I caught a ride down to Tijuana with Griffin because he was going to be playing a Sewn Leather show. He said there wasn’t enough room in his tiny RV for LaPorsha but that obviously wasn’t true. I understood. He needed my undivided attention to help calm him down as he drove the RV. It wasn’t even a big big one – it was like a Dolphin, one of the ones you drop in the back of a pickup truck. But Griffin was a high strung little guy – the polar opposite of the terminally placid bearded pot bellied dudes that usually pilot vehicles of that weight class.
Every missed turn triggered a minor meltdown, let alone the whole logistics of crossing an international border, and he needed me to bounce off and redirect the nervous energy. It might not seem like it but I can be pretty Zen in the right interpersonal combinations.
The show was at a gallery called Otras Obras, another TODDPNYC joint. Todd is a bit like Jeffrey Deitch – I’m not sure if I like either of them as people or the changes they create in the art communities I am emotionally invested in but there’s no arguing with their taste. They know what’s cool a hell of a lot faster that any other curators or promoters punching in their weight class. I just don’t love watching the fights. I’m a Benny “The Jet” Urquidez type of guy – I love me an underdog.
I don’t know if it was Griffin or Todd P that got El Muertho de Tijuana on the show but I never would have moved to Tijuana if he hadn’t played that night. Balthazar is an incredible artist who should be world famous but I don’t think he can legally travel to other countries. I made the mistake of believing his goth tinged cumbia was more representative of what was happening in Tijuana’s hipster youth culture than it actually was.
My dream was to start a No-teño band – a portmanteau of No Wave and Norteño. My vision was a mariachi version of jazz influenced bands like The Contortions. In my fantasy I would immediately meet young, disenfranchised brass and bajo sexto players who were just itching to let me croon over a darker slowed down version of the oompah music they’d been raised with. The reality was that the kids were into indie rock and electronic dance music. People were friendly, welcoming and receptive enough to my increasingly-theatrical-while-musically-minimal style but writing songs in Spanish didn’t magically transform me into the flavor of the moment.
We ended up getting a cheap balcony apartment right next to Parque Teniente Guerrero where El Muertho would play almost daily for adoring crowds of working class families. His KISS style make-up and obvious unapologetic homosexuality gave him unquestionable populist appeal but he wasn’t headlining the bars and galleries I was managing to book shows at. I recorded myself playing La Bamba at a viscerally uncomfortable tempo on my mother’s piano but for most of my new songs I just pulled random instrumentals off of YouTube because I hadn’t found a band. If I had been smarter I would have taught myself guitar or keyboard and taken songs, like the one I’m about to type and translate, straight to the park:
Amor es palabra, es solo palabra
Pero Amar es trabajo
A la comida no tiene sabor
Sin una poca cebolla y ajo
Porque Estás llorando mi corazon mi vida
Este vez eres cebolla o cuchillo?
Es nuestra amor cierto como una gran cena
O solo es un bocadillo?
(Love is a word, only a word. But to love is work. Concerning food, it has no flavor without a bit of onion and garlic. Why are you crying my heart, my life? This time are you the onion or the knife? Is our love true like a grand banquet or is it only a snack?)
I was super obsessed with main stream Latin stars like José José and Juan Gabriel but unfortunately I never learned basic musicianship and I’m not much of a singer. I do still feel that writing in Spanish set off something special in me musically even if I never learned to speak it properly. Who knows? – maybe my dream No-teño band lives in the forests of Northern California and is just waiting to read these words and e-mail me.
We got into the comfortable rhythms of living on the Mexican side of the border. We lived above a water purification store where we could refill our five gallon bottles but really they were on every corner. I combed the Coahuila Flea Market for an empty propane canister for the water heater and walked ours down there to sell it when we were ready to leave. It’s an unwritten law of Mexican tenant culture that you don’t just leave it for the next person unless they are a particular friend of yours. They’re worth too much money. Once every couple months we would endure a day or two of cold showers until I heard the distinctive jingle of a passing Z Gas truck and ran the empty cylinder down to exchange it.
Our Flame-Point Siamese named Catrick made the move down with us and seemed to take to the Mexican Street Cat life right off the bat. He had already been going to parties around Los Angeles with a stylish blue leather harness from one of the souvenir shops and riding buses and trains with us. We left the window open a crack for him behind the bars and he got used to coming and going as he pleased. We had to go to Los Angeles for a little longer than usual to perform a series of pieces based on the Planets of Classical Astrology at Human Resources.
We left out lots of food and water but Catrick was pissed at us for not bringing him. There was an ancient mansion surrounded by overgrown weeds, palms and fruit trees at the center of our block – it had an old model white Cadillac sitting in its yard that Catrick must have felt drawn to because it was the same color as him. He decided to flaunt his independence by moving underneath it and sleeping in its shadow. He pretended not to hear me calling him, I knew because I saw his ears twitch, and I had to put food through the bars of the fence to lure him and quickly snatch him home. It became a ritual we would have to repeat every time we left for even a single night from then on out.
There was a family of pigeons living in the outside of the north facing stucco wall, the window looked toward the border and was covered in chicken wire so they wouldn’t move all the way in between human tenants. I watched a few dawns through that window but nearly every dusk. The only way I know how to explain it is that darkness fell differently on the Mexican side of the border – like I could look North and see the exact gradation where it shifted. Something about the way the shadows would stretch out and devour the spaces between buildings. Maybe it’s something as mundane as different styles of architecture and urban planning or maybe it was all in my head.
There was a really nice silver decal of the Seal of Solomon I had bought from Mercado Sonora in Mexico City on the glass – we left it behind when we moved and I’m sure the next tenants hated it if the realtors didn’t just peel it off themselves before showing it to anybody. On hot days the pigeons would stink through the wall and I’d worry that they were giving us little red bird mites. One of them got in one day and Catrick made a desperate NBA leap for it in the stairwell but barely brushed the tips of its feathers with his claws. I let it out and he was furious with me. The next week he dragged in a flattened one from the street as if he’d killed it and I made fun of him:
“You’re such a loser dude, everybody knows you’re not a car!”
There was a homeless guy on our block we called Jack Sparrow – he had dark skin and matted black dreads and dressed in layers of grime encrusted rags and old puffy winter jackets worn flat with age. I never saw him speak – not even to himself and never in any language. He had developed a particularly unsavory defense tactic – he would pull down his pants and thrust his filthy, unwashed ass outward while walking backwards like a crab. Everybody instinctually recoiled from it in horror; you always knew he was coming because pedestrian crowds visibly parted on the sidewalk.
One night we were walking on the side of town near the Cultural Center when a tiny striped female cat came darting from behind a book store and urgently cried for our attention. I saw her again on a walk I was taking on my own about a week later and carried her home. We called her Tabby. Of course she was pregnant. She ballooned up like a watermelon and LaPorsha tried to wake me up in excitement the night she had her kittens but I was dead to the world.
I should have woken up.
Tabby’s instincts hadn’t fully kicked in and her babies were tangled up in a mess of umbilical cords she had neglected to sever with her teeth. I was able to cut four of them free but a fifth one had been strangled to death when his writhing siblings accidentally tangled the cords around his neck. Tabby lay next to the haphazard knot of infants purring contentedly in blissful ignorance that she had just decisively fucked up the delivery. Without my intervention they would have all died or at the very least lost limbs.
I put the dead kitten in a plastic bag and walked downtown to throw it away as far from the apartment as possible. I went to Speedy’s to buy some Oxymorphone, often referred to as the Cadillac of opiates, and Smart & Final to buy some Glorias from the small batch Las Sevillanas brand. I was looking for anything that could help us feel better or at least feel shitty less conspicuously.
Catrick had been neutered young but really stepped up to the plate for the foster father role. He played with the kittens without ever getting too rough and used to sit with his paw resting on top of Tabby’s like a sweet Captain Save-a-Hoe. I gave some of the kittens names but nothing permanent – things like Isaiah and other ones from the Bible I wouldn’t even remember. It was fun for a while but the kittens got old and Tabby started acting feral again – everybody was done with everything.
Catrick climbed onto the spot where our shoulders met in the bed and pissed so it would get on both of us. He was trying to tell us he was ready to be the only cat in the house again. I put Tabby and her kittens in a box and walked to the Park to start giving them away. The first tuxedo boy went with this young guy with a Faux Hawk whose printed polo shirt showed he had one of the better-paying-than-average cell phone store jobs. The kitten dug its claws in and buried its face in his chest and he said “Vamanos” and walked off into the sunset. I think they were probably quite happy together.
I ended up by the big Cathedral where rows of faith healer’s stalls sold dried herbs, medals of the Saints and pieces of rattlesnake skin. Men who appeared to be disabled walked around wearing laminated signs advertising acupressure and miraculous touch. I was able to find what appeared to be good homes for all of the kittens but everybody declined to take Tabby with them even though she was still affectionate with her offspring. Finally I just had an adult female cat in a box and that isn’t the sort of thing you can give away on the streets of Tijuana – not even outside the biggest Cathedral. I slowly walked away from the box – it’s not like she was peeking over the side and watching me. I felt bad but there wasn’t really anything else I could do – at least there was more street food on that block than the one by a bookstore I had found her on.
Perhaps just setting her on the ground so she could run off would have been more honest – and by extension more kind. There’s a lot of things I’m still figuring out.
LaPorsha had a gig where she would commute to Los Angeles to work in a BDSM Dungeon but she wasn’t guaranteed sessions, the only thing that made money, every time she made the trip and Black sex workers are just generally undervalued outside of niche situations so it was pretty much a waste of time. I made little scraps of money bringing cartons of duty free USA Gold cigarettes into Mexico then back into the United States. We only smoked them if we were desperate – we liked the Lucky Strikes with a picture of a dead rat on the box. When friends came down to play shows I would make sure that everybody muled the maximum two cartons for me in both directions. I kept them in my kitchen cabinet and made sure to never cross in either direction without moving and selling cigarettes.
We could have lived down there forever if it wasn’t for the constant police harassment. LaPorsha wouldn’t get it when she was alone because they just assumed she was Haitian but she didn’t like going anywhere alone and I got it constantly. The cops acted like dogs who are only interested in a stick the moment another dog picks it up. We walked Catrick in the park and they came up and accused us of stealing a cat. I carried an old karaoke machine down the street and they accused me of stealing that. It didn’t help that we were on drugs and all of our dreams about Tijuana having a thriving Downtown 81 style Arts scene weren’t working out anyway.
We gathered all of the stuff from our apartment and put Catrick into a carrier and walked back into the United States. I had another side hustle selling promotional copies of the The Order DVD from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 because I had found a huge cache of them at the Amvets in Skyline Hills. I never should have brought them all into Mexico but it saved me a few bus rides when I had to cross over and drop one in the mail.
The Customs guys told me that I couldn’t have them because I was obviously selling them which was illegal and I couldn’t think of a convincing lie. They told me to go back into Mexico and come back without them and I didn’t have any friends by the border to go give them to. There was this new art space that had just popped up in the row of border storefronts. It was closed but I left them in front of it in the hope that somebody who knew what they were might find them and it wouldn’t be a complete waste.
They sold slowly over eBay and Amazon but it still felt like setting several hundred dollars on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t until I was already back in the United States that the idea hit me. I should have said that I played in either Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front and gave the DVDs away to promote my band because both groups are referenced on the packaging.
Maybe I should explain this more for anyone who might be interested. Both of these classic NYHC bands play special songs created for the art film as Matthew Barney’s character free climbs up the sloping ramp of the Guggenheim Museum in a special section intended to symbolize the five stages of initiation into Freemasonry. The short section on the DVD was the only part of Cremaster 3 made commercially available but the full three hour film is now on archive.org.
All of the Customs Agents looked like skinheads anyway but it’s probably like 100 to 1 that they wouldn’t know I was lying. They’d have had to have been into early hardcore and known enough about both bands to realize I couldn’t possibly be even a temporary member of either one.
It doesn’t matter anyway, whatever I didn’t lose then I would just end up losing later.
Even the cat.
[photo from El Muertho de Tijuana Instagram]
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 