First published in Rue Morgue #51, November 2005
Sometime this past July I found myself in San Diego, California, where I was born, just minutes away from the Mexican border, near where I grew up. Having been away from that place for over twenty years – and yet having distinct memories of my childhood there – I couldn’t pass up the urge to visit the little town where I spent the first decade of my life.
Playas de Tijuana was only fifteen minutes from the border and exactly as I remembered it, for the most part anyway. The place is still tiny and welcoming, cloistered between the looming ocean on one end and a string of mountains on the other. Relying on instinct alone I found the place where I grew up within a few minutes, and the little house was very close to the way I remembered it.
Later, we took a drive by the beach and though the years seemed to have defaced it, the ocean retained its majesty, rolling out into a shifting horizon and infusing the evening air with the scent of wet salt. There were a couple of reasons why I was drawn back to visit TJ; aside from the obvious, it’s a place that I have returned to often in mulling over ideas for this column.
Much of this has to do with the fascination that many of the people who have interviewed me over the years have had for the place, and particularly how it relates to what I do for a living. Tijuana, by the way, is considered – even by polite standards – to be little more than the toilet of Southern California, a place overrun with drugs, prostitution, murder and every kind of criminal activity imaginable.
But I did not grow up in Tijuana the Terrible, I grew up ten minutes away in Playas, the serene little beachside town at its end. Quiet and quaint, Playas nevertheless suffered from the fallout of its paternal city. Which may explain why shuffled with memories of raspados and sandlot baseball on lazy afternoons, there are images of people dying or dead.
Riding around on bicycles, the kids in the neighbourhood would sometimes tip each other off when some dramatic smash-up had occurred. A few times I arrived early – once a little too early – and stood by watching people agonize in their mangled cars. Others may have been bloody and unconscious or bloody and dead, it’s hard to say because I never asked and was never told.
Anyway, these are the anecdotes that people – at least press people – have found intriguing and they have asked me time and again if my formative years in Playas had anything to do with my launching a horror magazine. Which got me thinking. The answer, I think, is no, not only because my time in Playas was not defined by these events (which were few and far in between) but because my brother, who saw as many car accidents as I did , has no interest in the subject whatsoever.
On reflection, however, there is one story I never told that may have something to do with my fascination with the genre, and it happened in Playas. One day, I found a piece of newspaper on the street, the screaming headline stopped me in my tracks. It read: “Nace niño sin ojos!” (“Baby born without eyes!”). Sure enough, there was an accompanying photo of the pitiful creature, its face contorted into what appeared to be a strange leer and a sickening flap of loose skin where its eyes ought to have been.
Riveted, I showed the paper off to friends, but at the end of the day I threw it away, sickened by the thought of a world where a baby could be born without any eyes. And I resolved that the world couldn’t be this one, because such a thing was too hideous to have happened in Playas, with its salt sea beach and raspados and sandlot baseball games. It seemed to me that it must have occurred somewhere else, where terrifying doctors consorted with evil men to make a public mockery of babies born without any eyes, because something so horrible could only exist in another place. And having resolved this, I made a neat distinction between what happens and what only happens on paper, the very same distinction that defines this magazine.