Spring is springing in the Baja California and I am coming to the realization that my friend Richard, the person in whose house on the Pacific Ocean I am living, does not do well banging cocaine or firing up speedballs.

This profound revelation, as such, has come to me based upon Richard’s increasingly bizarre behavior since we hit the hills near Rosarito Beach after the arrival of my paycheck from Washington. The fact that I’m getting paid to do what I’m doing—which is to smoke weed, shoot dope and sit on a balcony overlooking the grey-green sea and pounding surf while nodding out to the Cure and Joy Division—is an astounding thing.

It is as though I’ve been awarded a fellowship to research my dissertation on consuming narcotics in Mexico.

Such is life in Richard’s gorgeous cliff top oceanfront home—with a two-story glass wall on the Pacific from which I have a beautiful view of the sea and of Coronado Island from my loft bedroom—a short distance south of Tijuana.

A few days after the official beginning of spring, we return from the hills near town with a boatload of drugs and a seventeen-year-old local Mexican drug addict whom we acquire in the northern part of Rosarito Beach—a town famous for being the site of the filming of Titanic and for its spring break action.

We now have cocaine as well as Mexican Mud heroin. Enrique, the local junkie, is a grungy-looking kid with stringy black hair, darting deep brown eyes and a wispy teenaged John Waters mustache. Enrique has linked us to the local dealer with mucho cocaine, which he euphemistically refers to as El Coche Blanco (as opposed to El Coche Negro, for the tar heroin).

Enrique has also volunteered to do household chores in return for drugs. Even though Richard’s house has almost no furniture—the ultimate in oceanfront junkie minimalism, who wants to spend money on furniture when you need every peso you can get your hands on for dope, cigarettes, rice, beans and tortillas?—it is great to have someone around to sweep, do laundry and take care of other tasks that fall by the wayside when Richard and I are off in our little drug induced la-la lands for days at a time.

Since the drug dollar goes further in Meh-hee-Co than it does in San Diego or L.A., because of the overhead added by having to transport the shit north of the border, we are able to spend much more time in the Land of Nod than we would in Los Estados Unidos.

If more American dope fiends understood that Mexico is a nirvana of narcotics, the Mexican government would have to put up a wall along the border to protect the republic from the strung out gringo hordes.

The trouble, of course, with cheap Mexican smack is that you tend to become very strung out on very good dope. So, when my cash runs out between paychecks and Richard can’t borrow more money from his father in San Diego, dope sickness of Biblical proportions sets in.

Now, the Coche Blanco, will add an unexpectedly wonderful patina of mierda to everything.

With the new coke supply, the world starts to revolve around doing a Mexican Speedball, ideally every 45-60 minutes:

One small rat turd size piece of Mexican Mud heroin. (Ten dollars per turd from any of a number of Rosarito dealers that safely sell to resident gringos because they pay the cops to allow them do so.)

+

Water. (Less than a penny a shot, from the big water cooler jugs of spring water that everybody has in their home, including a lot of Mexicans. Shooting up Mexican tap water is not recommended.)

+

One big fat line of cocaine mixed into the cooked up liquid of brown tar and water. (Twenty dollars a gram for some pretty good shit.)

=

An enchanting high that is like racing at 100 MPH in a velvet coach. (Priceless.)

Our days dissolve into vague and fuzzy periods of time that separate one intravenous shot of cocaine and heroin from another.

All would be okay, except for the presence of Enrique, to whom I am supplying drugs and with whom I get into frequent nasty junkie arguments.

Drugs and household items begin disappearing, and Enrique is the culprit, although he defends himself vigorously, like any good junkie would, albeit in shattered English.

Enrique’s career as our houseboy comes to an end after he absconds with a pair of Richard’s sunglasses that hold some sentimental value.

I am sleeping the sleep of the dead one night when Richard bursts into my room and tells me to get dressed. I look up at him like he is crazy. He announces that intruders are outside—he has seen them with his very own eyes in front of the house.

I sit up.

Richard’s circle of friends and associates in the Baja includes an assortment of regular people, businessmen, dope using ex-patriots, ex-pats hiding out in Mexico, dope dealers and workaday locals.

On and off, Richard messes with some unsavory types, particularly in our mutual pursuit of drugs on credit when I am between paychecks.

Recently, he has been disappearing for long periods of time, doing God knows what. These trips into the hills east of Rosarito Beach and up to Tijuana and environs could be related to whoever is outside or whoever Richard is paranoid about, that he imagines is outside.

It is entirely possible that any of a number of individuals could be outside. These fears that there are people wanting to do harm upon our persons is one of the things that is making life in Meh-hee-coh a little edgy. Way edgier than I’d ever envisioned when I moved south of the border so Richard and I could write a novel.

We’re not writing one, although, I may be living one.

“Are you kidding?” I say.

“No,” Richard says.

“Are you seeing things?”

“I’m serious. There are people outside.”

Richard has been working on obtaining guns for the house, insisting that we need them for our safety, but none have yet materialized.

What are we supposed to do, however, if there are really people outside?

We don’t even have a barking dog.  The closest thing is an insanely loud parrot that belongs to the gay couple next door.

The truth is that the little gated development in which we live is virtually deserted this time of year. On the ocean side of the house, the sound of the crashing surf is so loud, especially at high tide, that you could fire a gun and it would be barely audible.

It is not only high tide, but a full moon high tide tonight.

I put on jeans, grab a jacket, and follow Richard downstairs. He goes to the fireplace and grabs several heavy, sharp tools—indispensable for getting a fire going, less useful if you need to shoot someone.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” I ask.

“We can pretend we have guns.”

Pretend we have guns? What if they have guns? Won’t pretending we have guns encourage them to use the real guns they possess?

Am I about to die in some awful Mexican violence that belongs in an indie movie about a druggy lifestyle and violent death in Meh-hee-coh?

“Oh Christ,” I said. “Why don’t we call the police?”

“This is Mexico. You don’t call the police here.”

I follow Richard outside.

He screams, “We’re here motherfuckers and we have guns! Come near us and we’ll blow your fucking brains out!”

“There’s two of us,” I add bravely. “You fucking pricks.”

Both of us brandish the fireplace tools like they will be of use if we are confronted by Tijuana drug cartel thugs with heavy artillery.

“Assholes!” Richard yells.

We walk around the brick patio in front of the house. I don’t see or hear anything, and conclude that we are chasing a figment of Richard’s imagination.

Paranoid delusions, I believe a working mental health professional would call them.

“We’ve got to check out back,” Richard says.

“Why?”

“Maybe they went to the beach.”

We walk around the side of the house. A full moon is hanging above the Pacific, casting a long beam of light on the surface of the water. We walk around back. The only thing that is evident is the sound of waves crashing thunderously on the rocks.

Richard goes down the long, winding staircase, several stories down to the beach. I stand guard at the top.

I watch him prowling around for a few minutes, illuminated by the moonlight.

When he returns, he concedes that no one is there. I grumble as we return to the house, bickering with Richard about whether we are surrounded by vengeful Mexicans that intend to do us harm or whether, perhaps, he had seen something and mistaken it for angry locals.

We go back around the house and go inside, walking out to the balcony to survey the scene again. There is the full moon, crashing surf, the flashing beacon of the lighthouse on Coronado Island. Otherwise, nothing.

“Richard, there’s nothing,” I say.

“Let’s check out front again.”

“Why?”

“I know I saw something.”

We go through the house again, and out the front door.

It is a cold night. I am wearing an army jacket and jeans, but no shirt.

We walk to the bring wall around the front patio. Richard peers over it at the vacant land next to the house.

“There,” he whispers, pointing at the empty landscape.

I see nothing other than shrubs and weeds.

“Where?” I say.

“Over there.”

He gestures toward some vegetation.

I see bushes and shadows and say so.

Richard curses and says that I must be blind. Don’t I see them?

“We know you’re out there, motherfuckers!” he hollers. “Get the fuck out of here! More people are coming!”

Ten minutes of more of this kind of thing pass.

“Richard, I don’t think anything is out there but rats,” I finally say. “Maybe we scared the guys away.”

“Maybe. I’m going to make sure we get guns as soon as we can.”

“Yeah. We should have guns.”

I go upstairs, get back in bed and fall dead asleep. An hour later, Richard is shaking me awake again.

“They’re out there,” he says. “Meet me downstairs.”

“Wha?”

“Get downstairs.”

He leaves. I must fall asleep within a minute of his departure.

When I wake up, the sun is shining, and Richard is downstairs cursing and demanding that I come down.

I descend the stairs while trying to shake off the cobwebs of a deep sleep.

“You asshole,” he says.

“Why are you cursing at me?”

“You left me out there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They were out there and you never came down.”

It takes me a moment to remember that he had woken me up again and asked me to come downstairs.

“Jesus, I must have fallen asleep,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s great that you’re sorry, but they could have killed me. You let me down.”

“What happened?”

Richard explains that when he went back outside he was trapped in the garage while the intruders stalked around outside. Turns out, he was in the garage until dawn.

“You screwed me,” he says.

“I did no such thing. I fell asleep.”

“I could’ve been killed.”

“Nobody was out there.”

Richard grabs the car keys from counter, announces that he’s driving into Rosarito and storms off.

I go out to the balcony and bask in the early morning Baja California sun, wondering if it’s time to return home and celebrate spring in Washington.

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.