L.A. to Calexico (leg one SOTB)

I spent a year in California once trying to figure out what to do. I thought I was going to work there. It was mostly a wasted year, except for the trip I took to Mexico. It was sometime in the late Spring, I think it was May. I was living with my friend Roger in the North Hollywood Apartments. They were publicly subsidized apartments, everyone there was hispanic, the billboards were in Spanish and in all the neighborhood stores that was the language that I heard. Roger is of Lebanese extraction and very dark complected so he fit in fine, I stood out a bit but figured out the rules. Leave nothing in your car. Get up early in the morning, get back in the apartment early in the evening. It was OK to go out in the front or back in the alley close to the door. I seldom went further than that at night on foot. When I would get up in the mornings I would always see broken glass in the streets, the windows of cars had been broken. Those people didn't know the rules. They had left something in the car, and it was gone in the morning.

My friend Hooper had come into some money; his mother had passed away and left him about $10,000. He didn't work and lived in a trailer, going through the money: He spent it on coke mostly. That stuff really is addictive. I wasn't working myself, just looking for work so he said "Hey, let's go down to Mexico. I'll pay." We tried to get Roger to go too. Roger hadn't worked in many years, he got money from the government somehow and just steamed along. He would go jogging every day and read books about metaphysics, play chess on the computer, and watch a little TV. He was from the '60s and still talked about The Establishment. Anyway, Roger wouldn't go. "Someone might break in," he said. I wondered if he really meant his home might be broken into our his routine, his life, his mind. I let it go though, didn't ask him about that.

Of course this was one of Hooper's attempts to break away from his addiction. I figured I might as well go along, I would pick a place off the beaten road where there wouldn't be the city temptations. I spoke passable Spanish so I broke out my Northern Mexico handbook and picked a destination. Cosala. It was in the mountains in Sinaloa, was a former mining town and dated to colonial times. Muy tranquilo, the book said. We would park at the border in Calexico, cross into Mexico and take the buses, as I had done before. The buses in Mexico are a good means of transport. The intercity ones that traveled long distances had TV monitors and bathrooms. There are enough poor in the country who don't have cars and can afford no other means of travel, so that is how they go. So that is how we would go.

It is a long way down to Cosala from the border, about 1,000 miles, very close to the Tropic of Cancer in the Western slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains. It would have been about the same distance to go to the tip of Baja California, but the only thing there is a resort called Cabo San Lucas, and almost nothing in between. Who would want to go there? I saw pictures, it looked appalling, unless you wanted to sleep at a resort which wasn't very different from one in Florida. I wanted to go where there were no gringos and stay in the $7 hotels, talk to the gente in their language, sit in the nice plazas that those towns all seemed to have and talk to the pretty small town girls. So we would go to Hermosillo on our first leg, a long day of travel. Then, rest up and continue on to Culiacan, on the coast, where we could catch a smaller bus to take us up the mountain roads to Cosala. That was the plan.

When we got to the frontera, my friend wanted to spend the night across the border, in Mexico. He didn't understand that the frontera was part of neither country, it wasn't really American or Mexican. All along the border this is so, and although there doesn't appear to be too much difference, it is better to spend the night on the American side, cross over in the morning and get away from the frontera, to avoid incident. I had figured this out in Laredo before, on a previous trip. I was with a different friend on that trip so Hooper didn't understand. It wasn't yet dark so I thought I would take him over there to have a look, over the border to Mexicali, I figured at least I might get a sense of where the bus station was.

Calexico was a town or poor people, but Mexicali was poorer and dirtier. There was a smell of fetid water from somewhere unseen and the sidewalks were a very very dark gray from the many decades of dirt that had been ground into them. No one washed things down in a town like that, and there were many small clumps of garbage in the gutters that had been there for several days. We walked around a bit and I spoke to a few people in Spanish, Con permiso, donde desta el estacion del autobus? From their answers, it was clear that it was not close to the border, not within walking distance, and a few people were directing me to the local city buses or were confused and just shrugged.

I had seen enough; it was clear we would have to take a taxi in the morning to reach the bus station. It was growing dark and the people walking on the streets were thinning out. As we walked I could smell the alcohol on their breaths and the tawdry shops were closing down, the bars would now start to fill. Some of the men smiled at us, I had seen that smile before and it is not a friendly one. I suppose you could be fooled by it, maybe that is why they flashed their teeth.

We had had a huge argument about staying in this town for the night, the entire drive from L.A. to Calexio it raged. "Let's just stay in Mexico!" he kept yelling. I prevailed, but it was exhausting. I asked Hooper if he wanted to go back now to the American side. "Yeah, let's get out of here," he said as he looked around in the twilight town. He was no sissy, he had spent some time in L.A. County Jail and that is no fun. But he was laughing a little nervously now and we crossed back over the border into Calexico, back to our hotel and made it an early night. I didn't have to argue with him about things as much after that.

"Don't worry Hoop," I said, "You can see real Mexico tomorrow. This whole border is just a necessary evil. And by the way, I aims to bring me back a wife!" I told him some stories about my other visit, and then he went down to the bar. I stayed in the room, reading about where we were headed, then went to sleep, wondering how it was going to turn out.