Robert Guskind

KING OF THE BAJA

The view from the two-story, floor-to-ceiling glass wall in our house
atop a cliff abutting the Pacific Ocean in the Baja California is a
magnificent panorama of the green-gray sea and Coronado Island.

I have repaired to the Baja, where my buddy from Zurich, Richard, is
living in his family’s oceanfront home, to write a novel and beat back
a nasty dope habit.

Nothing doing.

So far, I’ve only co-written a short story with Richard. Meanwhile,
the monkey I had on my back when I arrived from Washington is
finding the rarified air south of the border to his liking, thank
you very much. In less than a month, he’s grown from a chimp into
a large, red-assed baboon that regularly demands significant
quantities of the brown Mexican tar they sell up in the hills east
of Rosarito—a honky-tonk beach town a half-hour south of Tijuana
—in ten dollar pellets that look like rat turds.



I get off the phone with my editor in Washington having bought a delay of another week
on the story I’m supposed to send him to justify the paycheck he sends me that enables
my vida Mexicana. I could care less about work and writing right now. My body has
taken to demanding heroin on a regular schedule and I need my afternoon infusion of
dope. Badly.

Without dope and the normalcy it brings, I will be less than human by nightfall.

I ask Richard if he wants to go on a drug run with me.

He shrugs and says that he’s going to stay home to do laundry.

Would I mind picking up a few curas—which is what they call the pellets of brown
dope—for him?

“No problem,” I say.

“Why don’t you drive up to see Tarzán?”

Tarzán, a dealer who operates on horseback up in the hills, was recently released from
prison in Tijuana after doing time for stabbing his brother-in-law in the ass for cheating
on his sister.

Scoring in the Baja is much more Third World than working the streets of Harlem or
D.C.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll check out Tarzán first.”

Richard tosses me the keys and tells me to go easy on his blue BMW sedan.

I walk out to the garage in front of the house, start the car and navigate the narrow
cobblestone streets of the little seaside development in which we live. I drive out the front
gate and up a steep dirt path to the toll road between Tijuana and Ensenada.

I floor it when I hit the highway.

The sun is out, but it’s been raining for days, turning all but the paved roads—of which
there are a limited number—into foul rivers of mud. This is one of the reasons for trying
to find Tarzán. The mud trail to his place is likely to be more passable than some of the
others.

The sun is blazing down as I drive up to Tarzán’s house, hitting the dirt roads up into the
hills as soon as I get to Rosarito Beach. I put a Ramones cassette in the BMW’s tape deck
and turn the volume up as high as it will go, buoyed by the knowledge that I should feel
great within the hour.

The BMW fishtails through the mud with Rockaway Beach blasting from the speakers.

The car looks like it’s been on safari by the time I get to Tarzán’s place. I find him,
wearing jeans, cowboy hat and boots, astride his horse on the muddy path in front of his
house.

He looks down at me and considers my mud-splattered jeans and mud-caked sneakers.

“Buenos tardes,” I say.

“Buenos tardes,” he says.

I ask for six curas and give him sixty dollars.

Tarzán hands over the dope. I ask if he has any cocaine. He does. I buy ten dollars worth,
or a half-gram, coke being a wonderful bargain in the Baja thanks to the fact that it
became a major drug gateway to the U.S. after the Tijuana cartels took over from the
Columbians.

I’m going to get back in the mud-encrusted BMW and drive back to the house as fast as I
can, but I feel like getting high immediately.

“You mind if I get high before I leave?” I say, using hand gestures to indicate that I want
to shoot up.

“Donde?” Tarzán says.

“In the car?”

“No. Somebody see, is very bad.”

“Do you have someplace I can go?”

He toys with his gray mustache and points to a crumbling wooden shack outside of which
dozens of chickens are milling and clucking.

It is Tarzán’s chicken coop.

I am not a chicken person. They are foul, dirty, smelly, ill-tempered creatures that
deserved to be turned into McNuggets and be eaten by someone other than me.

It is the best I’m going to do, however, since Tarzán clearly doesn’t want a gringo
shooting dope in a car parked outside his house.

I want to shoot up a speedball and if Tarzán’s chicken coop is the only refuge available,
the chicken coop it shall be. I will not let a bunch of scummy Mexican chickens come
between drugs and me.

“Cool,” I say to Tarzán. “Gracias.”

“De nada,” he says. “Be careful the chicken. No hurt.”

“No problem,” I say.

I walk to the chicken coop, wiping sweat from my forehead. The temperature is in the
eighties and as I get closer to the coop, the nauseating stench of chicken shit fills my
nostrils. I beat down the urge to puke, plowing ahead like a man who will not be denied,
watching the clucking chickens, clearly unhappy with an intruder in their feathery and
awful midst, scatter as I approach.

I duck and go through the low doorway.

Fuck almighty.

It’s nearly a hundred degrees inside and hellish. The stench is overpowering. The
chickens, disturbed by my presence, are clucking manically.

Screw them.

I sit down on a wooden crate and start preparing the coke and dope I’m going to shoot as
I stifle an overwhelming wave of nausea.

I’m dripping in sweat. Feathers are flying. Chickens are approaching me, trying to peck
my legs.

“Get out of here,” I growl. “Go away! Shoo!”

The chickens ignore me.

“Andalé!” I yell, kicking at them. “Andalé!”

If it’s true that your surroundings don’t matter when you’re trying to get off, that the only
important thing is the drug, Tarzán’s chicken shack in the hills proves the point beyond a
shadow of a doubt.

I’ve done drugs in shooting galleries, crack houses, abandoned buildings, million dollar
homes, apartments, condos, offices, government buildings, department stores, hotel
rooms, youth hostels, rooming houses, doorways, bathrooms, vacant lots, parking lots,
parked cars, moving vehicles, public toilets, alleys, parks, stairwells, elevators, airplane
bathrooms, train restrooms, subway trains, buses, taxis, dingy basements, bars, clubs,
cafés, restaurants, theaters, museums, amusement parks, arenas and stadiums.

But never in a chicken coop.

It doesn’t matter. I could be in the middle of a crocodile farm or a serpentarium, for all I
care. The only important thing is the syringe with the mega-speedball I’m about to do. A
solid shot of fire and ice.

I stick the needle in my arm, find a willing vein and shoot up.

Yes.

Bells ring. A little cash register in my mind starts going cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.
A hundred slot machines in Vegas all hit the jackpot at once.

That’s what I’m talking about—the Music of the Spheres.

Fuck the chickens.

I feel like the King of the Baja. Like Frank Fucking Perdue with a major attitude.

So what if the glory is all in my mind because, in reality, I’m crouching in chicken shit
and my sneakers are encrusted with droppings, mud and feathers?

I stand up and brush myself off, kicking at the chickens near my feet.

“Kiss my ass,” I mutter to a particularly aggressive rooster.

Time to go before I pass out, puke or do violence to Tarzán’s chickens.

I gather my gear and march out of the chicken coop as though I’m exiting the Plaza Hotel
with a beautiful model at my side and climbing into my Rolls.

Tarzán is still sitting on his horse. I nod, thank him and tell him I’ll see him soon.

After firing up a righteous speedball, the drive back down the hill through the mud is like
an amusement park ride thanks to the one-two punch of the dope and coke. The car
fishtails and skids up and down the hills. When I hit the Toll Road and get north of
Rosarito, I floor it and blaze back to our place on the Pacific at 90 MPH.

Right now, with all my cares erased by a speedball and the bright February afternoon sun,
the Baja is a very cool place indeed.



Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist
and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan,
where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and
experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a
regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.