Mexican jail
The first three months at the house were happy, with just Kim, Harry O. and me fixing many things up in our off hours. Kim built himself a little bedroom out of a storeroom behind the kitchen. The front deck, built from scratch, came out quite nice, with benches built into the railings and back wall, and a six-inch-wide top railing to set beers on. It could seat eight comfortably.
In April, Bones drove down and paid us a visit for a few days. He’d brought some Acid and the four of us took it one evening. The others went out on the town but I stayed home for some reason and sitting and mussing on the living room couch, in the gloom of evening, casually listening to the radio, when I heard the song ‘The World is a Ghetto’. This affected me in a profound way. It pierced my soul with sadness and I believed for a few hours that the world was mostly ugly and life a futile and negative experience. Luckily, such thoughts disappeared with the high. I went to bed and woke up to sunlight. But I decided to never do Acid again. That morning, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, and saw that Bones had gotten so high the night before that he’d climbed up several telephone poles near the house, (I don’t know how) right up to the wires, and put branches of palms in them, to ‘decorate them’, as he explained.
Just four blocks from our house on the main drag of Ocean Beach was the popular local bar to which Kim and I would resort every few days. This was the bar I’d go to after church. There were lots of steady’s there and we made friends. Some would occasionally drop by our place and as Spring advanced that happened more and more. The great advantage of our living room over the bar was that you could light up a joint in it and that happened to be the one pastime a great many residents of Ocean Beach enjoyed. ‘Fama volat’ (fame flies). Compounding this increase in company was that one of our new friends was a bartender who was in a position where he worked that he could regularly steal quite a bit of booze from a large storehouse, and he enjoyed our get-togethers so much he started bringing over cases of beer and bottles of whisky, for everyone to enjoy, gratis. This started attracting freeloaders and shadier types to our house, some of whom we invited back if they had pretty girlfriends.
I remember we once went on a trip to Mexico with this bartender, on a whim, Kim and I, he and another of his friends (I forget both their names) in his car. He had a friend’s house he could borrow for the night, right on the beach, some thirty miles south of Tijuana. We drove straight there, and with his free liquor in tow, had a raucous night.
The next morning, hungover and ready to drive back, we stopped in a little town near the house, walked into a small, corner grocery store and each bought a bottle of Corona. We asked the fat, middle-aged owner behind the counter if it was okay to drink the beer on the bench outside the store. He says it’s fine and cheerfully opens the bottles for us. We are barely on our second sip on that bench on a bright Sunday morning when a police car pulls up and the two, armed officers tell us to cram into the back seat. They drive us to their station just a few doors down. They confiscate our beers and put us in a holding cell. After a few awkward seconds they tell us drinking in public is a crime and they will let us out when we pay the fine. “How much is the fine” we humbly ask? “Empty your pockets and show us your wallets,” was the reply. We complied and the fine happened to be exactly all the cash we had on us. Kim had only a few dollars. I had over twenty, so did the other fellow. But our bartender host had a hundred-dollar bill which quickly disappeared. Then we were freed. I asked, since we paid the fine, if we could have our beers back. They were sitting on a table right beside us, still cold, little drops of condensation dripping down the necks of the bottles. ‘No’, said the head officer, grabbing one bottle and taking a swig, motioning to his fellow officers to do the same. We drove straight home, non-stop and fast, driven, one might say, by Mexican justice.
