Locked Up In La Mesa

by Eldon Asp

  Prison had been hard on The Professor; he looked like a derelict. He wore rags all the time and he seemed a lot older than he was because he had a long beard and long, greasy hair. Just a really unfortunate-looking guy. But the thing about him is he loved kids. The only thing that made him happy, that seemed to give him some peace, was being around the little kids. And he was good with them, too.

  So if anybody needed some time to themselves for whatever reason, they’d bring their kids to The Professor and he’d take care of them. I think he charged something like a few pesos an hour, not much. He probably would have done it for free, but everybody has to eat. He was usually set up on the basketball court, which wasn’t used all that often, for basketball, anyway; it was Mexico—they were all about soccer and baseball. Anyway, The Professor had these plastic milk crates, and he’d put the little kids in the crates and line them up like a train and then push them all around on the slick cement. The kids loved it, and as far as I know, The Professor was never on anything but his best behavior whenever he had kids to look after. I guess the massacre was like a one-time thing.

  Flauta

  Goofy the Rock Star

  THERE WAS A MEXICAN ROCK star named “Goofy” in there, if you can believe that. That’s what they told me, anyway, that he was a famous rock star who played the flute and toured all over Mexico with Carlos Santana. Thinking about it now it seems ridiculous, and I wonder if a lot of people weren’t maybe exaggerating this guy’s success and popularity. It seems pretty far-fetched to be a big rock star and both have a name like “Goofy” and also play the flute. That’s two strikes against you, I would think. Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull played a flute and as far as I know, that’s about it for famous rock-and-roll flute players. So maybe “rock star” was overstating it a little bit.

  Anyway, this guy certainly acted like a rock star, that’s for sure. He was probably one of the biggest dipshits I encountered my whole time in La Mesa. He was a total asshole rich kid, and his mother spoiled him horribly. He was arrested for pot along with my friend Davy, who I’ve talked about before. They were partners in the deal and they got picked up together, but as soon as they got inside Goofy cut him loose.

  Goofy lived in one of the best places in the whole prison. It was a little house near the soccer field, with a front porch and everything. His mother had bought it from Heladio. (Later on, Heladio wanted it back for some reason, and Goofy’s mom came into the prison and put a stop to that right quick. I don’t know if she paid him to back off, or if she threatened to make trouble for the warden or what, but she was a wealthy, connected woman. That was the only time I can think of when Heladio basically had to take no for an answer.) There was always a great big bodyguard stationed out front, and there were also beautiful girls around most days. Goofy had to have his entourage around him all the time.

  He never really mingled with anybody else, unless they were rich and powerful. Whenever any bigshots were around he would come out of his little house to play his flute or otherwise make a spectacle of himself, but that was about it. Other than that, he kept to himself, just hanging out with his own little clique. He got the girls, no doubt about that, but he was one arrogant jerk. I don’t care how well he played the flute.

  Carne

  The Cannibal

  BESIDES HELADIO, THERE WERE TWO other really big-time players in there, and those were The Brothers, Robert and Johnny. They had a last name, obviously, but mostly people just called them “Robert Brother” or “Johnny Brother.” Anyway, there was never any tension between them and Heladio’s organization because they were basically business partners; The Brothers supplied most of Heladio’s heroin. They were East L.A. guys with a big retail heroin operation back home, but in La Mesa they were strictly wholesale. They also owned a hotel and cathouse down in Puerto Vallarta. I don’t know what they did to get themselves locked up, but maybe it had something to do with that. Whatever it was, they lived in La Mesa with their wives, and I think they had a pretty comfortable existence going for themselves.

  Robert, the older one, lived in the women’s section of the prison with his wife Helen, who was really the main day-to-day operator of The Brothers’ business, as far as I could tell. I should point out that there was a separate area for female inmates, and it was more like what we normally think of as a prison. It was too small for anything but housing—too small for stores or restaurants or any of that kind of stuff—so by default it was basically a cellblock. The female inmates were only allowed out into the main part of La Mesa once in awhile, for visiting days and occasionally at other times. Helen could come and go as she pleased because she wasn’t an inmate. She was just there to take care of Robert, and he lived in the women’s section for his own safety because he was blind; I believe someone had shot him in the head, was the reason for that.

  (One trippy side note about the women’s prison is they had a serial killer in there, and she was just gorgeous. She hardly ever came out to the yard or to El Pueblito, which is what they called the business district, but when she did, the whole place would stop and stare at her because she was so beautiful, but you could tell she was just evil to her core. What she did was, she traveled all around Mexico with her old man—husband, boyfriend, I don’t know—and he would hide in their hotel while she went out to the bars and nightclubs and picked up guys. She’d seduce these men and take them back to their room and then together they’d rob and murder these poor guys. I don’t know if they cut up the bodies or what they did to dispose of them, but they’d cover their tracks and then move on to the next town. So they eventually got caught and the old man was sent to Tres Marías, the prison colony off the west coast of Mexico, and she was sent to La Mesa.)

  Anyway, The Brothers: other than being big-time drug dealers, they were just all-around good guys, just real nice guys, and I was on good terms with both of them. I hung around with Johnny quite a bit. He was funny—he was this totally hard gangster, but every time you saw him, and I mean every time, he’d be wearing this white tennis getup, head to toe. White cap, white shirt, white tennis shorts. White sneakers. He always looked like he was on his way to the country club. How he kept his clothes so white I have no idea; maybe he had a bunch of identical outfits. Another thing he had was a real secure carraca. It wasn’t in the corral, it was next to the fence by the front wall, right next to the infirmary. There was this long corridor with a steel door at the end of it, and Johnny had this bodyguard that was always with him, this total East L.A. badass with a shaved head and a whole bunch of tattoos. If you wanted to see Johnny, you’d knock on the steel door and then a little hatch would open up and this bodyguard would look out. You would sort of announce yourself, and the guy would close the hatch and go down the hall to see if Johnny was receiving visitors. Usually he was. I used to go over there quite a bit and just hang out with Johnny and he’d tell me stories about the prison or about his business or whatever. And sometimes we’d go for walks around the yard. On one of these walks he said he was gonna tell me who the most dangerous man in the whole prison was, the one guy I had to make sure I never got on the wrong side of. Worse than the comandante, worse than Johnny himself, worse than Heladio even. Of course I was all ears.

  He pointed the guy out to me, and we were fairly far away, but he sure didn’t look like much. He was just this small, sickly looking guy, real dirty, and I said, “Him?” Johnny told me again he was the most dangerous guy in the whole place. So I said, “Why’s he so dangerous?” And Johnny goes,

  “’Cause he’s a cannibal, man!”

  Okay, that made sense, I guess: the guy might eat you. Now of course I was fascinated by this, and I started bugging him all the time to tell me stories about The Cannibal. He said The Cannibal used to be a nobody; he was just like any other inmate. Then one day another guy was laying out getting a suntan, or else he was passed out in the yard, something like that, and for whatever reason this little dude just walked over and smashed his head with a cinder block. He just pick
ed up a cinder block and crushed the guy’s skull with it. Before they could get him off of the guy, he started pulling his brains out and eating them—he ate the guy’s brains. That was the first time he did any cannibal stuff that they knew of. The guy spent years in the tumbas for that, literally seven or eight years in the tombs.

  The conditions in there were just brutal. The way it was set up was, it was basically like dog kennels. There was this row of cages, just wire mesh cages, and they were maybe six feet deep by about four and a half, five feet tall, and just about three feet wide. Tiny cages, with a little slot to pass stuff through. And that’s it.

  So one day this missionary or whatever he was, this helper guy, was going through there bringing food or medicine or something, and at some point I guess The Cannibal had gotten his hands on a knife—or maybe he sharpened something that he found in there, I don’t know—and this guy got too close to the cage. The Cannibal reached through the slot and grabbed hold of him and stabbed him in the stomach. He held onto this guy and stabbed him, then dropped the knife and started pulling the guy’s guts out. The guy was still alive, screaming his head off, and The Cannibal just kept pulling his guts out and eating them! He was holding onto the guy and eating his guts as fast as he could.

  So Johnny was telling me all these stories and I was just going, “Holy shit, this guy’s terrible!” I can’t even describe how bad that freaked me out. Other threats you sort of see coming, you can get out of the way or prepare or whatever. But a guy like that, he’s off the charts; he’s just too unpredictable.

  One day I saw a few of the little vultures and they had this cannibal guy with them and they were parading him all around, trying to drum up sympathy for this guy so they could make some money off him. They were going up to visitors, and inmates, and just anybody, and they were saying, “Have some compassion for this poor guy,” you know, “He’s been in the tumbas for…” however many years it was. They had their arms around him like he was their best buddy, and they were collecting nickels and pesos and whatever they could get for this idiot. They put him to work like that so they could get more money for chiva. Unbelievable.

  Another time I was sitting down in the sunshine, out near the fruit stand where this one killing took place, and I had my shirt off, just sitting in the sun. I had my antennas up like always, just minding my own business, but I kept an eye out for any trouble coming my way. Just making sure everything was okay, nothing was creeping on me, no one was sneaking up. I wasn’t worried about it, just being cautious like I always was, not really thinking about anything in particular except my predicament, like always.

  All of a sudden I felt this hand on my back, up by my shoulder blade. It was a hot day, but the hand was cold and clammy. I jumped up and spun around and I saw it was The Cannibal, and I mean, I screamed. I screamed at him to get the fuck away from me, and he just looked at me with the most hideous grin on his face and he laughed, like, “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.” Fuck, it was horrible; pardon my French. He backed off like that, just “Heh-heh-heh-heh” and pointing at me like, “I’ll remember you.” You know that kind of look?

  After that I never took my eyes off him. I was always worried about him remembering me and seeing me as a target.

  Navidad

  Three Wise Men

  IN ANY PRISON, PEOPLE DO whatever they can to escape. In the literal sense, that means getting over, under, or through the wall.

  (This is kind of a side note, but I remember once seeing a young vulture climb right over the cinderblock wall like a monkey. In broad daylight! There was nobody manning this one guard tower and the kid hauled himself over the wall right next to it and ran away. It was the craziest thing, but what happened after that was even weirder. The kid ran back across town to his mother’s house and hid out there for about three days. Finally she couldn’t handle him anymore and dragged him back to the prison by his ear. The problem was the kid was a stone junky and she couldn’t deal with his withdrawals and all the bullshit that came along with it. She knew if he was out on the street, he’d just get himself in trouble again to support his habit, and she was too poor to give him any money herself or even much food, so she figured out, rightly I think, that he’d be better off in La Mesa than he would in her house.

  That was the funniest thing, when she marched him up to the gate and made him turn himself in, like a little kid caught skipping school.)

  But anyway, that’s not the point of this story. The point of this story is that if people can’t escape literally, you can be sure they’ll try to free their minds. For some, that means Jesus or Allah or whatever the case may be. Others just go crazy, straight up. And the majority turn to drugs. A lot of them were probably into drugs before they got there, obviously; that’s probably why they’re there. They’re predisposed to it, you could say. Others get into drugs once they’re locked up, just to give themselves a little bit of relief from the boredom and the fear and the fucking despair of their situation.

  The way it worked in La Mesa was drugs basically were the economy. Any cash that was present got turned into drugs so fast that they might as well have just used drugs as money. Heroin, or chiva, cocaine, grass, bennies, Mandrax—shit, probably steroids, horse tranquilizers, who knows what kind of shit they had going around. Anything you could think of. On the surface of it it was supposed to be illegal—it was definitely against the rules—but it’s my belief that the rules were in place not so much to stop the drug use as they were to justify the bribes, to offer some pretext, because if you’re asking a guard to look the other way on a rule violation, it’s a lot more expensive if there’s an actual rule being violated. If it wasn’t against the rules you could just tell him to screw off. Not that you would, but you could if you wanted to. So the guards got paid, and a lot of them were pretty heavy drug users themselves, so those ones would be happy to take drugs for bribes as well.

  How did the drugs get in? Different ways. Guards brought some of them in. Or visitors. Sometimes someone would just lob a package over the wall at a certain time, or they’d cut open a soccer ball and fill that up with stuff and then boot it over. With the guards, you’d pay them off and they’d drop a bundle off the catwalk into the yard as they were making their rounds. Let’s say it was pot. Whoever had ordered it would take it and break it up into papers, like notebook paper basically. They’d roll it up with enough pot to make about three little joints, so you’d break that up and roll your own joints. And that was a dollar. The favorite thing was chiva, though, and most of that found its way into the prison with Heladio’s girls, mostly Irma, the blonde. Nobody dared search her.

  Anyway, I got it into my head pretty early on that I would like to try to move a little LSD. As far as I could tell, that was about the only drug they didn’t already have on the market. It was actually Heladio that gave me the idea, indirectly. He was always on the lookout for a new high, or a different kink or whatever. And so he asked me about it fairly early into my time there. He knew I was from the States, obviously, so I guess he figured I must be up on all the latest psychedelics. Which, not to brag, but I was.

  Bringing it in was easy. It was just paper, so you could put in a book, put it in your pocket, anything. They didn’t even know what to look for down there at that time. I had a friend of mine bring it in to me, at first just a couple hundred hits. Not too much. Now remember, Heladio got a piece of everything, so I didn’t want to fool around with that. It wouldn’t be worth it to piss him off. I basically asked him for his blessing and told him I’d bring him his share of the money when I got it. But he said he wanted to try it, and he did, and he liked it, so he just kept some of the acid and told me not to worry about it. I was in business, and it was very well-received. They loved it. LSD kept me in tacos and hot dogs for a good long time in La Mesa.

  Around the end of ‘74, my little LSD operation was really taking off. On Christmas Day, Johnny Bigotes came to see me and said he had these three farmers who wanted to try some. Pot growers, from Sinaloa,
I believe. Older guys. I guess they had tried mushrooms before and liked them, so when they heard I had acid, they wanted to try that, too. All right, I said, bring them over.

  I should probably say a little bit about Christmas in prison. It sucked; of course it did. But one of the things that made La Mesa more tolerable than regular prisons at that time of year was the way it felt more like a real community, like an actual small town because of all the different people who lived there, the kids especially. That helped with holidays, because everybody relaxed a little bit and tried to be happy, and it was more convincing because it wasn’t just a bunch of angry dudes in cells with bars on them. They also let us stay out late on Christmas.

  So it was late at night and I was walking around the yard. I was on psychedelics myself, tripping out on the lights and the Christmas music and stuff, feeling pretty good. But then I got to thinking, and if you’ve ever dropped acid or anything like that, you know how easy it is to just fall into a line of thinking, like a train of thought you get on and you can’t get off. I was looking around and I kind of stepped outside of myself for a second and started thinking, “Shit, look where I am. I’m spending Christmas in prison! In Mexico! How the hell am I even dealing with this right now?” You know, like that. Like: “Jesus Christ, this is terrible! I must be nuts not to be just completely freaking out right now!”

  I started feeling sorry for myself then, and I thought it might not have been the smartest idea I ever had to drop this shit on Christmas. My trip was turning bad; I was on a bummer a little bit. So I started back toward my carraca to kind of hole up and deal with myself when Johnny hollered to me and came walking over with the three little farmers. They had their big old hats on and their cowboy shirts and their boots. And they had their money with them, they were ready to go, so I turned them on right there in the yard; I gave them the acid and showed them how to put it on their tongues. Then while they were waiting for it to kick in, I took off back to my place because now it was really turning ugly for me. I was feeling all trapped and sad and sorry for myself.