By Thomas Shess, author of "Tough Love" and "Cantina Psalms."
We called her Mexicali Sally.
She wasn’t from Mexicali and her name wasn’t Sally. She was an 18-year-old Mexican woman and Sally rhymed with Mexicali, which at eighteen ourselves was reason enough for us.
There were five of us, seniors at the same San Diego high school, a couple of years into our driver’s licenses and the conviction that civilization ended at the border and adventure began on the other side.
Tijuana was a dozen miles away.
We went every chance we got.
My name is Richard Huebler. Everybody called me Ricky. The others aren't important except for Rapid Rolland, who earned his nickname by doing almost everything before the rest of us thought of doing it.
Sally went to our high school in Chula Vista, the last big town between San Diego and the border. That came as a surprise because she crossed the border every morning to attend classes and went home to Mexico every afternoon. We knew her by another name at school. At night she used still another one.
We discovered that one night at the Hollywood. The Hollywood was a strip joint a few blocks off Tijuana's Avenida Revolución. By ten o’clock it would be full of sailors, tourists and young idiots like us drinking beer we couldn't legally buy at home.
That was where we discovered our classmate dancing onstage. She was tall in her dancer's high heels, dark-haired, blue-eyed and beautiful. Not pretty. Beautiful. There was a difference, especially to five boys who had only recently discovered women came without clothes in real life not just mens magazines.
Seeing someone from algebra class walk naked onto a stage changes algebra forever.
She spotted us during her first number.
We expected panic.
Instead, when she came over afterward, she made us a deal. “You don't know me here. I don't know you at school.”
We agreed, Staring at her bikini top we would have agreed to sell California back to Mexico.
She arranged for a pitcher of beer to appear at our booth.
That made our treaty official.
She danced because the Hollywood paid better than anything she could find in Tijuana or San Diego. Most of the money went home to her mother and three younger brothers.
At least that was what she told us.
There were probably a hundred things about her life she never told us.
At eighteen you don't know enough to know what questions to ask.
We became regulars.
Sally became, in our minds, our private discovery. She would stop at our booth between numbers. Sometimes she'd sit with us. At school she barely acknowledged us.
Naturally, all five of us fell in love with her sweaty-after- dance-set self. For the first time, we basked in her aroma. Girls sweat to. So do grown women in our soon to be college years.
But then under those blue smoky lights, none of us knew what love was but dancing with a naked girl, who wore high heels on stage came in second.
Of course, the trouble started after too many pitchers of beer. Someone—I honestly don't remember who—suggested we pool a hundred dollars and offer it to Sally if she would let us go farther than the Hollywood allowed.
Not sex.
Just,..you know, she does it for us..."
That distinction seemed enormously important to us at the time.
Because I had been elected the silver-tongued devil of the group, they sent me to make the proposition. I found her after her set. I explained our magnificent idea.
She didn't slap me.
I almost wish she had.
She simply stared at me.
It was the longest anybody had ever looked at me without saying anything.
Then she said, “Your idea, too, Ricky?”
That hurt.
She walked away.
For the next month we ceased to exist.
No free pitchers.
No visits to our booth. No touching smooth thighs under the table.
At school, she passed us in the hallway without a word.
We were baffled.
We stopped going to the Hollywood and found the Long Bar, where the rowdier American chickas hung out.
That tells you everything you need to know about us. We couldn't understand why a woman willing to take off her clothes in front of a roomful of strangers would be insulted by our proposition.
Years later I understood. Taking off her clothes was her decision. We wanted to buy the decision. There is a difference.
Just before Christmas vacation I saw her outside school while she waited for hker ride.
She had been crying. She'd wiped most of it away, but not all of it.
I had been trying for weeks to find a way back into her good graces. The five of us were planning a camping trip. We'd drive east through Mexicali, then south toward San Felipe and camp somewhere overlooking the Gulf of California. I asked if she'd like to come.
“No funny business,” I insisted. “I promise.”
She studied me. Then she asked a question I wasn't expecting. “Is the hundred dollars still available?”
It wasn't. Whatever money we'd had was long gone. I told her I'd see what I could do.
That evening I gathered the boys at the Hollywood and told them what she'd said. Rapid Rolland reached into his pocket. He had just been paid at the grocery store where he bagged groceries after school. We all put twenty-dollar bills on the table.
We drew straws.
I won.
Nobody was joking. That should have told us something.
We gave Sally the money after her last set. She didn't count it. She took it, folded it once and put it away in her g-string. Then she took my hand. There was a room upstairs.
What happened there isn't important except that I entered it an eighteen-year-old virgin and came downstairs about half an hour still a virgin later trying desperately to look like somebody who understood what she just told me.
The boys surrounded me.
“Well?”
I told them a lie. "Best I ever had. I'm going to pay you all back. I swear."
Rapid Rolland stared at me. The first twenty dollars had been his. If he'd demanded his money back, I wouldn't have blamed him. Instead, I told them the important part. “She's coming with us to San Felipe."
We left the next weekend. Five boys and Mexicali Sally in an old Chevrolet heading east on Highway 2 with the windows down. There was too much wind to talk and maybe that was good.
She never explained to the others why she suddenly needed a hundred dollars.
I never told.
It was our secret.
That bothers me now. It didn't then.
We camped south of San Felipe on a rise overlooking the Gulf. There was nothing around us but sand, water and sky. What happened there belongs to the six people who were there.
She made out with me in the tent then it was Rapid Rolland's turn. For years afterward, whenever the five of us got together, somebody would eventually bring up that trip. Some years we told the same story. We remembered it as the weekend Mexicali Sally taught us how to be men.
We were wrong. She taught us nothing of the kind. She was an eighteen-year-old who needed a hundred dollars for medical reasons known only to her, trusted five fools from her high school enough to go into the desert with them. We mistook trust for something else. The trip ended. We drove home. And Mexicali Sally disappeared. She didn't return to school after Christmas vacation. She didn't graduate with us. At first we asked around. Nobody knew anything.
Then graduation came, followed by jobs, college, the service, marriages, children and all the machinery that carries young people away from one another.
Rapid Rolland stopped being Rapid Rolland.
I stopped being Tricky Ricky.
Mexicali Sally became a story we occasionally told.
About ten years later I attended a convention at a hotel in San Diego. During a cocktail reception I recognized one of the women who had danced at the Hollywood on the same stage as Sally. She was older, of course. So was I. She was working as a cocktail waitress. I waited until she wasn't busy and introduced myself.
She remembered the silly gringos who danced on the stage with her. That surprised me. I asked about Sally. She knew immediately who I meant. For a moment she said nothing. Then she told me Sally had married a wealthy rancher in Baja California. She said her older husband died and she now owned a successful vineyard operation in the wine valley Northeast of Ensenada.
“Seen her lately?” I asked.
She thought about it. “Years ago.”
“Is she all right?”
The woman looked at me. Something about the question seemed to amuse her, although she didn't smile. “She was fine when I saw her. I was working cocktails at the Caliente Race Track and she was there in a private box." She added a governor of one of the Californias was there with five other men.
I wanted to ask more.
Instead, I asked the question I shouldn't have. Do you know why she needed a hundred dollars back then?” The waitress looked at me sternly: "Es cosa de mujeres, Ricky."
She remembered my name.
Someone across the room called for another drink. She lifted her tray.
I stopped her. Tipped her. “One more thing.”
She waited. “What was her real name?”
This time she smiled. “It's not Sally?”
“Yes?”
She shook her head. “You boys never knew anything about her.”
Then she walked away. She was right. We didn't know she was the sole support of her family and that she occasionally took gifts from rich men and politicos from both sides of the border.
I never saw Mexicali Sally again.
And after all these years, we still don't know her real name. But we think of her when we order a bottle of Sierra Rico Vino Tinto from what we're told by our travel insurance guy as being the only matriarch owned winery in Baja.
She also gave us a bittersweet lesson to remember what fools we were and we should not ask personal questions as older men.
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