Papa Smurf and the Infinite sadness

Last Tuesday I was in El Paso TX. It was like a brief rest in hell. The air is always dingy and brown, a dusty patina on all thoughts and things.
The truck stop is rife with pushers, thieves and hookers. The police are as scary as the criminals with just the slightest of margins separating the two.
  On the C.B. I heard a voice call out like a circus side show barker " Hey drivers this is Papa Smurf, how bout it anyone need a ride over the border. I'll take you to all the sites. Shopping, massage parlors, strip clubs and cat houses. I take you there and bring you back."
The voice was one I had heard years ago in Laredo and when I saw his brown van cruising the parking lot I was sure this was the same "guide" that led me on a journey to infinite sadness so long ago.

When I decided to become a trucker 10 years ago I had never driven anything bigger than a Datsun.
I needed several weeks driving with a trainer to insure that no one got killed while I became familiar with the hulking truck and learned control.

My trainer was a new driver himself. Six months earlier he was a failed preacher who due to some parishioner infidelity had to leave town in a hurry. He picked me up in Atlanta, asked if I knew how to drive then told me to head for Texas and crawled in the bunk to sleep.
   We were going to Laredo and the whole way he spoke of Boys Town, a marvelous cat house he had heard of across the border. We had no time to quench his yearning for the carnal delights that lay across the river for we had a load leaving immediately for Massachusetts.
  For two weeks he obsessed about Laredo until we again were headed back to the cowboy town.
The cowboys are gone from Laredo replaced by thousands of trucks criss-crossing the border.
At night a line of trucks miles long clogs the dusty avenues waiting to cross the bridge. Downtown Laredo is filled with the wail of horns and curses in Spanish.
   We parked at a filthy old truck stop very near the river and heard Papa Smurf and his offer of safe passage to Nirvana en el otro lado.
I decided to join my trainer for the trip to Boys Town. After weeks of non stop rantings I had to see this mythical place. This would be my first trip into Mexico.
Papa Smurf's van was a beat up old Ford Econoline with fetid carpeting and torn seats. The man was as derelict as the van, unshaven greasy and had the nervous ticks of a junkie.

True to his word he effectively drove us past the unbelievably poor mothers and their filthy children.
Past dangerous looking policia leaning on their VW's . Past machine gun toting soldiers with faces of stone. Down crumbling streets dividing decaying buildings.

We pulled into a compound surrounded by a wall and razor wire. Inside the walls was a small town the size of several square blocks. The alleys of the "town" separated small one room cottages that lined either side. Along the outside walls stood larger cantinas blaring loud music.

The van pulled up in front of what he said was the best bar with the best women. Eight or nine of us piled out onto the street whooping and hollering. I was taken aback. This looked like a prison to me.
We entered the bar and were beset upon by a wave of highly painted women.
The scene was so far from normal I left the bar hoping the outside would be less frenzied. As I reached the door I turned to see my trainer seated in a chair with two girls on his lap another whispering in his ear.

Outside I wandered down the alleys past the doorways of the little cottages. In each doorway stood a woman some young some very old. Some beaconed with smiles and sultry taunts, others stood bored as if saying "may I take your order". Others had the hurt castaway eyes I see in strays who sense their luck is never going to change. No hope.

I wind up in the street in front of a drag club talking to a six foot five he/she. Carmen is a poet who has come to terms with her lot. She tells me this is indeed a prison for women responsible for debts either theirs or their family's that they cannot pay. She has the uncluttered mind of an alcoholic.
"Can't you leave?" I ask.
"Sure, my debt is paid but the money is good"
I ask what the women charge and she says most girls charge 20 dollars for sex. The very young and the very pretty charge more she says with a sneer.

I talk with Carmen for an hour sharing beers and Neruda. After a while I leave her to her work and look for my group. I am frisked by a terrible pick pocket that makes me laugh at her fumbling. She fumes off in a torrent of curses followed by her police escort that were waiting to crack my head open if I had protested being robbed.

I find my fellow Americans as they are entering the Donkey Show. This is so heinous to me I recoil in horror. They laugh at my Puritanism and say this is their last stop and to meet them back here in a bit.
I wandered around stopping at a few doors. The women are curious of the Amish looking foreigner. I try to talk to a few but my Spanish is poor and no one is in the mood for love poems by Neruda.

I go back to the donkey show. Thank God it is over. The poor old burro is laying on his side with a dazed drugged look in his glassy eyes. At a large table the Americans beacon me to sit and have a beer and meet the girl of the act. She has long black hair and a beautiful face. Her eyes are the same as the donkey's, glassy and drugged. I sit next to her in the booth and she leans heavily on me and whispers she wants to sleep. She lays her head on my shoulder and i feel the warm mother's milk leaking from her breasts as it rolls down my arm.

I feel the infinite sadness in this prison, stained by the flow of life.