Locked Up In La Mesa Read online

  One unexpected benefit to all this walking around looking at the ground was discovering little jewels, like little rhinestones and shirt buttons and stuff like that kind of glittering in the dirt. I never really gave much thought to where they came from. I guess they maybe fell off the transvestites, or if there was a fight or something they might have been torn off somebody’s cowboy shirt. But from time to time I’d be walking through the yard trying not to step on the death blobs of poison phlegm and I would find these little sparkly things.

  For some reason they made me happy. Maybe it was just the idea of finding some beauty in such an ugly place; maybe it was the thrill of coming across something kind of rare, like a four-leaf clover. Whatever the reason, I liked them, and I started to collect them. I remember the first one I found was a rhinestone that still had the little metal prongs on the back of it. I stuck it on my jeans, on the front pocket. That way, I could look at it whenever I wanted. Over the course of my time in La Mesa I probably collected about a dozen more of these things in different sizes and colors and styles, all stuck onto my Levi’s, sort of half to mark the time, and half just to give me something nice to look at when things got especially depressing.

  I don’t have those jeans any more, but I wish I did. They would make a good souvenir to remind me of how I dealt with that place, how I survived it.

  Cuchara

  Doctór and the Hot Sauce Cure

  THEY CALLED HIM “DOCTÓR,” ALL right, but let me tell you, this guy was no doctor. He was just this kind of hunched-over-looking guy with long, greasy hair under a little fedora, and he always had a bandana hanging around his neck. Something to know about bandanas: you’d see them all over the place, I mean almost everybody had one, but they used them for different things. First off there were so many stabbings going on all the time that guys would use them to bandage themselves up; you saw that a lot. Some guys would tie them around their necks like cowboys for whatever reason—I guess they thought it looked cool. A few people wore them like headbands, because almost everybody at the time had long hair. But mostly what you’d see were guys with bandanas draped around their necks, or hanging over their shoulders. What that meant was those guys were waiting to score some chiva. When they got ahold of some, they’d use the bandana to tie off, you know, to make their vein swell up so they could shoot it. Anyway, Doctór was one of them who wore it draped like that, and he also ran the Shooting Gallery. That’s what they called the room where everybody went to shoot up. The shooting gallery was this guy’s carraca, and it was on the ground floor in Tank C, where I had my place.

  Whenever anybody would get their hands on some chiva they’d go to the shooting gallery to fix. You’d see them lined up outside, and the line would snake around the tank, and they were also lined up inside. I mean there might be twenty or thirty guys lined up at a time. And they’d take turns shooting up. The Doctór, who ran the place, had needles and syringes and stuff, everything you needed, and he was real good at finding the vein, which a lot of these guys had trouble with because their veins were simply blown out from doing it so much. Forgive the gross details here, but they’d have this sore on their arm that looked almost like a little volcano, just scab on top of scab on top of scab, and what they’d do is they’d peel back the top of it and then jam the needle into the hole and kind of poke it around until they hit the vein. And that’s what Doctór was so good at; he had the touch.

  Anyway, so they’d wait their turn and then when they got to the front of the line, Doctór would shoot them up. He would take their little bindle, their little paper of chiva, and he’d cook it in a spoon over a candle with some drops of water. Sometimes instead of a spoon he’d use the metal cap off a big soda bottle, with a piece of wire twisted around it to make a kind of handle, so it looked like a miniature frying pan. He’d tie them off and then he’d get it all ready and he’d inject them. And for doing this, his price was two drops from every syringe. Before he gave them their fix he’d take the syringe and poke it into this vial and squeeze out two drops, and then the rest he’d shoot into the guy. Believe me when I say they watched him like a hawk; it was always exactly two drops. But it added up: Doctór was fucked up pretty much all the time. It was a profitable business for him.

  So one day this visitor came in, this American—white guy—and he was a stone cold junky. He was a mess, so he scored some chiva and then his buddies or whoever he was in there to see took him to Doctór to get him fixed up. He did his thing, and he came walking out into the corral, all smiles, and then he just kind of… fell over. Just collapsed there on the ground. Overdose. He looked dead; this guy was a goner. And so everybody was going apeshit because just think about how this looks: Here you are trying to run a prison, and now you’ve got, not even an inmate, a visitor—even worse, an American visitor—overdosing on heroin that he bought right there inside of the prison. I mean, this is a major scandal shaping up here. Of course everyone was freaking out because if this guy didn’t sign out at the end of the day, they’d know he was dead and then the warden would be embarrassed and it would be this big fiasco and the first thing they’d do after that is shut down the shooting gallery and throw Doctór in the tumbas (which means “tombs,” which is what they called solitary confinement). That’s if they didn’t just kill him, because they had that option, too.

  So these guys were trying to revive their buddy, they were slapping his face, and everybody was in total panic mode, but the guy was just gone. Somebody ran back inside to get Doctór, and he came running out and looked at the guy, and he just about had a heart attack because he thought the guy was done for, too. The guy really did look dead; he looked like he had already expired. Everyone was freaking out, but Doctór looked at him hard for a second and then he said, “No! I can save heem!”

  He sprinted back inside, and everybody jumped out of his way because they wanted to see what he was gonna do, like “How’s he gonna save this guy?” And he came running back out with a syringe and what looked like a bottle of Tabasco sauce. I mean it looked exactly like one of those miniature bottles of hot sauce; he said it was his own special concoction, his own special antidote. He stuck the needle into the bottle and pulled some of this stuff out and jammed it into the guy’s arm. Then he hit the plunger, and immediately, I mean IMMEDIATELY, this guy sat straight up like he’d just sat up in his coffin. And sweat just came pouring—like shooting—out of this guy, out of his face, out of his arms, everywhere, like he was on fire. And he jumped up and spun around and was like,

  “What the fuck!? Where the fuck am I?!”

  Then he went running off back toward the gate and we never saw him again. Everyone laughed, even though if you think about what had just happened, it really wasn’t that funny. It was just kind of comical to see the guy jump up and run away like that. I think it was nervous laughter more than anything.

  Anyway, as the crowd broke up I took a peek at the little bottle of antidote. Turned out it actually was hot sauce. That’s it—he just shot him full of hot sauce and the damn guy lived.

  Pistola

  Shootout At the Corral

  WHEN YOU WALKED INTO MY tank, Tank C, you passed directly under this sort of balcony in the front of the tank. This is on the inside, at the end of the catwalk on the second floor, and it overlooked the main area of the tank where the long picnic table was. There was an old black-and-white TV up on a ledge on the balcony and every afternoon a lot of the tank guys and, I want to say, most of the kids would gather around and watch “Popeye the Sailor Man.” They would sit at that end of the picnic table looking up at the TV and they would all sing along, I swear to God. It was the funniest scene: dozens of these total cutthroat junkies, murderers, transvestites, weirdos and little kids all singing along with Popeye at the top of their lungs, just loving it.

  One day it was almost time for “Popeye” and I was sort of wandering through the corral; I think I was going out for a hot dog or something. I had just left the tank and was maybe halfway throug
h the corral when a gunfight broke out. I was trapped right in the middle of it. There were a lot of people milling around when all of a sudden two guys started shooting at each other, one on either side of the crowd.

  So the bullets were whizzing by and we were all running back and forth like crazy, because these guys were just squeezing off shots, barely even looking where they were aiming. I don’t know what their beef was, but they were determined to settle it right then and there. They ran around in a big circle trying to get away from each other, and the whole time they were sort of reaching back and firing their guns as they ran. It was like they thought they were going to outrun the bullets or something. Of course I and everybody else were trying to get out of there as fast as we could, but there were a lot of panicking people there and so we made a big traffic jam, like a bottleneck, at the gate that led out of the corral. We were trying to get all skinny and sideways, just praying we didn’t catch a loose bullet. And these two guys literally ran in circles shooting at each other until they had both emptied their guns. When they had no more bullets left to shoot, they ran away in opposite directions, and that was it. Nobody got shot; even though there were bullets flying everywhere, not a single person was hit. It was a miracle.

  When the dust settled, everyone looked around at each other like we couldn’t believe we’d survived, and then we all went back in the tank and watched “Popeye” as if nothing strange had happened. Crazy.

  Palmera

  Fiesta of the Greased Pole

  THE MEXICAN CULTURE IS ABSOLUTELY crazy for parties; they’ll throw a party for any reason at all, any chance they get. That’s one of the main things that made my time in La Mesa bearable. Almost every weekend there was some kind of celebration going on, and it made it feel less like a prison.

  One of the biggest ones I remember happened not too long after I arrived. I forget the occasion. As usual, they woke us up early for lista, and then everybody went back to bed for a while. When I got up a little while later it was still pretty early, but there were already visitors arriving and the place seemed busier than usual for that time of the morning.

  I went for a walk, going about my business, looking for a taco or whatever, and I saw these guys out in the middle of the soccer field, digging a hole. ‘That’s odd,’ I thought. So I watched them for a while. And then I looked and I saw they had a telephone pole lying on the ground there next to them. Now it was getting really weird. So I wandered over there, you know, to find out what the hell was going on, and I saw these other guys with this big hammer—not quite a sledgehammer, but a big hammer—and they were pounding lengths of rebar, maybe three-eighths-inch rebar, into the end of the telephone pole. The rebar was about two and a half, three feet long, and they were pounding them in and then bending them over, so it kind of looked like a palm tree now.

  I was thinking these guys were just nuts, like they were gonna try to jazz up the place with their fake palm tree right in the middle of the soccer field, and I was just about to walk away, to write them off and walk away, when they came out with this pail of manteca, which is lard, and started rubbing it all over the telephone pole. Just greasing the hell out of this telephone pole with the lard. So now, of course, this was amazing. This was getting really weird. What the hell were these guys up to?!

  By now I was hooked, and I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what these nuts were doing. But meanwhile, in the background, I saw these other guys—this is over by the basketball court—I saw these other guys, and they were setting up a wrestling ring! How did I know it was a wrestling ring and not a boxing ring? Because they had masks on. I swear to God, they were these big musclebuilder dudes, and they had on these Mexican wrestling masks. (Lucha masks, they called them. And when the masks were on, these guys stayed in character. There were a number of wrestlers locked up in the prison and you never knew it; they just seemed like everybody else. But some days, like this one, they’d put their masks on and set up their ring, and they were like celebrities in there. They were like superheroes.)

  This was my first time seeing the wrestler guys, so of course I was like, “Holy shit, I gotta check that out.” I started to head over there, when I heard this big cheer go up behind me. I turned around and I saw one of the really big-time capos coming over from his apartment with his entourage. He had like six guys with him, and they were marching over to where these guys were greasing the telephone pole. Everybody was crowding around and cheering and clapping as they passed by. At this point I looked around and realized the place was really filling up. There were a lot of visitors there by now, and they were all dressed up fancy, and a lot of them had picnic baskets and bags of food and stuff, and it was just a real festive atmosphere.

  So anyway, this capo walked over to the pole and he started digging in his pockets, and he had a roll of string and he started tying stuff onto the rebar palm fronds. He had cash and little papers of chiva, papers of cocaine, rolls of pot. He tied these things on there while his bodyguards stood around guarding it, and the people just went nuts. They cheered and clapped, then another capo came out and it got even louder. This guy was a little more big-time than the first guy, and he came over with his entourage, all smiling and waving to the crowd, and he tied his stuff on there. When he was done another one came out. They went through maybe five or six of these guys, and then the last one was Heladio. When he came out, forget it, people just lost it. They knew he was gonna put something really good on the tree, so they were jumping up and down and hooting and hollering, and he smiled and shook their hands. He tied his stuff on and then it was time to stand the pole up. They got some ropes on the end of it and hoisted until it was standing in the hole, then they packed the dirt down around it. By now there were a few hundred people gathered around, and the anticipation was just insane. Everybody’d been partying, half the prison was drunk off their ass or high on one thing or another, the visitors were having a great time, there were pretty girls everywhere, the wrestlers were doing their flips and shit, putting on a show, there were bands now—actual mariachi bands walking around playing their instruments—everybody was dancing, and it was just a full-on party scene. It was incredible! And now it was time for the high point of the whole fiesta.

  The way it worked was, there were several different groups of junkies, different cliquas, based on gang affiliation or hometowns or the soccer teams they liked, whatever. Each group had its champion, which was a total joke because he was basically just the least decrepit junkie out of a whole bunch of decrepit junkies. These champions were going to try to climb this greased pole and snag the prizes for them and their buddies.

  So the first guy went. His friends marched out carrying him on their shoulders and he was just a chicken-chested little kid with his hair tied back and no shirt on so you could see his skinny torso. Not very impressive, but what did I know? Maybe he was a great climber. Either way, he got a good loud cheer from the crowd. He stood there at the bottom of the pole looking up, and you could practically hear his teeth grinding, he wanted those drugs so bad. Then he jumped up as high as he could and grabbed on to the pole, and you could tell immediately that this guy was never going to make it. I mean, I don’t know the first thing about climbing a greased pole, but I could tell right away that this wasn’t it. He slid back down and everyone laughed at him, then he tried a few more times before the capos shooed him away. They sort of booed him off the stage, so to speak. He went back to his buddies all dejected.

  The next guy came out and he was the same type: a skinny twitchy little dude with no shirt. He failed exactly like the first guy; he never got more than a few feet off the ground. Then the next one was a guy I knew. It was one of the talacha boys, which was what we called the cleanup boys, the kids who would do chores or run errands or that sort of thing. He did all kinds of little jobs for me; he was a good kid. One thing I felt real bad about (this was later on, well after the fiesta) was I had him tarring my roof one time after it rained, because there were big leaks in it. He wa
s up on the roof hot-mopping it when he slipped and fell right into the boiling tar. He was burnt really badly, and I felt awful for getting him into that.

  Anyway, this guy came out and right away people’s hopes were raised because this kid had equipment. Even though he was the same scraggly, scrawny junky type, he came out with ropes, and you could see he had a plan. So we were all cheering and clapping for him. I mean, who knew at this point if his plan was any good, but at least he was thinking about it on a deeper level than the other guys. What he did was, he walked up to the base of this thing and tied a little noose at one end of each rope (there were two ropes). He stepped his feet into these nooses, then he took the other ends and tied them around the pole, basically like two more nooses, only this time around the pole.

  And he started. He lifted one foot, then slid the other end of the rope as high as it would go up the pole before putting his weight on it—and it held! It slipped a little bit, but it held him. Then he lifted his other foot and slid that rope up the pole—same thing! Now we were really cheering, because this kid had potential to go all the way. Me and some of the other Tank C guys were cheering loudest of all, because we were fairly tight with this kid, so whatever he snagged off the top of the pole, we were liable to get a taste of. It was a long climb, though. It was probably twenty or thirty feet up there; it was fucking high up. But the kid was motivated. If you’ve ever been any kind of junky, any kind of serious addict, you understand what was driving this kid. He was sweating and shaking, but he stuck with it and eventually he made it all the way to the top. He picked it clean. And we were all cheering like we’d won something; it was a great feeling.