a Tijuana birthday:
BACK IN 1954, TIJUANA WAS A TOWN OF 19 THOUSAND CITIZENS...
BACK IN 1954, TIJUANA WAS A TOWN OF 19 THOUSAND CITIZENS...
MANY OF WHOM WERE EMPLOYED IN PROVIDING PLEASURE for visiting Americans. In 1920, Prohibition had become the law of the land, so thousands of Americans began crossing the border to do what they could not do at home: shoot crap, bet on horses, get drunk, and get laid. Movie stars came down from Hollywood with people to whom they were not married. Gangsters traveled from as far away and New York and Chicago. Women with money had abortions at a place called the Paris Clinic. Sailors arrived from San Diego to lose their virginity, get their first doses of clap, and too often to spend nights in the Tijuana jail. Sin did not depart with the end of Prohibition. The town boomed once again during World War Two, and thousands of more Americans would forever remember the bizarre sex shows and rampant prostitution of that era and the availability of something called marijuana and of how the whorehouses of the Zona Norte seemed always to be busy day-and-night. Sin was the city's major industry. Sunday, the 26th day of September in 1954, happened to be my 18th birthday that year, and four of us had traveled from Nebraska to Tijuana between registration day and the initial beginning of our college semester to celebrate.
On our first innocent night in town, Tijuana would become the the city in which I almost paid for the-one-and-only prostitute I would ever meet. Her name was Margarita, and she was a dancer at one of the nightclubs where Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth had once been among the clients, a place complete with gambling drinking, a big band, and fancy restaurant. "You have very nice blue-eyes," Margarita said, as she sat down at the table where me and my three college pals were sitting. She then gave me a smile and said that she had heard from one of my college friends that it was my birthday, asked me if I would like "a freebie," then pulled her blouse down a bit and gave me a small peek at her ample brown breasts. The band boomed behind me and I continued to stare at the wondrous sight until she pulled the top of her blouse back up. To me, she looked like an absolutely beautiful nymphet, a genuine love goddess. A vision which promptly evaporated the moment she promised me that she no longer had the clap. Much to the amusement of others, the four of us immediately got-up, paid our tab, and rushed out of the place, as the laughter continued to grow throughout the place until our final exit was made.
It was dusk on the following day, and the 4 of us were in a small restaurant on the Avendia Revolucion, dining with an older Mexican woman we'd met that afternoon. From our table, while the mariachis played aching old songs of love and betrayal, the Mexican woman said, "It is so beautiful. The music of Mexico." The woman's face trembled as she went on to talk about her husband and son. They had died within one year of each other. The husband of a heart attack after many years in the Mexican foreign service, the son in a senseless automobile accident along the border between Texas and Mexico. "When those things happened," she continued, "I couldn't live anymore. I didn't want to. I sat at home in the dark." She sipped her drink. "It was my daughter and 8 year-old grandson that insisted we go together to Puerto Vallarta, and that I take long walks on the beach. They said I had to heal myself. I had to see the sky and the sand and the sea and get well. Nature heals. Beauty heals. Don't you boys ever forget that. I hurt still at times.." She went on to say that the gray years had been erased by the sun and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she now worked in a small shop on Coaulia Avenida and was catching up on a decade of lost laughter. Not all the stories we heard in Tijuana contained such elements of melodrama and redemption.
But there were other tales of healing - a man from Brazil who had lost a daughter to drugs; another from Iowa who had lost a career to whiskey; a third from Britain had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Tijuana to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time. Among the ordinary Mexicans, life seemed sweeter. We watched great crowds of children play along the beach. Each day of our stay was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families. The Mexicans were friendly, even kind, but they were more concerned with their children than with visitors. Outside of the Zona Norte it was a good town for walking. We saw flowers growing everywhere: on the streets, on balconies, in small private gardens. The stalls of markets displayed watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, avocado. Street vendors sold shaved ice and coconut milk.
There were also irritations. In our small hotel the cost of newspapers, aspirin, and other necessities were extortionate. At night a small band played at poolside, playing watered-down American music, instead of the vibrant music of Mexico. We listened to banal versions of My Way and The Lion Roars Tonight. The combination was so deadly that we almost lost our appetite. "That is what the Americans want," a waiter said to us one night. "It's terrible, no? But they want this. They want to feel at home." When walking, taxi drivers came upon us like piranhas. Many of them were displaced Americans or Canadians, trying to look respectable; others were young and old Mexicans. It was an infuriating hustle. Staff members ushered us to restaurants. We suspected that was probably a racket with the restaurant owners kicking back money to the steerers.
Late one afternoon, we walked into a small shop selling Mexican folk art, and spent the remainder of the day with the owner, a woman by the name of Jillian Marcos, who had been in Tijuana for more than 20 years. She featured the best of the local painters, and for many, her shop served as a hangout and communications center for the artists, a place for hearing gossip, making contacts, and buying small gifts for friends. She produced cold drinks, smoked a cigarette, and talked about Tijuana. "First of all, it's really a street town," she said. "Everybody is out in the streets. You see your friends there. You meet new people there. The town is not social; it's certainly not normal with all the tourists coming over the border. But you can wear what you want to wear here, go as you want to go. It's certainly not like Acapulco. My friends come from Los Angeles and New York to enjoy the tawdry side-of-life. God knows, they have a good time. But the thing that they enjoy the best is the air in the morning. Here, the weather is always great. I go to New York and it's cold outside. I go to Phoenix, and it's blistering. Here the windows are always open. You can't really capture Mexico in photographs or paintings, because they leave out two essentials, sound and smell. In the states the windows are always closed and the air is imported and smells like cement. And another thing, there are too many people around for there to be any danger. I have always felt safe."
We never felt menaced in Tijuana. There were no obvious hoodlums, no street gangs, no dope peddlers. We never saw the kind of homeless people who now collect on the streets of America like piles of human wreckage. Even with the infamous Zona Norte, the town beyond was built upon the hard foundation of the Mexican family. In the evenings there were young men flirting with young women as they do in the evening in a thousand Mexican towns. You could hear the growl of the sea. You could dine in many restaurants.
On our last evening in Tijuana, we went to a wonderful authentic Mexican market called El Popo, filled with stacks of fresh cheeses, sweets, wooden spoons, piles of dried chilies, pinatas, and Mexican curios. We walked out to the street just as the sun was setting, watched kids pedaling tricycles down the hill and country people in sandals and straw hats gazing at the wonders of the metropolis, watched a carpenter laboring with an artist's intensity in a small crowded shop. As the afternoon turned to evening, we looked up at a disco above a large restaurant, and in the window, we could see that it was filled with with dark-skinned girls in tight bright dresses, the daily colored denizens of the Mexican night.
I carried all of them home with me from Tijuana, along with the sound of a rooster at dawn and the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea and the magnificent memory of the Mexican people.
It had been a wonderful adventure and a glorious 18th birthday...
On our first innocent night in town, Tijuana would become the the city in which I almost paid for the-one-and-only prostitute I would ever meet. Her name was Margarita, and she was a dancer at one of the nightclubs where Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth had once been among the clients, a place complete with gambling drinking, a big band, and fancy restaurant. "You have very nice blue-eyes," Margarita said, as she sat down at the table where me and my three college pals were sitting. She then gave me a smile and said that she had heard from one of my college friends that it was my birthday, asked me if I would like "a freebie," then pulled her blouse down a bit and gave me a small peek at her ample brown breasts. The band boomed behind me and I continued to stare at the wondrous sight until she pulled the top of her blouse back up. To me, she looked like an absolutely beautiful nymphet, a genuine love goddess. A vision which promptly evaporated the moment she promised me that she no longer had the clap. Much to the amusement of others, the four of us immediately got-up, paid our tab, and rushed out of the place, as the laughter continued to grow throughout the place until our final exit was made.
It was dusk on the following day, and the 4 of us were in a small restaurant on the Avendia Revolucion, dining with an older Mexican woman we'd met that afternoon. From our table, while the mariachis played aching old songs of love and betrayal, the Mexican woman said, "It is so beautiful. The music of Mexico." The woman's face trembled as she went on to talk about her husband and son. They had died within one year of each other. The husband of a heart attack after many years in the Mexican foreign service, the son in a senseless automobile accident along the border between Texas and Mexico. "When those things happened," she continued, "I couldn't live anymore. I didn't want to. I sat at home in the dark." She sipped her drink. "It was my daughter and 8 year-old grandson that insisted we go together to Puerto Vallarta, and that I take long walks on the beach. They said I had to heal myself. I had to see the sky and the sand and the sea and get well. Nature heals. Beauty heals. Don't you boys ever forget that. I hurt still at times.." She went on to say that the gray years had been erased by the sun and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she now worked in a small shop on Coaulia Avenida and was catching up on a decade of lost laughter. Not all the stories we heard in Tijuana contained such elements of melodrama and redemption.
But there were other tales of healing - a man from Brazil who had lost a daughter to drugs; another from Iowa who had lost a career to whiskey; a third from Britain had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Tijuana to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time. Among the ordinary Mexicans, life seemed sweeter. We watched great crowds of children play along the beach. Each day of our stay was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families. The Mexicans were friendly, even kind, but they were more concerned with their children than with visitors. Outside of the Zona Norte it was a good town for walking. We saw flowers growing everywhere: on the streets, on balconies, in small private gardens. The stalls of markets displayed watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, avocado. Street vendors sold shaved ice and coconut milk.
There were also irritations. In our small hotel the cost of newspapers, aspirin, and other necessities were extortionate. At night a small band played at poolside, playing watered-down American music, instead of the vibrant music of Mexico. We listened to banal versions of My Way and The Lion Roars Tonight. The combination was so deadly that we almost lost our appetite. "That is what the Americans want," a waiter said to us one night. "It's terrible, no? But they want this. They want to feel at home." When walking, taxi drivers came upon us like piranhas. Many of them were displaced Americans or Canadians, trying to look respectable; others were young and old Mexicans. It was an infuriating hustle. Staff members ushered us to restaurants. We suspected that was probably a racket with the restaurant owners kicking back money to the steerers.
Late one afternoon, we walked into a small shop selling Mexican folk art, and spent the remainder of the day with the owner, a woman by the name of Jillian Marcos, who had been in Tijuana for more than 20 years. She featured the best of the local painters, and for many, her shop served as a hangout and communications center for the artists, a place for hearing gossip, making contacts, and buying small gifts for friends. She produced cold drinks, smoked a cigarette, and talked about Tijuana. "First of all, it's really a street town," she said. "Everybody is out in the streets. You see your friends there. You meet new people there. The town is not social; it's certainly not normal with all the tourists coming over the border. But you can wear what you want to wear here, go as you want to go. It's certainly not like Acapulco. My friends come from Los Angeles and New York to enjoy the tawdry side-of-life. God knows, they have a good time. But the thing that they enjoy the best is the air in the morning. Here, the weather is always great. I go to New York and it's cold outside. I go to Phoenix, and it's blistering. Here the windows are always open. You can't really capture Mexico in photographs or paintings, because they leave out two essentials, sound and smell. In the states the windows are always closed and the air is imported and smells like cement. And another thing, there are too many people around for there to be any danger. I have always felt safe."
We never felt menaced in Tijuana. There were no obvious hoodlums, no street gangs, no dope peddlers. We never saw the kind of homeless people who now collect on the streets of America like piles of human wreckage. Even with the infamous Zona Norte, the town beyond was built upon the hard foundation of the Mexican family. In the evenings there were young men flirting with young women as they do in the evening in a thousand Mexican towns. You could hear the growl of the sea. You could dine in many restaurants.
On our last evening in Tijuana, we went to a wonderful authentic Mexican market called El Popo, filled with stacks of fresh cheeses, sweets, wooden spoons, piles of dried chilies, pinatas, and Mexican curios. We walked out to the street just as the sun was setting, watched kids pedaling tricycles down the hill and country people in sandals and straw hats gazing at the wonders of the metropolis, watched a carpenter laboring with an artist's intensity in a small crowded shop. As the afternoon turned to evening, we looked up at a disco above a large restaurant, and in the window, we could see that it was filled with with dark-skinned girls in tight bright dresses, the daily colored denizens of the Mexican night.
I carried all of them home with me from Tijuana, along with the sound of a rooster at dawn and the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea and the magnificent memory of the Mexican people.
It had been a wonderful adventure and a glorious 18th birthday...
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