Thursday night I was in the nest of wires behind my entertainment centre. Now, I understand that a lot of people have wires, but let’s take a breakdown of what I’ve got behind there:

• Surroundsound receiver, with 6 speakers and enough speaker wire to run them to China. They are not organized or bound with anything.
• Television
• Xbox
• Two VCR’s
• Sattelite receiver
• DVD player
• Wireless Router
• Cable Modem
• VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) terminal. Internet phone for the uninitiated.
• Three telephones
• Wireless Media Centre extender for Windows XP Media Edition
• Black Light (I refuse to get rid of this. It’s been with me for years. I don’t care if it doesn’t light up elves, aliens, Woolite patterns on the ceiling or Jim Morrison in day-glo orange anymore. It still makes my teeth look funny.)

Now you can imagine the speaker/telephone/network/electrical/audio/video wires and cables cris-crossing behind here. It’s HORRIBLE. My kids in their childish “La la I’m not thinking, OOH! SOMETHING SHINY!” way of thinking decided it was a wonderful place to hide during bouts of hide and seek, something I wish they wouldn’t do in the house. Well, while back there, one of the kids disconnected several appliances that since then haven’t run right. I was back there and was trying to get the router working again in a hurry, since I wanted to fire off just one email from my work account I had forgotten to send back at the office. Here’s the asterisk leading to a footnote in this story. My wife thinks it doubles as a fantastic storage area. *sigh*

She had stored a mirror she likes a lot back there. The frame had broken so she wanted to fix it later.

Well, to make a long story short, I was barefooted and in a hurry. I stepped on a patch of cables, and felt the satisfying crunch of a piece of mirror. I ignored it, kept going, and tried to get better footing by shifting my weight. Big mistake. Two shards of glass decided to splinter off vertically, and go into my foot. I hopped out from behind there and got into a lotus position on the mat in front of the television. I should not use the term lotus, since I am not in the least bit graceful and hit my head twice in the process. I looked at the sole of my foot, and began to remove the shards. My heart sped up, I got the classic tunnel vision, and began to feel extremely nauseous. The glass came out, I laid back, flying faster than any drug could make possible, and began to hyperventilate. As I did a fat-kid situp to examine my foot again, the spurting started. I yelled for my wife, who had to patch me up. I’m hobbling now. I’ve seen wrecks with fatalities, I’ve seen war casualty photos. I’ve seen the beheading videos from Iraq, and nothing gets to me like my own blood. I have no clue why…

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I have taken a plunge into the depths of my memory today for things I should remember, but for some reason have trouble recalling. One thing was probably my first trip to Mexico. The day I went across the border, I can recall the odd feeling of it all. I parked at the first place I could find (literally 100 feet into the country) due to my ill feeling about driving there. I parked and waited for bro in law to show up. While I was parked there, I noticed a small, menacing-looking man with a broom and a foul mouth. People would drive up and park adjacent to me and he would scream at them, insulting not only their intelligence and their driving ability, but also their mothers. I didn’t know where I was parked, so I peeked around the side and decided I had made a boo-boo. I was parked at the aduana headquarters, or customs/Mexican immigration. The short evil man managed to cuss out and run off not one, not two, not four, but five people in the 45 minutes I stayed parked in my old hoopty, a 92 Grand Marquis with blacked out windows. After the last one, my curiosity was piqued, so I got out and confronted him. I asked him in Spanish how come he had felt the need to threaten five other people, but had ignored me completely. He appraised me for a few seconds, looking at me up, then down, and then looked me straight in the eye. He walked around the side of my car to look at the car tag, and then chuckled. His response was simple. It was, “Son, you have that leather coat on, Ray Ban aviators, you’re light skinned, and no offence, but you’re a little pudgy and drive a Grand Marquis. I thought you were a federal agent from AFI or something, but I see I’m wrong. You’re not supposed to be here at all, but I tell you what. I’ll give you thirty minutes if you can give me some money for a refresco.” By the way, refresco money (‘money for a soda’) is plain old baksheesh. Jeez. I hadn’t been in the country an hour yet and I was already being codgered for money. I coughed up $5 and was very careful not to show him the $100 bills I had saved for so long.

I got out of the car and sat on the trunk to take in the spectacular scenery of garbage in a park and feces-smelling curb drainage from the sprinkle of showers that had just fallen. I use the term ‘park’ loosely since the defining criteria for calling it so was the fact that there was a patch of sparse grass surrounded by a cheap garden fence and concrete. I walked over to admire it, ignoring a man with no legs scooting around begging passersby on a mechanic’s creeper on the way. He smelled of wee.

While in this 50’x50’ park, I found a plastic doll’s head, a roach (ZigZag/Top kind, not the insect), a condom wrapper, and a bare corn on the cob. I happened to notice the mop man cursing out yet another person over by my car, and while looking in that direction, I noticed another person. This was a real winner, a guy with his black pearl-buttoned shirt unbuttoned to maybe the continental divide between man tits and belly with just enough tufts of chest hair flaring out around his gold medallion to thoroughly disgust me. He had a baby pram in his care and was being followed by an obviously South Mexican woman. You see, in my experience, the further south in Mexico a person goes, a person’s height and posture begin to degrade. So this woman was maybe 4’12” at most and was bent over, nervously pulling on her pigtails and smoothing out her indigenous dress which made me think “Maya” or “Mixteca” when I saw her. She was dragging an adorable little girl in a Winnie the Pooh tshirt and a denim skirt behind her. He looked around, walked over to mopmaster, handed him something I’m now sure was refresco money, and then ducked into the narrow wooden gate leading behind the aduana headquarters. He came back alone, skulked past the gate, met up with another individual, then REPEATED THE ENTIRE SPECTACLE AGAIN. I decided something was definitely up and decided to be Super Investigator ©. I noticed that he was putting these people into the back of a truck parked in an enclosed parking lot sitting atop a bluff overlooking the miserable trickle of the Rio Bravo. “Yep, Coyote.” – I thought to myself. He was getting these people out of Mexico and into the United States.

Finally my brother in law (whom I had never met in person before) showed up. I asked him what was up with Mr. Coyote over there, and he squinted for a minute and informed me that my suspicions were indeed correct. He also informed me that this was Mr. Backdoor Man in the flesh. This guy would go over to my Brother in Law’s house and bang the wife while Bro in Law was killing himself to eke out a miserable living. The kids got to hear all the adult sound effects too. (And you wonder why my niece had a baby at 13). That was my first urge to use a crowbar on someone in Mexico, a feeling I have managed to repeat on every trip there.

This recollection I have enjoyed today (fuelled by White Russians and the pain medication I’m taking for my mangled foot) had made me decide to focus on a new theme for a few posts. Being formerly employed as a migrant workers’ rights advocate, I am absolutely full of stories from all the children I helped along the way in my four years working in that field. I made an extra $500 a month, but I enjoyed helping kids out, which is a level of satisfaction I am quite confident I’ll NEVER achieve in my current career.