Tijuana, Mexico
The first time, I went with my family and it was like “The Brady Bunch Goes to Tijuana.” We had lunch on the main tourist drag, Avenida Revolución, and had the sense of being on a trapeze without a harness. Vendors approached us, shouted offers, kissed my sister on the cheek, and we weren’t used to that. Golly! It’s not like the Mexico at EPCOT! It felt both thrilling and tame, maybe what it’s like to “dive” with sharks even though one of you is in a cage. We requested “no ice” in our drinks (“Don’t drink the water”). My brother bought brass knuckles (a “Mexican divorce” the vendor called them, laughing and demonstrating a punch) and slipped them into my mom’s purse, which got searched at the border, and they just tsk-tsked and took the brass knuckles away and we joked about how dear old Mom could have wound up in a Mexican prison. We were out maybe twenty bucks. We shrugged, crossed the border, and went to the San Diego Zoo.
The second time was with the ex-boyfriend I spent all of my twenties with. He was weird about travel, and got jealous any time I took a trip with my family or for work. He wanted to go to Tijuana so our checklists would match. He’d never been out of the country before and was determined we’d spend one night in Mexico, to one-up my family. So we booked a room at a hotel, one street off the main tourist drag. We chose to walk back up to the border instead of taking whatever shuttle we’d used on the way in. We wound up on a local bus with people going to work, and a mariachi band playing for tips. There were no brass knuckles, no incidents at the border.
There was no third time, but there could have been. I lived in San Diego, which is right next to Tijuana on the map, if you ignore the border, which of course you can’t. The jolly red trolley that rolled through downtown went as far south as Tijuana. “TIJUANA” its forehead blared, with what felt like audacity, at least to my Virginia eyes. I met a cocaine dealer named Columbo on the night of my 30th birthday, and through him I met a guy named Jaliv; I guess Columbo passed my number around. (I never did any drugs, in San Diego or anywhere else — booze was my thing — but I liked knowing these colorful characters. Golly! They don’t have these folks at EPCOT!) Jaliv invited me to “party” with him in a hot tub one time; Jaliv invited me to go “house hunting” with him in Tijuana another time. I always made excuses not to go. I only wanted the characters at arm’s length.
The closest I came that year was when a twentysomething couple who lived on their small rented yacht — I’d met them, walking along the bay, when they were drunk and fighting, having just lost a lot of money in the stock market; this was 2008, and these stories were common — invited me to tag along as a sort of waitress on one of the “sunset dinner cruises” they took millionaires on. I chopped vegetables below deck; I poured wine. When no one needed anything, I got to stand above the deck and see the sights: sea lions, and a Shell gas station just for boats, and clustered on the hillsides on the opposite side of the water — houses in Tijuana. The captain didn’t narrate this part of the cruise. The wind blew our hair all around; we sipped our wine and bobbed on the yacht and just stared.
