You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The man in the lunch room regaling us with his Mexico stories.
“I swear I did 30 shots of tequila,” he says.
He is sun burned and has a 4 day growth of beard.
“then we hit the bar later that night…”
He’s 5’9″ 165 pounds. He is a good guy. A fun guy. A normal guy.
30 shots would turn this guy into liquid snot. If this man did 30 shots in the Cancun sun he would literally become the stuff that leaks out of a cactus when its been cut with a machete.
“Yeah we were hammered and they just kept pouring us drinks,” he says.
He talks about the endless volleyball games and wrist bands of all-inclusive liquid entitlements.
As I watch him hold court in the lunch room, his words begin to diminish. The volume is slowly lowered and I am removed from the table by an altered space of my own perception.
I am looking through an elongated vision sphere into my own mind and thinking back to the wildest times in my life.
It’s the early 80’s and Mexico is just a place South of San Diego.
Drive by shootings and kidnappings and drug cartels are not a concern.
When you go to college in L.A. you have a couple of options at last call. Go home. Go to Vegas. Go to Mexico.
I’ve done all three.
Mexico? Why not Mexico?
It’s as easy as going to Tommy’s for a double chilli cheese burger.
Mexico? It’s as easy as stripping naked at midnight at skinny dipping at Venice Beach.
In my book, Mexico was always a good option.
When me and my boys went south of the border, we frequently stopped in TJ.
And when we stopped in TJ the 1st thing we’d do?, Go to a Chinese restaurant of course.
Nothing says welcome to Mexico like egg roll and soy sauce served by a Mexican waitress.
Crazy.
Tia Juana was a wild west border town.
It was the three stooges on qualudes waving arrows that say USA THIS WAY.
Tia Juana was juke boxes in back alley drink joints behind La Revolucion Blvd.
It was cat tacos and shifty eyed Federales and 62 year old hookers promising you the best time $20 could generate in a back alley.
“Yo gringo, donkey shows over here. You like?”
OMG.
30 shots of tequila.
I think I’ve been to Mexico that many times.
And each visit is seemingly more unsettled than the last.
What was it about this pig trough of a nation that called to me?
Was it the reckless disregard for rules?
Was it the crap shoot attitude of anything can happen?
Was it the insouciant feeling that a beer and a beach and a sunset in a new country was jump starting life’s doldrums?
I made so many forays into Mexico, the stories run together. I pull back the curtain of my mind and I stare into the crystal ball of my past and I see the sunshine filter through the hazy neon lights.
Sometimes the moments are only a fleeting glimpse that has been able to hang onto the brain matter that hasn’t deteriorated or decayed in my head.
Some stories are so vivid, I can taste the dust, I can hear the little boy screaming “Chicklets Gum Meestor”.
Some stories are legendary, epic, Hangover-like.
Like a lava lamp oozing in an opium den, the memories percolate in my mind always close by for ready recall.
30 shots of tequila? That’s Romper Room!
My most vivid memory is the border crossing. That’s where Federales are chasing us from the rear and American border agents are training their weapons on us from the North.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
“What we do?”
“Pull out of line now.”
“Then what?”
“Gun it for the border.”
“What?”
The next thing I know we are passing a line of cars, waiting to be inspected before crossing back into the USA.
We are passing dozens of cars at 50 mph. We are headed North and we are driving on the shoulder of danger and lawlessness.
There is panic in our car. This is uncharted territory. You don’t pull out of the border crossing line and draw attention to yourself.
The windows are down and dust from this non used lane is pouring into our vehicle.
Why are we making a run for the border? Because we just got out of jail for doing nothing wrong.
And when we told the Chicklet selling kids to scram, they summoned their Federale Uncles to come and take us back.
No more Mexican jail for us.
Punch it.
So now it’s high noon in the wild west.
Guns are trained on us from two nations and we are renegades flying up the service lane.
STOP!
We pull into a 50 yard space I call the neutral zone.
It’s North of Mexico and it’s South of the USA.
I think there is yellow line designating this no man’s land.
We simply stop.
In our rear view I see the Mexicans, their toes on the yellow line of Mexico.
Ahead I see the American border agents, guns out, eye balling us.
We wait.
2 agents, guns drawn, walk into the neutral zone to our car.
“Let me do the talking,” I say to the miserable bastards in the car.
The agent gets to the window.
“Sir. We have just spent the last 24 hours in a Mexican jail. All we’re guilty of is being Americans with a few bucks in our pockets. They were coming to take us back so we got scared and ran.”
The border agent stares at the Mexicans on the yellow line behind us. I can see the contempt on his face. I can see his eye blink behind his mirrored sun glasses as he surveils the enemy to the south.
How many times must they have stared at each other, two countries separated by this 50 yards of neutral zone.
The sun burned agent looks at me and says “Boys. This is is your lucky day. Welcome to America.”
And like that he waves us over the yellow line.
In a matter of seconds we are safe in the good old US OF A.
We cheer that’s one part exuberance one part relief.
I wonder how many shots of tequila that moment is worth.
But that’s just one moment from one trip.
And every trip is a 3o shot marathon.
I have so many random filaments of thought and light that burst into my memory without perceived beginning or end.
I remember dancing with a young beauty in a Mexican Cantina only to be informed that my dream girl only had one arm and a thirst for free beers.
I remember sleeping on a jail house bed made of rebar as Mexican prisoners screamed at a parade of prostitutes being brought into the jail.
I remember a line of men flowing out the door of a Mexican bar as my roommate arm wrestled every man in Mexico for beers and tacos during a 48 hour non stop assault on debauchery.
I remember just wanting to go to sleep and walking down to the beach, only to stumble into a Federale assisted drug deal.
I remember being escorted away from the drug deal at the business end of an AK 47.
I remember pulling $20 dollars out of my sock to pay off the local law to look the other way.
I remember being afraid to be anywhere in the open so I slept in the wheel well of a PEMEX gasoline tanker in the middle of Tia Juana gas station.
I remember three of us wearing tuxedos, escaping from an Orange County wedding with a full keg in the back seat somewhere around Rosa Rita Beach.
I remember using sledge hammers to break through the wall of a building under construction only to pop up in the middle of the bar covered with white chalk board.
I remember coming into a tia juana cantina at 6am only to find patrons asleep on the bar. We woke them up and started a new party.
I remember almost driving into a big pile of dirt on Pacific Coast Highway while driving 125mph. The dirt was put there by banditos who wanted to rob us after we crashed. We didn’t.
I remember over the line softball tournaments at mile marker 69 In Rosa Rita. No tequila shots there. Ha.
As my vision tunnel refocuses on the skinny sunburned guy in the lunch room, I have to smile.
My ears open and I listen to his story about a wrist band and some 17 year old girl there with her parents.
“Then I found out she was only 17,” he says to laughter.
I laugh too.
I laugh because I know that my stories are so diabolically fiendish, so over the top, they could never happen today.
I forged these Mexico memories in a time when you didn’t need a passport.
You didn’t have to worry about drug cartels and shoot outs.
Christ, you didn’t even need money, if you could arm wrestle your way through country, which we did.
You simply had to have the desire to go and invite adventure to fill the moment.
I miss those days.
Crazy was simple. Crazy was abundant. Crazy was the road that rose up to meet you.
Mexico with a wrist band? Or Mexico in handcuffs?
Ha.
Life’s crazy™