You Won't Find Any Cheeseburgers Here

As the sun set behind the extinct volcanoes across the plain, we pulled out of Jose's dirt driveway, full of thanks. We headed for a campground south of San Vicente, called Muelle Viejo (Old Pier), where an English Colony had failed two hundred years earlier, leaving behind the ruins of a mill, some old pier pilings still sticking up from the lagoon, and a graveyard. We found the turnoff down a washboard-tough dirt road and followed it guessing at each fork which was the right way to go. We came to a little, round, white-washed adobe building with a thatched roof on a ridge over-looking the lagoon. You could smell fish grilling and through the door was a shelf with bottles of booze. We found stone firepits. Carlos went off in search of a suitable shit-taking place.
"I'm starving, Zurn, let's eat," said the Pepper.
"I don't think they have any cheeseburgers here, dude."
"I'm so hungry, I could eat fish."
"I want to go take some photgraphs of this graveyard I read about before it's too dark."
"What do you want to do that for?"
"I don't know."
An old man came shuffling out of the shadows selling firewood. "We'll buy some when we get back," I said in Spanish.
"Where are you going?" asked the viejo.
I told him we were going to look for the cemetario. He made a moaning noise. "Why do you want to do that?" he asked in Spanish.
"Why not?"
He made the moan again. "Tal vez llegan a ser atrapados." You might become trapped.
"Okay, viejo, we'll be careful not to get trapped."
He shook his head.  "Hay llojos."
Yoho's?  "Que son llojos?"
"No se debe ir en la noche."
Carlos came back. "I'm starving let's eat."
"Fucking Zurn wants to go to some graveyard."
"Oh my god."
I got in the truck and started the engine. The GIP and Carlos climbed in cussing and muttering. "Stay here then, ya pussies."
"We're not going with you; we're going with the truck."
We motored into the twilight, the old man's moans falling behind us. "Ahorita regresamos," I said to the old man.  We would never see him again.

Might Get His Ass Scorpion-Stung or Rattlesnake-Bit

We passed a few auto parts stores, but they were closed. The car overheated again and we had to stop and wait for it to cool. I poured in water from the five gallon container GIP's dad had given us for emergencies. Carlos still had not taken his shit and wasn't inclined to squat in the brush off to the side of the road; his ass might get scorpion-stung or rattlesnake-bit.

After about a forty-five minutes, the motor had cooled enough for us to get going again. We made it to San Quintin, but the two auto parts stores we saw in that town were closed on Sunday. Finally, at the very end of town there was a taller, a garage, open, and I pulled in. Two boys squatted against the wall. "Hola, muchachos, hay un mecanico aqui?" I asked. One of them ran off and came back with an older kid, maybe fourteen. I explained the problem.

He said he knew a guy that might be able to fix it, but they had to find him. I gave him a few quarters and he went tearing off on his bike. A guy pulled up in a beat-up old Buick. His name was Jose Mesa. Because the water in the radiator wasn't circulating, the problem, he said, was the water pump. This guy saved our asses. He drove me in his car to a town ten miles away where he knew we could buy a pump. We took my truck to his house, and he fixed it in his front yard. His house was off the highway, down a road of dirt and potholes. Extinct volcanoes rose from the flat plains across from his house. We gave candies and sodas to his children, and they laughed and played and screamed hysterically. Jose had to grind down the rotors in the pump to make it fit. It would have cost two hundred bucks or more back home, Mon-Fri, pick it up tomorrow. Here was a guy that got up off his couch on his day off and fixed a car for three shithead foreigners who he had over a barrel, and he was sheepish about saying fifty dollars for a price. I gave him eighty.

If three Mexicans in a car packed full of shit broke down in the U.S. would anybody help them?

Chinga!

Nov. 9

Shortly after noon we passed an old white-washed adobe church on a hill in the dust. Had I been alone I might have stopped to take its picture, but I thought to spare my passengers the delay.

That morning we had gone to get our tourist permits at the office in Ensenda. When I tried to open the tailgate to let Carlos into the back of the truck, the handle broke off. Great. Carlos is about five feet five inches, growth stunted by diabetes. When I first met him at UC Irvine, I thought he was some kind of Doogie Howser prodigy, in college at the age of twelve. "How old are you?" "Eighteen," he said, annoyed. He turned out to be one of the most fun guys you'd ever want to drink a beer with. How were we going to get the poor bastard in and out of the truck without being able to lower the tailgate for the next three weeks without robbing him of his dignity? The GIP is not much taller and weighs about a hundred pounds more. I call him the Guatamalan Insanity Pepper. Anyway, Jeez. The trip had just started. I held the door of the camper shell over my head while I tried to fit my hand behind the metal panel where the tailgate locks. While I was messing with it, I accidentally snapped the door of the camper shell clean off its hinges, and my sunglasses fell to the ground and broke. Chinga! How were we going to drive through Mexico for two weeks without being able to lock the door of the camper shell where all our gear was? Where could we get it fixed? Should we postpone the trip? Chingalo. We pressed on. Damn the torpedoes! I boosted Carlos into the truck and threw the door in behind him and we headed south, listening to football games.

When we passed the church, Carlos said, "Zurn, can you pull over somewhere in the next town. I gotta take a shit." Why he wasn't willing to just shit under a cactus somewhere, I don't know, but if it wasn't for Carlos's shit we might not have been forewarned that the truck was about to take a shit, too. It would be many hours, however, before Carlos actually get to relieve his bowels.

We came to a small town about a hundred yards long with a bus stop where two girls in the road near a car marked POLICIA, were waving down cars with a flag and holding out a rusty coffee can in which to collect money. The police car sort of reinforced one's charitable nature. You didn't really have to wonder too much what would happen if you just drove past. We pulled off the road at a cafe. When we stopped I noticed steam coming from the hood of the truck. Uh oh. Mierda. Big worry, maybe. That and the cafe was closed, much to Carlos' discomfort.

We decided it was a good time for lunch, the Pepper and I did, anyway, and we ate some quesadillas that his mom had wrapped in foil for us before we left LA two days earlier, about five pounds of them. We drank a few Tecates we had picked up in the last town and waited for the engine to cool. Carlos walked up and down the town looking for a toilet, but it was Sunday and everything was closed.

Among the people waiting for the bus, GIP found a guy who claimed to be a mechanic. (It occurred to me that probably everyone in Baja was necessarily a mechanic.) The man looked in the radiator while the the motor ran and noted that the water wasn't flowing. Probably just the thermostat. He said if we made it to San Quintin, we might be able to find an auto parts store with the part we needed. It was another hundred miles still to San Quintin.

Bad luck/good luck: I happened to be parked right in front of a hose coming out of the side of a building. I turned the spigot and, lo and behold, water came out. I refilled the radiator and boosted Carlos back into the truck. We took a deep breath and headed for San Quintin.

Baja Ha Ha Chapter One

11-8-95 La Paz, B.C., Mexico

We left Los Angeles ten A.M. November 4. Slept the night at El Cid hotel (Alas, I had no cid) on Calle Bucaneros. We watched Riddick Bowe knock out Evander Holyfield at Los Grillos bar and Sports-Grill. At Caliente sports book, I put $30 on a four game parley that would pay ten to one if I won. I had the Raiders high-scoring offense to cover eight and half points against the Bengals, the league-leading Chiefs needed just eight and half to cover the low-scoring 'Skins, Atlanta one and half over Detroit, and Denver over Phoenix in Denver with any spread was a shoo-in. We were able to get the game on AM radio until it was overcome by static in the hills of Lower California. The Raiders were covering 14-3. Reports had KC also with a 14-3 lead, and Atlanta was leading Detroit 19-0. Then we found the Chiefs game on the radio way the hell south of the border, a hundred miles or more, on some little dirt road, in a ramshackle, clapboard, shanty town where the last thing you would expect to find on the radio was an NFL game let alone, one from Kansas City. The day was utterly gray, and as the radio finally fell into crunchy on and off again static, we got a final score Raiders 20, Bengals 17, so there went my three hundred dollar payoff.

With the football games gone, so too seemed the last vestiges of star spangled America. The Pepper spoke dreamily of pussy, the mythical Cueva de Oro...

The Last Boingo Show

Went with Shirelle and Jeff Goldcastle to an American Film Institute Presentation of Buster Keaton clips at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences theatre on Wilshire in Beverly Hills. Mary Gross (of Saturday Night Live) came behind me to the water fountain. At the same time, the conductor--what's his name? The famous guy who conducts the Oscars-- was there in his tux and he introduced himself to Mary Gross, and since I was standing right there, he introduced himself to me, as well. And I told them my name. He was very friendly, telling us all about how he was using Robert Israel's original scoring for The General, and Mary Gross fawned for him a little. When I got back to my seat, though, I wished I had met the violinist, Galina Zherdev. Hummina hummina hummina. I wish I had done more than just meet her. Yow. I spent the next few hours fantasizing about what a sophisticated and romantic relationship we would have, she and I. Whooo. Something was robbed from the spirit of Keaton to see him dissected into clips like this, and so more and more I watched the look of concentration and sublimity on the face of Galina Zherdev.

Last weekend at the Oingo Boingo show at the Universal Amphitheatre I pushed a girl down. Shirelle and I watched the last game of the World Series at the bar in the Hollywood Athletic Club. Atlanta beat Cleveland one to nothing. We were about seven drinks into the night as we walked to the show. Our seats were not far from the stage, but they were off to the side. I saw an unoccupied row closer to the middle when the show started and we went over there. A couple of girls came. They said they followed us. Boingo was rad. That's right, RAD. Much fun energy. I danced like a happy high school kid and sang along without missing a word. I wanted to slam around down in the pit, so I grabbed Shirelle's hand and walked to the aisle leading down to the floor. A security guard was there and wouldn't let us through. The last time I would ever see Oingo Boingo. I handed him a twenty and he let us go, but there was another bastard at the bottom of the aisle before the floor and I was out of twenties. I stood among the people dancing in the aisle, pondering the sitch, when this girl in front of me turns around and shoves me as hard as she can knocking me back a few steps. I don't know if she resented my presence or if she was just being playful, or what, but when she did it again, I shoved her back and she went tumbling backward ass over down the stairs to the floor. Everybody turned to look at me, including the security guard. I took Shrill's hands and we went back to our original seats. She had to go to the bathroom and was gone a long time, so I took a stroll along the concourse to see the band from other angles. Cry of the Vato! Go Sluggo! Yeah, Bartok. There were some guys slamming around in the middle of the concourse, so I slammed with him. Some guy in a yellow polo shirt kept trying to grab me so I put him in a headlock and kept bouncing around and slamming into people. Soon other guys in yellow polo shirts were trying to get me. What the fuck's with all these guys in the yellow polo shirts? Then I noticed that the backs of their shirts said SECURITY. Doh! I let go the headlock and tried to explain over the loud music that I was just a rational fun-loving guy, no harm intended, but they came after me with their hands, and I pushed them away and ran around the amphitheater like Benny Hill with a bunch of yellow-shirted security guards after me. I made a go of it for about a minute before some dude jumped from out of nowhere and brought me down. Then they went Rodney King on my ass. Finally someone twisted my arm up behind my back and rushed me up the stairs and out of the building. "Asshole, you're going to jail. Wait til the sheriff gets here!" the dork from the headlock whined victoriously.
"Nah nah nah nah nah," I squinted my face and mocked his tone, like an eight-year-old on a playground. "Shut up, dork," I said. "Get me a manager and hope I don't sue the shit out of this place for inadequate security."
A guy in a tie showed up and I told him what was what. "Look, all I was doing was dancing and this idiot attacked me. You can't tell these clowns are security guards. I want a refund. Screw that, this is the last Boingo show ever. I wan't more than a refund." We argued back and forth and then the show ended. I spotted Shirelle walking out and grabbed her hand and left the security guy with an earful of fuckyous and we left.

With the Bunnies Like a Playboy

Mon. 10/23

Yeah yeah yeah. I don't think I have three pages of material in me right now. I forgot to payoff that ticket today. I hope they don't put out a warrant for my arrest. Sheet. ~~~~There are less than three weeks of school until I go on vacation for two months. I'll be leading an expedition to the tip of Baja and beyond for three weeks. Then I'll sub for ten days and make an extra thousand bucks and spend the next four weeks without a worry. I'll write and get high and wander around this city checking out bars and restaurants and museums. I'll see a college football game. I'll to to the library at UCLA and hit the bookstore at SC. I'll play my guitar. Catch a show at the Troubador. Ride my bike. Hike the Santa Monica Mountains. Take lots of photos. I'll see matinees and drink in coffeehouses, find one with a chess board. I'll take long naps, but not too many, and I'll stay up late. I'll go to a couple of hockey games, and I'll see Oingo Boingo's last show, since they were my favorites in high school. I'll go skiing! and hang out in the lodge by the fire and drink Schnapps and joke with the bunnies like I'm a playboy.

Wed 10/25
8:12 The 92nd World Series is on. In the first World Series, the Boston Pilgrims beat the Pittsburgh Pirates five games to three behind the pitching of Bill Dineen and Cy Young. The visiting team got half of every fifty cent ticket sold.

11/2 12:01 AM
I've got a sore left nostril, but nothing like the school nurse. She's had a horrific scab on the end of her nose for the last year and has taken to covering it with a Band-Aid. She's the SCHOOL NURSE! I see her smoking cigarettes in her car. Her skin is dusty, her hair is full of flour and shes got a scab the size of a quarter on her nose. Yeegh.~~~~I think I'll brush my teeth.

An Earful From Mr. Zurn

Wed.

I'm in this intern class. The teacher ain't half-bad; piquing my, uh, curiousity, she is. We're supposed to write about discipline management in classrooms. My main tool for discipline and management is my voice and its various decibels and tones. That and the good old Happy Face/Sad Face on the board, where I write the students' names and they can earn stars toward rewards and checks for consequences. The rewards are typically privileges like lining up first, or pencils, posters, kind words, etc Consequences involve lost recess, writing sentences, notes home, or worst of all, an earful from Mr. Zurn. I try to maintain a friendly environment where the children are comfortable, where their work is displayed, and where seldom is heard a discouraging word~~~~~~

Sat.

Ok. Here we go again. Ugh. Watching the '95 edition of SC vs. Notre Dame. The Trojans do not look well. They're not grasping with their tackles, the defense is flying all over the field and bouncing off the Irish ball carriers. Robinson is being completely out-coached by granny Holtz.~~~~