One of my best friends came back from the 'Nam in '70....got stationed at Bliss...I went down there for a few weeks just before he got out to help him pack up and move back to RI. We went to Juarez every friggin' night, drinking ten cent shots of tequila and chasing Mexican whores. They had all these shops with the typical sombreros and rugs and paintings and crap...one night we're leaving and we head up the main drag to the bridge and the uS...we go into every shop and haggle with the owners on the way out ,leaving every shop screaming "F You!" and them screaming back "you dirty gringos..eff you gringo"....so we get to the bridge, stumbling like the morons we were at the time and we turn back to look down the main drag in Juarez....heh....dozens and dozens of these shop owners screaming "F you gringos" and throwing us the single finger salute.
Anyway,we get to the check point and some clown pulls up in a pickup truck and starts slicking his hair back all nervous and stuff...so we're laughing like jackasses at HIM because we know he's trying to run something and we wait to see the border guards jack him up...unfortunately for us, that was the last thing we saw in public for the next four hours. These giant Texas cracker boys with badges picked the three of us up by our elbows and hustled us inside....and I mean BIG...I'm 6"3 and they towered over me. Anyway, I'm sitting in this interrogation room crashing like a ba$tard on the tequila buzz and this little skinny **** comes in with a NY Yankee hat on and tells me to strip. He went through my clothes with a razor blade. Slit the seams in my jeans on the inside and out up to the pockets. He cut the soles of my shoes from the tops all the way back to the heel. No lie.All the time he's saying to me"you ain't carry drugs are ya?" as he's cutting my clothes to shreds....heh ...yeah...WTF was I smuggling...fairy dust???
Anyway, at 6 am they let us go...the desert scirocco is blowing hard, tumbleweeds rolling down the main drag into El Paso...and there we are, walking back to the Holiday Inn with our clothes flapping and the soles of our shoes flopping and clip clopping...three total clowns...and right then I realized...that guy in the truck WAS running something...and the border guards were in on it. The moral of the story? Stay the hell out of other people's back yards.
