Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [53]
I hit my first in a long series of cheap bars. They were interchangeable; the people looked and smelled the same, the same fat Mexican girls danced nude on stage to bored catcalls. I described Fat Dog in detail to over fifty people, slipping out over two hundred dollars to bilingual Mexicans to translate for me. Nothing. Just a massive headache from over four hours of maudlin, saccharine Mexican music.
I walked back to Revalucion, deciding to hit a few nicer-looking joints before trying the dog track. I walked through three off-track betting palaces on my way over. No Fat Dog and no one willing to take time off from placing bets to talk to me.
I was getting hungry and decided to chance the food in the first halfway decent-looking juke joint I came to, which was La Carabelle. I knew right off the bat that this was a class place by T.J. standards: it was clean, the bar was well-stocked, the patrons looked a cut above the ones I had been questioning and the girls who danced on stage were pretty and slender and wore bikinis. I took a table near the edge of the dance runway. A waiter materialized and I ordered huevos rancheros and coffee.
The table adjoining mine was occupied by outsized, red-faced American men doing some hard drinking. From their short hair and the peremptory way they treated their waiter, I judged them to be Marine Corps brass, not likely to have information on my quarry. Still, they were talking loudly and when their conversation turned to golf, I listened.
“I was fucking surprised,” one of them said, “a shit-ass town like this having a championship course. Par seventy-two! Greens like lightning. I was lucky to get away with an eighty-seven! Jesus, all those years at Pendleton and I didn’t even know it existed!”
I leaned over and asked him where this golf course bonanza was.
The man started to get annoyed, then smiled broadly. His companions joined him and they all started jabbering drunkenly: “T.J. Country Club,” “Are you from Pendleton, fella?” “Just south of town,” “Near the dog track, greatest fucking Margaritas this side of La Paz,” “Watch out for that trap on the fourth hole, it …”
I didn’t wait for them to finish. I jammed out of the bar and maneuvered my way through the crowds on Revalucion to the lot where my car was parked. I couldn’t believe it: the Tijuana Country Club? But the parking attendant told me it was true and gave me specific instructions on how to get there.
I drove south to the edge of town. The T.J. Country Club course was hard to miss: it was a giant patch of light green in an otherwise brown landscape. Signs directed me to the clubhouse, which looked like a miniature of the Alamo, with a poorly printed, peeling sign announcing “Club Social Y Deportivo De Tijuana.”
I pushed my way through knots of golfers drinking beer and hoisting golf bags, looking for someone in charge. The room was dingy, the walls the same sandblasted adobe as outside. And the golfers looked crazed, not unlike some junkies I had seen, lining up in queues to buy golf provisions, pushing and shoving in their anxiousness to get to the first hole. It would be futile to attempt questioning here. I followed a group of prosperous-looking Mexicans outside, where the course opened up before me like a breath of clean air: rolling, strangely soft-looking green hills only slightly tainted by the omnipresent Tijuana brownness. The only thing to ruin it were the golf maniacs, dozens of them, milling around on the large patio, waiting to load their bags onto the scores of dilapidated golf carts parked in a blacktop loading area adjacent to the first tee. The whole scene had the air of an ancient ritual, completely American, prosaic and profound at the same time.
I walked over to a Mexican youth pulling beer bottles out of a large plastic trash can and handing them to golfers who grabbed them hungrily. When the trash can was empty, he took it back to a service shed to reload. I followed. “Habla Ingles?” I said, as he dipped his hands into