Border Crossing

The scarred red bricks of the plaza run in every direction in random geometries that overwhelm the senses. The primary colors of Mexican flags, rough wool blankets hanging from wires that run between dilapidated wooden stalls.

Motor bikes by the dozens, hawkers and barkers, cons, dealers, mules and murders. Wormwood tinctures; two hundred proof nightmares that end in alleys with pockets turned out. Toothless mothers manipulating tourists with emaciated children. Rotten meats. Chilies hanging in bundles like bee hives from anything that will hold their weight. Chiapas coffee. Oaxaca politics. Che's head worn on chests, hung from second story windows, tattooed in skin. Zapata murals painted onto the sides of liquor stores and groceries. Tapestries and stickers. Zapatista dolls in ten different sizes.

The signs of revolution and unrest are everywhere.

You see it in the eyes of the children. The perpetually frustrated faces of the adults. But most clearly it can be seen in the dominant presence of the Federales. You see it in the sun glinting off the black steel, machine gun barrels. The stench of fear is palpable and present in every moment on every street.

It is a fear of oppression to some extent. The unconscionable Cartels who work these streets ratchet the death toll higher every year. The Federales who are meant to protect the people are more likely to exploit them to their own ends and the difference between the police and criminal is often indistinguishable. However the fear of hunger seem the more ubiquitous oppression here as is the case the world over.

Buying a hand woven basket could mean directly contributing to the next revolution, you just never know. This thought always puts me in a mood to shop. I eat small meals at three different restaurants just to spread it around. I buy Chiclets from the street kids, junk trinkets by the dozens. I never barter. I am happy to pay twenty times the going rate.

My trunk is filled with brown paper bags full of tiny Zapatistas.

I buy shit here I would never lay money down on back home. Better to fund third world revolution than further participate in the utter disparity of American Capitalism. Even the Mexican Black market has deeper motives. It serves a greater purpose. Instead of concentrating the wealth into the pockets of the few, it spreads the wealth through out organizations working to even the economic playing field.

So crossing the boarder to see Pachito has political implications. The free market and black market economies are intermingled in a way that rarely flies for very long in the States. The U.S. is too burdened by it's burocracies. Stolen cars could never be sold out right from licensed dealers, police only shoot poor people when no one else is looking and pharmacies only dispense medications to patients with prescriptions.

You see, Pachito is my doctor.

Not the kind of doctor still paying inflated educational loans well into his forties. There is no degree framed sharply in hardwood and 14 carat trim hung squarely on a wall above a table of sports magazines. Pachito’s office is a scarred plywood counter, under which is an old Garcia Vega box containing a loaded .45. This is often, the single deterring factor that keeps his patients from climbing across to ransack the shelves of pill bottles behind.

As always I find him half asleep in a wooden rocking chair a book folded open like a pair of wings across his chest. One of the rockers bows is fractured at it's apex and Pachito has splinted the break with several chunks of marred splintered wood and bent rusted screws. Like most things in Tijuana it makes me feel uncomfortable and I can't help but think of Rube Goldberg. I am anxious that the entire chair will collapse methodically into a heap of dry dust swallowing Pachito with it. He rests with closed eyes until my shadow falls across his face changing it's surface temperature from one hundred and twelve degrees to one hundred. He opens one eye and smiles in recognition.

"Ah, yes friend, what can I do for you today?" he says pushing his bodies weight against the crackling precariousness of the Rube Goldberg rocker. The space behind the counter is so small and congested, he need only rise from the chair and we are standing eye to eye with the counter between us. He is placing three disposable syringes in a white paper bag beneath the counter before I begin to give him my order.

"Five of the 100mg morphina, oh, and some cotton balls as well"

Pachito disappears with the bag in hand behind a wall of tapestries and hanging rugs. I hear the pills dancing in their bottle as the doctor pulls them from the shelf, the hollow pop of the lid disengaging, more dancing, and finally the rumpled folding of the bag as Pachito reappears from behind heavens veil.

"Eighty dollars American" he says, one hand holding the bag behind his back, the other held still and quiet inside the cigar box beneath the counter. The good doctor is all business. I have been seeing him for nearly a year, with no more conversation between us than that which is required to conduct the transactions.

I fish the money from my shoe, balancing on one foot in the pouring Mexican sun. I fan four twenties on the counter and Pachito counts them at a glance. He hands me my order while snatching the money with his gun hand in the same instant.

I slink away without a thank you or good bye. I don't look back but I am certain Pachito returns almost instantly to his half sleep with the sun in his chair and the book across his chest.

I keep the package pushed down in my front pocket as deep as it will go, feeling with my momentum the path of least resistance through the crowded market street. I envision myself gliding through the oncoming currents of pedestrians gracefully, me on my path, indirect but efficient, dodging here and there without disturbing anyone else’s personal arch.

But in reality impatience makes me clumsy and I end up barreling through like a Pamplona bull, bumping elbows and stepping on feet. I feel decidedly stupid, a complete and utter American. People are swearing at me and a policeman has taken notice, so I try a different approach. Concentrate on breathing and just let the current take me, and with some luck deposit me on the patio of Cantina Calroso.

The exterior ambiance of Catina Calroso is ambiguously poolside 1960's Fort Lauderdale, but in place of the pool you have all the sights sounds and smells of downtown Detroit. It is what would be born if circa 1984 Las Vegas raped 1983 East Beirut. Round Technicolor tables with bright domed umbrellas, the burnt out shell of stolen Ford Nova, an aluminum bucket of iced beer, a box of medical waste laying open in the alley next door. Festive music, food and laughter. Homeless children, faces smeared black, wet brown eyes. It is not a difficult dichotomy to grasp, a simple economic equation of need outnumbering relief.

You can visit Cantina Calroso anytime and see for yourself, sit on the fence of third world and what a typical middle class American is accustom to and peer out across both of those toxic green lawns before deciding for yourself the cause and effect of the landscape.

I find an empty table, bright orange, near the kitchen entrance and immediately pocket a spoon from the place setting as I sit. The place is packed. Filled with San Diego City College students drunk on cheap tequila and Pacifico's. The waiters are annoyed and beyond trying to hide it. They refuse to speak English and only take orders in Spanish which forces the least drunk student to translate for the rest. It is a mess and takes fifteen minutes to negotiate a single round of drinks. My own patience wanes.

This is my spot. I come here often enough to know the waiters by name and they likewise know me. Juanita smiles at me from across the patio and mouths the words "Un momento". I smile and nod with both sweating hands in my pockets.

A minute later she is here at my table, greeting me in English, loud enough for the students to over hear. I order a bottled water, a Corona, and a civiche, emphasizing that the water be bottled. She understands and returns immediately with the beer and water and also a basket of salsa and chips.

The drunkest of the students is making a fuss over Juanita's sudden bi-lingual proficiency and has demonstrated enough disrespect to earn the attention of Jorge, Juanita’s husband. He swaggers through the patio from the kitchen with blood on his apron and his hands balled into fists. He is heading for the mouthy, drunk student. I see Jorge grab the kid by the front of his Abercrombie Fitch t-shirt before I take the water bottle and head in doors to the men’s room, confident in the fact that Jorge has the situation under control.

The door of the only stall will not latch so I sit in the john with my feet levered out against the door to bar anyone from entering unexpectedly. I fold a dollar bill around a pill and crush it against the seat of the toilet with the backside of the spoon. Empty the bills contents carefully into the spoons shallow cup. A syringe draws water from the bottle, rains into the spoon. Fire for heat until the fluid burns clear. A ball of dry cotton expands like a cloud submerged. The needle draws it all back in again then sends it down my vein. Soft silent gunboats of oblivion floating down a red river firing on every care, worry, ache, and pain. I pack it all back into my pockets a piece at a time feeling as if my body is just another piece of the equation, another integral part of the kit required to complete the transaction.

Back outside at my table the sun has been turned down several notches. I feel it on my face and the back of my neck but it is as if I am feeling it through the foggy distance of a deep sleep, and the tactile sensations of my waking reality have incorporated themselves into my sleeping dreams. The students are clearing out under the supervision of two Federales, resting the butts of their weapons on their hips, barrels pointed at the milky blue sky. Jorge's hands no longer fists are writing a log of the incident in a thick black book.

Juanita has come with the civiche sliding it gingerly pass the tables margin. White flakes of fish drowning in a sea of lime juice and white wine. I will never be able to eat it, it smells to much like the ocean and looks to much like bait. The morphine has turned my appetite from food to poetry. I am thinking of the book stalls that clutter the walks of the Embarcadero where I will pay to much for Spanish language hard covers written in a language I struggle to read. I am thinking again of revolt, of starting over.

And I think of what draws me to this place. The bubbling under the surface. The secrets and crimes that hang out in the open for anyone to see. The restlessness and purpose. The teaming frustration that may one day come to a head and change situations overnight.

My own secrets and crimes pale in the street lights of the Plaza where the Federales eyes are tuned to see only the colors of their country's landscape bleeding together behind the blinding audacity of government mandated lawlessness and corruption, which must be participated in or at the very least ignored.

Corruption has become so common and abundant they have run out of dark alleys to hide it. Why try to hide it when the rules can be changed? When laws revolve like carousels around a carefully protected hub, those who live outside the hub are trampled constantly by the law. Those who make an attempt to abide are left dizzy and nauseous in the wake of ever changing, irrational, unintuitive demands. The only individuals with the power to change the laws are those unaffected and shielded inside the hub. Brazen public resistance is met with machine guns making armed resistance the only constructive recourse.

Then there are those of us from the North who come to ride that same carousel for a nominal fee with little thought to the affect we are having or more often than not failing to even notice the locals suffering under our feet. We are all more than willing to take advantage of the lawless autonomy that forms in the cradle of an overtly corrupt tyrannical system for the sake of a good time. Like good Americans we are obediently distracted enough by bright lights and degradation that we never see the people bound and gagged behind the scenes whose ruined lives and misery maintain the dreary illusion.


So in Tijuana and all border towns like it, I recede in priority and largely go unnoticed. Here I can hide without the need of Zapatista's black anonymous masks. I can absorb the revolutionary spirit of the people and maybe conscript an army with in. One that may rise against and topple my own personal tyrants. I may call to arms my own teaming frustrations, threaten my self imposed servitude, rally my own restlessness fighting to become purpose.

On the other hand I may sit here until the morphine runs out, and then I may find my way back to Pachito to buy some more. Just another comfortable gringo buying my time and spending it freely as if it were just another commodity which will never run dry. One more spin on the carousel before the bottom falls out.

Either way it is certain that for me in this moment, the revolution ebbs low. Outside of my intentions there is nothing. Nothing in the way of action. Nothing beyond a basic awareness of certain unfortunate situations and a slowly suffocating spirit of defiance.

“Change occurs with-in the life span of trees and those same trees will tell the story of change, bound into books, and filed in stacks.”

This is what I think as I meander from shop to shop, handle the stories of great women and men, finger their pages searching for the spark that will ignite my intentions into action. It has to be here, everything, all of it is here hidden in these pages.

My only hope is for a little more time.