelly and me off at a swinging-door saloon. Inside, a Mexican rock band covered the Blue Cheer rendition of Summertime Blues. I bounced when I walked. I was an outlaw on the lam in Mexico. I wished all the losers back home could see me now. Looking down at myself, from the rafters, I looked just like Steve the idol.
Going with the first woman who approached me, I gave her my last six bucks. In her little room, down a long hallway at the back of the bar, she took a large jar of petroleum jelly, scooped out a two-fingered silver glob, reached under her skirt and lubricated herself, wiping the residue on the bed sheet. She climbed on a cot, onto her back, and lifted her skirt. She wore a garter belt hooked to black stockings with nothing in between. Only once before had I seen this view of a garter belt and stockings; in a black and white pornographic film in the back room of a motorcycle shop, where I hung out in high school. In the film the woman had sex with a German Shepard dog. I tried not to think of that now.
Somewhat at a loss, I undressed, then stood there giggling and gawking, like a kid from the Ozarks, until, with a deep sigh and a roll of her eyes, the hooker took charge. She rolled a condom onto my tumescent penis with the stoic professionalism of a nurse threading in a catheter, then pulled me onto the bed and positioned me between her legs. She turned her head away, chewed gum with her mouth open, and grunted in rhythm with her only other moving part, her sex, automatically, up and down, in and out. Afterward, I wished I had my six dollars back. Going in, full of hope, I had been fulfilling a fantasy. Coming out, I wanted to hide somewhere and cry. Walking back into the bar a Mexican guy, at a table with friends, said to me, "Hey amigo, hippie boy, was she better than a big dog?" I forced a laugh that made me feel even more like a moron than I already felt. At the bar I bummed five bucks from Kelly and attempted to drink my ego back in place.
In Tijuana, 1987, I walked half a block to a brightly lit nightclub with a display of framed color photos of the naked girls inside. Live Girls! Live Girls! Inside, an elevated stage down the center of the room, one long wall with the bar. A dancing girl in the spotlight. Around the stage a half-dozen US Marine inductees drinking, carousing, luring the dancing girl up close with dollar bills. Creedence Clearwater loud, through bad speakers. I took a seat and ordered, from a bar-girl, two tequila shots and a Budweiser. It was clear to me the girl was a guy though nobody else seemed to notice. Over time I had acquired a kind of deviate radar, prevertadar, and could spot sexual variations at a glance. She had a mound of curly hair and except for a low waist and short legs she was girlish and cute.
I drained the first tequila shot and nursed the beer. The second shot went down without pain. It unclenched the arthritis in my neck and shoulders. It felt wrong and it felt good. I motioned to the bar girl for two more then walked back to the hombres bathroom. A door into permanent stink, a long communal pisser across the back wall. A Mexican guy taking a leak. We peed and he laughed and said something friendly in Spanish. I laughed along. "Yeah, sure," I told him. "There's a place in France where the women wear no pants." I buttoned my jeans and took the second half of a joint from my wallet. I fired it with my Zippo and shared it with my amigo.
Back in the main room I took a shot of tequila and sat at the stage. The dancing girl was still dancing; the music had changed to T Rex and she had peeled down to a g-string. I really couldn't see much room for hiding a penis but then maybe it wasn't all that big or difficult to maneuver. She humped her pubis only inches from the wagging tongue of a young military recruit who was having a very good time. He seemed to believe the dancing girl was a real girl and I saw no good reason to ruin his fun. Another tequila shot arrived, courtesy of my bathroom buddy now sitting at the bar. I gave him a salute and sucked it down.
When the dancing girl came my way I took out a ten spot and tucked it safely into the top of her g-string. She sat on her spiked heels, leaned in whisper close and kissed my nose. She told me twenty dollars more would buy fuck suck good-time.
The drink, the pot, the boisterous atmosphere, my flickering aura; I was morphing into Mister Hyde. Soon I would be howling. I saw it approaching and let it come. Another shot of jet fuel inflamed my gullet.
The dancing girl picked her clothes from the floor, a bikini top, tight silver slacks, a thin fluffy robe. I helped her down from the stage and she got dressed and took me by the hand, leading me back outside. The jarheads whooped and laughed and wished me good luck. A taxi was waiting at the curb. The cabby got out and opened the door for us, she got in and I followed. The driver hopped back in and pulled from the curb. There was no meter. "Hold on a minute. I need to know where we're going and what it's going to cost me."
He said something something amigo, which wasn't good enough for me so I opened my door, ready to bail at the first opportunity. He said no no no no and the dancing girl said no no no no and I told him in a universal language I needed a set price or I was getting out. The dancing girl and the driver huddled then the driver told me five dollars. Okay, fine. I closed the door.
With sign language and occasional Spanglish the dancing girl told me I should go ahead and give her twenty dollars for the superduper sex soon to me. When we get there, I mimed back. She shrugged and put her head on my shoulder and a hand between my legs. A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a little court of facing rooms with a well-worn path down the middle. The taxi driver turned around and told me twenty bucks. Yeah, sure thing, hombre. I gave him a five. I climbed out to the sidewalk and the dancing girl came with me. The driver was also out of the cab, telling me I still owed him fifteen bucks. I was drunk enough to take a poke at the guy if he so much as touched me and he must have seen it in my eyes because he gave up the fight. I happened to look up the street and realized the bar we had come from was two doors down, the cab was only three of four spaces up from where we had started. The irony wasn't funny enough for twenty bucks but he had earned the five from sheer audacity.
The dancing girl and I walked into the courtyard. To the left a guy at a window counter told me seven bucks for the room which was a rip-off so I counted out six and put it in his palm; holding back a single in mild protest. There are no signs of warning at the borderline; Everything beyond this point is a rip-off, enter at your own risk, but I had budgeted for it. Besides, it was only money, if I didn't throw it away here, I'd lose it somewhere else. Once inside the room the dancing girl started dancing. In the distance a clarinet wept.
I gave her twenty dollars and she started a strip tease. I took out my camera and let her know we were here for a photo session not sex. My flash and focus set, I got her up on the bed and took aim. Totally naked she looked like a real girl. She kept her upper thighs together and when she turned, to give me a shot at her butt, she made a quick little adjustment with her hands. Abracadabra.
I took some pictures then, after a few shots, told her I wanted to see her dick for a couple of exposures. She responded with indignation which I deserved, if she wanted to be a girl and the rest of the world saw her as a girl, it wasn't my place to be outing her.
I went along with it, said I was sorry, I had made a mistake. Anyone could see she was all girl.
Smiling again she let me know that for another twenty she would get me off in whatever method I chose.
Thanks just the same, I countered, but I already got off earlier, I was happy enough with the pictures, and thank you for being a such a pretty model.
Outside, the taxi driver and a police officer were killing time, maybe waiting on me. I grinned then ran, my camera banging my ribs, but no one took up the chase. Slowing to a stroll, staggering a bit with drink, I tipped an imaginary hat to the pimps and barkers, the suckers and the bums.
My bouts of hard drinking began in my early adolescence and reached a peak in my late twenties. After I married Alison, and Dashiell was born, I had stopped drinking to excess. Now I was back at old habits. Alcohol consumption did not make me feel good, it didn't make me witty and it didn't relax me. It changed me, the way a full moon makes a werewolf howl, into a wildly irrational asshole. It made me stupid and sick. Yet, here I was, a premeditated drunk, losing my grip, glass by glass.
The Peppermint Disco Dance-Arena was in a weathered barn-like building, painted globular orange, and displaying a marquee of red and blue neon dancing girls. Inside, a cement dance-floor, wobbly tables and booths, green, yellow, red: posters and more posters, walls of cryptic art. A long bar. Bar girls. Small groups of couples sitting around, a dancing girl in a leotard. I walked to the bar and ordered two tequila shots and a beer. Music played, accordion, trumpet, violin, laughter, long polka lyrics, lazy inebriated musical notes floated around my head.
A young woman with a pleasant face, a big smile, and luscious zaftig curves, appeared next to me. She said her name was Lupe and I was very much handsome. Would I buy her a drink?
"Hi, Lupe. I'm Scot." I patted the strip of plastic tape over the cracked vinyl seat cushion next to mine. "Please join me. Senor Bartender, a drink for the lady and another shot for me." I dug my camera outfit from my backpack and looped the strap around my neck. Lupe spoke English well with an accent that was easy enough to follow. She wondered aloud, Photo-graphy?
"Yeah, photography. How'd you like to be a model?"
She told me maybe and maybe not.
The bartender brought our drinks which I paid for, leaving the small bills on the table. Lupe lunged forward in a nice way and, putting her arms around me, kissed my neck, cuddled in close, and proposed marriage: "Scot marry Lupe. Lupe marry Scot."
"Yeah, that's what I need, another wife."
She agreed, Si si, that's exactly what I needed, another wife. "Lupe wife, Scot handsome husband."
"I don't know, maybe we should get to know each other a little better first."
Lupe said why wait? She was already crazy for me, in loove.
"I love you too, baby. Let's raise a glass to love, marriage, and a baby carriage." I took a shot. I was fully inebriated, hopelessly, reeling in place. I took Lupe's hand and gave it a gallant smooch. "Let me take your picture. Look at me and tell me you love me." I raised the camera but Lupe pushed it back down and took my hand and placing on her left tit, told me, Scot love big boobies.
"I like all kinds but at this moment I like yours the best."
Lupe opened her shirt, pulled up her bra, and presented her breasts for my appraisal. Scot did indeed love her boobies. She took my head in her hands and pulled my face between her round brown pechugas. I stayed there for a while, submerged in boobs; it was dark and quiet. Calming. I rose, slowly, to the surface and went for my camera. Lupe leaned back, grinning and laughing offering up her chest for a close-up. I took a picture.
I said, "You're great, sweetheart. Go ahead and put em away; let me buy you another drink."
The world was fuzzy and I was mighty comfortable. I was drunk, shouting above the music even when it wasn't playing. I figured I could sit here with Lupe as long as I kept buying the drinks, so I bought more drinks.
Lupe scrapped her bar stool closer to mine and scooted her butt closer yet. She slung an arm around me and kissed my stubbled cheek. Again she proposed marriage, suggested we tie the knot and move to America, where I lived, and by the way where did I live?
"Hard to say right now. Santa Monica, La Jolla, Interstate Five."
She told me she didn't really live in Tijuana but far far away.
"Like once upon a time, far far away?"
Si si, she told me, Mexico City.
In Mexico City she had a ten-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl. She told me their names but they didn't stick. A rummage through her handbag produced snapshots; black & white but more befitting of a sepia tone. The boy wore a white tee-shirt, denim jeans, and simple huaraches. He was standing on dirt in front of a tumbledown barber shop, stiff, over-aware of the camera. His eyes burned with anger or maybe it was despair. The picture was worn and wrinkled and added lines to the boy's face; like a depression-era Walker Evans, except he was now, this very second. The girl was dark with Aztec cheekbones, long black hair, bottomless eyes, and a disappointed world-weary smile. Though only seven, she was dressed in ruffles and lace with bare legs and midriff. She was sensual in a way that embarrassed me, especially in the presence of her mother. "These are nice," I said and handed the pictures back. "Nice kids. You must miss them."
Oh, si si she did miss them, but if we got married she could bring the whole family to America.
"Yeah, well. I'm not doing all that great supporting the child I already have."
She took my left hand, pulled on my ring finger, scrutinized it, inquired, nino...wife?
"At the moment I'm not married, no ah, esposa, is that right, esposa means wife? I've got a little boy, a niño, Dash, uh, Dashiell, but I don't really want to go into that right now."
Lupe went back into the folds of her bag and brought out a pencil and a scrap of paper. She wrote down an address on Revolution Boulevard, pointed the direction and repeated a couple of times, "Revolution Boulevard, Revolution Boulevard."
"You want me to come see you? Where you live?"
Si si, she wanted me to come stay the night with her. Get happily ever after.
"Maybe."
She told me to wait, Scot, here, right here, and with that, she gave me a big sloppy kiss and departed to the Ladies' room.
I put my head on the bar for a couple of minutes or maybe an hour. The universe engulfed me in a rising tide. Somewhere above me a marachi band played and some guy sang Blue Moon in Spanish. Azul Luna.
After my first sexual experience with a Mexican prostitute, in my ill-spent youth, with my friend Kelly and the two Steves; after being searched of body and car by the customs police, we crossed back into the USA. We went to an all night restaurant and waited. When I queried as to what we were waiting for, Steve the idol explained: While in San Luis, after depositing Kelly and me at the saloon, Steve and Steve had gone to meet their connection. They had purchased two kilos of mexican brown for thirty dollars. Next, they had gone to a popular dance club frequented by underage teenage Americans who could legally drink in the border-town bars. Steve the idol, with his good looks, his charm and his radiant smile had, in short order, met a girl who had crossed over from Yuma to party-hearty with a group of friends. The girl, most likely drunk, gave Steve the idol her phone number which he would never use and her address which he would. She had crossed the border, she told Steve, in her parents car, a new Cadillac. Steve bid her adieu and then, with Steve the jailbird, located the Caddy parked close by, covertly popped the hood and stashed the marijuana inside. Now if the group of girls were searched at the border they would get busted and Steve and Steve would be out thirty bucks. If they crossed without being searched, all we had to do was wait until they were back home in bed and then open the Caddy's hood and retrieve the dope. And now, that's what we were waiting for.
I regained consciousness with my head on the Peppermint Disco Dance-Arena bar, sat up, and looked around. There were fewer people in the place. The bartender brought me a shot and a beer, telling me, on the house. Gracias Senor. I rubbed my face for a while then hit the tequila. Lupe hadn't returned and I had a feeling she was no longer in the building. I got up and stretched, and walked into the Ladies' room and looked around. A young girl with a curly mass of hair and a bumblebee leotard followed me in, took me by the arm, and led me back out. She said Lupe was gone and she was here to take her place.
"Yeah, okay, maybe, I guess. Uh, I gotta go to the bathroom."
In the hombre's room I took a leak and smoked a half joint, which filled me with a new energy and put sparks in my legs. Back in the main room a live nude girl danced a slow hoochie-coochie. A young Mexican guy had staggered out to the dance floor and gone to his knees in worship. His friends in a booth on the sidelines whooped and whistled and encouraged him onward. I brought out my camera and turned on my flash and started taking pictures. The kneeling Mexican made crazy faces. The nude girl made sexy faces.
At the end of the set I followed the dancer into the dressing room where a few girls, including the bumblebee, were hanging out, taking turns at the make-up mirror. I started taking pictures, posing the girls, laughing, flirting, hugging and kissing, making friends. I was whirling, happily vertiginous. No one was asking for money, we were taking fun pictures. A little goofy-looking guy from out of nowhere posed with one of the girls then asked would I let him take a picture of me. I gave him my camera and with a girl on my right and another on my left, we all said cheese.
A big guy came into the room to appraise the ruckus. He had twenty years on everyone but me. He was the straw boss. He told me no more pictures, told everyone else whatever he told them, in his native tongue. The party broke up and the boss demanded, with outsized gestures, I leave the premises. Hey fuck you, I've been buying drinks all night long. I already paid my way. The guy walked to a nearby closet and came back out with a baseball bat, to which I wisely replied, "Adios, amigos and señoritas."
Outside I walked a block then sat on the curb. I fired a smoke and drank from a bottle of mescal I'd lifted on the way out. I blinked in and out of consciousness. Somewhere a rooster crowed. I knew I had to get back on my feet. If I stayed here, sodden with drink, I would get robbed or thrown in the hoosegow. I got up and started walking. I stumbled by a teenager leaning on a post. "Acid, speed, marijuana, mushroom."
I hit the brakes. "How much for a dose of mushroom?"
I gave him a twenty and he gave me a baggie with a couple of good-sized 'shrooms. I took Lupe's address from my pocket and asked him to point me toward Revolution Boulevard. I pocketed the mushrooms and went back to walking, following the pusher's point. Again the rooster crowed, through the otherwise silent night, and then again and again, echoing, from no discernable direction. I'd never lived on a farm, but still, somehow, the rooster reminded me of home. My youth. Cock-a-doodle-do. Cock-a-doodle-do. Cock-a-doodle-do. I drank. And drank. And drank. I got a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke rings. I took side streets where not a happy soul stirred. Here and there glimmering shadows evaluated my ineptitude. I stumbled forward and whistled "Popeye The Sailor." I blinked but my eyes didn't open back up. I was in a little fishing boat puking over the edge into the wake of a speedboat. I jumped awake still walking, the rooster crowed. I checked behind me and saw the teenage pusher who was either following me or just happened to be coming this way. I tilted back my head and drank from the bottle of mescal, daring the pusher and the whole fucking world: Come and get me. I came to a man who was perched, haunches on heels, on a overturned trash barrel. He crowed like a rooster. He was the rooster. I stopped and watched as he crowed again and again. He looked up at me and said a paragraph that made no sense then went back to crowing. See you later, Rooster, was all I could come up with.
I put the flame of my Zippo into my face attempting to light a roach and slammed into a phone pole. I saw stars, a psychedelic light show. Down the block the pusher was still coming my way. My eyes were kaleidoscopes. The pusher was joined by a hundred other pushers. They all held hands.
I said, "Fuck you and you and you."
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Cock-a-doodle-do.
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I was throwing up in a porcelain bowl. Somewhere. Jail?
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Someone kissed me and I swirled and swirled and swirled and rolled onto the floor.
Leaves were blowing and a kid I knew in my childhood pelted my head with dirt clods.
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The curtains were on fire and I yanked them from the rod and stomped them out.
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Someone was whistling, every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.
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I was spinning into fragments and yelling: And you and you and you and you.
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A truck's air-horn honked, long and loud, from somewhere down below. I opened my eyes and sunlight kicked me in the head and cranked up the volume of my tinnitus. My bowels were boiling. Ouch, fuck, shit. I was in bed, in a hotel room. A chest of drawers, a sliding door closet, a window without curtains above a small pock-marked desk on which sat a wad of burnt cloth. Out the window, utility lines, a neon marquee blinking BOOTS - BOOTS - BOOTS. On the walls a low-rent paint job. Attempting to reel in my senses I held my head in my hands, blinked my eyes, searching through lost memory. Where was I? A closed door going to a bathroom. I could hear the shower running. A night table on which sat a reading light and a framed picture of a couple of kids. Lupe's kids? Yeah, Lupe's kids. Somehow I had found safe harbor.
A shot of anxiety broke through my nausea. I checked my pants pockets and found a single quarter and a baggie with a couple of psychotropic mushrooms. I checked my socks, stuffed in my boots on the floor, and found two-hundred and fifty dollars safe and sound. On the floor, next to the bed, my backpack. In my backpack, everything that belonged in my backpack. From my backpack I fumbled around and found medicine. I took out two Vicodins and four Ibuprofen, and staggered across the room where sat three large bottles of Arrowhead water. I washed down the drugs and drank a bottle empty, lit a smoke, and sat on the bed. I looked at my watch. Noon.
When Lupe came out of the bathroom she wore a white towel turban, a red towel sarong. She leaned on the door frame and considered me with neither a smile nor a frown.
"Hi, Lupe. How's it going?"
She told me I had arrived, loud and crazy, sometime in the night. She said I had set the window curtains aflame attempting to light a candle and a reefer. I had climbed out to the fire escape and heaved an empty bottle of mescal into the center of the street as a police car was cruising by. She said as the sun was coming up there had been cops in the building knocking on doors but they had somehow passed hers by.
I apologized, telling her so very sorry; maybe I should leave now, and let me give her fifty bucks for all her trouble. Now she was frowning, angry, but almost teary-eyed. I had insulted her by offering her money. She was a bar girl, not a puta. No, she didn't want me to leave. She told me to go take a shower. "Thanks," I said gratefully and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She smelled of soap and rain forest.
In the bathroom I sat on the crapper and voided my sick bowels of yesterday's folly. I was mortified by the sounds I made and the thick stink that would surely find its way to the other room. The water pressure was weak and the hot water soon went to cold, but I stayed. I soaped and rinsed and shampooed my hair. I took Lupe's toothbrush from the sink along with a green worm of Crest toothpaste, climbed back in the shower and scoured my teeth, brushed my tongue. I sat on the tile floor, closed my eyes, and let the cool water rain down on me. My stomach was pretty well fucked, and would be for the remainder of the day, but the meds were kicking in and my headache was slowly leaking down the drain. I don't know what I thought about.
When I finally came out of the bathroom, I wasn't wearing anything. Lupe was in bed, naked beneath a thin sheet. She motioned me to join her. I got prone and as I slowly peeled back her side of the sheet I noticed what I had not noticed the night before. A ragged and shiny scar, like melted plastic, blazed its way north and south over her sternum. She had been opened, peered into and welded shut again. I touched it softly with my pointer. "Jesus, that must have been painful. And scary."
She didn't want me looking at it, she pushed my hand away. I leaned over and kissed the scar. No no, she told me, kiss booby.
We kissed for a while, gently exploring, and she handled my penis like she really wanted to. I took a dip downward thinking I might give her a few laps but she headed me off and pushed me away. Good Catholic girls were not to be pleasured with perversity. Besides, this was all for me, though I had no idea why I deserved it. I reached for my backpack and took out a condom. As I tore away the foil wrapping and went to put it on, Lupe told me no, she didn't want me to wear a rubber. But rules were rules.
I put on the rubber and positioned myself between her legs. She held my penis, and gently squeezing, guided it into place. With the first stroke, I knew she had rolled off the condom. I suppose I could have stopped but I didn't. She worked out a rhythm and did elevator kegels up and down my shaft. My brain melted. For a moment or two my body didn't ache and my stomach didn't gurgle and then I was spent.
I smoked a cigarette in bed, then got up and dressed. I was irritated by Lupe's condom snatch but saw no point in making it an issue. I asked her if I could take some pictures. Yes, I could, but not before she got dressed. She was not the same person who had laughed and paraded her tits in front of my flash last night. She was shy, and serious. I waited for her to get dressed, then took a couple of shots, realizing too late, I had overexposed and possibly double-exposed the final frame on the roll. I let it go.
Lupe took me to a funky little restaurant where we had fried eggs with beans, rice, corn tortillas, and a mug of coffee. She told me a story about taking her kids to a sidewalk puppet show where one of the hand puppets, from the curtain's edge of the portable stage, had kissed her daughter on the nose. She talked about her sister, Marie, who was still in Mexico City, where she took care of her baby and Lupe's two kids. Marie always made people laugh when she made funny faces, so I made funny faces at Lupe and she laughed, but made me stop because I was getting mucho scary looking.
When our hilarity died down, Lupe gave me a pencil and paper, asked me to write down my phone number and address. I tried to explain how I didn't really have an address and how I was pretty much a freeloader and not exactly eligible for long-term relationships. She told me she was probably pregnant from our tumble less than an hour earlier and therefore we should get married. I used condoms as a shield against terminal disease; the thought of a pregnancy had never entered my self-centered head. I said I was really sorry and I guess I hadn't been communicating all that well, and besides, I was impervious to blackmail but here take this, it's a hundred and fifty dollars, you get pregnant, buy yourself an abortion. She took the money then called me something vile in Spanish and slugged me, fast and hard below my left eye.
When my vision returned I asked Lupe to excuse me for a couple of minutes then went into the restroom. I squatted over a truly disgusting toilet without a seat, and emptied a pound of red-hot turmoil, mephitis fume. When I came out of the bathroom, Lupe was gone. I drank two more cups of coffee.
I took a cab to the Greyhound bus station and bought a two-way ticket down the coast to Puerto Nuevo, a seaside village. Before getting on the bus I went to a little market and bought a large bottle of soda water. I smoked some pot and ate the magical mushrooms. On the bus, in a window seat, I watched an unfair and unforgiving world go by. Here, on the borderline, was the squalor, the downtrodden, the weak, the uneducated, the stereotypical third world that I exploited with my pictures, with this story. This wasn't really what Mexico was, where Mexico is. It was, however, where I was, what I was.
Nineteen years earlier, in Yuma, Arizona, at four in the morning, Steve the idol parked the woody away from the street lamps in a neighborhood of tract homes. The Cadillac, with two kilos of marijuana under the hood, was back home, though it was parked in the garage and the garage door was closed and locked. The Steves decided the best approach would be to break into the garage. Steve the Idol threaded the handle of a claw hammer through a belt loop. Steve the jailbird did the same with a tire iron. I asked if the implements were for breaking the lock and Steve the idol laughed. "The lock is easy, man. Don't need nothin for the lock. This (the hammer, the tire iron) is in case anybody wakes up." Steve the jailbird added to that, "I'm not goin back to fuckin jail, man. I'll kill somebody before I go back to fuckin jail."
And so I sat in the car and thought about a guy I knew back home in Highbridge. He had sat in the car while two friends (who I also knew) broke into a auto body shop where they robbed the till of less than a hundred dollars and then shot and killed the sleeping night watchman. The guy who sat in the car was tried, just as the other two were tried, for murder, and he got twenty years hard time. I didn't want to spend twenty years in jail for sitting in a car. I didn't have the time to waste; twenty years from now I was going to be rich, maybe even famous. I vowed to cultivate a better class of friends; to spend my time more wisely.
Steve and Steve were back, in ten minutes, with the jackpot, which we took to Steve the jailbird's apartment and broke into ounces and smoked joints until long past sunup. Two days later Kelly and I hitch-hiked back to Santa Monica and I began looking for new idols.
Nineteen years later, I departed the bus to the shores of Puerto Nuevo, high on psilocybin. The sky was sunny but cool; a wet sea breeze washed the stale bus smells from my face. Puerto Nuevo was famous for lobster dinners; all the little critter tails you could eat, along with beans and rice for around nine dollars. On a walkway of red hexagonal tiles, I passed by the bright vibrating colors of shack-like stalls of clothing, pi_atas, and sombreros, to a row of restaurants with giant lobsters painted on dirty-white adobe walls. Signs and prices in English and dollars. Linoleum floors and tabletops. Mariachi bands strolling about.
I chose an eatery for later, then took a hike to the beach where I sat in the sand at the edge of the Pacific, and watched the curve of the earth as it rolled forward in time. I was stiff and tight, and willed the sun to melt the ice in my shoulders and neck. I inhaled cigarettes and dosed with pain killers. The 'shrooms were fully dissolved into my brain and I laughed out loud to myself because I had no one else to laugh with.
Boots off, I walked to the water, and became fascinated with the waves washing over my feet, the sand moving beneath me, lowering me into the earth. Back on solid sand, on my back, I closed my eyes looking for peace. I dreamt Richard Avedon discovered my whore photographs and arranged a big exhibit in New York.
I was far far away when I heard children, and opened my eyes. Five barefoot kids in rags walked out of a cloud and into my line of vision. They varied in age from around three to around eleven. The oldest pushed a tattered junkyard baby-carriage that wobbled across the sandy ground on squeaky, bent, surreal wheels. She stopped the procession a few yards from me and produced, from the interior of the carriage, five mud-caked soda bottles and handed one to each child. As she did so, she talked to the group in a soft but authoritative manner. A boy of around four held his bottle close and spoke to it like it was his rag-doll friend, savvy to the secrets of an imaginary world. He touched his bottle/doll to a cheek, then raised it with both hands above his head and exploded it on a concrete chunk, at the upper edge of the sandy beach.
The group leader arranged the children tallest to shortest and walked single file toward me then across my field of vision. As they passed they maintained stride and kept all eyes to the front. The four-year-old boy broke stride and turned his head to look at me. I watched a fly crawl across his forehead and down to the dry snot on his upper lip. Diffused light glowed from his face, like a Kodachrome transparency. I smiled at him. He raised a short, skinny brown arm and showed me his middle finger.
