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Sometimes it’s better to stick to what you know. When things go wrong, they always seem to go wrong at the worst possible time. One morning, in the late summer of 1998, I was driving through the streets of Colonia Felipe Angeles in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with my girlfriend’s brother Jorge. Jorge and I were about a minute away from his family’s place. We had just copped five globos (small balloons) of Mexican black tar heroin and made an extra stop at the pharmacy to buy insulin syringes, jeringas. As we headed back to Jorge’s, two Juárez municipal police cars approached us from the opposite direction, passed us, did an immediate U-turn, and pulled us over. The cops searched the car and found our jeringas, but didn’t find the dope, because Jorge had swallowed it before I stopped the car. That didn’t matter to them—they arrested us anyway. The car had New York plates, and they must have thought that they could get an easy mordida, or bribe. My girlfriend was at work and had left Jorge and me to babysit her daughter. Because the eight-year-old child was in the back seat of the car, the cops brought us to Jorge’s family’s place so we could drop her off before they took us in. They could have let us leave the car, but they towed it in instead. It was a decent car, a Nissan sedan, but since we didn’t have the mordida money then and there, the cops took us downtown. For a junkie, it is a nightmare to get busted two minutes before you are about to shoot up your morning fix. The Delicias Municipal Jail in downtown Juárez was an impregnable fortress built of stone. It was nicknamed Las Piedras, “The Rocks.” The cops put us in a room full of younger guys who were delirious after being locked up all night, drunks with hangovers, and junkies going through the various stages of heroin withdrawal. Cement benches extended around the perimeter One V i aj e s 2 Border Junkies of the bare, rock-walled holding cell. Las Piedras was dingy and hard, and I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. Jorge and I sat there for three hours until my girlfriend finally showed up and got us out. My car was parked outside the jail. Laura, my girlfriend, seemed angrier at the police than she was with Jorge and me. Her mother was there, cursing the cops out in Spanish for not letting us go in the first place. I think the real reason the cops ran us in was because we were short fifty pesos—that was about five U.S. dollars—for the mordida. Laura’s mom was pretty upset about the whole bust, but she too directed her anger at the municipal police rather than at us. I was just grateful that I had given Laura a thousand dollars just in case something went wrong while I was living with her and her family . As we drove back to the house, the conversation quickly turned to Jorge and me and how we had screwed up. Together, we concluded that we should have taken the main road back to the house from the pharmacy instead of the back road that paralleled the Rio Grande. Silence followed. Back in Felipe Angeles, I parked the car, and Jorge and I decided that this time we would just walk over to the heroin connection’s house. Moving to Juárez to live there with Laura and her family was an attempt to remake my life. I grew up in New York State and in Hartford, Connecticut. When I was thirteen, my family moved from New York to Connecticut. Sometime before the move, I began experimenting with marijuana with some of the neighborhood kids. My parents were from upstate New York and had met each other at community college. They were both from large, low-income, rural families and had moved up the American social hierarchy from lower- to middle-class status. I see my own childhood as having been a transition from country boy to city kid. The move to Connecticut put my family in the partially integrated community of Bloomfield. It was not long after our arrival there that I began to hang around with other kids who were using drugs and alcohol. This was...

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