“At least they know we haven’t forgotten them,” Cynta says. “And they know we’re not our government. Love thy neighbor, right? Not only does it give you the warm fuzzies, you get to live in the world without worrying.”
Cynta’s been sick, with Lyme disease. Her adrenals are all but gone. She recently, briefly, lost the use of her arms.
But she’s feeling pretty good today.
The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.
I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR. YOAKAM
In certain places, the border possesses a lovely kid’s-book geometry. For example: Per my map, there should be an exact spot where the border stops being the Rio Grande and starts being a fence.
And there is. It’s behind a brick works near El Paso.
Standing in the shade of a big tree are two round, middle-aged Mexican guys.
“Dónde está Mexico?” I say.
“Aquí,” one answers.
We introduce ourselves, reaching across the border, which is just: a monument and a stripe on the concrete.
Yellow Shirt/White Hat is Jesse. Red Shirt/Black Hat is Tomás.
“So,” I say, stepping across, “this is Mexico?”
“Yes,” says Tomás.
“And this is the U.S.,” I say, returning to my native land.
“Yes, yes,” says Jesse, stepping into the U.S. “Mexico now, now U.S.”
We step giddily back and forth; straddle the line so we’re in both countries simultaneously; stand on the line, declaring ourselves to be nowhere at all.
Using my arms and baby Spanish, I ask: Why don’t the people, the Mexican people, come from there (I gesture to Mexico) to here (I make a grand sweep encompassing all of America and the grand opportunities contained therein).
“Problems with the migras,” says Jesse.
“I don’t see them,” says Tomás. “But they see me.”
We agree that Mexico and America have been good friends forever. We agree that, historically, the rich man has, forever, been stamping on — we all simultaneously perform the same gesture: stepping one foot each down on some imagined Poor Man. I snag three bottled waters from the van, and we drink to our shared respect for the worker; them in their country, me in mine. Occasionally, a foot, absentmindedly kicking at a pebble, will wander out of its own nation, or one of us will briefly emigrate to keep the sun out of his eyes.
As I pull out, a Border Patrol truck’s blocking the road. The agent looks like Dwight Yoakam. Technically, he tells me, I’ve broken the law.
“You, uh…you saw me go back and forth?” I say.
“I saw you standing in Mexico,” he says. “What I could do — and of course, I’m not going to DO this — is take you to Juárez and have you cross there. No biggie. But just so you know.”
This, we agree, is the beauty of the United States: Here we stand, the Law and the Lawbreaker, joking about the fact that he’s busted me, comfortable in the knowledge that he’s not going to shake me down, as would most assuredly happen if this was, say, Juárez, where he says some drunken cops recently shot at a journalist who’d taken a photo of them getting wasted, then beat the crap out of him.
“Although how much have you got?” he says. “Ha ha!”
“How did you know I was even down there?” I say.
“Camera,” he says, nodding up in the direction of the sky.
I LOVE YOU, I DO, BUT NOT IN THAT WAY
I leave Texas, drive across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and see no sign of a crisis, no sign of an overloaded system at the point of breakdown, no crime, no discourtesy even.
Which, of course, does not mean that crises, overload, crime, and discourtesy do not exist.
It just means I didn’t see them.
Everywhere I go, the next town ahead is said to be the really dangerous town, the one that justifies all the cartel fears and border paranoia, the town where the real shit goes down. Ditto for Mexicali.
I walk across the border at Calitex, and find, on the exterior wall of a strip bar, an inadvertent poem:
25 Beauty Full
Girls on Scene
Continuously dancing from 3 p.m.
Promotion.
On Buckets of Beer and Bottes
Of liquor
No cover
Charge.
But mostly, of course, Mexicali is just a town, waking up on a quiet Saturday morning: A gangly teen guy comes out of a changing room in too-baggy jeans, waits for the Judgment of Mom; a guy holds his toddler in a gentle headlock, kissing kissing kissing her repeatedly on the neck, which fails to stop her wailing; three slouching, hotted-out teenage girls loll on a bench, watching the street with eager who-might-love-me attentiveness; pigeons troop across the sunlit grass of a park like an overfed gray army. Whatever scams, corruptions, or cartel-related high jinks went down last night, all is well in the park this morning, with the bad boys still in bed.
It’s a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people’s dreams begin to be of leaving.
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.
If Mexico were as rich as we are, we’d only be getting their tourists.
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave.
Outside, a pregnant woman displaying much cleavage, selling Chiclets on behalf of a “home for poor women,” asks if I am sleeping in Mexicali tonight. It’s hot and I’m tired and my mind is playing tricks and I suddenly see her as she would be if, instead of a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, she were a Calitex soccer mom: The school does not properly emphasize reading; their vacation plans are proving difficult; she really hopes her daughter will stick with the cello.
But she’s not a soccer mom, she’s a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, and in spite of the far-along state of her pregnancy, asks, several more times, with increasing urgency, where I’ll be sleeping tonight, and only finally believes me when I say: America, for sure, honestly.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Imagine the following scenario: Two babies are born at precisely the same moment. Baby One is healthy, with a great IQ and all its limbs and two kind, intelligent, nondysfunctional parents. Baby Two is sickly, not very bright, is missing a limb or two, and is the child of two self-absorbed and stupid losers, one of whom has not been seen around lately, the other of whom is a heroin addict.