Across the Wire Read Online Free PDF

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