You may have seen the VH1 oldies video for “Low Rider Man”. I believe it still plays occasionally. Like the song, its considered something of a classic.
The video (actually shot in 16mm film) consists of a chicano car club parading up and down Whittier Blvd in cherried lowered “shorts” with hydraulic lifters bouncing the chassis up and down to the beat of the tune.
(a “short” was the term for a 2 door coupe–any vato loco driving a 4 door sedan was said to be driving “la coche de su madre”)
Roberto staged and filmed that video early on a Saturday morning in 1974 with one of the car clubs from our hometown a few miles east of east LA.
For free.
A third single to be released off the “Why Cant We Be Friends?” album was entitled “In Mazatlan.” The band had so liked the “Low Rider” video that they wanted another one shot for the new single. One of the band members had written the song after vacationing in Mazatlan. He had enjoyed the vibrant chaos of the big open air market in the middle of the old city so much that he wanted footage from there to be cast in the new video.
Being that it was another hot, smoggy and boring San Gabriel Valley summer, and being that I was as usual not working or going to school because of my draft status and lack of ambition, Roberto decided to invite me along as his assistant.
I cheerfully accepted and off we went down the newly opened paved highway which stretched through the Baja California desert for nearly 1,000 miles from Ensenada to La Paz.
Roberto also brought along his new Bolivian girlfriend Anna (later to be his wife and the mother of their two children). Roberto spoke good vato mexicano but Anna was fluent in the real thing, as well as in English. It was clear to both of us mongrels from the barrios de Los Angeles that she had been very well bred indeed in South America.
As it was, Anna seemed not to be happy that I was along for the ride. I wasnt a very good influence on Roberto, the inkling of which she confirmed a few miles south of Ensenada where we had stopped to obtain our travel permits.
Once we drove off again, enfranchised by our letters of transit, I produced with comically dramatic fluorish a half ounce bag of green/gold Oaxacan from my backpack, held it aloft in the middle of the backseat and asked, anybody want to get high?
Baja has to be the most bountiful desert in the world, about as lush and green as could be expected from such oddly desolate geography. The land too retained an aboriginal Southern California beauty, rugged purple and brown red rock formations with millions of cactus sprouting twenty feet high in all directions.
We were never more than a few miles from the Sea of Cortez on one side or the Pacific Ocean on the other. Another advantage was that between Ensenada and La Paz sat a few small fishing villages on the gulf side but little else. You cant be more alone in the world and yet so close to the truly living God.
The vast emptiness was matched only by the silence of my compadres on the way down. I sat in the back rolling joints and passing them forward to Roberto, who drove most of the way in stoned angry silence. I became acutely aware that this rift between them revolved squarely around my presence.
The plan was to make it in two days to La Paz and then catch the ferry over to Mazatlan, an overnight boat ride away, capture some film of the market and then spend as much time as we could before our few dollars ran out exploring the mainland jungles inside the tropical zone.
Since we werent sure what awaited us in La Paz we made the decision to smoke the half ounce before we got there. It was fun and daring to be riding around in Mexico smoking dope, but we knew once we ran back into civilization we would run smack into the many federales who survived mainly on the frequent busting of gringo hippies. Either they extracted sizeable bribes or you would be thrown into a Mexican prison for 30 years, or both if you were extremely unlucky.
Since War’s management had generously provided a $250 travel voucher for the trip, we didnt expect any bribe that we could muster would work very well.
We also knew that anybody working for the Mexican government (in those days a corrupt dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)masquerading as a democracy) was automatically deputized for the express purpose of busting American, Canadian or European junkies who came to Mexico attracted by the cheap cost of good strong Mexican dope (cocaine and heroin as well as the green gold).
What that meant was any plainclothes Mexican citizen who happened to work for the government (the largest employer in the country by far, of course) had the potential to take us down for a very long time under the hardest prison conditions imaginable. A nation of narcs, as it were.
Driving through a moonless night in the Baja desert is like flying over the ocean at night. All is black everywhere except inside the fuselage and the few feet in front where the headlights beam.
I had dozed off in the backseat when BAM! the VW microbus rocked back and forth and careened off the road into the sand with a stunned Roberto still gripping the steering wheel. We grabbed the flashlight and scrambled out to see just what the fuck had happened.
It was a steer, who apparently had been attracted to the warm pavement, which still retained much heat from the days scorching sun. The steer had lain in the road sound asleep. Now it would sleep for eternity, another senseless victim of human progress.
We straightened the crushed right front fender as best we could with the tire iron to keep it from sheering off precious rubber tread and kept on keepin on toward our ultimate destination.
We hadnt bothered to consider that the highway crisscrossed and switchbacked straight up and then straight back down a rugged coastal mountain range several different times along the route. We didnt have in our possession nor had we thought to consult a map. In fact, the paved road was so new that it had probably not yet been mapped, or even if it had, maps were likely not yet available for commercial sale.
Our progress became even more slowed by the large Mexican trucks which rumbled down the highway and whose drivers acted as if we did not exist as they bore down on us from either direction. After the first few almost blew us into oblivion, we decided to pull off the highway each time another one came upon us.
On the second afternoon of the trip, Roberto found that he could no longer get the stickshift to move out of second and into third gear. Shit shit shit he kept spitting out as he worked the shift until finally he stopped struggling, resigned to twenty miles an hour from that point on.
That night, exhausted from the heat and strain of the slow going, we stopped about 170 kilometres north of La Paz in a fishing camp which contained, as if from a dream, an olympic sized swimming pool beside the gulf and nothing else.
Much of Mexico, especially the few man made parts, appear to be based more on dream motif than reality. Nothing, including the ancient ruins or the golden domed cathedrals built in the middle of the jungle by 17th century religious madmen, made much sense to the well ordered anglo mind of the twentieth century.
Its one of the reasons Mexico so inspired the waves of junkies, drifters and poets who swarmed over it during the last century like horse flies on a roadside taco cart.
I went off by myself looking for a shower and found instead the dreamlike swimming pool. Nobody else around, so I stripped down to my shorts and dove in. The water felt cold and invigorating to my heat exhausted body.
As I came up for air at the side wall I felt my head suddenly pulled forward violently and smashed hard onto a pair of hungry, mauling lips. An insistent tongue forced its way down my parched throat.
Anna let go of me, stood up, quietly hitched and pulled over her head the loose dress covering her naked body then dove gracefully into the surreal well lighted pool.
Hes asleep she whispered when she surfaced beside me. We embraced for the longest time in the rapidly warming water. I couldnt begin to fathom the extent of my luck much less whether it was good or bad. My brain had ceased to function. I was little better than a dead cow by the highway.
Finally, I took Anna by the hand and led her down onto the beachfront feeling for the first time protected by and not in fear of the thick Mexican darkness.
The next morning I was convinced that Roberto had full knowledge of my treasonous act. Surely, Anna had confessed as soon as she found him awake. If he did know he never mentioned it. I stayed quiet with my head down as I rolled up the remainder of the half ounce.
I could hardly stand the sight of Anna any longer, but I have since replayed in my mind several thousand times every inch of her body which I explored so fervently that night in the sand.
Before the trip ended I would, despite myself, daydream endlessly of getting back to the US and replacing Roberto in Anna’s life.
Nineteen, tall, gracefully thin with a swans neck, high aristocratic cheekbones and a light brown complexion, Anna was the love child of a wealthy banker and one of his mistresses. She had left her mother behind in hysterical grief and emigrated from Bolivia to LA all by herself less than one year earlier.
Somehow she had come to find work as a secretary at the office of the UCLA film school. Somehow she had been seduced by my great childhood friend Roberto.
I struggled in vain not to be completely consumed in the fires of her youthful latina beauty, which appeared even more awesome in the vast desolation that separated the three of us.
I prayed to God and Satan both, repeatedly, begging each one in turn for a chance to be with Anna again in a different life, one which did not include Roberto.
I no longer wished to exist in the current world without her.