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Drugs for insomnia, impotence, allergies, high cholesterol, more impotence, pain relief, and even toe fungus are all now pushed on American television as regularly as alcohol is. The government, the FDA, has allowed these companies to do this with minimal regulation. I’m sure the drug companies would prefer, for example, not to have to list “anal leakage” or “suicide” or “head explosions” as possible side effects on their high-dollar TV commercials, but some vague semblance of the law that still remains in relation to the common good forces them to at least warn you that if you take the antidepressant they are pushing on you, you could maybe kill yourself. All of these new drug ads encourage us to “ask your doctor” and, ever the good consumers, we obviously do if you look at the billions we generate in drug profits.

I have always had trouble sleeping. To me, sometimes it is like dying, every night, and I can’t help but hang onto my drifting waking consciousness. Or my mind gets in a thought rut, an idea like a song being replayed as accompaniment ad infinitum, over and over. Only two things ever really help my insomnia: substantial exercise earlier in the day, (the very best sleep is from physical exhaustion when sober) or taking Xanax or Valium to sleep. I began to see all of the ads for these sleep aids on television, and two years ago, I decided to indeed ask my doctor about one of these new drugs for sleep. My mother-in-law, Eve, was taking Ambien at the time. She swore by its effectiveness and had experimented with several different combos before she got the right dosage: 6.5 mg, rather than the 5 or 10 mg pills. She didn’t drink with it or mix it with any other drug, and it worked exactly as promised, giving her a full seven to eight hours sleep every night.

I decided to ask Dr. Jacobs about them on my next visit to the pain clinic, but first I asked him to write me a script for Xanax instead as I knew it worked well for me as a sleep aid. I rarely took it during the day, as I got no real high or any special feeling of being anxiety free from the drug; it just made me drowsy and put me to sleep. Dr. Jacobs said no, though. He didn’t like prescribing Xanax, didn’t like any of the benzos at all. He did write me a script for Ambien, though, at full strength, which at the time was 10 mg. I asked him if there would be any drug interaction problems with the hydrocodone and Flexeril, and he said there shouldn’t be, as I was on such small amounts and had developed a tolerance to the opiates. He did advise me not to drink at all though.

But I did drink, my daily vodka crans and tequila. Combined with the 60 mg of HC, the 30 mg of muscle relaxants, Xanax, and Cannabis sativa, it did seem to bring out the worst side effects of the drug Ambien. The main problems I had were loss of memory and sleepwalking, both of which worried me. I was getting sleep on the drug, but it was more of a complete black out. I no longer remembered my dreams—which in some ways, was a blessing. I still had powerful nightmares on occasion, usually finding myself on a dark beach with brown tidal waves coming at me, or on open plains with nowhere to run as the entire sky blackened with an advancing wall of purple and blue tornadoes. Most often, I find myself trapped in an endless black sea in the middle of the night in a torrential rain, gigantic black waves towering over me as I try to stay above water . . . but then the true fear begins as I realize that there is something else there with me, there is something under the water, something so black and dark and incredibly huge that to face it, to contemplate it, would destroy you, and I feel this great immensity rising toward me, just brushing my treading legs, the whole ocean rising with its incomprehensible mass, coming for me, and an overwhelming sadness then overtakes me as I realize fully and completely that this is indeed Death, that there is no escape, this is the moment I’d been waiting for . . . Even more often, I found myself on bridges, my car stalling in the middle of the bridge over a peaceful green river. I notice then that it is raining, that the river is rising, and the water is now muddy and covering my feet, and then it returns, that feeling from the black ocean, and I am suddenly so sad because I know it is over, it is too late, as my car fills with water and I am pulled off the bridge into a raging brown torrent, slowly sinking into the swirling mud . . . These dreams came to me less frequently than in my past, but one still emerged in the night on occasion, and the complete blackout from Ambien was a relief.

I had to be in bed within forty-five minutes or so after taking 10 mg of Ambien because when it hit, I went down immediately. Problem was, like many men, as I went further past forty, my prostate came to make itself known and every evening I was up at least twice a night to take a piss. The bathroom was right next to our big bed, but when I took Ambien, instead of waking up fully to walk to the toilet, I didn’t wake up until I was just about ready to urinate. That first week of taking the drug, two nights in a row, I was woken up by Patricia saying, “Jake? What are you doing? Jake! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes then to see that I was in my usual stance, one hand on the wall to use gravity, only I was standing in the far corner of our bedroom getting ready to piss on the wall and carpet. On another night, Patricia stopped me just in time as I stood there, completely asleep and oblivious, my dick in hand about to urinate on top of the plugged in and running air purifier we had humming in the other corner of the room. In my defense, it was large, round, and white, so it looked like a toilet. Had Patricia not woken me up, I would have shocked the hell out of myself pissing on a plugged in appliance. Both episodes bothered me, so I cut out the vodka cranberries to see if that was what did it.

I then, for some reason, had another weird side effect where I would sleepwalk all the way downstairs, only to wake up before an open refrigerator to find myself shoving another giant bite of a cheesecake or two cookies, or slabs of ham and cheese, basically as much immediate sugar or salt as I could get into my mouth at one time. This happened even when I hadn’t smoked any pot so it wasn’t that. Plus, with pot, unlike with Ambien, one was fully cognizant of the fact that the cannabis had stimulated your appetite, given you the munchies, and you could make a decision to fight it or go with it. Personally, I always went all the way with the marijuana munchies as the drug heightened your sense of taste so well that when they came on, discovering a half gallon of ice cream or chocolate brownies in the kitchen was like finding a pound of gold, and neither sweet ever tasted as good as they did when high on pot. But with Ambien, this wasn’t a choice. I just woke up and was binge eating anything, a loss of control that again worried me.

I called Jacobs office and told them of the side effects and they said to stop taking the Ambien immediately. I did, but I kept the bottle, and should note that in subsequent attempts with the drug when I was not taking as much hydrocodone or muscle relaxant, had smoked no weed, and had not had any alcohol to drink, the Ambien did work without the side effects. It still wiped out all memory of the night before and killed all of my dreams, but I went down for about six hours for sure. Even so, I still didn’t like the way Ambien made my rest feel like an artificial and not-at-all refreshing manufactured sleep. I woke up groggily and reluctantly from Ambien, no matter what I had mixed it with so I gave my mother-in-law the rest of my pills to break in half if she ever needed them.

Jacobs was an excellent physician and had his PA, Ms. Portales, immediately call in a few small scripts for me of a variety of sleep aids so that we could see what would work best, but to no avail. I tried Lunestra, Rozerem, most of the ones advertised now. None of them worked. They actually seemed to fuck with my sleep, instead of causing it. My dreams came back, only now they were accompanied by more nightmares than usual, ones that the insomnia drugs amplified even more. I had some of the weirdest most violent dreams of my life on these sleep aids, horrific tortures, humans flayed alive, bodies cut in half, with the upper torso still alive, crawling, pulling the bloody body along the sand in agony, trailing blood and guts. Old dogs, long dead, I had cared for deeply, appeared in my dreams so real I woke up with tears in my eyes realizing they were gone. At one point, my strong, paternal grandmother came to me in the night and grabbed my chin as I looked up at her, a little boy again. She gave me that harsh stern look of hers and admonished me for wasting my talents as an artist, insisting that I get down to work before my life was over. The woman had just died only weeks before but the dream had seemed so real that I woke up rattled and sweating. I could see then how people felt they had been visited by ghosts as I was shaken for days.

Patricia was growing worried. She said that I was sleeping so deeply on this mix of insomnia drugs, which I was combining with alcohol and HC again, that she was worried I was dead one night; she found herself touching me thereafter, making me stir in the night to check on my breathing. On other nights, she said I was whimpering so loudly in fear that she was forced to wake me up. Whenever she did, I was more relieved to be awake than asleep, transported back to my comfortable bed and my sweet, beautiful wife, away from the nightmare landscape or scenario in which I’d been enmeshed. I finally ditched all of these sleep aids and decided to either stay awake until exhausted or try to get some more Xanax or Valium, which was all that worked.

I went online first but couldn’t bring myself to pay 200 bucks for an online doctor consultation when I had only had a ten dollar co-pay, if that, when Dr. Garza had prescribed the drug for me. I could understand both Garza and now Dr. Jacobs’s reluctance to prescribe Xanax in combo with hydrocodone, but was frustrated that their main objection was that people abused the drug and that one could also become dependent on it. I was not going to do either; I just wanted it for the three nights a week when I absolutely had to get up very early for my job. Or, now that I used MDMA on occasion, to take the teeth grinding edge off the drug with maybe 1 mg of alprazolam. I did know from reading as well as experience that many people did abuse alprazolam and took “ladders” for fun. “Ladders” were 2 mg sections of Xanax that one could break off into 0.5 mg doses, which was what I wanted to do. Others just took the whole 2 mg and mixed them with alcohol for a kick, high school and college kids at parties.

Unwilling to pay such high prices and tired of going through all the bullshit of faxing records or going to another doctor besides Jacobs for a script, Dean and I finally just drove down to the Mexican border—Nuevo Laredo was just three hours from SA—to buy some Valium (diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam) over the counter. I also wanted to stock up on a few bottles of Mexican Tylex which contained 30 mg of codeine and 500 mg of acetaminophen. The opiate codeine was much weaker than hydrocodone and had barely any effect on me. Even if I tried to chew it up like I did my Lortabs and Vicodins to get them quickly into my bloodstream (which was difficult, as Tylex codeine came in powder form in a capsule) the codeine took too long to hit me, and when it did it was a dull, barely perceptible high. It also did little to kill any back or muscle pain, compared to my HC.

The only reason I even kept a couple of bottles of the Tylex horse pills around was to help me get off the hydrocodone in case I ever ran out of my supply. I had once used Tylex to cut down to two Vicodin a day from eight or ten a day. I had used the taper down method of counting out my pills each day, slowly reducing them in number each weekend to lessen the withdrawal symptoms. The Tylex helped some, but I still had the shits and cramps and felt lethargic and sore for days. They were no substitute either; even when most of the HC was out of my system, the 30 mg of codeine was a weak attempt to reach opiate receptors in my brain I’d long ago blown out.

The taper down method was still the best way for me to cut down, but I never used it to completely quit my HC dependency. I still have calendars in my desk running back to 2003 with mad scribbles in two inch squares for each day of the month that read: ten p.m., 20 mg HC, 1 F (flex), two p.m., 5 mg, HC, six p.m. 5 mg HC, 10 mg Val (valium), nine p.m. 10 mg HC (40 total/ 24 hours) 1 mg Xanax, 2 oz. vodka, four hits MJ (mary jane) slept four hours, jimmy legs bad, three a.m., 600 mg Ibuprofen, slept downstairs 1 hr, S&S at school eight a.m. (shakes and shits in the morning at work before my first lecture). The next day, I had notes of either going down in my HC amounts and up in ibuprofen, or up in HC and down in everything else I was taking to mask its loss. I have years of these scribbles, up and down with Vicodin and Lortab, notes on every single day’s intake, with the occasional mostly blank entry that only read “80 mg HC, feel good again, fuck me . . .”

Dean had brought his new girlfriend and fiancé Veronica into town on this trip to Mexico but neither she nor Patricia wanted to cross the border with us. Though both had been deep into Mexico before, neither woman liked the sharp, sleazy edge of the immediate Mexican border with the US. They did ask us to pick them up some Retin-A, some type of miracle, cortisone-like, wrinkle cream they couldn’t get in the US. They were worried about our safety a bit also as there were many real warnings at the time for Americans to be careful in all Mexican border towns from Nuevo Laredo to Tijuana. The border drug war had heated up with local Mexican police officers and federal law enforcement (the federales) and local drug cartels all competing for the highly lucrative illegal drug profits gleaned from the massive use of marijuana and cocaine in the United States, the world’s biggest drug customer state.

This was nothing different than Prohibition back in the ’20s in America. Even an eighth grade idiot could figure out the basic business supply and demand equation of the illegal drug trade. Because marijuana and coke are illegal, and demand is still high, it is sold at a high price in the huge global black market for illicit drugs. My own great grandfather and namesake, Victor Stewart, made himself a millionaire on the same business model with illegal alcohol back in the 1920s. Victor was a cowboy from Texas who’d become a rancher and farmer south of San Diego from years of hard work. It was also Victor’s job to monitor for the US government the flimsy border that ran along hundreds of acres of his ranch.

My young grandfather and his many cowboy brothers in California rode horses up and down that border, which was only a five-wire fence in the 1920s. They pulled wagons to drop highly refined flour over the fence for the Mexican families from Tijuana with whom they were doing business. These families and businesses needed and wanted the more highly refined American flour for certain pastries and sweets. In turn, they dropped five-gallon metal cans of pure alcohol on the US side of the border. The boys brought the alcohol back to the barn, and my great grandfather added in and cooked the sugar alcohol mix to make very strong whiskey. He had an old model T with a false extra gas tank under the front seat that he then filled with the whiskey.

Victor drove the car into San Diego several times a week with its extra load to personally take his many sons to a Catholic school there. He came back on those afternoons with the boys and a suitcase of cash. Before he died at 100, I remember the old man bragging in the 1970s that no man in the country was making the kind of money he was making on the Mexican border in the 1920s, thousands of dollars a month. He didn’t drink much himself—just one shot of whiskey every morning at breakfast—but he was sad to see Prohibition repealed, along with the immense profits from the illegal drug trade.

Eighty years later, Dean Brown and I left Patricia and Veronica drinking at a nice hotel in Laredo to walk across the border and buy cheap drugs that were even stronger than the illegal ones that people were fighting over so violently right in front of us. I had students in my classes who were from Laredo, who had family in Nuevo Laredo, telling me that they were even worried themselves about the border drug war. It wasn’t so much that you yourself would be a target of violence, but rather that you might get caught in the crossfire of the state government’s drug cartels and the private business drug cartels. In some Mexican towns, the private drug cartels were more respected than the federales who were famously corrupt.

As you cross into Nuevo Laredo on foot you are accosted by dozens of desperate and shady men trying to sell you everything from illegal drugs (or legal ones by steering you to a particular Mexican pharmacy that was giving them a customer kickback), to young women or boys for sex. Dean and I had crossed a few times and were good at it. We always stashed whatever drugs we had on us on the US side at a rest stop or restaurant just before one of the US drug check stops that you were forced to pass through well beyond the actual border. These secondary search stops were several miles north of Laredo where you and your vehicle would be checked primarily with drug sniffing dogs. We would pass through these stops clean on the way home and stop at the rest area, wherever, to pick up our small amount of weed or, in Dean’s case, cocaine also, whatever we were smoking or snorting on the way down to Mexico and on the way back to San Antonio.

When you make the first walk into Nuevo Laredo, the idea is to walk quickly and with purpose and ignore all of the jackasses promising you pussy and drugs. We walked straight through the first town square on this last trip in 2005 to a small, dingy pharmacy on the southern side. Things were indeed heating up as I noted the strong police presence. There were many men in uniforms, some of them driving around in brand new Chevy pick-ups with large machine guns mounted in the truck bed, a man with a federale uniform, a black knit mask over his face, and a bullet proof Kevlar vest manning the large automatic weapon. I pointed out two of the trucks and guns to Dean.

“You think those are fifty caliber?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Seems like overkill.” He was distracted as we walked across the square; he not only wanted to go to the pharmacy but was looking for a street connection also, one of the better ones, men who weren’t so desperate they accosted you right at the fucking border crossing. An old woman wrapped in an Indian blanket with long white hair done up in two gray buns above her wrinkled, sun-burned face stared at me. She had noticed me pointing out the mounted machine guns and the federales, the soldiers. She looked like some old Mexican native, an Indian straight down from the desert mountains, or from central casting. When I said “Buenos tardes” she smiled again and nodded toward the federales and said in a surprisingly loud, firm, and knowing voice, “Esos son los hombres malos!”

She was sure to stress the first word and I turned to Dean as we entered the pharmacy.

“Did you hear that?”

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“That old lady just said the police are the bad guys down here.”

“What’s new with that?” Dean said. He glanced over at the tiny old woman on her park bench. “She’s probably a spotter for the cartels.”

“With an Uzi under that blanket . . .”

Inside the Mexican pharmacy, the way it works, you tell them what you want and they call a doctor who is usually in the next room or next door and he writes you a script and they fill it on the spot. The better pharmacies have runners who get the script for you so it is easier to go to these shops rather than go with some potential thief or con artist hanging out in the square who asks for the money up front and promises to go do the whole doctor/pharmacy run for you. This is a good way to kiss fifty bucks goodbye, though some of these guys are legit, mainly the ones that ask you to follow them to the particular doctor’s office. These front men can also get you stronger stuff.

Dean placed his large order with the pharmacy first, eager to leave, still looking around for the right runner he said. I placed my order. You could load up but not too much. If you call the border patrol, they’ll even tell you how many pills you can bring back of a type of medicine sometimes. Usually, it was no more than ninety or 120 of each brand. To get around this, I ordered three thirty pill bottles of 2 mg alprazolam ladders which would give me 120 doses of 0.5 mg of Xanax, exactly the dosage I liked for sleep. For taking it with X, I would need maybe 1.5 mg, or almost a whole ladder by the end of the night to smooth things out or bring on sleep more quickly when I was ready to quit the ecstasy high. This kept me right at the ninety pill limit. I ordered two sixty pill bottles of Tylex, or codeine, and four thirty pill packets of 10 mg of blue Valium, or 120 pills which was maybe pushing it on the Valium when re-crossing the border.

I sat down in their waiting room and looked at all of the cheap crap covered in dust on the shelves of the drugstore. An odd mix of people was milling about in the park square, just outside the tall glass windows of the store. There were dorky old harmless tourists walking past, loading up on cheap tequila and Kahlua which wasn’t that cheap, liquor not much of a bargain in border towns anymore. There were poor locals wandering aimlessly while wealthier locals in expensive cars lined up in a massive, miles-long traffic jam to make the crossing into the US to probably go shopping at one of the many mega-mall “Factory Outlets” that had sprung up across southern Texas. There was the stoic old lady, some bums who looked either passed out drunk or dead, immobile and supine beneath a tree or two, a smattering of college kids having come across to “party” in Mexico, and always, everywhere, the ubiquitous police.

A middle-aged man from Nuevo Laredo with a giant brown mustache was sitting next to me. He also caught me staring at the heavily armed police and felt the need to tell me in Spanish, just like the old woman, that the police were the bad guys down here. Two people in a row had now told me this unprompted; it was as though I was visiting a country under siege by their own government and the people there wanted others in the world to know of their predicament and plight. Dean finally found the street guy he was looking for, going by hunch and experience.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Wait for me.”

“Wait!” I said, but he was out the door.

He walked up to some shady looking young man in cowboy boots, a vest and cap, and they began gesturing and trying to talk.

The friendly man with the mustache said something to the woman behind the pharmacy counter who then looked at Dean and his connection and at me.

“Hombre malo; he’s a bad guy,” she said, motioning her head toward Dean’s man. She didn’t need to tell me this as I had put up my own feelers when I crossed the border. I did this in any country I traveled in, or in any strange, major American city I was visiting for the first time. I sharpened my awareness and went by any bad gut feelings I had in addition to logic and reason.

Going with any of my first impressions usually served me well and had kept me out of trouble more than once. Being stoned sometimes helped with this almost extra-sensory awareness for any potential dangers. Not only did I not like the guy Dean was talking to, the whole bustling, dirty, trash-strewn market square was now putting me off. The old lady was suddenly gone, and even more men with guns seemed to be everywhere.

I said “perdón” to my new mustachioed friend and walked up to Dean to interrupt him. The man in the cap smiled widely, revealing perfect white teeth, reminding me of my own personal motto: “Beware the Smiling Man.” I asked Dean what was up and he briefly explained that he was looking for some hard core steroids to inject. He needed help as this guy spoke barely any English except to keep saying “No problem” over and over, waiting for the money. I talked to the man in my broken Spanish, giving him the names of Dean’s drugs also.

Dean then gave him twenty bucks, promised another fifty when he came back, and the man ran off.

“You can say goodbye to that guy, now,” I said.

“Nah, he wants the money.”

“Yeah, he just got it.”

“Listen, you don’t have to wait—”

I cut him off. “I’m not. This place gives me a whole new bad vibe that it never gave me before. I used to come down here at night with a group of people and get blasted and never really worried. Now, I don’t even like it for thirty minutes during the day. Plus, did you see that line we gotta wait in to get back into the States?”

Dean was chewing on his Nicorette maniacally. The tobacco companies had found a brilliant new delivery system for their drug, the popular poison, nicotine. Before, you bothered others with the cigarette smoke, or you were spitting out tobacco juice with dip and chew. Now, no more mess, just smack on some bubble gum to get your nicotine fix. Make it fruit flavored and you had the potential for millions of new, young customers to become dependent on the drug for life. Even better, all of this was being done in the name of helping people kick the nicotine habit, that is, to stop smoking it. Dean had been chewing the original flavor Nicorette gum since its debut and was hooked now on the expensive twenty-five dollar packs.

“Yeah, I saw the line; so what?”

“Well, I’m gonna get my shit and split. You sure you’re okay here?”

“No worries,” he said, smacking the gum. “There are a lot more guns down here,” he said, looking about. “This is worse than just last year.”

“I know. Don’t forget your stuff at the pharmacy.”

“Tell Veronica not to worry.”

“Right.”

I went back to the pharmacy and picked up all my downers and paid in cash, making sure not to forget the girls’ two tubes of Retin-A. I couldn’t wait to leave and headed toward the long line at the bridge over the muddy Rio Grande to get back into America. As so happened, I was in line just behind the friendly, well-dressed man with the big brown mustache whom I’d met in the pharmacy. He spoke a little English so we talked for quite a while in both languages as we shuffled along in the slow-moving line. I guess because of his dress and the dignified way he carried himself, I assumed he was a doctor or lawyer, an architect, some distinguished professional the whole time. Just as we made it to the US Customs border crossing station, we had to split into different lines. He asked for my card and I told him I didn’t believe in them. He laughed and gave me his own and we said our goodbyes. I turned the business card over to read that I had been talking to a fucking clown for over an hour. His business name was El Mustachio and he worked parties for kids on both sides of the border. He also made animals out of balloons.

Once inside customs, I pretended nothing and declared everything and passed through the first checkpoint. Usually these American border guards were serious and suspicious company men assholes. I had been pulled aside and detained by these men years before in my mid-twenties when crossing back into the states from Ciudad Acuna having driven across from Del Rio for a night of drinking with coworkers from a project on the US side. I’d driven over in my own truck and on the way back in, forgot about emptying my ashtray just in case there were any roaches in it. I’d meant to toss it out in Del Rio, but pot can make you forgetful.

This was a big mistake, as there was one tiny roach which set off one of their drug-sniffing dogs on my way back over the river. The border guards proceeded to tear my truck apart looking for the big drug stash that didn’t exist. They’d all seen too many movies to the point that when I pulled out my Copenhagen to have a dip while I waited, a guard slapped it out of my hand and grabbed it, picking up the dark brown, sharp-smelling, finely ground tobacco, running it through his fingers. The idiot had thought it was pot, or some other drug, that I was trying to eat the evidence.

I ended up being held in a cell for hours, strip searched, the works. In the end, two cops came in with the roach and maybe three pot seeds they’d found and laid it before me in a plastic bag as though it were big evidence. They briefly tried some bullshit song and dance on where did you get it, how much do you have, etc. and I disarmed them with simple honesty. I told them I smoked on marijuana on occasion, was out of pot, and couldn’t remember where I got it as that was actually a very old roach I must have forgotten was even in there. I also told them I wanted to be released immediately or charged and that I wanted to call my lawyer. The seeds were a joke, the roach, less than half an inch long with nothing inside it. They knew they had nothing, even with the new “zero tolerance” policy which had just begun then with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, turning these border guards and many other gung-ho, uncool cops into unreasonable, judgmental assholes overnight. So I was let go.

Twenty years later, I’d just bought a multi-month supply of much stronger drugs than marijuana, every one of which, besides the Retin-A, could make a weak-willed person physically dependent. I thought I was scot-free, but at the last and second checkpoint, some young, buzz-cut, fat ass, redneck, pink-faced, uptight, white-boy dipshit stopped me and went through all of my shit. He was very accusatory and rude, asking me why I needed so much Valium, so much Xanax, on and on. I made up some lame ass grandparents story on the spot making sure to tell this moron that I’d checked with his home office on all of this down to the exact amount and the pudgy prick knew I was right. He knew exactly what I was doing, that these drugs weren’t for my grandparents, and yet he could do nothing. Frustrated, he still held me and called his boss and sure enough, they nailed me on the amount of Valium and the kid took one of my boxes. This visibly pissed me off, which made him happy and they let me cross. I waited there for Dean for thirty minutes and he came breezing through holding two big plastic bags. I gave him shit about losing his twenty and he said, “No, no, no. I know what I’m doing. The guy came back and wanted me to go with him personally to see a doctor to get the steroids. I was already getting in line so I got my money back, tipped him five bucks, and here I am.”

“Did that fat little redneck give you any shit?”

“The second guy?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Not a word.”

I do believe that some people are just born lucky. Dean was carrying double of everything I had and more, plus too many bottles of Kahlua and expensive Tequila and waltzed across intact.

On the interstate on the way back home, we declared some liquor and didn’t mention the prescription drugs at the last big South Texas checkpoint, which is full of even more drug and bomb sniffing dogs, mainly German Shepherds, panting out there on the hot highway. They sniffed, we passed, and the guards waved us through. We pulled over at a Chili’s restaurant not a mile from the checkpoint and Dean picked up a couple of film canisters he’d hid behind a light post in their parking lot, one filled with coke and the other with pot, for the drive back to SA. Patricia turned down all of it and took a nap. I smoked some weed and tried to read a book while Dean and his fellow corporate attorney Veronica cranked up the music, did lines, drank tequila, and chatted about The Law for the next three hours.

Back in SA, I used my Xanax ladders as sparingly as possible, breaking them up for bad nights with no sleep. I tried to do the same with the Valium, but ended up using them daily to cut down on the Vicodin. This worked until I ran through the anti-anxiety med and went back up to my usual prescribed six HC a day. The Xanax lasted longer, helping me sleep for months, but not long enough. I wasn’t worried about becoming too dependent on them. It takes ingesting several milligrams of Xanax every day for months to get truly dependent. It is also a tough drug to kick, like Valium, and thus one I would only recommend to others in small amounts. Eventually, using only a couple of milligrams a week total, I ran out, hoarding my last few alprazolam ladders for the few times a year I took MDMA to use both in conjunction.

The violence on the border has only grown worse as we ship automatic weapons across to them and they ship drugs over to us. I haven’t gone back to Mexico since, mainly because of the hassle rather than the potential of being caught in the crossfire of any gun battles over turf and smuggling routes in this endless drug war. I didn’t like running the gauntlet of sleazy con men, or the smell of the polluted river, the urine soaked sidewalks, the destitute and desperate people that often filled many border town streets begging for help, or mainly, that long-ass line you had to wait in to be rudely inspected like a potentially diseased cow trying to come home. The Tylex codeine sucked, and no matter how hard I tried to conserve after each trip with Dean to the border, the Valium and Xanax still disappeared too quickly every time. I would make no more trips to Laredo para mira los hombres malos; none of it was worth it.