Tijauna is a hell of a town.

I suppose that Tijuana’s famous for a certain amount of immorality. The drinking age is only eighteen; drugs and prostitutes are easy to find. Not a reputable place, by any means, but an easy good time for the young and foolish. We weren’t interested in any of that, honestly. We were just curious and feeling adventurous when we (my brother Matt and our friend Daniel and I) decided to spend an afternoon there once. I think we were teenagers at the time—older than eighteen but younger than twenty-one, if I recall correctly. We were perfect idiots, too; I should mention this to frame this story properly. I think we went because we thought we were cool and had a sort of curiosity—an attraction, if you will—to the wildness of the idea of Tijuana. We’d been to Mexico before. We’d been to Tecate, to Ensenada, and to Rosarito. Not the same thing, it turned out.

We took the trolley to the border because that’s part of the adventure. For some ineffable reason, trolleys are how San Diegans go to TJ. We then crossed a pedestrian bridge into Mexico. I remember being surprised at how little security there was for an international border. We were excited to be in Mexico, and found a block or two of touristy shops to look around. Almost immediately, a street vendor offered to sell us vicodin. We probably giggled like excited schoolgirls then politely declined. A taxi driver offered to drive us to TJ. We were cheap bastards, and we were already in TJ, damnit, so we declined his offer, too. We walked a block and found ourselves in Mexican suburbia. So we walked back to the touristy place, two blocks in the other direction and got hit by suburbia again. The cab driver watched us amusedly the whole time, and then offered again.

“Revolution Avenue,” he said in perfect American. “That’s where you want to go.”

We had never heard of it, but okay. Apparently, we were the only ones who’d never heard of it. It’s very famous. The driver dropped us off in the middle of the street and charged us eight dollars for the ride. We later learned that eight dollars was more than the ride was worth, but we didn’t know, and the cabbie knew that we didn’t know.

There was a party going on, as far as we could see up Revolution Avenue in both directions. The street was lined with bars, hotels, and strip clubs, and the American college kids overflowed into the streets. We didn’t have a plan, didn’t know what we wanted to do. We started walking aimlessly up the road. People who spoke various amounts of English kept trying to sell us things. After a few city blocks of not stopping anywhere, we decided to try to find some tacos. As white as we are, we considered ourselves taco connoisseurs, so with pride we passed many taco carts trying to find the perfect one. In reality, we were all looking for one that reminded us of the one we’d liked that one time in LA. We found a shop we liked, eventually (note the use of the word “shop” instead of “cart”) and sat there. They sold one kind of taco and cans of soda to go with.

When we sat down, the guy running the place looked at Matt and asked, “¿Cuantos tacos quieres?” Now, there are three words in this sentence. One of them is taco. One of them is a form of quiero, as in, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” And the third is fairly self-explanatory. Also, we were there to buy tacos, so even if one didn’t understand the language, the nature of the question could be deduced fairly easily. But when the nice man asked Matt this simple question, he immediately forgot all the Spanish he’d learned in high school and a wave of panic washed over his face. He looked at us, his eyes pleading for help. I was surprised. I mean, my Spanish was shit, too, but “¿Cuantos tacos quieres?” isn’t really even Spanish.

Most of life is competition with our brothers; that day, I was winning. I translated, and tacos were had by all. Between the three of us, we ate fourteen tacos. The man charged us for eighteen, and my Spanish wasn’t good enough to ever find out why, so we paid it, and were back out into the street.

After some more pointless walking and shallow interactions with various street vendors, we encountered a man in his sixties who insisted on walking with us for a little ways. He kept telling us how great a certain club was and how beautiful the dancing girls there were. We weren’t interested in dancing girls (no, we weren’t gay… we had religious inhibitions…and I really can’t remember why we went to TJ in the first place), so nothing he could say was going to get us in this club. Eventually, he said, “My sister is dancing in there right now! You should come see my sister!”

I feel like I should pause here and let you consider the heavy implications of his statement so I don’t have to explain them. His sister (he’s sixty-ish, remember). Is dancing (naked, we presume). And he’s okay with it (promoting it and probably profiting off of it, in fact). At best, she’s in her fifties, we’re imagining, or if she is young…think of the family dynamic. Not that we were interested before, but our desire to walk through those doors actually registered at absolute zero.

We continued on. We reached the end of party town and continued on a little farther after that. We were still in a fairly busy place. Eventually, we were the only white people in the street. We saw a pickup truck drive by with a bed full of standing policemen. It seemed silly at the time. I suppose it reminded us of the Keystone Cops or something like it. We also noted their assault rifles with three foot long magazines (guns are illegal in Mexico, FYI, but the police carry some pretty heavy artillery).

There were a couple of brothers, Americans about our age, who worked to gain our attention from across the street, so we went over to them and gave a friendly hello. They seemed excited to find fellow English-speakers (we were honestly a five minute walk from an entire colony of American college students, but somehow these guys were still excited), and they were carrying puppies. Arm loads of puppies.

“I’m saving these puppies!” I remember him saying, adding that he’d traded his cell phone for them. He had puppies poking out from his inside his sweatshirt, in his pockets, and in his hood, and so did his brother. There must have been at least a dozen little white dogs riding on these kids. “Do you guys know how to get back to the border from here?”

We did not, unfortunately. We had lost our sense of direction a long time ago, but we pointed north anyway because we are explorers and America is north, damnit. The guys thanked us and headed that way.

We turned around and headed back toward Avenida Revolucion. Somewhere we found a churro stand and I asked the woman how much they cost. One dollar, she indicated. I could see that her churros were about the size of my littlest finger, so I was disappointed that a whole dollar would only get me two bites. But we were in Mexico, so I shelled out. “Three,” I requested. “Tres,” I probably held up three fingers because I assumed she wouldn’t understand. I expected her to reach in there and pull out single finger-sized pieces, but instead she produced three brown paper lunch bags and filled them completely with cinnamon deliciousness. I was ecstatic.

One of the shops we stopped in had a wool poncho with an Aztec design on it, and the shopkeeper asked me if I liked it, and I said that I did. “Eighty dollars,” she said. I was disappointed and started to walk away. “Wait!” she said. “Seventy-five dollars.” I kept walking. I’d never bargained for merchandise before, and I didn’t want to try. “Hold on, where are you going? We can make a deal for you!”

She was an imposing woman, and strong-willed, so I stopped.

“Now,” she continued. “What is the most amount of money you would pay for that?”

I shrugged. “Twenty bucks.”

She freaked out. “I’m trying to make a living! How do you expect me to feed my kids?” or something like that.

I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “Then don’t sell it to me. Seems pretty simple,” and started to walk away again.

“Okay!” she agreed. “Twenty bucks.” So I bought it, though I hadn’t really intended to. I didn’t feel good about the bargaining experience, though. Somehow she’d made me feel guilt or something worse. She also informed me that it’s not a poncho, it’s a gaban. I wore it around for the rest of the day, and for weeks after.

We talked about getting a beer but never did. I’d never had beer before and thought it would be fun. I can’t remember why it didn’t happen. The sun set, eventually, and we took a cab back to the border crossing. Oh, and there’s a gentlemanly conduct that most drivers in America adhere to (taking turns and staying in lanes and obeying traffic lights and keeping safe distances from fellow drivers) that Mexican cabbies haven’t been introduced to yet. Someone should get on that.

There’s a line to get into America, apparently, a line that takes hours to get through. We took turns holding our place in line and exploring the area around. A drunken American saw me in my gaban, called me “Father,” and asked me what time Christmas mass was. We also saw the puppy guy again, somewhere ahead of us in line, and he still had his puppies. I wonder if customs let him bring them across the border.

Of Sand, Pliers, and Mexican Jumping Cactus

 I once read a piece by a British oilman in Saudi Arabia who said, “Never travel through the desert with fewer than four people, because that’s how many it takes to get a car unstuck from the sand.” Yeah, that’s a paraphrase. No, I don’t remember his name. Yes, I did once get myself in trouble for not listening to him.

I don’t remember with any certainty, but I think it was New Years Eve, either 2008 or 2009. See, my brothers and I have been going to the same place in the desert for years, camping in the exact same spot every time. We don’t even have to specify where to meet anymore; we simply mention the desert and a day of the week, and then we all show up, none of us ever having doubted the rendezvous location. There are many washes there—big, sandy dry canyons carved out by the desert storms—that run perpendicular to the highway, and if one turns off the asphalt into one of these, he could find dozens of hidden places to pitch camp in the soft sand at the bottom.

Our spot is outside of a small desert town. It’s a one bar, one church, and one gas station type of town that the interstate runs through near the Mexican border. Follow the highway north for a couple miles and you see mountainous badlands to your right, and vegetated, flat desert to your left. The desert isn’t actually flat, because the washes have carved it out in so many places, but you can’t see those from the highway. Our spot is out there.

I packed my truck in the morning, went to work for the day, then drove out to catch up with the others when I got off at 10:00pm.  I got out there near midnight. I hadn’t been out there in a while, and had never tried to find the place in the dark. Eventually, I discovered that many, many turnoffs looked like the one I remembered, and that the more of these that I saw, the fuzzier my recollection of the real one became. I doubled back and picked one, then drove into the sand to head up the canyon.

I imagined that our spot wasn’t more than a mile off the highway, so I watched my tripometer closely. After nearly a mile and a half, I decided I was up the wrong wash, and needed to turn around. But this wash was narrow and rocky, and there was no place. So I pressed on, hoping to find a turnaround place. Eventually, I encountered a Y in the road, and I determined that if I started up one way, I could then back up the other like a U-turn in reverse. I did not want to stop the truck because of the sand, but I had to choose between this or pressing on for a better spot. I chose the U-turn. I got stuck.

Driving on sand is not difficult, but you should never stop in deep sand because you may have a hard time getting going again. My wheels spun without moving the truck; they flung sand and quickly dug themselves deep into it. I stopped trying when I realized what was happening, but it was too late.

I put the truck in neutral and tried to push it. Nope. I put rocks under the tires to gain traction. Nope. I tried calling my brother with the little cell reception I had. He answered but we couldn’t hear each other. I dictated my predicament into the phone just in case he could pick up enough detail to help.

I climbed to the top of the ridge to see if I could see a campfire, smoke, truck lights, or hear voices. Everything was black and silent. I looked at my tripometer and saw that I was about four miles off the highway. Not that far, I thought, and decided to hike back to it. But what to bring with me? One has to think of worst case scenarios in the wilderness. A knife. Water. A flashlight. A jacket. A snack. Pliers.

Why pliers? Because there’s a species of cactus in this part of the world that we call Mexican Jumping Cactus (a quick google search tells me it’s actually called Cholla Cactus, or Jumping Cholla). It’s cactus, right? Pokey and shit? But this is no Saguarro that those pansies in Arizona brag about. The plant is sort of…modular. Meaning that the branches grow in such a way that if you unhappily get caught by the barbed spines, they don’t just poke you; the spines dig deep into your skin and the entire motherfucking branch breaks off from the plant and sticks to your hypodermis. Then every single spine on this branch (when I say “branch,” picture a spherical module of spiny plant, not a long woody stick with leaves), decides to also dig into your skin so that you have dozens of them stabbing your leg. If you try to remove it, this spiny sphere of plant simply rolls a little to a new location on your leg, leaving the old spines still attached where they penetrated you and a whole bunch of new wounds, too.  Oh, and it’s poisonous. Not “kill you” poisonous, rather “burning and stinging pain, with moderate swelling” poisonous. And if you can successfully free yourself from this little passenger, you are left with a million barbed spines deep in your leg…. so, pliers-- I brought them.

The moon was bright enough to see a bit, which was good because my flashlight didn’t work. I calculated that if I walked four miles per hour, I could reach the highway in one hour, then reassess my location and try to find our campsite. If I had no hope of finding the site, I could always hitchhike back to the town.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that it would be quicker to walk in a straight line back to the highway instead of following the curvy wash that ran at who-knows-what-angle to the road. I climbed up the canyon wall and carried on in the best direction I could decipher. I could see the orange glow of the western horizon behind me and knew that the highway ran north-south somewhere east of me. If I walked away from glowing western horizon, I couldn’t help but cross the road.

I found the walk invigorating. I was alone in a peaceful silence and darkness, and I was stimulated by nature. I could hear coyotes. I thought of mountain lions, of course, but didn’t let myself dwell on it. I couldn’t shake the thought of rattlesnakes from my head, and every stupid stick on the ground looked like one, of course. And somehow, even with my eyes carefully glued to the ground before my feet out of fear of snakes, I still stepped right into it, just like I knew I would: a goddamned Mexican jumping cactus.

I felt it before I saw it. Two pieces grabbed onto me, one outside my jeans and one on the side of my shoe; both were firmly latched through the clothing and deep in my skin. When I finally stopped howling and hopping around like I’d stepped on a Lego, I sat down to free myself. I’d been hit before, so I knew what to do. I used my knife to pry them away from me while using the pliers to pull them straight out. I then used the pliers to get all the little pieces out. It’s painful, and it bleeds a bit because the barbs cause more damage on the way out. I had to pull the big pieces off, then take off my shoe before I could get the little pieces. And with my poor eyesight in the dark, finding each of the little ones was time consuming, but if I didn’t get every one, then each step could be a twisting blade in my leg. It must’ve taken a half hour. Eventually, I got resituated and kept moving.

So now I’m limping a little. And bleeding. And less sure of my direction. Somewhere along the way, my cell phone rang but I lost the call immediately. I’ve only been in the wilderness an hour and I’m already thinking about mortality. I thought a lot about what an idiot I am.

 I did eventually reach the road. And it turned out that my brother had heard what I told him over the phone, and my friend Daniel was driving up and down the highway waiting for me to pop out of the desert. I flagged him down and he picked me up, then we started driving to camp. Within a minute of driving, we were suddenly surrounded and run off the road by Border Patrol cruisers. They didn’t even give us a chance to cooperate and literally came alongside to force us to swerve into a sandbank.

Apparently, there are tall towers with many cameras on them that the BP uses to watch the roads. They saw a car pull over and pick up someone on the side of the road, and that’s some kind of red flag. We explained, and they checked our ID’s. They were complete dicks to us the whole time, and when they were leaving, we asked if they would help us get the car free from the sand. They said, “No, you’re fine,” and left us to dig ourselves out. And when we finished digging that car out, we drove back into the desert to dig my truck out, too.

Life on the San Diego River

Mark Twain is a god. Or a demigod, anyway, and if you haven’t read his Life on the Mississippi River (and I imagine that anyone who takes time to read internet blogs must love reading and therefore be a well-read person) you need to do so immediately (at least the first half), before you consider reading anything else. If you have, you may appreciate my allusion to it, combined with the humor in its comparison to our own mighty, mighty San Diego River (hint: this is a joke—it’s funny because our river isn’t mighty. And by “isn’t mighty,” I mean that at the point where it passes thirty yards from the front door of my apartment it must be a solid twelve feet wide, and hardly deep enough to get your ankles wet… also, it’s contained by a construction of concrete banks. I saw a duck in there once.) I’ve long imagined that I would call my autobiography Life on the San Diego River out of admiration for that titanic American writer and out of a juvenile need to make myself laugh. Alternately, I’ve considered calling it, The Last Generation of American Smokers, but this option is problematic. We may not be, in fact, the last generation of American smokers. Also, we quit smoking. Months ago.

I never wanted to be a blogger (this is me distancing myself from my own actions so that you are left without ammunition to judge me). I never liked blogs. I don’t tend to like the kind of person who must be writing most blogs. But I’ve recently encountered more than one good friend who enjoys the practice, and I think I’ll give it a go.

I’m not here to share my innermost feelings (actually, I have no innermost feelings. I’m a very shallow person, really). I’m not here to entertain you, necessarily. I’m not here to vent… necessarily. I am here to force myself to write down some of the stories that I am fond of telling. Some of them will be worth reading, if I can do them justice. I won’t lie to you, I promise. I won’t misrepresent any of the players, either. I won’t write morals onto the ends (I’m not fond of stories that have morals—I hardly like conclusions). I will attempt to be true to my own voice (if you know me, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine me rambling on; if you don’t know me, then picture a half-drunk bearded guy with a touch of ADD talking too fast and getting excited long before he gets to any punchlines).

If anything I say causes you to question my perspectives, reference this:

I’m college-educated male born in the mid-1980’s living in the dark depths of San Diego. I’m an atheist of sorts, and I’m a humanist rather than a patriot. I don’t believe in hurting people. I have good intentions, most of the time, but I lack ambition. I like good beer, good music, and good company.