While I drank Mountain Dew and ate beef jerky everyone else slept. At some point in the night I started thinking. These guys are crazy! I’m driving 95 in the pitch black and they’re sleeping. They don’t know me or anything about me. I could have narcolepsy. I could fall asleep, cross the median into an oncoming semi and explode us all in a fireball. I could be doing blow off the steering wheel and careen off a guardrail into a support pillar. I wouldn’t trust me. Lucky for them I just want to go to Mexico.
At sometime around 4 am I saw the lights of the fabled old western town of El Paso. The city is amazing at night. From the mountains to the north that encroach on the city like a monolith, to the Rio Grande that separates but doesn’t, across which lies the much bigger Cuidad Juarez, it all seemed surreal.
We checked into a Motel 6 and got some sleep. Jerome got his own room, the rest of us split a room with two queen beds. Me and the quiet guy got to sleep on cots. This was less than ideal, but we were only staying two nights and I just wanted to go to Mexico.
The next morning it was up and out on our way to downtown. Jerome said he knew a good Mexican food place so we could eat before we crossed. Downtown El Paso is basically on the border with Mexico. We drove up and down in a maze of one way narrow streets between warehouses and office buildings. Once I was sufficiently lost, we pulled into a generic parking lot filled with old work trucks and tiny imports. All with Chihuahua plates. This was a big moment for me. I’m a huge Mexican food fan. It borders on food snobbery. This was going to be the closest to authentic Mexican food as I was ever going to get. I was not disappointed. My Spanish was good enough that I could read the menu fine, but there were some items that weren’t familiar, which was what I was hoping for. I didn’t come all the way from Odessa to eat burritos or tacos. I was going to try something NEW. One entree caught my eye - Chile Rellenos. Battered Anaheim Chiles stuffed with cheese. I couldn’t have imagined a better start to my Mexican adventure.
It was already well past sundown when we finally left town on the 4 or 5 hour drive to El Paso. No one else wanted to drive, so Jerome gave me keys to the rented Chevy Tahoe. Jerome was a 40 year old heavyset black man who was widely rumored to be gay. I didn’t know him all that well, but when he said he was going to El Paso and Juarez with some of his friends I couldn’t help tagging along. I just wanted to go to Mexico.
I was 19 years old and full of an eagerness to see new places and do new things. As I drove we talked about what it was we were getting ourselves into. Jerome had grown up in El Paso and had been to Juarez many times. He assured us (mostly me) that there was nothing to worry about. He said it was simple “Don’t do anything stupid, or break the law, and we won’t have any problems. Besides, we can always bribe the police in Mexico.” That last line always brought up something of a chuckle. I don’t think any of us believed we would ever have to pay a police officer to let us go free. It’s just not something that happens in the U.S. You don’t even think about it.
For the most part it seemed I was the only one with any real apprehension. Besides Jerome and myself, there was: Mike, who was Jerome’s closest friend that I knew, and there was the blonde quiet guy Matt, I never did figure out why the hell he was around, and then there was Rob. Rob was the greasiest, sleaziest, grossest looking guy I’d ever seen. If you’ve ever met someone and knew immediately you couldn’t trust them, that was Rob.
So it was that the 5 of us were driving in the middle of an October night to El Paso and adventures unkonwn. The chatting died down slowly over the hours until there was nothing but me, the road, and the occasional chirp of the radar detector as I slid the Tahoe through the bug filled desert darkness.
to be continued . . .
The pools of muck mock the road,
Shopping bags haunt the tree,
Sulfur pierces the air,
Industry everywhere.
Violence wins the losers,
Vulgarity speaks all languages,
There will always be places like this.
There will always be sirens, stenches, and sharp fences,
in my den of pestilence.
Drop the smile and tell the truth.
You’ve been dancing around it for years.
I can see it in pictures from our youth and the fear falls to the floor like an old woman’s tears.
Like that time I said that thing that I could never take back.
Like that day my heart attacked, and you kept it on track.
If we could remember all that moved,
all that crushed,
all that flowed uphill,
Then that would be something worth remembering.
Soft warm water washing against it,
Lapping up the knees of some timeless animal.
Living the lives of all souls ever incarnated.
A ghostly reminder of history.
of posterity.
The creature of our past.
Ever wandering the shore where the land of our reality,
touches the ocean of life’s truth.
the ocean no ship has crossed, no soul has transgressed with consciousness.
Ever shrouded in a fog we create.
Some divine transcendence might allow a realization,
but the strength of our reality, our land, our hologram, billows choking blinding clouds.
Yet it still walks, swims, and crawls on the edge,
where the ocean meets the sand.
Sadly sitting somewhere,
sifting through stuffy sacks,
of soggy stacks,
of photographs.
Mountains of monotonous memories,
molding more me than you.
Reading red inked backs,
recalling rusted revellings,
rolling under to renew.
Falling fictitiously,
for fear of finding,
a forest of facts,
missing any laughs.
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somewhere there’s a reason.
somewhere beneath my excuses. but you might as well push down the plunger, ’cause you’ve already lit the fuses. something that used to be so easy. I’ve been trying to find the bottom, sometime it won’t be there. |
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Do you ever drink while doing housework? I love to. It’s a trade off thing. Do some dishes. Drink a beer. Fold some clothes. Take a shot. Vacuum the rug. Have another. By the time it’s over I’ve passed out on top of the made bed in a nearly spotless house, save for the empties everywhere. Sometimes when I wake up I’m not sure where I am. “The hell? We don’t have a maid. Who folded the toilette paper this way?” |
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When and why did regular iced tea become “Unsweet” iced tea? It didn’t used to be this way, at least not here. I go to a restaurant and I say “I’ll have iced tea.” And they ask “Sweet or Unsweet?”. I always say “Regular tea”. And they always say “Unsweet tea then”. Like there’s no such thing as regular tea! And it’s always with a sense of “You should call it Unsweet because that’s what I just called it”. Well you know what, I’ll call it what it is and nothing else! Not that long ago there was no “Sweet” tea. You ordered tea, and you got tea - REGULAR tea. If you wanted it sweet guess what, you sweetened it yourself. I guess that became too big a hassle for some people. I’d like to meet the lazy jerk who stood up and said, “Hey! I’m tired of pouring sugar into my drink and stirring it myself. My wrist is getting tired! Can’t you just sweeten it for me? Waah wah wah (tear)” Gasoline is called “Unleaded” because they took the lead out. “Unsweet” tea would mean you took the sweet out of the tea. I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of tea that comes naturally sweetened. You know why, because there isn’t one. That’s why there is Sweet Tea and just plain Tea. There is no such thing as “Unsweet” tea.
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You are all that is still good in the pools of June,
and all that is sweet in the cinnamon thrown and strewn. I am the unkind word which needs a talking to, like the Wednesday morning which won’t turn blue. Everyone tries to make something. Everyone tries to tie two and two together. Everyone tries to gather the falling pies of life and make them sing. Everyone tries. But a few have only to roll over in a bale of cotton candy on a November evening in New York and say “I love you”. But just a few. A few like you. Because you are all that is still lovely beneath the hungry twists of grain in August and everything after. |
