Road Trip

The first thing that grabs you by the throat in a Mexican jail isn’t the prisoner with one eye and no teeth, the one who wants to be your new best friend, but the smell: my God, the smell. It’s like pig shit mixed with turpentine. It made my eyes water, or that could have been tears of stark terror, terror gnawing at the edges of my brain. Larry and Scotty looked tearful as well.

Larry and Scotty were my two work pals from the vasectomy study, funded by the National Institute of Health in Los Angeles. All three of us were newly graduated from college and this was my first job job, the kind you have to go to every day to pay your rent and buy food. We went door to door in the suburbs of Los Angeles County and the San Fernando Valley, interviewing potential male candidates (between the ages of thirty-five and fifty) to explore the long-term effects of getting your tubes tied, in the male sense.

None of us grew up in Los Angeles, so we had no local friends to hang out or party with on the weekends. Larry was tall, gangly, and slightly buck-toothed. Scotty was short, had acne scars, and a curly moppet of red hair. All three of us were shy unless we had a beer or two, and none of us had a girlfriend, mine having dumped me a few days after graduation. Larry and Scotty never mentioned any past relationship.

We hung out in jazz clubs in the Valley and read novels to each other: Kerouac, John Irving, Hermann Hesse, Burroughs. We tried creating a writing group until I got mad at Larry for telling me I was just plagiarizing John Irving and to find my own voice. I told him to fuck off, we argued and ended up dropping the whole writing venture. We mostly got along, except Scotty had personality conflicts according to his therapist, meaning that he hated most people. Somehow, we passed muster with each other.

The trip to Mexico was our fantasy reliving of On the Road, our pilgrimage to reimagine Sal and Dean’s psychedelic journey of ceaseless wandering. The novel touched a place of raw yearning in me. At twenty-two, I was numb from working two monotonous jobs—canvassing door to door and driving a cab. I was barely scraping by; I craved finding some kind of soulful meaning in my life. I wanted to learn to be free on this road trip.

We drifted through Mexico, driving down arid roads, past scrub brush and snake cactus. The gray sand foothills rolled for miles. Driving back from San Vincente, we pulled into Ensenada. It was late afternoon, around four, and we parked the car on a main street lined with cantinas and small bodegas. Scotty spoke a little Spanish, so he went into one of the bodegas and got us a six-pack of beer. We borrowed an opener from the store owner and sat on the curb, just relaxing, watching the locals walk past and soaking up the late-day sun. The honeyed sunlight glazed the street, and I was thinking how hip we were when the federales pulled up in military vehicles with their rifles drawn and circled us like we were fugitive serial killers.

We jumped up like we’d landed on a trampoline, and six federales started shouting at the same time. They wore faded olive-green uniforms. Sweat circles radiated from their armpits like the rings of Saturn.

“Balad al suelo, bastardas!” one of the federales shouted. I couldn’t tell which one because my head was turning from right to left in fear.

Larry stood up. Scotty sat on the ground. I squatted, not sure what to do.

One of the federales, short and fat with a missing ear, grabbed my arm and yanked me toward him. “Que eres estupido! Baja al suelo idiota!” he bellowed in my ear.

“Scotty, what the fuck is this guy saying?” I whispered frantically.

Scotty’s eyes were bulging, and he whispered through gritted teeth, “He says you are an asshole and to get down on the ground.”

I sat on the ground and Larry followed suit. We put our hands on our heads like we’d seen in the movies.

The federales huddled together, looking over at us occasionally, discussing what they should do with their captives. A grandmother walked by, holding the hands of a small boy and girl; she looked at us, muttering to herself, and shook her head. After a few minutes, the police gestured for us to get up, cuffed our hands behind our backs, and crab-walked us down the street. Some of the locals came out from the cantinas and bodegas to watch the three dumb gringos strolling to the Ensenada police station.

The station was hot with one anemic ceiling fan lackadaisically turning. It squeaked on every fourth spin. The linoleum floor was so dirty that a mud floor would have been an improvement. A television on a corner table flashed different images of President Carter talking to the press, and the American hostages, bound and blindfolded, being paraded down a street in Tehran.

I gazed at the screen, my wrists chafing from the handcuffs and sweat trickling in threads down my back. I had never been arrested, sheltered in a suburban home before college. Now, I was powerless, unable to speak the language and defend myself. I could disappear behind these walls, and no one would know.

The federales told us to stand against a wall and one of them walked back to a rear office. I could hear a loud voice that sounded like gravel in a blender and a chair scraping the floor.

A large man with gray, close-cropped hair and a black goatee came out and glared at us. He looked like he’d worked out in the past but now was losing his tone, like a soft, sloping mountain, all bulge and girth.

A skinny federal saluted and called him Capitan.

I looked over at Scotty to say something to get us out of this mess, but he was trembling and looking at the ground, so I attempted with my elementary school Spanish to explain, but El Capitan cut me off in English.

“You know why we arrest you?” he asked.

“Sir, we have no idea. I swear we didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh, you did something wrong. Being drunk in public is something wrong.”

“Sir, I swear, we just got here. We just had one beer on the street looking at your beautiful city,” I wheedled.

He looked me up and down, then wagged his finger. “You don’t know nothing, but at least you don’t have a fat ass like your friends. It’s illegal to drink beer in public. Time for you and your friends to learn that lesson.”

Larry started trying to explain, asking if he could call his parents, and Scotty started moaning. The federales shouted at us to shut up, and the Capitan gestured for them to take us out of the room. Two of the federales, both skinny with faces like jackals, marched us down a long hall. The walls were faded green and peeling, revealing strips of pockmarked drywall. Plaster chips crunched under our feet.

They brought us to a large holding cell, opened the steel-barred door, and sharply nodded for us to vamoose into the cell.

We walked gingerly as if stepping on a lake with cracked ice and huddled in a tight circle, three sheep at a wolves’ convention. The other prisoners stared at us; their expressions wavered between feral menacing and zombie dullness. The bowel-deep fear of being alone in this backwater with malign men churned my stomach.

“Whadda we do, whadda we do, whadda we do?” Scotty moaned in a mantra.

“Who knew it was illegal to drink beer on the street? I saw a couple of locals doing it,” I said.

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Exactly. Locals drinking beer, not three white guys on a Mexican road trip to hell,” Larry said.

We stared into each other’s eyes and became quiet. I went into a kind of mental fever, struggling to figure out how to escape, but my mind was too choked with terror to think. We pressed our backs against the wall, shoulder to shoulder. Larry was making a rasping noise every time he inhaled. Two guys next to us were on the floor with a piece of dirty cardboard and a couple of cockroaches the size of my middle finger, trying to get them to race in a straight line.

Scotty shook himself out of his panic attack and tried to problem-solve. “Maybe we can call the American embassy, or I can call my parents in San Diego to come down and bail us out.”

“I don’t think they give us a phone call, Scotty. This isn’t Dragnet,” Larry said.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other like a boxer, nervously taking in our cellmates—one large drunk guy sleeping it off on a bunk, his oil-stained baseball cap covering his face, our cockroach-racing friends who looked like vultures over a carcass, a handful of stoned men with bloodshot eyes standing in another corner, and one white guy dressed in seersucker shorts and a festively colored Hawaiian shirt, sitting on stool reading a paperback. He was medium height with sandy brown hair combed over to one side with a caved-in chest and waist that ended disappointingly in a pair of spindly legs. He had on canvas sneakers, brown with dirt; his ankles were crossed nonchalantly as if he were sitting at a marina club waiting for a Negroni.

He radiated blasé indifference, insouciance, as my acting teachers would have described it, so coolly distant and relaxed sitting in the seventh ring of hell. He flipped through the pages of his romance paperback with a soured, entitled dismissiveness as if he had bitten into a piece of eggshell in his omelet.

He looked up from time to time to scan the room. His blue eyes had a light that appeared to race from the back of his brain to the front.

Suddenly, a guy dressed in dirt-crusted mechanic overalls started pointing and yelling at the three of us from across the cell. We couldn’t tell if we were standing in his special spot, or if he was giving his opinion of cottage cheese. We moved farther to the corner, and he stopped yelling.

I tried making eye contact with the book reader, my head nodding to signal quietly, “Hey, hey, we’re white guys just like you, locked in a jail where no one speaks our language. Hey there, yoohoo.”

No good. He ignored me and kept reading his paperback. He stifled a yawn. I was so spooked my calves were cramping.

One of the prisoners in a cell down the hall was moaning, then shouting and crying at the same time. No one in our cell seemed to notice.

The guy with the book suddenly shouted out. I can’t remember everything he said, but it went something like this, “Oh, give him some heroin for chrissakes, enough already!”

Our literary cellmate stood up abruptly, slapped the paperback on his thigh, and looked at us. “I’m Leonard, and who might you three merry minstrels be?” he asked.

Scotty mumbled something about being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and Larry stared sullenly at his shoes, so I spoke up. “We’re from LA, on a road trip, you know, a boy’s trip south of the border, but things haven’t turned out as planned,” I said.

Leonard slowly looked us over, his eyes moving from each of us to the next. He had the expression of someone trying to decide whether to bother to help us or just sit back and watch us drown slowly.

He shook himself slightly, cleared his throat, and pointed a bony finger at us. “You gentleman have stepped in a pile of shit, which I would say you are in knee-deep,” he noted.

“Yes, sir, we certainly did,” Scotty whined.

Leonard swatted at a fly circling his head with the paperback. “I can appreciate that. My first time, I looked exactly like you three nimrods, but I’ve become a seasoned regular over time.”

“You’ve been in jail here before?” I asked, stunned.

He condescendingly smiled at me, like it was obvious. “Oh yes, I am an expatriate, a local businessman here, you see, and I have a long relationship with El Capitan and the other pillars of this community. I run a little import/export business, clothing, and some erotic specialty items, and occasionally I run into a little trouble. Minor disagreements with the federales. Nothing serious since I know where a few skeletons are buried, so to speak. But sometimes I push my luck, have one too many tequilas, say the wrong thing and someone gets angry, and I end up here for a few days. Not every local doing business with me gets in a huff, but a few do. Very thin-skinned, these folks in Ensenada,” he noted, nodding subtly at our cellmates.

He pulled a purple-green tie-dyed bandana from his back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Now then, how much money do you three have?”

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“You want to get out of here? You’re going to have to hand over some guacamole, amigos.”

“By guacamole, are you talking about cash?” I asked.

“You go to the head of the class, genius!”

Such gifts never occurred to me. This was near the end of our pseudo-Beat Generation, psychedelic mushroom road trip, and I was about tapped out. I had about forty dollars in my wallet and planned to borrow money from Scotty until my next paycheck.

“I got about fifty-one dollars, and that’s it,” Scotty said.

With my part, that made a measly ninety-one dollars in bribery money.

“That won’t buy you shit or Shinola desperado,” Leonard said drily. “How about you, Bucky?” He was alluding to Larry’s buck teeth.

Larry had a vexed, soured look. “I might have something, but I was planning on using it for a business venture. So sorry, no,” he said.

“Dude, how much do you have?” Scotty whined.

“Three hundred, but I need to keep it.”

I lost it. “Keep it? Hey, man, we don’t have any options here! What do you need it for?”

“I was going to buy some Mexican Quaaludes. I know a pharmacist in Tijuana.”

I had to close my mouth so the flies wouldn’t land there. “Are you shitting me? You were going to smuggle Quaaludes over the border? Are you nuts?”

Larry sputtered, and spittle sprayed from his mouth. “Don’t give me your holier-than-thou attitude, Mike. I’m sick of living like a character in Les Miserables. I’m sick of TV dinners and iceberg lettuce, living hand-to-mouth. You drive a cab and work full-time at the vasectomy study for Christ’s sake!”

“Oh, excuse me, your lordship. So, you thought selling a few Quaaludes would get you a table at Le Dome and a date with Melanie Griffith?”

Larry grabbed me, clutching the front of my henley, ripping the collar. The cockroach racers got excited, thinking a fight was going to break out and they could gamble on the winner.

Leonard squeezed between us and separated us. “Gentlemen, this isn’t a productive use of our time and resources. You’re only digging your grave deeper. I suggest you let me negotiate our release with El Capitan. I will only charge a small commission.”

“Wait, you’re coming with us to talk to the head honcho?” I asked.

“I’m your magic genie; without me, you’re shit out of luck,” he replied.

The three of us stared at him, unsure if this pompous goofball was our salvation or ruin. We huddled in the corner and deliberated. I argued that he at least knew El Capitan and our jailers and could negotiate our release. Maybe.

I turned to Leonard. “OK, we’re in. Larry, give him the money.”

“What about your contribution to freedom?” Leonard asked.

“Forget it. We need gas money and a couple of burritos to get home,” I said.

He considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Fair enough.”

Leonard called out to the guard and whispered something into his ear in fluent Spanish. The guard nodded in a very somber manner, like he had just been given the formula for cold fusion.

The guard walked away, and after a few minutes, two federales came to the cell and motioned for the four of us to follow them. We were escorted into the office of El Capitan. The floor was covered in a deep maroon carpet, lush as jungle moss, with gold stars embossed like constellations.

A black velvet painting, about five-by-four-foot, was behind his desk. A naked, brunette woman with green eyes was holding a tiger by the leash and smiling at us. The tiger’s teeth were bared and glistening.

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and coconut oil. El Capitan was leaning back in his chair, cracking walnuts and tossing the shells in the rusted metal waste can. They dinged like a cowbell against the rim.

“Ten minutes. I have an important phone call and we need to make this quick,” he said.

“Ten minutes is all we need, Jefe! Sin problemo,” Leonard chirped.

Leonard cleared his throat and assumed his best trial lawyer pose. “These young men acknowledge and bitterly regret the trouble they have caused to the good people of your community, as do I, for my sordid behavior at the Gordo Gatto Cantina last night. We would like to present you with this fine, this emolument of three hundred dollars, American, as penalty and apology for our crimes.”

Leonard neatly set the cash on the captain’s desk. El Capitan thumbed the bills disdainfully, sniffed loudly, and cracked another walnut.

“It seems to me that three hundred is too small a fine for such egregious crimes,” El Capitan snorted.

“Very true, very true, Jefe, but sadly, this is all we have.” Leonard wrapped his arm around Scotty’s shoulders. Scotty snapped his head sharply at Leonard and glared at him. Scotty wasn’t fond of being touched by strangers or touched in general.

Leonard smiled sheepishly at El Capitan. “Now, we can call this young man’s father, who is the chief of police in Fresno. We can let him know his son has been arrested in Ensenada and ask him to come down and negotiate with you, a joint American-Mexican law enforcement collaboration? How does that sound, your eminence?”

Scotty stared at Leonard in utter bafflement. Scotty’s dad ran a chain of bagel shops.

El Capitan stiffened, dropped his walnut, and picked up the pile of cash. He stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket.

“No need for that. We will make an exception this one time, para estos tres jóvenes traviesos, these naughty boys. But let this be a lesson to you: do not come down to our beautiful city and get drunk and disrespect our people,” he intoned soberly.

We bowed our heads in shame and said we were sorry; we would never do it again. The federales walked Leonard and the three of us out the door.

We walked out to the street. It was night, and the cantinas were just starting to fill up. The town was vibrant with colored lights, and the laughter of children sounded like a chorus of cherubim singing. The breeze was scented with salt air and roses. I saw a couple walking hand in hand down the street and a grandmother holding a baby in her arms while sitting on a small porch. We could hear mariachi music faintly from somewhere.

Leonard took a deep breath and patted Scotty on the back which made him jump. “Well gentlemen, this is where we part company. Normally, I would treat you to a libation to celebrate our freedom, but I think it best if the three of you get out of town and back to the States,” Leonard said.

We agreed and got back in our car and drove out of town, heading north to Tijuana and the border. I drove, Larry sat glumly in the back, and Scotty just looked out the passenger window. None of us spoke for a while.

As I drove to the border, the headlights splintering the darkness, I wondered who won the cockroach race.