Losing Clementine (6 page)

I chose a spot at the back of the lot and pulled forward until the nose of my car was three feet from the border fence, an ugly metal wall that snaked off over the hills and disappeared with the horizon. I'd heard it didn't even stop at the beach but kept right on going into the water just in case you had any ideas about wading out and around.

It was faster to walk across the border than to drive. I put my bag on my back, and we headed for the series of revolving metal gates that were heavy enough and spun fast enough to make you worry about losing a finger. A guard waved us through. No passport check. No baggage search. On the other side, a troop of brown-skinned children juggled for tourist change, and beyond them cabdrivers in dark sunglasses and pressed yellow dress shirts offered overpriced rides.

“You need taxi?” each asked as we passed, despite having watched us say no, no, no, no to the other four guys in front of him. Hope springs eternal.

We shook them all off and headed toward our hotel. A huge McDonald's was off to our right along with a billboard advertising human growth hormone at “lowest price!” Cars snaked back toward the U.S. border, inching forward like rush hour on the 405. Vendors walked between the lanes pedaling snacks and drinks. Rolling carts like out of a county fair offered warm pork rinds crumbled into bite-size pieces off whole back sections of skinned pig. Last chance for a bouquet of flowers, a bag of tamarind candy, an out-of-season Day of the Dead skull.

Those cars not in line to cross the border were zipping around traffic circles marked in the center with gargantuan statues. One was abstract and looked like Chinese chopsticks, another clearly portrayed an Indian chief, and a third was of Abraham Lincoln holding a broken chain and looking as if he, too, didn't know how or why he had come to be there. People were everywhere, enough to fill the city of Houston.

It was less than a five-minute walk to our hotel. With practiced efficiency, we were ushered into the air-conditioned lobby, and the receptionist with perfect English took my credit card. Beyond the front desk was a coffee shop and bar pushed up against the wall to make room in the center courtyard for an acre of slot machines, all of which flashed and jingled whether anyone was playing them or not. Encircling them were twelve floors of rooms. The doors faced out onto interior balconies that looked down on the gamblers. Unlike Vegas, which blocked out all time-of-day indicators as if it were conducting a scientific experiment, the whole hotel interior was topped by a glass skylight. It felt more honest that way.

A bellman took us up to the fifth floor. He opened my room with the key card, flipped on the lights, and accepted the two-dollar tip. Everyone took dollars here just the same as pesos and would give you change in either currency. That, at least, hadn't changed since my last trip across the border some dozen years before.

Richard looked at me with the creases around his mouth forming deep gullies. “I don't know about this.”

I wondered if I should've paid the bellman more to stay.

“About what?”

“Maybe you shouldn't take anything you buy here.” He gestured around the room like I was considering fishing around under the bed and swallowing whatever I happened to find there. “It might not be safe.”

Richard and I had always had different opinions on what constituted safe.

“I'm hungry,” I said to change the subject.

“Already?”

“I'm anticipating it. I'm going to take a shower and a nap first.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.

“Find a room.”

“Why can't I sleep here? We slept together platonically all the time while we were married.”

Good, I thought. I'd been hoping to use this trip to rehash old marital arguments.

I opened the door and let in the jangle of the slot machines below. “Out.”

“Why?”

“For being an asshole. Get your own room.”

He picked up his duffel bag with all the wounded huffing he could manage, and I let the door slam on its heavy, autoclosing hinges behind him. Even with it shut, the hyper ringing of the slots penetrated the room. That was going to bug me.

I was good to my word and turned on the hot water. The room looked like any hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio, or Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, except stocked with free bottled water for those with delicate constitutions and a fear of microbes. I stepped under the spray, yelped, and put my hands over my nipples. The hotel had fallen under the sway of high-pressure, low-water shower heads that threatened to pierce your skin with needle spray.

I turned my back and unwrapped a bar of soap. I liked this. Being away had always felt good to me. A fast car or an airplane could almost always outrun whatever black cloud was chasing me. Most times it would take a day or more for the cloud to catch up.

After having the sweat and dust knocked off me by the water cannon, I needed tequila, so I pulled on a pair of my nicest jeans.

Across from the hotel was what looked like a strip mall but was, the bellman assured me, an enormous discotheque several hours from being open for business. Next to it was a bar that at capacity couldn't have held more than fifty. At the moment, it held nothing but a bartender and several neon Tecate signs. The sun was still up and only thinking about starting to retire.

I sat at the bar and in two awkward sentences established that my Spanish was slow, error prone, and confined to the present tense. I pointed at the drink menu. Margarita on the rocks. The barman, who had been flipping through a magazine, looked pleased to have something to do, and the drink came strong and without salt.

Rock
en español
was turned up loud, and a flat screen TV behind the bar played videos to go along with it. I watched a cartoon where a man's limbs were being cut off one by one like a Monty Python sketch until he fell into the ocean as nothing but a torso and head and was rescued by topless mermaids. The bartender set down a bowl of snacks. They looked like small, matte brown marbles and tasted like honey-roasted peanuts. They were light and crunchy in your mouth and addictive in a way only Cheetos and cigarettes had been before. The bartender and I ate them and watched the cartoon morph into amputee porn, which was funny in both our languages.

Too soon the video was over, replaced by the Mexican version of The Cure, and Richard had taken the stool next to me.

“I asked the bellman where you went,” he said.

I pushed the bowl of snacks toward him.

He took a handful. “These are delicious.”

The bartender came over, and Richard pointed at my drink. I went back to watching the excessive male eye makeup on-screen.

“Would it help,” he asked, “if I owned up to being a jerk right now?”

“Which time?”

“What do you mean which time?”

I took a healthy sip of my margarita, reached over, and pulled the bowl of nutty goodness back toward me and out of his reach.

He conceded defeat. “In the hotel room. I shouldn't have brought up sex.”

To point out just what he was missing, I brought one of the nut snacks to my mouth in a slow, sexy motion like one of those ridiculous burger commercials with the lady in the bikini.

“And I should not have commented on the frequency of your urination.”

“That was wrong of you.”

“Yes, it was.”

I let him have a nut snack.

“What
are
these?” he asked, putting a palmful in his mouth.

“The vehicle of my redemption.”

He ignored that. “We should eat all of these and then go to dinner. I have a place.”

I took my eyes away from the television. Richard had never once in the history of our rather rocky and complicated relationship made a dinner reservation.

He shrugged at me. “I asked the bellman for that, too.” He ate a nut snack. “It's possible we're supposed to order rotten corn.” He looked sad. “It won't be this good,” he said and ate another snack.

Huitlacoche
translates roughly into “raven's excrement,” which is another way of saying bird poop. What it actually is is corn that has been infected by a fungus and morphed into black tumors. The chef mixed it with Oaxacan string cheese and served it in a purse-shaped crepe with poblano chili sauce. It's better than even the nut snacks.

The cab ride to the edge of town had taken less then fifteen minutes. The driver had dropped us at the foot of a steep, circular drive. Above us one of the priciest restaurants in Tijuana was perched on a knoll, surrounded by transplanted palm trees and aloe plants all dramatically lit with uplights buried in the ground cover.

We had been ushered inside and seated promptly. The host had held out my chair and even placed my napkin in my lap, which I admit was a little overly familiar.

I scooped another bite of the
huitlacoche
onto my fork. “Tasty, tasty tumors,” I said and laughed because sometimes you just crack yourself up.

“Don't joke about that,” Richard said.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

There were only four other occupied tables, and the dining room had the judgmental hush of a library. We were close to attracting attention.

I took a sip of light red wine. The waiter had assured us in perfect English that it came from a local vineyard.

“Tumors,” I whispered.

“It's not funny.”

That was interesting because I was pressing my lips together to hold in the giggles, which was forcing them down into my diaphragm and making my ribs pulse with unexpellable energy. Richard cut a ladylike bite from his edible purse of bird poo.

“Tuuuumors.”

“I am serious.”

I couldn't help it. I started laughing. I laughed until I disturbed the chickadees hanging in cages around the restaurant. Their chirps echoed off the tiled floor of the indoor courtyard, where a small child had escaped his mother's table and was slapping the water in the central fountain. I wiped tears from my eyes. Richard concentrated on his food, but his dimples were showing.

“Mmmm … uncontrolled cell division.”

That was enough to make him put his knife and fork down, which brought one of our four waiters scurrying over to take away the plate.

“You are insane,” Richard hissed, but he lost the battle with his cheeks, which split open in a wide grin.

“I win,” I said.

“You do not win.” He took a sip of wine and laid his hand on mine, slipping two fingers into my palm. I squeezed them.

“I want to go with you to the doctor,” he said.

“What?”

“When we get home, I want to go with you to your doctor visits.”

“Richard.”

“Have you made arrangements? For your care, I mean, not for—. Do you have a place to go?”

“I'm working on it.”

After duck
carnitas
with blue corn tortillas, tamarind sauce, and cilantro, we stumbled out of the restaurant and into a cab. The four waiters waved us off, bidding us a quick return. Tourism was really down.

The sun had set while we worked our way through the courses, and Tijuana, like Los Angeles, was at her best at night. The soft-focus light of restaurants and bars took the edge off.

Traditionally, someone sits up front with the cabdriver, and Richard's Spanish was even worse than mine.

“Dónde música?”
I asked the driver as we headed back toward town.

“Discotheque?”

“No,” I said.
“Personas.”
I mimed a fiddle.

He nodded, and we were off, with neither of us being absolutely certain we had understood the other.

The cab had seen better days. Part of the door's plastic lining was missing, and the dashboard had been loosely upholstered with a Muppet-like faux fur. Unlike the sharply dressed drivers standing vigil at the border, our chauffeur that evening was fraying at the edges. He looked to be near retirement and relying on the faded picture of Jesus taped to the center of the steering wheel to get him through. I guessed that meant I was relying on Jesus, too, and under the circumstances, that was worrying.

We drove through town and by the Zona Norte, the city's famous red light district, where tourists were warned not to go. Another turn took us past a few small bars and then deeper into a neighborhood full of seemingly nothing but apartments already gone dark for the night. The streets got smaller, one after the other. The radio was not on, and I could hear Richard shifting in the backseat. Just before he could get nervous enough to reach over and tap me on the shoulder, the cab stopped, and the driver said in his best English, “This good place for music and for drinking.”

I was all for a good drinking place.

“Gracias.”

Cabs in Tijuana don't have meters. Everything is negotiable. I offered him a five-dollar bill, and he nodded and accepted it.

A small wooden sandwich board sat on the sidewalk, painted in a curlicue font I couldn't read in the dim light. The sound of guitars floated out of a window, and every inch of curb space was taken up by cars sporting some amount of scrapes and body damage. Driving here was a full-contact sport.