Paper or Plastic? (Part II—Double D’s)

    I used to work with a red head girl everyone called Double D’s. She inherited the nickname after she banged Robert the produce guy on a stack of lettuce boxes in the produce cooler. Double D’s stood for Dirty Dana, she was the store slut.

Mortality Wake Up

Lying on a sterile table, white wax paper

crinkled under my young body—

a needle buried in my wrist.

Beyond Palace Walls

    Drunk, I staggered down a Tijuana alleyway. A moon bent like a finger nail clipping lit my way. I watched a mangy brown puppy eating old tacos from a tipped garbage can as I dragged my tired feet back towards the U.S. border. I had just been drinking, laughing and dancing with friends at one of our favorite bars when that familiar anxiety came over me. I had to leave. I told everyone I was taking a taxi back to the border, but I had something else in mind.

Paper Contortionist

We boys found refuge in the bamboo forest.

We cracked and snapped through yellow shoots

that pierced the earth like leafy daggers.

Concrete Crack Sutra

Down the Boulevard of wilting eucalyptus trees and tagged up bus stops, a concrete crack breathes through crab grass lips—

Each night under the siren filled lights, the sharp points of high-heeled ladies clip-clop like hooves across that crack by the dozen

Porky’s

    Tucked in the back corner of Tijuana’s Plaza del Zapato there’s a dirty gem responsible for some of the best nights and worst mornings of my life. Porky’s was a melting pot for Tijuana’s punk kids, cokeheads, Goths, gays, hipsters, and

Twolips

Remember how our tongues swam

like two eels playing Twister?

The Batting Cages

    I had just turned fifteen, had no money, and since I didn’t want to get stuck driving the rusty hatchback rotting on the side of my parent’s house, I got a job working at the local batting cages. Most of the time, I just chain smoked behind a tattered net, watching the softball girls in their tight spandex shorts. The college guys that worked inside the shop were amazed by how much I smoked for fifteen and my habit earned me the nickname “Smokey.”

Expensive Brownies

    I stirred a bowl filled with gooey brownie batter as my accomplice Christian looked over my shoulder. “So how much should we put in?” I held up a zip-lock bag filled with pot. I had just graduated high school, moved out on my own, and was ready to try any mind altering substance that came my way.

Trouble with Authority

    Whenever I ask my friends if they would care to join me for a cup of tea, or when they see me reading the latest issue of Poets and Writers, their response is usually the same, “Man, Old Pat would kick New Pat’s ass!”