The Black Meat.

I walk down the garish arabesque neon of Juarez Avenue. Not a soul. Drunken corpse lies in someone else's overcoat, shiny over the dirt. Cowboy a foot away talks to Durango via cellular. Taxi drivers don't even bother me. The wind blows harder. Trash and dirt swirls in eddies across the street up into the blank dark. Dirt in my eyes. Fucking desert! I cross a street in front of Tequila Derby - weekend be-bop joint for teenage revilers and high school hipsters - look down the alley. Taxi? Asked meekly. He knows I need nothing. I stop to buy a pack of Lucky Strikes from an indigenous Mexican Indian huddled in a cove of crumbling masonry, small television emitting black and white images of The Simpsons in Espanola. We chat on the weather. Nasty. Muy feo.

Two queens walk by and give me the eye as I pass The Cafe. I stride up to the corner and cut down a street, hands in jacket pocket, cigarette hanging from mouth in a real James Dean fashion, you dig, giving the fags their B-movie production. Down a silent street. Lampposts emit yellow glows...some areas dark and foreboding with shadow like phantoms moving in them. Black dog drags something grisly and wet in its maw. It whines and stops. Scratch. Scratch. Picks the black wet thing up again and trots off down the dark street lined with brick and adobe houses. Is it meat?

I light another cigarette and walk to the corner, the wind is howling fierce. I stand under the lamp and listen to the buzzing of the condenser. I think of Oscar. I think of William. I think of Tony. I think of Hector. I think of all the things I have done the previous two years.

I wish I never left Tijuana.