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BartCop in a Mexican Jail
Part Three
It was like a Tarantino movie.
Carl and I were prisoners of the Mexican Federales,
and I have no idea what rank that is.
Are they cops?
Are they rent-a-cops?
Are they the Mexican State police?
Were they Mexican FBI?
They were men in brown uniforms with hueueueueuege guns.
Hey, you think my I.Q. of 64 betrays me now?
ha ha
Imagine how it betrayed me 21 years ago,
Sidebar:
Y'know, it's funny...
Hadn't really given this a lot of thought
since the day it happened.
The absolute, Swear-to-Koresh truth is,
me & my buddy Carl were being kidnapped by
unidentified agents of a foreign
country, and since we were just 21 years old, we didn't have
much experience with alcohol, we
were loopy on beer and kidnapped by men with guns.
So, we're riding in a 1953 Mexican Federale Chevy Bel Air in 1974.
We were in Mexico, at night, drunk, drinking in a town the size
of Smirk's brain,
and we were being driven away from the town - out into the desert.
It was like a goddamn episode of the X-Files.
We were as kidnapped as little Elian.
I'll bet there's nobody reading this who has been in the custody
of another nation's police force.
The first five seconds you realize you're in the custody of the
"state" policia,
(which, to this day, I don't know their rank) ...is really
a naked-at-school feeling.
Y'know, Americans walk around with this you-can't-touch-me arrogance,
but when you cross the Rio Grande, there's a whole new set of
rules, Cubby.
Sidebar:
Under Mexican justice, you are presumed
guilty.
Wake the kids, that's an important statement.
In Mexico, a car wreck is a crime.
Even if your car collides with another
car, for any reason,
the burden of innocence is on you, and
a screw-up could mean your ass.
Ok, Ok, I'm getting side-tracked...
Carl and I are in this 1953 Chevy Police Car, (in 1974) and we're
drunk.
We're driving away from down, into the Mexican desert.
Before this story is over, remind me to tell you why it was such
a goddamn honor to stand
before the Bill of Rights in Washington DC in Oct 98 and just
stare at that Document of Freedom...
Suddenly I realize I'm being kidnapped.
Riding in the dark, Mexican desert with four Mexican cops
and the hum of the motors and the lights of their sedan.
It looked a lot like a black-and-white movie.
The Mexican desert, at night, it was nothing but shades of gray.
Eventually we arrived back in Reynosa.
Like everything else, there was never any explanation given.
Why take that ride for no reason?
We'd been driven into the desert for 20-30 minutes, who knows
how many turns
left and right, left and right we'd been making. Koresh,
it was at night, and we were
not exactly paying attention, and who knows how many miles we
went....
Sidebar:
The chairman of the team of psychiatrists
I use says this wasn't my fault.
As far as I know there was no "lost time,"
which is kinda double-extra creepy...
ha ha
All I knew was, we eventually arrived at their "precinct."
They dragged Carl and me towards the Gunsmoke-looking "pokey,"
and I remember marking the irony
of this 1870's-era jail using a brand-new American Yale lock
with a half-inch thick loop on the SOB.
Maybe the mountains would crumble to the sea, maybe the sun would
refuse to shine for you and me,
but that Yale lock was gonna do it's fucking job till the end
of time.
They slammed the door behind us.
Slam!
(I wish I had a page with Flash animation)
So here we are in a Mexican jail or prison, they never made that
clear.
Matter of fact, these assholes never, ever once identified themselves.
They never spoke any English, even tho their town thrived exclusively
on American tourists.
So, me and him are standing in jail.
We're both about equally drunk, ...maybe, ...who knows.
We stood there for a second and looked at each other and thank
Koresh they
let us finish our "business" outside the bar before we were taken
into custody
because this dark, dark cell Carl and I were in didn't seem to
have any plumbing.
When I say it didn't "seem to," it's because this jail was so
large we couldn't see
the rear end of it, not that I'm comfortable using the term "rear
end" in that cage...
As Carl and I stood there and assessed the situation,
I heard a groan come from the too-dark-to-see back of the jail.
This wasn't good - I knew that.
This next paragraph, like every word of this, is Swear to Koresh true.
While we were standing there, facing each other in the Mexican
jail cell, drunker than Smirk
on his 40th birthday, held captive in a stone and steel
cage, against our will, by a foreign government,
...Carl, opens his wallet and hands me the $150 he owes me.
But the good news doesn't stop there.
I took a year of Spanish at St Mary's High School in, ...Denver.
I was ready to use my skills to negotiate a way out of this situation.
So I call out to the jail guard, "$20, telephano."
Serious as I can be, I'm waving a twenty dollar bill thru the
bars at my captor,
offering a "big" chunk-of-cash for just a lil' phone call.
I'm like fucking Maverick or Little Joe Cartwright, wrongfully
accused, captured by some
foreign government, made to play by their rules, and not only
was I drunk with an I.Q. of 64,
I was 26 years more stoopid then than I am now.
If I had footage of that, ...me waving the $20 bill, I'd put it up right now.
ha ha
"Here's a tape of BartCop, believer in Jesus Christ"
ha ha
I'm standing there waving this twenty for a half hour, like the
idiot I was,
and the guards just looked at me like I was speaking fucking
Greek.
After all, we musta been a good 3 miles from the McAllen, Texas
crossing,
so there's no way these kidnappers knew any English, right?
I mean, how could the cops in a Mexican boys town ever meet enough
Americans
to figure out what it means when a prisoner waves a $20 bill
screaming "telephano?"
So, I'm waving, waving talking to the damn wall.
Here we are, in jail, in some other country.
We don't have a lawyer.
We didn't get a phone call.
(Like, what was I going to do with a phone call?
Call the White House and demand Jimmy Carter launch an invasion
of Mexico?)
We were arrested, without being read our rights.
It'd be different if we had been arrested in Kabul, or Pangopango,
but this was "Boy's town," three miles from Texas.
Time passes.
Now & then we'd hear a groan from the back of the cell.
We hugged those front bars tighter than Marie Osmond on prom
night.
We were drunk, in jail in some other country where they wouldn't
speak English
and we didn't know what to do. But then, ...God sent an angel
Click Here for Part Four of Bartcop
in a Mexican Jail
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