Imperial (176 page)

What is the secret? I asked.

They don’t tell anyhow, because for their secret they get twenty-five dollars an hour, a hundred bucks for four hours.
³⁴⁶

Celery, he continued, is raining, and broccoli is lots of moisture sometimes dropping down; no good. In six hours I make a hundred twenty bucks for celery. For eighty to a hundred pounds they pay eighty-nine cents.

So much for Angel, who undoubtedly has never been cheated out of a dollar in his life. So much for green wealth. Now, what about other reliable Imperial products?

The last time Lupe had been to the Thirteen Negro, the going rate had been five pesos a dance. Now it was ten. He was horrified; he couldn’t believe it.
Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.

At the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico, the snooty half-Chinese girl he liked parleyed with him through the glass door; so it came out that she would be two hundred and fifty pesos, naked from the waist down only, probably for ten minutes maximum, so he was despondent; he remembered when that would have been a hundred pesos.
What a great choice!

A bored and sleepy girl who sat down on the steps of the Hotel Altamirano with her head resting on the wall offered to strip from the waist down and present herself for up to thirty minutes for two hundred and fifty pesos. That’s not bad! Lupe remarked. Licking her lips, she milked her giant breasts at him.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.

Chapter 187

IMPERIAL BEACH (2005)

Taking the road to the right of the Tia Juana road, we come to the seaside, just beyond the head of the Bay, and find the Initial Monument, which marks the start of the boundary line . . .

—Douglas Gunn, 1887

I
n fact, Imperial Beach does possess an avenue called Date, but this memorial-ization of the entity which I call Imperial is silver with fog and weeps with trees. On silver nights one makes the final west turn off Seacoast Drive, onto the long pier where fishermen stand luring dreams as big as swordfish by means of the stinking clams and mussels they won two or three days since at low tide; here lies a clamshell as silver as the fog’s ear. Looking over their shoulders I see the white foam-snakes wriggle in upon their sides, parallel to one another in the black water-night. (From my Imperial nights I remember many a train like a darkness-spined beast; I remember occasional trees, the Salton Sea a mirror of purple darkness. The siren songs of trains in Imperial equal the waves of Imperial Beach; both would carry me away if I only had a
pollo
’s courage or need.) Closer to the lights of the city the night is blacker and less alive; that must be beach. House-lights rake sand accidentally; mostly, however, that zone remains as unknown as Imperial itself. But to the south, at the very end of the restless black water, a light pulses in the silver air: that’s our Coast Guard, marking the delineation of Northside and Southside which continues indefinitely out to sea.

I love it here. Imperial Beach equals almost perfect blankness, at night, at least; and foggy days are nearly as good as true Imperial nights. I never liked Bombay Beach, whose flat hard streets stink; had I ever made a friend there, I could have entered somebody’s boarded-up trailer with a deck on it; from that deck, or even from the levee, which resembles the border wall, I could have dreamed my way into the Salton Sea. Oh, cold bulbs, cold lights! Trailers with no lights, a satellite dish glazed with dust, and the grey mountains of the moon beyond fences! Almost half the houses wore lights on them in Bombay Beach. The winter haze was so rich and cold . . . Give me Imperial Beach! If it’s not in Imperial, I’ll make it so, going farther and farther away from that accidental and salt-poisoned sea until I’ve come back to Mother Pacific . . .

But it already is so, and has been ever since the line of 1848 cut away Northside from Southside. Imperial Beach, which resembles El Centro much less than El Centro does, say, Dateland, Arizona, is no less El Centro’s sister city for all her ocean fog; the
pollos
make her so.—They do work most Americans wouldn’t do, said Border Patrolman Dan Murray. And tonight, in the chilly darkness and in spite of Operation Gatekeeper, somebody must be creeping northward . . .

Chapter 188

SAN DIEGO (2003-2006)

Subdivisions in various localities have already proven highly successful and flourishing settlements have sprung up on half-barren fields.

—Ludwig Louis Salvator, recollections from the nineteenth century’s “Sunny Seventies”

A
t rainy times San Diego extends all the way to Los Angeles, with water shimmering out of palm trees and white warehouse walls becoming foggy sky. The median strips of freeways turn lush almost instantly; this is how California was supposed to be.

Kindly San Diego, as you know, has offered to pay for the lining of the All-American Canal. All she asks in return is to drink ninety-nine years’ worth of the water thus saved from seeping into Mexico.

San Diego may be excluded from the entity which I call Imperial, but she enjoys membership in the Water Drinkers’ Club; and on rainy days she grows new houses beneath the same wet skies as in Fullerton or Santa Ana; she excavates sodden meadows as in Irvine; here in San Diego by the ocean where water is trembling on top of ashcans, and in the shadows of recycling barrels on sidewalks, I gaze south to green fields in the fog: “inhumanly” (what does this word mean?) straight fat stripes of green between thin stripes of grey.

Sometimes it does seem at those rainy times that the fog thickens as one goes south from Los Angeles, the foliage ever more flourishing, almost voluptuous; then quite suddenly we have come into a foggy orchard country; white-foamed streams slobber down through the rain; we’re in the pages of
Ramona.
The flowers, ferns and fan-palms of San Juan Capistrano can trick me into believing the homestead promotions of the railroad companies. But then the coast grows arid again as one rides into San Diego, whose water-glass is eternally half empty.

And yet,
WATER IS HERE
, nourishing flocks of little white houses and trees, hummocky turf out of Emily Brontë, and then there is the grey-green ocean, with seagulls swooping in and out of the shining pavement-rectangles of another Ocean Parkscape, the fog as thick as ale-foam now over the beach houses, clean black ribbon of wet road, endless rectangle of beach, infinite rectangle of white-scribbled dark sea, trees on parking lots; the sea-horizon has softened; the land-edge is crookeder than usual, thanks to the wind. A pier stands on centipede legs, flying the American flag. The beaches are empty and clean. Sometimes the ocean darkens, particularly over dark stones, but a prominent meteorologist assures me that this phenomenon has more to do with the increasing darkness of the clouds. Now sea and fog comprise one square punctuated by rain-sounds; the square goes upward infinitely but it is underlined by dark greenness.

In San Diego I remember rain on the night-black parking lots of Tijuana, bulky female figures bowing under umbrellas as the green or pink glows from motel lobbies strike them in the shoulders; I remember rain running off roofs, and the taste of solvents coming down from Otay Mesa. San Diego is less smelly, more “natural,” richer of course. San Diego’s rain is clean.

In San Diego, an Imperial Avenue runs right through the Mexican neighborhoods. Then where does Imperial Avenue go? Follow the old plank road through the Algodones Dunes and then you will know.

San Diego is lovely and perfect.
“Moisture Means Millions.”
San Diego is lush white lace on the fat waves, the sea shining simultaneously silver and gold. San Diego is the glints and sparkles of water in tidal estuaries. Poor San Diego! Her water’s all salt!

In San Diego it is a cool summer day in December, palm trees whipping in the sea breeze, crisp shadows, blue sky. An American flag flies from atop an old hotel. Banana leaves wave above parking lots of glittering cars. I see a billboard for Mel Gibson’s new movie “Apocalypto,” and an advertising blimp hovers over so many cars that the farthest ones are washed out by distance. The skyscrapers of San Diego’s core huddle compactly amidst the sprawl. The freeways are lush with ivy, ice plants and palm trees. This lovely coast remains verdant between and among the concretions of humanity. But just outside the city we find this verdancy to be actually a human artifact; for the hills, though bushy, are semi-arid, the dirt tan or even white, showing through between grass-clumps like bald patches in a worn carpet.

Chapter 189

TIJUANA (2003-2005)

Bring me the sunflower so that I might transplant it into burning fields of alkali . . .

—Eugenio Montale, before 1982

A
t the beach stood the white pyramid to replace the one which had been shrine-caged in wrought iron—oh, that had been a very, very long time ago, when Tijuana was still Aunt Juana’s hot springs and there had been no wall. There was wall now, all right. On the stele was incised LIMITE DE LA REPUBLICA MEXICANA and beside those words the graffito FUCK INS.
³⁴⁷
It was a foggy Sunday afternoon. Every moment, a couple or sometimes just a man would approach, carrying a little child, and pointing at the wall so that the child would understand, its guardian would explain: The gringos stole our land.—These were the words I heard them say, more or less. Occasionally a man would come alone to brood; once a man came with his infant girl clutched against his heart; he gazed at the stele without telling her anything, but his face came alive with anger and hate.

In the course of my journalistic career I have visited quite a number of countries which do not hold the United States of America in great esteem. One of my criteria for categorizing them is how they treated me. I remember Yemen, where they threw stones at me; and Serbia, where one night, fearing the worst, I barricaded the door of my hotel room with furniture; but I also remember Taliban-era Afghanistan, where people’s kindness, even if it might frequently be tinctured with reserve, almost never got superseded by their hatred for the nation I came from. What about Southside? Very few Mexicans seemed to hold me personally responsible for what my government had done back in 1848. A weary flick of the hand was my answer when I asked them how they felt about losing half their territory. The inhabitants of Mexican Imperial confessed with engaging graciousness that they benefited from the border economy. They liked American pickup trucks and movies. On the other hand, the existence of the wall, the actions of the Border Patrol and the examinations they endured whenever they crossed the line, all these they considered to be continuing insults. If I associated myself with any of those three things, I could expect to be treated accordingly—not by any means to get a stone in my face as in Yemen, but to be myself insulted or occasionally threatened. When I stood on the Calexico side of the so-called Friendship Wall, gazing through the bars as I waited for José López from Jalisco to give me his latest progress report on the Chinese tunnels, the people on the Mexican side, assuming as I suppose that I was looking at them like animals in a zoo, sometimes sent back toward me unkind words and glances. But as soon as I had gone half a dozen steps into Mexicali, I could almost have been one of them; they were friendly with me; if they wanted something of me, they made their proposition with respect.

In Tijuana that friendliness and that respect were less in evidence than elsewhere in Imperial. I am not saying that people were rude; I have been treated well in Tijuana on any number of occasions; still, it did not feel exactly untoward if when simply going about my business in Tijuana I was made to feel as I felt when I peered through the Friendship Wall.

And so, as I stood by the boundary stele on that hazy white Sunday, I was not made to feel entirely comfortable. For instance, that bearded man with the little girl in his arms, after he glared at the limit of his Republic he also glared at me. Frankly, I felt more defiant than intimidated, for not only had I never fought in the Mexican War, I never supported it; so I looked right back into his face; then we both gazed elsewhere—namely, at the wall itself, which continued westward, painted with figures and rust-continents, descending steeply into the grey sea.

Directly north of the stele itself was a park, closed off perhaps for security reasons; and here a foxlike little dog stared curiously into Southside. (Never mind the white Bronco with the Border Patrolman inside; skip the Nightbuster; of course they were both there, too.) Presently the dog entered a hole and came back into Mexico.

I heard that a hundred years ago there used to be a Tia Juana Hot Spring, I said.

Aguas termales,
said a man on the beach. It’s still there.

The Fiesta Inn still has water from the hot springs, said a woman.

In the Colonia Twentieth of November there’s one, the man said. He was a commercial printer.

What makes Tijuana special?

He grimaced thoughtfully and said: The climate. It always changes, he said proudly.

If you were a millionaire would you stay here or go back to Chiapas?

I’d stay here, because everything is close at hand.

By
everything
I suppose he meant the Otay Mesa on the road toward Tecate, and its inhabitants gazing down through the brown air at a sprawl of grimy little houses, the tomb of Juan the Soldier, the blue-and-pink two-storey hotel in Matamoros whose first storey was a nightclub; the Río Tecate, which comprised approximately as much water as the Río Nuevo; a midget who was not unlike the large-footed young woman sculpted of wood by some long dead Aztec; with inturned hands she offered her conical breasts to the border traffic; her vacant white shell-eyes and the two white shell-teeth in her dark mouth gaped with cunning, holy idiocy; behind her ran the tiny auto-glass shops, seafood restaurants, gas stations, fast food and tire shops; the small lines, mostly of men, seeking jobs at Óptica Sola and Tyco at seven-fifteen on a Monday morning; graffiti’d apartments and mini-malls, taco stands and hubcap stands, a graffiti’d metal fence, then concrete housettes in the dirt mountains; a woman standing on a sidewalk island, holding in her arms her sleeping son who was almost as large as she; clouds swirling behind wires; hissing trucks and buses, layered clouds, solitary men with caps on their heads and hands in their pockets, standing by factory fences; steps made of tires set flat into the steep mud; gasoline haloes in the pothole-puddles; the same smell as at Metales y Derivados, a smell as of pencils—it was the
maquiladora
where they made furniture—white light glaring through the holes in the clouds; and then, beyond a fence, puddles and garbage, swampy ground and green grass and mountains, eroded dirt with many strata.—The worst and best things in the whole country are happening here, said a reporter for
La Frontera.
—Shall I tell you one of the best things? It is that Tijuana’s parking lots are so often named after women. Another is that within her blind archway the Virgin of Guadalupe towers over all, contemplating the mysteries across from Dorian’s department store.