The last installment saw me in search of water in a nondescript, dusty town in Mexico at the end of the day. I settled on imbibing beer, flicking beer caps at a child, wandering through a forest into a clearing, and being picked up by the Mexican police for creating a disturbance. I pick up here after a trip to the local police detachment.
Mexico: A Night In The Hoosegow Part 2
By the time we made the detachment the beer had totally kicked in and I was pretty intoxicated so the details are a little fuzzy. However, from what I recall, the policemen took me into the detachment where I was stripped of my personal items including all my money, papers, and my shoes, and interrogated, which in Mexico apparently means being unceremoniously slapped and tossed around getting one’s shirt torn at the collar in the process. Clearly unimpressed by what I had to say for myself, the policemen loaded me back into the Bug and transported me to the local jail. Since everybody that I had been in contact with throughout the whole proceedings spoke barely any English, nor I their language, and by the fact that I was thoroughly intoxicated by this point, I had little to no idea what was happening. However, in retrospect, it was not totally unlike being 15 again and coming home drunk at two in the morning to face my angry and belligerent mother. The jail on the other hand was an entirely different experience from anything I had known.
I don’t recall going from the Bug to the cell block but once in the block I remember. The cell block was gloomy and dimly lit. It was made up of two rows of cells about three hundred feet long and two stories high facing each other and separated by an open space about thirty or forty feet wide. Everything was made of bare concrete and metal bars.
When I entered the cell block led by a mountain of a guard, he was huge, I was greeted by a chorus of cat calls and hollering. The place just erupted. The guard pulled me to stand in front of a cell about halfway down one row of cells on the bottom floor. I stood about a foot in front of a cell in which there was housed one loan belligerent soul. Without warning this craven soul lashed out his fist from between the bars and punched me in the nose shouting, and please excuse his French here, “I’ll fuck ‘ya! Do you hear me! I’ll fuck ‘ya!” To be truthful, I had never been wooed in quite this fashion before and I found it somewhat disturbing. Cleary, Toto, we are no longer in Kansas, I thought to myself. The guard, bless his soul, thought better of putting me in this fellow’s cell, as it first seemed he intended to do, but rather, he put me in the cell directly on the right with two other fellows who by comparison were quite sedate. And with the rattling of keys and the clanging of metal on metal as the door slammed closed behind me, in I went.
In my inebriated state it took me about ten minutes too take inventory of my surroundings and introduce myself to my cell mates before I settled upon a course of action. Undaunted by my reception from the fellow in the next cell, and secure in the knowledge that an impenetrable concrete wall and metal bars separated us, I sat on the end of the cot in my cell in the front right corner closest to the fellow that had punched me in the nose. Once seated, I called the fellow over and proceeded to strike up a conversation with him. He in turn reached his hand out from between the bars while holding a mirror so that he could see me around the concrete wall that separated us. Looking directly into the mirror so that I could see him, I then launched into a heartfelt diatribe as to how society had wronged and failed us, how it was that we were deserving fellows each of us, and that we deserved better than we had been given. I expressed my belief in the inherent dignity of his person and good nature and suggested we start over and be friends after all. He responded by taking aim with his mirror and dousing me with his water bottle. He then uttered a string of oaths and re-stated his amorous intentions in an unflattering manner. In the face of this I persisted for about fifteen minutes before I got tired of being doused and retreated to the back of the cell. The fellow next door continued to douse anyone that tried to sleep on the cot nearest his cell off and on for most of the remainder of the night. Disillusioned, I made the decision that night to exclude him from my Christmas card list. The rest of the night was a relatively uneasy and sleepless one, as we three in my cell traded time in rotating shifts in the only two dry cots left in the cell that were out of reach of the raving lunatic and his water bottle next door.