Tumbling Through Tijuana

My older brother at my mother's suggestion takes me on a field trip to Tijuana Mexico in an attempt to steer me away from my antisocial, at risk life style.

 

          It was 1958 and I was a fifteen-year-old oppositional, defiant, malingering underachiever and wannabe tough guy. I avoided higher education, hung out with the wrong crowd, smoked like a chimney and drank myself silly every chance I got. Being lazy and unmotivated, I had little purpose in life other than to entertain my phantasies by grooming myself like Elvis, but if you called me on it back then, I’d have said you were full of s**t.

          My mother had decided that I needed, "attitude adjustment." Her version of it was more akin to shock therapy. A trip to Mexico would be an eye-opener for me; an objective lesson contrived by the adults in an attempt to shake some sense into the mottled brain of a wayward adolescent. You know, stick his sorry little a*s into a dirty Mexican border town for a day, shove his pimply face into some real poverty, show him how cruel life can actually be. In my case, I knew it wouldn’t work. In my mind, I’d already written off this social experiment as a punishment. 

          My well-intentioned mother had put this idea to my twenty-three-year-old big brother, Johnny, who was a good, young Christian, doing all the right things in life. At Burbank High he had been an honor student, as well as a campus leader who had lettered in sports. He was a “goody two-shoes,” but I knew it was all for show. There was another side to Johnny: deep, dark, and shadowy. How did I know? On various occasions, I had caught him drinking beer, smoking, and jacking off to a girly mag. He’d caught me more than once at all the above plus some. We definitely were not angels.

          On a bright, sunny morning we headed on down to Tijuana, Mexico for the day. I had heard about T.J., a raucous city of sleaze across the border, where the basic rule was “anything goes.” You could acquire things you couldn’t get in the states like switchblade knives, cherry bombs, Benzedrine pills or “bennies,” and dirty comic books called “Tijuana Bibles.” You could do other things to that would piss the adult world of like, get a tattoo, drink a beer in a bar without having to show ID, as well as see a naked woman dance on stage with her tits sticking out. You could even get laid if you wanted, provided you didn’t mind getting the crabs . . . or worse.                   

          I had nothing to lose on this trip, or so I thought. Johnny could have made me scrub piss-covered urinals down at the bowling alley, pull weeds, wash his car, or, just lambasted me with a Jesus lecture in order to make our mother’s point. I simply took it in stride. I knew the Jesus lectures would come sooner or later anyway.

          We were in Johnny’s nearly new two-door, hardtop Ford Fairlane. It was a pretty nice ride back then, much too nice for a pair of white boys to float through a scummy border town like T.J. For obvious reasons it would attract the attention of the wrong crowd�"thieves, cops, hookers and the like.

          Like I said, Johnny was a good Christian young man; he’d been to college, done his military service, led youth groups, and already had a suit-and-tie job in a bank where he was some sort of a boss. He wanted me to do the right thing: shape up, straighten out, and make better choices for myself. He was trying to mold me into a good, young (Christian) man like himself. I played along to the point of having my soul saved by Jesus Christ in order to have Johnny as an ally. He made sure I went to church.

          I didn't like church preferring to sleep in. I did believe there was a God but he didn't like me and there was no way I could live up to his standards. Anything that interested me seemed to piss God off. That could only mean I was destined for Satan's firey furnace in hell. With Johnny's cajoling I tried to improve myself but eventually I would f**k up or get caught at something. 

          One time, Johnny caught me with a telescope trying to watch Margarite Lawson, our nubile, teenaged neighbor across the street undress. After dark I could see her through her bedroom window  with her room brightly lit. Naked, she'd lift her arms up above her head, twirl around and wiggle her body and check her tits out in the mirror. Then she would preen a devilish smile of smug self approval and blurt out a squeal of delight. But all I could see of her was from the waist up. What I wanted was to see her a*s and p***y. 

          Then I had a great idea, actually a flash of genius. If I moved the telescope up on the roof, I could gain an angle that would allow me to see down to just above her knees maybe. I was in the process of moving on that brilliant idea when Johnny caught me. He took a long look in the telescope saying he wanted to be absolutely sure that my nefarious activity was sinful before he took it away. Then came the harangue.

          Lust of the flesh was a horrible sin according to Johnny. He accused me of being wicked, WICKED! And, if this sinful behavior continued, I would end up being worse than a "fornicator." I didn't bother to ask for an explanation of the word as I knew it just labeled me as more damaged goods backsliding down the slippery slope in to hell's deepest hole of fire. Johnny finished by chastising me as a hopeless pervert. He grimaced and threatened that God had special punishments in store for sinners like me. and to save my soul from eternal damnation I must immediately! turn from my evil ways. Then he shifted to a guilt laden theme of, Jesus silently weeping over the sick, sad, sorry state of my soul. He blathered on about, "oh, how Jesus loved me. And, Oh how I was breaking his heart."

          I really felt I had become a heathen and that I deserved the punishment I had coming. But, hard as I tried, I couldn't change. My mind would get stuck on something and that something would take over.

          I was beginning to worry that, the something,  my mind was under the control of, was the devil. As hard as I tried I couldn't stop the evil thoughts that ran through my head. One time I started having thoughts about God sitting on the pot. There he was with his pants down to his ankles, sitting up in heaven on a throne-toilet of gold with a big hole in the seat for his big, fat, a*s to stick through. Then, out came three, large gobs of poop. Stinky brown and slobbered with rectal fluids dive bombing through puffy white clouds,turning them t**d brown while hapless souls on earth futilely scurried for cover only to be clobbered by the holy turds. Obviously, I couldn't talk to Johnny nor anyone else about such thoughts that haunted me. Everyone knew I was troubled. Our father didn't want to deal with any of it.  

          Our father was a reclusive drinker that lived a tense life, putting all his energy into an early death of sorts by the virtue of the eat-sleep-work formula, and consuming a lot of alcohol along the way. He didn’t talk much and never smiled. His facial expression was always giving off the unspoken message of leave me the f**k alone. After dinner he would brood in his den, smoking and drinking in a hypnotic trance in front of the TV until he eventually passed out.  

          He didn’t have it in him to be a father. But then, he had had no father himself. With no father present, he had no way of knowing what being a father was all about. I loved him because he was my father but hated him because he couldn’t do the job. My mother tried to intercede and do my father’s job but couldn’t, and I resented her for attempting to do something she just wasn’t supposed to be doing in the first place. Johnny was more like a father to me than a big brother; but, as far as I was concerned Johnny’s religious slant on everything killed any meaningful honesty that could have existed between us. He would always resort to bible quotations and his own conceptions of what would piss off Jesus and get you sent to hell.

          Hilariously, now here we were about to cross the border into Mexico and that modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah town known as, "T.J." The traffic began to slow just north of the border. We merged into two long lines of cars, queuing up for the border crossing. Elephantine trucks were moving to a separate line on our right side. All I could see above the cars in front of us was a red-white-green, Mexican flag, flopping lazily about in the breeze. Off in the distance, smoke curled skyward from several different points on the horizon. Rough dirt roads scarred the parched hills, and what little else I could see did not look inviting. Though only mid-morning, the heat was already stifling. 

          Anticipation ramped me up into a high state of anxiety. I began to fall into a hypnotic trance as the serpentine line slowly lurched forward. Eventually I caught sight of a uniformed man standing on a pedestal in the center aisle amid the traffic lanes. Mesmerized by his image, my mind transposed him to be a figure of Jesus floating on the water. Occasionally, Jesus, with a slight flick of his wrist, would motion a vehicle forward as accompanying red and green lights flashed alternately between his hand signals. The super-heated blacktop must have been frying my brain. I felt like I was trapped in a pee and poop filled porta-potty left in the desert after a Burning Man Festival; I expected a snake to slither by at any moment. 

          We had only two cars in front of us when I was able to discern the facial expression on my traffic-directing Jesus. His face was waxing a dull smile as if he were totally unconscious and bored to death by the ongoing parade of fools passing by. As our turn came we got his laconic wave and passed him by. He just looked toward America as if he didn’t give a fiddler’s f**k. Certainly no Jesus, he was more like a schoolyard doofus and practically as useless as the border monument that stood alone on the hill to our east. The green and red signal lights would do just as well without him.

          Johnny eased the car forward and we crossed the border into Mexico. The front end of the Ford did a hard bounce as if it had just fallen into a ditch. We left the smooth, lined pavement of the U.S. only to pop up on an undulating field of rock, dirt, and sand aggregate in Mexico! “What, no pavement?!” I exclaimed as the world as I had known morphed into sepia collage of pandemonium. Immediately we were lost.

          Lacking directions and with no road signs, we, immediately, stumbled into a shabby neighborhood. I sensed disaster, no, a nightmare of horrific proportions was in the making. I had anticipated T.J. to be somewhat different when compared to my own country, but what now lay before me surpassed all my naive expectations. The place was sheer madness. All of what I had been taught to believe was proper, clean and orderly, was gone and now I was descending into a filthy, chaotic circus. The confusion was traumatizing, much like seeing an auto accident. I flinched! Gazing into this human sore of collective neglect, the poor of my homeland now seemed rich. 

          I saw crude huts fashioned out of broken tree branches, scrounged lumber, and other discarded refuse. Dark faces peered out at us from within these hovels. I saw dirty kids, mangy dogs, and everywhere I looked trash lay strewn about, useless tires, old oil drums, and other discarded junk. I saw human wheelbarrows doing the work of animals.

          We drove on dirt roads that seemed to have more rocks and ruts than the countryside. Dilapidated cars stood stranded at the sides of the road with spent brake shoes and their hoods up, exposing tired engines that belched steam and smoke from leaking radiators. Those that were running careened precariously, bouncing and creaking along on worn out springs and held together with duct tape and bailing wire.           

          I choked as smoke from trash fires got mixed with dust, exhaust, and raw sewage, casting a noxious pall between us and the blue sky above. Imagine the smell of burnt rubber, beans, and dog s**t all together in a bowl of sun-cooked piss - through in some fresh cat turds and barf for good measure. Oblivion was about to envelope us.          

          A conspiracy of denial rendered my impressions as false and unreal. I pretended it was a movie set, that all before me was a show, and it would all be over soon. I couldn’t bear to believe that people genuinely lived like this.

          At a Pemex service station, Johnny filled up on cheap gas. Probably not a good idea for his near new car just to save a buck maybe. The service station attendant gave us directions to get to Avenida Revolucion, The main drag. Shortly we were back on pavement but the white line was useless in controlling the random flow of traffic. Dented up, piece of s**t, jalopies swerved to and fro without a thought for the white line and even across into the opposite lane if it suited them. Capricious men steered and sneered while they flipped each other off yelling slang Spanish slurs and insults about your: sister's virginity,  w***e mother, and fornicating goats. A long bending right turn right turn released us from the nasty human sore of neglect we were seeking freedom from. Now we were on the main drag - Avenida Revolucion.

          More chaos enveloped us. Double parked cars, jay walkers, hawkers of rubber bugs bunny dolls, sombrero's and serapes while hookers laid up against the walls behind the sidewalk. I didn't know they were hookers, I just thought they were a bunch of big assed chicks trying to hustle a ride to somewhere better if there was such a place in Mexico.

          At the first stoplight, off the sidewalk from behind a burro painted up to look like a zebra, a guy slid up to the passenger window. Bug eyed, he crammed his head in and pitched us a floor show as he wheezed beer breath.  He had a big, "Poncho Via" mustache over a liver lipped mouth both jumping up and down in synchronized dance as he ranted about a floor show. It would involve a woman getting screwed by a donkey. He waved tickets in our faces that he could sell us, right now, for a special price.

          I'd never considered such a possibility: I thought the idea was outrageous; its novelty appealed to me even though I knew Jesus would be pissed. Overcome with giddiness and abandoned to that something that occasionally highjacked my brain, I blurted out, “Hell, yes!” Johnny grimaced, uttered the word “abomination,” and floored the car through the red light to get away from the huckster. It was at that moment we got to meet our first Mexican cop. Decades later, I would be reminded of his face every time I saw actor Eric Estrada on television.

          As it turned out, the Tijuana motorcycle cop perched himself daily in front of the Chi-Chi Club, which was owned by his brother. He would write traffic tickets that would be discounted, provided the offender patronized his brother’s establishment. Business was always good for both.

          Our fine for running the red light was ten dollars. We were told we could settle on the spot or go see the judge Monday morning after spending the weekend in jail, that is. Johnny did his best to talk our way out of this, but it wasn’t working. Five dollars later we were on our way again but not before we paid a visit to the Chi-Chi.

          Tinny horn music from a brass band with a thumping backbeat vibrated the curtain that functioned as a door. A saturnine, pig faced bouncer stationed at the entry slipped to the side so that we could get past his hulking torso. Beyond the entry was a dark cavern and a dimly lit stage at the center, a bar along one side tended by a bemused, melon headed, peon with a perpetual smirk on his face.   Several hard looking young women in kimono bathrobes sat across from him. they leered our way drinks in hand while snarling deep drags on their cigarettes. The stale scent of smoke, alcohol and sweat permeated the blue-green cloud of polluted air that hung above the stage. A musky hangover from the night before where bodies had been erotically grinding each other in the dark recesses of a slap-dash w***e house somewhere near the back of the club. Without the noxious smell the place would still be fowl. 

          Johnny's christian upbringing jerked him back like a dog's leash on the collar of a hungry pit bull causing him to act as if he didn't want to go in. But, I think he really did; his curiosity was no different than mine and five dollars not lost to a bribe made the adventure worth it. I thought we could at least get a hamburger (or a taco since it was Mexico), but with Johnny along, I knew a beer would be out of the question.

          A dark-skinned girl in a G-string who looked like she was fresh out of the Amazon Jungle, swung up onto the stage as if she were maneuvering through the vines of a rain forest. She had a hungry, savage look to her. Thin as a noodle with her small b***s sagging toward the stage floor, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. She dawned a cowboy hat, bumped around the stage, guffawing and making lewd motions with her crotch, all the while erratically chicken-dancing and flashing the occasional crocodile smile. She flicked her G-string and winked at us and  inviting conspiracy she whispered, “Ya wanna eat ma p***y?” syncopated with a short set of pelvic thrusts as we made our way to a table. 

          Johnny winced and became rigid like he was having a seizure. He gritted his teeth and I thought I heard him seethe, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” He started to move toward the exit but the rotund, pig face bouncer blocked his way. Desperate to get way Johnny grabbed my arm and started towards the rear door. As we crashed through it our way out was blocked by a garish fat lady in a G-string. Big sloppy b***s and hammock thys her bulbous body looked like a giant helping of cottage cheese. Her grotesque face was framed with dyed blond hair, turquoise eye shadow and fire-engine red lips plus chalky make up. Halloween as I named her sneered and threatened to horse-f**k us both if we didn't pay up five dollars for a room. My god we were in a w***e house.

           Talk about filthy, it was a tent city of cobbled up sack cloth partitions with dirty mattresses and half used rolls of toilet paper scattered about. As we back peddled I tripped over a pail filled with used rubbers, butt wipes, cigarette butts and other flotsam. Halloween face was livid, she said when she finish horse-f*****g me she was going to have, Rupricto f**k me up the A-hole for good measure. 

           In a worried voice I asked, "w w wh who is Rupricto?" She pointed to a cubicle where I heard the bray of a donkey. I offered to scoop up the fowl pail of rancid effluent to which halloween face handed me a scooper and mop not missing a chance to stick her humongous b***s in my face. Luckily, Halloween face got distracted by giggling and the clucking sound of a chicken coming from the bathroom. I was curious but if we were to escape the Bettlejuice lady we had to move quickly. 

           waisting no time we used this opportunity to wheel around and take seats on the side of the club up against the wall. Jungle girl was still goofing around on the stage and seemed to be bored to death. This was fine by me, as I didn’t want to be any closer to the stage for fear of catching her crabs. Then locking in eye contact, Jungle Girl, stared us down,  With a flip of her head the hat popped off, she tossed her hair over her shoulder, turned in front of us, and dropped her G-string. 

          "POW!" there it was, lips sticking out or, more accurately, hanging down like a pig's snout. My limited experience with female verginatalia was lifted to a new frightening level of reality. But it wasn't as though I had no previous knowledge of such things. I had already had some experience with female genitalia, but it wasn't threatening and scary like Little Miss Amazon's. 

          

             When I was but ten years of age, I had seen what was . . .well . . . "almost" a p***y. I say almost as it was too young to have pubic hair yet. Danya Hurlbut, was a pre pubescent entrepreneur, selling young boys an opportunity to increase their knowledge of female anatomy out behind the grade school auditorium during lunch time. She would line us up and lift her dress up to eye level, panties already at her ankles, and give you a quick peak - all for 25 cents. You had to look quick because she had to get to the next paying customer. And, as I already said, it wasn't, yet, a p***y: it only had peach fuzz on it as near as I could tell. 

             Danya's, soon to be a p***y was stuck up there sandwiched between her legs like a vertical hamburger.  Embryonic, in it's hopefully unsullied state, her soon to be a p***y,  was . . . nice, compact and seemed new out of a box. I wanted a closer look, to see the little hole where guys stuck their fingers, fantasized putting their pricks in, and, where babies came out, but that was two dollars and not affordable.

          Danya's twat invited more attention, where as jungle girl's was disgustingly repulsive. It was hanging before me like a mangy, smelly, beaver pelt and was anything but nice. Full bush and shaped much like an inverted Christmas tree, it had more in common King Olaf’s beard than an exciting sex object. I had to wonder if she wasn't Rupricto's girl from the show that was offered us out on Tijuana's main drag by the street hustler.  Then things got worse. 

          She jumped off the stage, bounded up to our table and wedged herself between Johnny and me - up close and personal. God! All of a sudden it smelled like a bean and cheese burrito soaked in vinegar had just landed on us. She looked at Johnny and barked contemptuously, “So . . . U wan’ play wi’ da p***y?” as she thrust her hand into his crotch and clutched on tight to his family jewels.

          Johnny, in a state of petrification, went catatonic dropped deep into prayer and I was ready to follow him. Remember now, he, the good Christian boy, would never, NEVER play with a girl’s tits, touch her p***y, or grab her butt cheeks, let alone “do it” with her. Only kissing was permitted if you loved her and if you were planning to get married. Johnny made a desperate thrash sideways and pushed her off. She labeled him a "joto" and then turned to me. 

          She threw a sweaty armpit laced with stubble around my neck and, in a cloud of halitosis, chirped, “How ’bout you, teeny-weeny?” Quickly I thought, “My God, how does she know that about me?”  And I’m traumatized with the thought that she’s going to make me do it with her despite the small size of my wiener. I sat there wishing she’d just cut a nasty old bean fart and leave.  

          I was lost. "Oh s**t!" I thought, "what if she grabs my wiener?!" I should have been thinking of an exit strategy but instead I froze, not knowing what to do nor where to start,I didn't want any part of what may be down there between her legs. S**t, I’d probably already gotten her crabs! And I certainly didn’t want to have my wiener inside her for fear it would rot away, if not fall off. 

          Besides, my wiener was reserved for Janet Baily, a tall statuesque socialite and senior at Burbank High. She was two years older than me, and wouldn’t even turn her head on my account. And why should she; she could have anyone she wanted. Like one of one thousand other horny guys at school, I would only come together with her in my dreams, wet or otherwise.

          This was my version of a safe relationship, fixated on a love object that would never be available to me while steering clear of those that would. Johnny could handle the French sexpots and Lil’ Miss A's of the world if he wanted to, but, right this moment in the Chi-Ch, his dilemma was the same as mine: how do I get out of this? 

          I knew what he must have been thinking: “Get thee away, sinful harlot!” Despite the pious Christian front he put up, he knew a lot more than he would ever let on to. How did I know this?

          

          When Johnny was a high school senior he had a girlfriend, Dixie, who lived up the block from us. Late one hot summer night while the neighborhood was asleep, I saw Johnny pull up in front of her house to drop her off from a date. I watched and wondered why they weren’t getting out of the car. As curiosity overtook me, I slid out my bedroom window, sneaked up on the car, and peered at it from behind a hedge.

          Even though I was close enough to view them both, all I could see was Dixie’s head thrown back against the passenger’s seat; Johnny was nowhere in sight. Dixie was moaning and groaning, breathing fast and hard, making ooh and aah sounds, and all the while a sloshing sound was going on somewhere beneath the window frame. What could possibly be going on? They didn’t say anything. But it sounded like a cross between a wrestling match and a Slurpee-eating contest. Then Dixie let out an exited gasp and the top of Johnny's head emerged from down near her lap. OMG! he was wiping his face off. In the moonlight a big s**t eating grin crossed his face. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but I eventually did. How disgusting! I thought. A Christian pervert, no, he was on his way to becoming a . . . formicator?

           

          Back in the Chicago Club, Lil’ Amazon's face pinched into a grimace like a pissed off little snake as she called us a couple of “lil’ dic’ modder fockers” because neither of us would go in the back room with her. I was still trying to figure out what a “joto” was, but I knew it couldn’t be complimentary. Still, anything was better than being called a "fornicator." I began to turn indignant; Miss A was starting to piss me off. Then she looked directly into my eyes.

          Her eyes were blank discs heavy as iron wrecking balls, totally devoid of inner life. clouded with a host of tangled and distorted feelings she became like a scary monster. I sensed that life was horribly over for her. No, she hadn't given up; she never had a chance at anything better, nor did she know what anything better may be. I now began to feel sorry for her. My God! it struck my like a bolt of lightning. In a different time or place she could have been my sister. Questions flicked through my head at warp speed.  

          I began to wonder, where did things turn wrong for her? Why she wasn’t in school, working on an education and preparing herself for a respectable career like I was supposed to be doing? And where was her family, and what did any of them think about how she was throwing her life away? Or had they already thrown away their own lives? At my young age, I couldn’t realize that she didn’t choose this life. I had yet to understand that she was a social outcast and that stage dancing, dick sucking, scamming, selling her a*s, hustling, and outright stealing might have been the only options available to her in order to connect with a reliable food supply and a place to sleep. Nor could I comprehend the abuse she may have suffered when she was a child, and that she was just one of many children along the main drag of T.J. and other impoverished places who were destined to such a miserable, dead-end fate. Confusion set my mind reeling and I needed time to absorb the concept of a bigger world in order to understand hers and what others have had to do in order to survive. 

          A fat biker walked in and Lil’ Miss A dropped us, like a couple of turds out of God's sky toilet, at the sight of new prey. We used this moment as an opportunity of escape. We side stepped and did an end run around Pig face, heading through the curtain smiling and waiving, bye-bye to the smirking derfus behind the bar and his consorts. As we fled to the street, we pandered Officer Estrada who was in his office as usual, perched on his motorcycle seeking the opportunity to create more business for his brother and himself. In the meantime we were, hopefully, once again on our adventurous way. 

          We'd both had had enough of T.J. and were scared shitless. As we drove back to the border, passing through the rambling border town, it was clear that Johnny felt tense and irritated, while I remained in a foggy, semiconscious state, trembling with fear. Somewhere near the far side of town some of my composure returned, and yet, as we drove on, everything around us still seemed surreal.

          Like angels in a forlorn land of godless zombies, we motored purposely on. In truth, I was just too young to understand. I was much like a kid being given his first drink of liquor in a bar. I winced at the taste but wanted more anyway. After all, don’t you prove your manhood by doing manly things? I could have asked Johnny to turn around at any time and head home right then and there, but I didn’t. Intuitively, even at my young age, I, somehow, realized the need for this ritual of initiation.

          Johnny, even with his greater age and maturity, seemed no more prepared for the events of the day than I was. We gritted it out together. But for me, after a day in Mexico, I concluded that I would never return. I did change, however, because of it. My mind got stuck on, Little Miss Amazon even if she was the last thing I wanted to have roiling through my head. But her image was beyond control and persisted in what I would come to learn was, obsessive thinking. 

          There was a wildness we had in common forging a deep unconscious bond. It expressed itself in totally different ways based on our own respective up bringing. Yet, I realized I couldn't fix nor save her. All I could do, was pray for her. Because of my distorted God image, I didn't believe God would hear my prayers anyway. But, I didn't want him to hate her because he hated me. And, I didn't want her to be punished by God just because she never had a chance. 

          I had a chance and I was just throwing it away: I deserved the punishment. No, I couldn't save the little slave girl dancing in the bar. But, she saved me. I began to realize that regular food, a clean place to sleep, and work without having to sell my a*s to some pervert was a blessing in itself.

Author's Note

Do I have any potential for gaining an audience for the two border books I'm working oN?