Jesus and Carl’s Junior

I learned about the 2015 Paris attacks five days after they happened. I was with Teo and Aprhi in a café, outside Mulege, Mexico. The patron gave us a password and we got on the wifi and read the news while we drank our coffees.

It felt good to be a part of it, the hysteria, the helplessness.

We smashed the table and said things like, “Oh man,” and “I can’t believe it,” and watched in outrage as the shop door kept swinging open and people kept coming and going and the cars outside kept honking and pulling U-turns and parking all crooked in the street.

Five days.

We had no idea.

After learning in La Paz that we were illegals in Mexico, that we somehow skipped immigration, that our van, lacking proper paperwork, was liable to be impounded, and that there was no way we, or the van, were getting shipped over to the mainland, let alone into Guatemala, we ducked off Highway 1 and hid out for two weeks on a beach with no wifi and no nothing except an old man who’d cruise through every morning in a station wagon turned farm car—nothing but a wood platform on a frame behind an engine under a hood—selling fruits.

A couple avocados, some bananas. We claimed everyday was our last.

“We gotta get to San Diego,” we said.

“Gotta get this van figured out.”

“Gotta get back on track.”

“Gotta get going.”

“Gotta do something.”

But every day, we stayed. A couple avocados, some bananas.

The whole time on the beach, we never wore clothes.

Aphri dug himself a lounger in the sand and spent his days in the sun with his cock out and his headphones on. If his headphones came off it was to ask if there was anything to eat, if either Teo or I could bring it to him, or to moan in pain.

It was always the same.

“Oww!” he’d say, referring to the broken ankle he obtained in Cabo, when he failed to jump from one bar table to another.

Then I’d say something like, “Told you, you shoulda started from the actual bar and got a proper run up.”

Then he’d say “Oww!” again and Teo would slice him up some veggies, dick swinging over the cutting board.

After an avocado and tortilla lunch, Teo and I would wander the beach collecting driftwood for the night’s fire. Sometimes we’d walk together, talk about leaving—

Teo’d ask, “Why San Diego?”

And I’d say, “Can’t stay here.”

And he’d say, “Why not?”

—and sometimes we’d walk in opposite directions, not talking at all.

Maybe that’s when the attacks happened. Maybe I was alone, in a squat, at the south end of the beach, running my fingers over some phantom face I’d found in a sea-worn log.

Maybe they happened on one of the days where we left the beach. Maybe they happened when we were at the store down the road, loading the counter with beer and tortillas and refried beans.

Maybe we were stopped on the side of the road between the beach and the store. Maybe Aphri was whining from the car to get going and Teo was standing at the edge of a cliff looking over and I was kneeling before a wayside shrine, its peeling white walls and pink pillars, its dusty glass door, its dozens of photos propped up in mounds of melted candle wax before the arm-sized statue of a saint.

—

We eventually left the café outside Mulege and headed north. I drove, with Aphri in the passenger seat, his cast foot stuck out the window.

“You hear that?” he asked. He’d convinced himself after learning the van was illegal, that it was also falling apart. “We need to get rid of this van, man.”

“Need to get rid of you,” I said.

“Seriously, listen.” Aphri hovered his ear over the dash. “This thing’s gunna fucking explode soon. I don’t feel safe.”

“We’re fine,” I said, hand splayed like a star fish in the heat.

Teo smiled at me in the rearview, all holy and silent and shirtless.

Aphri pulled his foot in the window and went through the cupholders in search of change. “We’re not going to make it to San Diego,” he said. “Look at this shit.”

The gas gauge was rounding empty.

“Teo, how much cash you got on you?”

“Like seven buck, American,” Teo said, leaning forward to double check his back pocket.

“What do you got?” I asked Aphri.

“I paid for the last tank.”

“You use the word tank, liberally,” I said.

We consulted the dash, where we kept a tally of who paid for what—beer or gas—in permanent marker.

“Fuck off,” he said as I counted the tallies under his name. “It’s your turn.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

On either side of the road were tall white cinder-block walls, with coils of barbed wire at the top. As the road rose and fell, I could see over and into the gated communities they surrounded. In one of the communities, on a hill, stood a fifty-foot statue of Jesus painted all kinds of colors. But the paint was old and chipped. His eyes were cold and gray and there were blotches of bare concrete over his body and face. What was left of him carried the sort of fear-driven threat of an animal up against a fence. A warning of violence beyond his control. I couldn’t tell if he wanted us to turn around or get a move on.

Then I thought, your feet are literal concrete. Either way, you’re not gunna do shit.

I held his empty stare as long as I could, watching him watch over all those houses and out at us, and it only made me say it again, “Oh yeah, we’ll be fine.”

In Tijuana, the gutters were lined with trash and there were men and women with eyes like the Jesus statue in every doorway. Everyone and everything was for sale. You could feel it. I only had twelve buck American and a few pesos in my pocket—barely enough for gas to get us over the border—but it felt like a fire.

I found an open spot on one of the main street and parked the van. I got out and lit a smoke. One drink. A couple drinks. Then we’re off. We’ll get gas, we’ll get going. Just a couple.

My skin itched and my heels refused the ground.

We drank some forties on a bench overlooking an intersection. The sun dipped. Grease sparkled under the streetlights. People’s skulls showed through their faces.

We drank some more.

We went into a sex shop and I bought a cock ring. Figured I could hang it from the review in the van, like a dangling shot gun sight, or a catcher of wet-dreams.

We followed a tinge of red light into a dark strip club where broken mirrors lined the walls. The broken mirrors on the walls had an equalizing effect. Like we too, upon entering, had been shattered and shuffled into the mix. There were pieces of us everywhere. There were pieces of us beside pieces of the young girl on stage, vacantly walking circles around a pole. There were other pieces beside the other girls, meandering between tables, some older and some just plain old, their knowing eyes cut through cake-thick make-up.

I watched the girl on stage. I didn’t know her story, but I knew it was different from mine,

maybe even the opposite, and therefore compelling in the way that mine never could be. She had her phone out, but no one seemed bothered. Maybe she was reading the news. Maybe she was lying to her mother about where she was. Maybe she was making plans with a friend for when she got off. Maybe she was alone in the world and this shattering reality would hit her every time she looked up, so she didn’t, she stuck to her phone, or focused on her heeled steps.

“Do you have clubs this crazy where you’re from?” An older woman leaned her face in beside mine. Her eyes were done like a melting Cleopatra. She rubbed my chest with one hand and fiddled with my belt with the other. I didn’t know what to say. I looked back to the stage and noticed the girl react to something on her phone with a look of resignation—

The melting Cleopatra slid her hands into my pants and folded my cock over in a way that made it suddenly fill up. “There we go,” she said. Her perfume was revolting but all I could think was, We’re here.

“I only have five dollars,” I told her.

Five dollars wasn’t enough for an actual fuck. She said she’d give me head, but that we’d have to do it in one of the private dance booths, and that we couldn’t let her boss see. “Five dollars is not enough,” she said. “We have to pretend it’s a dance.”

The booth was three feet wide, made of rough plywood, with a plywood bench, painted white, but worn down to a greenish brown in the center. The woman pushed me back onto the bench and closed the thin white curtain behind her. I didn’t know what to do but I didn’t have to. She did. She looked up at me with the condom wrapper in her teeth. She had me in her hands. I swelled up and she put the condom on. She encouraged me. She held me. She looked over her shoulder.

“We have to be quick,” she said.

Bodies moved past outside the curtain.

I can’t talk about the sex beyond that, can I? Can I say I was overcome by the image of my own grandmother—only a couple years older than this woman—her frail body and darkly blooded veins knotted about outside her skin like torn fishnets? How I imagined all the men who’d taken the sight of her and twisted it into something else, something flush? How I imagined her in a place like this, in a scant black dress, her face buried in coverup and smelling of beer?

“You ready?” the woman said. “Come, come.” But I wasn’t even close. I needed to get out of my head.

I asked the woman if she’d heard about Paris.

  She said, “You’re from Paris?”

I said, “No, the attacks.” But she didn’t hear me. 

She said, “Men in Paris are part donkey!” 

It was meant as a compliment. 

My cock looked like a sardine in her beat-up mitts, but still, she made a face like it was the biggest thing she’d ever seen. 

In all your ravaged life? I thought. 

—

Stepping out of the booth and back into the shattered darkness of the club, I saw Teo cringe.

Something of a Madam stood with two hands on our table. Aphri was striking a deal. He was interested in the girl who was on stage, the one on her cellphone, who now stood by the bar, shaking her head in response to another woman there with her. When Aphri insisted, the Madam sent Cleopatra over to the bar to see if she could talk to her. It was the worst parts of a nature documentary, the two older women with their coercive arms around her young shoulders, her head dropping, shaking, pulling out her phone, trying to escape, whispers, cock breath years of death into her ears, on her face—

The two older women came back to our table, leaving the girl on her phone at the bar. “We will go both of us,” Cleopatra said to Aphri—I imagined silicone particles from my condom landing on his face—but she was looking to the Madam for approval. “Same price?”

Outside the bar, Teo and I spent the last of our cash on Oxys while we waited for Aphri. We popped them right away and called it our secret.

“Take ‘em now. They’ll kick in when we cross.”

“San Diego!” Teo said and looked up into the sky.

“Teo, is there something you want?” He rolled with the punches like no-one else I knew.

“I want to be back on the beach,” he said. “But I’ll settle for a burger.”

Aphri came out in a rush and said that we should probably just go, that things got weird in there, that while they were both going down on him, he started thinking the one actually looked a lot like a man, that maybe she was a man, that she hadn’t let him touch her like the other one had, and so he

stopped them both and asked the one to prove she was a woman, which obviously stirred shit up, and so nothing was finished, and so he didn’t want to pay and so we should probably just go, we should just go, “Go, go!” he said.

For three hours we sat in the border line-up with the engine off to save gas, Teo and I sunk deep in the felt of our seats. It was a carnival, the line-up. Venders sold forgiveness in the form of big lit up crosses and whole nativity scenes and little bronze Jesus heads encircled in thorn.

You could buy churros or empanadas. Percocet, reefer. A quick fuck. The New Testament.

When we crossed, the officer searched the van. He lifted our mattress and said, “Just need to check and see you don’t have some kind of bomb in here.”

We all laughed.

Aprhi said, “This guy is great.”

And Teo said, “Ha ha.”

And I said, “Jesus, fuck.”

Across the border, we drove straight to Carl’s Junior, went through the drive through and parked around back. We ate in our seats then fell into that sort of sleep you can only fall into in a parking lot after you’ve filled your hollow self with American fast food. A sleep so deep and dark, it’s like death, but better, because you know you’ll come back from it. And that none of this really means anything. And that one day, you’ll wake up and the sun will be shining over your normal, well-adjusted life, and you’ll have forgotten it all.