by J. R. Helton
As you cross into Nuevo Laredo on foot you are accosted by dozens of desperate and shady men trying to sell you everything from illegal drugs (or legal ones by steering you to a particular Mexican pharmacy that was giving them a customer kickback), to young women or boys for sex. Dean and I had crossed a few times and were good at it. We always stashed whatever drugs we had on us on the US side at a rest stop or restaurant just before one of the US drug check stops that you were forced to pass through well beyond the actual border. These secondary search stops were several miles north of Laredo where you and your vehicle would be checked primarily with drug sniffing dogs. We would pass through these stops clean on the way home and stop at the rest area, wherever, to pick up our small amount of weed or, in Dean’s case, cocaine also, whatever we were smoking or snorting on the way down to Mexico and on the way back to San Antonio.
When you make the first walk into Nuevo Laredo, the idea is to walk quickly and with purpose and ignore all of the jackasses promising you pussy and drugs. We walked straight through the first town square on this last trip in 2005 to a small, dingy pharmacy on the southern side. Things were indeed heating up as I noted the strong police presence. There were many men in uniforms, some of them driving around in brand new Chevy pick-ups with large machine guns mounted in the truck bed, a man with a federale uniform, a black knit mask over his face, and a bullet proof Kevlar vest manning the large automatic weapon. I pointed out two of the trucks and guns to Dean.
“You think those are fifty caliber?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Seems like overkill.” He was distracted as we walked across the square; he not only wanted to go to the pharmacy but was looking for a street connection also, one of the better ones, men who weren’t so desperate they accosted you right at the fucking border crossing. An old woman wrapped in an Indian blanket with long white hair done up in two gray buns above her wrinkled, sun-burned face stared at me. She had noticed me pointing out the mounted machine guns and the federales, the soldiers. She looked like some old Mexican native, an Indian straight down from the desert mountains, or from central casting. When I said “Buenos tardes” she smiled again and nodded toward the federales and said in a surprisingly loud, firm, and knowing voice, “Esos son los hombres malos!”
She was sure to stress the first word and I turned to Dean as we entered the pharmacy.
“Did you hear that?”
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“That old lady just said the police are the bad guys down here.”
“What’s new with that?” Dean said. He glanced over at the tiny old woman on her park bench. “She’s probably a spotter for the cartels.”
“With an Uzi under that blanket . . .”
Inside the Mexican pharmacy, the way it works, you tell them what you want and they call a doctor who is usually in the next room or next door and he writes you a script and they fill it on the spot. The better pharmacies have runners who get the script for you so it is easier to go to these shops rather than go with some potential thief or con artist hanging out in the square who asks for the money up front and promises to go do the whole doctor/pharmacy run for you. This is a good way to kiss fifty bucks goodbye, though some of these guys are legit, mainly the ones that ask you to follow them to the particular doctor’s office. These front men can also get you stronger stuff.
Dean placed his large order with the pharmacy first, eager to leave, still looking around for the right runner he said. I placed my order. You could load up but not too much. If you call the border patrol, they’ll even tell you how many pills you can bring back of a type of medicine sometimes. Usually, it was no more than ninety or 120 of each brand. To get around this, I ordered three thirty pill bottles of 2 mg alprazolam ladders which would give me 120 doses of 0.5 mg of Xanax, exactly the dosage I liked for sleep. For taking it with X, I would need maybe 1.5 mg, or almost a whole ladder by the end of the night to smooth things out or bring on sleep more quickly when I was ready to quit the ecstasy high. This kept me right at the ninety pill limit. I ordered two sixty pill bottles of Tylex, or codeine, and four thirty pill packets of 10 mg of blue Valium, or 120 pills which was maybe pushing it on the Valium when re-crossing the border.
I sat down in their waiting room and looked at all of the cheap crap covered in dust on the shelves of the drugstore. An odd mix of people was milling about in the park square, just outside the tall glass windows of the store. There were dorky old harmless tourists walking past, loading up on cheap tequila and Kahlua which wasn’t that cheap, liquor not much of a bargain in border towns anymore. There were poor locals wandering aimlessly while wealthier locals in expensive cars lined up in a massive, miles-long traffic jam to make the crossing into the US to probably go shopping at one of the many mega-mall “Factory Outlets” that had sprung up across southern Texas. There was the stoic old lady, some bums who looked either passed out drunk or dead, immobile and supine beneath a tree or two, a smattering of college kids having come across to “party” in Mexico, and always, everywhere, the ubiquitous police.
A middle-aged man from Nuevo Laredo with a giant brown mustache was sitting next to me. He also caught me staring at the heavily armed police and felt the need to tell me in Spanish, just like the old woman, that the police were the bad guys down here. Two people in a row had now told me this unprompted; it was as though I was visiting a country under siege by their own government and the people there wanted others in the world to know of their predicament and plight. Dean finally found the street guy he was looking for, going by hunch and experience.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Wait for me.”
“Wait!” I said, but he was out the door.
He walked up to some shady looking young man in cowboy boots, a vest and cap, and they began gesturing and trying to talk.
The friendly man with the mustache said something to the woman behind the pharmacy counter who then looked at Dean and his connection and at me.
“Hombre malo; he’s a bad guy,” she said, motioning her head toward Dean’s man. She didn’t need to tell me this as I had put up my own feelers when I crossed the border. I did this in any country I traveled in, or in any strange, major American city I was visiting for the first time. I sharpened my awareness and went by any bad gut feelings I had in addition to logic and reason.
Going with any of my first impressions usually served me well and had kept me out of trouble more than once. Being stoned sometimes helped with this almost extra-sensory awareness for any potential dangers. Not only did I not like the guy Dean was talking to, the whole bustling, dirty, trash-strewn market square was now putting me off. The old lady was suddenly gone, and even more men with guns seemed to be everywhere.
I said “perdón” to my new mustachioed friend and walked up to Dean to interrupt him. The man in the cap smiled widely, revealing perfect white teeth, reminding me of my own personal motto: “Beware the Smiling Man.” I asked Dean what was up and he briefly explained that he was looking for some hard core steroids to inject. He needed help as this guy spoke barely any English except to keep saying “No problem” over and over, waiting for the money. I talked to the man in my broken Spanish, giving him the names of Dean’s drugs also.
Dean then gave him twenty bucks, promised another fifty when he came back, and the man ran off.
“You can say goodbye to that guy, now,” I said.
“Nah, he wants the money.”
“Yeah, he just got it.”
“Listen, you don’t have to wait—”
I cut him off. “I’m not. This place gives me a whole new bad vibe that it never gave me before. I used to come down here at night with a group of people and get blasted and never really worried. Now, I don’t even like it for thirty minutes during the day. Plus, did you see that line we gotta wait in to get back into the States?”
Dean was chewing on his
Nicorette maniacally. The tobacco companies had found a brilliant new delivery system for their drug, the popular poison, nicotine. Before, you bothered others with the cigarette smoke, or you were spitting out tobacco juice with dip and chew. Now, no more mess, just smack on some bubble gum to get your nicotine fix. Make it fruit flavored and you had the potential for millions of new, young customers to become dependent on the drug for life. Even better, all of this was being done in the name of helping people kick the nicotine habit, that is, to stop smoking it. Dean had been chewing the original flavor Nicorette gum since its debut and was hooked now on the expensive twenty-five dollar packs.
“Yeah, I saw the line; so what?”
“Well, I’m gonna get my shit and split. You sure you’re okay here?”
“No worries,” he said, smacking the gum. “There are a lot more guns down here,” he said, looking about. “This is worse than just last year.”
“I know. Don’t forget your stuff at the pharmacy.”
“Tell Veronica not to worry.”
“Right.”
I went back to the pharmacy and picked up all my downers and paid in cash, making sure not to forget the girls’ two tubes of Retin-A. I couldn’t wait to leave and headed toward the long line at the bridge over the muddy Rio Grande to get back into America. As so happened, I was in line just behind the friendly, well-dressed man with the big brown mustache whom I’d met in the pharmacy. He spoke a little English so we talked for quite a while in both languages as we shuffled along in the slow-moving line. I guess because of his dress and the dignified way he carried himself, I assumed he was a doctor or lawyer, an architect, some distinguished professional the whole time. Just as we made it to the US Customs border crossing station, we had to split into different lines. He asked for my card and I told him I didn’t believe in them. He laughed and gave me his own and we said our goodbyes. I turned the business card over to read that I had been talking to a fucking clown for over an hour. His business name was El Mustachio and he worked parties for kids on both sides of the border. He also made animals out of balloons.
Once inside customs, I pretended nothing and declared everything and passed through the first checkpoint. Usually these American border guards were serious and suspicious company men assholes. I had been pulled aside and detained by these men years before in my mid-twenties when crossing back into the states from Ciudad Acuna having driven across from Del Rio for a night of drinking with coworkers from a project on the US side. I’d driven over in my own truck and on the way back in, forgot about emptying my ashtray just in case there were any roaches in it. I’d meant to toss it out in Del Rio, but pot can make you forgetful.
This was a big mistake, as there was one tiny roach which set off one of their drug-sniffing dogs on my way back over the river. The border guards proceeded to tear my truck apart looking for the big drug stash that didn’t exist. They’d all seen too many movies to the point that when I pulled out my Copenhagen to have a dip while I waited, a guard slapped it out of my hand and grabbed it, picking up the dark brown, sharp-smelling, finely ground tobacco, running it through his fingers. The idiot had thought it was pot, or some other drug, that I was trying to eat the evidence.
I ended up being held in a cell for hours, strip searched, the works. In the end, two cops came in with the roach and maybe three pot seeds they’d found and laid it before me in a plastic bag as though it were big evidence. They briefly tried some bullshit song and dance on where did you get it, how much do you have, etc. and I disarmed them with simple honesty. I told them I smoked on marijuana on occasion, was out of pot, and couldn’t remember where I got it as that was actually a very old roach I must have forgotten was even in there. I also told them I wanted to be released immediately or charged and that I wanted to call my lawyer. The seeds were a joke, the roach, less than half an inch long with nothing inside it. They knew they had nothing, even with the new “zero tolerance” policy which had just begun then with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, turning these border guards and many other gung-ho, uncool cops into unreasonable, judgmental assholes overnight. So I was let go.
Twenty years later, I’d just bought a multi-month supply of much stronger drugs than marijuana, every one of which, besides the Retin-A, could make a weak-willed person physically dependent. I thought I was scot-free, but at the last and second checkpoint, some young, buzz-cut, fat ass, redneck, pink-faced, uptight, white-boy dipshit stopped me and went through all of my shit. He was very accusatory and rude, asking me why I needed so much Valium, so much Xanax, on and on. I made up some lame ass grandparents story on the spot making sure to tell this moron that I’d checked with his home office on all of this down to the exact amount and the pudgy prick knew I was right. He knew exactly what I was doing, that these drugs weren’t for my grandparents, and yet he could do nothing. Frustrated, he still held me and called his boss and sure enough, they nailed me on the amount of Valium and the kid took one of my boxes. This visibly pissed me off, which made him happy and they let me cross. I waited there for Dean for thirty minutes and he came breezing through holding two big plastic bags. I gave him shit about losing his twenty and he said, “No, no, no. I know what I’m doing. The guy came back and wanted me to go with him personally to see a doctor to get the steroids. I was already getting in line so I got my money back, tipped him five bucks, and here I am.”
“Did that fat little redneck give you any shit?”
“The second guy?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Not a word.”
I do believe that some people are just born lucky. Dean was carrying double of everything I had and more, plus too many bottles of Kahlua and expensive Tequila and waltzed across intact.
On the interstate on the way back home, we declared some liquor and didn’t mention the prescription drugs at the last big South Texas checkpoint, which is full of even more drug and bomb sniffing dogs, mainly German Shepherds, panting out there on the hot highway. They sniffed, we passed, and the guards waved us through. We pulled over at a Chili’s restaurant not a mile from the checkpoint and Dean picked up a couple of film canisters he’d hid behind a light post in their parking lot, one filled with coke and the other with pot, for the drive back to SA. Patricia turned down all of it and took a nap. I smoked some weed and tried to read a book while Dean and his fellow corporate attorney Veronica cranked up the music, did lines, drank tequila, and chatted about The Law for the next three hours.
Back in SA, I used my Xanax ladders as sparingly as possible, breaking them up for bad nights with no sleep. I tried to do the same with the Valium, but ended up using them daily to cut down on the Vicodin. This worked until I ran through the anti-anxiety med and went back up to my usual prescribed six HC a day. The Xanax lasted longer, helping me sleep for months, but not long enough. I wasn’t worried about becoming too dependent on them. It takes ingesting several milligrams of Xanax every day for months to get truly dependent. It is also a tough drug to kick, like Valium, and thus one I would only recommend to others in small amounts. Eventually, using only a couple of milligrams a week total, I ran out, hoarding my last few alprazolam ladders for the few times a year I took MDMA to use both in conjunction.
The violence on the border has only grown worse as we ship automatic weapons across to them and they ship drugs over to us. I haven’t gone back to Mexico since, mainly because of the hassle rather than the potential of being caught in the crossfire of any gun battles over turf and smuggling routes in this endless drug war. I didn’t like running the gauntlet of sleazy con men, or the smell of the polluted river, the urine soaked sidewalks, the destitute and desperate people that often filled many border town streets begging for help, or mainly, that long-ass line you had to wait in to be rudely inspected like a potentially diseased cow trying to come home. The Tylex codeine sucked, and no matter how hard I tried to conserve after each trip with Dean to the border, the Valium and Xanax s
till disappeared too quickly every time. I would make no more trips to Laredo para mira los hombres malos; none of it was worth it.
-25-
Dean came into town a while back on a short trip to SA to spend his forty-eighth birthday with us. I was about to turn forty-seven, our birthdays not very far apart. Neither one of us could believe we were almost fifty years old. Besides the wisdom of experience, we’d changed little in over thirty years, save for our bodies starting to break down. Dean had finally married his girlfriend Veronica, but she was overwhelmed with her new practice and partners back up in Dallas, and he’d come to San Antonio alone. We hadn’t seen each other in a while and to celebrate his birthday, he and Patricia and I planned to drive out to the Floores Country Store to hear some music. Dean was still a fan of Bob Schneider who was playing that night. It was a first come first serve deal on the tickets, so we would have to leave at about six p.m. for what would be a pretty crowded venue even though the band wouldn’t come on until nine or ten. I had several hits of X and one even for Patricia, who had given in to our peer pressure to take one. She hadn’t been rolling with us again since the Austin New Year’s trip to also see Schneider almost seven years before.
That afternoon, much like whenever Dean came to town, we went out to get our standard supplies of fresh limes, orange juice, ice, a hundred dollar bottle of gold anejo tequila to make some powerful margaritas. In the grocery store to buy the limes and OJ, he asked me if I had ever tried nitrous oxide before.
“You mean those whippets?”
“Yeah, you put them in a big balloon and inhale the gas.”
“Nah, I remember people doing it but I never tried it. It just seemed so . . . desperate.”
“It’s okay for a lark. It only lasts about fifteen seconds or so when it really kicks in, but it’s fun; you float away.”
