On the Edge: the Last Bar in America

At 4 o’clock it was already getting dark. I had been running from the border, looking for somewhere to hide. There was nowhere. It was hard to tell which side I was on. I was surrounded by lavanderias, escritorios, a biblioteca, Padilla’s Mexican Insurance and countless casas de cambio offering the dollar at 498 pesos.

But I knew this was America when I heard the drone of a spotter plane somewhere overhead in the low clouds. This day, the elements favored the illegals. How many times in my short stay in San Diego had I seen that bizarre scene of the choppers and their lights closing in on some unseen clump of “aliens” up in the tussocky hills next to the border crossing. How often under the loudspeaker barks of the hovering spacemen and the white tubes of their searchlights had I seen those desert bushes explode into a dozen men, stumbling out with their hands up, to be herded by light and loudspeaker down to a waiting posse of border guards.

Me, I was just running from the rain, but I was still desperate. Back at the border I had gotten caught up in the Sunday swirl, the tide of humanity that surges back and forth from one civilization to the other. Cars, fumes, jostling crowds, sailors coming back up with their ceramic E.T.’s and sea gulls on bollards . . . . I just had to get out. Out of the mainstream at least until the tide retreated a little. So I had followed the instructions on the sign: U-Turn to U.S.A. I’d started back up the roads snaking north, just as the rain began.

It’s about a mile up that you suddenly get the feeling that you’re at last in an eddy. A backwater. No more frantic border shambles. Suddenly a little old town, with little old garages and only a few trees between it and the raw desert moonscape that starts past the tracks. On the veranda of an old wooden house under a towering ancient pine, an old boy with a florid face and a black cowboy hat sits watching people doing hop, skip and long jumps through the rain puddles. Above him a hand-painted sign reads “San Ysidro Hotel.”

“Is there . . . .”

“Full up,” he grunts. “Has been for years.”

“No, just somewhere warm, a drink . . . .”

He looks at me, checking me out. Border guard? FBI? Then he nods across the road. I turn and look.

The other side is a concrete row of two-story buildings with some of the pastel shades you associate with Mexican towns, some of the token half-moon tiles the Pep Boys tend to use on the fronts of their car-part stores. But nothing Pep Boys scale here. That’s somewhere beyond. From its faint roar, and the distant sprouting of signs, you know the traffic river runs behind the trees. The last lap to the border.

It takes a moment to see what he’s looking at. It’s just a tiny place with a door and a window and a sign that says Grady’s Keg and a screen door with a handle advertising Seven-Up. But inside . . . inside it looks so snug. As I get closer, it sounds so warm, and as I open the mesh door, it smells so--God! Turkey! “You’re just in time son, we’re having Thanksgiving early. Get stuck in.”

A big hand takes my arm and leads me straight over to a table that just fits between the outside door marked “Gentlemen” and the jukebox. It’s crowded with pots and dishes of potatoes, yams, stuffing, cranberry sauce, each in its foil-encrusted dish--and a big-bird turkey. I feel I’m intruding, but I tuck in. I feel like I’ve slipped into the wrong family dinner. Still, nobody else seems to mind. Conversations fly around me in English and Spanish.

Somehow it just feels so damned cozy. Maybe because it’s so tiny. There are no pool tables, no high-back alcoves, none of your bar-top video Trivial Pursuit games. The man singing on the jukebox turns out to be Engelbert Humperdinck singing in Italian. “Quando, Quando, Quando.” The woman serving behind the bar turns out to be the owner, Dottie Brinegar, daughter of an old Kentucky moonshiner, a 54-year-old mother of eight.

Behind her on the bar wall are black and white photos. Old pictures of race horses and their owners and trainers. “Winner: ‘Speculative,’ D. Long up. ‘Brooklyn Bum,’ 2nd. ‘Big Shindig,’ 3rd. V. W. Lee, owner. E. L. Lee, trainer. Dec. 21, 1958.”

“You interested in horses?” says a Mexican-American. “Those fellows up there used to come in here every race day from Caliente. Andy, he still comes in here. That’s his brother in the black suit. Others--they’re dead. But Andy, he should be in today. Him in the picture.”

“I sell only American beers,” Dottie insists. But her Michelob poster is in Spanish:

“Michelob--Excelencia Insuperable!”

“Journalist, huh?” says a big fellow on the corner stool. “Pity Two-Glass Jim ain’t here--he’d tell you a story or two.”

Two-Glass Jim is their oldest regular, 78. Brings his own glasses. Two of them. One for the beer, the other loaded with rock salt to sprinkle in it. Ted Kaeg is a young’un. He’s only been coming here every day for 20 years.

Everybody’s chewing away at the bar. Today, the jar of boneless chickens--hard-boiled eggs in vinegar--sits unloved next to a glass pot full of money. The money-pot’s label says “For Big Bob in Sharp Hospital.” Big Bob weighs 400 pounds and he’s in there doing something about it. Having half his stomach removed.

Next door another pot also has money in it.

“Christmas Party,” says its label.

“You guys are quite a club,” I say to my neighbor.

“Listen man, this is Grady’s. And this is San Ysidro. Not your San Diego types here. We care about each other. I bet that all you outsiders think about is the McDonald’s massacre when you think of San Ysidro, right?”

He is right. McDonald’s put San Ysidro on the map, in the worst possible way. And since then killings at the border have confirmed the image of a horribly Wild West town.

“There’s no use denying McDonald’s happened,” says one older Mexican-American. “I was there--I kept yelling at the police ‘Shoot! Shoot him! What the hell are you waiting for--more orders? That guy’s killing people!’ You know they waited 20, 25 minutes. Every time I think of it I feel sick.”

He calms himself with his beer.

“I had my friend--she was killed up there,” says his neighbor, a young black mom. “You can see how community-conscious we are: Look at the McDonald’s site. Nothing!”

“That’s not the community. That’s the council.”

“Used to be much better when we had a sheriff. He used to say--only one of him--’Just don’t do anything stupid and I’ll stay off your backs.’ He did, too. Not like today’s cops. They use the town’s name . . . you know, smuggling, violence, as an excuse to act tough.

“Yes sir, come to Grady’s for friendliness, good prices and a chance to meet your local vice squads. They’re in and out every week. Not like swept-up joints in Chula Vista, where there’s lots of money, lots of wheeler-dealers. Here there’s only Dottie. They’re always in here.”

“Yeah,” says Jimmy Perez, “this used to be a clean, quiet neighborhood down here. Then the gringos started moving in because they couldn’t afford their own areas any more, then the blacks and Filipinos followed. You know there’s even some people have to live across the border. They can’t afford American prices so they rent in Tijuana and work up here. Reverse immigration! But even companies are moving in here because local people are cheaper to hire. Changes are coming. It won’t be the same.”

I excuse myself out to the men’s lavatory. It’s beautifully clean when you get there. But first you have to go outside through the rain, ‘round the back. Then there’s a curtain of run-off water splatting down between you and release inside. What’s more, now someone has taken my place at the bar to eat his plate of turkey.

“Do you mind?” he says. “I’ll just get this down inside me.”

No problem, I tell him. I lean on the bar to his right. Next to me is the vivacious face of Jenny Hepner.

San Ysidro? “It’s the last place where people are friendly,” she says. She’s bilingual. Works as a computer operator in San Ysidro. “San Ysidro is not racist like San Diego. It has been good to me. People here are still natural. We don’t have the same problems.”

“Except at 3 in the morning,” says Ray Espinoza. “That’s when police shoot and then talk. True. They’ll fire a couple of shots in the air just to stop you and ask where you’re going.”

“Yeah, it can be wild,” says Frances. “Sure. The other day a bullet just missed me. There was this ‘illegal’ running away past me. A border agent is after him. He fires. I hear this shshshew! Right past me. He runs up and says ‘Sorry,’ then goes on chasing after him. I tell you it gets wild down here.”

So why do they choose to live down here?

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Frances says. “It’s because we all feel in it together here. Outside people forget we’re here, with those thousands of people crossing the border every day. Either they’re intent on getting to Tijuana for a good time, or they’re desperate to get back home in San Diego. We’re no more than a pit stop. When people think of us they think McDonald’s, money change, illegals, drugs, fugitives. But that’s fine, as long as they leave us alone.

“We’re not up-tight like up in San Diego--look at this bar! You got one like this where you come from? Where everybody mixes, all races, all kinds? We’re different, mister, I swear it. Trouble now is, the whole of America’s moving South. Land developers, speculators, this place won’t last long as it is.”

“The only time . . . the only time!” shouts Ray, trying to get a word in edgewise. “The only time San Ysidro’s been on the map was with McDonald’s massacre--and before that when Bobby Kennedy came down. Lookin’ for votes. And I always remember, when they offered him a Mexican hat, he refused to put it on.”

The drinking has overtaken the eating. The talking is drowning out the singing. Somewhere back there in the jukebox, Marty Robbins is singing about El Paso.

“Here, Frances,” says Dottie. She’s wrapped some slices of turkey and yams and potatoes up in foil. “Anybody else?”

It is well and truly dark outside. The rain has stopped. It’s time to go. Jimmy’s telling the world how many miles he can pave with his new machines--12 miles, both sides of the road, per day. Elizabeth is telling why she’s happy living solo in Tijuana even though she’s American and gringa, and works in San Diego. Life’s easier, people nicer, and she can rent a nice big house with a garden for $200 a month.

I’m about to go. The question suddenly hits me.

“Do you realize this is the Last Bar in America? The last before the start of a whole different continent?”

“Well, if you say so,” says Dottie. “Hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Listen,” says Jimmy Perez, “I was born in New York. I’ve got five kids. But I’m living here. You’ve got to understand this is not America. It’s not Mexico. San Ysidro’s a country on its own. Hey! We celebrate the American and the Mexican revolutions. We have twice the fun! It’s not what you are here. It’s who you are. We’re not La Jolla yet. And thank God for that.”

Outside, it has cleared. The spotter plane even sounds happier. It’s back in hunting with a chance. At the Beyer trolley station a group of blanketed Mexicans board the red carriage. Within two stops, the Border Patrol has rounded them up and ushered them back out, all in a huddle, on their way south again.

We’re back in the normal world.

Pity. For a moment, back there in the Last Bar in America, I thought we’d altered the meaning of normality. For a moment. Probably just a Thanksgiving fantasy. Turkey-talk. Gobbledy-gook.

Delicious while it lasted, though.