[testimonies about the machine] [Perspective to the here and now] [Other renegades who testify]
Witness the 32 times I have testified recorded in
Plato's illegitimate bastard son's 9th cousin's rage against the machine:
| Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | |
| 12:23 pm | Five Years, More Or Less The line started forming at five o’clock in the morning. If I got there by six, I was lucky, and the door still wasn’t open yet but we were only twenty deep. I read the newspaper and joints were passed around, I was reading the business section while everyone else was getting stoned because the work was mindless enough for it. Those not smoking were drinking, admitted alcoholics trying to survive somehow. I refused a hit off of anything, I was trying to survive too, and I was mostly older than they were. The door finally opened and we piled in and signed up. Someone put a movie on and we waited and our names were called eventually if we got lucky enough. It was horse-shit work for minimum wage. Someone occasionally had a car and we piled in and took off, or else Tony would just drive us himself, and we did whatever they told us to do. Even the stoned guys, slowly and lazily, attempted to do whatever. We got paid daily. After we cashed, we drank or smoked or whatever on a corner near Twenty-fourth Street, Darren was there on Fridays and it was the only part of it that made any sense. Then I drank. We all did, even the people smoking more joints and blunts, we sat there and celebrated our own miserable existence. I drank quarts of Coors and Darren drank malt liquor and everyone else drank cans of crappy American beer. We spoke English and Spanish, and Fridays were always that way for a while. I was almost proud of us, the lowest common denominators of society, on the corner of Cleveland Avenue and somewhere west of 24th Street in National City. When it broke up, some of us wandered over to the trolley station, stood there and waited, ticket or no ticket, we went home eventually. The sun was always setting as we stood on the platform, waiting. Juan leaves Thursday for camp something-or-other, and then home for a weekend in August, and then to Wisconsin and then back to Iraq. He’ll start with a new rate, what with being in the National Guard now, but I told him to fix someone’s tank whenever possible and they’ll probably have him back as a mechanic in no time. It’s hard work, but you don’t get shot at as much, which should be his goal there. After that, I reckon I’ll go back to doing whatever, standing in line somewhere with the drug addicts and alcoholics and trying to get lucky for seventy dollars a day. I honestly don’t care. This leads to that, and leads to something else, which leads to whatever, it goes wherever it goes, I’m satisfied that I have very little control over it. I only know that I don’t want to go back to where I just left, I don’t want to be put in charge of anything that I have no control over (by design). If I get lucky then I can land something near the trolley and avoid busses altogether or maybe something in Otay Mesa where all of the warehouses are. Whatever I do doesn’t matter. Me and Juan and Anna have been playing video games and drinking beer (except for Anna), these days have passed by quickly. I have ordered Juan to go park his car up at his grandparents house where it can be behind a locked gate, and I am holding the keys because everyone will want to drive it and no one has a license or insurance. It doesn’t seem to matter much here, the license and insurance parts of driving, but it matters to me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe these are things that I should add to my list of not caring much about. At four-thirty in the morning, most of Tijuana is sleeping. The morning is chill, cabs are easy to get, and destinations are reached quite rapidly. Downtown in the collectivo costs ninety cents, and sometimes when money is tight I would walk to the border from there, through downtown and then onto the pedestrian bridge over the Tijuana River. Five o’clock in the morning is interesting on that bridge; it can be deserted, dangerous, or even ridiculous. One morning it was thirty-five degrees outside and there was a naked sixty-year old woman standing there screaming at a moderately well dressed Mexican gentleman, who looked quite confused about everything. Another morning, the cops would stop me and demand identification, I reckon that night was slow and they were looking for breakfast, no tengo dinero señor policia, I make the border, regardless. Even at a quarter past five there is already a long line to cross, but it moves quickly because the bad guys are still sleeping, even the government knows that. Jumping the trolley, I get off and stand in that line, the faces will have changed but the people will be the same, the drugs and alcohol will be there, and so will I. We’ll file in whenever they decide to open the door and sign up. Someone I don’t know behind the glass will motion me over and look at me. "Have you ever been here before?" "Yeah. Back when you were up in National City." "How long ago was that?" "Five years, more or less," I will say, and then probably have to fill out more paperwork. I wonder if Bukowski had to fill out paperwork when he went back to work at the Post Office. |
| Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | |
| 1:55 pm | Matriarch |
| Friday, July 11th, 2008 | |
| 3:24 pm | Happy Birthday Tijuana . "Poor Mexico: So far from God and so close to the United States of America." - Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico (November 29, 1876 – December 6, 1876; February 17, 1877 – November 30, 1880; December 1, 1884 – May 25, 1911) For one hundred and nineteen years, Tijuana has officially been a city, in Baja California, surviving a revolution, a hostile takeover, various floods and fires, tourism, Hollywood, gangsters of various nationalities, crooked politicians and crooked police officers, and various gringos like me and Daniel and Darren and Jeff. Tijuana survives in spite of the big metal fence, the department of homeland security, the ever-increasing influx of Chinese immigrants, dust, and a peso weakened by its relationship with the dollar. Tijuana is doing just fine, she still sparkles respectably in spite of her reputation, people here are still making art and giving the world a big crooked smile like a big-nosed clown at the circus. Happy birthday, Tijuana. Happy birthday to you. I am celebrating by drinking Tecate beer, out of the handy one-point-two liter bottle. Anna is going to bake a cake, and make the frosting from scratch, using sour cream and cream cheese. She loves to bake. I imagine that there are activities all over the city, or at least there should be. Someone should throw a parade, school children should be proudly marching down some blocked-off street somewhere. But I have the feeling that this day will go largely unnoticed. This fits, because Baja California went largely unnoticed when Tijuana was born. Porfirio Díaz had more important matters to attend to, I reckon. In underdeveloped nations, one comes to expect that things aren’t always so smooth. When looking around, the inevitable conclusion is reached that there isn’t going to ever be enough money to fix everything. One accepts it; otherwise one would go insane. Maybe I am insane. That would explain a lot. That would excuse me from all of this, perhaps I should just drink a lot of tequila and call it a night. One issue that anyone has no choice but to shake hands with in Mexico, is the unarguable fact that it does not at all run like the United States of America. However, it is easy to point out the similarities; a constitution, a federal republic, a democracy, a distinct flavor of freedom, three independent branches of government, and so on. The constitution of Mexico guarantees citizen’s rights, and each of Mexico’s thirty-one states also has its own constitution, even the Federal District. The United States of America is basically set up the same way, long before Mexico might have used that blueprint to build its own political machine. These similarities are interesting in respect to the stark contrast of the colonization of the two countries. Expansionist England’s idea of colonization was vastly different from the approach that Spain used in pillaging gold, silver, and other riches and resources from newly discovered lands. The North American indigenous tribes were scattered, unsophisticated, and easily disposed of for the most part. Ultimately, these tribes were driven into quarantine and permitted to exist in certain patches of land under terms that changed according to the needs of the settlers. It was relatively easy for the most part, because there were so few of them to deal with. Some assimilation occurred, mostly through marriage, but to a larger extent this practice of quarantine continues today, arguably, except that new gambling institutions have granted some of these small tribes an opportunity for some small form of economic autonomy. Good for them. In contrast to England’s role in the Americas, Spain sent conquerors in order to establish their presence. The Aztec and Inca Empires numbered twenty million each, and both were already established, complex, and thriving civilizations. After conquering these civilizations, the Spanish then assimilated their peoples rather than to drive them out or pen them up. This was accomplished through religious conversion, coercion with enemy tribes, and the accidental introduction of smallpox - the latter of which killed up to fifty percent of the Incas and up to ninety percent of the Aztecs. For the Aztecs - and then the remaining Mayans two centuries later - the pure indigenous, the mixed, and the land owning Spaniards formed a society, and then re-formed it again, and yet again. Modern Mexico was born from this assimilation. Cooking has become a passion for me these days, cooking and writing, but cooking especially. My challenge has been to do more with less, and it’s surprising what happens when I stop and think about what substitutions I can make and how I can arrange things. I have no actual grill, yet I can grill inexpensive fish in butter and spices that no restaurant here could ever match. I made macaroni with cheese from scratch last night that could be served at a gourmet banquet, but I have no cheddar cheese. I also learned that cream cheese doesn’t melt well in a microwave oven, that only a double-boiler and a lot of patience will do the trick. Not having a double-boiler, I make them, I use everything from baling wire to spare cooking utensils. I am fucking MacGyver in the kitchen. Neither the cooking nor the writing is making me any money. So, I have plenty of time to think, and the funniest thought occurred to me recently, it is one of the few times I’ve actually laughed in recent weeks. I said it out loud. I said to the computer, over the constant hum that accompanies the radio. I said it to the half-full super-caguama of Tecate and the ashtray full of cigarette butts. I said it to the only person listening. "This depression is really depressing," I told myself. Something will break soon, it always has, even here. I reckon I could work as a Mexican in some capacity if I wanted to straighten out my paperwork, but a forty-eight hour workweek would defeat the purpose of getting any job that would afford me the time to write more. There are opportunities in the United States that pop up, but I would rather stack boxes on a conveyor belt than to be some unappreciated cog in someone else’s machine – I’m sick of beating my head against a wall. If I’m going to work at anything other than writing, then I need a job that won’t make me insane; or even better, I need to figure out how to market my writing skills. Marketing myself has always been my greatest weakness. In the meanwhile, I am cooking dinner, as inexpensively as possible. Tonight, we are having sopes, Mexican soul food. Since I already have Maseca, and cooking oil, and an onion and some garlic and salt and water. For five dollars and fifty cents, I just procured dry crumbly cheese (queso cotija), serrano chiles, tomatillos, and two packages of chorizo. This will feed six people until they are full and happy and I will still have plenty of sopes left for lunches tomorrow. The tomatillo is an amazing fruit and an essential ingredient in most green salsas in Mexico. The flower blossoms and then a husk forms and the fruit grows inside of it. The surface of the fruit underneath the husk is sticky, and it isn’t uncommon to find dead insects that have unwittingly found their way into the husks prior to harvest. Then trapped onto the gummy coating of the fruit; unable to move and unable to consume anything, they are stuck and then die. Sometimes I feel like one of those insects, and the world is a tomatillo. Green salsa is an essential ingredient in sopes; thus, have I been assimilated. "If Porfirio Díaz would have been allowed to do what he wanted to do, then Mexico might be even more powerful that the United States of America is now," Juan told me. "How so?" I asked. "The oil. He could have controlled the oil and then Mexico would have been in a position to dominate instead of be dominated. Díaz wanted to industrialize Mexico, to make it compete with the United States. I wrote a paper on it in high school," he answered. "Mexican oil really didn’t become an issue until around nineteen hundred and twenty, and it wasn’t even discovered in Mexico until ten years before that. And Díaz sympathized with the rancheros, he even encouraged their encroachment onto publicly held land wherever possible. The rancheros didn’t want modernization, it would have hurt them financially, so basically Díaz killed his own attempt at modernizing Mexico," I said. Juan, and the friend he was with, both stopped and stared at me for a moment. "Hey, I live here," I told them. "The least I can do is to learn a little bit about your history." José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, after eliminating his political opponents either through murder, monetary manipulation, or plain old intimidation, led Mexico into its last revolution. Initially he gained office through the widespread civil unrest where people began to demand a one-term limit on the presidency, which he championed, and ran his predecessor out of office. His handpicked successor proceeded to screw things up so badly, that Mexico conveniently forgot all about the one-term rule, and Porfirio Díaz was again elected after somehow the constitution was changed to allow two terms in office. Díaz then made sure that term limits were abolished altogether. Eventually, as with all good dictatorships, it had to come to an end. After promising a free election, Díaz rigged the results for the last time. Francisco Madero had become increasingly popular, and his supposed defeat, along with too many other things to mention in one paragraph, started the ball rolling on Mexico’s second revolution. Díaz was eventually forced to flee and took exile in France. I find this ironic - even though Napoleon was long dead - as the French army during their occupation had captured and imprisoned Díaz, twice. Coincidentally, Porfirio Díaz is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, near Paris. So is Frédéric Bartholdi, sculptor of the statue of liberty. Small world. Both gave wonderful gifts to the United States of America, although Porfirio Díaz certainly didn’t mean to. The Mexican revolution, after its resolve in nineteen hundred and seventeen, led to years of instability and unrest and open intervention by the United States of America. It also led to the shortest term ever served by a president in world history, all of forty-five minutes, by Pedro José Domingo de la Calzada Manuel María Lascuráin Paredes. By the time Lascuráin’s name was pronounced, he had resigned. Some candles burn very quickly, I reckon. Yet, Porfirio Díaz’s torch blazed brightly for over thirty years. Porfirio Díaz is responsible for the existence of Baja California in its present geographical condition; in eighteen hundred and eighty-eight he decided that the federal territory needed to be divided into two districts, each of which were headed by chief executives assigned by the president of Mexico. Tijuana was still sparsely populated, but by the turn of the century, it became a place where people didn’t mind carving out a life for themselves. Tourists came along, and shortly after the Mexican revolution ended, the first racetrack opened in Tijuana, near the border. This was in nineteen hundred and sixteen. Porfirio Díaz was dead by then. The track was almost destroyed by a flood later in the same year, but the Casino Royal was demolished. They rebuilt that same track, but then built another one farther south, along with a larger casino and hotel complex (all part of the Agua Caliente complex), and Tijuana boomed. At least, until Cardenas closed the casino and racetracks opened in California, and the Hollywood crowd found entertainment elsewhere. But history has been fixed now. This is my gift to Tijuana. Two race tracks existed simultaneously. I have proof, courtesy of my good friend Rene Peralta, and thanks to Daniel. Thanks, Rene and Daniel. And thanks, Tijuana, for everything.  |
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | |
| 10:32 am | Laughlin The image is my daughter Anna, she's fifteen, and almost six feet tall. And yes, I would tell her this story if at any time I felt that there was something she could learn by it. And I wouldn't change a word. I've never held anything from her. She makes me be an honest dad. Even when I drink a lot late at night and decide that recording my voice is a good idea. She tells me differently. Part One: Part Two: That's it for voice, at least for a while. My fingers miss the keyboard action. |
| Monday, June 30th, 2008 | |
| 5:34 pm | Because I Promised... |
| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 | |
| 9:20 pm | The Foam Factory |
| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | |
| 2:41 am | The Gift Horse's Bit One hundred degrees isn’t so bad. On Sunday, everyone here took off to the beach, for Playas de Tijuana, except for me. I remained here, hunkered down as if there was anything that could possibly go wrong. Neighbors were throwing parties, grilling carne asada, music blaring underneath erected canopies because no one could stand being inside. Except for me, I was driven toward other concessions. I had to sit here and admit that Laura Hillenbrand was wrong somehow, that she got crossed up somewhere in her version of Tijuana. Hillenbrand’s research is considered to be excellent. Even though I don’t much care for her writing style, I admire her attempt in capturing the feel for what it was like here almost one hundred years ago. I trusted her because of it. Hillenbrand wrote about the manure-pile sliding down the hill in the storm that took out the casino and the track. This would have put that hill just south of where the current track sits, perhaps a mile. The track and casino would have had to been in close proximity in order for the mound of manure to slide into both before finding its way into the Tijuana river and making its way out to the Pacific ocean. But if the original track was, in fact, close to where Pueblo Amigo now sits, then the pile would have had to have been north of the river, on the hill close to where the border is with the United Stated of America, close to Colonia Libertad. Otherwise, the pile would have had to go through the river and out the other side. This seems impossible. It still felt like ninety degrees at midnight, when the music outside finally stopped. Everyone else here managed to sleep except for me, I had three liters of beer and two packages of cigarettes for fuel, and fingers and mind refused to quit. Daniel had kept handing me pieces of information that proved his point, that there was no way that one flood could have knocked out the original track and the casino at the same time. He went out of his way to do it, he believed it was mine in spite of what I already had. Daniel always comes into the Dandy del Sur and sits next to me, ordering a Dos Equis in aristocratic Spanish, making sure to roll the R’s in rhythmic perfection. Placing the accents appropriately, lifting syllables with crane-like precision, he over-exaggerates his graciousness to the cantinera when she slings a bowl of shelled peanuts in front of him. "Ahhhh, gracias, muy amable!" Always, he pulls on his first sip of beer as if it tastes like the best beer he ever had. Even the peanuts, at least the first few, are the best in the world. Something in the way that Daniel looks around, as much as very little has ever changed in the Dandy del Sur, it is always brand new to him. Whenever we walk together, I am constantly frustrated by his slow gait, just as he is by my quick pace. Daniel looks around consistently and takes his time, something might be otherwise missed. I glance out of the corner of my eye, content that if I do miss something, it will have been unimportant simply because I missed the event, that if I didn’t see it then it really never mattered. Yet, we could easily be brothers even though we don’t look much alike, because there is a sibling-like repertoire in our demeanor. Sometimes we bicker. That particular night, Daniel drank quickly, and I had had quite a few scotches already. We were going to an art exhibition in the CECUT, the cultural center of Tijuana. Daniel had brought a friend with him and I forget his name. I am bad with names. I am bad with art exhibits, too. I never know what to say. So I got somewhat drunk, and then we climbed into someone else’s car and took off toward Zona Rio. Today was not so hot, maybe ninety, maybe less, the wind was only warm and the sun seemed kinder. Anna is out of school for a while, she lounges comfortably in the coils of the cold-blooded cinderblock, amusing herself with video games and internet and television and music. I wandered down to the fruteria, a smallish store that sells fruits and vegetables and other odds and ends. Conveniently two blocks away, they often run out of even staples, but luckily I stashed away some chiles seranos from last week, because they had none. Six tomatillos, two packages of chorizo, and one onion later, I returned home, and Anna dutifully started on the dishes while I checked my email. Not more than three minutes had passed. "Dad?" Anna called me out of my office. She stood there with an onion in her hand, looking at me with an odd grin on her face. "What?" "The lady from the fruteria just dropped this off," Anna told me with mild amusement. "But I only bought one, it’s right here in the bag," I replied as I rifled into it. "Apparently not," Anna said. I reached into the bag and pulled out my onion. Anna laughed. Evidently, everyone knows where the gringo lives, I’m generally more famous than I give myself credit for. Incredibly, the lady that runs the store thought enough of me to make sure that I got my onion – believing for whatever reason that it was left behind – that she made two blocks’ journey and handed it to a surprised Anna at our door. She would have done that for anyone, perhaps; but she did it for me. We entered the CECUT and Daniel was obviously right at home, there was live music playing before the showing, we arrived fashionably late. Me and Daniel’s friend wandered around and pretended that we knew anything, admiring the paintings while Daniel mixed with the artists and patrons as though he were in his own kitchen. Daniel understands how this relationship works, the networking of poets, writers, painters, some chain that holds their sway. I am mostly uncomfortable. "People here know of you," Daniel once told me, long ago. He never told me that I needed this connection with the artists and writers and so on, but he certainly has implied it at every opportunity. I tried that evening, wine sloshing on top of beer and scotch, and mostly failed at anything, I can’t dance that way. I never learned how, and I don’t know if I ever will. I met the artists and mentioned something that I admired about their work, and where that leaves anyone I have no idea. It might be worse with writers and poets. The best that I can do with Daniel’s gift horse is to saddle it up and put a bit in its mouth, I haven’t learned how to ride it yet. We rode back to Centro de Tijuana and they dropped me off where the evening began, it was still early enough for a nightcap at the Dandy del Sur. I walked in and sat at the bar and ordered up a scotch and a beer. Baseball was on. This was my dance, the one I knew all of the steps to. The gentleman to my right, two stools over, began a conversation in Spanish with me. We talked about baseball, watched the game, and cheered for whichever team needed it. After a half-hour of Spanish, he turned to me between innings. "Are you refriedgringo?" he asked out of nowhere, in almost perfect unaccented English. I looked at him, and sort of grinned. "Actually, yes, I am. How did you know?" He smiled. "Who else would you be?" he told me. The ball game came back on and then we got lost in it for a while. |
| Friday, June 20th, 2008 | |
| 12:21 pm | Lesbians Without Tacos Mona was pretty, but more cute than anything else, in an odd way that you wanted to put your finger on but couldn’t. I was a freshman in college, or perhaps a sophomore. I’m not going to press my memory for that, lest I forget the most important things, or lest I forget the things that I know I never will. I worked full time, was in a rock band, and tabled sixteen credits. Even back then, I never really had a good idea what would happen next. I was all of eighteen or so. The rock band wasn’t bad; we were all in this college or that one, USC, Cal Poly, Mt. San Antonio, where ever. My destiny from the start, apparently, was to be a musician. I was born with perfect pitch. I could master any instrument that I took a liking to. Piano, or really any type of keyboard instrument, was my bitch. I could make a piano do anything I wanted it to do. I worked in foundries in my youth. I loved them. It was backbreaking, sweaty, thankless, and yet so rewarding. Taking molten metal, pouring it into a mold, cutting off the down-sprews and the risers and the gates. Sandblasting, testing, even machining. I got drunk on it. We were making something out of nothing. I miss it still. And also school inside of all of this. One day, working on a major in music, I was dutifully crafting something in a practice room, and a head kept peering in from outside of the door. I played on because I had the room reserved. Yet, the head kept appearing, some young girl from outside of the door was interested that I was in this particular practice room. Other practice rooms were unoccupied, I could tell from the lack of activity. Finally, I had to stop. I got up and opened the door. "Yes?" I asked her. She was maybe five feet tall. Compact. Cute. A smile that lit up the hallway. "I… um… was just listening to what you were playing," she said. "Ah, well, there are other practice rooms available," I told her. "Oh, I’m not a music major, I was just passing through," she informed me. It was awkward. "Can I come in and listen to you for a while? I promise not to bother you." I let her in. "Mona," she said, extending a hand, smiling, as if I were someone important. "Dave. Or David, whichever." Mona had these big brown eyes and freckles on her nose. Everything about her was warm and comfortable. She sat, and I played on, and she kept smiling as if to make me believe that everything I did was wonderful and special and amazing. My tongue is generally planted firmly in my cheek when I refer to Monday as lesbian night in the Dandy Del Sur. But this is also a truth, in part – it doesn’t necessarily have to be Monday for lesbians to enjoy a nice cold drink there, it could be any day. It does seem that Mondays are most likely, for whatever reason, the days to enjoy the very distant company of two girls who are unusually interested in each other. How would I know that they were lesbians? I didn’t used to. I went to the Dandy del Sur for a lot of years and only know of one lesbian that was self-professed. We occasionally watched a ball game and chatted from a distance. She was masculine, in her thirties, and drank her liquor straight. She knew the cantineras very well. Girls and women frequent the Dandy often, workmates or friends through other means; the Dandy is one of the only bars in Tijuana where females can comfortably enjoy a drink and not get pestered. Most Mexican men are aggressive, flaunting their desires with speed and verbosity, pouncing on their prey with drinks and propositions. But not in the Dandy del Sur. The Dandy is a safe haven, generally filled with professionals and artists of all different types. Mexican men who drink there have enough money, education, and class to have overcome what is considered to be culturally expected. I noticed this even before I learned that on some nights, as many as half of the female patronage might well be lesbians. Even before I started paying attention to it. Mona began to follow me around a lot, and I enjoyed her company. She always seemed to know where I would be, and we would snack out on the lawn outside of one of the music buildings. She was studying psychology. One day we were out there on the grass between classes and I was working on something. "David, I have to tell you something," she said. "Um. Sure," I answered, not looking up. "Before we go any farther," she continued. This got my attention; I had no idea that we should be going any farther. Going farther with what, exactly? In the two days that I had known her, nothing romantic appeared, I had no designs on it, and she didn’t seem to either. "With our friendship," she assured me, reading my face. "Ah, ok," I said and put away my work to give her my undivided attention. "I’m a lesbian," she confessed. I waited for more. "And?" I finally asked. "That’s it, that’s what I thought I should let you know," she finished. I shrugged. "Well, then we have something in common, Mona, we both like girls." Mona smiled really big and then hugged me as if I’d just given her a car. One Monday evening, after Scott and Jody and everyone else had left, I sat and sipped on my scotch. It was somewhat crowded in the Dandy, but there was still plenty of room at the bar. I was watching American football, taking stock of the people around me. There was one young lady who had been there for at least an hour, I had seen her there before with a friend. She was beautiful; brown skin, small firm body, occasionally smiling. She pretended to watch the television, sipping her beer, alone. She wore glasses, and it made here even more attractive, she was the diamond in this rough terrain of half-drunk stones. She sat five barstools away, occasionally chatting with a curious stranger; she was elegant and polite. She was so very young, perhaps twenty-two. I pulled out my laptop to distract myself and began to write, but the words came slow. She was buying her own drinks, and I kept thinking about how wrong it was. All of these young men in here, and no one was buying her a drink! I stewed in my own thoughts, frustrated and perplexed, she was so beautiful. I ordered another scotch. "Don’t look over there," I told the cantinera in Spanish. The cantinera decided to hate me, glaringly, she had no patience for my nonsense. "There is a pretty young lady in glasses sitting over there. I’m buying her a drink, but please don’t tell her whom it’s from. Put it on my tab, please." Mona was with me wherever I went, and then into the summer. She came with me to all of the band’s rehearsals and gigs; she was my best friend. We laughed at everything, pointed out attractive women to each other, and shared our darkest insecurities with one another. She had girlfriends, the most beautiful, sexy girls I’ve ever seen in my life, and all of them were smart. We partied a lot, too. And then one night it happened. As many times as I’ve gone over it in my head, I still can’t make any sense of it. It didn’t change our relationship outwardly, but I think that it was something that allowed us to both move on, to no longer be joined at the hip, and then to eventually drift apart forever. Listen: One night, there were a lot of us partying in some apartment that I rented on the west side, we were drinking and smoking and other things. Music blasted while people were getting blasted, and slowly the evening unwound with people coupling and escaping to somewhere, and me and Mona were left, high and watching a television screen. Mona was wound up. I had never seen her like that; she was crazy with desire, moving her hips against the carpet, until finally she got up. She extended her hand to me and helped me to my feet, and then didn’t let go of my hand. "Come on," she said, leading me to my bedroom. "What?" She just pulled me in, and then shut the door behind her. I stood there, I had no idea what she was doing or wanting, and then she walked up to me and I started to say something. "Mona..." "Shhh! I’ve always wanted to do this for you," she said. She began to kiss me, and I kissed back, her mouth was warm and sweet. Deeper, our kiss went from sweet to passionate, our mouths were locked, tongues exploring, and she pressed her body against me and felt that I was very aroused. The kiss lasted forever, I can feel it even now. Our mouths finally parted, and as we panted, Mona pulled off my shirt and put one hand on my chest, and then went slowly to her knees. My jeans fell to the floor, and she didn’t wait for me to step out of them, she went to work on me and took all of me as if it was something she had done all of her life. In probably two minutes, Mona inhaled my orgasm. I knew that I would never be on the receiving end of oral sex that would ever come close to what she had given me. She just looked up at me and smiled. "Where did you learn how to do that?" I asked her. She shrugged. "Was that the first?" "The second," she admitted. "I wanted you to be the first, but I decided to make a practice run on my brother’s friend. Was it good?" Then she pulled me down onto the mattress. We laughed and played and kissed all night until we slept. And then we never mentioned it again. The second beer that I had bought for the pretty young girl in the Dandy, anonymously, had pushed a button on the control box of the cantinera’s patience. She ratted me out, I saw the young girl look over at me out of the corner of my eye as I worked the laptop, and she raised her beer to me, to thank me. I was sheepish, it wasn’t what I wanted. I raised my scotch glass to her and smiled and nodded. I tried to work, to write in there, but I felt silly. I was now avoiding her glances. She finally came over and sat in the seat next to me. I closed the laptop; I was trapped in my own shining heart. We didn’t have much to say to each other, I told her that I bought her the drinks because no girl as beautiful as she was deserved not to have someone buying her drinks. She didn’t say anything. I was standing next to my stool, and she stood up and looked into my eyes, and kissed me. Sweetly at first, the kiss went into that deepness, then passion, and then more. Our tongues began to explore and she pressed her body up against mine, and felt my arousal, and went deeper still with the kiss. I felt myself losing control, that the kiss was more than arousing me, that it was going to be a forever kiss that was familiar distantly, and I became frightened at its intensity. I pushed her away, gasping. I excused myself and paid my tab and left the Dandy, it was Monday and there were no tacos that night. Two days later, Alex worked the day shift, I got to the Dandy at about five in the afternoon. I told her about what happened on Monday, and she smiled and laughed a little bit, I’m not so prone to accidental romantic encounters. I described the young girl to Alex. "Oh, you mean her? Yes, she’s a lesbian," Alex blurted out. "I don’t think so, I mean, that kiss..." "She is," Alex assured me. "Seriously? Maybe she’s bisexual," I offered. "Maybe, but she definitely likes girls," Alex said. "How do you know?" “Other than the fact that she brings her girlfriends in here, she hit on one of the cantineras the other night,” Alex informed me. “Which one?” I asked. Alex nodded in the direction of Sandra. And then, one week later, the pretty young girl came in with a girl friend. We acted as if nothing happened, just a nod in my direction. She was into her girlfriend, they discretely held hands underneath the bar. I called Alex over. "That’s her, right?" I whispered. Alex smiled and nodded. "Told you," she said. I left after one more drink while avoiding the taco stand, and I climbed into a cab. All of the way home I wondered about Mona. I wondered if Mona ever wondered about me. |
| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 | |
| 3:48 pm | Monster The laptop isn't dead, but the mouse refuses to work consistently. Tracing my finger along a small pad underneath a cramped keyboard never served me from the start. For the want of a properly functioning mouse, I have instead repaired one of the husks of many broken desktops that will never be discarded until time is set aside to remove the dead patient's organs. Thus, my Frankenstein monsters, such as the one I currently type on, are raised from the dead. This machine's brain is old, and the thought process and nerve centers are antiquated. So am I, then, in some ways. When I ask this monster to do something that it isn't immediately prepared to do, the hard drive sounds like a vacuum cleaner, motor spinning, sucking something into its delivery receptacle, and in a few moments, it complies. It has imperfections and character. I could add more memory and a burner and another hard drive, and other nifty qualities from other machines, but I won't. Like anything I've ever written, I could edit it over and over again; change the monster into something else, something better. But then it would lose its character. The character of the monster is the most important aspect, the key to beast. Sometimes that's important, especially when one needs to find its weakest qualities. And then, one becomes capable of realizing that every beast has a purpose. I once wrote a story about a baseball player on the fringe of being a professional. He was in the minor leagues, and then wound up in Mexico just hoping for a chance to hang on long enough to get a break somewhere else. He played in a fictitious league here, called the Baja league; I had minor league teams all over the place here. The players barely made money - they were traded for equipment, or even food. The story was horribly constructed, rushed, and put away quickly. I only let one person read it, a friend who would understand it perhaps, and not care about the literary quality of it. It was his pornography, in a sense, something he could relate to. A few days after I gave it too him, I had to tell him. "It's horrible. Very horribly written, rushed, with shallow characters and an improbable plot," I told him over a beer. "I know," he said, looking at the television in back of the bar, not changing expression. "But I liked it." The main character was traded to a team with deep pockets. They paid him well, and he started to play well, really well. The owner of the team had this beautiful daughter, who fell in love with the gringo baseball player, but in the end, when her love was unreturned, he was released. It didn't matter how well he played baseball, what mattered was how well he played anything else that would allow him to continue to play baseball. The story, obviously, was really about me. "Stop thinking of yourself as a writer. Think of yourself as an author," she told me, someone who likes what I write. This implies publishing, of course, which is a tricky proposition. The world isn’t asking for another novelist. The world wants everyone to watch television. The world lives through viewing itself on an electronic screen. Everyone is making videos, watching movies, and teething on a reality based in a rectangular box. Meanwhile, I listen to the radio and type. The monster I've created inside of myself doesn't watch television, or rarely does. He writes, and reads, and cooks, and wonders what factory or warehouse he'll wind up in next. The baseball player in my story is the writer that I see myself as. I can't seem to be able to do what it takes to be an author, to do whatever it takes to be able to write. Instead, I keep having to go back and work in Bukowski's Post Office. Soon, this monster inside of me will be grinding out a living in a factory again. I remember once when Charlie got into some trouble, that many years ago when he lived in Los Angeles that someone had duped him into doing something that wound up being illegal. Charlie came into the Dandy one afternoon, distraught, holding papers. "It's the multi-headed Hydra!" Charlie announced. "Twice, I thought that I killed it, that I chopped off the monster's head, but it keeps growing a new one!" The government was taking away his social security. They figured that Charlie owed them a lot of money. He had been scammed into doing something that he shouldn't have done so many years ago, and apparently, the action that was taken the first couple of times wasn't adequate. "Well, Charlie, you can appeal," I told him, reading the letter sent by the Government. "Already taken care of that, but I need your help," he said, and handed me about a dozen sheets of paper. On one side of the paper, there were sports betting odds from the sports book, and on the other side, was mostly illegible scrawl written hastily by Charlie, explaining his case against their claim. I read it the best that I could and argued with him because I wanted him to approach it completely differently, and we went around in circles. I finally acquiesced. "Fine, Charlie, but I'm doing it under protest," I told him. Charlie nodded. It took a few hours to unravel his writing; not having good eyes, he couldn't even see his own handwriting. He sent what I printed for him. A couple of weeks later, the Government dismissed the case, and Charlie had finally killed the Hydra. It wasn't his letter that did the trick; it was the simple act of the appeal. Apparently, too much time had elapsed from when the alleged event occurred, in order for the Government to make a case for collecting from it. Regardless of how, the monster was tamed. |
| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | |
| 4:39 pm | Ricardo Flores Magón History is time’s invention and time is humanity’s invention and humanity is often a big ugly liar. Other times, humanity is drunk and has no recollection; or else, a faulty one, changing both time and history to suit its needs, desires, and so on. History is often written with the pen of a hangover, making research difficult or impossible for accuracy’s sake. Where humankind is involved, mistakes are bound to happen. Researching the casinos that once sprang up in Tijuana after the turn of the century is a great example of how humans seem to want their demise to be remembered differently than it actually occured. The big casino, Aguas Calientes, either burned down, flooded out, or both, depending on whom one wishes to believe. Countless other rogue casinos also confound matters, by their ignored illegality during that era and by the confused historian that might use an inaccurate account of an incorrect location. My best source indicates that the same flood that destroyed the original racetrack also destroyed most of the casino. Daniel flails me for it, but it isn’t my fault. It isn’t his fault either. Our references are tipsy, at best. Even the origin of the name of the city of Tijuana is told in various ways. The most popular is from Tia Juana, or Aunt Jane, as having owned a friendly ranch here in the early days before anyone bothered to name the region. I have also read about three different indigenous tribes (depending on the story), that have some inebriated historians placing the name of the City of Tijuana as originating from the word Ticuan or Tihan or Tiwan and so on, all of which have some meaning to do with being near the ocean. But actually, no one really knows, the historians were all drunks back then I reckon. In nineteen hundred and twenty-five they even changed the name of the city of Tijuana to Zaragoza; too bad it didn’t stick or the point would be moot. Then again, the Dandy del Sur might be one-half block east of Calle Olvera instead of Avenida Revolución if it weren’t for the second Mexican revolution. Of course, had anarchist Flores Magón succeeded in ruling the Tijuana area from inside of the United States of America, where he was in exile in nineteen hundred and eleven - until the Mexican troops that Magón once supported finally came and drove his fellow anarchists into the United States of America or else killed them, then Baja California might even have become a communist country. Ricardo Flores Magón died in Leavenworth, by the way, after being arrested in 1918 by the United States of America for "obstructing the war effort" in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and received twenty years in prison. He didn’t make it out of there. Kurt Vonnegut’s moral hero, Eugene V. Debs, was also arrested in 1918 by the United States of America in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Small world. Debs made it out of prison though. At least Magón has a street named for him here, I have no idea about Debs. The worst thing I can think of to say about Debs and Magón is that they were men who truly wanted to make the world a better place, they just used the wrong tools. There was a time when Mexico would shine for me on days like last Saturday did, when the newness and the difference of everything I had ever come to understand about people and culture were as freshly plowed fields in my vision. I would swivel my thoughts like so many moving pendulums, they would miss and collide and sometimes fly free and disappear completely, and at some points I often had to reel from the dizzy mess I made with my perceptions. The simplest things, taken for granted elsewhere that I had ever been, are the things most special here. Mexico won’t let anyone take anything for granted; She’s a jealous mother tediously tending to her children. Mexico now shines for me every day, especially on days like last Saturday, because my perceptions have been saddled, harnessed, and reigned. A simple walk is a precious thing, especially on the tenth of May, Dia de las Madres. Small fiestas are everywhere, gently blending into the warm afternoon, sweet music and extended families spill out onto their front patios, it feels like a holiday. The streets aren’t so mean and people seem slower and happier. I strolled to the market and realized that just the trip was the shine, and that step by step is how spices are added to flavor anything that tastes good. In this way traditions are added to cultures like the shine I sometimes feel and the spices I sometimes taste and it all glistens and simmers and for years until I finally come to realize how good all of it really is. And that the whole world should be just this way, always. That was my last Saturday. We ate posole, from two huge pots full of it, and I was the only one who dared to sling dashes of habanero into my bowl. The gifts were beautiful picture collages of motherhood, from beginning to now, history lessons so simply arranged as to convey the idea of matriarchal necessity. Some people played games while others sat content for the opportunity to share the afternoon. More collages. These are things that history can never change, no matter which drunk is in charge of writing the particular chapter. The great thing about Saturday was that it will never have any relevance to politics or religion or whatever else makes written history swerve outside of the lane, because such events threaten no one on any level. Saturday made no statement, it only provided everyone with the great sense of hope and beauty and love. Ricardo Flores Magón wanted to provide the world with hope and beauty and love, too, but he wanted everyone to live in communes and outside of the control of a government. This is certainly not very comfortable for the government that doesn’t appreciate anyone wishing to live outside of the sphere of its ability to control. Magón’s movement was certainly powerful enough to affect the second Mexican revolution to the point where, after infecting Zapata’s peasant army with enough reason to fight to the impossible fight, Madero felt that he had no choice but to quell it even here in Tijuana. Even now, the Zapatistas in Chiapas embrace the Magónista movement from the turn of the twentieth century, it drives them toward whatever goal of autonomy that they feel they might be able to achieve. Yet, if Mexico City had thought enough to go after John Frémont, then Alto California might still belong to Mexico, imagine that. Or, perhaps, if Frémont had been a communist, then maybe either Mexico’s troops would have been dispatched in the most rapid manner possible; or else, again, Alta California might would have been a communist country. And then Magón would have been spared Leavenworth and then a suspicious death while in prison there. Cultural misconceptions are another source of inaccurate history. Duly, on Sunday, Mother’s Day in the united States of America, I called my mother and we talked a lot about a lot, and I shared one conversation that I had recently enjoyed with a young lady from the United States of America. This young lady was very nice and mentally sharp, and upon learning that I lived in Mexico she teased me with jokes about Mexico and Mexicans. But then she looked at me, and changed expression, serious as a nun in a habit. "Is it really true that in Mexico they eat beans with every meal?" She asked innocently enough. "Every meal. Even with corn flakes." The young lady looked at me, and only when I finally grinned after waiting a moment did she laugh. Sunday was lazy, too. Juan washed his car and drank my beer, I watched him while we continued to devour yesterday’s posole at random intervals. "The other day, I crossed into the United States and the customs guy was asking me a lot of stupid questions. Finally, I had enough. I told him that I was a United States citizen with a valid passport, and that I had already showed it to him. What else did he want from me?" Juan said. "You told him that you served in the military, I assume," I said. "I told him that it was how I got my citizenship," Juan told me. He scrubbed away at the motor with a rag that looked like it deserved to be a rag scrubbing a motor. "Finally the guy looked at me, and he asked me why I lived on Mexico. ‘Simple,’ I told him. ‘When I want a beer, I just go down the street and buy one. No one asks me any questions. No one cares who I am. I don’t have to get into my car and drive anywhere. I just go buy a beer.’ And then the guy looked at me, and he said, ‘Really?’ And I told him how it is here in Mexico." I grinned. "And he let you pass?" I asked sort of knowingly. "Of course!" My guess is that Flores Magón passed through the border with relative ease in the years of the second Mexican revolution, that there was really no point at the time in controlling border traffic. At any rate, he spent half of his time in jails and prisons in the United States anyway, because the Mexican government had a price on his head. Again, anarchy certainly isn’t an easy path to follow. Neither is communism, because communism is basically anarchy, except that someone is in charge of everything so that people who supposedly aren’t repressed but really are repressed, can’t challenge the concept of anarchy. So, there are people who feel that Magón got what was coming to him, and it’s difficult to argue that point. The wobbly route-cab held only me for the longest time. The driver tried at everyone, every person in view, no one needed anything at the moment. I was patient for him, early and entertained by wandering pedestrians and graffiti-ridden cinderblock, wondering who would bother to tag illegible scrawl onto the face of a mortuary. I wasn’t in any hurry to get anywhere in particular. "No hay nadie," he said, and there really wasn’t anyone, at least anyone that needed to get somewhere else. "Es Lunes, como las cuatro," I reminded him, Monday at four o’clock is a bad time to drive a cab. Many cab drivers just go home and take a nap. "Son las cuatro?" He didn’t have a watch. Finally we picked some people up, avoided striking other vehicles through what had to be divine intervention, and I found myself in the Dandy del Sur again, saying hello to old acquaintances. Scott showed up, we were catching up on life while watching the Cubs hammer the Padres. The quirky jukebox spun eclectically behind us, and lesbians crowded our space and then left, we moved over and took their seats. "No tacos tonight, he’s taking the night off," Scott reminded me, as I came back from checking, hopeful that somehow he would be wrong. Monday night in the Dandy del Sur, evidently, means that there will be many lesbians and no tacos. This would make for a great title to a short fictional story: Lesbians Without Tacos. Or maybe not. I was hungry. Scott left, and Daniel came in and we drank. There was even tequila. And then I began to inquire to anyone within earshot if there was a Chinese restaurant nearby that was any good at all. Fourth Street, on the other side of Constitución. We drank some more and then walked over there and the food was pretty good. Daniel had read what I wrote about Charlie and told me about my style and so on, but this is tantamount to telling a dog about its bark, the dog can’t change it even if it wants to. It was good, that Monday evening, especially when the Mexican waitress came over and asked us if we were brothers. "Brothers? No. We’re lovers," I told her, and Daniel actually had to get up and go over to her and tell her that I was kidding. The waitress didn’t take her eyes off of me after that, for the entire time that we were there. I guess I can’t fault her for assuming that Daniel and me are brothers; I reckon that white people all look the same. Maybe anarchists all look the same, too, maybe that’s why Ricardo Flores Magón was lumped in with Eugene Debs and all of the others who were locked up for being in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. So far as I’ve been able to research for the last week, Ricardo Flores Magón didn’t even speak English. So, either history is lying, or history has lied. |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |
| 11:26 am | One Thirty Four I have been asked about this year’s Kentucky Derby, which I suppose makes sense if one considers that I usually break this race down to nuts and bolts every year. I don’t win this race very often, I think it is, by far, the most difficult race to figure. Unless there is another Seattle Slew or Secretariat or in the race, anything can and often does happen. Twenty horses, about half of them deserving, enter this race almost every year and only one can win. So, in my opinion, it doesn’t make any sense to bet anything under 10-1 odds; it would offer no value in a contentious race like this one. In other words, if one feels that any of ten horses have a realistic chance at winning, then why would anyone accept odds and anything below that? So, unless something changes in the odds in the next few hours, I’ll watch it from home. Just like I did last year. And I think that Pyro, the #9 horse, will win Kentucky Derby number One Thirty Four at odds of 9-2, flying in from out of the clouds in deep stretch to catch Big Brown, the #20, 5-2 favorite, by a head. But don’t bet on it. |
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |
| 3:43 pm | Sandbox "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat’s Cradle, 1963 It was finally cold yesterday, at least colder than it had been, which was almost hot not more than a few days ago. The taxi was a colectivo, filled and emptied and then filled and emptied again. Doctors, schoolchildren, cooks, shoppers, and so on - even a gringo. The station wagons have been replaced with large passenger vans, they’ll cram in as many as will fit, stopping for anyone who looks like they're waiting for anything. We chugged along and stopped at practically every stoplight. Nine miles and nine pesos later, I waded through schoolchildren in their uniforms, parents wandering aimlessly, early morning maintenance workers. Through the gates, with a buenos dias, I suddenly realized that I had no idea where Anna’s classroom was. I went to the last one that I remembered was hers and recognized the teacher, who was already addressing the parents, and here I was actually late for once. "Entra, señor, sentirse," she invited. I felt relieved that she recognized me, I sat at the small cramped desk in the back, and she continued as I stared out the window. Anna’s school, a Federal Secondary school for somewhat elite students, rests on the ruins of the old casino, destroyed in the early nineteen hundreds by the same great flood that destroyed the original Caliente racetrack. All that is still standing are a few small buildings, converted to storage, and one of the chimneys that were once used to burn trash. The teacher went on about whatever, evidently cell phones are being confiscated for having pornographic content; it’s a different world than when I was last in school. Forty minutes later, she was handing out report cards by calling the students’ name, but Anna wasn’t called. Fifteen minutes after that, I finally had a chance to ask why – it turns out that I was in the wrong classroom, the correct classroom was, evidently, way over there. I was playing in the wrong sandbox. Thankfully, I didn’t have to sit through another meeting, I just got the report card and got out of there. David Kirshstein just pissed me off, that’s all there was to it, he used the company I worked for to suit his needs and his pocketbook, I considered his company to be a bad client. When me and Elvin started planning the Chargers job, all of the field walls at Qualcomm Stadium, I was sure that we would fall on our ass. I’ve never done a stadium, neither had Elvin. And Elvin’s work ethic was never exactly stellar, I got along with him because I liked him, but there was never any urgency in anything he did once he became the art director. But what drove me, was imagining that Kirshstein had lost the bid to us, and that on opening day he would be watching the game to see how the treatment came out, and that he would have a fucking coronary when he saw how great it all was. And then, perhaps, we could consider ourselves as competition, we were sure that the Miami Dolphins were going to need new field wall banners. So I learned Adobe’s Illustrator as I went along, planning the construction, the dimensions, four different measurements, hours and hours of painstaking calculation and planning. In the end, I drew it all up, and Elvin dropped the art into the construction drawings, and we printed it, finished it, and installed it, and it looked beautiful. And with one week to go before my last day, there was Kirshstein, sitting in our conference room with me and my boss, offering us some work on the Padres. We were on our ass, there wasn’t anything coming in, a lot of people had been laid off already. So, even though I wanted to tell him to go pound beach-sand up his tight ass, I pretended to be a hungry vendor. And he played us, he played my boss, and he got over. "We need to put something up on the barbecue shack, we’re thinking of signage all around the top of it," Kirshstein offered. We had a rough sketch, a sixteen-foot by seven-foot square box. "We’ll have you print graphics and lay them up on the sides, after we attach it to the roof," he continued. Then he looked at me. "How’s your carpentry skills," he asked. "Well, I’m not going to try to build you a dresser, but I can build this, it isn’t complicated," I told him. My boss didn’t say anything, even though later she insisted that she offered me a way out of having to do it. This is pretty funny to me now, considering that we really had no business turning down anyone who wanted work from us. The other funny thing is that after I prepped all of the half-inch medium density overlay, I built it in the middle of the shop floor while the sewers look on, entertained. I sat in the middle of the partially constructed box, fitting the hardware. "You know what that looks like? It looks like you’re playing in your sandbox," Shari told me. Kirshstein’s final design was almost twice as large, and twenty times more complicated and detailed. He called out bracing with hardware that wasn’t commercially available, so I improvised. And then he decided that someone else was going to print the graphics, which was the entire point of fabricating the sign face. The last week I worked there, I spent it fabricating that goddamned box. I did it by myself. I digitally routed every piece to size, hand routed forty-five degree chamfered edges on the braces, hand-installed the hardware. It was disassembled with assembly instructions, driven to Petco Park, and installed in less than two hours. There is a piece of me that wants it to fall apart, but it won’t. Fuck you anyway, Kirshstein. Fuck you and fuck your sandbox. I left Anna’s school and caught another cab, a sedan this time, and the driver didn’t seem keen on picking up anyone else. He even drove me right to the spot I wanted to get off, away from the route, and there I was in my own sandbox for a change. Another four miles and nine pesos later, I was having a coffee with Jody, the overcast last day of April was appropriate for Baja. I bought a paper and walked across the street and me and Jody talked for a while. I drank Cuban coffee and walked around all over the place, I sat and read the paper while drops of water occasionally made their way onto the sports page. By ten, I was in the Perico, and by eleven, Jody showed up again. We laughed at the picture in the San Diego paper, the one that showed all of these soldiers in Tijuana to fight the drug trafficking violence. There they were, maybe two hundred soldiers in the heat of the Baja morning, and one lone ice cream vender offering relief from the heat. He was pushing his cart along, offering his goods, and I bet he sold a lot that day. That was his sandbox, and he had a captive audience. People sometimes ask me if it’s dangerous what with the cartels killing other cartels or each other in a power struggle, but the smart people aren’t worried about it. After all, so long as they keep it in their sandbox and stay out of ours, what’s the difference? None of it bothers me in the least. It might as well be a million miles away from here. I drank all day and wandered around and when Jody found me again in the Dandy del Sur, we were both about finished for the day. We were shaking the sand from our shoes and having one more drink, watching the Padres come back on the Phillies, planning our next toast. Friday evening, same sand box. Tomorrow, I have to go to the United States of America and pick up the last check from the place I used to work. Tomorrow, I have to visit someone else’s sandbox one last time. And then, afterward, I’ll come back here with my pail and my shovel and build sandcastles the way that I want to for a while. And my sandcastles will be however I want them to be. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 11:07 pm | Documentation It delights me to no end that I didn’t have to present any papers or documents to anyone today. And it delights me even more that I won’t have to do it tomorrow, either. I have a cell phone upstairs, it has been plugged in for weeks, charging. The signal doesn’t even reach to here. The biggest decision I’ll have to make in the next few days is if I want to go to the United States of America in order to pay for another month’s service on a cell phone I never use anymore. Of course, if I don’t have the proper documentation, the Government of the United States of America will not let me go anyway, so if I can conveniently forget my papers then the problem will solve itself. I woke up late this morning, half-past seven, too late to go to Centro. I got up anyway and made coffee, and I thought about Jody and Scott sitting in the Café Francaís, sipping Columbian coffee and poring over the newspapers, maybe wondering where in the hell I am. I wanted to be there. But here was good, too. Here, I finished my coffee and wrote and opened a beer at about half-past ten and wrote some more. And it worked out exactly how it was supposed to work out. I soon realized that tomorrow I have to go to Anna’s school, every trimester the parents or guardians are obligated to represent themselves and get the grades. Starting at seven in the morning, this meeting can go on for hours, although my patience will run out long before that and I’ll excuse myself and politely leave. I’ll be the only gringo there anyway. And maybe even the only man. And no one will ask me to present any identification there to prove who I am. So, the trip I didn’t take today can be taken tomorrow. I won’t see Scott tomorrow but maybe Jody will be there, and we’ll talk about the Red Sox or the Padres. Then, maybe at ten o’clock tomorrow morning we’ll wander over to Calle Sexta and open up the Perico. We’ll drink until Jody wants to head up to Zona Norte, and then I’ll wish him luck. And then I’ll leave there, too. I’ll wander the streets, maybe I’ll go to the seafood district and get some fresh clams in the shell, maybe a kilo of shrimp. The girls at my favorite place to buy fresh seafood pretend have a thing for me, maybe tomorrow I’ll invite them dancing and drinking, and we’ll laugh and pretend that we have some sort of clandestine date for Friday night. I love the way they smell, the way they look at me and smile and tease me with those bedroom eyes. It makes me feel so human. I’ll wander around some more, probably stopping by the Dandy del Sur for one last drink. And I’ll think about how all day people are just being people and sharing space on this planet, and sometimes they enjoy making each other feel good about this place. No one is asking anyone else to prove who they are, and mostly everyone accepts everyone else for whomever they claim to be. On my way home, still not having to present any documentation to anyone, I’ll think about how in other countries it probably isn’t like this, and then I’ll arrive more than sober and less than drunk and take a little nap. And I’ll dream about living in a world where no one has to prove anything to anyone except to his or her own self. |
| 5:53 pm | Spaghetti There aren’t many gas appliances in Mexico that utilize a pilot light, no one wants to waste the propane on mere convenience. The only exception is that some people allow the water heater to keep that small flame lit, but nothing else. Especially not the stove and the oven. So, when I went out into the kitchen just a minute ago, Rocio told me that she was having trouble getting the oven going, could I please light it. No problem. I opened the even, and lit a match and turned on the gas. I brought the flame into the tube, and then it caught... BAROOM! Apparently, Rocio had been trying and trying to light that oven. The propane, having nowhere else to go, gathered heavily and waited for some poor bastard to come along with a match. The oven, full of wayward propane gas waited for some poor bastard dressed in nothing but a robe. The blast blew the oven apart, and out from the wall, with racks and doors thrown wherever. And coincidentally, I just found a wonderful new way to remove hair from one’s legs, I’m silky smooth from the knees down. Propane explosions are quicker than anything you can buy at Walgreen’s. I just checked, because I had to, and my testicles are still there, albeit very frightened. "Does this mean that we’re not going to have garlic bread tonight," Rocio asked. "Um," I said, and turned right around and got the hell out of the kitchen. Suddenly, I'm not very hungry. |
| 12:53 am | I am Livejournal user number 1922. I have no idea what distinction this holds, but I reckon that after eight years, I deserve the right to set some ground rules here. So, after a short absence, I went back and deleted friends that haven't posted in two years or more. Then I deleted friends with which I have no contact; either we never comment on each others entries or I comment on theirs but I get the feeling that they would rather I just go away. So I will :) Anyone who still wants to read my stuff can always bookmark http://refriedgringo.blogspot.com as I mirror almost all entries there, we don't necessarily have to be friends here. Except for this: That explicit sex and excessive alcohol consumption will remain only here, because my parents are still alive and I don't want to give them any reason to go into cardiac arrest on my part. Not that there is ever an overdose of that, but you never know, I could get my second wind any day now. So anyway, all other suggestions for improvements are always welcome. |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 2:09 pm | Carcacha Y Se Les Retacha Somewhere in the mean streets in the Federal District of Mexico City, the Chilangos are running their shell games where the coppers are the robbers and the taxistas are the storytellers, and they speak their own language. A subculture, Chilangos sometimes speak Caliche (or Caló they sometimes call it), which is very loosely based on Spanish and Mexican slang. They have a saying there, a saying I’ve adapted for myself, to keep me sane in times that insanity insists on trying to harsh my mental sweetbread. Carcacha y se les retacha, which loosely translates as bounces off of me and sticks to you. After about three years of being miserable on and off, I am happy every day now. I wake up and make coffee and write. At ten o’clock, I get a beer from the refrigerator and write. In the afternoon I go to the store, then I start dinner. Then I write some more after dinner, sometimes until three in the morning. On Tuesdays, I go down to Centro and see Jody and Scott and we drink Cuban coffee and speak in English. Sometimes I go on Friday night, we meet at the Dandy del Sur. Mostly, I have been staying home and writing and cooking. My stress level, which must have been off of the charts a month ago, is at a wonderful flat-line, now that I don’t have to cross the border every day. I’m going to try to make it last forever. The only thing I miss, really miss, is my cab ride to the border. Miguel took me and Anna for a long time, we dropped Anna off at school and continued on from there. Miguel had a passport, he crossed the border at least once a week for groceries or clothing or parts for his taxi. He spoke some English. Ten dollars a day. We would talk about baseball, football, soccer, anything. We would see a large dark vehicle with tinted windows and make out the silhouettes inside, carrying automatic weapons, screaming down the road on their way to somewhere. "Good guys or bad guys?" Miguel would say. "Cops or Criminals? What’s the difference?" I would answer. We would laugh about that a lot. And even when I got to work I was good, but sometimes it only took an hour until the pressure became too much. In the end I was even running machines. I wasn’t even supposed to know how to run some of the machines, but there wasn’t anyone left to do it. "She doesn’t want me here anymore," I told Rick, about a year ago. "You’re wrong, Dave, how can you say that?" "Trust me, she has other plans, and they don’t include me. I know when I’m not in my bosses future plans, I’ve been through this a few times, I’m telling you it’s just a matter of time, so be prepared." Rick shook his head. "Why?" he asked. "I don’t know why, Rick. But I know." Of course, a year ago I didn’t have the magic words I now have. Carcacha y se les retacha. I gave two weeks notice nearly a year after my boss, for reasons that I’ll likely never know, carved her intentions for my lack of a future with the company into the planks of the floor I walked on. I saw it every day, in so many different ways, until one day I finally called her on it in a meeting with the owner of the company; subtly, but firmly enough to illicit her true intentions. The company, for lack of sales, was struggling. "It will get to a point where you might not be able to afford me, you need to keep that in mind," I said, even though my pay had already been cut significantly. "If you lay off some of the younger guys, they’ll get another job quickly, but with me you have a better opportunity to get me back once the company is back on its feet," I offered. Knowing that she would never lay me off and give me the satisfaction of possibly collecting unemployment, I knew that her reaction to my statement would hold the key. "Then, who will run the router? I don’t have anyone else to run the router," she countered. So, I knew, then, that the only likely reason in her mind that I wasn’t entirely expendable was for fear of not being able to run a machine. I trained Rick, and I waited, and sure enough she decided to make it unbearable, it didn’t take long. One morning not long after that meeting, I came into work and the pressure was immediate, another day of trying to do the impossible with no resources. Then my boss, obviously sensing that I was at a breaking point, pulled the stress trigger. I calmly walked into my office and sent her an email. It was short, sweet, and to the point, but it might have well said this: Carcacha y se les retacha. Here’s another comforting thought I’m enjoying at the moment: Whatever happens next, happens next. Music by Café Tacuba Interpreted from a song by Juan Jaime López (My translation into English is not direct; it is loose in order to provide a better feel for the song.) CHILANGA BANDA Ya chole chango chilango (I’ve had enough of you Chilangos) que chafa chamba te chutas (what bad jobs you have) no checa andar de tacuche (your uniform doesn’t suit you) y chale con la charola! (and you bring your ugly badge) Tan choncho como una chinche (so fat, like a blood-filled flea) mas chueco que la fayuca (more crooked than the contraband) con fusca y con cachiporra (with a gun and a wooden club) te pasa andar de guarura. (you like to think you’re a bodyguard) Mejor yo me echo una chela (better, then, I’ll have a beer) y chance enchufo una chava (and try and find me a girl) chambeando de chafirete (working as a driver) me sobra chupe y pachanga. (leaves me enough to drink and to party) Si choco saco chipote (If I crash into another driver) la chota no es muy molacha (the cops don’t bother me much) chiveando a los que machucan (they extort the one with the money) se va a morder su talacha. (then they’ll bite the hand that feeds them) De noche caigo al congal (At night, I go to the club) no manches dice la changa ("Don’t be ridiculous," she says,) al choro del teporocho (to his drunken propositions,) en chifla pasa la pacha. ("Just buy me another drink.") Pachucos, Cholos y Chundos, (Wise-guys, gangsters and robbers,) Chichinflas y Malafachas (pimps and delinquents) aca los Compiras rifan (this is where the thieves are) y bailan Tibiritabara. (dancing to the tropical sound) Mejor yo me echo una chela (better, then, I’ll have a beer) y chance enchufo una chava (and try and find me a girl) chambeando de chafirete (working as a driver) me sobra chupe y pachanga (leaves me enough to drink and to party) Mi ñero mata la vacha (my partner smokes marijuana) y canta la cucaracha (and sings "La Cucaracha") su choya vive de chochos (his head taken over with pills) de chemo, churro y garnachas. (and glue and joints and junkfood) Pachucos, Cholos y Chundos, (Wise-guys, gangsters and robbers,) Chichinflas y Malafachas (pimps and delinquents) aca los Compiras rifan (this is where the thieves are) y bailan Tibiritabara. (dancing to the tropical sound) Transando de arriba abajo (Covering every part of town) ahi va la chilanga banda (that’s how the Chilangos are) chinchin si me la recuerdan (they’ll pay if they try and screw me) carcacha y se les retacha (It will bounce off of me and stick to them) |
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |
| 12:25 pm | Bad Encounter "What good are dreams if they come true?" - Frederick Exeley, A Fans Notes, 1968 Outside, the moon was in its last quarter and approaching newness once again and the silver sliver floated across the Tijuana skyline. Mostly all of Tijuana notices none of this, what with comings and goings and constructing and remodeling – almost everyone is perpetually busy here. Even the taco vendor on the corner was oblivious to the moon’s cycle; he was busy pawing through his goods with a large metal spoon, stirring the rice and creaming the frijoles, poking around into every metal pot and letting loose the smells that are so coveted on the southeast corner of Calles Sexta and Madero. I caught only glimpses of it through the traffic that continued to obscure my view, so I went back inside and joined Scott on the north side of the long bar in the Dandy del Sur. "I’m trying to make sense of it," Scott said. "Sense of what?" I asked through my glass of beer. "Sense of life! Why in the hell are we here, Dave? What in the hell are we supposed to be doing?" We took turns subconsciously glancing over to where Charlie always sat at the end of the bar. The stool was unoccupied, and has been mostly unoccupied by anyone for over four lunar cycles. In four lunar cycles, five hundred and thirty bottles of beer went unconsummated by someone sitting on that stool in the corner. One hundred and ninety-four celery stalks never found their way into a small glass dashed with lemon and picante sauce. Forty-four lottery tickets were not split with the wife if the owner of the Dandy, two hundred and twenty shots at obtaining financial independence not taken. And so on. These statistical observations are about as hollow as the insignificance of the moon’s cycle. After all, the moon is made of cheese. There was a hole in Scott’s universe, made more obvious by the fact that there was also a hole in my universe. Scott had recently loaned me Frederick Exeley’s first novel, and I found myself thinking about the hole that was in Exeley’s universe. Exeley continually filled the hole in his universe with alcohol and the football New York Giants. It occurred to me right then that perhaps Exeley was correct about one particular thing, no matter how much of a drunk or a raving lunatic he seemed to be. I sat there for a minute and refocused, biting back on my cynicism and thinking about the taco cart outside on the corner. The taco cart might as well be the center of the universe, and all of that rice and creamed frijoles and chile rellenos and milanesa and lengua en salsa verde and on and on, are all different dreams that we dream – cravings wrapped in a tortilla underneath the Tijuana moonlight. We are, even in our sleep, barking at the moon - full or not full. These dreams sustain us, we’re always hungry for more, and such dreams drive humanity to do what it does. We build monuments, invent religions, war with each other, make love, pollute the planet, save the whales, overdose on drugs, perform heart transplants, and so on. Science, that great religion that attempts to find an explanation for everything whether an explanation is deserved or not, keeps trying to figure out which ingredients of, say, tacos de bistek con papas, might cause some people to, say, cut down some trees in the Amazon. Exeley’s argument might be that dreams are not supposed to be understood, that science has no business breaking out causes and effects when it comes to dreams, and that the idea isn’t that dreams come true; rather, that dreams are consumed. "I think that after we finish this beer, we’re supposed to be eating tacos," I told Scott. New moons become full in a very short time, and then become new again and then full again and so on. This cycle has occurred over six hundred times during my existence on this planet, and will continue to occur until mankind blasts the moon from the sky; or else until the universe begins to implode, up to the point where our galaxy is sucked back into the celestial utensil drawer from whence it came. Put the large metal spoon away, no more tacos! The moon will, then, be a simple afterthought in humankind’s invention called time, in either case. At some point, the fragile relationship that this planet has with its one and only satellite that was not made by humanity will come to an end. All of this taking for granted of the moon’s relationship with humanity will either never have happened or will happen still, however one wishes to perceive the cycle, but the essence of the moon’s cycle will be no more. All cycles eventually come to an end, no more cheese. If the universe is, indeed, some thirteen-point-seven billion years old, and this planet and its moon are, in fact, around four-point-six billion years old, then the lunar cycle for this planet has occurred almost sixty-billion times. The debate rages concerning humankind’s history on this planet, but the earliest proof of anything resembling a human being dates back to seven million years ago; or, it could be assumed that all of humankind has witnessed no more than ninety-one-point-two-five million lunar cycles. This makes me feel very young, indeed. "Look, I know this sounds silly, but everything is happening just like it’s supposed to happen," I told Scott, just before we gorged ourselves on tacos. Scott looked up at me over his reading glasses, smirked, and then smiled. "Really," he said sardonically, folding the eyewear into his jacket pocket. "All I have to go on are empirical observations," I warned. Scott was unmoved, so I was in for a fight. "Ahem. Our reason for existence, our job, so to speak, is to destroy this plant," I said blandly. "Dave, how can you say that?!" "Scott, think about it, that’s what we’re doing. And I don’t mean this in a negative sense, but we’re doing a damned good job. We’re not supposed to destroy it as fast as we can, in whatever way possible, we’re supposed to break it down in a certain way, inside of a certain time frame; not too fast and not too slow. In other words, there needs to be environmentalists and there needs to be greedy capitalists, and they need to make sure that this planet is broken down properly, that’s part of the plan." I pictured the taquero outside on the corner stirring the rice and priming the tortillas, pot lids clinging while all of humanity licked their collective chops. "What about free will?" Scott asked. "That’s all part of it, somehow it’s all part of the equation, that free will is factored in there, it has to be. Whatever the plan is, the planner had to have figured that free will would direct humanity more than anything else would - assuming that there is, in fact, a planner. And that’s the other great part! I have no idea about the structure of the plan, and I don’t have to worry about it. Things are happening exactly the way they are supposed to be happening!" We ordered one last round and drank quickly, and I went on hoping the tacos would last until we got there. "All of this philosophy of mine takes just one small leap of faith on your part. You have to forget everything that you ever learned about the nature of time. Time isn’t linear; it isn’t from here to there or from beginning to end. Time is circular, but not circular like a cake or a basketball, it is both here and there, it is everywhere." "Um," Scott said. "Seriously, Scott, think about it, if we get some nuclear-powered microscope and look at a very distant planet, we are looking at that planet’s past! And, quite probably, our future! And if we were actually on that planet and looking through the same microscope back toward this planet, we would be looking at our planet’s past while living in our planet’s future. This is proof that our concept of time is all screwed up, because if time were really linear, it would never behave like this!" We downed the last of our beers. "In other words, Scott, all of this is happening because all of this has already happened. And all of this is going to happen. Charlie isn’t here because he’s not supposed to be here, but Charlie is here, was here, and will be here. Always! In fact, the same thing is happening with you and me!" Scott didn’t argue, but neither did he appear to be convinced. I don’t blame him, I wasn’t too convincing. We got out of there and ate some tacos on the corner while the moon smiled sideways overhead. Over four lunar cycles ago, I had finally finished cooking Christmas dinner, a bit tired from all day in the kitchen; it takes from dawn until the late afternoon to cook enough food for everyone who shows up. Three turkeys, fully stuffed and perfectly browned, patiently waited while lavishly surrounded by loads of sweet potatoes, wild rice, corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, and so on. The dinner rolls were about finished, Rocio helped me to toss them into a large towel-covered bowl while more than two dozen guests pretended not to anticipate the upcoming feast. After all, it smelled fabulous. I opened the drawer and reached for a ladle, and stopped – my eyes affixed on the corkscrew. Charlie had always brought the wine on Christmas evening, always a light red, not too dry, and always good. I grabbed the ladle and slammed the drawer a little too hard. Rocio came around the corner into the kitchen in a moment. There is a rhythm to the clanging pot-lids at every taco stand that sells tacos various in Tijuana, and obviously, I do not have that gift. "Are you ok?" she asked, long and thin fingers reaching out and gently touching the handle of the drawer. "Sorry," I said. "I’m tired, I’ve been doing this all day." We grabbed plates and silverware and set the tables, and the wineglasses stayed in the cupboard. I was very much not ok, fatigue aside, I was angry and emotional and about a dozen other indescribable and indefinable feelings permeated my soul on Christmas evening. I swallowed it back the best that I could, but even as Rocio dared not argue that my attitude was or was not simply attributed to exhaustion, she knew better, she always knows better, and she kept a sharp eye on me after that. I looked at Rocio, we stood at the head of the table before Christmas dinner was served. "You know how to say Christmas grace, like Charlie always did," I quietly assumed in her ear. "I’ll say something afterward." "You want me to say grace in Latin?!" "No, in Spanish, nobody here understands Latin, I mean the traditional Catholic grace," I said. Charlie always said grace in Latin. "Nuestro Padre..." Rocio bravely began. Over four lunar cycles ago I had taken a couple of days off, and then on a Wednesday after work I showed up at the Dandy del Sur and drank Noche Buena and waited for Charlie to show up. Five-thirty came and went and someone said that Charlie hadn’t been in there all week, but no one knew for sure because some had been there Monday but not Tuesday or Tuesday but not Monday and maybe not between five-thirty and seven-forty and so on. I listened to everyone and tried to make sense of it. Charlie was as punctual as an atomic clock; this wasn’t at all like him. Punctuality and routine was Charlie’s trademark, he was more than a simple creature of habit and he invited this discipline to define himself. There were those of us who admired this aspect of Charlie, the art of routine. And even those who thought it absurd still managed to set their watches by Charlie’s comings and goings. Scott came in twenty minutes later and I explained everything to him. "I know where he lives, I’ve been there," Scott offered. "If Charlie doesn’t show up tomorrow night, then let’s go see what’s going on," I said. I strongly believe in privacy, that everyone basically wants to be left alone from time to time. Maybe Charlie had the flu, it was going around like a spinning top all over Baja four-and-a-half lunar cycles ago. A couple of the guys in the Dandy said that they saw Charlie at the race and sports book on Monday or Tuesday morning. That would be just like Charlie – no matter how he felt, he would always make his way to the sports book every morning, he loved to have action down on the games. And, in his own way, Charlie had every game in town covered, he knew what he was doing. Scott came late to the Dandy the next day and still no Charlie, so we finished our beers and took off down Calle Sexta going west for a few blocks until we arrived at F. F. Martinez and Scott insisted that we go south, which didn’t work out. I finally got him to go north and we paced back and forth on the east side of the street trying to figure it all out. There was an older woman standing at an open gate leading into a dark tunnel, with countless electricity meters lining one side of the wall of the tunnel for all of the distance that I could see in. The woman was carrying a skateboard, making the scene appear even more absurd. The old woman with the skateboard was all we had. In Spanish, I told her that we were looking for a friend of ours, that we hadn’t seen him in a week and we were worried. "Amigos de Charlie?" she asked. "Ven, Charlie vive aqui, muy enfermo es Charlie", she told us, Charlie was very sick. Scott and me followed her past the gate through that tunnel – and out another gate, which led to a rectangular cement patio surrounded by apartments that looked more like motel rooms that went up to three floors high. The lady pointed up, second floor, I rushed up the steps and Scott followed. Looking through a window I saw Charlie, that radio pressed to his ear, lying sideways on his bed. The door was locked, but the window was open next to it, and it didn’t take much to get at the doorknob from the inside. Charlie couldn’t speak very well, he looked stunned; everything looked all wrong. "We’ve got to get him to the other side of the border," I told Scott. My cell phone didn’t dial into the emergency numbers in Mexico. I walked out of the door of Charlie’s place and asked someone to call an ambulance, and the doors closed abruptly. No on wanted to get involved. I ran outside to the payphone, but it was broken, so I ran back up to Charlie’s apartment. "Scott, I’m going to run over to the police station," I said. And I looked at Charlie and said, "Charlie, hang in there, buddy, help is on the way!" Charlie understood, I could see that recognition, even if he couldn’t say much of anything at the moment. I ran out into the Tijuana night and covered six city blocks as fast as I could. Rocio finished the Christmas dinner grace, and I stood silently, thinking about what should be said next. I thought I should explain the absence of Charlie to the guests, but I reckon now that I was trying to make sense of it myself. I cleared my throat. "Every year, a close friend of mine, and a close friend of this family has joined us for Christmas dinner," I began in Spanish. There were no wineglasses, where were the goddamned wineglasses? "His name is Charles Anthony Smith. Unfortunately, he can’t make it this year." I stopped, and everything hit me all at once. "I am going to miss him so much..." I broke down and had to go out back. Rocio stoically took control and explained everything to the guests, and the turkey was carved and everyone was served while I sat on the Maytag outside of the back door. Tears were rolling down my face, and I just sat there and drank Noche Buena like nothing happened. Anna and Sharon appeared after a short moment, I don’t think they ever saw me cry before. "It’s ok," I told them through a long and thick hug, "I’ll be ok." But I wasn’t ok, it took a while longer than that just to get to this point, and there are no guarantees that I’ll ever be the same again. Charlie was my friend. Maybe twice every month, he brought his mail into he Dandy, and I read it to him, letters from his sister Kathy, various bills, and unwanted solicitations. Sometimes we loaned each other money. We would buy each other a beer now and again. We were great pals. And it was more than just that. I knew every medical ailment, every appointment with the doctor, his entire schedule. He made sure of it, even if I didn’t care to hear about it. Charlie trusted me. He trusted me enough to make sure that I was aware of his every movement. I knew the appointed night that his lady-friend showed up, the day he did his laundry, dental appointments, every place that he ate, each bet that he ever laid down. That trust means more to me than anything, I miss it, and I miss my friend. Sometimes I still hear him chuckling, radio pressed to his ear, and I hear him telling me about the one game that screwed his eight-game parlay. I hear him tell me about his dentist, and about some young new waitress in his favorite diner, and about how he is going to church in the morning for some obligatory mass. I don’t think that Charlie’s voice will ever leave me, I think that his voice will outlive the man in the moon. Four and one-half lunar cycles ago on a cold, dark Friday night, I cautiously ran into the police station and explained the situation. I told them that a friend of mine was in bad shape and we had to get him to a hospital on the other side of the border. Rather than simply to call an ambulance, they decided to take me to Charlie’s place with them, which was all right by me, I just wanted some action taken. It seemed to take forever, and while I waited I stepped outside and called Scott. "Scott?" "Dave!" "Scott, we’re on our way, we’ll be there in a minute!" "Dave, I think he just died! I think Charlie’s gone, man!" "No way, Jesus Christ!" "I think he just died on me, Dave!" I got into the back of a police truck and we squealed out of there. "I’ll be there in a minute, Scott!" I said and hung up. I grabbed onto the roll bar of the pick-up and fed navigation instructions into the cab, alongside me was a serious-looking young man in uniform with a seriously powerful automatic weapon in his right hand. He tried to chat me up about who Charlie was and my relationship to him, but I was preoccupied. We rolled to a stop and I led them in and up, Scott was outside of the apartment by then. All around us, curious eyes peered onto the scene like cats at a goldfish bowl. I looked at Scott, hopefully. He looked down and shook his head. Charlie was gone. The Mexican Police seemed a bit panicked, and two Red Cross people appeared out of nowhere. Scott’s Spanish isn’t so good, but mine is. The Red Cross had already been there in the afternoon and Charlie had refused to go with them, the same two people that were here right now. They told us all sorts of things that they thought had happened to Charlie, none of them turning out to be even close to the truth. Then the police wanted to talk to Scott and me. We were being questioned, and the line of questioning was quite disturbing at first. "Look," I told them in Spanish, "You’re wasting your time, we’re Charlie’s friends. Think about it, why in the hell would I run down to the station to get you guys over here? First of all, none of us knows exactly what happened, and yet, here we are hanging around. If we had anything to do with this, why in the hell would we be here? I live here, so does Scott. Just let it play out, stop being cops for a minute." They appeared as though they were going to get more aggressive, but I guess they thought about it, and I guess it started to make sense. "You have to wait for forensics to get here, you can’t leave until they are finished." Scott and I talked, under the still somewhat suspicious eyes and ears of the Tijuana police. "What happened?" I asked Scott, wondering. "Dave, it was surreal. After you took off for the police station, Charlie asked for some water. I talked to him. I gave him some water, which he drank rapidly, I had to stop him. ‘Charlie, what happened,’ I asked him. And you know Charlie, you know how his answers are sometimes purposefully nebulous. He raised his hand and held up one finger and said, ‘I had a bad encounter.’ And I laughed a little bit but before I could ask him what he meant, I heard a sound, as if he just let out all of the air in his lungs. I felt for a pulse, and there wasn’t anything. Charlie was gone." "What does that mean, Scott? ‘I had a bad encounter’..." "You know how Charlie speaks sometimes. He enjoyed ambiguity." As the hours passed, the cops finally relaxed. Scott and I sat alone, cold and wondering at the steps of the second floor. "Dave, I have to take a leak," Scott finally said. "They’ll yell at you if you leave," I told him, but he had to go anyway. Somehow, as they chased him down in the parking lot, he managed to convince them to give him five minutes, and Scott came back, and forensics finally showed up. They were very professional, and very meticulous. We finally got out of there after midnight. "I need a drink," I told Scott. We went to the Dandy del Sur, and tried to get warm, but cold hole inside of us wouldn’t let that happen, even with liquor and the heat from the night people surrounding us. I took Rocio with me to the morgue the next morning. The funny thing about the morgue in Tijuana, assuming, of course, that anything about a morgue could be amusing in any way, is that anyone can accidentally walk in through the back door, like I did. And Charlie’s body was entirely covered by a white cloth except for his arms, dangling down like white tree branches on a winter ash. I turned around quickly and got out of there, I didn’t want Rocio to follow me in. We found the front door, and then we learned that the only thing that they could tell us was that Charlie was dead and the next of kin were being sought. If, after twenty days, they were unable to locate the next of kin then they would be very interested in talking to us. Three quarters of a full lunar cycle was the waiting period to find out anything. I bought a candle on the way back down into Centro, and we burned it in the Dandy del Sur where Charlie used to sit. Scott showed up and it was just us until Francis, the afternoon waitress came in and saw the candle there. She stopped, and stared at it and started trembling. "No," she said, looking up straight at me. I looked down. I nodded, because I had to, and then Francis lost it, she came undone. The surreal defining moment of all of this is that here I was, Rocio looking on, holding a young lady close and whispering into her ear. "Shhhh," I told her. "This happens, it’s part of life. I’m also going to die someday. So are you. So is everyone, it’s all right," I whispered in Spanish. Somewhere in all of this, Scott also lost it and had enough and got out of there. Rocio then tapped me on the shoulder. "Go after your friend, I’m going home to tell the kids. Come home when you’re finished." I kissed Francis on the cheek and wiped away her tears with the back of my index finger, and then I left. I found Scott down in the Perico, and we drank all night. "Dave, I couldn’t stay there," Scott told me, excusing his quick departure from the Dandy de Sur. I understood. We drank until we were drunk. Really drunk. And we made a pact to honor Charlie in the Dandy del Sur on Friday, exactly one week after he passed away. The next day, I called everyone that knew Charlie in the Dandy del Sur that I could, but I have no idea how I got home the night before. Maybe I got into a taxi and told the driver to follow the moon. "Look up there," I might have said, "I want you to follow that moon until I tell you to stop." The taxi driver would have thought me absurd, after all, how does one follow a new moon? How do you follow something that you can’t see? Charlie followed his God that way, he didn’t have to see it to know that it was there. Maybe that would have been explanation enough for the cab driver, and maybe he turned off his meter and thought about it. Maybe the taxi driver did just that, maybe we chased the invisible moon. Maybe we even caught the moon that night. Maybe at some point I jumped out of the cab and grabbed the moon by the tail and took a ride. Maybe I climbed up onto the moon, and there was Charlie, radio pressed to his ear. "Charlie, come back down, I need you here," I would have said. Charlie would’ve wagged a scolding finger at me. I would have then slid down off of the moon and into my bed, and Rocio would have told me exactly what Charlie would have said. "This happens, it’s part of life. I’m also going to die someday. So are you. So is everyone, it’s all right," Rocio would have told me. Somewhere in all of this, I slept for a good long time. A week after Charlie was gone, we held a service of sorts, at exactly five-thirty in the afternoon, the exact time that Charlie would wander in to the Dandy every single day. I lit another candle where Charlie always sat, and Alex set a beer there next to the candle. Then she brought a bowl of cucumber slices in salsa and lemon juice, then the bowl of peanuts, and then the celery. Charlie’s spirit was served, just as it was when he was here with us. Scott, Jody, Daniel, Estelle, Darren, and me sat around the bar and celebrated Charlie’s life. Even one guy who lived in Charlie’s apartment complex showed up and had a beer in his honor – we never learned his name, never found out how he knew that we planned this ceremony. We sat around the bar and remembered everything about Charlie that was good and kind and caring, which is everything that Charlie was. Everyone told their stories about how they came to know Charlie, how Charlie touched their lives in some way, when Estelle met Charlie in Paco’s place back when she was slinging drinks in there, and Daniel met Charlie through me in the Dandy del Sur. Me and Jody and Darren met Charlie in the Nuevo Perico back when it was called Armando’s Ladies Bar (sadly, the ladies didn’t seem to buy into the name), and Scott met Charlie through me and Jody. Charlie was born and raised in the Midwest, attended the University of Kansas and then a seminary college, where he almost became a priest. He told me about it once, he said that right before the final step he was called into a room with the other priestly candidates, and they were advised concerning the ramifications of the taking of their final vows of servitude. Because of that conference he changed his mind. I never asked him why. He majored in Classics, which meant that he had to be able to speak, read, and write in both Latin and Greek. Charlie taught Latin and served in the United States Air Force somewhere in there after he graduated, and eventually made his way to California. Charlie became a very successful travel agent, he guided tours all over the world. When I met Charlie, he was still organizing tours, in fact. He couldn’t see well enough to read anymore, macular degeneration had taken its toll on his eyesight, but he went to work every day until the last agency he worked at decided to cut ties. He gave up his alliance to a good friend of his, but he was always looking for something to keep him busy. Charlie’s poor eyesight was his only limitation, and he still managed just fine in spite of it. Charlie would tell a story on himself every once in a while, he was a wonderfully humble man. One evening Charlie and me were sitting in the Dandy and it was like any other evening there. Charlie would drink, starting no earlier than five-thirty in the afternoon, exactly five beers. At the end of the evening, he would go home and pour himself a brandy with water, and drink it slowly before he went to sleep. Only occasionally would he change his choice of liquor. "I switched to rum," Charlie told me that evening. "Rum?" "Well, I like to mix it up now and again," he admitted. "Then, why not tequila?" I asked, sipping a scotch. Charlie laughed, radio pressed to his ear, and he wagged a finger. "No, no more tequila, I can’t handle that stuff," he chuckled. He kept chuckling, and I knew he was going to tell me the story. "See, I used to drink that stuff, but I had an unfortunate, embarrassing occurrence." Charlie put down his radio and took a drink of beer, fiddled with his napkin, laughing all the while. "Well, you know years ago before I rented my apartment, I used to stay at the Hotel Nelson. It’s a nice place, I used to rent by the week. And, every night I drank a glass of tequila with some water right before I went to bed." Charlie started laughing again, and then composed himself. "So, one night – and I don’t know what happened..." He laughed again, barely getting through the story. "So the only part I remember is when I closed the door to my room, and then I was cognizant of the fact that I had my briefcase in my hand, standing outside of my hotel room, stark naked! I guess I thought it was time to go to work, I don’t know what happened." We laughed and laughed. "I tried the door and of course it was locked. I had to go downstairs to the lobby, and thankfully it was three in the morning and no one was around except for the desk clerk. He tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help it." "Hey, at least you had your briefcase!" I howled. "Well, he let me back in my room |