About 5 miles southeast of La Mesa is hill of considerable size called the Cerro Colorado. At the base of the hill, tucked away into one of the drainages of the hill is Encino street. There, parked on that dirt street was my Dad, eating a piece of jerky with the truck off and the window down as he tried to figure out how he was going to spring his dumbass son from a dirty Mexican Prison. He sat there, gulped down some Parkinson’s meds with a Luke-warm water bottle, his mind started to drift. One of the many curses of Parkinson’s is fact that the Meds make you extremely drowsy. 5 minutes into thinking he was asleep. Asleep on a dirt street of Tijuana, sitting in his shitty pickup truck that happened to be the nicest damn non-drug cartel truck that neighborhood had ever seen. No fear, no plans, no shits to give but how to break his son out of la Mesa. Little did he know, that something...call it fate, karma, who knows, maybe it was God that put him in that location for a reason. But I’ll be damned if something didn’t take him there for a reason...
“Senior! Senior!” My Dad woke up to a hand on his shoulder. It was dark and he could not see a face. For a brief second that man was what he would commonly call a “Victor Charlie Visitor”. It had been almost 50 years and they still came to visit at night.
A quick rush of Adrenalin and then calm...as South Vietnam quickly transformed back into Tijuana.
“Senior. Are you ok?”

I’ll talk about this later. Now back to me.

One week had passed since I performed my Achilles-ectomy and the enfermera released Felix to the yard. Felix was bandaged heavily and was given a shitty wheel chair with a wobbly wheel to ride around on. As I am a sensitive man (no homo) I felt that it was important for me to pay my respects to Felix and his new found retirement, so earlier that week, I purchased the soccer ball that was holding and waited for Felix to enter the yard. It wasn’t long before he wheeled his chair out in the open. Hoping a fanboy would come by and show some sympathy, he pulled out in the yard far enough that people would notice him. Unfortunately for Felix... sympathy does not exist in La Mesa. As he sat there soaking in the sun rays, JD and I decided to entertain our friend with a little one on one futbol game. We just knew that Felix would love to see us play. We kicked the ball around, laughed, faked a couple of falls like soccer players do if bumped wrong. We played that shit up. The more ridiculous we were, the more pissed off Felix became. As he started to turn his whee chair, I yelled “Felix!” Picked up my soccer ball and walked towards him. As I approached him, I bent down, pulled the knife from my shoe and at at the most opportune time, I opened the blade to my sharp case double x knife and slowly stabbed it in to the soccer ball.
I looked at Felix and said: “Maldito eso es un cuchillo afilado.” For you gringos...“Damn that’s a sharp knife”.
I then handed Felix the soccer ball as a retirement gift.
Sympathy does not exist in La Mesa. Especially when you are an asshole like Felix.

To be continued.

All my love, no homo Ed.