A Night in Tijuana JD Clapp

Mike Fritcher CC



A Night in Tijuana

   Part 1: Tijuana Needle Exchange
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   I reluctantly walked across the border at San Ysidro, between San Diego and Tijuana. I had made this crossing at least 100 times before, but the cartel violence at the time had kept me from visiting Mexico for a long while prior to that night. For some context, the week prior to the night I am writing about yielded: 39 deaths, nine decapitations, three public shootouts, and two kidnappings—all in Tijuana (November 2008). The bulk of my previous trips to Mexico had been for fun—to party, or fish, or vacation. That night I had been asked in a professional capacity. 
   Why was I there? Colleagues from University of California, San Diego had asked for my input on field data collection methods. Apparently, a new strain of HIV had appeared, and the U.S. government didn’t want it jumping the border. My colleague explained, “Last month we started noticing something was wrong. All the samples we collected resisted the antivirals.”
   Based on what we knew, the most likely vectors were IV drug users and patrons of brothels, so my colleagues started monitoring and began rudimentary preventive measures-- a needle exchange and condom distribution. They hoped I might draw upon my experiences developing field data collection approaches for studying drinking to help them to evaluate their efforts.
   Once across the border, Tijuana still assaulted the senses with a barrage of sounds—horns, sirens, barkers, and disco music and smells—smoke, exhaust, sewage. But Tijuana felt different then I remembered, the fiesta vibe replaced by a lit fuse feel. A Mexican public health worker, Omar (pseudonym), picked me up a block from the crossing in a public health department van. My colleague, a US-based post-doc, Renee (pseudonym), rode shotgun. I sat in the back of the van. Like something out of a Hollywood action movie—one of the many filmed LA’s paved river basin— we drove a block before the diver jumped the curb and drove down the paved banks of the Tijuana River. The river, little more than a stream of putrid sewage ten yards across and a few inches deep, ran down the middle of the large, paved trench. Large drainage culverts dotted the sides of the concrete banks every quarter mile or so.
   Around dusk we slowed in front of a culvert to navigate a pile of burned mattresses, shopping carts, bicycles, and half-charred pallets. I asked what happened.
        “The police barricaded a bunch of drug users inside with pallets and then lit it on fire,” the post-doc replied.
        “Jesus, did anyone die?” I asked.
        “Everyone inside. We don’t know how many, though.”
        “Did it make the news?” I asked.
        “No. With the cartel violence, that isn’t news down here,” she answered.
A mile or so later we passed two Americans riding BMX bikes in the riverbed. Curious about what Americans were doing in such an unlikely place, I asked the post-doc.
        “Everything stacks up at the border when the US tightens security—immigrants, women being trafficked, and lots of drugs. There is a   
​         ton, maybe literally, of cheap heroin on the streets right now. They come for that.”
   Further up the river, under a bridge bracketed by culverts, people gathered in a makeshift camp on our side of the river. As we approached, a swarm of heroin users appeared from culverts on both sides of the sewage stream and shuffled like zoned out zombies toward the van. We got out and the needle exchange began. It was very orderly: used needles went into a bio-hazard container, and the post doc and health worker passed out new works. 
   When people started to take off their shoes preparing to cross, Omar stopped them from wading over. “Open wounds in sewage don’t mix. Hep C and sepsis are a big problem,” he explained. 
   Needing clean needles, people on the other side of the septic stream began tossing little poison HIV darts across the reach. One hit my boot and I moved back a few paces. Omar expertly tossed across new works.
   As we were driving away, people yelled for us to stop. I looked back out the rear window to see a small group of people looking down at a man on the ground who had just shot up. Renee and Omar went to help. I stood to the side knowing he’d overdosed. A friend of the poor man, explained to me in perfect English, the man’s clinical dose had reached lethal levels, and he had overdosed a few times earlier that week.
   “We all knew he would overdose and die soon.”
   Renee administered CPR. She worked on him long after he died. The exchange between the three of us in the van read like a surreal movie script—but it was really happening.
         Renee: We need to get out of here before the police come.
         Me: What about the body?
         Renee: They will sort it out.
         Me: Is this legal? The needle exchange?
         Omar: That depends on who you ask. 
         Renee: I tried…
In silence, we drove back the way we came, headed for the second location.

Part 2: Redlight District

   Our tasks in the redlight district included handing out condoms and lube, assessing whether there might be some environmental intervention to employ (e.g., posting a health worker on each corner of the redlight), and coming up with evaluation measures.
   Prior to that night, my only knowledge of the strip clubs and redlight district bars was rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Tijuana’s redlight district spilled onto Avenida Revolution. Boys from San Diego—especially the boys matriculated in the all-boys Catholic school I attended—made regular pilgrimages to Tijuana to drink at the cantinas and procure alcohol to smuggle north. We made occasional side-trips in search of the mythical “donkey show” (thankfully never found) that typically ended at the Bambi Club, a little strip club that served beer by the bucket. Rather than equestrian bestiality, the Bambi Club featured a mother/daughter act who pioneered a gynecological form of beer pong. Prostitution was implied, but never witnessed. Things had changed in 30 years.
   The redlight district of 2008 seemed loosely organized by the sexual services offered. “Vanilla” strip clubs and brothels were located on the street beginning the redlight district. The women working at these venues, explained the public health worker, were poor and mostly local. One street over featured LGBT strip clubs and brothels. Then came the fetish venues (i.e., BSDM, etc.) and finally, brothels/bars where the sex workers were obviously underaged and likely trafficked. 
   The clientele at all these venues was men (ages 18-65) exclusively from the U.S.  I noticed the vanilla venues attracted younger men including military service members. 
   The “underage” section catered to middle aged, white men. The three bars I observed offering underage girls were similar. One girl, dressed in a skimpy Catholic School girl outfit, would be posted in the door. A pimp would stand behind her like a watch dog. Unlike the other establishments, there were no barkers or sex workers trying to entice customers; everyone seemed to know what was on the menu at these venues. 
   As we walked back to the van after this depressing tour, a pimp aggressively approached me. Here’s how I remember that exchange:
        Pimp: What’s wrong gringo? I watched you go in five places and not go with any girl. You don’t like Mexican girls?
        Me: I’m just visiting with your health department. We have free condoms and lube for the girls.
        Pimp: I have Russian girls upstairs. I have a white girl from Texas. I have a girl from Korea who will blow you cheap.
        Me: How old is that one (pointing to school uniform clad girl in the doorway)?
        Pimp: Oh…You looking for even younger?
        Me: No.
Thankfully, a man about my age (mid-forties at the time) who could easily be my neighbor interrupted the above confrontation to negotiate for the girl in the doorway. I slunk away.

Part 3: Aftermath

   As the crow flies, I lived twenty miles from heroin river camp, 17 from the stolen children standing in those doorways. Those two very different realities, hit me like a brick driving home.
   Before the drive, however, I endured a20-minute line to cross back into the U.S. It felt like three hours, and I kept expecting the TJ Policia to come pull me out of line to ask about a dead heroin addict they found in the river. 
   Once on the road home, I ran the events of the night through my head; I felt ill. Then I became angry. I thought, the drug users were victims of sorts (be it disease or circumstance) but their addiction fueled a system of violence where criminals where happy to exploit them, and everyone else was happy to look the other way. 
   On the sex trafficking side, I thought, the pimps, traffickers, and “johns” in the redlight were vile, evil, disgusting. When the initial anger past, I became cynical. What can be done? Really? Nothing, I thought. 
   Then I considered the complication of the drug and sex trades being intertwined, two illicit industries that profited criminals and corrupt politicians, and enjoyed by the middle- and upper-class consumers at the expense of those without power or status. How the hell do you solve that age old problem? I wondered.
   Finally, I became reflective. Did those visits us San Diego boys made to the Bambi Club in the 80s lead to underage sex slaves--dressed like the girls we used to fantasize about--standing terrified in brothel doorways? Were we somehow complicit? 
   Then I wondered what if sex work was legal, regulateed, non-exploitive? Or those addicted could get drugs legally and use in clean and safe settings? At best, it would be pissing on a wildfire, I thought, there are too many vested interests in keeping things status-quo. 
In the end, I got another grant of my own and was unable to work on that project. I went back to studying first world problems—college kids getting drunk. As turns out, that is also an unfixable problem. Now, I often wonder if I wasted my career looking for scientific answers to problems that nobody in power really wants to solve. But, all these years later I still can see that post-doc administering CPR and that young girl in the doorway, and I know there are some problems that you never give up on, no matter how hopeless doing so might seem.

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JD Clapp writes in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Wrong Turn Literary, The Milk House, Revolution John, and several others. His story, One Last Drop, was a finalist in the 2023 Hemingway Shorts Literary Journal, Short Story Competition.

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