Locked Up In La Mesa

by Eldon Asp

  But Robbie was just certain it was a girl. He couldn’t stand to think he’d just been flirting with a guy, so he sort of pushed past me and opened the door. Sure enough, the transvestite was still there. She smiled over at Robbie and he squinted back at her like he was really studying her, trying to figure out if she was a chick or a dude. Then she got up and started walking over, so Robbie slammed the door shut and went into a full-on panic. He was like,

  “Shit, man, I think it’s a guy! He’s coming over here! What are we gonna do?!”

  “Yeah, no shit!” I said, and I was kind of annoyed with him now because that’s exactly what I’d just told him was going to happen. I was happy to see my brother, but why did he have to go and bring this crazy transvestite into the scene? So I said, “I don’t know what you’re gonna do, Robbie. It’s your girlfriend. I wasn’t the one told you to flirt with her.”

  Sure enough, there she was, knocking on the door. She knocked and knocked while Robbie and I argued over who was going to have to go and deal with her. Finally I just said “Fuck it,” and I went and opened the door. There was this guy—it was very obviously a guy when you saw him from that close up—there’s this guy, and he’s smiling all big and trying to look past me into the room. You know, looking for Robbie. I tried to be nice, tried to close the door without being rude about it, saying, “No, no thank you, we’re fine, no thank you, there’s been a mistake, goodbye,” that kind of stuff. The transvestite got all huffy and marched off, cussing me out the whole way.

  So Robbie and I hung out for a while in my carraca until the coast was clear, then we snuck out of there and went to grab a hot dog. Robbie kept his head down as we walked through the prison. No more strutting and flirting for him, not until he was safely back home. He’d learned his lesson.

  Enchufe

  The Flames of Passion

  HOLY SHIT, THIS ONE WAS terrifying. It started out so awesome and ended up with me just about crapping my pants I was so scared, except I wasn’t wearing any pants.

  All right, what happened was, I was up in my carraca with this chick. Super hot. She and her boyfriend had come down to visit my friend Davy, but the boyfriend was a stone junky and whenever they came down the first thing he’d do is go and score some chiva. He’d shoot that and then he’d nod out and she’d be all horny and frustrated and stuck with this unconscious boyfriend. So I’m a generous guy, I’m gonna take care of her; I wouldn’t leave her like that. It was risky, though, because the boyfriend was a bad, bad dude—this guy was terrible.

  He and a buddy of his had both gone off to Vietnam and did at least a couple tours there, maybe more. Both of them came back with pretty serious drug habits and severe mental problems. They ended up in San Diego where they were doing all sorts of really bad shit: robbing banks, robbing gun stores—crazy, violent shit. They used to come down and visit Davy because they had this plan where they wanted to find a connection in Mexico so they could trade a bunch of these stolen guns for a great big shitload of pot. And whenever they came down they always brought their girlfriends with them, who were both super hot and just freaky as all hell. One was a blonde and the other one was a brunette; it’s the blonde one I’m talking about in this story.

  Anyway, so the boyfriend was a violent psycho and he was out cold in Davy’s carraca while me and the girl were going at it in my place next door.

  Before I go on, I gotta explain a little bit about how the electrical system worked inside the carracas—you’ll see why in a minute. There were two wires, a ground wire and a hot wire, running through the whole place, and in each carraca there were two leads that came off of them. That was how you could tap in to the electrical supply: you’d take whatever appliance you wanted to use and just touch the wires to the prongs of the plug. For example, say you had a light bulb. You’d touch the ground wire to the base of the bulb, then you’d touch the hot wire to the base, too, and it would light up. There was your light. In my carraca I had a little hot plate type of thing, which was basically just this thick coiled wire that looped around and around and got hot. I don’t know what you call it in English but down there they called it a resistencia, so it was some sort of a resistor, I guess. These things were always burning out but they were real handy and they only cost about two bucks or so, so those were pretty popular. You could lay tortillas across them and cook the tortillas, or you could heat up soup or whatever you wanted with it. I had scrounged up a couple of old cooking pots somewhere, which came in handy for heating beans or stew or whatever I had.

  (As I’ve said before, the federales gave me about seven bucks every two weeks to buy food, but I generally blew through that far too quickly to actually live on it for the whole two weeks. Meanwhile the state prisoners, which was most of the population of La Mesa, got a decent sized helping of beans or some kind of stew most nights. My buddy Johnny Bigotes, who was a state prisoner, was a skinny little guy who never ate much anyway, plus he was just a generous person, so thank God he didn’t mind sharing with me. He’d come back with the food and we’d pick the bugs out of it and heat it up on my resistencia, which we also used to make coffee. Not real coffee, but a fake version that we made out of what they called “coffee rinds.” Not grinds, or grounds—rinds. It wasn’t actual coffee beans, but it was the branches of the coffee bushes. You could boil those for a really long time and make coffee. I would buy some canned milk and put a little bit of that in with the coffee, and that was our special treat. We’d cook the same branches over and over until the coffee came out clear, and that’s when we knew it was time to get more rinds.) Anyway, the point of all that is there were these two leads hanging down from the main line, which ran from carraca to carraca up near the roof line. That was how you got electricity into your carraca.

  So I had been flirting with this blonde since I first saw her and now that her boyfriend was nodded out, she’d come knocking on my door. So we were in my place going at it, and it was amazing. I was behind her, standing up, and she was flailing all around and backing up into me. I guess she pushed me backwards closer and closer to the wall until eventually I bumped into the wires, or brushed against them or something. I didn’t notice it at first because I was so into what we were doing, but I guess the bare ends of the wires touched each other and shorted out. By the time I turned around and saw what was going on, the wires were on fire. Electricity was arcing between them, crackling back and forth, and the fire was climbing up toward the ceiling, toward the main line. I was like, “Holy shit! This whole place is gonna burn down!”

  So now this chick and I were standing there buck naked, neither of us knowing what to do, with little fires breaking out all along the path of these wires. The paisley tapestry was on fire, and the cardboard wall a little bit, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life; this was the worst, because the whole place was like kindling. Jesus Christ, just think what this places was made of! It was all dried-out old wood and cardboard and cloth, and we were all stacked on top of each other and locked inside. The stampede alone would kill pretty much everyone as soon as they figured out what was going on and really started to panic.

  So the girl started putting on her clothes, and at first I was putting on my clothes, too, because what else could I do? And then I was like, “Fuck it,” because this was way more serious than getting busted naked with this psycho’s girlfriend.

  By now the fire had climbed up to the main line and was working its way over into the next carraca, not Davy’s place but the other one. I ran over there and banged on the door, but those guys were already wide awake and yelling. So I went to the next one, and I banged on their door, and I figured the fire hadn’t reached that place yet because the guy inside was all groggy as if I’d woken him up. But somehow he was able to stop the spread of it; somehow he knew how to cut the power or whatever he did to stop it. So the fire was put out without terrorizing everybody and without causing a riot in the tank.

  What it did do, however, was knock out the e
lectricity in the whole tank for a day or two and cause a fair amount of fire damage to the neighbors’ place. The tank capo and the guys whose stuff was damaged and the amateur electrician who was gonna fix the wiring all got together to figure out how much money I owed them for the trouble I’d caused. It ended up being three or four bucks for some wire and for the guy’s time to fix it, and a few more dollars to get the neighbors a new hot plate and lamp. They went pretty easy on me; mostly I think we were all just glad the whole place didn’t go up in flames.

  I was a lot more careful after that—with the electrical stuff, anyway. I still pushed my luck with that dude’s girlfriend every chance I got.

  Permanente

  A Star Is Born

  NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF industry or business you’re talking about, when there’s a lot money at stake there’s bound to be competition for it. That’s just the way the world works. Well, I think I’ve made it clear there was a ton of money changing hands around the prison. To be in charge of that would put you in a pretty lucrative position to say the least. If you were in that spot you’d have to expect there’d be guys looking to take you down.

  When I showed up, the head of the whole place was Heladio Diaz, no question. Heladio was The Godfather. He had his bodyguards and his underlings and what have you, but at that time I don’t think he really faced any serious challengers. The average prisoner didn’t care who was in charge as long as the drugs kept flowing and the guards were taken care of and the violence never got too far out of hand. We were happy with Heladio, and I think he knew it; he seemed pretty relaxed most of the times I saw him.

  Where things got shaky is when the drug supply dried up, the heroin supply in particular, which it did from time to time. Maybe there was a big bust on the outside, a big drug seizure; that could dry up supplies everywhere for a while because the dealers either didn’t have it any more or they were keeping their heads down because they were scared they’d get busted too. In Mexican prisons, at that time at least, the last thing the authorities wanted was to choke off the flow of drugs. They had certain ones they didn’t like and didn’t want in there, like Mandrax for example. Mandrax is a downer, but it can make you violent if you eat too much of it, so they didn’t want that. They didn’t like alcohol for the same reason, but there’s no way to stop it, not when you can make your own so easily. The two they really didn’t mind were pot and heroin, because pot makes you mellow and heroin makes you happy and usually makes you just want to sit down. If you were running a prison and you had your choice between dealing with a bunch of angry, sober criminals or mellow, nodded-out junkies, you’d probably let the dope slide, too. You’d look the other way. I would.

  And like I said, the only time things really got sketchy is when the heroin wasn’t getting through. At first the price would go up, and then guys would get desperate, and the vultures would start robbing each other for it. The whole mood would get dark; everybody would be depressed, and they’d start looking for other things they could do, like sniffing glue, drinking more, eating more Mandrax—all recipes for violence. Stabbings would increase; the place would start feeling like a powder keg. Like you could hear the fuse burning down: hisssssss. Fuck, it was scary sometimes.

  And then always, right before it got totally out of control, like magic the taste would come back, the heroin, and everyone would relax.

  Here’s the thing, though: the only loyalty a junky has is to whoever gets him his shit, and that’s only as long as he’s getting it. So if you did want to make a play for control of the prison, those dry spells were the opportunity. If you could supply the chiva when Heladio was dry, you could make a serious claim on his business. You could establish yourself. And that’s what this one young guy did.

  “Estrella” was his name, which means “star,” and did he ever act like it. Remember I said before how Johnny Brother was always slicked up in his white tennis outfit? Well, Johnny Brother had nothing on Estrella. This kid favored white also, but with him it was white track suits, like Adidas track suits, and he had these gold chains he would wear, always on the outside of his jacket where everyone could see them. Permed hair—he was a total dick.

  But he hustled hard. He got his hands on some heroin when even Heladio couldn’t, and he made his mark. There was one dry spell, just awful, I want to say it was almost close to a week, and the place was ready to blow, like full-on riot time, when Estrella came up with the chiva. It was like the hallelujah angels singing down on this kid. Everybody got high, and everyone was so grateful to Estrella. He kicked Heladio down his ten percent just like he was supposed to. Made a big show of it, marching to his place with cash in a briefcase, and Heladio, even though he felt punked by this kid upstaging him like that, he had to bite his lip and take it.

  Soon after that Heladio got his supply up and running again and Estrella dropped back, sort of faded into the background, but he was on the map now. He was just this scrub from B Tank, just a glorified vulture himself, really, but for a brief moment he’d established himself as a player.

  Pico

  Tunnel to Nowhere

  I MENTIONED BEFORE HOW I used to go and visit with Johnny Brother quite a bit. Robert too, a little, but mostly Johnny. He and I became pretty good friends. Johnny’s carraca, as I said, was across from the infirmary. Well, on the other side of that was the cesspool. It was this big tank, almost like a pond, and it was covered up with a big wooden lid like a platform, but only partially. So you’d think it would stink to high heaven but it really didn’t. Even on super-hot days it never stank too bad, and I don’t really understand the engineering behind stuff like that but I guess it had something to do with the water on top, like somehow they’d figured out how to make all the shit and sludge and stuff sink to the bottom and then the layer of water would keep the smell from escaping; I really don’t know.

  But anyway, this other buddy of mine, a guy named Alex, lived in the carraca next door to mine with my friend Davy. Alex and his wife were both hairdressers, and they had gotten caught selling heroin out of their hair salon, so that’s how Alex wound up in the prison. From the day he arrived, he was dead set on getting out of there. You couldn’t hold this guy; he was totally determined to escape. He was so committed to it that other people started believing he might really pull it off, so they began paying him money to bring them along, too. The plan he’d worked out was to dig a tunnel under the wall and get out that way. Pretty straightforward.

  Not long before we got there, a bunch of other inmates, mostly Americans, had tunneled out and escaped, which was why they now tried to make sure all the Americans stayed in the corral, because it was more secure and farther from the outside wall. The way those earlier guys had done it is they dug down through the floor in a corner carraca, in the strip of apartments along the fence by the front wall. They did it with the cooperation of Johnny and Heladio, who brought in a little storage shed for them to hide the dirt in, the dirt they’d dug out of the hole. Well, when that one went down, the comandante and everyone had been pretty embarrassed, so they made a big show of throwing Johnny in the tumbas in order to show that no one was above the law (no one but Heladio, I guess). It was strictly for show, of course—I don’t think Johnny even spent one full day in the hole. They probably snuck him back out to his place after lockdown.

  Alex had the idea that he was gonna do it the same way, with one notable improvement that actually came from me. One of the problems with the earlier escape was that they hadn’t figured out a plan for what to do once they came up out of the ground outside the prison; they just broke and scattered, with the guards shooting at them and everything. So I had the idea to get some accomplices on the outside pull up right next to the wall with an unmarked van, like a small panel truck. And there would be a hole cut in the floor of the van just big enough for a person to crawl through. The van would park right on the spot where the guys were gonna surface, and they’d come up out of the ground and crawl right inside of the getaway vehicle, and nobody
could see shit unless they were lying on their bellies looking under the van. Once the van drove away and the guards got around to noticing the hole in the ground, everyone would be long gone.

  So that was my awesome contribution, and for that idea Alex let me come along for free, not that I thought it would work. Still, I was glad to be invited, because a lot of people weren’t. Some guys were excluded because they were almost done with their sentences anyway, so it wasn’t worth the risk; others were thought to have loose lips, so they couldn’t be trusted; and some weren’t allowed in on it for the simple reason that nobody liked them.

  The reason I thought it wasn’t going to work, and I tried to tell them this, was that they were being completely stupid about where they were putting the dirt. Obviously they didn’t want to run the storage shed play again—the comandante would spot that a mile away after the last time. So I said they should take an empty carraca and put it in there. No guards ever went into the tanks anyway, so there was no reason anyone would ever have to find out, but I think Alex was too cheap to rent another carraca to stash the dirt, or maybe he was just too stubborn to listen to me.

  The hole they were digging started inside of a tiny carraca Alex had rented right next door to Johnny Brother’s place out by the front of the prison. From there they were going to head under the fence and beneath the grassy buffer zone leading out to the wall. The total distance was probably something like ten or twelve yards; this was a sizeable amount of dirt we’re talking about. The part that was so dumb about it is they were dumping all that dirt into the cesspool. Every night, they would haul it around the end of the building and dump it in the cesspool. Stupid. When you walked by in the daytime you could see the water level getting higher and higher and higher. I tried telling them that they were gonna fuck up whatever system was in place for clearing out that sewage sludge, but they didn’t listen to me.