Out With A Bang in Tijuana

Mexico, I believe, is a bad place to be when you’re half dead, and our family friend Bill wasn’t even half dead. “I’m all the way dead,” he kept croaking.

And he wasn’t in Mexico, either. Not yet. But he was close. We were in San Diego. I had come here thinking I’d be visiting Bill in the hospital, but since, according to Bill, they did what they could to kill him there, he checked his own lymphoma ass out before my plane could arrive, and after a bunch of panicked phone calls I found him in a hotel next to a freeway that leads to El Centro.

He looked about as bad as I expected he would—not any worse, which is good. Back in the day, he and my mother had been Las Vegas junket junkies together, always hopping on a bus full of other couples with coupons in their fists to make the eight-hour drive to Vegas and stay for two days nearly free in some sub-quality hotel, returning with big stories about what they’d won or almost won.

“I wanna go out with a bang,” Bill complained, hugging me but barely, he was so weak. “Know anybody who can build a truck bomb?”

He was on his way to the same Tijuana clinic that had finished my mother—to strengthen his heart so he could come back and live through conventional medicine. I was there to go with him. Bill was my mother’s best friend when her life was leaking out of her like air from an old beach ball in the same clinic where he was now headed. I drove him there then, too, for regular visits with her, and one memory that stands out during that time is of the Haiti-trained doctor, who kept asking me and my sister to knock on his arms.

“Knock right here,” he’d say, indicating his forearm, and we did as he asked. Oddly, his arms were hard as wood and seemed just as hollow. He claimed their condition was due to some illness he’d cured himself of years before, some illness that slowly hardens you, evidently, until, unchecked, you become stiff as a board and just as dead. Luckily, though, he’d caught it at the arms and lived to open this here clinic to cure other people of their sicknesses. Every day he would administer non-FDA-approved cancer treatments to his patients, but since they’d been left for dead by the American medical industry, they figured they didn’t have anything to lose by journeying to this place that offered hope, even if it was just in the form of a wire-haired old acid vat walking from bed to bed brandishing his forearms as evidence of a cure. “Knock on wood,” he’d laugh, and everybody did, even my mother, who couldn’t lift a hairbrush.

I used to have to carry her from her bed to the bathroom because she refused to use bedpans. She started kicking the second she saw the doctor coming through the door with a bedpan under his arm. Once she knocked it right to the floor, where it clamored loud enough to wake the whole wing.

Now, whenever I wonder if I have the strength to deal with something seemingly insurmountable in my life, I just remember that Tijuana cancer clinic and how I had to cradle my own mother like an infant as her life faded from her. At that I know I can face anything, even this fresh journey with Bill, because it’s times like these that define a person, they serve as a denominator of your character, and I’m grateful they were bestowed on me. But barring the fact that my mother didn’t make it, Bill seemed determined to take on the same sojourn. I had my doubts, but I also had the memory of my mother alive and kicking in a Tijuana clinic, knocking bedpans to the floor and going out with a bang.

But when I awoke the next morning Bill had disappeared again. Later I learned he’d died on Christmas day in a casino, and not just any casino, but one of those big blow-ass casinos that look like an electric oasis in the middle of the California desert. I have to smile at that. Bill always loved to gamble, and he always bet big. So I guess he decided against the Mexican clinic for unconventional treatment after all. I guess he had his own treatment in mind. I guess he didn’t want to gamble his last days on a fight he figured he couldn’t win, so instead he headed for his idea of heaven on earth so he could go out a winner, and out with his own bang.