Messed Up/Funny/Weird Stuff That's Happened To Me

[aldousburbank]

Throwing my sombrero in the ring here for a place to tell messed up, funny, weird, instructive, or transformative tales and possibly, band camp stories.  Come tomorrow, September 16, 2013, the GNS thread will be taken off life support and or but so here’s a place to shAaare (read M. Savage style) your experiences.

Viva Mexico

For a while now I’ve pondered how to roll out the Mexican Prison genre of Burbankia Lore, (Section 11:11 of the Dewey and How Decimal System, as utilized in the Amazing Dope Tales wing of the Cosmic Hard Knocks Library- currently housed in my mind), but it’s too much work.  I’ve never kept a journal.  I did then.  I thought to peruse it for inspiration but declined, thinking I’d be happier remembering flavor over ingredients, insight over detail.

The thing is, Mexico has a Napoleonic justice system, meaning the state has 1 year in which to press charges against a foreign visitor.  In the meantime they house you.  Mexican citizens are lucky enough to have 3 years in which to be charged so Detective Juan Holmes has plenty of time to get the facts in the case straight.  In the meantime you work it out with the guilty and the not yet charged.  But they throw the whole enchilada at the wall just to see what sticks, how shaky you seem, and therefore, what financial negotiations might be fed with souped up picante stew.  I say this as a way of saying that HOW I got to be in a Mexican prison is interesting, but a much larger story than I can attempt to type at a sitting, or than you would want to read.  And it matters not one bit for the sake of a story.

Mexico has changed since the 80’s and 90’s when I lived or traveled there frequently. Employment with cartels surpasses employment with local and federal enforcement and pays better.  But the enforcement dudes were always the lowest, dumbest bastards that justified the nasty images the term Mexican Federale conjures up.  I’ve had lots of adventures with these guys and they roll one way only, well two- crooked and dangerous.  To deal with them properly (when you have to) you must first recognized they are 500+ years into the Stockholm Syndrome, sexually repressed, misogynistic, uninformed, and big baby momma’s boys.  And those are their good points.

Generally you get thrown in jail first, prison later.  The dudes roaming the streets with US gifted trucks and armaments are mostly kids that are usually commandeered by some senior, heavily mustached ass.  The commandante in charge of booking us was busy with hookers and cash and had visible powder residue on his unruly ‘stache.  Mostly he let the incompetent underlings try to deal with the paper game involved but they were more interested in watching Miami Vice on the satellite.  See, this is not even really a cop station, but is a hotel that was taken over by the anti-narcotic gang.  This is convenient when you need a base of operations, your own hotel.

In the basement they set up some barred holding cells.  This was the jail.  So I’m with a crew of indigenous extended family members and my wife and some of our nuclear family.  When traveling you never know when you will be roadblocked and hassled.  Foreigners become targets, vitamins become drogas, and etc.  So there we are, my wife is pregnant and they have her in a separate area where she is safe actually, but this is because I was a real insistent ass to the commandante about her.  So a few days pass and every day I ask the gimp guard, when he comes down, to get the backpacks locked in an adjacent cell so my lady can have her vitamins and womanly things,  Fortunately, local women, friends of ours, were bringing her food and checking on her.  Every day doofus would come down and ignore my request.  I finally yelled some obscenity at him to piss him off and get his boss’s attention. My cellmates got bent out of shape because they chose to remain extremely compliant but I’m not very good at that.  After the guard left there were some hard feelings and rhetoric.  I said “F you guys, I need a joint.”  It just flowed out of my mouth without thinking about how ridiculous it was.  “Where are you planning on getting a joint asshole?” said one of my cellmates.  I told him that I didn’t know but when I did, he was not getting a toke, not a one.  The cell grew smaller.

Next day, the dude comes down again, I call him a MFer, and he gets all pissed and grabs his keys to open the cell and do something.  He does and we’re yelling, shoving, he’s grabbing his sidestick.  The commandante heard us and yells down “Que chingado esta pasando pinche cabrones?”  He huffs down the stairs clearly bothered by the commotion.  “He’s bitching at me to get some shit for his lady boss.”  “Well what the hell does he want?”  “I don’t know some fucking vitamins and clothes or something.”  “Well get the shit asshole, what the hell is your problem?  If she needs her vitamins then get them!!!” (Mexicans are big on vitamins)

So dude is all pissed, opens up the next cell, brings my wife’s backpack into my cell so I can get what she needs out.  But there’s Mexican mota stuck to the bottom of the backpack, they had it in there with “evidence” and it must have been an angel that stuck that on there.  I brush the weed off while I’m messing with the pack, hand him the stuff. 

“Hey” I say to my friend, give me a smoke.  I take out the tobacco, refill, spark up.  All me, no sharing.
The next day they moved us to the state prison.  A city where anything goes, but you can’t leave. Designed for 900, it held 1600.  The bullet pock marks were still on the walls where the Army had quelled a riot a few months before.  You were supposed to have a knife that you checked with the guard when visiting administration offices.  Conjugal visits, to order.  Rent a cell for this since privacy was nearly non-existent.  Dances, where local women came on buses to lighten an inmate’s day.  Furniture and other items were manufactured in there, mostly in the halls outside overcrowded cells.  Beans and corn tortillas twice a day for free.  Other food items, and everything else, for purchase.  Lots of dope.  Lots of natives displaced from their lands.  The only things that were no nos were handguns and hard liquor.  The things is, everyone was already busted so, no prob.
Anyhoo, that’s it for now.  Maybe an intro to some of the stuff that went down, and what I learned from it, when I’m done being nauseous from typing. 

[Renaldo]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Not sarcastic like it sounds. What a crazy experience that must've been.

[PB the Deplorable]

.. Mexican Federale... you must first recognize they are 500+ years into the Stockholm Syndrome, sexually repressed, misogynistic, uninformed, and big baby momma’s boys.  And those are their good points...

We may have stumbled on a gig George Noory is qualified for.   

[sleeplessinca]

Amazing experience.  It must have been pretty unnerving by the sound of it.  You sound like you and your wife have a way of getting along.  I would have been lunch for those guys.  I've had some pretty crap stuff happen but don't feel this is the place to share.  Sorry.  It just isn't.

[Nucky Nolan]

*My grandma owned a bar in Hell's Kitchen, and she served meals of corned beef and cabbage to members of the Westies way back in the day. My maternal grandfather was a made man in the Mafia's Gambino crime family. I couldn't join La Cosa Nostra because of my ethnicity, like Henry Hill. I'm not an FBI. I'm part Appalachian and Irish. However, I did join an international crime syndicate, which was much more powerful than the Italian organized crime groups. I was on the Commission, the group that made all of the decisions. I sat next to the heads of all criminal groups, as well as representatives from various alphabet agencies like the CIA. That's why I can predict world events before they happen. I'm connected (hee) to high-ranking officials. I've seen actual UFOs and EBEs due to these connections. I visited Area 51 on a VIP "guest pass". We summered with the Rockefellers, and we wintered with the Rothschilds. I even got to meet the secret ruler of the world. If I dare type his initials, Swiss hit men will rub me out in one or two days. They got to JFK, so they can get to me.

*Okay, the above is equine feces, except for the part about my ethnicity. I'm definitely not a gangster. That's a horrid lifestyle, and the mere thought of being a mobster chills my blood and churns my gut. The only familial link is my great-great-grandpa who helped someone finance his circumvention of Prohibition. If I was a jerk, I would sell books and tapes based on my absurd story and make the rounds of the alternative/paranormal circuit. Here's a question for anybody, and you could start a new thread on it. How can people make a career out of selling lies to the public and not think twice about it? That seems borderline pathological to me.   

[Juan]

I was run over by my own car.

[ChewMouse]

I was run over by my own car.

All right. I'll bite.

Were you driving it at the time?

[aldousburbank]

Wet cold day. With his typing fingers he attempts to tickle the amygdala forward.

So, anyways, 9 dudes in a cell.  One of them is an artist.  My cellmates would point out a particular corrida (Mexican ballad) that would blare daily on the ubiquitous Mexican radio as being about our artist amigo Paco.  The song was about a particular love triangle gone bad and the jilted lover dude, kills a dude, then frames lover dude 2, Paco.  Judge finds Paco not guilty after 3 years holed up.  Lover dude 1's family raises enough cash to reverse the verdict.  Paco returns for life and paints it away, never seeing lover girl again.

Paco was (is) a good artist.  Tonal perspective and brush mastery no prob.  At some point he began a new work, an exact copy of the "miracle" self-portrait of the Virgin Mary, given to poor indigenous Juan Diego in the year 18stupidwhenever, and enshrined as La Virgen de Guadalupe throughout the country.  It didn't seem too interesting or challenging as it's been done a million times on black velvet and raza paraphernalia. 

But as the thing grew we saw a beauty to it that drew us to want to look but he liked to keep it covered mostly, with a sheet, except the part he was working on.  But the cell was small so it was hard not to see.  After a couple of weeks the thing looked shimmery and 3d and even the golden lace adornments on her clothing were precisely articulated.  Then he went to finish with the face, but he kept redoing it.  At some point we were sure it was done because she was beautiful and perfect and we told him so.  But early in the morning he woke us up by rising and rubbing out the face and starting it again.

Finally, after we lost interest, he called us all together for the unveiling.  He swoops the sheet off and the 8 of us stare politely because her face, while no longer beautiful, was clearly and perfectly Paco's face.  I still think of that.

[Centurion40]

Love it!

[aldousburbank]

Love it!

Hey, the Burbank Coat of Arms!

[Centurion40]

Well earned!

[aldousburbank]

Back at you ese!