Across the Wire (4 page)

Von’s religious ethic is similar in scope to Teresa of Calcutta’s. Von favors actual works over heavy evangelism. Spectrum is based on a belief Christians call “living the gospel.” This doctrine is increasingly rare in America, since it involves little lip service, hard work, and no glory.

Von often reminds his workers that they are “ambassadors of Christ” and should comport themselves accordingly. Visitors are indelicately stripped of their misconceptions and prejudices when they discover that the crust on Von and his crew is a mile thick: the sight of teenybopper Bible School girls enduring Von’s lurid pretrip briefing is priceless. Insouciantly, he offers up his litany: lice, worms, pus, blood; diarrhea, rattletrap outhouses, no toilet paper; dangerous water and food; diseased animals that will leave you with scabies; rats, maggots, flies;
odor
. Then he confuses them by demanding love and respect for the poor. He caps his talk with: “Remember—you are not going to the zoo. These are people. Don’t run around snapping pictures of them like they’re animals. Don’t rush into their shacks saying, ‘Ooh, gross!’ They live there. Those are their homes.”

Because border guards often “confiscate” chocolate milk, the cartons must be smuggled into Mexico under bags of
clothes. Because the floors of the vans get so hot, the milk will curdle, so the crew must first freeze it. The endless variations of challenge in the Borderlands keep Von constantly alert—problems come three at a time and must be solved on the run.

Like the time a shipment of tennis shoes was donated to Spectrum. They were new, white, handsome shoes. The only problem was that no two shoes in the entire shipment matched. Von knew there was no way the Mexican kids could use
one
shoe, and they—like teens everywhere—were fashion-conscious and wouldn’t be caught dead in unmatching sneakers.

Von’s solution was practical and witty. He donned unmatched shoes and made his crew members wear unmatched shoes. Then he announced that it was the latest California surfer rage; kids in California weren’t considered hip unless they wore unmatched shoes. The shipment was distributed, and shoeless boys were shod in the
faux
fashion craze begun by Chez Von.

Von has suffered for his beliefs. In the ever more conservative atmosphere of American Christianity (read: Protestantism), the efforts of Spectrum have come under fire on several occasions. He was once denounced because he refused to use the King James Bible in his sermons—clearly the sign of a heretic.

Von’s terse reply to criticism: “It’s hard to ‘save’ people when they’re dead.”

Von has a Monday night ministerial run into Tijuana, and in his heyday, he was hitting three or four orphanages a night. I was curious, unaware of the severity of the poverty in Tijuana. I knew it was there, but it didn’t really mean anything to me. One night, in late October 1978, my curiosity got the better of me. I
didn’t believe Von could show me anything about my hometown that I didn’t know. I was wrong. I quickly began to learn just how little I really knew.

He managed
to
get me involved on the first night. Actually, it was Von and a little girl named América. América lived in one of the orphanages barely five miles from my grandmother’s house in the hills above Tijuana.

She had light hair and blue eyes like mine—she could have been my cousin. When she realized I spoke Spanish, she clutched my fingers and chattered for an hour without a break. She hung on harder when Von announced it was time to go. She begged me not to leave. América resorted to a tactic many orphanage children master to keep visitors from leaving—she wrapped her legs around my calf and sat on my foot. As I peeled her off, I promised to return on Von’s next trip.

He was waiting for me in the alley behind the orphanage.

“What did you say to that girl?” he asked.

“I told her I’d come back next week.”

He glared at me. “Don’t
ever
tell one of my kids you’re coming back,” he snapped. “Don’t you know she’ll wait all week for you? Then she’ll wait for months. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it!” I said.

I went back the next time to see her. Then again. And, of course, there were other places to go before we got to América’s orphanage, and there were other people to talk to after we left. Each location had people waiting with messages and questions to translate. It didn’t take long for Von to approach me with a proposition. It seemed he had managed the impressive feat of spending a lifetime in Mexico without picking up any Spanish at all. Within two months, I was Von’s personal translator.

It is important to note that translation is often more delicate an art than people assume. For example, Mexicans are regularly amused to read
TV Guide
listings for Spanish-language TV stations. If one were to leave the tilde (~) off the word
años
, or “years,” the word becomes the plural for “anus.” Many cheap laughs are had when “The Lost Years” becomes “The Lost Butt Holes.”

It was clear that Von needed reliable translating. Once, when he had arranged a summer camping trip for
barrio
children, he’d written a list of items the children needed to take. A well-meaning woman on the team translated the list for Von, and they Xeroxed fifty or sixty copies.

The word for “comb” in Spanish is
peine
, but leave out a letter, and the word takes on a whole new meaning. Von’s note, distributed to every child and all their families, read:

Von estimates that in a ten-year period his crew drove several
million
miles in Mexico without serious incident. Over five hundred people came and went as crew members. They transported more than sixty thousand visitors across the border.

In my time with him, I saw floods and three hundred-mile-wide prairie fires, car wrecks and gang fights, monkeys and blood and shit. I saw human intestines and burned flesh. I saw
human fat through deep red cuts. I saw people copulating. I saw animals tortured. I saw birthday parties in the saddest sagging shacks. I looked down throats and up wombs with flashlights. I saw lice, rats, dying dogs, rivers black with pollywogs, and a mound of maggots three feet wide and two feet high. One little boy in the back country cooked himself with an overturned pot of boiling
frijoles;
when I asked him if it hurt, he sneered like Pancho Villa and said, “Nah.” A maddened Pentecostal tried to heal our broken-down van by laying hands on the engine block. One girl who lived in a brickyard accidentally soaked her dress in diesel fuel and lit herself on fire. When I went in the shed, she was standing there, naked, her entire front burned dark brown and red. The only part of her not burned was her vulva; it was a startling cleft, a triangular island of white in a sea of burns.

I saw miracles, too. A boy named Chispi, deep in a coma induced by spinal meningitis, suffered a complete shutdown of one lobe of his brain. The doctors in the intensive care unit, looking down at his naked little body hard-wired to banks of machinery and pumps, just shook their heads. He was doomed to be a vegetable, at best. His mother, fished out of the cantinas in Tijuana’s red-light district, spent several nights sitting in the hospital cafeteria sipping vending-machine coffee and telling me she hoped there were miracles left for people like her.

Chispi woke up. The machines were blipping and pinging, and he sat up and asked for Von. His brain had regenerated itself. They unhitched him, pulled out the catheters, and pulled the steel shunt out of his skull. He went home. There was no way anybody could explain it. Sometimes there were happy endings, and you spent as much time wondering about them as grieving over the tragedies.

God help me—it was fun. It was exciting and nasty. I strode, fearless, through the Tijuana garbage dumps and the Barrio of Shallow Graves. I was doing good deeds, and the goodness thrilled me. But the squalor, too, thrilled me. Each stinking gray
barrio
gave me a wicked charge. I was arrested one night by Tijuana cops; I was so terrified that my knees wobbled like Jell-O. After they let me go, I was happy for a week. Mexican soldiers pointed machine guns at my testicles. I thought I was going to die. Later, I was so relieved, I laughed about it for days. Over the years, I was cut, punctured, sliced: I love my scars. I had girlfriends in every village, in every orphanage, at each garbage dump. For a time, I was a hero. And at night, when we returned, caked in dried mud, smelly, exhausted, and the good Baptists of Von’s church looked askance at us, we felt dangerous. The housewives, grandmothers, fundamentalists, rock singers, bikers, former drug dealers, school-girls, leftists, republicans, jarheads, and I were all transformed into
The Wild Bunch
.

It added a certain flair to my dating life as well. It was not uncommon for a Mexican crisis to track me down in the most unlikely places. I am reminded of the night I was sitting down to a fancy supper at a woman’s apartment when the phone rang. A busload of kids from one of our orphanages had flipped over, killing the American daughter of the youth minister in charge of the trip. All the
gringos
had been arrested. The next hour was spent calling Tijuana cops, Mexican lawyers, cousins in Tijuana, and Von. I had to leave early to get across the border.

Incredibly, in the wake of this tragedy, the orphanage kids were taken to the beach by yet another
gringo
church group, and one of the boys was hit by a car and killed.

My date was fascinated by all this, no doubt.

Slowly, it became obvious that nobody outside the experience understood it. Only among ourselves was hunting for lice in each other’s hair considered a nice thing. Nobody but us found humor in the appalling things we saw. No one else wanted to discuss the particulars of our bowel movements. By firsthand experience, we had become diagnosticians in the area of gastrointestinal affliction. Color and content spoke volumes to us: pale, mucus-heavy ropes of diarrhea suggested amoebas. Etc.

One of Von’s pep talks revolved around the unconscionable wealth in the United States. “Well,” he’d say to some unsuspecting
gringo
, “you’re probably not rich. You probably don’t even have a television. Oh, you
do?
You have three televisions? One in each room? Wow. But surely you don’t have furniture? You do? Living room furniture and beds in the bedrooms? Imagine that!

“But you don’t have a floor, do you? Do you have carpets? Four walls? A roof! What do you use for light—candles?
Lamps!
No way. Lamps.

“How about your kitchen—do you have a stove?”

He’d pick his way through the kitchen: the food, the plates and pots and pans, the refrigerator, the ice. Ice cream. Soda. Booze. The closets, the clothes in the closets. Then to the bathroom and the miracle of indoor plumbing. Whoever lived in that house suddenly felt obscenely rich.

I was never able to reach Von’s level of commitment. The time he caught scabies, he allowed it to flourish in order to grasp the suffering of those from whom it originated. He slept on the floor because the majority of the world’s population could not afford a bed.

O
ne of the most beautiful views of San Diego is from the summit of a small hill in Tijuana’s municipal garbage dump. People live on that hill, picking through the trash with long poles that end in hooks made of bent nails. They scavenge for bottles, tin, aluminum, cloth; for cast-out beds, wood, furniture. Sometimes they find meat that is not too rotten to be cooked.

This view-spot is where the city drops off its dead animals—dogs, cats, sometimes goats, horses. They are piled in heaps six feet high and torched. In that stinking blue haze, amid nightmarish sculptures of charred ribs and carbonized tails, the garbage-pickers can watch the buildings of San Diego gleam gold on the blue coastline. The city looks cool in the summer when heat cracks the ground and flies drill into their noses. And in the winter, when windchill drops night temperatures into the low thirties, when the cold makes their lips bleed, and rain turns the hill into a gray pudding of ash and mud, and babies are wrapped in plastic trash bags for warmth, San Diego glows like a big electric dream. And every night on that burnt hill, these people watch.

In or near every Mexican border town, you will find trash dumps. Some of the bigger cities have more than one “official” dump, and there are countless smaller, unlicensed places piled with garbage. Some of the official dumps are quite large, and some, like the one outside Tecate, are small and well hidden. People live in almost every one of them.

Each
dompe
has its own culture, as distinct as the people living there.
(Dompe
is border-speak, a word in neither Spanish nor English. It is an attempt to put a North American word or concept—“dump”—into a Mexican context. Thus, “junkyard”
becomes
yonke
and “muffler” becomes
mofle.)
Each of these
dompes
has its own pecking order. Certain people are “in.” Some families become power brokers due to their relationships to the missionaries who invariably show up, bearing bags of old clothes and vanloads of food. Some
dompes
even have “mayors”; some have hired goons, paid off by shady syndicates, to keep the trash-pickers in line. It’s a kind of illegal serfdom, where the poor must pay a ransom to the rich to pick trash to survive.