Time, Warped

The guy who cleans the clinic each day is a Mexican-American close to my age--maybe a little younger than me. He's been in prison for a while, and still has a few more years to go. I know he likes music, and since there are a few Mexican bands that I like, I asked him one day about his favorites.

"You like Café Tacuba?," I ask.

"Who?"

I explain who they are and that they're from Mexico.

"Do you know Molotov?," I say.

"Nah, I don't think so," he answers.

"How about Maná?," I try. This band is a little more mainstream and has been around since the late '80s.

"Yeah, I seen them on TV," he says. Finally, a hit.

I quickly figure out that musically he lives in the early 1990s, probably about the time he entered the prison system. Anything later is largely unknown to him.

He tells me he likes Los Tigres del Norte. This is one of the oldest and best-known groups from Mexico, singing in the Norteño style. He also really likes a guy named Chalino Sánchez, a singer of narcocorridos; ballads about drug smugglers. Sánchez is the O.G. of Mexican music, the Latino Biggie and Tupac. Like them he died young and violently, and is now idolized by many.

Sánchez was an illegal migrant worker/coyote/drug dealer who turned singer while in a Tijuana prison. He was hugely popular in the late 1980s among California's underground Mexican music scene. But not so popular that he wasn't shot while on stage in early 1992. Chalino, who always performed with a gun tucked prominently in his belt, fired back. Sánchez survived, but was kidnapped later that year in Mexico and found murdered with two bullet holes to the back of his head. The murder remains unsolved, but has been attributed to the Federales, to drug dealers, and even to an elaborate hoax, with Chalino alive and in hiding somewhere.

Sánchez is my guy's favorite. A singer who romanticized drug dealers with lyrics referencing torture and death. Am I surprised? A little. My guy is soft-spoken and extremely polite. He works hard and has told me that when he does finally get out, he will never end up in prison again. He says he's too smart for prison and is wasting his life inside. He loves history, and religion, and can quote obscure references and texts.

But then again, much of prison life is a contradiction:
The beauty of the landscape surrounding the razor wire. The order and structure imposed on the violent and unstable. The often mean spirits of the caretakers, and the men in clinic who are always inmates first, and patients last.

My guy has seven years left before he's out. As for me, I'm not sure where I'll be in seven years, but I do know that in seven days I'll be done with this rotation.

I won't miss it.