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Being clean-shaven was important for a panhandler in the bridge area. The nice thing about living with Víctor’s family was that when I wasn’t home, they watched my room. Elsewhere in Juárez, there was always the possibility that someone would have cased my place, broken in, and cleaned me out. One weekend as I walked through the neighborhood, I was almost attacked by a group of vigilantes who accused me of stealing a radio. After questioning me, they persuaded me to walk to the door of a nearby house where they asked an old woman and someone else inside, “Is he the one?” One of them had a baseball bat, and I knew that if I fought them, I would lose. I decided to go along and only fight as a last resort. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. When we got to the door, the old woman took off screaming, and a young guy came to the front door, looked at me, and told the gang, “No, it wasn’t him!” The vigilantes let me go. Down at Perico’s later that day, all the guys there told me that algunos vatos andaban buscando para ti (“Some cats had been looking for you”) because of a stolen radio. I told them that I knew all about it and that it had been resolved. Since I lived at Víctor’s and Víctor had a reputation as a thief, there may have been some confusion that marked me as a suspect . The whole incident blew over, and I was just glad that the young guy at that door denied my involvement in whatever was going on. No one from the neighborhood came around my room to start trouble with me, and Víctor’s family was not one to be messed with. His brother Gilbert, who lived right next door to me, was in the Mexican Army and kept a sidearm in his house. Víctor once told me that back in the days of the local gang wars, his brother had used a shotgun against Nine V igi l a nc e 136 Border Junkies another gang. While I lived there, there didn’t seem to be a lot of violence in Juárez, and if there was, I wasn’t around when it happened. I usually just minded my own business. Keeping up my habit and making it to work everyday took all of my time and energy. By late June, I was thinking about trying to detox again. I spoke with my boss at work and confessed everything. He understood my position and respected me for telling the truth. Because of a lag in pay periods , the company owed me a full week’s pay, so I knew that I would have some money when I got out of whatever facility I decided to go to. A journal entry I wrote at the end of August summarizes several attempts to detox over the summer: If only I would have stayed off dope when I had the job. They even gave me a second chance at Allied. All’s I had to do was leave the needle alone. When I went back to v/outreach in June I had the strength and the chance to get it right but I stayed 2½ days and took off with 400 pesos in my pocket and over 500 dollars in checks waiting for me at work[.] How did I ever expect to stay clean. By the end of that week I had 7–8 hundred dollars in my wallet but I also had a monster of a dope addiction holding me back. So I stopped going to work and it was an instant replay of last summer all over again. 3 wks later I was broke and living in Juárez. And to make it all worse [it happened while I was living] in Víctor’s room which he wanted when he got out of jail. At least the rent was only 35 dollars a month. But I now know I would have been way better off living in El Paso and paying the higher rent and should have kept working. Not panhandling like I do everyday now. Even the money panhandling at 40–50 dollars a day could have gone for something better, but it’s the drugs. They suck my pockets dry and are killing me [specifically heroin]. I am so...

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