Driving With Bighead

 

Hope you’re ready for some fun with this week’s excerpt from my upcoming book Marijuana Cowboys. Maybe it’ll distract you from politics, brain-eating fungi, and mass shootings. And on those light thoughts, here comes Driving With Bighead.

 

To set the scene, we’ve just left Bighead’s favorite taco place in Ensenada. They featured tacos de cabeza. For those unfamiliar with tacos de cabeza, we’re talking about cow heads, and I mean every part of them except the skull. But that’s another story. We’re now on our way to Bighead’s mountain ranches where the marijuana cowboys are growing huge crops.

 

 

At the eastern outskirts of Ensenada, Highway 3 climbs about 3,000 feet before reaching a vast valley bordered by mile-high mountains. The first section is curvy and narrow and carved out of the side of the mountain and what it lacks in shoulders and guardrails it makes up for with sheer cliffs. We passed dozens of these little white crosses. Sometimes plastic flowers and framed pictures accompanied them, each shrine signifying where someone’s loved one flew over the side. I imagined some of the crosses were left for people knocked off the highway while leaving a cross. Judging by the number of crosses, a lot of people had gone airborne, and the way Bighead drove, I feared we’d join them.

Like El Brujo, Bighead had a surplus of testosterone. Also, self-confidence. Either that, or he was out of his mind.

A little voice suggested: Probably both.

“You look nervous, Mikey. What’s wrong?”

“You mean besides imminent death?”

Bighead chuckled and reached behind his seat, fishing around the cooler for a cold one. “Here, drink this. Chill out.”

“I could’ve grabbed that myself, you know. That way you could keep your eyes on the road.”

“I could drive this road blindfolded. Watch,” he said, then closed his eyes till my yelling made him stop.

“You know that song I Can’t Drive 55?”

“Yeah.”

“Sammy Hagar wrote that about me.”

“No kidding?”

“Lots of songs are about me.”

“Like I’m Too Sexy?”

“There you go. Remember Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain?”

“That was you?”

“She was bitter after the breakup. I also inspired Nobody Does It Better. Remember Werewolves of London?”

“That was you drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s?”

“How you’d know?”

“Your hair, it’s perfect.”

He patted his bright red coif. “Hey, let’s listen to the cd,” and started fishing around in the glove box.

Which is why we were swerving from lane to lane, narrowly avoiding head-on collisions.

Also, why I said, “Why don’t you let me find it?”

“Thanks, Mikey.” Swerving away from a pickup, he said, “You’re lucky you’re riding with me.”

“I am?”

“I’ve got lightning-fast reflexes. And the way the Mexicans come right at you on these hairpin corners? Trust me; you need ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, you drive in their lane.”

“Who’s side are you on?”

“I just wanna get there alive.”

“Speaking of lanes,” said Bighead as the Eagles Life In The Fast Lane came on. He sang along, “I was brutally handsome. . .”

As we went around another corner on two wheels, I said, “Please slow down.”

“And let those tailgaters pass?”

When a horn started beeping, I looked over my shoulder, saw a Mustang convertible packed with jeering assholes. With their sneers, their preppy clothes, and their Republican haircuts, they reminded me of the frat rats that plagued me in college. Especially the way their middle fingers pointed.

“Why not let ‘em pass? At least they’d be out of our hair.”

“No one passes Big Ed.” He offered advice. “You’re in Baja now, buddy. This is a place where nice guy’s finish last.”

I was thinking: At least they finish.

“Besides, our friend Pablo told me you were a maniac for adventure.”

“You knew Pablo, too?”

“Please. . .am I not Big Ed?”

“Right.”

Pablo would say that. After I drove an airboat into a storm of gunfire and jumped from his plane with a half-ton of cocaine, he’d gotten the wrong impression. I would’ve corrected him, but Pablo Escobar wasn’t someone you contradicted. Not if you wanted to stay alive.

“What am I worried about?” said Bighead. “The guys already got the message about you.”

“What message would that be?”

“That despite appearances, you’re a dangerous man and not to be fucked with.”

“What’s wrong with my appearance?”

“No offense, but you look like a surfer. A surfer who golfs.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

When he stopped laughing, he said, “It’s better to look intimidating.”

“That’s what Pablo told me.”

He’d suggested I add forty pounds of muscle, fifty pounds of flab, prison tattoos, and facial scars. I passed on his advice.

Meanwhile, the assholes in the Mustang wouldn’t stop with the horn. It was getting old. If I was driving, I’d have let those idiots pass. Who needs the stress, right? Bighead, that’s who. The guy thrived on it. Which is why he swerved all over the highway blocking that Mustang like a roller derby goon till an oncoming ABC bus forced him back into our lane. The whole time, that fucking horn never stopped blaring.

I was losing the famous Señor Bueno cool. Who wouldn’t? When I turned around to check out the assholes, they went into a bird-flipping frenzy.

I said, “That does it, now I’m getting angry,” and hit those turds with a dirty look.

The assholes responded to my dirty look by laughing and throwing opened cans of beer at me. Not a smart move. If they’d have accounted for the force of the headwind, not to mention the rear window their cans of beer would encounter on their way to my face, perhaps they wouldn’t have thrown those beers. And perhaps those beers wouldn’t have blown back onto the windshield and blinded the driver long enough to miss that hairpin turn.

When I said, “Holy shit,” Bighead glanced in the rear-view mirror—just in time to see a Mustang full of frat rats fly off the cliff.

He offered me a high-five. “Now that’s more like it.”

“Huh?”

“Fucking Señor Bueno. Talk about intimidating. You took out five assholes and didn’t even need a gun. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you can tell me. I’m copasetic.”

“I gave them a dirty look.”

“Some kind of ninja mind control, huh?”

I sighed.

“Remind me to never piss you off.”

On the next hairpin corner, I caught a view of the Mustang. It was 1000 feet below, belly up and on fire. “We’ve gotta stop. . .”

“Why? So you can jump off the cliff and unburn them? Let’s face it, they deserved it for tailgating.”

“Even for assholes, that’s a shitty fate.”

“Trust me, word of this gets around? None of your peers will give you shit about how you look.”