Across the Wire (8 page)

Negra had another problem: to go to school, she needed shoes.

All students in Mexican schools must wear uniforms. The idea behind this is noble: if everyone dresses exactly alike, then the middle-class kids will be no “better” than the poor kids. Everyone will be equal and have an equal chance.

In theory it works beautifully. Of course, the richer kids can wear new uniforms, new shirts and shoes. They can wear a new uniform every day of the week if they please. The poor kids must wear one uniform every day until it falls off; often they go home and wash their pants and shirts every night. And if they’re really poor, they can’t afford shoes. In Mexico, the bare foot is not a symbol of comfort—it is often a symbol of shame.

Negra had missed the opening of school, and she wanted to learn how to read and write. Her mother came to me arid told me about it. She was surreptitious, because Negra was proud.

I invited Negra to come with me to downtown Tijuana. She piled into the van eagerly. We drove into town and shopped in
the shoe stores along Avenida Revolución. It was an incongruous sight—little ash-gray Negra, barefoot in the shiny glass-and-chrome shoe store, watched over by yuppie Mexican women in Jordache jeans and duty-free Parisian perfumes. The saleswoman was gracious in the extreme, taking the measure of Negra’s feet and brushing the ashes off gently when she brought out the shoes. We bought Negra black shoes, and with some money to buy a uniform, she was able to attend school.

One day, on her way back home from classes, a gang of
barrio
kids caught her, beat her up, and stole the shoes.

She had to wait two weeks until she saw me again. I immediately bought her a new pair, but when she got back to school, they told her she had failed and been expelled. She had missed too many classes.

It was a warm day in spring: we had pulled in with a huge load of clothing and food. My mother and I had collected 150 half-gallon plastic jugs, and we’d been up at dawn in her backyard, filling them with the garden hose. I hadn’t seen Negra for two weeks. I wanted to get a box of food to her family before the crush started. I took cans of corn, string beans, fruit; a sack of pinto beans; a kilo of rice; several jugs of water; bags of doughnuts, bread, bananas, oranges, onions, avocados, and plums.

There were men gathered around Negra’s shack, grinning at me, then looking at their feet. I glanced in the door; an undulating shadow revealed itself to be a couple having sex in the dirt. Negra’s shack had become a whorehouse. Negra was gone.

H
is name was Andrés. He awakened with the sun. He lay in bed as long as he felt like it, picking the crust of glue off his upper lip. It was white and vague as milk, but hard; it pulled out his whiskers, which were few and thin, black against his dark brown skin. Bed was a mat of folded cardboard on the broken roof of what used to be a small house on a forgotten hill above downtown Tijuana.

A few years ago, the house burned and the city’s services were cut off from the hilltop. The steep alley that led there was left to wash out and be broken up by weeds and grasses and small trees. You could pass the alley’s mouth a hundred times and never know there was anything up there. All you’d see from the street was a carpet of shattered glass and clumps of trash. Besides, this was not near the main tourist routes of Tijuana. This was west of the main city, an area of tawdry used car-part shops and sidewalk clothing vendors.

If you paused at the alley’s mouth at night, and if you looked up, you would see the far end of the slope backlit by streetlights beyond the summit. And in that glare, you would see indistinct movements: legs, and bodies nervously shifting. And if you were white, and they saw you, they would come swarming down on you in a pack—feral and hungry. And they would feed.

They were the
cementeros
, the glue addicts and paint-thinner sniffers who lived on that hill with Andrés.
Cementero
derives from the word for “glue,” which is the same as the word for “cement”:
cemento
. Literally,
cementero
could be said to mean something like “cementer,” though it has a stronger connotation that is almost religious.
Cementeros
are “followers of
the glue.” (Aptly, and somewhat eerily,
cementero
is almost the same as the word for “cemetery”—
cementerio.)

Their numbers were (and are) fluid. These homeless boys were thrown out or had run away. They had wandered into downtown Tijuana from violent homes or the shattered homes of downtown’s hookers. They were the sons of the women who copulated with animals in the downstairs bars in the lower depths off Reforma and Revolución. Some of them were orphans, some of them had parents in jail.

They found each other. They formed small groups like street kids everywhere, and they thought they would engage in the Utopian dream of cast-off children: they would look out for each other, form their own street version of the families they lost. But this was Tijuana. And the hustle of these streets left no time for utopìas.

Daily life revolved around prostitution and drugs. Soon the boys realized that the thousands of
gringos
who came down to party on the weekends made easy targets—especially once they’d had enough to drink. The boys lured the tourists away from the disco lights. All it took was a promise: girls—
muchachas bonitas
. They were sly enough to know that we still believed the racist myth of
fock my seester
, and they said it. And the gringos followed.

Or they offered dope, cheap. Or themselves. Or watches. The point was to get the victim alone. Then the one boy magically became three, four. Eight arms, eight legs lashed out of the dark and pummeled, with fists, shoes, rocks, pipes.

This on a good night, when the boys were feeling kind. Every one of them carried a knife, or a sharpened screwdriver, or a jagged strip of metal. Andrés kept his tucked in the back of his pants. Sometimes one of the boys was just cranky, just
feeling grouchy. So he sliced the drunk
gringo
for good measure.

Sooner or later, some of these boys found their way up the hill. Of course, it seemed a haven. It was like a fortress. They felt safe from other, meaner street toughs, the
cholos
and
surfos
(ersatz surfers, whose gang colors featured the bare footprints of Hang-Ten logos that were sometimes drawn on their baggy shorts with pens). And, as always, the police.

However, the hill had its own harsh rules. Every boy looked out for himself, and alliances were often more dangerous than loneliness. Everybody was distrusted.

On the night I first met Andrés, I was led up the alley by an ever fearless Von. All the other boys had heard us coming and vanished down the other side of the hill like rodents. They were soundless and invisible and gone before we were halfway up the hill.

Andrés stayed behind. I could see him, stark and stick-thin against the lights. He stayed behind because he had to—Andrés had two deformed knees that turned his feet perpetually sideways. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk. He balanced on two aluminum crutches, and he moved slowly when he moved, his feet dragging and banging along the ground.

“Nobody looks out for nobody,” he told me.

We were looking out at the city lights.

“Fucking lights,” he said. “Beautiful,
¿qué no?”

“How do you eat?”

He smiled. “Stealing.” He acted out delivering a blow with his fist. He ducked his head like a little boy. “
You
know,” he said.

Andrés was barely five feet tall. He had long hair, long graceful hands that looked delicate—painter’s hands.

His clothing was old and dirty: baggy cords and three shirts, a grimy watch cap on his head. He wore battered Converse high-top basketball shoes on his tangled feet. The jaunty shoes made his feet seem small. Everything about him was evocative of a child. It was disconcerting, because he was saying, “We gang up on them and beat them up and steal all their stuff.”

He had the features of a Mayan carving—slightly sloping forehead, large nose, turned-down mouth. His eyes were bright as obsidian chips.

“It’s hard for me,” he said. “I can’t run. So I try to join in when they’ve got the guy down.”

“Do you use your crutches?”

He laughed, covered his mouth with his hand.

“Sometimes,” he said.

All over the hill, there were little burrows where the boys buried jars filled with money or watches. No one dared disturb another boy’s jar, and when one was tampered with, the revenge was swift and final. They killed each other with stones or knives.

The violence attracted the infrequent attentions of the Tijuana police. The cops raided the hill sometimes and delivered their version of social service to the boys: sound beatings. “Torture,” Andrés called it. To avoid the cops, or anybody else, the boys dug elaborate tunnels under the house. At the least hint of approaching feet, they dove into their rat mazes, where they hid, only their eyes peeking out from under the slab foundation. They slept under there, too, jammed in on top of each other in
the cold. They had sex there, sometimes undulating against each other underground.

And, at all times, there was the glue.

They were reduced to shambling zombies by it, their brain cells melting inside their skulls to give them their escape. There were nights when the tunnels were jammed with mindless, drooling bodies; the boys shrieked in hallucinogenic terror under there, came charging out like enraged pit bulls, swinging their knives at ghosts. Then they passed out, arms flung open to the sky, which must have seemed a baffling wonder to them before they slipped away.

This was the best hour for murder. When a hoy had a vendetta against another, he would choose this time of coma in which to strike. The most recent murder had involved two lovers. One of these two fell in love with a third. The new couple plotted to kill the old lover and take his jar. On the night of his last high, they waited until he’d fallen over, then they crushed his head with cement blocks.

“That’s why I sleep on the roof,” Andrés told us. “Nobody looks up there. They’re always looking in the dirt.”

We’d gathered at a street-side taco stand. We were buying him supper. It took Andrés about ten minutes to get down from the hill. I walked with him, while Von went ahead.

“What’s wrong with your knees?” I’d asked him.

“I need surgery.”

“Could you walk after it was done?”

“That’s what they say,” he said.

“How much does it cost?”

He blew air out through slack lips. “Oh. Forget it. Too much.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, shaking his head at the immensity of it.

We bought him a paper plate of tacos.

“I like gum,” he said. “Do you have any bubble gum?”

I did.

He smiled.

As we left him, he reached out and took my hand. His fingers were soft and limp. His hand was cold.

“Be careful,” he said.

The last I saw of him, he was balanced on his twin sticks, smiling a little over his plate of tacos and staring at us. He was smaller than everybody around him. And they repeatedly bumped into him as they passed, rocking him until it looked as though he were going to fall.

L
aura Patricia lived in San Antonio, a small village inland from the port city of Ensenada. The town was nothing much: two small stores that sold beer, mostly, and a scattering of whitewashed houses nestled in a bend in the road among small vineyards. We stopped there every two weeks on what was known as “the Long Run”—a three-hundred-mile haul that took us down the coast, then back northwest, across vast landscapes of mountains, high desert, and prairie.

In the early spring, the rains would be beginning to taper off. The floods of 1978 and ’79 had devastated parts of the region. Bridges were cracked in half, and the town of Guadalupe had actually washed away, with nothing left but outskirts surrounding a wide mud flat. San Antonio itself was hit repeatedly by the creek that ran between it and the orphanage we visited on the run. During the worst rains, the creek swelled to a mad river for a night, rising over its banks and screaming through house after house, blowing out the windows in brown torrents.