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shocking Rosarito
Wednesday, September 1 1999
Kevin the DBA came over after work for the first social call in a long time. The engineering department has been so overworked the last few months that it's been rare for us to socialize.
We talked about a lot of things, including Kevin's anger management troubles as a young adult, a condition he subsequently cured with the help of a [REDACTED] french fry.
We also talked about my new painting, which is rather hard to ignore, considering how its bright colours, large size, and bizarre content dominate the room. Kevin was terribly impressed with it, more so than I expected. "What are you doing working at [name of company]?" he asked. The second thing he asked, of course, was when I was going to paint him one. I didn't even bother to tell him that to do so was a logistical impossibility, that the heavens should thank their stars I managed to find the time and motivation to paint this one.
The most fascinating part of our discussion came when Kevin described a recent trip he took to the Mexican coastal resort town of Rosarito. He'd gone with a contingent comprised largely of the company sales team. They'd rented an overpriced hotel on the beach and spent a fairly typical "gringos go to Mexico" sort of night, drinking, smoking cheap Mexican schwag, etc. But Kevin, not surprisingly, had a miserable time. Kevin is the sort of guy who appreciates sanitary conditions, orderly streets, and (of course) beautiful women. He's easily shocked and disturbed (perhaps revolted is the word) by unclean conditions. But there's also a intensely vivid interest lurking behind his revulsion. He remembers every detail of the things that disturb him, and there's no stopping him when he recounts one of his horrific tales. His experience in the squalour of Rosarito was no exception.
The first scene Kevin recalled vividly was a large family consisting of a mother and her shoefull of children. They were squatting in a circle, passing something around. Interested, Kevin glanced over to see what they were up to. He thought perhaps they were shooting marbles or playing cards. But no, they were eating. The thing being passed around was a miserable can of refried beans containing a spoon. The mother was ripping small shreds from a tortilla and passing them out to the children, whose attention she commanded absolutely. As each child received his shred of tortilla, he wolfed it down in a greedy instant. Kevin was blown away. Never before had he witness such absolute poverty.
Later, on the filthy Rosarito beach, surrounded by blowing trash and the fragrance of sewage, Kevin was approached by a mangy dog. He described the poor animal in all its horrific detail. Its back and the insides of its legs were missing large patches of skin, as if it had been run over by a truck. What hair remained was a tangle of dried blood and swarming flies. The dog looked at Kevin with a pathetic, drooling face, begging for something, anything. Kevin didn't know what to do; he just wanted the dog to go away, or better yet, never have come to begin with.
By this time we'd been joined by Kim, who asked naïvely if Kevin had done anything for the dog. He hadn't of course; all he had done was vividly record the moment in his mind.
The thing that struck me most about Kevin's Rosarito first-impression was how different it was from mine. I'd been excited and intrigued to be in a third world nation, a land with no safety net. For its part, Rosarito had struck me as infinitely more tidy and refined than the squalour of Tijuana. And what about the terrible, awesome wall? Had Kevin not even noticed?
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