Spiderman in Tecate (Baja California)

Unsplash image: Greg Bulla @gregbulla

Spiderman in Tecate

I won’t name the man I talked to in Wacky Joe’s* in Tecate, where I drank a Tecate, even though he revealed his name to me. This is because of what he said. I don’t mean the stuff he told me about the four dead migrants found on Tecate Peak a few weeks previously. I don’t mean the stuff he told me about his own history—his deportation after being caught at a checkpoint near Yuma, Arizona. I don’t mean the stuff he told me about the Spider Shore Facebook page that cataloged the murders in the city by the __________ cartel but which failed to attribute any deaths to them.

     I mean the stuff he revealed to me about a kidnapping that he had witnessed by members of said cartel.

     “The first time they came into this bar, they came without their guns,” he said, by way of introduction to his story. “They were nice enough to leave them in the car.”

     But their detente didn’t last long. When they came back a month later to kidnap a guy, they were armed. They dragged the guy away and shot him. The kidnapping might have been captured on video, but the perps were never going to be captured. The police were no recourse, of course. They weren’t about to go after the cartel.

     He told me this stuff because (or in spite of) my telling him I was a journalist.

     A Snidely Whiplash deadringer walked into the bar about 20 minutes into our conversation. He had a thick mustache and his own steel-tipped pool cue. He looked like a movie villain. But what about the dude I was talking to? Was he a villain or a hero? The two men started playing pool and I watched for a while as I wasn’t behind the 8 ball. (I didn’t feel like I was at any rate.) They were talking about the price Chinese families have to pay the cartels for safe passage to the US, around $13,000. They started talking about other stuff too, but I lost the thread of conversation because my Spanish is poor.  When I got back to my hotel room, I scrolled through the Spider Shore page, and found a video of Spidey, decked out in full costume, directing traffic in downtown Tecate. 

     Traffic (the vehicular kind) seemed like the least of the city’s problems.

     I wondered if the dude I met was Spidey, in Peter Parker guise. Reaching out beyond his own impotence to ensnare me in his web. It made sense. Posting on social media is, after all, about the best superheroes can do these days.

There is no Wacky Joe’s in Tecate but the fictional name is a stand-in for the bar I visited in early October, 2023. The names of people and other details are obscured in this factual narrative out of an abundance of caution.