Andrew and I had ‘kidnapped’ a friend who’d graduated in my class, while he was visiting with some underclassmen buddies who’d landed in San Diego for University. They all roomied up, and Mark, one of my closer friends, took a vacation to see them. Andrew and I told him we’d shoot down on one of the days to visit.

We were at an afterhours party one Monday evening, completely off the rails, and decided to drive Andrew’s car due-south to pay a surprise visit at, dunno, 1:30 in the morning? The guys in the apartment were up drinking Bud Light, and when we called and announced we were en route, they welcomed our late night visit.

What Mark didn’t know, what I myself didn’t know, is that within 30 minutes or so of our arrival, we’d be crossing the southern border into Tijuana, Mexico, to go find a strip club somewhere in the deeper parts of the city. Impulse ruled the moment!

As previously mentioned, straying off of the tourist thoroughfare of Revolucion Avenue in TJ during the daytime is ill-advised, but going into that city at 2am, three white boys, and going deep into the heart of the dangerous inner-neighborhoods is rightly ill-advised. Insane, really. Well, that’s exactly how we spent our evening, into the pre-dawn, morning hours, on that fateful weeknight.

I remember our cab driver was reluctant after we crossed over and demanded a trip to the city’s finest strip club as our intended destination. In broken English, he said something to the effect of, “Are choo guys chure…?” And it didn’t seem to be our request for a ride to the club specifically. It felt more like, rhetorically, “Are you three guys sure you even want to be in this fucking city after dark?!? Are you completely crazy?”

At that point, it didn’t really matter. We were so tuned up on cocaine and stark recklessness that nothing was going to stop us now. Add to that, Andrew also wanted to connect with Reno in the AM to re-up his supply of Cocaine, and we all wanted to wait for the pharmacies to open up so we could grab more goodies. They open early down there.

But first! The club! There was one other “gringo” in the place. I saw a patron with an actual peg-leg, like a pirate. The entire place turned to watch us walk through the entrance. It might have been the most frightening thing I’ve ever walked into, but I was too high to process it or speak on it in a way that might have been substantive.

I could tell that Mark, our semi-willing hostage, felt the same way too. His energy was tense. Andrew, on the other hand, was all systems go. He led the way to a small, circular table close to the stage of fully nude and very tired looking Mexican women dancing. One of them had a huge scar across her midsection.

Undeterred by the horrorshow we had walked in on, we ordered three Mexican beers with lime wedges, and sat back to watch the evening’s entertainment. But still, even the waiter was wary of our arrival. I remember him muttering in broken English:

“You guys maybe shouldn’t come here”, and, “I hope you leave here safe.”

No sympathy for three completely tweaked out white devils riding in like wild horses to the complete surrender of dangerous impulse.

Not a pretty sight. That was also an unfortunate by-product of location, however. Southern Cal. Tijuana. The quality of the cocaine was just too good. Too potent, in all the best ways. It hadn’t been stomped on six or seven times by the time it hit our blood brain barrier. You don’t find such a high quality product in our homeworld of the northeast.

Andrew would end up going upstairs with one of the ladies of the night, leaving both Mark and me alone for about 20 minutes. We both immediately looked at each other and said some sort of, “We need to get the fuck outta here!”, simultaneously. We both agreed to try to team-up against Andrew, the most confident and reckless, and oldest of our crew, and do or say what we could say or do to nudge him in the direction of “Getting the fuck outta there.”

It took a little wheedling, but by then it was beginning to dawn, and the establishment was closing for the night. Day? I felt like I was in that place from the movie, “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”, by Tarantino and Rodriguez. The vampires close and go to sleep when the sunlight begins to creep through the windows.

The waiter, muttering as we settled our tab, said, “Careful when you leave here,” or some such thing. We, a whole bunch of Mexican Men, big bowie knives affixed in leather holsters on their belts with the big silver buckles. Everyone, stone drunk. Too drunk. Some staggering a bit. Some jovial.

Others, angry. The energy of it, we kept a wide berth and made our way into the predawn, barely light out, but here comes the sun. Little darlings.

The other gringo in the club that night, a scraggly looking ex-pat, I assume, he spoke fluent Spanish it seemed, was having some words with another customer on the way out.

As soon as we stepped out of the club we saw him get socked in the jaw and knocked onto the concrete. The beautiful western sunrise was just beginning. The sky was brightening. We found a cab as fast as we could as Andrew placed a very early morning phone call to Reno.

It would seem that Reno never sleeps, as he picked up on the first or second ring. We told the cabbie to head toward Reno’s restaurant. He shook us down for a c-note, telling us to “Give me the money or we’re going back to my neighborhood.”

We ponied up and he took us to the cantina. It was closed but Reno and some younger looking guys were sitting and smoking on the steps near the entrance. Andrew and Reno conducted their business in the back. Reno would always send Andrew to different nearby locations with handwritten notes that we would pass along to the proprietor who was in possession of our desired pills.

We made two stops. Well, three, if you count going back to Reno’s joint to prepare ourselves for the walk back over the invisible line to the land of the free and home of the brave. The first was to a little apartment not a block from the restaurant. Andrew went in by himself while Mark and I awaited his return. It’s funny. I was never frightened when conducting business in TJ. That evening? The club? That had scared me to my fucking soul, but with Reno facilitating things, it always felt safer. Contained. Andrew emerged.

We walked another block to one of the pharmacies that dominate Revolucion Avenue. We gave Reno’s note to the pharmacist, and he brought us into the back area of the store. There, we purchased — I don’t know even know how many — benzos, all varieties, Somas, Percocets, GHB, Steroids — Andrew’s thing; he had a few clients who were trying to turn into hulks; Rohypnol, for personal use only; ketamine; and whatever else interested us.

Then, we strolled back to the cantina. In Reno’s back office area, we got busy unboxing and then undressing and wrapping the foil punch-out cards that held the pills in Saran and affixing the mostly flat packages to our bodies. Sternums, stomachs, upper legs, lower backs. This was something we had done countless times.

The glaring difference on this particular day, however, is that it was like a fucking Tuesday at dawn when we caught another cab ride from Reno’s Restaurant back to the border to get back to Andrew’s vehicle, and, most surely, to save Mark from the inevitability of a nervous breakdown when you consider all the in’s and out’s of his night out in TJ with his whacked-out high school pals.

It had been a heavy trip to lay on him—his first time in TJ. I felt bad. Andrew and I hadn’t exactly given him a heads-up about our intention to bring several ounces of cocaine and upwards of a thousand schedule 1, 2, 3, and 4 drugs back home with us after the club.

Looking back, I feel terrible about the gravitas that we subjected Mark to that night. But what's done is done. We survived. Except we almost didn’t. And we very nearly didn’t safely re-enter the border crossing thanks to yours truly.

Smuggling anything out of TJ on a Friday or Saturday evening back in the late 90s was a breeze. Tourism from young, white college kids, of legal drinking age in Mexico, is like 75% of that city’s economy. Every time we passed the border on previous visits, the federal agents screening people would barely glance at us. They’d just wave us through.

But on a Tuesday? At not-yet-quite 7am, and looking as brazenly zonked and haggard as we did that morning? This was going to be a whole new frontier that we’d never explored before. And this pilgrim made one of the dumbest and most impulsive mistakes that I’ve ever made.

As we waited in the short line back to the land of our origin, wanting nothing more than a fast ride up the PCH and about 20 hours of sleep back at my Venice apartment, I remember, for still-unknown reasons, when it was our turn to walk through, I made eye contact with one of the Federal Customs Enforcement Agents patrolling the area.

I suddenly stopped short, stood stiff and upright, and I saluted him.

Yeah. I saluted him, as if I were some kind of fucking soldier or federal agent myself; I gave him a proud salute. On top of that, I fucking winked at him.

Yeah. I did that.

He gave me a stone-cold look that made my blood go cold and the “C’mere…all of you” finger wave. We slowly approached.

He and his partner looked us up and down for what felt like half a lifetime. It was probably about 10 seconds. And then the one I saluted spoke:

“You mind telling me what the hell the three of you are doing leaving Tijuana, Mexico, at 7am on a Tuesday?” he asked. His gaze was not friendly.

And just one cursory patdown, I knew—we all knew—that’s all it would take to be ushered into custody in violation of I-don’t-know-how-many federal laws that could potentially land us in prison for I-don’t-know-how-long. That’s all it would take—just a gentle tap on the midsection, feeling something underneath my T-shirt.

I felt like I was dying inside.

Thank goodness for Andrew.

Always the charmer, the best looking, the slickest and the quickest of the three of us, even despite the deficiencies of cognitive functioning after all the drugs and alcohol we had consumed that night, replied, confidently, almost immediately:

“It’s our first time here, and we feel like we’re going to catch a disease if we don’t get the hell out of this dump.”

The icy gaze from the agents again. The two Feds looked us in the eyes. They looked us up and down. They looked at each other. The one whom I had saluted gave me the “C’mere” gesture again with his two fat fingers. He wanted me to lean closer to him so I could hear what he was going to say.

“You three. Get the fuck outta here and don’t come back,” he told us quietly, sternly.

We briskly walked to the parking lot, where all the pedestrians crossed over. It was nearly empty when we got there: Andrew’s Honda and a small collection of other parked cars. We all got in just as quick as rabbits, and with consideration to the exhaustion we were all feeling after a night out in TJ, we dumped a pile of nearly pure cocaine onto a compact disc case, cut three large lines, and started back in the direction that we came from.

When we got to the house Mark was vacationing at, he muttered something unintelligible as he climbed from the backseat. We watched as he staggered up the walkway, then leaving and driving back towards the freeway, just a few short hours from our own safe haven back in LA, once we saw he had gotten inside safely. I’m not sure we exactly “showed him a good time” that night, but he had left with one hell of a story.

Close call. I was never chastised for saluting the Customs Agent. Rather, we found the whole experience hysterically funny. It just became another wild and crazy story in the litany that would best define my and Andrew’s relationship, always throwing caution to the wind and always motivated to put ourselves in strange and dangerous situations just to find out what might happen. And there were many. And we would just laugh and laugh and tell our friends back at the beach.