Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

After a long silence in which no one seemed to move, Rooney said, guardedly, “Let’s go. It’s three o’clock now. It’ll probably take us a while to find the Woolworth’s.”

  “I have a terrible headache,” Jenny said, rubbing one hand up across her temple.

  “Do you have an aspirin?”

  I threw a half dollar onto the table and slid out of the booth. As I stalked to the car, Jenny was bugging the waitress for an Empirin or somedamnthing. I got into the car and lit a cigarette. It tasted like dust, and so did the day.

  Getting into Tijuana, unlike the crossover to Hell, involves no Stygian water-ride, and if one of the border guards be named Charon, at least he has had the good sense to have it Anglicized. At that point, all differences cease.

  We drove up to the big white pass-through that stretched across the road. The parking lot on the American side was not filled. Had it been a weekend, with the jai alai, the dog and horse races at Caliente, the bullfights, the lots would have been banged to the fences; but this was Thursday, and midday was not too far advanced, and traffic was steady, but not a flood, as it would be the next day.

  We were waved through without a passing glance from the patrolmen. Does no one smuggle anything into Mexico?

  A few feet beyond the pass-through, the car told me we were in Mexico, and I knew why most people left their vehicles on the American side (a single reason out of three good ones). The pavement came to a halt, was replaced by a three-foot stretch of open dust-dirt, and then resumed as pavement again. But a return to pavement so marked I knew I had left the United States. The Mexican pavement was in chunks. It was pocked and upthrust as though a decade of cars had gone over it without the most minor attention by repair gangs. We bumped and jounced across the passway, the Magnette clanging like a dinner gong.

  (The other two reasons, incidentally, are that if you have an accident involving your car in Tijuana, whether you are right or wrong, struck or striker, the car is impounded, they throw you up under the jail, and only a feisty bribe will get you out; the third reason is that hubcaps, car seats, dash clocks, luggage racks, headlamps and other minor items have an uncanny habit of vanishing from the auto in question. Some contend it is the highly spiced atmosphere of the town.)

  We passed through the Mexican side with even less event than the Yankee entrance. Fat chance they’d keep out a spendable dollar.

  Once through the arch, and a left turn, it was an open scene from Hogarth. Perhaps Hieronymus Bosch. Possibly Dali. Definitely Dante.

  Filth.

  The word comes unbidden. A hundred, two hundred rickety taxis, all parked in rows, waiting for the turistas. The street hard-packed dirt and broken concrete. Dozens of barefoot urchins, scuddy in their dingy rags, clutching cigar boxes full of Chiclets to be sold at a dime or half dollar for a penny pack. Ramshackle buildings, swayleaning as though propped from behind with poles. A miasma of road dust rising turning in the sunbeaten air. A sense of hurry, of expectation, of fear and sickness and something about to happen. A faint electric stir of movement within the mass gibbering movement of dirty hack drivers and shawl-wrapped women hustling for the dollars. A tone of impending disaster, always omnipresent. Was this perhaps the stench that filled Pompeii before it dissolved in fire? Did Sodom or Gomorrah have to contend with that stink no Air-Wick could ever contain, that color of madness in the wind and in the very horizon line?

  I gunned the Magnette and pulled out of the middle of the maelstrom. We banged down the street, between two untidy rows of temporary structures, all of which were selling car upholstery. Tuck and roll shops. Best bargains. Get it here, installed in ten minutes, satisfaction guaranteed. All misspelled.

  Cover-up shops for stripping and repainting cars; hot cars; stolen cars; lost cars; impounded cars; and legitimate tucking and rolling, as well. Guaranteed to last at least till you recrossed the border.

  A huge sign across the end of the road bellowed:

  BIENVENIDAS AMIGOS!

  Welcome, suckers. Unfurl your desires and let us see under which banners you skulk. We have it here, guaranteed, satisfaction 100 percent or we give you a dose of the clap free!

  A clutch of buildings clogged the roadside on either hand. One of them said MARRIAGE DIVORCE CAR INSURANCE on a sloppily lettered sign. A second advised FULL COVER INSURANCE WHILE IN MEXICO GUARANTEED! A third reversed the order (or perhaps the owner was more of a cynic) by offering DIVORCES QUICK—MARRIAGES—NOTARY. Notary what, I never paused to inquire. We did a dog-leg and turned up another street, in as hideous a condition as the one we’d just left, following a white arrow-sign that said DOWNTOWN TI.

  Someone had, perhaps, bitten off the remaining section of the sign. Mad dogs, I am told, are not uncommon in such heavy climates.

  Farther into TJ, the incredible poverty and squalor of the people struck us like a hammer blow. “MiGod, it’s unbelievable!” said Rooney, as a gaggle of barefooted, dirt-smeared children raced directly across our path, causing me to swerve into a huge chuckhole. They ran across the razor-edged rocks of the road as though their feet were wound with asbestos.

  Slat-houses tottered at every curb. Porches boasted fat old women, whose only joys were watching the horrors the young girls had to endure. On every bit of habitable land, someone had thrown up a jury-rigged shack. Garbage cans lived more open lives than the people whose refuse they received. Every half-block there were one or more stores advertising LICORES.

  I could understand it; the only way to live and stay sane in such a cesspool, was to stay liquored-up constantly. We drove on.

  After what seemed a Minotaur’s maze of twistings and turnings, through streets littered with animate and inanimate garbage, with the castoff and the downcast, with the vile and the pitiful, we saw a street of neon lights and brighter buildings. Traffic was incredible. The taxis moved as though their wheels were about to be revoked. Pedestrians leaped out—perhaps hoping they would be struck down by a rich gringo—and masses of humanity surged across at intersections which had never known the luxury of a stoplight.

  We drove down past the old bullring, the Toreo de Tijuana. The new one was up on the hill overlooking the town, but the turistas go there, and for a real bloodbath corrida, the townsfolk go to the old ring, where the toreros must perform with more skill and passion. A bright, romantic poster outside the ring proclaimed:

  6 LA TRASQUILA 6 THE GREATEST BULLFIGHTING FIGURES CARLOS ARRUZA (The Mexican Cyclone) FERMIN ESPINOZA MILLITA (The Master of Masters) AND SILVERIO PEREZ (The Pharaoh from Texcoco) FIGHTING TO DEATH IMPOSING BULLS FROM 6 LA TRASQUILA 6!!

  I did not read this sign all at once, then. Much later I was to have painful opportunity to study it at my leisure, or a copy thereof, while lying on my back. At the time, all I saw was the bright poster color and the word ARRUZA. We continued driving toward what had to be the center of town.

  As we drove, seedy-looking men with rolled newspapers leaped out onto the street, trying to wave our car into whatever empty lot they had appropriated as a parking area. We drove straight down into the heart of town. The roads were a little better now, on a par with a neglected side street or country road in the States. I knew I’d have to have the Magnette completely overhauled when I got back. Every seam was sprung; every bolt was loose.

  We cruised around, and finally I spotted the Woolworth’s. It looked like any plastic-and-chrome eyesore from the States, but among the filthy, falling-down shops and bars and arcades of downtown Tijuana, it was shining, gleaming, sparkling, a reassurance that stability still existed. We rolled slowly toward the big store, and I saw an empty parking place on the street. “She said behind the Woolworth’s, in their parking lot,” Jenny said.

  It was the first sentence out of her mouth since we’d left the coffee shop in National City.

  I pulled around the side of the building, and started into the lot. An old Mexican with gold teeth came running out of a rickety guard-shack and tried to take a dollar from me. I asked if this was parking for Woolworth’s. My S
panish was passably understandable, but not enough to get elected mayor. He answered in English, almost. “Ess park for no-whan, no Wowlwort’s, ees pay for aver’whan!” And he continued to shove his hand through the window. His hand looked as though the last time it had been introduced to soap was when Calvin Coolidge approved the World Court. “I’m waiting for someone, I’ll only be here a few minutes,” I tried to tell him. I should have known better; it was a stupid thing to say, a turista remark. He didn’t give a damn if I was there for a minute or the decade. I backed up and found myself on the street, with the old man still screaming imprecations at me, possibly for running my nasty old car across his valuable dust.

  The empty parking space was still there. I pulled into it, and as I negotiated the bumper of the car against the high curb, I realized I was being “navigated” from the sidewalk by a little boy of nine or ten. Unasked, he had taken me as his mark. A moment before he had not been there, but like some sort of ambulatory plant he had sprung from the shadows or the sidewalk, and was hand-waving me into the slot. Then he reached into a cigar box he carried, pulled out a penny and leaped at the parking meter. He beat the other four kids to the meter by a split-instant. They were identical in a tragic, sorry way. Each was his own person, but each dwelled within a coat of the same Tijuana dirt, and so they looked alike. The kid that had thrust the penny into the meter was around the car and trying to get my door open before I’d turned off the motor.

  Rooney reached across Jenny and unlocked the door Jenny had just locked. “They’re just children, Jenny.”

  She looked as though she’d eaten a ripe persimmon. “But they’re so filthy!” The Louvre portrait of squeamish. Her nose wrinkled. Her lips vanished.

  “It comes from not bathing,” I said, snappishly. “And from having to sleep in a doorway. Offensive as hell, ain’t it.”

  She didn’t answer. By this time we had parted company for good and always, and for a second a wisp of thought crossed my mind how this adventure had altered all our relationships to one another. Then the kid had my door open and was demanding I pay him for parking my car, for his having waved his hands to steer me in, for his having put a penny in the meter.

  “Doe-lahr, Señor,” he urged, “doe-lahr!”

  I shook my head no. He would not be put off. “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” he kept saying, not shouting, just demanding, in a tone of righteous indignation that was guaranteed to intimidate the sternest soul. And in an instant there was another one beside him, and a third, and then a very little one, no more than five or six, with huge wet eyes like one of the hideously stylized Keane paintings, and all of them with the cigar boxes filled with small change, packets of Chiclets, a knife perhaps.

  The tiny one managed to wiggle past me and would not budge; wedged in between the car seat and the door. I asked him and asked him again, tried, “Vamanos,” and it didn’t work, so I lifted him bodily and set him outside the car, closing the door with my back. His body went rigidly limp, if such a thing makes sense. He was affronted. He demanded money; for what nebulous service I cannot guess.

  We managed to elude the kids, and it only cost me a half dollar to the one who had invested his penny. It was a quarter to four. We had forty-five minutes. So we walked up the block.

  In the space of two hundred yards, it was a toss-up which deal would be more to my advantage: taking one of the girls offered to me by the sidewalk hustlers, or sell the two I had, turning a tidy profit. Rooney’s bemused stares canceled either possibility. We walked through the shops and I decided I wanted to buy a set of steel-rim bongos. The opening price was thirteen dollars. When I left the shop, I had the bongos and was six dollars and fifty cents lighter.

  Finally, it came around to 4:30 and we returned to the car. The fog lamps were gone from the front grille. I cursed eloquently, and Jenny mumbled something about replacing them, but I was in no mood for heroics, so I hustled them into the car, and we backed out of the parking slot. I pulled into the parking lot and here came the Old Man once more. I gave him the dollar and pulled into the back.

  Jenny had been told to look for a 1962 Imperial, black.

  We saw it parked at the other end of the lot, next to an old Ford with a man and woman in the front seat. Loafing against the rear of the Woolworth’s was a trio of oily looking juvies overdressed and indolent. “I hope Luis isn’t one of them,” Jenny whispered. I didn’t say anything; he probably was.

  We pulled in next to the Ford, and I cut the engine. The man in the Ford was talking earnestly to the girl beside him. She was a wild-looking blonde, and I had the strange premonition that they were there for a familiar reason. “Let’s get out, let them know who we are,” I said. I got out and went around the car, and very ostentatiously helped Jenny from the car, as though she were an invalid. She looked at me peculiarly, but I didn’t feel like explaining.

  One of the young hoods detached himself from the group, waved good-bye to his fellow lounge-rats, and ambled across the lot toward us. “Uh-oh, here we go, gang,” I said softly. The guy and the blonde got out of the Ford. She was wild. And I thought, Perhaps they’re friends of his, cover sent along in case of trouble.

  “Let’s go,” the kid said, walking up to the five of us. It was Luis. He had a memorable scar on his right cheek. I doubted he had come by it at Heidelberg.

  He opened the doors of the black Imperial, and I helped Jenny and Rooney into the back seat. I started to get into the front seat, and he said, sharply, “In the back.”

  “I want to follow in my own car,” I said. He shook his head. I stared at him for a long moment, and without uttering a sound Luis said, Do you want this thing done, or don’t you? I got into the back seat. The blonde and her boy friend got in the front. He was carrying a copy of Kafka’s IN THE PENAL COLONY, in a well-thumbed paper-back edition, and while I wasn’t dead certain, I was inclined to think my original estimate of the couple was correct. Why is it a corollary of being a college student that caution and common sense have been left out of the equation?

  Luis backed out of the space, spun the wheel as I imagine he thought Fangio might have done it, and sped across the lot, out a side entrance, and down another street. He drove without saying a word, but flicked on the car radio, and in a moment we were inundated by yay-yays and boom-booms from a San Diego rock ’n’ roll station. It was reassuring to know that bad taste was not strictly an American malady.

  He drove for a long time, back and forth and around, and at one point stopped to buy a newspaper from a hawker standing on a deserted stretch of road. I surreptitiously glanced behind me as we whipped away down the road, and the newspaper vendor was moving quickly toward a small shack set off the road. I looked for, and found, the telephone lines running into the shack. Signal number one, apparently passing us through.

  We drove a while longer, and Luis pulled in at a liquor store that also sold IMPORTED FRENCH PERFUME THE REAL STUFF! He got out, went inside, and I slow-counted to three hundred and eighty-five by thousandcount. He came back with a brown-paper sack twisted at the top, and I knew we’d come through phase two of the clearing process. He was assured—in some indefinable way—not only that we were not being followed, but that we were what we declared ourselves to be: waifs on the sea of intrigue. He roared out of the parking lot of the liquor store, and tooled the big Imperial toward the hills overlooking Tijuana. We roared past Caliente track; I relaxed, and Jenny looked more frightened.

  It was a twisty-turny, and I went through a third of a pack of cigarettes. Finally, we pulled down a side street, turned left through an alley, and went right parallel to the street we had just come down. Luis whirled the wheel again, and pulled up into the driveway of an expensive-looking home surrounded by a high polished-wood fence. I could see the house through the close slats of the fence, and it was a big-money pad. Whoever lived there (and don’t think for a second it wasn’t obvious who lived there), lived well.

  Luis braked to a halt before the inner gate, and honked twice, sharply, pa
used, then honked again. The gate went up, pulled on a chain by a skinny, underfed-looking Mexican youth perhaps a year or two younger than Luis, the pickup agent. He drove the car through, and the rickets case let the gate down again. We were in a narrow passage between the fence and the side of the house. Beyond the house, the passage opened into a large back area that ended in open-face garages. From where I sat, I could see a Bentley, a Thunderbird and what looked to be an Aston Martin roadster, each in its own berth, each a current model, each gleaming and polished.

  Luis got out, and I opened the door on my side.

  There was just barely enough room to squeeze out, and be wedged against the side of the house. The college students in the front seat could not yet leave the car, the passage was so narrow. Luis came around the car and opened the door beside me, into the house. I stepped back and Jenny and Rooney slipped past me. Luis watched Jenny’s legs as she slid out of the car. Eyes salivate, don’t ever let them tell you otherwise. She caught him at it, and smiled coquettishly.

  Luis ran a hand through his thick, glistening shock of hair. The Demon Lover strikes again!

  We went inside, and were followed by the college students. There were three couples waiting. The girls were all exceptionally attractive, and all under twenty-one, I would have guessed.

  It was an anteroom, with two sofas, several large borax modern chairs, and a tv set babbling a moron’s guessing game. Something about trusting one another…

  We sat and waited. Luis vanished through the only door leading into the house. I looked around at the others, and they were all studiously directing their attentions to the two microcephalics vying for prizes on the tv screen. I didn’t fool myself that they were interested in what was happening there; they were afraid, unsure of protocol, and suspicious that everyone else was a friend of the Doctor. (The name now had an ominous ring, though by the wealthy surroundings it should have been otherwise.)