Across the Wire (18 page)

The next time I called Cynthia, we were on: the disc jockeys were already talking about it on the air. I was to take them into a preselected location in the 91X van: both she and their midafternoon personality, Oz (whose on-air promos solemnly pronounced him “probably the worst deejay in the world”), would
accompany me across the border and hand out gifts. I didn’t want either the radio people or the folks from the
colonia
to get in trouble. Anything was possible—from outright banditry to police raids. If we heaped gifts on one group of people to the exclusion of another, there could be retaliations. (One fellow, who turned out to be Negra’s uncle, lived near the new dump. He was rumored to be hoarding money in his shack. He’d been seen that day selling his possessions. He was, in fact, getting ready to return to Michoacán, and had sold his furniture to pay for the trip. It was a less developed area in those days, and his shack was set apart from the others. A gang of toughs, after failing to bust in on him, decided to set the shack on fire and burn him out. The fire killed him.)

In many Latin American countries, too much attention can get you killed. It is illustrative to note that in El Salvador, almost every Salvadoran professional wrestler wears a mask. The saddest thing about it is that safety is entirely up to the momentary whim of those who have the power, which is usually a chopped-down carbine.

We would select a safe
colonia
and arrive on a commando raid: in and out.

Things had changed with Von, too. When I left, the Mexico Crew was still a loose assortment of renegades working out of a Baptist church. It was a motley crew in those days, but eight years had passed, and now the Crew was a Corporation—Spectrum Ministries, Inc. Every single member from my old days was gone. Many, like me, were married and trying to get on with their lives. Some were burned out. Some were so angry at their experience that they cursed Von and all he stood for. A few had
become missionaries on their own. Von, whom some of us called “God’s Machine,” was still there. He was into his sixties and outrunning men and women half his age.

One of his old-timers now ran the drug-treatment center in the neighborhood where the Satánicos lived. We were looking into the area as a potential beneficiary of the gift drive. He invited me to walk with him down the hill, to look at their small compound. We strolled away from the ball court, through a grating wooden gate that opened onto a small yard. There, a family was gathered around a trash fire. He introduced me to them. We shook hands, joked, and they laughed and wished us
“Dios les bendiga
” (God bless you) as we moved through.

“91X!” he yelled. “No way!”

He couldn’t stop laughing.

“Praise God!” he hollered.

It was totally dark. He chugged along at a steady thirty miles an hour, and I was trying to keep from tripping over all the rocks.

“This is the clinic we run,” he said as we made our way along a cement-block building. “They came and took all our medicine away.”

“Who?”

“They. The city. Said we weren’t using it right.”

Almost nothing was visible on the street. The moon wasn’t up. The houses had saffron wedges of candlelight in their windows. Transistor radios were blaring
cumbia
music. Voices could be heard within, murmuring, or laughing, or cursing.

We were at the church. “Right here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the dirt at the entrance to his driveway. “They shot a guy right here. He died right here. He was standing around and
a car pulled up and they shot him. He was gasping and gurgling. Right on this spot here.”

One of the addicts was guarding the driveway.

“¿Qué onda?”
the missionary said. (What’s up?)

“Nada,”
the guy replied.

“We built this place out of plywood and scrap.” He unlocked the door to the little church. Every door in the compound was padlocked shut. The church had a dirt floor, wooden benches. “The cathedral. Not too fancy.” Next door, there was a workshed. “Look at this,” he said. “The guys build stuff in here. It’s part of their rehab. Check out this cabinet.”

It was quite nice. They had fashioned it out of sheets of plywood, two-by-fours, hinges. All of it was lovingly sanded and shellacked.

“Pretty nice, huh?”

“What are these?”

Shiny wooden objects were stacked on the workbenches. They seemed to be wooden squares that looked a little like big floor tiles, hinged, with a handle sticking up from the top.

“Tortilla-makers.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, really. Tortilla-makers. See? You open it up like this, put the dough in here like this, then press down the handle like this. Makes instant tortillas!”

The handmade tortilla press was the main industry of the rehab center. The men got up at five or five-thirty, attended a six
A.M
. Bible study, then ate breakfast. (“It weeds out the ones who aren’t really serious about getting off drugs,” the missionary said. “Kind of like boot camp.”) After breakfast, it was off to the woodshed to build these ingenious little machines. The
profits from the tortilla-makers, selling for ten dollars, helped keep the center running. I bought one.

He showed me the dorm room, a cluttered bedroom of stacked bunk beds, separated by a blanket from a small kitchen area. His own quarters were no better—he unlocked yet another door and led me up a steep homemade stairway. At the top, in a kind of small plywood attic, was his room. Battery-powered lamps illuminated a rough table and bookshelves made from wooden boxes. On the walls hung mounted blowguns and Indian artifacts from his many trips into the South American jungle. His hammock was strung in a corner, its bottom brushing the top of a kerosene heater.

This compound and the youth center nearby would be the focus of one of the Christmas runs, those kids in the street the recipients.

“This is it,” he said.

He walked me back out to the street. We talked there for a few moments about private matters of heart and faith. A strange sound at the back of the compound sent him and the one addict on a quick perimeter march, flashlights nervously probing all the darker corners. When he came back, he said, “Cat.” We stood around for another minute, then, to my dismay, he said, “Well, good night!” and went back to his room. I looked up the street. I thought,
Oh great
.

It had gotten late. As I walked in the direction of the youth center, I occasionally tripped over big rocks jutting out of the dirt. Ahead, vague in the dark, I could see a group of the Satánicos. Their cigarette ends flared intense red, and seemed to float disembodied like fireflies. I clutched my tortilla press, figuring I could at least break somebody’s nose before they got
to me. About a hundred yards farther up the hill, a car in the middle of the street turned on its headlights and sat there. The Satánicos were a blue-gray shadow against the light. They were watching me. But, after all, this was Christmas. It was a time for wonders, and as I came even with them, they all called “Good night,” and “See you later,” and “How’s it going?”

I replied, “
Hasta luego,”
and “
Buenas noches,”
and kept walking, touched and relieved.

Back at the youth center, one of the addicts saw my tortilla press. “Hey!” he said. “I made that!” He was beaming as he shook my hand.

But this is not the story I have come to tell you.

Nor is the story of 91X’s big broadcast, nor even what came after. Christmas 1990 began once all these events were finished. But we had to go through them to get there.

I pulled into the 91X parking lot at seven forty-five. It was Friday, December 21—a blustery day with early-morning clouds sailing in from the sea. Victor Harris, one of the ace drivers on the old Mexico Crew, slid the Spectrum Ministries van into an executive slot near a small pile of toys and clothes. The radio station staff had already been out there since six. Dwight Arnold, who was officially in charge of the project, was up on a ladder, hanging the black-and-yellow 91X banner over the entryway to the station. Several puffy-eyed suits from the “Mighty 690” AM side of the station stood around gawking, blowing on Styrofoam coffee cups.

A tent stood dead-center, where bagels and coffee were being doled out. Cream cheese in white plastic buckets attracted one homeless guy who was wearing several pairs of glasses at once. He had white cheese hanging in small icicles from his
whiskers. I was impressed at how hard he tried to look like a station employee. Later in the day, he caught a chance to slip into the studios through an open door and not reappear.

Bryan Jones, the morning disc jockey, was well into his radio show, and “cutting edge” music echoed off the Highway Patrol building across Pacific Highway. “We’re broadcasting live from the parking lot,” Jones cried into the mike, “collecting toys for the needy and homeless, and we’re
freezing
our
butts off!”

Later, he would say, “Donate to the homely and needless.”

By nine, two large piles of goods had accumulated. David Thomson, guitarist for the mighty Los Angeles rock band Tokyo Burlesque, drove all the way to San Diego to help load toys. It struck me as incongruous that this rocker in his very bad ’67 Mustang fastback the color of blood had chugged down I-5 to stand around in the rain putting several hundred pounds of stuff in the vans of a bunch of Baptist missionaries, most of whom wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Tokyo Burlesque or 91X.

Cynthia came out to say hello. She was a beautiful woman with a blond mane. “You did this,” I said as the steady flow of rock ‘n’ roll philanthropists dropped off trash bags full of clothes. Somebody brought a clear plastic Winnie-the-Pooh full of Cracker Jacks.

“This is great,” Cynthia said. “But wait till Oz gets here.”

It was now midmorning. Steve West, an Englishman, took over the mike. He put me on the air a couple of times, but he seemed to think my name was “Ruiz.”

Suddenly, the drummer for the Beat Farmers, Country Dick
Montana, made an appearance. He staggered out of the parking lot, saying, “Anybody seen Oz? Where’s Oz?”

West motioned the Reverend Dick (mail-order) over to the mike. Already famed for his cheerful dissipation, Dick didn’t disappoint, quipping on air that he’d recently barfed. He also suggested people bring in provocative underpants. Then he lurched back into the parking lot and vanished.

The first vanload of toys pulled out, to much hoopla. Another would go out during West’s show. It rained. The Trash Can Sinatras pulled up in a record-company van. They had come to play on-air, to help the “lads and lassies” of Tijuana—though I’d lay odds they had no idea who or what that might be. They shuffled around in the parking lot. Gorgeous and indecipherable Scottish-sounding accents ensued. “Hootmon,” they said. “Oots a roody hoot tee plee heer!”

They went inside and performed an acoustic set on the air. Then they came back out. Kids had flocked to the parking lot with video cameras and Instamatics, and the Trash Cans (or are they the Sinatras?) gave autographs. After they left, two Asian girls ran up to West begging to see the band. Told the band had left, one of them cried into the mike, “I just got screwed!”

West, unflappable, said, “Right here in the lot?”

Wait till Oz gets here.

They were right: as soon as Oz took over the show, what had already been a successful morning kicked into some bizarre overdrive. Victor took off once, twice, three times with vanloads. Skateboards, surfboards, food, clothes came in. A trucker tore in from the freeway in his eighteen wheeler and handed Oz a ten-dollar bill. Four, five, six vanloads.

Seven. It was coming far faster than we could load it. Even when the Marines hauled away a large pile for the Toys for Tots program, we were having trouble keeping up. By five o’clock, Victor was speeding in and out, hauling the donations up to Pastor Von’s offices, and the stuff was apparently rising to the ceiling. After the ninth load, more drivers had to come in—we were running double loads in tandem.

It continued after dark: a ten-speed bike; $140 in groceries, neatly boxed. An unemployed woman pulled up in her car. “I got a blanket,” she said. “I was just cleaning a lady’s house in trade for a cake. You wanna see the cake?”

We walked to her car. The cake was in the front seat.

She handed me the old blanket. “Wish I could give you more,” she said.

Pastor Von finally appeared to be interviewed. On the air, Von told Oz about a group of orphanage kids in Tijuana who had decided to give Christmas to children in the garbage dump. Each child took one of his or her own toys, wrapped it nicely, then went to the dump and selected a child to give it to. I always imagine a hush all over San Diego at that moment, like the hush that befell us all in the parking lot, everybody pausing for just an instant to consider it.

As the last vanloads pulled out, and the torrent of donations finally began to slow, I went inside and collapsed on the couch in the lobby. A “jock” named Pam Wolf was doing the last show out in the dark, wrapped in a blanket. It was raining. A biker rolled up, reached under his leather jacket, and pulled out a teddy bear.

We’d spent thirteen hours out there, and none of us had
really seen what the magnitude of San Diego’s generosity was. We had seen it being whisked off, but it would be an hour or so until we got to see how huge it had turned out to be. I had been trying to think of an appropriate thank you for Oz and Cynthia, and all I could think of was to give them my only picture of Negra. They’d huddled shoulder-to-shoulder in the cold wind, the picture flapping between them.

And still, people came. They rattled the door. Cynthia would jump up to open it, and someone would hand her a toy. The last, sweetest thing was what finally overwhelmed her. A young businessman in a shirt and tie appeared at the door with six large coffees. “You’ve been out in the cold all day,” he said. “Take these, and Merry Christmas.” She sat on the arm of the couch and cried.

Still, Christmas had not yet come.

Cynthia, Oz, and a group of workers stood in the Spectrum Ministries building and gawked. There was stuff everywhere: toys, clothes, coats, blankets, shoes, cookies, cans of food, bread, candy, bicycles, Walkmen. Some of us sorted out four hundred of the best toys for the next day’s “X-Mas.” We had selected Trincherazo—the old “Lower Dump”—because it was isolated enough to be controlled. Von was going in the next day to bathe the kids, and they would announce the toys late in the day, before too many hundreds of invaders could hit the hill. Probably, our only invaders would come down from Panamericana. The radio crew and I would swoop in at the last minute.