Playa Naranja
Playa Naranja (Orange Beach), known as Playa del Contrabandito (Smuggler’s Beach) until the mid-70s is close to civilization, yet desolate. In the late summer of 1972, Paul, Karla, and Karla’s mother drove through there on their way home to Chula Vista. Only Paul and Karla left. This is their story.
The troubles at Playa Naranja in Baja long predate the failure of the Trump Organization and its cohorts to build the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico. To blame Trump, or anyone else associated with the Trump Organization, for the subsequent fleecing of hundreds of Americans looking to Baja for a cheap alternative to the good life is not only unfair, but also plainly wrong considering the facts.
The Trump Organization, like many before it trying to develop this oceanfront property (the Zapata Corp and Lumumba LLC), failed because of the supernatural. Of this, as your writer, I am certain.
Playa Naranja is and remains haunted. The grounds and terrain are soft, saturated with the unholy supernatural. The locals say that these forces keep the ocean front lot empty to this day.
When the first feet, tucked neatly into a Converse and severed at the ankle, washed up at the base of the cliffs, no one really thought much of it. It was either the Federales or the Cartels. No one took credit for any of this, the cartels preferring to advertise their kidnappings and assassinations hanging from local overpasses.
Driving past Playa Naranja on the main North / South highway, cell phones lose coverage. Car headlights flicker. Radio reception, AM or FM, is always disjointed. The locals thought this was just a big Yanqui Navy SEAL conspiracy. Since the SEALs were trained and based just north of the frontiera in Coronado, this made good sense and soon became a local truth. The US Navy’s control of the local atmosphere through the judicious, willful, and systematic laying of chemtrails off the coast often took the blame.
Each spring, new feet, new immigrants, surf into Playa Naranja with the king tides.
The locals knew it was something else. Trump was long gone.
Locals always know.
A stiff offshore breeze usually comes in every afternoon, blowing out what morning surf there might have been and bringing the beginnings of the night’s fog with it in the form of a fine mist. It lulls you.
Today, at Playa Naranja, there’s just a hole in the ground where hope was, with some random, nondescript concrete caissons, looking like little refugees from Pointe-du-Hoc. The cold pillboxes stacked haphazardly on the bluff, in a large, neatly scraped two football-field-sized, rectangle, waiting for an invasion of Americans which will never come.
When the Trump resort failed bigly, suppositions and allegations flew. Some of the finest law firms in San Diego and Los Angeles, the ones not conflicted out, billed hours and marked up the price of photocopies.
Trump offered the common man who wanted to buy a condo rivaling Coronado’s best, the opportunity to do that just 9 miles south (16 kilometers) of the world renowned San Ysidro border crossing.
To be clear, this all began and ended in Chula Vista, just north of San Ysidro.
El Patio
Paul and Karla sat in El Patio on 5th Avenue and waited for their huevos con chorizo while pounding cups of coffee. They were going south of the border this weekend, that wasn’t up for discussion. The only question was, would the Old Lady come with.
The Old Lady had been dying for years, living out her life with her daughter and son-in-law in a ten by ten room in one of the many duplexes tucked on the edge of the industrial zone on 5th Avenue off Broadway in Chula Vista. She started wishing herself dead thirty-six years ago when her third husband never came home from his cruise on the Big E. Time was slowly and surely granting her wish.
They say that the best death is a quick death, but in a Pacific fog, nothing is quick. Paul flashed to delivering the U.S mail to Connors Manor, a convalescent home in National City. The smell, the feel, the taste of the ammonia – not an in-your-face death, but death extended on layaway at Fedco.
Chula Vista was a better place to live than National City, but it was still Chula Vista. National City, whose Mile of Bars became the Mile of Cars, all catered to the US Navy and its coterie of civilian shipyard workers and contractors.
They planned it all over a breakfast of chorizo, huevos, and menudo at El Patio. It didn’t take long to decide. Paul and Karla were heading south to KM39. The old lady was coming with.
KM39 was 39 kilometers south of the border crossing at San Ysidro. No doubt named by an imaginative cartographer, a milestone with a worn “39” was easily missed in an early morning fog, planted on the side of the highway.
The beach was like Black’s below Torrey Pines, just north of La Jolla, but with smaller cliffs and a less violent break off of a small reef yielding consistent sets. It was easy to get to the KM39 beach. It was safer, smaller, and were it not south of San Ysidro, easier to reach than Black’s.
Paul could grab some waves from the outside reef break without stressing too much about the locals or rogue waves knocking him off his board and kicking his ass.
At KM39, the top predators, the dolphins, patrolled the swell. supported more than the random old Yanqui surfers who made their way south. Dolphins roamed the swells as the top predators. Squads of pelicans skimmed the water. Sand sharks hugged the flat sand, feeding. Spiny ocean perch fed in the surf, trying to avoid pelican rapture. It was your typical, run-of-the-mill Baja beach at the edge of a Pacific kelp grove, older than the soft tides buffering the locals, mammal or fish.
The surf spot, unknown and untouched by anything except surf and cervezas, sat like many other Baja towns on the placid Pacific coast. It wasn’t as close as Rosarito Beach, yet not as far as Ensenada. Its salt and wet facilitated the consumption of beer and sleep, which made for a good weekend.
“Channel 39 Action News Weather just announced thing are warming up for the next few days. A couple of nights in Baja would do us all a lot of good. No better time than now. My next shift starts Tuesday at noon.”
“What about Ma?”
“Mother, too. She’s part of the family, right? She’s had a good week so far so she should be all right. It’s nice down there. She could use some of that sea air and a couple cans of Tecate.
“Let’s just throw her shit in the camper and go. We can pack and be on the road in a half hour and hit the beach in two. We can park ourselves in the lot at KM39. If we move our ass we can catch sunset.”
“Sounds good to me, but suppose Ma gets a bad spell while we are down there? What if she gets one of her attacks?”
The waitress came with the check. They both paused, interrupted, and looked up at her. She held the bill out to Paul, who snatched it as if it came from the CHP.
Paul and Karla looked into each other’s eyes and knew then. It was a contretemps of conspiracy.
“Gracias,” Paul said, shooing the waitress away, who was unimpressed with his Spanish.
“Paul, what if the Old Lady dies in Baja?”
He fished for cash in his left pocket as he popped another jalapeno-pickled carrot into his mouth.
“Baja or Chula Vista? What does it matter? What’s the difference? Dead is dead. Mexico has great doctors, anyway. She’s eighty-seven years old. She’s just thrilled to be here.”
Paul farted into the naugahyde seat before continuing.
“When I’m eighty-seven, you can haul and put me wherever you want me put, woman. If things get real bad, we can always bring her back this side of the line through the number one US Customs gate. Go and talk to her some and see what she says.”
When they got home from El Patio, Karla walked into the upstairs apartment and took a seat next to her mother sitting on the couch watching The Mark of Zorro on XETV 6.
Paul, needing to piss, scurried into the yellowed bathroom, closing the door quickly behind him.
Convincing her mother was just a formality once she and Paul decided they were going. Her mother was equal to it all. She never sat out any of these road trips. She was coming with.
She wasn’t going to sit in front of a grainy black and white Zenith all weekend, she was going to suck some good ocean air. The old folding chair Paul liberated (an easier admission than theft) from the Church of the Most Precious Blood parish hall on 4th Avenue, fit snugly in the camper shell, with Karla’s mother. Maybe it was best to give the old lady an illusion of choice, Karla thought.
“How would you like a weekend in Baja, Ma?”
“This coming Friday? It’s Memorial Day weekend. Won’t it be crowded?”
The Old Lady whistled with every breath. Labored. COPD labored.
“Yeah. Friday.”
“OK. I guess,” she said weakly.
“Great! We’ll leave after Wheel.”
“Wheel of Fortune?” Weaker.
“Yeah. Right after.”
The air conditioner shuddered on and dripped a cold tear on the ashtray grey carpet as Paul came out of the bathroom with no sign of having washed his hands, pissing Karla off. Karla spoke to Paul as if her mother was no longer in the room.
“She’s up for it so let’s do it. But this time, put out enough socks and tidy whities on the bed. I don’t want you running out this time.”
“Fine. But this time, pack her damn Dodgers cap so she can wear it while she’s listening to her games on the radio. I can recycle underwear. I don’t think she survives without her damn Dodgers cap.”
“Sure. But this time. Pack water.”
“Cash. Do we have cash?”
“Make sure we have our IDs. I don’t want to end up in secondary again while they check us out.”
The last time they had gone down, they spent three hours in secondary inspection coming back. They had forgotten their ID that day. No ID.
The escalation ended. Paul and Karla went about the business of getting ready for the drive down to KM39.
Vin Scully
Paul thought himself patient and by the by, he was. He had to be – he was a postal worker. He’d expound on this if the subject of patience came up in any conversation. For hours, he would rant about the depths of his patience, if you were patient enough to let him.
This was Paul’s theory of patience relativity. To work for the Post Office, you had to be patient. If you go postal at the Post Office, nothing gets delivered. Then where would society be?
This was the theory.
Every camel must bear the weight of the straw breaking its clichéd back. Paul’s straw was the Old Lady’s obsession with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Specifically, the Voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Vin Scully, set him off.
It was not the persona, but the voice. Scully broadcast games on KFI, whose AM signal took over the western United States at night. Every Dodgers night game was heard in Chula Vista.
Vin’s voice was the straw, the ill-placed Jenga piece in the tower yanked out at the wrong time, the bolt helicopter pilots in Vietnam called the “Jesus bolt” whose failure made the main rotor spin out of control and the copter disintegrate, slowly burned Paul, whose love for Karla tamped down on his hatred of the Old Lady’s love of Dodger blue.
Paul dreaded baseball season, but his patient nature meant that he tolerated the Dodgers and Vin Scully, despite being a Padres fan.
And so, Vinnie was talking tonight. Talking about sausage.
“You know, Jerry, that Farmer John’s sausage is made of only the finest ingredients.”
Jerry Doggett was Vin Scully’s sidekick.
The convenience of entering Mexico quickly never made up for the pain of coming back to the US through San Ysidro. You’d could end up sucking exhaust, mainly diesel, for hours, waiting your turn to come across.
The drive down was uneventful. Going south was easy, there was never any wait unless the Mexicans knew that someone was trying to evade the law thinking going to Mexico was a viable and safe option for random felons. It usually wasn’t.
Once they cleared the border, there was little backup in the run down to KM39. The road was clear with nary an accident or hang-up on a smooth road on a clear day.
They sat together on the bench seat listening to the infernal Dodger Farmer John’s pregame show. In no time, they drove past the bull ring by the ocean and headed south, the Pacific Ocean on their right. Paul imagined the smell of pork sausage, mixed with the real smell of seaweed, bobbing off the surf line breaking into the Pacific sunset.
KM39
When they pulled into KM39 parking lot, Paul could see the waves breaking on the reef about fifty yards out. You could get to the reef even on the choppiest of days, making this a great spot, untouched by the 21st century. The smell of salt and uprooted kelp from offshore lulled the restless to sleep and healed everything. A salt mist punctuated the smell like the accordion backbeat of a narco corrido band.
Paul, as much as he wanted to be away from everything, could not escape the reach of an AM radio superstation. At night, KFI’s beam was strong enough to be heard throughout the western US.
Vin Scully’s dulcet voice was enough to sooth any baseball fan looking for a fix, and Karla’s mother loved to hear the sing song play-by-play. They could smell (and hear) the Farmer John’s sausage sizzling during the commercials, motivating each to drink another Tecate to top off the carne asada tacos of undetermined lineage from the vendor working the back parking lot with the small hibachi grill and the bucket of local beer on ice.
Both Paul and Karla felt safe, despite being south of the border, they felt safer on the beach in Baja then in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Otay.
So it was that night with the Pads playing a three game stand up the road in LA. And so, one by one, they fell asleep listening to the Padres lose to the Dodgers up at Chavez Ravine in LA. Extra innings did nothing to maintain their interest. By the top of the 12th inning, they all snored snug.
It was during the postgame show with Jerry Doggett that Karla woke up.
“Paul! Paul! It’s Ma! Ma’s having problems breathing.”
Paul woke up snorting and disoriented, in mid apnea. Still no response.
“Paul, wake up.”
“Ungh.”
“Paul.”
No response.
“Paul!”
“All right, all right. Whatdyaneed?”
Paul opened the door and stumbled five feet away from the camper, unzipped his pants, and drained his bladder into the dirty sand on the edge of the pitted asphalt parking lot. He stumbled back to the truck.
“Paul!”
“OK. OK. Had to piss. No choice. What’s wrong?”
“She…” hesitated Karla. “She doesn’t seem to hear what I am saying. No response.”
“Hit her.” Paul said.
“Hit her?”
“Yeah, get her moving.” Paul slaps the Old Lady three times, hard.
“I think we should go back. Go back home.”
“No way she’s gone! No way. Hand me your mirror?”
“A what?”
“Your mirror, for your makeup.”
Karla handed Paul her compact. Paul struggled to open it and handed it back to Karla.
“If I put a mirror to her mouth we can see if she’s breathing… if she fogs the mirror. See if you can get a pulse.”
Karla put her index finger on the Old Lady’s neck. She repositions her finger, looking for the pulse she can’t find.
“It was your idea to come down here. Not mine.”
“Karla, honey…”
Karla screamed and lunged at Paul. She came at him, balled-up fists trying to hit him anywhere she could land a blow. Paul brought her into him and hugged her, trying to hug the rage out of her.
“I think she’s passed.. She’s gone.” Paul could feel her tears through his thin t-shirt.
“Maybe God can help us here,” Paul offered.
“Please God, if you bring her back, I’ll never take your name in vain. And I’ll respect her better. I will.”
“Jesus, Karla!”
“What the hell, Paul? Blaspheme much? If you bring her back, Jesus, I’ll …”
“You’ll what, Karla?”
Karla broke down again. However, close the apartment in Chula Vista, it was going to be a long drive north today.
“I don’t think God’s in a bargaining mood today, Karla. Don’t know that he’s willing to make a deal.”
“I can’t take it, Paul. What the hell were we thinking coming down here? What are we going to do without her?”
“We’ll learn to live without her social security check, don’t worry. If it gets really bad we can move to National City or further East. Maybe I can get a route in El Centro.”
Paul held her hands and made eye contact.
“You worry about yourself right now. I’ll take care of this. Let’s get the hell outa here. Now.”
“Do you think we should look for a doctor, the paramedics or something?”
“A doctor or the paramedics in Mexico at five o’clock in the morning? We all need to get out of here.
“You stay with her and see what you can do while I start packing. We should be ready to move out in fifteen minutes.
Stay here. Hold her hand. Talk to her. She’s still here, somewhere. She wants to get back to Chula Vista.”
“Right.”
Breakfast in Baja
It felt like the last stop before hitting the border, though it wasn’t. It was just the last restaurant before they turned east inland to Tijuana towards San Ysidro, through the Tijuana River encampment, which had yet to be cleared of its occupants and coated with concrete.
Paul steered the pickup into the Alfonso’s parking lot, joining an old late 50s Ford, which had either escaped from Old Havana or the set of Christine.
He turned off the ignition and set the parking brake.
“You go ahead in and get a booth. I’ll join you soon. I’ll lay Mom down a bit and just cover her up some.”
“OK.”
They paused, each taking a half breath.
“Do you need a clean towel? I packed some in the back.”
“No. I got it. Order me a coffee and give me ten minutes. Go.”
Karla hopped out of the truck and slapped the door shut. The screen door slammed behind her as she entered Alfonso’s.
Paul went into the camper shell and started throwing stuff around, looking for an old flannel blanket and a Racing Form from his last trip to Del Mar last year.
He grabbed the little bottle of patchouli oil he always kept next to the wheel well. It came in handy when they would drive to Imperial Beach to buy weed and get stoned. It never really covered up anything, but it smelled nice. He couldn’t afford to lose his government job, and so took all the precautions he thought necessary.
Paul opened the passenger door and gently cradled his mother-in-law and lay her flat on the seat. She hadn’t soiled herself, but he knew this was just a matter of time. He took the Racing Form and placed it between her skirt and underwear, just in case. It was too late to be embarrassed.
He lay her evenly across the seat and spread the orange flannel blanket. You could hardly tell anyone was there by the time he was done.
Hell, he thought, she almost looks upholstered into the seat. Satisfied, Paul joined Karla in Alfonso’s. The screen door slammed behind him. He sat down across from her.
“So, what did she want, when she, you know… passed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for this.”
“I don’t know. Cremation? I don’t even know who to call. Who to tell.”
“Not many friends.”
“That’s right. Not many friends. Never many friends.”
Karla stirred her coffee. There was clump of Mexican coffeemate refusing to dissolve in the lukewarm mixture. It was stubborn and insoluble.
“I’m going to go check on her. Stay here.”
Paul squeezed out of the booth. Even though it was still morning, the wet back of his thighs stuck to the vinyl seat. He grimaced.
He was back in less than five minutes. The sun was starting to be full blown. It had risen.
“How is she doing?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine. But it’s starting to heat up. We need to hit the road soon. I cracked the window a little and sprinkled a little patchouli oil. Ya know. To smell better. She… she’s starting to smell a little bit, not much.”
Each stared at their coffee.
“What comes next, Paul? Do we call local cops? The Federales?”
“I dunno. Who are the locals around here, anyway?”
“What are we going to do?”
“I dunno. Let me think.”
The two dawdled and picked at the bad ceramic of their mismatched coffee cups.
“She just looks like she’s resting.”
“She can’t die in Baja, and she never will die in Baja. She’s just resting her eyes.”
Paul looked out across the highway to the Pacific. This stretch of the shoreline was almost inaccessible because of the cliffs and the terrain. At best, you could walk out there for a looksee up and down the coast.
“There is something else we could do. We can head for the frontiera, and once there just pretend everything’s normal. Your mother is resting her eyes or sleeping, listening to Farmer John commercials with her damn Dodgers cap on as we cross the border.”
There was an awkward silence as they wondered who would speak next. Paul had more to say.
“Remember when Joe Fraser’s son drowned surfing down here? The poor guy got reamed. He spent two weeks running between his bank in Chula Vista and the “authorities” in Tijuana, just hauling money south.
“He got his son’s body back into the U.S., but for every move he made, he had to come up with green, and lots of it. We can’t do that. She has to pass north of the line. Agreed?”
“I don’t know if we can pull this one off, Paul. You know me and my guilty face. This is bigger than hustling tourists in Balboa Park. People can read me like a book. We’ll never get through Customs.”
“Well, we can’t stay here. Not much longer. We need to go.
“OK. I get it.”
“OK, Karla. Finish your coffee and pay the bill while I go out and set Mother up. I’ll pop my head in when I’m ready.”
They both stared ahead into the sugar dispenser, which was filled with the raw, brownish cane sugar of the time, big square crystals that crunched if you caught one right between molars.
Like his patron saint on the road to Damascus, Paul was struck by lightning. In a moment of extensive clarity, he knew what to do.
“Do you trust me? I’m going to go take care of things.”
Karla nodded.
“Wait here. I’ll be back.”
It was a declarative statement. He wasn’t to be convinced otherwise at this point.
“Do you need anything from the truck before I go? I’ll be about an hour. Have some more breakfast.”
“Yes! My magazines!”
Paul came back with a handful of magazines, worn by previous lives in the beauty salon on 4th Avenue. He pecked her on the cheek and left.
Karla signaled the waitress for more coffee and started leafing through a copy of Elle even before Paul was out the door.
Blowhole to Hell
The pickup rattled out of the parking lot, trying to avoid the unavoidable, the living potholes.
Paul pulled out on to the frontage road. Across sat the Playa del Contrabandista. He crossed the road and pulled into another plateau of dirt, an empty lot, where the Trump Baja Resort was to be built. The lot was cleared raw, and then abandoned after the project failed.
Karla’s mother was light, and it just was a damn shame that it had to end this way, but he had thought it through all night, and he saw no other way. There was no other way.
Light as a flower, he thought, and wondered what she really looked like way back when. No matter. This was going to end this way. What happens in Baja was going to stay in Baja.
The cliffs at Playa del Contrabandista were riddled with blowholes, connections to underwater caves a twenty to forty feet or so below. Paul could smell the moisture as he made his way onto the dirt plateau, overlooking the cliff.
About fifty yards towards the ocean, he saw it. It was the kind of hole you didn’t want to slip and fall into, a perfectly bored stone chute, straight down into the breakers below. You couldn’t see the breakers, but the roar and the wet impressed.
“Cool,” he thought to himself.
That’s when he felt the Old Lady shudder, quiver, a cough, a breath, and a wheeze to life.
Holy shit! She lived! What the… the Old Lady lived! Her breathing was labored but every draw seemed deeper, stronger, and more certain. What to do? Karla will be thrilled to just spend another minute with her Ma.
Paul did not hesitate. He had come too far. They had all come too far. He had listened to too many Dodgers radio broadcasts. It was time. He unwrapped her shroud and stripped her. Fuck Vin Scully. He was violently effective, as if peeling a banana. She barely winced in his hands at his rough, impersonal treatment.
Paul caught her milky eye as he flipped her into the maw of the blowhole, feet first.
Her face contorted. Paul knew she knew what was happening. He looked her in the eyes. Her pupils narrowed, recognizing him.
Her pupils narrowed in terror.
Paul shoved harder, with more purpose, forcefully down, freeing himself from her grasp.
She tried to dig her nails into his forearms. It didn’t matter. She slipped and let out a shriek as she fell below, her hips careening from one side to the other of the hole.
Paul looked down blankly. He did not care.
As she went down, the blowhole acted as a pipe, making her louder to anyone right above the hole, mainly Paul. In reality, he was deaf, so she screamed in loud silence, loud enough to hear herself scream. The waves eventually regained control of Paul’s soundtrack, and it was as if she never was.
Paul turned and walked away, leaving her clothes and makeshift orange shroud behind, yet more scraps of old clothes waiting to become someone’s lucky find. Her Dodgers cap caught his eye as he walked. She must have dropped it.
Paul picked it up and put it on.
“If you shove your mother-in-law down a blowhole in Baja, and no one hears it, did it happen?” he thought.
The Drive Home
Paul and Karla cleared US Customs at San Ysidro without issue – they were waved right through. There was no reason to stop them – they were just a couple from Chula Vista coming home after some camping in Baja. The officer did ask himself why anyone from Chula Vista would wear an LA Dodgers’ cap, but to each his own.
The Social Security checks were cashed for another three years, until Karla’s dreams about her mother became too real. Paranoid, she went down to Chula Vista PD to file a missing person’s report and notified the Social Security Administration that Ma had left the apartment, never to come back.
“Ninety years old!” complained Karla to the Social Security worker as she canceled her mother’s monthly social security check.
“Maybe she went south, to live in Rosarito? I’m so sorry. I hope they find her,” opined the clerk.
“For sure,” said Karla, thinking about how Paul and Karla would live in El Centro.
La Madonna Naranja
Locals know who walks the bluffs above Playa Naranja. They hear her complaining in the wind, indignant, sometimes crying out for something that sounds like “Fernando.”
Her body long gone, stuffed into a blowhole no one will ever find, she looks to the sky, searching for Dodger blue, in a world gone orange.
At night, she wails with the steady Pacific offshore breeze. Sacrifices are brought to her. She keeps the locals on edge and the bluffs whistle empty to this day yielding the odd foot in a sneaker.
And that’s pretty much why the Trump Resort was never built at KM16 – at Playa Naranja, home of the Orange Madonna.