Locked Up In La Mesa Read online

  But the place had a window! In the back, up near the ceiling, there was an open window with bars on it. It was about five feet long and a foot and a half high. Even with everything else wrong with the place, the fresh air from that window would make it feel like a palace. I asked him how much. Two hundred and fifty bucks, he said, and it was the only carraca for sale anywhere. I had no choice. I turned away from him and dug my money out of my stash.

  (When you’re in prison, or you hang around people who’ve been in prison, you learn pretty quickly the best places to hide things. The first place anybody’s gonna look for your valuables is in your pockets, and then in your socks, but if you know what you’re doing, the better hiding place is inside the waistband of your jeans. What you do is you make a vertical slit through the inside layer of the waistband, and that gives you access to the little pocket between that and the outer layer, and that runs all the way around your waist. Sometimes it’s divided where the belt loops are sewn on, but then you just need to cut more slits to get at the other compartments. That can be handy anyway to keep your stash separated, your drugs from your money, or your small bills from your large bills or what have you. There you go: free advice!)

  Anyway, Roger had brought me a few hundred in cash before they transferred me out of La Ocho, so I counted out Heladio’s money and gave it to him. He handed me the deed to the room and explained the rules: the place belonged to me until I either got out or died. If I wanted to sell it before then, I had to go through him. Somehow I expected that. I pointed at the pile of guys passed out on the floor.

  “Do they come with the place?”

  He laughed and poked them with his foot to wake them up. Then he gave them each a little dollar paper of chiva and they all ran off to go fix. We shook hands and he was on his way.

  So there I was in my new home, and man, was it ever a shithole. It needed a lot of work. First on the list was a door. There was a small garbage dump out behind the corral where you could scrounge all sorts of random junk from out of the burning piles. When I got there and started looking around, I saw the tank capo who’d taken my Levi’s jacket the first night. He was wearing it. He spotted me and tried to sell it back to me for two dollars, but I told him he should keep it; I said it looked good on him. It didn’t, he looked stupid, but it was funny to see how shocked he was that I didn’t want it back. At the dump I found a couple of old soda-pop crates and some boards that I figured I could use to build a door. I dragged my treasures back to the tank and wrestled them up the stairs to my carraca. I was starting to feel a little bit sick, so I wanted to get a door on the place before it got too bad. I wanted the privacy.

  Just about then, Johnny Bigotes came in and looked around at the place. He nodded like he approved, like it wasn’t too bad. He asked if I needed any help building the door. I told him I could definitely use some help, so he disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a hammer and a saw and a little bag of nails. He had a couple of mismatched hinges, too, so together we built the door and hung it. It looked pretty good. (At first I used a bent nail to hold it shut; later on I bought a small lock off a guy.)

  By this time I was feeling pretty shitty. I knew I was running a fever and my guts were going crazy. I had a thin mattress in there (whether it came with the place or Johnny brought it I don’t remember), so I closed the door and laid down on that. Even though I figured I was probably coming down with dysentery, in a way I felt better. If I was gonna get sick and die, at least now I had my own place to do it in.

  Not long after I flopped down there on the floor, basically resigning myself to whatever was gonna become of me, I heard a huge commotion downstairs in the tank, so I had to get up again and check it out. I dragged myself out the door and onto the little catwalk, thinking the whole time that I was gonna pitch over the side and die, as dizzy as I was. Looking down, I saw a big brawl going off on the ground floor next to the picnic table right below me.

  It was Mexicans versus Americans, a bunch of them on each side. The Americans were fighting them off with clubs and fists and whatever else they had, but they were badly outnumbered, and all I could think was, “Shit, they’re gonna kill us all and I can’t even fight.” I couldn’t do anything, so I just went back inside and flopped down on my mattress again, waiting for them to come and get me if that’s what they were gonna do. But I guess it came to a head and then everybody dispersed and that was the end of it. I never did find out what the problem was.

  So I’m laying there and I’m sicker than hell and I can’t eat anything, can’t drink anything. (Not that I wanted to; the only water they had was this funky-ass cloudy water where you could actually see stuff floating on top, and eventually you reach a point where you’re so thirsty you don’t even care about that, but I wasn’t quite at that point yet.) So I just laid there when I wasn’t puking in a can, which I spent a good portion of my time doing, and tried to sleep, but all around me I kept hearing this scratching, skittering noise: rats.

  There was a little bit of light coming in from the window at the back and also through the gaps in the boards at the top of the front wall, above the door. Every time I heard them I’d open my eyes and find them trying to climb on me, to bite me or to get at the puke in the can by my head. And each time I’d yell or stomp my foot to scare them away. Eventually I took my boots off so I could throw them at them or use one as a hammer to smack ‘em or just bang the floorboards to chase them off. I remember there was one entire night where I didn’t get even a wink of sleep because I had to spend the entire time dealing with these little fuckers. That was about the low point of my life at the time.

  After a few days my health turned the corner. I fought through it and fought through it, and slowly I started getting better. One of the families that lived in the tank brought me some food which also helped a lot. (In that way, La Mesa was like a real little community. I think about someone in an American prison looking out for a stranger like that and it seems pretty far-fetched, to say the least.)

  Once I was up and around again, I set to work really tricking out my carraca. If I was going to spend the rest of my life in this place, which seemed as likely as not, I figured I might as well make it as comfortable as I could. I gave it a lot of thought and then I had Roger bring me down some wood and some paint and a couple of big paisley tapestries, which were easy to come by back in the hippie days. So Roger showed up and he had three cans of paint, but all three of them were these little dinky cans that weren’t nearly enough to do anything with on their own, and they were all different colors. So I ended up mixing them all together which gave me kind of a muddy blue color, and I used that to paint the ceiling and the back wall. I left the front wall pretty much how it was because it was in the best shape, and I tacked the tapestries up along the side walls. I took special care to nail those down tight in the corners and along the floor, thinking it might help to keep the rats and the bugs from getting in.

  At some point in there I got my hands on a metal army cot to go with my thin little mattress. I don’t recall exactly how that came about, but that was a major score. And that gave me the idea to try to maximize my living space by elevating my bed right up under the window like a sleeping loft. I was so excited I didn’t even really measure it that carefully; I just nailed up the posts I planned to rest the bed on and then hoisted the cot up on to them. I put it in on an angle so I could get the two legs at the head of the bed onto the braces and then I was gonna lower it gently down onto the other two. But when I started to lower it down I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach—it didn’t fit.

  It turned out the bed was about an inch longer than the room was wide. And because it was made with these heavy metal bars, there was no way I could cut it to fit or even bend it to get it in there. At that point I’d be goddamned if I was gonna reorient the thing to run along the side wall or any shit like that; I was dead set on putting my bed up under that window. So what I did was I climbed up on something with my hammer in my hand and I
just pounded the shit out of that bed until I managed to push the neighbors’ wall over far enough to get the bed level. I don’t know how I pulled that off without attracting the whole tank with the clatter I was making, but I did. I had my loft, and underneath it I placed another little mattress covered with another tapestry, sort of like a Bedouin couch, which were real popular at the time.

  Then along the side wall to the right of the door when you walked in, I propped up a board, which was already painted yellow, on some bricks or something to make a little bench. That’s where I would eat sometimes. If I was lucky enough to get my hands on some peanut butter and jelly, say, I’d sit there on that little bench and make my sandwich, resting the bread directly on the leg of my jeans because I don’t think I ever did have any plates.

  Yeah, Christ, it was pretty rough. But it was home.

  Toro

  Bull’s-Head Tacos and the Salad Dog

  ONE OF THE REALLY MESSED-UP facts of life in La Mesa for me was that even though I was locked up in a state penitentiary, I was technically a federal prisoner, since I was there on federal charges. What this meant is that the state authorities who ran the place were under no direct obligation to feed me, so they didn’t. What I got was the equivalent of seven dollars every two weeks from the federales, and out of that seven dollars I was supposed to buy food and whatever else I needed. As you can imagine, it didn’t go far, so if I wanted to eat, I had to get creative.

  Working in the prison shops—wood shop, welding, that kind of stuff—was an option, but for the kind of kid I was, and the situation I was in, it was certainly no option for me. There was no way I could get my head around the idea of lifting a finger to help the people who had me locked up, even if it meant I would starve. I just couldn’t do it. In fact, I even bought my way out of work detail when I first arrived in La Mesa. There was a policy in place at the time that said that all new inmates had to do a mandatory period of work in the prison industries. I forget how long it was, but because that system was just as corrupt as every other in there, you had the unspoken option of buying your way out of it, so that’s what I did. I think it was fifteen dollars or something like that. It was well worth it to me not to have to work. Stealing, likewise, wasn’t even an option. There’s actually very little theft in prison, in my experience anyway. The risk is just way too great. Someone is bound to find out, and it’s not like you can make a clean getaway.

  Sometimes I’d get a bit of cash from friends who’d come in to see me, and I had my seven dollars from the feds, but I always tried to stretch my money and make it last a little longer. It didn’t always work out.

  One time I remember I was just starving, my ribs were sticking out; I was dizzy. I don’t think I’d eaten anything for at least a couple of days. (All told, I think I lost somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty pounds while I was in there, and I wasn’t real chubby to begin with. Between the dysentery and the damn starvation, that was a pretty effective diet plan to say the least.) I had no money to speak of, but I could still get credit. That was never a problem in La Mesa; as long as you were willing to put your life down for collateral, you could buy most anything on credit. Those terms made the deal a lot less attractive, though. I never liked to be in debt to anybody, especially not like that, but these were desperate times.

  Well, right down the street not far from the prison was the arena where they held bullfights every Sunday. The bulls always lost, which was unfortunate for them but lucky for a lot of us in the prison because their heads usually wound up in the giant cooking pot of this one inmate chef; I forget his name. The first time I had cabeza tacos, I was walking through the yard one day, just starving, and I saw these guys with a huge black cooking pot sitting in the fire. There’s steam coming out of it, and the smell was just incredible. I swear it was like a cartoon, where you see the guy kind of floating along on the vapors of whatever good thing he’s smelling—that was me. So I followed my nose, I went floating over there, and I saw them lift the lid and inside of it there was this gigantic bull’s head. They’d sawed the horns off to make it fit in the pot, but damn if it wasn’t a full-on bull’s head sitting there, just bubbling away. The guy was throwing all sorts of stuff in there with it: onions, salt, pepper, cilantro, and my stomach was just in knots because even though it was totally gross to think about it, and definitely not something I would have eaten on the outside if I had any choice about it, at the time it just smelled so good to me I thought I was either gonna cry or pass out.

  The guy saw me looking at him, and looking at this pot boiling there, and he asked me if I wanted a taco. So there I was nodding away until he asked me if I had any money. Well, I didn’t, so I had to just shake my head. I could see him thinking for a second, like he was considering his options, and then in the end he carved some of this meat off this thing—the cheek, I think it was—and he put it in a warm flour tortilla and topped it off with some really good salsa and then he handed it to me. It was twenty-five cents, but he said I could pay him later. I think he knew how hungry I was and took pity on me. So I ate the bull’s head taco, and it was every bit as good as it smelled. I’m not sure I’d eat another one if you put it in front of me right now, but at the time, in the state I was in, it was absolutely perfect.

  There were other delicacies I tried, too. Nothing as out-there as the tacos, but good stuff. One was watermelon with chili powder on it, which is how they eat a lot of fruit down there in Mexico, but I’d never tried it before. There was one dude who had the fruit concession there and he always had this great big machete with him. He was in there for murder. I didn’t know the circumstances of his case but I assumed it had something to do with that machete because he seemed awfully attached to it. Anyway, you could go up to this guy’s stand and buy yourself some watermelon and he would whip out that machete and chop you off a hunk before you could even blink your eyes. Real neat slices, and always super-fast; he was an expert with that blade. Then he’d sprinkle the chili powder on it, and that was the thing right there. That was a treat. Something else this guy had that was kind of cool was, if you wanted orange juice, he had this hand-cranked orange juice machine. I’ve never seen another one like it, so I wonder if maybe this guy invented it, but it was this heavy-duty handle thing that he’d crank around and it would press the oranges and also turn them at the same time so he could get every bit of juice out of them. No electric power or anything, all mechanical. So you got fresh orange juice; that was pretty neat.

  But as I said, finding my next meal was pretty much a constant concern. The thing that totally saved me, that I came to depend on, was the hot dog stand. The guy who ran it sold these little hot dogs, just your basic little wieners, for around twenty cents, I think. And he’d let me buy on credit. So I’d get my little twenty-cent hot dog—basic dog, basic bun—and then he had all the condiments there, and that’s where I’d get creative. I used to literally pile on the onions and peppers—I’d line the peppers up end-to-end and stack them so it was like I was building a brick wall of peppers—and then I’d add relish and tomatoes and whatever else he had that day. By the time I got finished raiding this guy’s condiments I’d have the garnish literally stacked two or three inches high over the top of the bun; it was like a big salad with a little dinky hot dog buried underneath it. That was my salvation; I ate a lot of salad dogs that year.

  Sombrero

  Yosemite Sam and the Laundry Girls

  ONE REALLY BIZARRE SIGHT AT la cuenta, but also fascinating in a weird way, were the transvestites. There were maybe ten or twelve of them who were really going for it, the cross-dressing. Some of them actually cleaned up pretty good, but in the mornings they all just looked like hell. I mean obvious dudes, with stubble and crooked wigs and their makeup all smeared, but wearing ladies’ nightgowns and even lingerie, some of them. Just horrible-looking.

  They always had this one old guy with them, and he sort of ran herd on all these girls; he was their pimp. He let them stay in his carraca with him, and
he was obviously having sex with them, but he looked like the straightest guy you could ever meet. I remember he had a wide black mustache, like a Hitler-style mustache, but bigger. It looked like a comb stuck to his lip. And he wore this great big—I mean gigantic—cowboy hat. It was almost like a novelty hat, like it wasn’t even supposed to be a serious hat. Like a cartoon cowboy hat. He looked like Yosemite Sam from Bugs Bunny. A Mexican Yosemite Sam.

  One thing that was interesting is this old cowboy guy not only lived with these transvestites and pimped them out or whatever, he also ran the laundry business. You’d drop your clothes off, or they’d have a kid come by and pick them up, and the transvestites would do your laundry. There were these big concrete troughs in the corral and they had these old-timey washboards, and they’d just be scrubbing clothes all day when they weren’t turning tricks or whatever. They did everybody’s laundry, everyone with money anyway, and they did a good job. A lot of the guards used them, even.

  That old cowboy had a good thing going, I think; he did all right for himself.

  Diamante

  Treasures in the Minefield

  EVERYTHING WAS SO DIRTY AND filthy, and everyone was packed in so tight with their neighbors, that just trying not to get seriously ill was pretty much a full-time job. There were all kinds of nasty illnesses going around, like dysentery and tuberculosis. Some weeks it seemed like half the people in there had TB. It was horrible. You could lie in your bed at night and hear people coughing all over the prison, in every tank, that gross wet chunky kind of cough.

  When you walked through the corral or the yard or anywhere, you had to be careful where you stepped because guys were always spitting up these horrible clumps of bloody mucus. They’d spit it out wherever they were; they didn’t care. This stuff was just deadly, though. You’d be almost guaranteed to get infected if it got into you. I used to think of walking around there almost like I was walking through a minefield, which I basically was, I guess, when you consider that a wrong step could literally cost you your life. The only difference was the death would be slower and probably more painful. So you had to watch out for the mucus and make sure that you didn’t step in it.