Jeremy Eaton

It had been five years since I had toured the bars, discos, strip joints, and dollar-a-dance whore emporiums of Tijuana. I had been writing a novel back then, and I wanted to walk in the footsteps of my character, who was looking for a missing person. The idea this time would be, in a sense, looking for Tijuana itself, or rather the heart of Tijuana’s Saturday night.

I had a pocket full of money and a native guide named Fernando Castro who parks cars at the La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla. Fernando is 28. He grew up in TJ, and it was still his favorite place to barhop. Fernando speaks Spanish a lot better than I do, and he’s big. About six feet, 200 pounds, close-cropped hair, a neck as thick as a fireplug, and an earring stud in his left ear. Fernando is quiet and not the smiliest guy I’ve known. Overall, he gives the impression of someone you could hit with a lamppost and it wouldn’t ruin his night. I liked these qualities in someone I’d be drinking with at three in the morning in Zona Norte.

Fernando came by my place in North Park about 6:30. To the south, the half-moon hung like a blade in a darkening indigo sky. I threw an overnight bag in the bed of his Toyota truck and hopped in next to him. He had the Pretenders’ Learning to Crawl on the tape deck. In the headlights of oncoming cars and by the reflected light of the dashboard, he looked grim, as if we were on our way to identify a body instead of checking out nightlife south of the border.

Fernando and I hadn’t really talked to each other.We had shared a restaurant booth with some mutual friends one night. Mostly, I had just seen him around, parking cars.

“You married, Fernando?”

“No. I got a kid though, a boy.His name is Fernando He’s five. I see him on the weekends.”

“Yeah. Same with me. So, ah… nobody’s gonna miss you, you don’t get back ’til 4 a.m. or whatever?”

“Nope.”

From the speakers, Chrissie Hynde was singing about how she went back to Ohio, but her city was gone.

At the border, we were waved through. Talking, we missed the Centro turnoff and came up on TJ from the west, from the Ensenada road. First Avenue was jammed with people, as if some huge evacuation was taking place, a sudden, desperate population flow.Of course, that’s exactly what’s going on any night of the week.

Smoke from the taco carts — vendors frying carne asada and scallions, carnitas, tortillas, pork rinds, tongue, and goat’s head — with dust and clouds of exhaust from junk cars burning oil. It all rose skyward toward the gathering cloud layer lit from below by the neon of the strip along Revolución to create a roiling,murky ceiling.

Tijuana used to be much funkier. The main drag, tourist row — basically, Revolución, from First Avenue to Avenida Agua Caliente— is now a roughly equal balance of slick and sleaze. Just five years ago there was more dust and garbage. The place still has an immediately foreign feel to it — you don’t feel like you’re just out of town, you definitely know you’re out of the country. But in recent years, the impression of TJ being some thirdworld version of an American city has become more pronounced.

Lately, I haven’t had occasion to spend much time in TJ. The changes seemed sudden. I was curious about some of the new joints.They were reminders of time passing at the accelerated rate you become painfully aware of as you approach middle age.

We cruised First Avenue for a hotel room. I told Fernando he was welcome to crash in whatever room I could find. “Okay. Maybe. Thanks.”

We drove past Mariachi Square, down First, past El Tony Bar, Cielito Lindo, Hotel San Francisco, the Dragon Rojo Bar, Jockey Club, the Hotel Alaska, the Fantasy Bar. Fernando drove around a few blocks while I tried to find a room. A dozen places were booked up,but on Fourth Avenue, I found a room at the Adelita Hotel. I tossed my overnight bag on one of two single beds with faded roses on the spread and locked the door. Toilet, sink, bed. It was a room.

We parked the truck at the original Tijuana Tillie’s on Seventh,the oldest tourist well in town. Four bucks to park all night, another dollar for a tip. It wasn’t that long ago that two bucks took care of it. It was about eight o’clock. We walked through TJ Tillie’s swinging doors into the saloon, where manic, plodding disco/rap-music blared incongruously in a mostly empty room.Some 45 rpm records hung from the ceiling, along with a few hundred hats. We ordered two Dos Equis and looked around at the four American couples, the only other people in the bar. Two were in, say their 50s and seemed to have known each other for a long time. The men leaned against the bar and drank while the women sat at a nearby table. One of the men — short, white hair, pale yellow sport shirt over a white T-shirt— was smashed. He didn’t let go of his glass of El Presidente brandy, ice,and water while the bartender built him another drink. The one I figured for his wife kept looking sidelong at him and made exasperated faces at her lady friend. The other man,taller, thin, and bored looking, stared at the silent bank of television sets that had a Cubs baseball game, highlights from the dog races, rock videos, and soccer simultaneously winking and strobing in a dark corner. Were these people retired and traveling? The drunk definitely had that pickled, lost look seen on plenty of retired Americans down here, puzzling over a long career at some job that maybe didn’t add up to much.

The two other couples were younger, sitting 30 feet apart. Both girls were young and blonde. Their dates were young too.Probably from San Diego or L.A. They drank margaritas, though one of the girls had something that looked like pure red dye no.2 in a small birdbath of a glass.

Fernando told me that you used to be able to place bets with the bartender on the jai alai games next door. Never had to leave your bar stool. Probably still could. He hadn’t done it in a while. “If you came in this place with a tie on at one time, the waiter would come over with scissors and cut it off. The other waiters might come over and hold you while the guy cut it off. Then he’d run around all over the place waving the piece of tie and then pin it somewhere. I never saw them do it with bras and panties, but you used to see a lot of bras and panties hanging up too.”

After looking around the room,which had an air of a party to which someone had forgotten to invite guests. I asked,“Well,what do you say? Crawl on?”

Fernando finished his beer. “Sure.”

We left the drunk American and company and went out through the swinging doors. The low clouds and churning smoke from the taco carts shone purple in the reflected glow of La Vida Disco’s mass of aqua and violet neon. Revolución was a river of headlights, taillights, flashing squad car lights flowing between banks of riotous, blinding signs.

“Any suggestions?”

“We could go to La Unicorna.”

Fernando pointed across the street, “That’s like the oldest strip joint down here. I used to sneak in here when I was 15, 16.”

We walked down a flight of stairs into nearly total blackness, except for some light bulbs along the back bar to the right and a few tired, red and blue spotlights playing over a stage in the middle of the room. Onstage was a topless dancer, legs spread, swaying huge hips and a red-panty-clad ass in front of some dim shapes I couldn’t make out.Her belly protruded as if she were pregnant. One of the dim shapes suddenly stood up, leaned over, and planted his face between the woman’s cheeks. She continued to sway, playing her rear end over the old American. He was maybe 60, thinning gray hair, glasses, and a denim work shirt. He stuffed a bill into her panties, and she pulled them to the side to give him better access. She smiled dreamily as if this were quite pleasant. The old American had a mirthless look about him as he nuzzled her energetically. Four young Mexicans at a nearby table hooted and clapped.

“Hey, are all these dancers fat in here?” I was looking at a woman with hennaed hair in a skintight, mock-leopard-skin dress. She had a body like a construction worker who had been unemployed for six months and drank too much beer in front of the television.A Mexican girl with bleached-blonde hair; tight, low-cut T-shirt; and blue miniskirt cruised by Fernando.

“Buy me a tequila?” she asked.Fernando shook his head. “Two? Three? Four?” Fernando smiled and kept shaking his head. She waved him away and walked on by. Onstage, the woman with the body like an old VW bug was straddling the old gringo, who was now lying on his back on the stage. She squatted over him, swaying, pulled the front of her panties to the side and hunkered down on him. The old guy put both his hands on her small, ski-slope breasts. He still didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. His face,when he surfaced, was set with determination as if he were performing a damned difficult job that had to get done.

The henna-haired leopard- skin woman came over and asked if we’d buy her a tequila.“Sure,”I said before Fernando could cut her off. “Sit down.” She collapsed like an avalanche of flesh next to him. She asked for a cigarette, and I gave her one. She called the waiter over, and the girl who had asked for a tequila saw this. She came back and sat down next to me.

“Tequila?”

“Sí. ¿Como no?”

The waiter brought three.Both girls had a finger of Coke in shot glasses as chasers.The tab was $12. “What’s your name?”I asked the blonde next to me.

“Marabella.”The other girl introduced herself as Elena.

“Are you going to dance?” I asked Marabella. It might be worth sticking around for. “No,” Marabella said. “I don’t dance here.”

“You dance someplace else?”

“Sure. For fun. I don’t like to dance like this for work. Elena dances here.” She gestured at the large woman next to Fernando. I wondered how much of Elena’s dancing the structural integrity of the building could take.

“But you’re working, right?”

She nodded and looked at the winking red light on my tape recorder.

“¿Reportero?”

“Sort of. Escritor, si.”

“You going to say something bad about me?”

“No.Why would I do that?”

“I don’t like that.”She pointed at the recorder with her chin. “It’s more better you turn it off.”

I turned it off, and Marabella told me she would be working all night until about 5:00 a.m. She charged $40 for “one time.” Or more if…she indicated the possibilities of special requests. I said, “Well. I’m working too. Maybe we’ll come back later. It was nice to meet you, Marabella, Elena.” Fernando and I stood, and they both got up without saying anything or looking at us.They went off in two different directions. Elena to the back to change and go onstage and Marabella to wander the shadows behind the boys who had come in while we were talking.

We cruised on down Revolución, pausing at the entrance to Rio Rita’s.From the door at the bottom of another set of steps, like the ones at the Unicorn, whistles blew, horns sounded, music pumped deafeningly, and the shouts and wails of dozens of voices in unison rose up the stairwell, “Sounds like some kind of mass exorcism going on in here,”I said.Fernando glumly nodded as if to say, “Ah yes, the public exorcisms on Saturday night, a primitive practice of my benighted people.”

But what he really said was,“Those are American kids down there.”

Rio Rita’s is a long, lowceilinged room that stretches back half a block beneath the building above it.A bar that can seat two dozen people is on the left.Looked like four bartenders back there.The place was packed. Inside, the temperature rose ten degrees and the humidity twice that. The air was dense with teenage sweat.

It looked like maybe 300 eighth graders had liberated a nightclub and were greedily guzzling themselves into oblivion with evil-looking drinks and buckets of ice and beer. These kids weren’t that much older than my sixth-grader son. Screams were coming from one group of tables pushed together, where a dozen kids with complexion problems, cracking voices, braces,and homework assignments hanging over their heads were dementedly cheering on a waiter who had grabbed hold of a girl, maybe 16,by the bottom of her chin. In his other hand, he held a plastic squeeze bottle filled with a foul, brown concoction, and he arced a stream of it into her baby-bird-like mouth. Around her, friends screamed and counted down from ten to zero, confusedly, in both Spanish and English. It took them about 15 seconds to get from ten to two, and the girl sputtered, spraying a few of her friends. Two waiters stood by, one blowing a whistle, the other sounding an air horn. Another waiter wrapped her mouth with a towel and then proceeded to shake her head like a maraca. The girl’s eyes glazed over, closed. The waiter let her go, and she opened her eyes, smiling under the peer pressure.

I asked a passing waiter what was in that squeeze bottle. “Tequila, Coca...yo no sé.” I watched the bartenders for a while and saw that they emptied unfinished drinks — margaritas, daiquiris, whiskies, Kahlua, everything — into a gallon wine bottle with a funnel at its mouth. I had a feeling that was the special squeeze cocktail the kids were being served.

The U.S. Navy was pretty well represented in Rio Rita’s, judging from the haircuts and tattoos. I asked a guy who looked to be in his late 20s, maybe early 30s, sitting with two girls who looked 17 or 18, if I could join them for a while, ask them a couple of questions.

The guy was from Ocean Beach, a remodeler. He had grown up, in part, in Tijuana; and though he wasn’t Mexican, his Spanish was excellent. The girls said they were 20 years old. Okay. Both of them were plump with baby fat.Where were they going tonight?

One of the girls said, “We’ll hang out here for a while. Then we’ll go to Tequila Sunrise down the street. It’s great. They have a volleyball court in there.” She meant Tequila Circo,not Tequila Sunrise.

And what was she drinking? It was that same chemical red stuff I had seen at TJ Tillie’s. “Sex on the Beach,” she said and smiled both proudly and shyly at the same time.

I asked the remodeler where he hung out in TJ these days, besides Rio Rita’s.

“This place is changing so fast; there’s always a new club every time you come down here. I just walk down the street and whatever’s happening…” he shrugged.

Any one place he recommended over another? “Well, since I’m from the old school,Mike’s and the Aloha Club. Then there used to be this place, the Long Bar.” I remembered the Long Bar very well. It was one of my favorites too. We talked about how the place had become a disco with a slide in it, like a kid’s playground with booze. But that was exactly what this place was too. All it needed was a sandbox and some hopscotch squares on the floor.

I rejoined Fernando at the bar and we decided to mosey. We walked southwest to the Long Bar, just for the hell of it. Inside, it was renovated in a nouveau- deco style,or whatever you call that sterile, almost menopausal combo of pink, chartreuse, charcoal, and rose. The crowd inside— and there was a crowd— was well-dressed Mexican kids about the same age as their Norte Americano counterparts down the street. Instead of straw hats with pastel Corona bands, Corona Beach Club T-shirts, iridescent Bad Boy shorts, or those tight black bicycle pants and Reeboks, these kids all had impeccable coifs, shined shoes (stockings, heels, and skirts on the girls), and tasteful but unapologetically displayed jewelry. They liked to party in classier surroundings than the cat-box atmosphere of Rio Rita’s.

We didn’t even have a drink;we decided to press on toward the heart of Saturday night in Tijuana, though I suspected we had stumbled onto it back at the Unicorn.

It was still early, only about 9:30. We toured a few more discos and a dark, nearly empty bar with a few quietly drinking Mexican men and some hookers. One of the women was sitting in the lap of a black man. Her tank top was rolled down beneath her large, brown nipples, and the black guy was staring at them, uninterestedly. If he looked bored, the woman was positively comatose with ennui. There was something funereal about the atmosphere that reminded me of bars in New York where junkies would hang out drinking Cokes and waiting to score. Something in the dead-fish eyes of the bartender, the hooker, the black man,and the doorman made me immediately numb and depressed. The guy at the door asked me what I wanted, “Pussy?”

“No.”

“You go down the street. This place is for Mexicans. Go down there.” He pointed vaguely back the way we had come.

“Sure.”

The night was already humid, and every time we entered a room, the sweat would stand out on my face and soak my T-shirt. It occurred to me that we might have looked like a couple of cops: Fernando with his hulking form and deadpan resignation— eating something hard to swallow, the look you see on cops too often — and me talking into my little tape recorder like a radio transmitter.

In Mariachi Square the norteño music vied with rock and roll coming from the Rincon Bar. It was still too early to head across the street, into the Zona Norte, I figured.The Zona’s Indian beggars; the kids darting in and out of barrooms, selling flowers or Chiclets; the drunken campesinos in their cowboy hats, stretched out on sidewalks and in doorways; the manic desperation of shop merchants barking insistent invitations to bargains didn’t seem festive, exotic, or charming. Years ago, I saw all this with the eyes of a novelist and drank it in for material.Great stuff. Now I just saw a lot of people trapped in the little box of Coahuila with no way out.

We got in a cab and told the cabbie we wanted to go to Plaza Rio Tijuana, across the traffic rotary from the Tijuana Cultural Center. It’s a shopping mall built along the lines of, say, Seaport Village. Very high cuteness quotient. A thousand well-dressed, upperclass Mexicans wandered through the little alleyways, sat at café tables,indoors and outdoors. Shoe boutiques, gift shops, and clothing stores were mostly closed, but the dozen or so cantinas and restaurants were open and doing a brisk trade. Flamenco music, yuppie jazz from Joe Mamas (the keyboard player looked like Neil Simon; the drummer looked like the Hillside Strangler), disco, Greek music, and rock and roll struck at the air in dissonant competition. Fernando and I weaved through the crowd and sat at a table outside a Spanish restaurant and we ordered coffee. We watched a belly dancer in front of the Greek place, and then a guy came out and danced like Zorba on the sidewalk. He placed a chair on top of a table, then a carafe of water on top of the chair, and proceeded to lift the whole thing, table and all, with his teeth. He spread his arms out and danced gracefully in a small circle. My teeth hurt to watch him.

We milled around for another hour or so, watching the Mexican yuppies, and decided they weren’t any more interesting than American yuppies. “Come on, Fernando. Let’s go down to Coahuila. What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“Well, the Plaza Río Tijuana ain’t the heart of Saturday night in TJ.Maybe Pasadena. I don’t even recognize this place as Tijuana.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty nice.”

We grabbed another cab, went back to Revolución, and ended up at another topless bar, La Bambi. We didn’t have to descend into the place, just push aside some greasy, leather like curtains. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like curdled, gray milk. Music, Mexican disco, heaved and thrust into the room like some fascist, brainwashed Muzak. A woman onstage tottered on high heels and launched bruised, pale thighs over the heads of sailors and Mexican pollos marking their time. Doing The Big Wait: like guys doing short time in jail or soldiers on a 24-hour pass in Bangkok or Olongapo. Why did everybody in this town look like he was waiting for something?

The host of the evening, a gray-haired Merry Widower of a Mexicano gentleman, ushered Fernando and me to the very best seats. Raised a little from the tables on the floor, a good view of the dancers, up away from the rabble. “Tequila y dos cervezas, por favor.” A hooker named Claudia came over and said she’d like a tequila too. She showed me her breasts.“Very nice,” I said. “Sort of globular without being too ponderously pendulous.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Peekshures!”She snapped an imaginary lens up to her eyes with her fingers. “Polaroids. ¿Qué sabe?”

“Yessiree. Yo sabe.” I tried to leer appreciatively, gave it up, and drank my tequila.

I saw the Old Gringo. The Old Muff Diver. The same guy from the Unicorn, stuffing bills into the dancer’s G-string.He had moved up the street in a progression of joints, still nuzzling, doggedly working his way through the thatches of womanhood on display in town, on a mission from some joyless demon inside himself.

Claudia left. She heard me when I said I wasn’t springing for Pasión Insatiable, Polaroids, or “Fucky Sucky.”Again $40.

A couple of guys were seated next to us. Navy, I figured.One guy was a very spiffy dresser. Charcoal jacket and matching shirt buttoned to the throat.“Hi!” I greeted him.

“How’s it goin’?”

“Want some of this tequila? I got a bucket of it, but Claudia didn’t drink hers, and I’ll be blind if I drink all that.”

“No. thanks. I don’t drink that stuff. Got a beer?”

“Yeah, I got a beer too. But that’s mine.”

I whipped out the little recorder with the red, stuttering light. “You in the Navy?” I asked him.

“I couldn’t say.”

“You’re not sure?”

“What difference does it make?”

“None. What’s your name?”

“I can’t talk to you.”

“Why?”

“I’m with CID.” Central Intelligence Division.

“Oh. Well, you look like a CID guy. Nice clothes. You’d think the CID would get guys that don’t look like…CID guys.”

“I look like CID?” He seemed pleased.

“Shit, yeah. No offense, but you definitely got that look.”

“Yeah, I guess so. My name’s Darryl.” He extended his hand.

I shook it and said, “I won’t use it. Your name.”

“Right. Right. Call me something else.”

“I promise to. Maybe Larry or something.”

“Okay. How about Desmond? Could you call me that?”

“No problem. Poof! You’re Desmond.”

“Good. Good.

I asked Desmond about TJ and how he liked to tour the town on his time off. He ran a commentary on the dancers and how he couldn’t talk about the other stuff.Panama and Noriega, sensitive stuff.“That’s okay, Des, I’m not interested in that.”

“That dancer up there, Lucy. She’s nuts about me.”

“Yeah, she gives you those looks, man.”

“I mean she really likes me. You know? Don’t you love it?” He grinned.

“Yeah,” I said.“I do.” I grinned back,but it wasn’t the same grin.

Walking over to the police station on Eighth Avenue, Fernando and I threaded our way through squad cars parked at angles in the middle of the street.No traffic could move down that block. The policia municipal vehicles composed a herringbone gridlock.Cops leaned against their cars or carried cuffed prisoners up the station stairs.Some cops sat on a bench along the sidewalk, leaning against the station wall or against the columns rising from the edge of the sidewalk. Here, they laughed, played pocket pool, smoked Del Prados or Fiestas while they cut deals with arrestees, prospective inmates.

I walked over to a cop on the sidewalk. He had some scars at the corners of both eyes, probably from boxing. Boxing is very big down here.He was laughing, though. So I introduced myself and asked him if he’d talk to me for a minute. His nameplate said his name was Raymundo Guzman.

I asked him what kind of problems he sees down here on Saturday nights. “You got a problem?”His smile disappeared, and he looked much meaner.

“No, I have no problem. I’m just curious; I’m thinking of writing a book. What kind of stuff do you see on Saturday nights…or any night?”

“Oh, it’s a very hard job. Especially Saturday, even the other nights.You know the drunk people fight and use the knives.”As if in illustration, two cops guided a handcuffed prisoner to the station door. He was bleeding from cuts on his arms and face.They didn’t stop to bargain. He was going in. Period.“You have robberies too.”

“Armed robbery?”

“Yes. But knives, not guns. Mexicans like knives better. They’re cheaper, more personal. I’m talking about personal robberies.”

“Homicides?”

“Of course. Drunk peoples in the bars. I told you. Somebody gets drunk,t hey don’t like somebody, they have a knife.…” He shrugged.

“How about Zona Norte, Coahuila? Is it dangerous?” His smile was back now. “Yeah. That’s where we get our best problems.”

One a.m., and we’re heading south again on Revolución. A line stretches for half a block. Mostly young Mexicans. All of them waiting to get into Las Pulgas. It means “the fleas.” I had seen more people between the ages of 15 and 25 tonight than I had in a month.

Fernando and I spoke about Tijuana as a Mexican city. “It’s not a Mexican city,” Fernando was saying. “It’s an American city. We call it San Diego’s other cheek.” He slapped his rump. “This place wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the U.S., for San Diego.” Leaning for support against another vendor’s cart was a junkie doing that gravity-defying nod only junkies can perform. His clothes were stiff with filth. One hand rested on the edge of the cart, his feet back, his head down as if he were a faith healer trying to heal the taco cart. His knees buckled, he swayed, but he never fell. Fernando was still talking.“Tijuana is basically an American product. Like Chryslers…or Cheez Whiz.”

About the popularity of disco in Mexico, Fernando said, “Yeah, it’s definitely that or norteño or cumbia.” The latter style is from farther south, around Monterrey. The difference is in the percussion, the number of drums, and whether or not there’s an accordion. Accordions are norteño's ear mark. But Fernando had a bizarre scrap of one of TJ’s urban legends to recount. It was told about several different discos, depending on who you asked. “It was around the time of John Travolta, and Saturday Night Fever, and all that. It seems there was this guy who looked exactly like Travolta — in that white suit and everything. He was dancing really hot with this girl. They cleared a space around them, just like in the movie. All of a sudden, the girl notices and every- body else sees that this Travolta-type guy has one rooster-claw foot; the other foot is a goat’s hoof...and he’s not dancing on the floor. He’s like up in the air. The girl screams and flips out. She runs away into the bathroom; but when her friends follow her in there, she was gone. No one ever saw her again. Disappeared. They locked the doors so the guy couldn’t get away, but he disappeared too. I heard it was the Aloha Club.” Fernando grinned for maybe the third time in the evening. There are few Americans down in Zona Norte. I didn’t see one for the rest of the night. Fernando and I spent the next two hours in the Delicias Bar, Copacabana, La Charrita, and La Adelita. Basically, Coahuila is where you go if you want to get laid or meet up with a pollero. You can dance with the whores for a dollar, though I tried it with one older woman. She looked 50, but she was probably not much older than me. “You go upstairs? Ba-boom? Ba-boom?”

“I just want to dance. I like the music.”

“Ahhh....” She looked disgusted and waved me away. No time for dancing.

There was no romanticism here. The idea of being in some third-world bastion of amorality and exoticism, like Cairo or Calcutta, was hard to maintain with the smell of urine and tequila, perfume and cigarette smoke from the almost uniformly chain-smoking hookers. It just seemed crowded, desperate, gaudy, and sad. In Richard Rodriguez’s book Mexico’s Children, he calls Tijuana “...a metropolis crouched behind a hootchy-kootch curtain.” He adds that “[Tijuana’s] history is a matter of matchbook cov-ers and cocktail napkins.” Vincente Fernandez, Mexico’s most popular singer, crooned from almost every sound system within blocks. All through the night, the taco vendors worked beneath bright racks of lights, chopping meat, tossing handfuls of onion and cilantro onto folded tortillas fried on portable grills with a tireless, rapid rhythm. Along the border fence, a few blocks away, restless shadows paced the ridge beyond the trampled fence, silhouetted starkly by La Migra’s new klieg lights. It was reminiscent of World War II movies like Stalag 17 or The Great Escape or news footage from the Berlin Wall in the ’60s. Everywhere, people slept on the cracked, trash-strewn sidewalks, in doorways, in cardboard refrigerator or washer/dryer boxes. Children cried, Fernandez crooned, drunks babbled, young men flushed with cerveza shouted too loudly at the whores who continued to chain-smoke and look on all of it with inert expressions or a quick smile that would flare like a match flame and go to ash again in the time it took to inhale.

Fernando and I walked uphill, away from the carnival-in-hell atmosphere. We sat in the bar at the Hotel Nelson until 3 a.m. Fernando spoke to me in his low, soft voice about how, two weeks ago, he had broken up with his girlfriend of two years. Ah, that explained the look. But by now I was wearing that look too, only mine came from the parade of poverty and the lingering image of those klieg lights and silhouettes along the border that I could still see when I closed my eyes and held the bottle of beer to them, rotating its cool surface over my forehead.

“She was 19, and she was always on me about hanging out with my friends and stuff. She always was making me promise that I’d be true to her, and I was, man. Absolutely. Now she found some guy.” He went on a little about his feelings for her, and I sympathized. I told him I probably couldn’t have been true to someone at 19 if I tried. All those hormones. This probably didn’t help much. He spoke about his childhood in Tijuana. “I remember my dad got me a bicycle one time, but my mom wouldn’t let me keep it because it would only get stolen in TJ. She made me keep it at my grandma’s in San Diego. I didn’t get to use it too much.

“Sometimes I would ditch school and go to the border and help the ladies with their bags, groceries and stuff. Help them carry them from the border back into town or whatever. I’d make $15 or $20 a day sometimes.

“We used to spy on the prostitutes in the neighborhood. Me and my friends would hang around them, cuz we liked some of them. And then when they’d get some business, you know, they wanted us to go away, but we wouldn’t. This one girl next door we really liked. We didn’t want her to go away, upstairs with the guy. So she would give us all a kiss on the mouth so we would disappear. We would climb up on the roof in the place next door and open up these wooden windows, like a trapdoor on the roof, and we would peek in and watch. Sometimes she’d catch us and yell at us, get all embarrassed, and cry.”

His parents worked in a laundry in San Diego. They both had green cards, but when Fernando’s younger brother was born, his mother quit to stay home. “They were gonna take her green card away cuz she wasn’t working. They wanted her to get a passport.So we had to move real fast. We moved to National City, and I didn’t like it.Everybody had cars. Nobody walked or rode bikes. It wasn’t like being in a neighborhood anymore. Nobody liked me because I was a Tijuanero.”

Fernando and I parted company at about 3:30. I crawled back to the Adelita Hotel and fumbled with my key in the lock.Voices, radios, someone arguing, a dog howling outside, and traffic noises, taxi horns all lulled me to sleep. It was just like New York. I didn’t even take off my shoes,and I left the light on.

I woke up at eight o’clock. My tongue felt like roadkill wrapped in sandpaper,and my head rang like a room full of telephones. I stared for a minute at an oil painting print hanging out of its frame, buckled from water damage. It was a snow-covered mountain scene with fallen aspen trees over an icy brook. Other aspen trees stood to one side, their leaves a fire color. It hurt my eyes to look at them. A bare lightbulb, still blazing, glared over me.

After standing under the cold shower for a couple of weeks, I got dressed, left my key at the desk,and walked out into the chaos of Fourth Avenue, under the merciless Baja sun.

I tried some coffee at the Cafe Palacio, but I had trouble chewing it. After listening to a couple of sad Mexican songs on the radio, I got up and followed a flow of people dressed in Sunday finery. They were all heading to the Catedral de Guadalupe on Avenida Benito Juárez.Next to the vaulting, twin-spired church was the school where Fernando went as a kid, when he wasn’t ditching. I walked the steps, through the crowd, and dipped my hand in holy water at the entrance. I crossed myself and entered the church; I hadn’t been inside a Catholic church for maybe 20 years. The cloying smell of women’s perfume and incense made me nostalgically dizzy.

The church was jammed with people,standing room only in the back. The priest said the Mass in Spanish, and it was close enough to the Latin I remembered to send me further down memory lane. The priest faced the congregation. He held a chalice toward the ceiling. Bells rang at the altar. Everyone stood. I could see fresh flower arrangements at each pillar from front to back. Gold-leaf paint trimmed the rococo work on the columns. Another bell rang and everyone sat. Four young men,acolytes or altar boys with well-combed, fashionable haircuts, passed baskets, and most everyone contributed something.

I swayed on my feet where I stood. The air seemed close and lacking oxygen. At one point, everyone turned to the people nearest them and smiled, shaking hands. I shook hands with several strangers. This was a new one on me. When did they start doing this? I stayed only a few minutes. I felt like a fraud.

I got in a taxi and told him, “La linea a San Diego, por favor.”

He chatted away happily in Spanish that was too fast for me and dropped me off near Colonia Libertad. I walked past shacks with plastic tarp roofs and gutted burned-out junk cars staring sightlessly through broken windshields like the corpses of extinct, metallic saurians. Entering the U.S. through the customs building is like entering some spartan, proletarian shopping mall. I got on the trolley and headed back to San Diego.We passed the Exxon Valdez on our way through the shipyards.

My roommate met me at the door as I shambled past him. “You look like shit. How was Tijuana?”

“Bargains galore,” I mumbled.

“Everything must go…act now…one size fits all…the sale never ends.”

“So what’s the angle on TJ? What’s the word?” He insisted on knowing.

“Whores,” I said and collapsed on my futon. My roommate gave me a puzzled look and closed the door.