Locked Up In La Mesa Read online

  The cops jumped out and ran over to the Vega. They hauled Roger and Barbara out, pretty roughly, and cuffed them and threw them in the back with me. We got going again, just driving around in big circles because the cops were gonna try to shake those two down now, to see if they had any money. So we were all in the back there, and of course we had to pretend that they got the wrong people, like it was all some big misunderstanding, so we couldn’t let on that we knew each other. We were whispering back there, and I was like, “Dude, what the fuck?!” They just shrugged and shook their heads or whatever, trying to explain it without really saying anything. Then the cops started in with the money talk.

  I don’t think Barb spoke much Spanish if any, but Roger had a fair bit; more than me, anyway. I was catching maybe every tenth word, but he had a pretty good idea what they were asking him, and he just sat there shaking his head. No dinero, no way. That was basically his position. Which is bullshit, because he could have gotten his hands on some emergency cash if he really wanted to. His connection, the bigwig in Tennessee—Greg was his name, or maybe Craig—he could have wired some money to a bank or whatever, and these guys would have been okay with that. They didn’t give a shit, they just wanted some money. The way it works, what they would have done is they would have dropped Roger off somewhere close to the border, then hauled me and Barb in and booked us on a lesser charge, something they could easily make go away once Roger got his hands on the money. Either that or they could take us and hide us someplace, like a private home for example. They’d hold us hostage, is really what it amounted to, until Roger came through with the ransom.

  So I was back there next to him and I was trying to say, “Roger, give ‘em some damn money,” you know, and he said,

  “There is no money, Steve.”

  I don’t know if he was just scared or what, or if maybe he thought it would make him look guilty if he came up with a bribe, but he had some reason. He just dug in his heels and he wouldn’t budge.

  “There is no money, Steve.”

  The cops couldn’t believe it. Here they had these three white Americans, and we’re on our way to a Mexican prison, which is like everybody’s worst nightmare, and we can’t even come up with a few hundred bucks to save our skins; it didn’t make any sense. Shaking bribes out of scared gringos was half the job for these guys. And they had some kind of sixth sense for it, I swear. I don’t think they had a radio in the car, so I don’t know how anyone else found out about us, but I looked out the back at one point and there were two more cruisers following us, and then I looked again later and there were four, like they knew these guys had some big fish on the hook. Anyway, obviously, with every new cop that tagged along, the price was going up. If we were gonna buy our way out now, we were gonna have to come up with a whole shitload of money. But still Roger swore there was nothing, so it didn’t matter, I guess. Our fate was sealed.

  They screwed up the order of the names in the caption, but from left to right, thats “Barbara,” Roger and me the night they arrested us. I look like a baby.

  Candado

  La Ocho

  THEY TOOK US TO THE Eighth Street Jail, the one they called “La Ocho.” There were a bunch more cop cars out front when we got there and also some news reporters and local politicians—those kind of people, important people in the community. I guess word had got out somehow that these guys were bringing in some pretty serious traficantes. Dangerous criminals. So everybody wanted to know about it or be associated with the bust in some way.

  So we got there and they marched us into the place, and the first thing they did was drag us up some stairs to this little room, just a little cinder block room, and they stood us up in front of this table. On top of the table they had all these kilos piled up, and I knew it wasn’t the same pot, for two reasons: A) they didn’t have time to get all our pot from the car to the room and stack it up all neat like that; and B) there was too much of it, way too much. It was total bullshit—just a fake photo-op setup.

  So they stood us there and took a bunch of pictures—of us, of us in front of this pile of pot, of the pot by itself—and then they took us back downstairs and threw us in separate holding cells, me and Roger in a men’s cell and Barb next door in the women’s. Hers wasn’t nearly as crowded as ours, but she definitely had it worse. That first night was just terrible. The guards and trusties kept coming around to get a look at the white girl, all whistling and talking dirty (you could tell even if you didn’t know Spanish). At one point they strip-searched her and then later on one of the trusties unzipped his fly and pissed into the cell by her feet. They all laughed at that. She was barely keeping it together.

  Over in our cell, Roger wasn’t doing too great either. He’d never been in any kind of jail before, and he was pretty scared. I told him, I said,

  “Roger, whatever happens in here you gotta promise me you ain’t gonna cry, all right?” I told him whatever happened we could probably handle it as long as he didn’t start crying. I had had a little bit of experience with jail (nothing major), so I wasn’t quite as shocked as he was, but this was pretty awful.

  The cell was maybe six feet wide by about eight feet deep. There were two sets of bunk beds, one on each side, and at the back of the cell there was a hole in the floor—that was the toilet. It was a four-man cell; I counted 21 prisoners in there when we showed up, making it 23 total. We got in so late that almost everybody else was already sleeping. There were three guys on each bunk, and the rest of ‘em were packed on the floor like sardines in a can. We had to stand up the whole first night, that’s how crowded it was.

  First thing the next morning, we started trying to weasel our way into a better spot in the cell. I tried to put on this attitude, not real aggressive, but definitely sure of myself and, you know, not somebody you’d want to fuck with. I told Roger to kind of follow my lead. There was one rack of bunk beds right next to us, with three guys up on the top bunk, and at one point in the morning the biggest dude up there climbed down and went to the back of the cell to take a leak. And I didn’t say anything, I just hauled myself right up there in his spot and gave the other two guys the dickeye. As soon as one of them jumped down Roger climbed up there with me and then we had the last guy outnumbered and he climbed down too. After that we held that bunk every moment for the next seven days. When one of us had to piss, the other one would stretch out and block the bunk from anyone climbing up; that’s how we held the high ground.

  It wasn’t as hard as I’m making it sound. The other prisoners were way more messed-up than we were, almost without exception. I’m talking about drunks, junkies, country kids who were practically starving to death they were so malnourished, and just these total derelicts from the worst parts of TJ. It was a sad collection of individuals. Jesus Christ. They were all Mexican as far as I could tell, except for this one old Rastafarian-looking guy with long gray dreadlocks. He was from Belize, I believe; he was the worst.

  The Rasta was always smiling—in that place! That was the first sign that he was mentally nuts. I’m not sure he’d even committed a crime; my hunch is the cops just had nowhere else to put him. He was a horrible sight, depressing, and absolutely crazy. It was the kind of crazy that starts to feel contagious after a couple of days. Someone said he’d been locked up in that tiny cell for five months already before we showed up; where his mind went all that time I have no idea. One image I don’t think I’ll ever shake is him taking a leak, and the whole time he’s pissing, he’s dancing around with these mincing little steps—like tiptoe-through-the-tulips kind of steps—and literally bathing with his own urine, scooping it up with his hands and splashing it all over his face, all over his hair. That was about the worst thing I’d seen in my life up to that point. I guess I’ve seen worse since.

  Anyway, the food was as bad as the rest of it. Once a day, they’d wheel this big iron pot around on a cart, and everybody would gather around. They’d give you one tortilla apiece—stale, of course—and then they’d scoop out
this ladle full of watery beans and just plop them right onto the tortilla, boiling hot. So you’d be standing there, and it would be burning the shit out of your hands, and you’d have to try to blow on it to cool it off or whatever, and at the same time try not spill it because that was all you got for the day. It was ridiculous. After a few days, someone came to visit us, I forget who it was, but we sent him out to bring back tacos, and this guy came back with real tacos for everybody in the cell. That was a highlight. It worked, too, because nobody tried to get the top bunk from us after that.

  Overall, though, the situation was still just impossible, especially for Roger and Barb. She was crying pretty much constantly now, and I could tell Roger was starting to lose it, too; he was praying all the time and he didn’t look right. He said our getting busted was a sign from God telling us to clean up our act. I told him it was a sign that we needed a better plan, so I drew one up right there. It was pretty elaborate, with a Zodiac and wetsuits and fishing gear and all sorts of stuff going on. I did it mostly to distract Roger and try to lift his spirits. It didn’t work, though. He and Barb were in awful shape; we had to do something. Lucky for them (unluckily for me), something occurred around this time that gave me an idea.

  As the week went on, some guys were transferred out, some they let go, and some new ones were brought in. And one night they brought in this group of U.S. Marines—I think there were maybe six or seven of them—and they’d fucked up bad on their furlough down in TJ. They decided they were gonna bring a little pot back to their base, which was Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego. They went the beach route (where I wanted to go when we got our hands on a Zodiac) and got picked up by the federales while they were sneaking around the fence. I don’t know exactly how much they had, but it was a tiny quantity, just enough to say they’d done it, really. They were probably fairly drunk; I think that’s safe to say. And now they were scared.

  One of them, this big handsome farm boy type named Hank, seemed a little more composed than the others. He was looking around, obviously thinking there was no way in hell his buddies could make it, not like he could. So he called the guards over and swore to them that he’d acted alone, that the pot was his and the others didn’t know anything about it. He kept saying it louder and louder until eventually they let him sign a declaration—a confession, basically—that put the whole rap on him and let his buddies off the hook. The second he signed, they let the other guys go; the kid was a hero! Well, that was the answer right there.

  The federales had a weak case at best against Roger and Barb. They weren’t caught with anything, and they hadn’t admitted any crime. I, on the other hand, was fucked. So to save everybody the hassle and expense of a crooked show trial, I signed a declaration that said I’d never seen the other two before in my life, that it had been me alone with the pot, and my friends went free. (The next day I signed a second declaration swearing that the guards beat me with hoses to make me sign the first one. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, and even the guards seemed to get a kick out of that.)

  Before they left, with Barb bawling her eyes out and thanking me over and over, I took Roger aside and I made him promise me that he was gonna do everything in his power to get me out, whatever he could do from the outside to help me.

  Now I was all alone, and I have to say I felt a little better for it. I knew I could handle whatever the situation could throw at me. Not easily, of course, not happily, but I could take it. With Roger and Barb safe on the outside, I could quit worrying about them and focus on my own survival.

  The biggest threat to that, next to the awful conditions, was probably the guards. They were like mean animals, like when a cat gets ahold of an injured bird. They got off on the control they had over the guys inside, and they were obsessed with getting confessions, which, since I’d already signed mine voluntarily, they didn’t need to wring out of me. That was an unexpected benefit; there was no longer any need to interrogate me. Other guys, the ones who still swore they were innocent, were basically tortured, almost every day. The guards took them to a windowless concrete box where they beat them with hoses or other tools. Sometimes they’d put tape over the guy’s mouth and then shake up a can of soda and open it right under his nose so the carbonation would burn and fizz in his sinus cavities. The guys who’d been through it said it hurt worse than the beatings. There was never any problem getting confessions out of people; the rate was close to a hundred percent, eventually.

  But sometimes even that wasn’t exciting enough for the guards. When they got really bored, they’d hold fights in the hallway outside the cells. Just like in any prison, there were all sorts of enemies locked up, guys from different gangs or just guys who had a beef with each other on the outside for whatever reason. There was always a lot of trash-talking back and forth between the cells. So once in awhile the guards would let two enemies out into the corridor and it was just like a human cockfight. They’d go at each other with all that hate and anger boiling up in them from the situation they were in. Two guys who’d maybe had a minor argument about a girl or a little bit of money would become mortal enemies. There was betting just like a cockfight, too, and the guards loved it. They’d laugh and cheer, and then when they’d had enough, one of them would get a hose and spray the fighters until they broke it up, just like you’d do with a couple of dogs humping in your yard. I remember one fight between a young kid in my cell and an older, bigger guy from down the hall somewhere. I don’t know what it was about, but they went at it and the kid got the worst of it, by far. After they broke it up, he came back to the cell and his nose was smashed sideways on his face, just totally flattened, and of course he didn’t get any kind of medical attention; of course not.

  What else? The trusties. They were pretty much as bad as the guards. They were long-term inmates who were basically really good at kissing ass. Nobody liked them, but they sucked up so much that they were rewarded with jobs in the jail and more freedom than the rest of us. And what they used that freedom for mostly was thieving. They’d steal anything they could get their hands on, and if they couldn’t get their hands on it they had other tricks.

  I remember watching one night just fascinated as one old prick literally fished a wallet from a guy’s pocket while he slept on the top bunk inside the cell. The trusty’s job was to mop the hallway outside of the cells, and he came back with his mop after lights-out. He had part of a wire coat hanger jammed into the end of the mop handle so that the hook was hanging down, and what he did was he sort of gently poked this guy until he rolled over in his sleep. The first few times the guy didn’t move enough, so the trusty would wait a few minutes and then give him another tiny poke with the hook, just enough to make him roll around a bit to find a more comfortable spot. When he got him where he wanted him, he worked the hook into the guy’s pocket until he snagged the wallet, and then he held his breath and reeled it back out through the bars. The whole process took at least forty-five minutes, I’m sure. The patience and skill involved was simply unreal. I saw the trusties steal all sorts of things that way: wallets, clothes, leather belts, shoes—anything that could be converted to cash. I had a brand-new Levi’s jacket which Roger had given me before he left, and even though it was about a size and a half too small, I made sure to keep it on and buttoned up at all times after I’d seen what they were capable of.

  I only spent probably three or four days on my own in La Ocho after Roger and Barb got out, but it was really starting to wear me down, the boredom and the crowding and the stench worst of all. I was only twenty-five years old, but lying in the same cramped position on that hard concrete bunk was turning me into an old man. Finally on the eleventh day after my arrest, word came down the prison grapevine that the federales had arrived to take some of us to the pen: Penitenciaría de La Mesa.

  I had heard stories about La Mesa, the notorious state prison on the east side of town. Those who’d survived it made it sound like an absolute nightmare, with one important exception: in La Mesa,
you could move around freely, indoors and out. After almost two weeks in La Ocho, I would have gladly risked anything just for a chance to breathe fresh air and to see the sky again. I couldn’t wait to go.

  When they called my name, I worked my aching body down off that bunk for the last time. Two guards came up to the cell with a couple of federales. They unlocked the door and waved me over. I hobbled out, and one of the feds grabbed me hard and slammed me up against the bars. I resisted, naturally, and his buddy cracked me in the head with his pistol butt. Then they cuffed me and hauled me out of that dark humid hole to the street outside. I felt like I was gonna go blind in the sunlight, it was so bright, but I loved it. I took huge deep breaths of that shitty Tijuana air, just filling my lungs. God, it felt good to be outside.

  It didn’t last, of course. They threw me in the back of an old police van with several others and drove us across town to the headquarters of the federal police. Once there, they lined us up and marched us to a holding cell in the back of the building. At the cell door, one by one, they took off our handcuffs and shoved us inside, a lot harder than they had to. One of the federales was the same fat-faced bastard who’d pistol-whipped me back at La Ocho. He pushed me around until I mouthed off and then he pulled his gun and wound up to hit me again. This time before he could clock me I threw up my forearm to block him. I saved my head but I came away with a knot the size of an egg just below my elbow. His buddies all laughed, but I think it was as much at him as at me; they didn’t seem to like him any more than I did.

  Anyhow, with that little bit of excitement out of the way, the cops moved on and I checked out the new cell. The other prisoners were all sitting on this low bench that ran around the perimeter. There were no bunks; it was more like a waiting room, but with bars. It was dark in there, and I noticed there were tiny specks of dust caught in a skinny little shaft of sunlight. I followed it with my eyes up to a tiny hole in the plaster of the ceiling. Beyond that was the open sky.