You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

JUAREZ CROSSINGS

When I entered The Architecture School at University of Oregon, in 1959 there was a sign over the entry which read “10% of you who register as freshmen will graduate in architecture. And 10% of those who graduate in architecture will become licensed architects.” In the second year of the architecture curriculum, the faculty failed half the remaining sophomore class each term. There were 120 students registered in architecture with me for the Fall term of my second year. The following fall there were only 15 in my class. In order to stay in architecture, I had to dedicate every waking hour, that I was not working or sleeping, to my architectural classes.

While there was a great desire, there was no time for dating. To make matters worse, the student who rented the apartment below mine, squeaked when she was having intercourse. It seemed like every other night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I would hear her and her in their bedroom below mine. Eeeeah, Eeeeah, Eeeeah. For me, it was a difficult time.

By the end of the term, although I had passed, I could take no more and decided to go to sea as a deckhand on a freighter. I was told that the merchant marine unions in the United States held entry-level jobs for friends and those who paid a bribe. However, if I were to go to Veracruz I could sign on a ship as a deckhand. So I took my backpack with me to my last fall term final. When I had completed the exam, I walked the short distance to Franklin Boulevard and put out my thumb. My first ride came quickly and ended near Cottage Grove. There, I was passed by an endless stream of cars. The sun was getting low and there was a chilly breeze stirring. It seemed that I would have to find lodging in Cottage Grove, only 20 miles from where I had started. Then as a car approached, I saw a person in the back seat sit up abruptly. He looked directly at me. The car drove past, then slowed and stopped. It backed up as I ran to meet it. I climbed into the back seat and recognized a former fraternity brother from my freshman year at Oregon State. He said that he had been sound asleep and suddenly he had a strong urge to look out the window as they were passing me. He recognized me and convinced the driver to stop. I rode with them for the next two days to their destination, Albuquerque, New Mexico. From Albuquerque, I made my way to El Paso.

It was evening by the time I crossed over the Rio Grande into Juarez, Mexico. I wandered through the commercial district looking for a hotel. There were many, all with a cantina at the entry. At each, I would ask for a room. “To sleep?” the incredulous clerk would ask. When I answered, “Yes to sleep.” They would say they had none. It was getting late. I decided to try one more hotel. I asked the clerk for a room, he responded “Just a room?”, I answered “Yes, a room for sleep.” the clerk paused as if in disbelief, then he turned to the manager and said. “It’s late. We won’t need all the rooms. We could spare a room for sleep.” The manager agreed and the clerk showed me to the room. It was small, barely nine feet square. There were no windows, no toilet, not even a sink. There was a double bed in the middle of the room. There was no pillow and no blanket. On the bed was a badly soiled sheet with pubic hair and other remnants of numerous sexual encounters.

I declined and decided to cross back over to El Paso to find a hotel. I joined the throng of revelers on the bridge returning to the US after an evening of debauchery in that seedy Mexican border town.

The US border guard was passing these staggering and boisterous people through with a wave of the hand. At most, he would ask one or two questions before letting them pass. However, when it was my turn to get a wave of the hand, he held up his hand signaling me to stop. He ordered me to empty my backpack on the table in front of him. As I pulled my belongings out of my pack, a crowd gathered. Picking through my things, he would hold each item up to where the crowd could see them. Then he would ask “What is this?” The crowd encouraged his antics with laughter. When he picked up a pair of my underwear, he held them high so all could see, and loudly asked “So what is this?” The crowd laughed as I quietly replied “Underwear”. A few items later he came across a bottle of pink liquid which I knew to be a tincture of opium. My father, a physician, had given it to me in case I should encounter food poisoning. The border agent held it up and loudly asked “And what do we have here?” I had to tell the truth, and yet I could not tell him that it was opium. I used the boisterous crowd as an accomplice in order to disguise the continents of the bottle and save myself from arrest for drug smuggling. Loudly I proclaimed “It’s diarrhea medicine.” The crowd roared with laughter. The inspector was satisfied with his sadistic game and told me to take my things and pass through.

Six weeks later I had a fresh fruit drink from a street vendor in Puerto Vallarta. That night I suffered a very serious case of dysentery. If I had not had that little bottle of pink liquid I could easilly have died of dehydration.