Culture

Years ago, it might have been in eighty-eight, I spent a Christmas vacation with a friend of mine, Hector Tamio. We were both in the same four man team in the U.S. Armies 7th Manchu Light Infantry Division, based in Monterey, California, and I couldn’t afford the ticket price for a plane ride back home to Vermont. When Hector, more commonly known as “Tito” found out that I was staying on the base instead of heading home like every-one else, he asked me to be his guest at his mom’s home in Mexicali, California. Mexicali is a border town, with a sister city in Mexico, called Calexico. Hector hade family that lived in both towns, and I saw this as an excellent chance to get to known a little bit more about Mexico first hand.

The entire vacation, and Christmas dinner were fun and exciting. Many events that happened that were noteworthy themselves, but will be left to other stories. One event that happened highlighted the fact that I was from a different culture entirely.

Back then, when I was a bad boy, I smoked. I smoked only Marlboro Red’s Hard Packs. I would also sell both Generic and Marlboro to the other soldiers when we in the “field”. Where there wasn’t any source for store bought goods, you either packed it with you, or you went with-out. Some nights I would freeze because I didn’t bring my sleeping bag, but I was making a lot of extra money selling cartons of cigarettes for three to five times the cost. Towards the end of my tour, the guys started introducing me to newbie’s as the Bank of Rowley, I was doing so well.

Part of the business side was to know who always didn’t buy enough to feed their habit for the time that we were in the field. The other part was knowing how to manipulate a crowd of people (with loaded rifles) when you knew most of them didn’t have any cigarettes for them-self’s and they thought I did, and I did. So what I did was pretend that I was always on my last carton or two. I would give upper ranks a Marlboro, and lower a Generic. Because the first question always asked was, “how many you got?” I would say something like, “I only got two left till we get back to camp, but I’ll sell you a carton for X amount. In today’s prices around two hundred dollars a carton. After a few days begging for cigarettes people started lining up, giving me entire paychecks for a fix.

After they bought a carton I would give them ONE, with the rest coming later. In order for them to never find out how many I really had, I worked out a way to fool them. I never took the entire pack out of my pocket. I would open the pack still in my pocket and take out one and give it to them. They can’t count what they can’t see.

Remember that I’m going on Christmas Vacation with Tito? Yeah, I forgot to mention that Tito was a former gang leader, and that the new gang leader was one of his lien tent. Guess who was invited to this guy’s house for New Years Eve? That’s right Tito and I.

We go over there and everything is good. Tito is loved around that place, and I’m getting along great with the new leader. That is until the guy asks me for a Cigarette. I treat him like every-one else and pull a cigarette out of my pocket. Way, bad, idea, He goes ballistic. Starts bitching, yelling commands, and speed dialing his friends, the rest of the gang, all in Spanish no less. I’ve got no idea what is going on, and tell/command/ask Tito to figure out what is wrong and bring back some peace to the situation. Thirty seconds ago, every-thing was good. What happened?

It turns out that I presented my cigarette to him the wrong way. In his “world”, a lesser person, that I didn’t think I was, nor knew that I might want to act that way, gave their cigarettes away in a totally different way. What he expected was that I pull out my entire pack of cigarettes, flick open the cover, and then flick out a cigarette a little way out of the pack. In this way both persons in this cultures ego were satisfied. The one with the cigarettes was able to say, “These are mine, have one.” The leader was able to say, “That’s nice, if I want one, and you have value, all I will take is one. On the other hand if I want the entire pack, I will take the entire pack, because I own you little man. After the little misunderstanding the rest of the night went fine, that is until I did it again to him by mistake around midnight. Oops! Tito and I both agreed that we were not dealing with these guys again, and before any one could do any-thing about us, we jumped in Tito’s car and left very quickly. Later the next day, when I woke up, it was all good again, thank God.

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