Ensenada

The Chool Bus (ch24)

CHAPTER 24: The detour to Ensenada is ill timed as the Mexican Government cracks down on a notorious cartel kingpin and all hell breaks loose.

Rolling into Mexico at Tijuana was an eye-opener for Billie and Buck. The long lines of vehicles were met with street vendors, flowers, jewelry, mariachi singers, hand-made trinkets, and much more for sale, some of the vendors, small children, each with their own unique pitch. “What the hell?” said Billie. “That kid can’t be more than ten-years-old. He’s selling balloons like they’re goin’ outta style.”

“Right,” said Buck. “Gotta love unrestricted capitalism. Seems kind of messed up to me, but i’m sure there’s a reason for it.”

Billie shrugged. “But…they’re everywhere. Maybe the cute kids and the little old abuelitas are the best border vendors… i just hope those kids have a safe place to go at the end of the day.” Billie was feeling a little emotional about young kids out there soliciting the gringos in their fancy cars. Billie was thinking about the migrant families she knew in Kansas. That is before the ICE-cold goon-squads started sweeping them up and shipping them off to El-Salvadore. She couldn’t imagine any of those kids among the long lines of cars with god knows what kind of psychos driving them.

Once through the border gauntlet, The Forks made their way along the Mexican coastal highway, a little over an hour and a half to Encenada where Professor T, on the advice of a US Navy veteran, steered Billie and the Chool Bus to a popular cantina. The cantina was within walking distance of a cruise ship docking area so lots of people from around the world come and go.

After finding a place to park the bus for an overnight stay, the gang made their way to the cantina. Once seated, they struck up a conversation with a group of cruise passengers from New Zealand. Turns out, one of the New Zealanders had spent a few years in the Denver Tech Center working for an engineering firm. He knew several of Jack’s Denver friends, and so the Forks and Buck found themselves at a raucous table of jabbering small world stories. Jack noticed a “bachelorette party” special on the menu, and suggested pooling resources. 

“You can really tie one on here,” said Mort T… fifty beers, a bottle of Don Julio 7, and a plate of guac and chips at the table…a bangin’ party for ten people. Five beers, a shot, and some guac for good measure… not that cheap, but super convenient.”

So Jack passed the hat, ordered up the special, and the party began in ernest. Around the time this impromptu group started giving way to slurred conversations, a small team of federales entered the cantina. They spoke with the manager in hushed tones for a moment, then left abruptly for the next-door business. Presently, the manager made an announcement that there had been a raid in a nearby town where the government targeted a narco-kingpin, killing him and his family and others. The response was spreading like wildfire. Buildings were bombed, vehicles torched, rival gangs were joining the chaos, and battle was breaking out all over the land.

“Damas y caballeros,” the cantina’s public address system amplified the manager’s voice. The waiter translated for the Forks’ table… “We have been advised to encourage everyone to shelter in place until this wave of retaliation subsides and it’s again safe to go out on the streets.“

“Holy crap!” Buck seemed almost excited about the development…scanning the Cantina for escape routes and hiding places. He decided to save the beers for later when a loud explosion shook the table.

Buck made his way to the window to see if he needed to go into fast-action mode. But the smoke was several blocks away.

Just then several pops, like black-cat fire crackers cut through the din, and Buck saw a couple of dark figures a couple blocks away. It looked like they were exchanging fire with a group of federales taking cover behind a black SUV. This is where someone from the New Zealander party directed the gang to hide in a dry goods pantry. A couple other parties joined them and twenty-five souls huddled together among the bags of pintos, cans of tomatoes, and bins of dried peppers. No one was feeling safe and everyone was sobering up, fast.

“Relax, everyone.” said one of the New Zealanders. “They won’t attack the cantina. They don’t want to hurt the tourist trade. I asked the manager if there were any cartel types hanging around. He didn’t think so…hopefully he’s right and we can get back to the ship unmolested.”

After a couple hours of tense waiting, the manager announced the danger had passed. The attacks in or around the area were few, but the gang passed a couple burning vehicles and there was evidence of gun play, spent casings, pools of blood, crime-scene tape, and local emergency responders running to and fro.

The Forks made their way back to the bus… feeling fortunate the action hadn’t got closer. It was a tense ride back to the RV park in San Diego and no one slept easy that night… definitely one to remember.   

NEXT WEEK:
After a hair-raising taste of narco-politics and street carnage, the Forks finally make it to Vegas. But none of them survived that day unfazed.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

The Chool Bus (ch23)

CHAPTER 23: The Forks take a few days detour South to San Diego, then across the border to Ensenada before the next round of focus group interviews in Las Vegas.

“La Holla?” Buck Wellstone mispronounced the words.

“No… say it like this,” said Jack. “La HOY-uh… it’s based on a Spanish phrase la joya, which means ‘the jewel’. This might, of course, be fake news as another Spanish term, la hoya, refers to a geographic hollow. Or… ‘the holes,’” Jack burst into a juvenile fit of laughter, then composing himself after wiping away tears and blowing his nose. “Sorry, i get a kick out of the way people tend to jazz up the mundane. I mean, the neighborhood around UC San Diego is straight-up gorgeous…pristine beaches, perfect weather, marine life out the wazoo…but it’s really nothing more than a neighborhood of San Diego. Some refer to La Jolla as a State of Mind. And no one really knows why anyone would literally call it ‘the holes,’ perhaps they’re referring to the sea-level caves that can be seen from La Jolla Shores.”

With that, Jack closed his US road atlas, Billie punched the address into Siri’s Drunk Sister maps app, Professor T was engrossed in a book, earbuds on blast, and with that the Chool Bus was underway. Roughly four hours…straight south. They would arrive in time for supper in La Jolla, get a good night’s sleep then up and at ‘em early for the first round of focus group interviews at the university.

***

Buck Wellstone had grown accustomed to accompanying Billie in the passenger seat, keeping her company and exchanging music playlists. Now, Billie has never been a country music fan, but Buck was serving up the classics and where Billie was familiar with pop-country playing on radio stations, Buck was showing her, for the first time, deep Appalachian “old-timey” Mountain fare, and the open-range cowboy singing poets exemplified by the likes of the Carter Family, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, etc. 

“Why, this sounds like the tunes they used for that Coen Brothers movie…the one critics said was loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey,” said Billie. The actual music was not all that exciting for her, but she didn’t let Buck in on that as she was starting to warm up to Buck himself. In fact, she was getting a bit worried she might be in danger of falling for the big fella. While first impressions lead folks to regard Mr Wellstone imposing and dangerous, he was actually quite gentle, compassionate, and somewhat vulnerable. Billie, in a word was starting to fall for him.

Now, Billie is very good at mental multi-tasking, and as she steered the Chool Bus southward through Pasadena then Irvine she was able to pay attention to Buck’s occasional commentary and his old-timey playlist while her non-binary nature was waging a vigorous debate over the relative merits of sparking up a conventional relationship with… a guy.

First, was she thinking about committing to a person or a type? She knew that dating Buck meant committing to a specific person, regardless of gender. Like, he was never going to understand her on the levels of her female lovers. Does she run the risk of growing tired of that, or can the relationship grow stronger over time like her favorite aunt and uncle…despite the annoying gender-specific quirks to which many hetero couples must grin and bear?

Does going hetero erase a part of me? Her thoughts were working overtime. After all, the common fear is that settling with someone of the opposite sex would make others perceive her as “straight.” She worried whether entering a monogamous relationship would alter how she, or the world, view her identity. So many questions: Did she explore enough? Does she need a more polyamorous arrangement? Would Buck be able to trust her? So many questions. It was getting harder to continue the illusion of full attentiveness and Buck was starting to notice from the broken dialog and self-interruptions. Billie was making more apologies for unfocused responses. She knew she was spreading her awareness too thin for safe driving…she would have to focus on the wheel in the urban traffic zones. When a feeling of tightness in her chest pushed her into a defiant mood, she said something rude to Buck and both went silent for a long moment.

Meanwhile Jack and Professor T were having a spirited debate about the nature of good and evil. Every once in a while one of their voices would cut through the bus’ engine and tire noise. It must have been a banger of a debate. By the time the four hour stretch was through they arrived on a logical equation, an accord, a compromise. This was it: The pursuit of self-interest PLUS aggression or violence MINUS basic human compassion EQUILS generic evil.

As Billie steered the bus into the RV park on the outskirts of Sandog SoCal, Billie apologized for the rude outburst and Buck assured her he was not even remotely offended, he wasn’t explicitly lying as her sudden inexplicable rudeness did hurt a bit.

He too was sliding down that slippery slope…he felt as if it were possible he could fall fairly hard for this contradictory bundle of gentle, fair, beautiful, tough-as-leather, one hundred percent bad-ass bitch.

He never thought he would meet, let alone get hung up on someone identifying themself among the rainbow LGBTQ coalition…but here we are.

Rolling into the UC Sandog Student Union parking lot, the Forks prepared to roll out the schtick. It was time for everyone to put on their most professional and focused masks. Time to gather some qualitative data from this affluent Southern California corner of our spiritually ailing nation. There would be a week break between San Diego and the next research destination, Las Vegas. In the meantime, the Forks would dip their toes in to the sands of Mexico… they gonna fuck around and find out.

NEXT WEEK:
The detour to Ensenada is ill timed as the Mexican Government cracks down on a notorious cartel kingpin and all hell breaks loose.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links