This is the first installment of a three part travelling story. I left for Mexico in the early fall of 1999 with $1,200 in my pocket and nothing but the clothes on my back from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I was at the time not receiving treatment for mental illness. I left for Mexico primarily to avoid what I perceived as possible further persecution and mistreatment under the mental health laws of Canada and its institutions in which I had been remanded against my will on numerous occasions and subjected to treatment I did not want. I also left because I was laboring under the delusion that I was being attacked by the local chapter of the Window Washer’s Union (I was a self-employed window washer under cutting the market at the time), a group I had had no contact with, but whom I blamed for the cutting of the brake lines on my car. I convinced myself my safety was at risk. It may well have been as someone had cut the lines. However, in truth, it was questionably a false premise I fomented in my mind to justify a further adventure. I spent six months walking and busing across Mexico before I was picked up by immigration and told to leave the country. The story below chronicles a night I spent in a Mexican jail during a part of that walk-a-bout. Enjoy.
Mexico: A Night In The Hoosegow.
The place was Mexico on the edge of yet another of a seemingly endless train of squalid, dusty, homogenous little towns. An obscure little shop with a dirt floor and a counter in an open front that announced with faded signage that it sold beer stood out from a line of ramshackle buildings. The discolored blue ceramic counter top was littered with bottle caps. Four white hens pecked and scratched in the dirt looking for food along side the shop. Out front at the road side amongst scattered piles of refuse sat a derelict stripped and rusting wreck of a car covered in a thick coat of dust and dried mud. A dog barked in the distance as a dilapidated and ancient pick-up truck rumbled by along the rutted dirt road in a cloud of dust. Inside the shop was an indigenous girl of the area with dark hair and in a peasant dress sitting on a stool while about her moved a young boy of perhaps four years old. The time was the end of another dry summer day in a long succession of dry summer days.
I wandered up to the store counter parched and in search of water to replenish my bottle. Though I knew precious little of the local language I was able to communicate my need largely through gesture and to similarly understand from the girl that she too had no water to give me. Another dead end. The locals in this forgotten backwater it seemed were inhospitable to gringos. Having been in search of water for over an hour I stopped to consider what to do next. With days end fast approaching I concluded my chances of finding water before darkness fell to be slim, after which my chances were none at all. Scanning the faded store signage I was able to glean that a pint of beer, Corona, cost less than a can of pop. Always the frugal one, though I had largely sworn off alcohol for years, I was unable to pass on this bargain. Beer would have to do. So I parted with a few coins from my scant supply of money and ordered a cool frosty one to slake my thirst. Finding water would have to wait until the morrow.
I stood there quietly drinking my beer to the sound of chickens clucking with my elbows propped up on the counter top. The girl sat with her head bent over some sewing she had in her lap seemingly oblivious to my presence. I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand and watched the boy as he moved about the displays in the store. The boy poked his head out from behind one of the displays and smiled at me. I smiled back. Having been pleased with the first, I finished my beer and ordered two more. I hadn’t eaten that day and so the beer began a mild but pleasant and faintly familiar burning sensation in my gut.
The boy continued to stare and smile. He lunged a step or two towards me and laughed. I stuck my tongue out at him and we both laughed. It seemed he wanted to play. I took a bottle cap and placed it on the counter before me and flicked it with my finger at the boy trying to hit him. The boy deftly dodged the cap and let forth with a peal of laughter. The girl looked up at me from under her brow unperturbed, said nothing, and went back to her sewing. So I lined up a half dozen more caps on the counter and proceeded to fire them at the boy in succession while the boy dodged to and fro all the time laughing in glee. This game continued until I had finished my beer when the girl, rising up from her stool, started to gesture and shoot words at me that I could not understand. She shooed me like she would a flock of pigeons from a doorstep. I got the message. I had come to the end of my welcome. So I ordered two more pints for the road, shouldered my back pack and bed roll, shot the boy one last smile, turned, and started to walk down the brown dusty road, a pint of beer in each hand. The beer had started to work its magic and I had begun to feel a little giddy. I began singing a loud, boisterous tune as I sauntered off towards the jungle where I could be alone in my obscurity and drink my beer in peace. If I was lucky I would find an abandoned hut to sleep in for the night.
I burst in under the canopy of the jungle with a heady laugh. Birds scolded me from above for disturbing them. I forced my way through the tangled undergrowth possessively clenching the beer in my hands so as not to drop it. I struggled on slowly for a time until I broke into a clearing. On the far side of the clearing was a fence marking the property line of a homestead which stood yet a little further in the distance. A short, rutted track ran from the homestead to the fence line. I crossed the clearing to the fence, leaned on a fence post, and placed a beer at my feet. The other I opened, bent my head back, and took a long slug. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and filled my lungs with air letting forth with a loud chorus of some tune from my youth the title of which escaped me. I took another pull on the bottle and drained it, throwing the empty with great force towards the middle of the clearing. I bent down for the last beer almost falling in the process, straightened up and opened it. The open beer in my right hand, I turned and stared at the horizon, squinting at the setting sun. Stumbling, I turned back to inspect the wire of the fence between the posts and started to tell myself aloud stories of what seemed at the time to be of great import and profundity loudly punctuated with snippets of melody from half remembered songs.
I was behaving in this manner, drunkenly singing and talking to myself, drinking the last of my beer and wondering if it was too late to go back to the store and get more or if I could even find my way, when the Mexican police drove up along the track from the homestead in a Volkswagen Beetle. Apparently, my plan to isolate myself from being a drunken nuisance to others by retiring to the jungle had failed. It seemed my drunken boisterousness had not gone unnoticed by someone, perhaps someone at the homestead, who in turn had alerted the authorities.
There wasn’t much ceremony. Two burly policemen leapt out of the car excitedly spouting words that could have been Greek for all I was able to comprehend, placed me in cuffs, and crammed me into the back of the Bug. They didn’t even have the decency to let me have the last two mouthfuls of beer left in the bottle. Wheeling the car around in the clearing, they made for a main thoroughfare where we rattled and bumped along the road as they drove through the thickening darkness to the police detachment.