13.

We walked the streets of Nuevo Laredo looking for a dentist. After an early morning rising and coffee on the go, Little Chris and I had jumped in the Buick and driven 250 miles to the border. It was a bleak and cloud-covered day. The car, parked on the American side, looked as ghastly in the morning light as the people who’d sold it to me. They were a cancerous old couple living in the lee shadow of a chemical plant in Zachary, Louisiana. The old man had a respirator and spoke through a tube. Forty years in the plants had been good to him. His wife stood under the car port smoking a Pall Mall and giving me the history of the car. Other than the deteriorated paint, it ran smooth as ExLax.

“It’s a good car,” she said, waving the smoke away from her tanned and emaciated face. “It didn’t even catch fire when the plant exploded in ’72.”

Done and for 750 dollars that old stage coach was mine. Of course, it was the apex of folly buying a car when I had neither license nor any need for a car. It was the idea of the grand gesture that still infected my soul, same as it always had. I couldn’t do things straight and narrow, by the book, remain within the system. I saw a system and I sought the means to corrupt it, make it work for me rather than work for it.

Plus I had bad car Karma. I had made some type of devil’s deal with the automobile and though I drove well and was generally kind to my cars, they all went bad on me some how, some way. The Impala, towed out of my life last year, now belonged to a mad tow truck driver in Port Allen. The Toyota had been abandoned when I left to go to sea. The Toyota it replaced was repossessed by the city of New Orleans to pay for parking tickets. The Honda…Not to mention wrecking TC’s car in a head to head matchup against a pickup truck. Then I caved in the quarter panel on his replacement car. Man, was I menace to myself and others or what?

But not today my friend. Not today. That morning in Mexico Little Chris and I were gringos with a grip of cash and just enough Spanish to be dangerous. The way it works is this: a ‘dentist’ writes you a prescription. You pay her, then take your scrip to a pharmacy, get your pills, go your ass back to America. Do not pass Go. Do not buy a woman or any mota or coca or fruit. Do not buy any pottery or velvet Elvis or Corona beer. Don’t drink the water. Do get your boots polished. Do sit in a zocalo and admire the Mexican pigeons and their Mexican ways. Do eat breakfast in some greasy joint where the flames rise behind the mustached cook. Do ignore the stares of the clientele as they attempt to glean whether you are freaks or undercover cops disguised as freaks. I preferred people believe I was the former while Little Chris acted like he was carrying at least two guns. He gave off that smell of desperation, like he was always kneeling at the edge of the cornfield, ready to sprint down those rows and leave it all behind.

Finding a dentist was the easiest part of the day. Walking the steps up to her office was a bit harder. Choosing from the available drugs was hardest, though we knew what we were there for, Valium and a bit of speed. The dentist sat behind her desk under a framed copy of her diploma and passed Chris the photo albums. The floors were threadbare carpet, the walls cheap paneling. Not much dentistry going on. Just as well. A body might get a bit more anesthesia than they desired. We made our choices, paid the nice dentist lady, took our scrips and then paid a guide to lead us around the corner to a pharmacy. Tipping everyone in American notes, we waited to get our prescriptions filled.

Staring through the pharmacy windows, the neon Rx appearing backwards, the street and its milling populace spread out before me, Little Chris shopping for Mexican toothpaste and being told no one bought Colgate because it meant ‘hang yourself’, I had a hallucination. Surely it was brought on by the concatenation of long nights and an endless ride across the nation. And my feeble brain flame was about extinguished from the drudgeries of college algebra and college lit. So I wasn’t afraid of what transpired. I figured I was due a few free hits after all the money I’d spent on acid in the last year.

I saw my father standing across the street, leaning against the wall of a furniture store. He lit a cigarette and blew a puff into the sky. He was clean shaven and very young. I knew why he was there. He’d come to this very town almost thirty years earlier to get a Mexican divorce from his first wife. Accompanying him on the bus ride from Chicago was his soon to be second wife as well as my mama. She emerged now from the furniture store carrying a small stool painted primary blue. She showed it to my father to admire, taking a drag off his smoke. They walked off hand in hand as the Abierto sign flicked off on the store. There was a shout, and my parents turned around. A rider had fallen off his bicycle and the machine was amuck, flying riderless down the crowded sidewalk. People leapt to the side as the bicycle careened left and right. My parents tried to remain together while getting out of the way but it was impossible, and each leapt aside as the bicycle passed between them. You could see it in her eyes; that look that someday she’d jump away like that for good.

Then the Valiums were in our hands and together Little Chris and I walked back across the Rio Bravo carrying nothing but ourselves, a helluva lot of Mexican sleeping sickness and a bottle of El Presidente brandy. The border dicks let Little Chris, murderer, pass right on through but for me they had a special room with flashlights and a nut busting pat down. I was clean as Mr. Rogers but my clothes reeked of concert fumes and the doobie we’d rolled in the car. A German shepherd, thankfully leashed, lunged at my crotch as the dicks gave me the evil eye. They knew a douche bag when they saw one and I had Summer’s Eve written all over me. Done with the questioning and the frisk, they gave me a last look of contempt and let me back onto American soil.