Tijuana

As you may have read in my previous posts, I am in San Diego.  Being here has reminded me of something that happened to me on an earlier visit to this fair city.  Although I've detailed this story in shows before, I have never published it in print.  Enjoy...

Don’t go to Tijuana. No matter what you’re thinking, it’s worse.

Now if you know me, you know the last place on earth I would have a good time is Tijuana.  So of course while I'm on a business trip to San Diego, I leave my nice, clean, high-rise hotel where Billy Dee Williams is a guest, and I make a run for the border--like an idiot. The cab driver drops me and three friends of mine off near the border station, and I know he was thinking the same thing I was--these guys are going to be raped and killed before they even get a chance to eat a churro.  It was like “VICTIM” was tattooed on our foreheads. The cab driver looks at us as we get out of the car and says, “Be careful.” It was like he was my mother sending me off to the ‘Nam.

So we get out and we cross the border into Mexico--and no one even looks at us. That’s when you know things have just gotten out of control. It’s like Mexico is saying, “Give us your tired, your poor, your terrorists with cocaine and black market babies. It’s a party, amigo!” They assume, “Hey, maybe he’s bringing in livestock and fruit, but if he’s bad-ass enough to walk in here, I’m not gonna screw with him!”

So we’re walking to downtown Tijuana on all these bridges and raised walkways that go over dry trenches filled with trash, and there are all these street vendors and beggars and kids trying to sell you shoes from the guy who walked by before you that they killed and dumped in the culvert. And there are all these beggar women with babies, and you want to give them money because they look so pathetic, but then you find out after you walk further up the way that there’s a guy renting babies to beggars so they can make more money. I’m serious! He has a stand! I’m pretty sure he was licensed! It was like 2nd Wind Used Babies. Somewhere there was probably a 24 hour slot you could return your babies in--like Blockbuster! I imagine that pretty soon he’ll be put out of business by Net-babies because they have no late fees, but still, he was doing well. I half expected to see one of those machines like at the airport where you return the cart and you get some change, only there’s this long line of screaming babies all chained together.

So, I rented a baby--you know, just for fun--and we kept going. Now as you get closer to downtown, that’s when the drugs start. No. It’s not what you think. Everywhere you look there are pharmacies with big flashing signs that say “Claritin! Ritalin! Prozac!” It’s like Cheech Marin is standing on the corner saying, “Hey man, you want some amoxycillin? You want some anti-inflammatories? How about brand name anti-emetics with 50% higher efficacy rating than placebo?” And not only that, but every one of these pharmacies has a sign somewhere in their front window, and they all say the same thing: “YES! WE HAVE VANILLA EXTRACT!” I’m serious--every store. I was afraid it was street slang for white slavery or albino insulin or something. I didn’t even want to know.

Now we’re downtown, and everywhere we go, there are guys coming up to us and saying, “Hey man. Let me introduce you to my sister! I’d like you to meet my sister! My sister would like you!” And I’m thinking, “What nice young men. You wouldn’t think it by the missing ear and the outline of the crack pipe in his pocket, but he’s truly friendly, wanting me to meet his family.” But then the illusion is shattered because the guys all go on to say, “Come on, man! I’m talking quality! No chicks with d#@ks here!”

OH MY GOD! You mean? Oh no! Why, I even bet she’s not really your sister! But, thank you. Thank you so much for the offer. I appreciate it. Please stop stabbing me. I’ll give you this baby if you go away. It’s new.

The biggest shock for me was not that there were transexual hookers in Tijuana, but that there were enough of them and there was enough of a customer satisfaction issue as result that the disclaimer about them had made it into the standard sales pitch. It was at that point I realized, I would make a terrible John. “Oh! Excuse me, sir, ma’am, Pedro’s sister, whatever. Oh no! No! On the contrary, there’s more than I expected, and that’s the issue. I’m sorry. Please accept his baby.”

So the night was pretty uneventful. I don’t drink, do drugs or whoremonger, so for me, Tijuana is mostly about fresh tortillas. However, my friend really wanted to buy a Cuban cigar, so we ended up in a cigar shop at the end of the night. He bought his cigar, and the girl who worked there was very helpful. She gave us some advice about how to get back across the border more quickly, which was good, because we hadn’t really bothered to figure out how we would get back into our home country. She said, “Take a cab to the border station, but not an orange cab--do not get in an orange cab! If one stops, run away from it! Then, when you get to the border station, there will be two lines--a walking line, and a bicycle line. You want to be in the bicycle line.” But we don’t have bicycles, helpful cigar-girl. “You can rent them.” Ah! Like the babies! “If you rent a bike, it will take you two hours less to cross the border.” Sold. Anything that would get me out of that hell-hole faster was a good idea to me.

So we get a non-orange cab, and the four of us pile in. It’s tight. We are packed in. We tell the guy we’re heading home and he starts driving like a bat out of hell--except that he’s not going in any one, particular direction. He is driving us all over creation. Now he’s doing one of two things. He’s either: a) Running up the fare; or, b) Taking us out in the desert to kill us.

By this point, I’m laughing, because if you had ever asked me where I was going to die, I wouldn’t have said Tijuana. Two of my friends are also amused, but my friend Troy—the one from Burnsville, Minnesota—is terrified. Guys named Troy shouldn’t go to Tijuana. He keeps saying to us, as if the driver can’t understand him, “Maybe we should do something. Should we do something? Seriously, guys.” He’s getting more and more panicked. Finally, he turns to my friend Brian, who speaks solid, high school Spanish, and he says in a shaky voice, “Brian. Tell him we want to go to America.” Brian, in a moment of extreme savoir-faire, turns back and says, “I’m pretty sure he already knows that, Troy.”

Eventually the driver gets us to border, and the fare is like sixty dollars. As we’re getting out, my other friend, John—who is somewhat excitable—throws a twenty dollar bill at the cabbie and tells him to go f@#k himself. I am convinced that this is where I’m going to die as a direct result of this action. I silently curse my cohorts for wanting to go to Tijuana when I just wanted to go to Friday’s. When I get out of the back seat I’m distracted by the cursing cabbie, and I don’t shut my door. The cabbie shouts obscenities at John for a few more seconds, then floors it and peels out with my door still open in the back. The car is going about thirty when the door is closed by a trash truck which is also doing thirty in the opposite direction. The force of the impact actually lifts two wheels of the cab off the ground, and the cabbie never even slows down. He never even touches the brakes. Stuff like this happens in Tijuana all the time.

So now, we’re at the border, and the girl was right. There are thousands and thousands of drunk, high, infected Americans trying to get back across the border. It will take three to four hours, easily. But there’s an almost empty line labeled “Bicycles” and a friendly guy renting bikes just a few feet away. We rent four bikes for about twenty dollars total. The guy tells us to just return them on the other side of the border, but doesn’t really give us any more instruction than that. We get to choose our bikes--and this is where the fun starts. They were bikes only in the loosest interpretation of the word. My bike had no pedals. Another bike had no seat--just a sharp metal point sticking straight up. Most didn’t have chains, some of them had handlebars that were bent sideways at a ninety degree angle. Also, most of them were sized for an eight year-old girl. These were just “token” bikes. But we rented them, and we started riding, pushing or carrying our bikes through the roped off area that led to the border station.

Now, it’s impossible to ride a little girl’s bike through the streets of Tijuana and look tough, and we had to ride past over three thousand drunken people who were in line waiting to get to the same place we were going—they just didn’t talk to the cigar girl, so they didn’t know about the whole bike thing—and they are mad! They are booing, and cursing, and throwing things at us. We’re trying to be cool, but it’s hard when you’ve got a flowered basket on your handle bars and a piece of sharp metal violating you. I thought we were going to be lynched.

We finally make it to the front of the line, and we have to stand and wait next to the drunkest frat boy in Tijuana. He’s talking to the border guards .“Hey! Hey! I’m not Osama Bin Laden! Let me through! I’m not Osama Bin Laden!” The guard says, “I know you’re not. ‘Cause if you were, you’d be full of f#@king holes by now.” Excellent.

The guard walks up to us and says, “Bike riders. You will leave your bikes here, walk through the metal detector, go to the immigration desk and speak with the agent, come back out here, pick up your bike, carry it back going AROUND THE OUTSIDE of the metal detector, and continue into the United States.”

That’s when I realize what’s going on. My bike, which I am carrying at this point anyway because one of its wheels has locked up, is obviously packed full of heroin, Ritalin and pure vanilla extract. I am a mule. I am Caleb, Full of Grace. It’s obvious that the bike guy is paying kickbacks to the American Border Patrol, and that’s why this whole system which makes absolutely no sense is in place. I’m going to carry the bike around the metal detector and then just walk unimpeded into the country? And we wonder why we have a border problem? There’s already a wall at Tijuana, but it has a door in it and the Border Patrol is just letting people through as long as they’ve got a bike. Who needs a passport when you’ve got a Schwinn with no chain?! This is the thin line that stands between me and the oppression of evil men.

The immigration guy doesn’t even look at us and just waves us through, making me feel much better about homeland security, and we’re on our way home. We just have to return the bikes, and we still don’t understand how that’s going to work. We’re walking past the border station and we’re thinking, “Maybe there’s a building, or maybe a guy has a stand, or surely there will be some kind of sign or something. I mean, what’s to keep us from stealing the bikes--besides the fact they’ve already given us tetanus and some form of bike-AIDS?”

So then we round the corner of the building and there, on the side of the road that heads back into Mexico, is a thirty foot wide, shoulder high, pile of bikes. No sign. No stand. Nothing. Just throw your bike on top of the pile and God bless America. And right next to the pile of bikes, was a pile of babies. I will never go back to Tijuana.