I’ve told you a half truth. I love Mexico and the experience of living there played a major part in making me who I am. The other half truth is that I HATED Mexico. How’s that possible? It’s easy because there are actually two Mexicos, the safe and protected community I thrived in and dangerous and corrupt Mexico I traversed on a regular basis to visit friends, shop, gas the car, etc.
Allen G. set me up with legal insurance as soon as I got there. Legal insurance provides someone to sit in jail for you if you got arrested and an attorney to defend you. I bought a second set of papers under an assumed identity ($25 US) just in case I had to leave the country in a hurry. I kept a 50 peso note in my right pocket, a 200 peso note in my left pocket and a $20 US bill in each of my shoes. Paying off a corrupt policeman looked like you were doing the Hokey Pokey: you put your right hand in you took your right hand out, etc.
Cops loved to pull you over and hit you up for a bribe. “You got de marijuana?” On occasion, they would drop a bag of marijuana in your car and then threaten to arrest you for it. Marijuana was everywhere. A thirty gallon garbage bag full of the best stuff was $15US; you heard that right, $15.
My neighborhood had a private-police force whose sole purpose was to keep the local, state and federal police out of the area. We tipped them regularly and gave $50 Christmas presents. After Christmas, they would stop by to show us a rocket launcher, new body armor or some other weapon that they cherished. We were safe at home unless the neighbor’s guard got frightened.
My teachers were real SOBs. They spoke fluent English but made you do everything in Spanish. Asking them to talk in English was taken as an insult. It was their country, and the language was Spanish. Often, we had to learn two sets of medical facts: the Mexican facts and the US facts. Yep, every professor had some part of the body named after him! Once learned, Mexican facts needed to be unlearned.
My three roommates and I had a maid. We overpaid her at $16US a week (yep, $4 a man) and our neighbors were unhappy as the word spread to their workers. She washed our clothes by hand on a scrub board. She also serviced one of my roommates. Her dream was to marry a rich US doctor and get out of Mexico. I hope she made it.
I slept on a giant waterbed in the master suite. I had a rubber tree growing in the middle of the bathroom and out the roof. Due to that damn tree, I had to open the shower door and put my feet in the shower in order to sit on the commode. I painted one entire wall with black board paint and would put my notes on the wall and lay in bed memorizing them. One night, I had crumbled up maybe 15 versions of my term paper and thrown them on the floor, figuring she would pick them up in the morning. When I came home the next day, the maid had not only picked them up but had ironed them and put them in a neat pile on my desk.
Weekends were spent at various parties and occasionally in the red-light district (boys will be boys). Do you remember “Gunsmoke” with Matt Dillon and Kitty? The red-light district looked just like the Dodge City on Gunsmoke, including hombres on horses and horses tied to hitching posts. My policy was to window shop only. There wasn’t a condom large enough to protect my whole body from whatever diseases those women carried. Bartering with the hookers was fun until we’d get thrown out. One of my gang had a quick shooter. He would haggle with the whore long enough to put a smile on his face. She’d get angry, demand payment and call the bouncer over.
Last story for today. On holidays, we would go to the central market to buy fireworks. Mexican fireworks often have the power of a stick of dynamite and were GREAT! The merchant who sold fireworks was usually scarred from head to toe. He would demonstrate his product, rockets, by lighting them while he held the stick in his hand. Mexican fireworks were great if they worked. The failed fairly often. One Fourth of July, a rocket backfired in our back yard taking out a large amount of glass.
The only time our private police force showed up ready for trouble was that Fourth. Early in the morning, my roommates and I climbed up on the roof, jumped onto my neighbor’s roof and tiptoed to the far side of his house. Then we jumped onto his neighbor’s roof (our good friends and medical students) and assaulted their house by shooting our smaller rockets and M80s down their chimney. It sounded like a war zone.
We were lucky we didn’t get shot. I was lucky I didn’t get shot! Milo engineered the whole thing. God blessed Milo. I miss that side of me; but, alas, everybody grows up sooner or later. (I’m really old, I used “alas” in a sentence).
Here’s your joke of the day:
The boy went into the mall to get a job. He told the management that he was the world’s best salesman. They gave him a job as a seller but expected profits from day one.
On Saturday evening, the manager came down and asked how many customers he had served today. The boy said he had helped one customer. The director was disappointed with the boy and said he already had sellers today who had done much better than him. The manager asked the boy how much the sale was worth, and the boy answered “$93,100.25”. The manager was very confused and asked the boy what he had sold.
The boy: “I started off with a $0.25 fishhook which got him looking at the fishing poles. I set him up with the $100 bait master and asked him where he was gonna fish, I told him about that great lake down south but told him he’d need a car with all-wheel drive to make it up the rough terrain so we got him into the $33,000 SUV we had on the lot, when he asked about boat rentals I thought I had lost him, but I ended up selling him the $60,000 Riverking Pro to top it off.”
The manager steps back in disbelief and says, “Wow, you sold that all to a guy who came in for a fishhook?
“No,” the boy said, “The customer came in and told me had to buy tampons for his wife. I simply told him the weekend was already wrecked so he might as well go on a fishing trip.”
