Mexico

It’s Friday, I've got no job, I've got no class and I’m headed down to Mexico! I am a freshman attending the University of Arizona in Tucson and the second semester is coming to a close in a couple short weeks. I must have done something good because I had recently been granted permission from my parents to bring my pickup truck to campus to use for the remainder of the year. My parents had previously been against me driving anything that wasn't powered by my own “Chevro-legs". I am driving South on the SR-85 in my blue 1995 regular cab Chevrolet with my roommate Chris and good friend Sean sitting beside me on the cloth bench-style seat. We’re loaded with a cooler full of snacks, beer and water, a sleeping bag per person, and around $300 between us. We reach Why Arizona and I pull into a Mobile gas station to fill up on American gas for the weekend; I think we bought Mexican insurance here too, but not worth describing. I remember the gas prices fairly reasonable still in the summer of the 2003; so gas ran me probably thirty five bucks for my eighteen gallon fuel tank. Mexican insurance was twenty dollars a day and we paid for coverage for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Fully loaded and ready to get rolling with this entirely spontaneous vacation that was only happening because the previous night I learned that my seventeen year old brother was going to be in Rocky Point for his first time that weekend. Upon hearing this news, I gathered up Sean and Chris the next morning and they took very, very, very little convincing that it was time to make moves. So, I’m in line to pay for the gas when I overhear the clerk tell the man in front of me that the border is closed! “DUDES! WE’VE GOT PROBLEMS!”
After freaking out for a minute or two we decided to disregard the bad news and keep on truckin’ south; we were on a mission. During the stretch from Why to the border at Lukeville we did notice a high volume of American RV traffic headed back towards Phoenix; All Arizona license plates, all towing four-wheelers and sand rails, all going the wrong way! The same doubtful thoughts crept up on all of us when we arrived thirty forty five minutes later at the border and there were twice as many people leaving Mexico than there were entering. Refusing to give up, we question the border police and some other tourists headed our direction and nobody really knows what the deal is. All we knew, was that Americans weren't being let into Mexico; the only traffic that got through for the next couple hours were p.o.s.’s that all had Mexican license plates. After over two hours the line of RV’s ahead began moving; they were letting us across! Twenty minutes later the three of us in my Chevy had passed the border and were playing “Chinese checkers” passing by campers and slow beater-mobiles. Patience had paid off at the border and we were dashing in and out of traffic on the shabby Mexican highway. With a 350 cubic inch Vortec engine dropped into my Chevy that yielded 350 horsepower and close to 400 pounds of torque we played “leapfrog” for the next half hour. Consequent of driving that way, it was pretty much inevitable to come across a few close calls where our “safety window” after returning to our lane was considerably less than a second. Nevertheless, we make great time until we were unpleasantly stopped again. We come to another stop, literally within five miles of our favorite bar that we were headed to. Standing on top of my truck, I couldn’t see the end of the line of traffic ahead of us. For a full mile ahead of us there were Americans in every sort of vehicle parked all over the road and the shoulder. After locking up the truck, we walk through the mile-long RV city until we reached the front of the line. We heard talk of some sort of a riot on our way to the epicenter of the action. When we got to the RV at the front we saw taco stands and portable food venders set up all across the road, and behind them there was a mob of nearly a hundred Mexicans. Apparently, the local fishing community was rioting because of a new restriction or regulation on where they could fish. Blocking American tourism kept the local economy from making money so their logic was right on if they were trying to piss off the government. The three of us were at the front, buying a burrito from a fat Mexican lady who had set up her stand in the middle of the road; we saw a man and his wife driving a Ford Taurus attempt to squeeze past the mob all slowly and politely. These people must have been ignorantly oblivious to the scene or insane because what happened next I’ll never forget; about twenty fishermen surrounded the vehicle with rocks and baseball bats and closed in on them until the driver had nowhere to go. Then, in a flurry of madness the Ford was flipped over with the two occupants still inside. Every window had been shattered out and I remember the wheels spinning as fast as they could go because the man driving must have been pressing the accelerator down until he fell upside down onto the roof of his car. Without thinking about it or talking about it Sean, Chris and I started running in the direction of the flipped car followed by a crowd of maybe twenty Americans. It all happened so fast that I can’t recall what happened to Sean or Chris, but when I reached the mob surrounding the car I didn’t slow down. I smashed into the first two men that I saw and they went flying since they didn’t see me coming and had their backs to me. There was still a three man thick ring of rioters around the car and I got to my knees and looked through a forest of hairy brown legs towards the passenger window of the Taurus. The woman was screaming and bleeding from her mouth, and I couldn’t see the man that was driving. I began tunneling my way through the legs of the angry mob and after crawling about three feet I noticed my hair was soaked and there was blood dripping down my face. I didn’t feel any pain, most likely due to the adrenaline rush of the moment, so I kept crawling until I could reach the car. When I got there I noticed that the man who had been driving was being pulled out of the driver side window; by whom I could not tell. He was screaming in pain because I could see that his right ankle was caught behind the accelerator and whoever was tugging at him was causing him extraordinary pain. The woman seemed dazed and hardly conscious when I grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard. She responded by looking right at me and passing out cold! I then managed to reach inside the window and attempted to open the door, which was pointless because it was jammed shut from being flipped over. The most awkward thing was that the woman in the driver seat, still buckled in but crumpled up in such a position that one of her breasts was completely exposed in my face, had fainted and I couldn’t wake her up! There wasn’t really another way so I wiggled my way past her boob and clutched the man’s foot behind the pedal. He had somehow managed to get a very solidly knotted loop of his shoelaces around the pedal and the more somebody pulled him, the tighter his shoe got. Unable to undo the tight knot, I laid there in the most awkward of positions for a second thinking, when BAM, the idea hit me like a cigarette lighter to the face! Actually, I hit my face against the Fords push-pop cigarette lighter while trying to reposition myself and realized that it could be very useful. I pushed it in and waited for what felt like forever amidst a lightning fast dream-like experience. It popped out and I held it to the wedged loop until the lace snapped and the man went lurching out of the window, kneeing and then kicking my face as he went by. I was then pulled out face first through the same window the driver had just exited and was immediately attacked by a number of Mexicans that I still cannot estimate. I lay face first on the asphalt as blow after blow reigns down on my back, shoulders, and head. Everything went dark… I regained consciousness shortly after being stomped on and learn that Sean and Chris had pulled me out of the crowd after they both got out of their own fights against the rioters. The three of us were covered in sweat, dirt, and blood but sharing a beer in the back of another man’s pickup truck who had apparently driven his big ass truck right at the group of rioters making then scatter and back off for a bit while people were loaded into the back of his truck and hauled back to the American side of the fiasco. “DUDES…WE’VE GOT PROBLEMS.” We all cracked up for a minute as the adrenaline wore off and we started feeling the beatings we had just endured. It was a beer bottle that had been smashed over my head that had me bleeding and I didn’t even notice it. It was the most satisfied I’ve ever felt in my life. I felt like an ancient gladiator that had just won in the Roman Coliseum. The occupants of the Ford Taurus had been successfully removed before taking too much damage and we were all back to relative safety. After talking with groups of other Americans who had also rushed in to help, and taking a few minutes to recover, we headed back to the Chevy to go home. What happened next is a whole other story all together, but I will say that we did make it into Rocky Point that night and were the only Americans to do so.