A Slow Day in Tijuana
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Slow+Tijuana/3168936/story.html
It's one Tecate after another on a quiet Tuesday in June as you lose your grip on reality in a sombre cartoon joint south of the border.
By Chris Koentges
June 18, 2010
The box. Rusted metal. Dial at the centre, as on the front of a beat-up closet safe. It hangs from the neck of a silent Mexican man like an oversized
talisman. Cords extend from opposite ends of the box. A grip at the end of each cord. Hands, not the silent Mexican man's hands but yours, grasp the
dangling grips. Rotating the dial clockwise sends something measured in volts through the cord to the grips. The question: do you tender pesos for the
sheer cheeky masochism of this service--or wager them that you can hold onto the ends of the cords longer than the man is capable of turning the dial?
The joint. There's a lone fly buzzing above shelves stocked with a single brand of mescal. There's a spittoon that's stained--from spit. A live
rattlesnake curled up inside a jar. Hard men are drinking tequila and beer alone at different tables. The silent Mexican is a crumpled man; grey,
dusty and gaunt. He is the very best of Tijuana which, by definition, makes him the very worst, too. To be a tourist in Tijuana, to be someone who's
going to enjoy "TJ" (as the college boys and girls who cross from San Diego call it), you must forget that this silent withered man with the mousey Fu
Manchu might be a real human. The trick is to think of him as a cartoon character. A Jorge, perhaps. You theatrically roll the ooor in your
imagination, which is entering into overdrive as it turns these splotchy bits of reality into vivid animated cliches. TJ is a realm that nobody sees
but you.
It Is A Tuesday In June. There are no bullfights. No school holidays. No other turistas. On a slow day in Tijuana, the young gringo male is an
aggressively sought-after commodity. Over a 45-minute circuit of Avenida Revolucion, you pass the donkeys painted like zebras, shoo away runny-nosed
orphans hawking Chiclets, talk poontang with scarred night-club owners in gold chains. You stop to watch the pale, larger ladies from Midwestern
America pose clandestinely for photos next to beggars with no eyes or legs. Revolucion is the anti-travel experience of, say, visiting a leper colony
on the Ganges.
An American marine with a giant gut warns you when you cross the border, that straying from Revolucion is "like sticking your hand into a c-ckatoo
cage." His tone is more of an invitation than it is a warning. You stumble past the Lorena Hotel, which rents rooms by the half-hour. A scrawny
American scrubs blood from his collar on the curb. You stumble into the regions of what the AAA TripTik calls the red-light area north of Calle 1A,
west of Constitucion.Then down calles and avenidas with no signs. Finally, you are hustled into the sombre cartoon joint by a sneaky senorita who
scans the street to make sure nobody has seen you enter.
The dark room is half-filled with hard men who don't speak to one another. You refer to them, giddily inside your imagination, as "hombres." You've
only encountered such men in Robert Rodriguez films. They wear crisp blue jeans, thick leather belts, heavy patterned shirts and American Stetsons.
Dark Stetsons. There's a tension as you enter. And so you scurry into the booth at the back to regroup. Your eyes adjust to the darkness. You drink
Tecate. You wait.
You begin to believe that you yourself are some kind of hard man. Hell, yeah. A man not to be messed with.
The Silent Mexican Man with the homemade torture device shuffles to your booth. He thrust the grips at the ends of the cords in your direction. With
indifference, he thrusts them again. The third time, he puts them right in your hands. Harmless as the ends of a skipping rope.
You freeze. Maybe you are not some kind of a hard man. You cannot give the order to your fingers to curl around the grips.
He mistakes your hesitation for indifference and shuffles towards a sullen Mexican man sitting with a shot glass at another table. To your momentary
relief, he is dismissed with some Spanish to the effect of "pee off."
You drink the Tecates faster. You decide that you will spend the night in the sombre cartoon joint to atone. You will wait for another, badder, silent
Mexican man. Maybe you will stab him with the corkscrew on your Swiss Army knife to show everybody how bad you are.
Except you've left the sombre cartoon joint. You're shuffling down a dirty street as the hawkers pack up for the night. This is character, you tell
yourself. You gaze at a broad angle over the animated realm. Then beyond it, up towards the long dusty roads that wind into bleaker hills crammed with
corrugated shacks, as if it actually were all strictly for your entertainment. You have given the notion of the seedy border-town bender a mythology
and vividness that might not actually have existed. You realize now you're only two blocks off Revolucion. Your rapidly evaporating hardness has come
down to TJ's reputation for sin and debauchery. And even at the end of this quiet, stupid afternoon, this realm, your personal TJ, is Herb Alpert, who
named his brass band after what the eyes now flit across. His jaunty elevator music never let you doubt that TJ could be anything but a place where,
no matter what kind of potential harm you might throw yourself toward, there could never ever be any real consequences. Everybody who's allowed to
goes back across the border when the sun sets. You'll simply click your heels three times and wave your passport.
Children now tug at the cuffs of your shorts, pleading for nickels. There's a desperation to Tijuana at dusk. Of not having sold enough trinkets.
Their noses run. Their lips are cut. You didn't see the donkey show. You didn't buy contraband erection pills. Your pockets haven't been picked. You
might be the only tourist left in Tijuana on this quiet June day, and the high-pressure sunglass vendors are trying to buy your bug-eyed snowboarder
shades. You have, in short, failed to consummate any kind of significant relationship with TJ whatsoever. You cannot flee fast enough.
But before you go back to San Diego, before you even leave the sombre cartoon joint, you witness the silent Mexican man approach an older, stately man
sitting at the bar. He has a weathered face, shrouded beneath a black Stetson that is less crisp than the other Stetsons. You tell yourself he is a
rancher. He nods slowly at the enigmatic box and solemnly he places a stack of fresh American bills atop the counter. The silent Mexican man passes
him the cords, and surreptitiously, painstakingly, every head in the bar shifts to the money, then the box, and then the hombre rancher. Your heart
explodes up into your throat as you watch him, almost regally, take the ends of the cords.
The expression on the silent Mexican man's face never changes as he rotates the dial. At first, the hombre clenches his teeth. Then, as the dial's
turned further, he manoeuvres his arms up and down as if driving a truck off a cliff. Further still. He's up from the stool to his feet, body tensed.
He cracks a slow smile. And then, the dial cranked, a powerful grin. He lets go, shaking the pain out of his hands, rolling what stiffness is left out
of his shoulders.
The silent Mexican man grabs the money and hobbles out of the joint. His hands still shaking as he wipes the sweat from his brow, the rancher looks to
a younger, tougher-looking hombre two stools down. The gaze is held for an instant, the younger nodding in quiet acquiescence to the older. And all is
silent again on a slow day in Tijuana.
[Edited on 6-18-2010 by BajaNews]
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