Locked Up In La Mesa Read online

  By this point it was totally dark, and people were starting to light fires around the yard. I hesitate to say it because it was still a penitentiary and I was still scared as hell, but there was almost a party atmosphere to it. I’d never seen a prison like this, never even heard of one. This place was like a real little old-time Mexican village, with stores and cantinas and fruit stands and stuff like that all set up around a little square in the middle of “town.” As I walked around exploring the place, I realized there were lots of families locked up in there; it seemed like everywhere you looked there was another little kid, or a woman holding a baby. It was crazy, but in a lot of ways it seemed more civilized to me than just warehousing a bunch of angry convicts in little cages. I walked through the place with my head spinning, trying to take in the whole crazy scene at once. But there was just no way—it was too weird, too foreign.

  One thing that stands out in my mind to this day, in a bad way, was this young guy, maybe a few years younger than me, walking along with his mother. Maybe it was his grandmother. Anyway, she was this old lady, and she’d had a stroke or something at some point, so she was barely able to walk. And I remember her eyes just looked terrified. I don’t know if she knew what was going on, but she looked like she was scared out of her mind. She couldn’t talk, and her tongue was jutting out of her mouth. She made this weird moaning sound, just a continuous low groan, like a ghost. This kid was basically holding her up while they staggered through the yard, and with the way she looked and the noise she was making, it got under my skin and made me really uneasy. It was already dark and spooky anyway, and when they came lurching out of the shadows into the firelight, almost anything would have looked freaky, but that was bad. I still remember how awful that made me feel.

  After that I was walking along, just kind of reeling, not even thinking yet about where I was going to sleep or how that would all work out, just generally freaking out about whether I’d even survive the whole experience, when I passed by this group of guys hanging around a little bonfire. One of them reached out to me as I passed and at first I flinched away from him like he was going to hit me, but then I realized he was handing me a little joint. So I kind of nodded, saying thanks, and walked on with the joint. I took a couple of good hits and it kind of took the edge off everything. Then I pinched it out and saved the roach for later. I started feeling like maybe I was going to be okay. Like there was a chance I just might make it.

  Either way, it was gonna be an adventure; I knew that much for sure.

  Asiento del Excusado

  George Couldn’t Adapt

  WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED IN La Mesa, one of the first people I met was another American, this guy George Anderson. He was in there for trying to smuggle something like a million cross-tops. (Cross-tops were mini-bennies. Benzedrine. Speed. They used to be these great big tablets, but then they started making them real small with an “X” or a cross stamped into them. Cross-tops.) He’d gotten caught with the cross-tops and had immediately rolled over on his connection, who wound up being sent to the very same prison—La Mesa. So George had kind of a target on his back, and a real bad reputation as a snitch, which I didn’t know about because I didn’t really know about anything yet. I just knew he had a spare bunk in his carraca, which I guess should have tipped me off that he wasn’t very popular. He told me I could crash there and I jumped at it. I figured out pretty quickly that he was a really unlikable guy, creepy and cocky and horribly prejudiced against everybody, Mexicans especially, which, on top of everything else, didn’t make him too well-liked.

  At night they’d bring us all inside the tanks and lock us in, and guys would be playing guitars and playing their stereos and drinking their rice wine or their tepache, which was this fermented pineapple drink that was really easy to make and surprisingly not bad. And they’re shooting their heroin and eating their Mandrax or whatever (Mandrax is another name for Methaqualone, which is basically like Mexican Quaaludes). Smoking their pot. Going to sleep. The real unfortunates would have nothing but a blanket, and they’d lay out a little spot on the benches, by which I mean the benches plus the table plus the floor on either side of it—just everywhere.

  The shitter was way up front by the entrance to the tank, so if you had to go, you’d leave your carraca and have to pick your way past these guys sleeping in pretty much every inch of available space. You’d find a place to set your foot, right next to some guy’s head, and then try to balance there while you found your next spot, maybe just missing another guy’s fingers. Sometimes to get there you’d have to climb up onto the table and then down the other side, back and forth, finding these little stepping stones of empty space where you weren’t going to walk on somebody and piss them off. It was not easy.

  And when you finally got there, of course, it was a total fiasco. It wasn’t quite a third-world-hole-in-the-ground toilet, but pretty close. Imagine basically a toilet bowl with no seat on it and no tank to flush it with. So what you’d do is you’d sort of balance on the rim of this thing while you squatted down, and then when you were done, there was this 55-gallon barrel of water there with a dip can, like a gallon can on a chain, and you’d scoop out enough water to flush the toilet.

  Anyway, what this guy George had, that he was just so proud of, was this disgusting old shit-splattered toilet seat that he’d gotten from somewhere or other, which he kept hanging up on a nail in his carraca. Whenever he had to go—he’d be wearing his robe, this red plaid robe, and he’d go marching through the tank with this toilet seat tucked under his arm like he was some kind of general or lord or something. He had stringy blond hair and a pot belly and skinny white legs. Every time I saw him marching through there with his toilet seat, I couldn’t help laughing; he looked ridiculous. He thought he was so much better than everybody else and yet he just looked like an idiot. If you find yourself in a new situation, you have to adapt, right? He couldn’t do it.

  This is awful, but one time I remember George got dysentery. If you’ve ever had dysentery, you know that it makes you shit pretty much constantly; it’s horrible. Somebody was always getting dysentery because the water and the food and everything was so filthy and contaminated. Anyway, so George got it, and one night he was doing his thing, marching from his carraca up to the front with his little robe and his toilet seat under his arm, and as he got more and more desperate, he started going faster and faster and faster, picking his way through these people sleeping all over the benches until he was practically running…

  …and about halfway there, it broke loose. It just got away from him; he was shitting like a goose. He was fully sprinting now, just running and shitting, running and shitting, all over these guys, just letting it go. Everyone was waking up and realizing what had happened to them, but by then he was long gone, shitting on other people. Finally, he made it to the end and cleaned himself up a little bit in the bathroom and then snuck back the other way while all these people were groaning, like, “Oh, God!”

  I’m sorry. It’s disgusting, but it’s real.

  Mansión

  A Place of My Own

  ONE OF THE FIRST FRIENDS I made, and easily the best friend I had my whole time inside, was this guy called Johnny Bigotes. (Johnny was the interpreter my first night in there, when the capos were shaking me down for my jacket.) “Bigotes” means mustache—Johnny Mustache. He was also known as Juan Salcido, and also Johnny Ellis. I believe there were others. Why did he have so many aliases? I never asked him; I guess he felt it was necessary. Johnny was a real nice guy, instantly friendly to everybody and everybody liked him. He’d done time in an American prison or two before La Mesa, and by the time I met him he was pretty well institutionalized. I remember one time we were hanging around by the outside gate, and we saw this early-sixties car drive by. I think it was a Chevy Malibu, maybe, like about a ‘62; it was okay, nothing special. And Johnny goes, “Wow, Steve, look at the new Chevy!” This was 1974. He thought a twelve-year-old car was brand new. That’s the kind of weird
time-perception thing that happens to people who are in prison too long. The world sort of moves on without you. He also wore clothes—dress pants, loafers, collared shirts—that were eight or ten years out of style.

  Anyway, the reason I bring up Johnny is, after my first few nights on George Anderson’s spare bed, I was pretty antsy to line up my own carraca, and I figured Johnny might be able to help me with it. I was starting to hear the rumors about George: how he was a snitch, he was a creep, whatever, and I definitely got that vibe off of him; it was time to go. Plus he hung that toilet seat of his on a nail right over my bunk. It was definitely time to go.

  Johnny himself had actually come up to me in the corral one day and just kind of whispered as he was walking by that I shouldn’t get too friendly with George. Like he was bad news, and he was gonna make me look bad, too. At first you don’t trust anybody in prison, you don’t believe anything, because you don’t know who’s trying to scam you or trick you or whatever. But the more I got to know George and to see him in action, the more I started figuring out that Johnny was right. George was a creep, and nobody liked him; he didn’t have any friends. So I appreciated Johnny looking out for me like that.

  Something they did every morning, early, when the sun was just peeking over the wall, was the guards would come storming through the tanks, banging their billy clubs against the carracas and yelling “Lista! Lista! La cuenta!” The count. We’d drag our asses out to the corral, and everybody would stand around with the other people from their tank while the guards took a head count. It took forever, and it was almost always freezing. Guys would build fires with whatever they could find around: plastic or old tires, sometimes wood, and we’d huddle around in that toxic smoke and try to get warm.

  So on maybe my third or fourth day, they woke us up for lista, and we were all out in the corral, and I went looking for Johnny. Finally I saw him and I walked over and said, “Fuckin’ A, you were right about that George guy. I gotta get out of there.” So he said he could help me get a place, said he’d introduce me to Heladio Diaz.

  Well I won’t lie, my sphincter kind of squinched when he said that, because that was a pretty serious name. Everybody knew Heladio Diaz; even on the outside you heard about him. There were songs about Heladio Diaz. He was a big-time drug boss, and I heard that on the day they busted him, he had an eleven-hour gun battle with the federales before they were finally able to bring him down. He was known for being absolutely fearless. In here, he was the head capo of the whole place; he was like The Godfather. He got ten percent of everything that went on in the prison—everything. If you sold ten papers of chiva, which is what they called heroin, you kicked one down to him. Shit, if you sold ten tacos, you kicked one down to him, or the cash equivalent anyway. He was a scary, powerful dude. If you wanted to do anything in La Mesa, you had to go through Heladio, and that included real estate, because even though the tanks were these total shantytowns, they still had actual paper deeds to every carraca. You had to buy it, you couldn’t just strongarm a guy out of his place. I guess that’s how they kept the peace, and how they made sure Heladio got his cut. No way around it—everything went through him.

  Johnny offered to introduce me to him, so of course I said sure, and later that day he took me over to Heladio’s place. Now, you picture a normal carraca, right? This wasn’t that. This was a two-story casa looking out over the square. It had a little balcony up top with a Jacuzzi on it, and sometimes at the fiestas you’d see Heladio up there with his bodyguards and his entourage, which was usually these two beautiful girls and this one sort of flamboyant pretty boy, and they’d all be drinking and dancing and whatever. There was always a lot of gossip and rumors around about Heladio and his people, about their alcohol and their drugs and their sex practices, especially.

  So we climbed up the stairs and there was this steel security gate like you see in shitty neighborhoods, and then behind that there was a normal door with one of those slidey kind of peepholes. Johnny banged on the security gate and a second later the peephole slid open and someone looked out. Johnny said he wanted to see about a carraca and the peephole slid shut. Then the door opened up and Heladio himself was standing there with a big smile on his face. He was wearing a pale green guayabera and white slacks. Bare feet. He looked more European than Mexican, more like a dapper old-school Spaniard or an Italian gentleman. He had great hair, black with a cool streak of white in the front. Just a real distinguished-looking dude. Anyway, he didn’t even look at me at first, but he was warm and friendly to Johnny: shook his hand, asked him how he was doing, all that. Then Johnny introduced me. He said, “This is Steve,” and Heladio turned to me, and I swear my blood ran cold. I can’t explain it; he didn’t do anything, it was just the force of him. I could feel my life in his hands. But I did what I always did: I played it cool.

  “How you doin’?” I said. He just smiled at me. And then, what really freaked me out is, he said to Johnny,

  “Okay, you can go.”

  So Johnny turned to me and he said, like, “Good luck” or whatever, and he just left me there! Now I was freaked out, because even though Heladio was all friendly and smiling at the moment, I’d heard all these stories about how he was so ruthless and he was a killer and he was this and he was that. But he waved me inside and what was I supposed to do? I had to go in.

  I followed him inside and he had this full living room set up in there. It was really nice and you could see he had an office area and his bedroom was in the back with the balcony off of that. There was a girl in the bed, partially covered by a white satin sheet. I could see her blonde hair and olive skin, and she looked good. I didn’t want to be gawking at her, but she looked really good. And right in front of me, in the living room, he had two more of his playthings or whatever you want to call them. At one end of the black leather couch was the young homosexual kid wearing this big white robe with light blue slippers. There was a cigarette dangling from his hand, and I remember the ash was real long and I kept looking at it, waiting for it to fall, but I want to say it never did. At the other end of the couch was a girl, and she was beautiful. Black hair, dark skin, I’d say she was about seventeen years old. She was wearing a short tight black skirt and a black lace bra, and she had a gold bracelet that she was playing with, sort of dangling it between her lips. Very seductive. Heladio introduced me to the girl first. She slid the bracelet back onto her wrist, almost like she was embarrassed, and stood up to shake my hand. She smiled at me, looked me right in my eyes. Her name was Elsa. The boy was called Bobby. He didn’t get up, he just nodded from the couch, so I nodded back. Then Heladio told me to take a seat. There was a glass coffee table in front of the couch with a chair at one end of it. I sat in the chair while Heladio sat down between Elsa and Bobby.

  “You would like a carraca,” he said.

  “Yeah, I would. Tank C if possible.”

  Tank C was where most of the Americans stayed. There were better apartments in the buildings outside of the corral, but Americans weren’t allowed to stay in them since a bunch of them had escaped not long before. He nodded, as if to say it was no big deal, then he turned to Elsa and said something in Spanish that I didn’t catch. She got up and poured us a couple of drinks from a bar in the corner. Tequila, really nice, in fancy crystal glasses. Meanwhile, Heladio opened this silver and mother-of-pearl snuff box that was sitting in front of him and poured out a good-sized little pile of cocaine right onto the glass table. And then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes (Fiesta brand, I believe) and offered me one. I’ve never been a smoker so I said no, but he took one for himself and gently mashed the tip of it into the cocaine, then lit it up. That was a trick I’d seen a lot of the Mexican bigshots do with coke or heroin, sometimes both. He took a long drag of that and then he started cutting up lines with a razor blade. Five lines he cut.

  There was an end table with a drawer in it, and Heladio reached past Bobby and pulled it open. Inside I could see a stack of hundred-dollar bills and a Browning nin
e-millimeter. He peeled a hundred off the stack and closed the drawer. Then he rolled up the bill and offered it to me. I said, “Ladies first,” and so he handed it to Elsa. She made quick work of her line and then it was my turn. I snorted mine and then Heladio did his and then it was Bobby’s turn. I don’t know if his nasal passages were clogged or what the problem was but he just couldn’t make it work so he ended up eating his coke. That left one line for the other girl, the one in the bedroom. She came in with the sheet wrapped around her, and if anything she was even hotter than Elsa. She was older, maybe early twenties, and just ridiculously gorgeous. The way she had it draped, the sheet barely covered her, and she just kept looking at me and smiling. She did her line no problem and the whole time, she kept smiling at me. I think she knew how nervous she was making me; I think that was the point. They said her name was Irma.

  We finished our drinks and took a walk, just me and Heladio. I didn’t see any bodyguards, but I couldn’t really tell. He might have had guys looking out for him all along the way, hanging back in the crowd. We went through the yard to the corral and then over to C Tank. I noticed how quickly everyone got out of his way. Anyhow, we went through the tank to the back where the stairs were and then up to the second floor and took a left on the rickety catwalk. Heladio stopped next to one carraca and said,

  “This is the place.”

  I looked inside: it was about seven feet deep by maybe six feet wide. There was no door. The floor was uneven and covered in rat turds, and it felt like you could step right through the rotten boards into the carraca below. Nothing was cut to fit, it was just scrap plywood and boards sort of patchworked together, everything overlapping. The walls were made of cardboard, newspaper and termite-chewed wood with gaps here and there where you could see through to the neighbors’ rooms. And there were about half a dozen dead bodies piled on the floor. Actually it turned out they weren’t dead, just passed out from sniffing glue or acetone or something. There was a jar open on the floor, and it gave off a strong chemical smell.