Meet Me in the In-Between

by Bella Pollen

  And I remembered.

  A year earlier—concert in Hyde Park for Live 8, and though at least a dozen other bands were playing to save the world, I hadn’t known a soul who wasn’t there for Pink Floyd. It was late in the evening and the sky was shuddering with storm. Nobody cared, everybody was high on the waiting—twelve hours and then some—punch-drunk on emotion, swaying through the lulls between acts. But then the air tautened. A lone stagehand trailed out wires, a rumble built. NO MORE EXCUSES! flashed across the backdrop in liquid light. Two hundred thousand people roared into the starless night, as pink pigs drifted through the sky and the opening beats of “Breathe” electrified London.

  Sometimes in Nogales, I’d screw up my eyes against the light and there was the dragon’s tail of the actual wall, dark green, trenched into the ground. It was not made of bricks or even of metal. It was made of . . . well, if we’re honest, it was made of lazy thinking. Remove the political posturing, kill the fear. Wasn’t the jigsaw of Mexico and the United States always a good fit? One mass block of workers staring at one giant JOBS AVAILABLE sign?

  Esteban had been strumming his own tune for a while, something quiet and melancholy. “This is for our fifth band member,” he said. “The one who never came back.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was our Syd Barrett, you know? Doomed.” Esteban formed a chord, hit it once.

  “Hey,” I said, and admittedly I was feeling pretty maudlin when this idea hit me. “Let’s record a message to David Gilmour! You know, with the camera! Get him to come and play a gig out here!”

  The boys looked at me.

  “You can get a message to him?” Jaimé asked.

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. Maybe, I thought. And if so, then maybe here was something I could do. Something I could give.

  Dear Bella, Gilmour’s note accompanying the CDs had read. Hope this does the trick. And I too, just like Vicente, had traced my finger over the inscription.

  “Sure, why not?” Vicente coughed a few seeds out of his craw, then positioned himself in front of the camera, CDs clutched to his chest. “Hey, David!” he shouted. “I don’t know what to say. You are a great musician . . . maybe the greatest in the world. Thank you, and that’s all!”

  “Hey, David Gilmour!” Jaimé nervously adjusted his shirttail. “You’re the king of the enchiladas. You’re like the biggest fuckin’ tamale of all. You touch my heart. You touch me in here, you know?” He thumped his chest.

  Jorge’s turn. He stood, arms dangling uselessly by his sides. “I dunno how to start,” he mumbled.

  “Just do it, man.” Esteban stopped playing. “He’ll hear you no matter what you say.”

  “Pretend you’re writing him a letter,” I told him. My own accompanying note would have to be handwritten, of course. Dear Mr. Gilmour. Dear David. Fuck. Awkward.

  “I can’t write,” Jorge said.

  Up on the street, the last of the concert crowd had dispersed. The sun was dropping in this way station, this holding bay of dreamers. Time for business. Esteban was an electrician who dealt drugs. Vicente was a tourist guide who peddled information. Jaimé taught twelve-year-olds and moved guns. And Jorge? Big, soft Jorge? Well, who knows? Everybody in this town held down two jobs, but the one that put food on the table always began at dusk.

  “OK, well, I jus’ wanna say one last thing.” Vicente had taken the microphone again. “David . . . I hope you live a long time. I hope you die good. I hope you don’t lose all your money or ever have to be separated from your loved ones.”

  Don’t die young, don’t die bad, don’t die poor or lonely. A message of luck summing up the collective fear of Nogales. Summing up everyone’s fears, I guess. I switched off the camera.

  Back in London, I spliced my footage together and sent it off with a note that I drafted at least a dozen times, but which eventually began: Dear David, kind of a funny story for you . . .

  And then I waited.

  I get it. Music is a beautiful plague, contagious and airborne. It pays no lip service to borders, to closed doors or minds. It connects those small cells of Jaimés, Estebans, and Vicentes everywhere. It connects us all. Spin the globe and stick in a pin. Up in Greenland, fishermen are sitting around ice holes humming songs from Ummagumma. Russian gem dealers grunting “you crazy diamond” are flying their Cessnas over the mines of eastern Siberia. In London hospitals, anaesthesiologists are softly crooning “Comfortably Numb.”

  The music belongs to them as it belongs to every one of us. I understand that Nogales’s number-one Pink Floyd Fan Club is not unique, but it was unique to me.

  So I’ll go on waiting and I’ll go on hoping. I have no doubt that you’ll come round in the end, David, because when you think about it, it’s only the teeniest, tiniest of fix-its. A border town, a desert sky, and one last, great gig to play beneath it.

  SECRET LIFE

  In the Los Angeles Hertz parking lot, there was but one solitary vehicle left: a gleaming black Lincoln Continental with souped-up masculinity lights and seats upholstered in an animal skin that looked suspiciously like that of the endangered snow leopard.

  I checked the plates against the key fob in my hand.

  The rep on the ground was a skinny kid with chin fuzz and a sloppy relationship with his chewing gum.

  “Hey!” I waved him over.

  “Hey to you, lady customer!” His Hertz uniform shirt, unironed and unbuttoned over a Mickey Mouse vest, was hanging loose as he was.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, gesturing to the Lincoln. “What’s this?”

  He consulted his clipboard. “This is your vehicle, ma’am.”

  “It can’t be!”

  “Why?” He glanced up. “You book something else?”

  “Well, yes! I asked for nothing flashy or expensive-looking. An inconspicuous car. You know, the kind of car no one could pick out in a police line-up.”

  “Inconspicuous, huh?” He patted the pimpmobile affectionately. “Oh, this ol’ cough machine’ll blend in anywhere.”

  I took in his nut-brown legs, the surf shorts across which a cavalry of sea horses, snouts raised, was gamely charging. “Forgive me for asking, but do you actually work here?”

  “You betcha!” He flicked his name badge. RUDY, HERTZ EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH.

  “OK, well, Rudy. I can’t take this car.”

  “Sure you can. This is one classy ride. A classy ride for a classy dame!”

  I sighed. “Don’t you have something else?”

  For a moment I was hopeful that an actual directive was running through Rudy’s head. Find this customer the car she wants!

  “Look, I’m heading down to Tijuana,” I told him. “I need something low-key, you know?”

  “Low-key or fancy schmancy”—Rudy spat his gum into a pot housing a cactus—“you cannot take this vehicle into Mexico.”

  “But I always take my car into Mexico.”

  “Not rentals you don’t. The border is like the carjacking capital of the world.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll put it in a proper parking lot.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Rudy peeled a fresh stick of gum from his pack and compressed it between his teeth. “Parking lots are basically carjackers’ showrooms. Tijuana is like the Bermuda Triangle of rental vehicles.”

  “Is this some funky way of getting me to sign up for the extra insurance?”

  “Listen, lady customer.” He jangled the keys down into my hand. “Whatever you smoke is fine by me, but know this fun fact: with Hertz, your insurance runs out at the line.”

  There’s no excitement like the vibe of a new city. Knowing nobody, everything to learn before familiarity comes like a photograph slowly revealing itself in developing fluid. I had no good reason to go to Tijuana. After a couple of years, the material I’d been collecting had more or less formed itself into a novel, but the idea of wrenching myself out of a world I’d been so happily lost in was unthinkable, and I’d been seeking out tra
vel pieces and any other snippets of work that kept me close to the line. First Emily and then even John had gone back to their normal lives, so I’d asked my only LA friend, Casey, a heavily tattooed film executive, to come with me. By the time we hit San Diego we were both exhausted from a sneezing fit brought on by the Lincoln’s hairy interiors and nauseated from gobbling five pounds of dates purchased from a Vietnam vet in the festering heat of Salton City.

  “Are we nearly there?” she whined.

  “Can you die from too many dates?” I whined back.

  “Must we really park this side and walk over?”

  “Just keep your eye out for the exit, OK?”

  “Which exit?” She lifted her head from the map just as we sped past the turn-off ramp signposted LAST EXIT TO US!

  Immediately, another sign, this one flashing across the freeway in warning neon: TO MEXICO ONLY! And before I could even consider making an illegal U-turn, we found ourselves trapped in the gridlock of a dog-barking, temper-fraying, agent-shouting, trunk-searching, multiple-lane checkpoint.

  “Oh crap,” Casey said.

  Driving in and out of small border towns is fun, it’s buzzing. Twenty minutes of queuing and plenty of ways to pass the time. There’s always some poor bastard on hand to soap your windshield or gargle with gasoline and set his mouth on fire for your entertainment. Street kids hawk noxious-coloured sweeties from trays slung around their necks. Velour towels printed with lurid images of the Last Supper are on sale and all this under the roving eye of the Mexican police, who lounge against the cement divide, chain-smoking and keeping watch for a pretty girl to hassle.

  Tijuana takes itself a lot more seriously. California’s port of entry to Mexico is the busiest land port in the world, with twenty million cars and over fifty million people crossing every year. When, ninety dreary minutes later, Casey and I were finally waved past the barrier, we were aghast to see that the queue back to San Diego was at least a hundred and fifty cars and still growing.

  “Over there!” Casey pointed at a crude PARK HERE sign. I hesitated. “The Bermuda Triangle of cars,” Rudy had said. But we had only this one day, and to waste half of it tailbacking in traffic was out of the question.

  In the razed wasteland of the parking lot, an old man pushed stiffly off the steps of a trailer and made his way towards us, limping mildly. “Twenty dollar,” he announced, casting a shrewd eye over the Lincoln as if already weighing up whether to sell it by the yard or the pound.

  As the old man took the bill I noticed the scar in the centre of his palm—a small welt circling soft, purplish skin. I’d seen this crucifixion scar before and knew it to be some kind of rite of passage between prison inmates. Without thinking, I reached out and touched it, and his hand closed round my finger like a Venus flytrap.

  The attendant’s eyes were cloudy, the colour of a glacial lake. And even though I had yet to ask the question, he nodded, an imperceptible yes.

  Alfredo was seventy-two, he told us, holding his little white moustache to the vent blowing cool air from the Lincoln’s dashboard, a retired coyote recruited at thirteen by two Artful Dodgers. Smuggling had been the job of his dreams. Money, kudos, adrenaline—everything a bored street kid could ask for. After a while, though, and much to his dismay, his sense of morality kicked in. Witnessing the rape and robbery of his charges was scary and sad, he said, directing us through his old beat with directional shifts of his forefinger. Here were the shallows of the sea, the culs-de-sac that never truly dead-ended. “The pores in America’s skin,” he called them.

  He got married. After the birth of his daughter he refused to bring across any more children. He worried that some of the men he was helping into America were scavengers, animals, but how was anyone supposed to tell the difference? In the garden of good and evil, the boots of all men left the same tread. As the years passed, he lost faith in people, so he began smuggling drugs instead and wound up where he was always going to wind up.

  In prison he lifted a copy of Lines and Shadows off the library trolley. Joseph Wambaugh’s novel detailed a crime task force sent to patrol the no-man’s-land between Tijuana and San Diego—not to apprehend the thousands slipping into the United States, but to stop those who preyed on them. Alfredo had been profoundly shamed. “I done so many bad things,” he said. “God knows I did.”

  The last time he went to prison he promised his family he would leave them alone. “And I’ve kept my word.” His little girl would be grown up by now, an American citizen, living a new life on the other side of so many divides.

  “Why don’t you try to find her?”

  “She’s in San Diego. She knows I’m here.”

  “Maybe she wants you to make the first move?” I was having difficulty squaring Alfredo’s image of himself as redemption-unworthy sinner with the regretful philosopher in our front seat. It was neither bad luck, bad geography, nor bad guys that killed most people—it was bad education. And what if Alfredo’s daughter hadn’t understood that?

  “We could go to San Diego, bring her over to you,” I offered, beginning to write a heroic role for myself in Alfredo’s tale. I conjured up a pitch-haired girl, looking out of a small adobe house somewhere in the burbs.

  “She’ll find me if she wants to,” Alfredo said stubbornly.” He pressed his forehead to the window and stared at the metallic blur of traffic. “There is so much wanting in this city,” he said softly. “It eats away at your soul.”

  For weeks after returning to London, I paced the cage of my office, unable to settle into a routine. Even as I guiltily closed my door against the clomp of my own daughter’s feet on the stairs, I was thinking about Alfredo’s. His acceptance of loneliness as her punishment for him made me sad. If a parent loves a child unconditionally, shouldn’t that child try to absolve the parent of crimes committed? Wasn’t it OK to fuck up a little if you loved a lot? And so I fretted about Alfredo, with his secrets branded into the palm of his hand. When the time had come for Casey and me to cross back over that day, he’d taken us to a track on the outskirts of town. “Follow it to the end,” he’d instructed. “Give the man twenty dollar and tell him your friend Alfredo sent you. Avoid the queue, you know?”

  A ping of his seat belt and he’d been gone.

  But the real reason I was fractious was that I’d run out of excuses to ship myself back to the border. The novel was written. There were no more free travel passes from magazines. I couldn’t even lose myself daydreaming. With other books, the world created had been a place that obeyed no space-time laws. There were no limitations on how often I could visit. But the world of the border was not mine. The lives of those who revolved around it would continue on without me and I would have done anything to get back there. It took me a while to figure out there was only one way: lift the story off the page and find it a new creative medium.

  With that in mind, I posted the thing off to an LA film agent named Sylvie. Despite having zealously revised the final manuscript, I added a note peppered with phrases like “work in progress” and “super-early rough draft.” If you’re English, to be seen to try and then fail remains one of life’s greater humiliations. Should anyone denounce your work as a piece of poop, better it be poop dashed off in a matter of hours. So low were my expectations that when, sometime later, a triptych of unpronounceable surnames flashed up on my mobile, I nearly hit the decline button.

  To be clear, this isn’t one of those stories with a blockbuster ending—nevertheless, a few phrases sank in. Great work! Quite some interest! To me, naturally, the exclamation marks said it all. Prone to the scepticism that is yet another cornerstone of the English national psyche, by the time this Sylvie person and I had wrapped up our conversation I had her pegged as an incorrigible bullshitter. With each ensuing phone call, particularly those in which she had something positive to report, I imagined her as an increasingly repulsive type of Hollywood monster. Still, by the time I’d agreed to come to LA and was waiting for my bag at the luggage carousel a few mo
nths later, I can’t pretend I wasn’t excited. I was beginning to see a future of script meetings and highly paid consultant work. Then a text from Sylvie pinged onto my phone. “Sorry! Manuscript escaped,” it read.

  Escaped? Sure. No doubt some insider’s euphemism for total loss of interest.

  “Bummer,” I texted back.

  “Stand by,” came the reply.

  LA terrifies me. It might be a town for dreamers, but it’s not a town to be dreamy in. I had no idea how to stand by there.

  I called Jerome, an agent/manager whose number I chanced upon in my contacts list.

  “Fabulous!” he roared. “Let’s hook up.” And minutes later we were being escorted to his table in Chateau Marmont. I was coming down with a heavy cold, while Jerome appeared to be soaring on a marathon high. He buzzed through a virtual poppy field of hallucinatory topics before landing on Hurricane Katrina. “I was there, you know.” He dropped his head into his hands. On the second day, he’d looked out of his hotel window and seen an alligator tearing into a dead body. “A dead body! A gator! Jesus Christ,” he groaned. “I’m so messed up, baby.”

  I discreetly ordered myself a hot whiskey and lemon.

  “You should get that remade,” he said suddenly. “I’m thinking snakeskin.”

  “What?”

  “Your watch strap. It’s fraying.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at my wrist.

  “I have a friend at Hermès who owes me.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “You’re so grounded,” Jerome’s voice cracked. “You’re one of my favourite people.”

  We’d met only twice before, and both times I’d suspected him of bitter misogyny. I covered his hand awkwardly, but even this small act was enough to breach his own internal levees, and he broke into sobs, pooling snot onto the sesame bun of his cheeseburger.