Another story from my '12 DEAD FROGS' memoir (1963)– My U. of Arizona college friend decides to marry a prostitute named 'TIA'--she worked the RED-LIGHT DISTRICT, Canal Street, Nogalas, Mexico.

(MEMOIR in paperback): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0777FHXX2

(Excerpted from TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES, A Filmmaker’s Memoir, by Rick Schmidt ©2017).

Even though I was having a confusing and miserable time in college at the beginning, at least I was free. I wrote letters home saying everything was going well, hoping no one would read between the lines, see through the smoke screen. How many other young college men and women have sent such similar false notes home to moms and dads? But it hadn’t taken long to realize that college was certainly better than sitting back home in California. At least I was on a new adventure, existing someplace where I could develop my own life. And I didn’t, as yet, have to get some shitty job just to eat and pay the rent. As long as my parents kept the $ per month checks coming, I figured that I’d have fun while it lasted and worry about grades later.

I had made a few friends at the fraternity and we stayed in touch after the fraternity disbandment. And one of the highlights of any U.of Arizona entering freshman male’s first year most certainly included a trip south of the border, down Mexico way, a short sixty-mile drive from Tucson.

TEQUILA SUNSET (1963)

At University of Arizona (commonly known as “the playboy college” due to easy entrance grade levels and the constant partying) just about every young, red-blooded male I knew went across the border at some point, to a town called Nogales, to buy time with a prostitute. The women cost under $10, and for many young men, like myself, this was their first sexual experience.\

A group of us soon made the trip to the red-light district called “Canal Street.” It was wall-to-wall bars, women of every size and description, calling out from porches to every man who passed by. Their big smiles welcomed us to the surreal boardwalk, featuring rides of sexual gratification. We all “did it” that night, myself ending up with a nice Mexican girl named “Tia” (maybe not her real name…), who gently aided me in the pursuit of carnal pleasure. It was over in about fifteen seconds. But she didn’t seem at all like the other carousing whores I’d seen that night, calling out to us young Americans from their bar porches. She had undeniable class, and a niceness that made the event all the more baffling. She had asked me if it was my first time and I had answered that it was.

Thinking back to that clean-looking but barren room, the Madonna statue in a niche in the wall, the dark blue curtain as I rested temporarily on her bed – it could all have been so dreary. But the girl’s sensitivity somehow made it lovely and OK. We talked long enough for me to find out that she had family somewhere in central Mexico and was earning money to send back for her parents and extended family who, she explained, thought she was employed as a high-paid secretary. I figured that the story could possibly be true coming from her nice lips, but then again, maybe it was just a made-up story for johns like me. It didn’t matter, really. but I just hoped that she was telling the truth for her sake, that at some point she could call it quits and resume a normal life for herself somewhere else, away from all the riffraff.

Canal Street, Mexico (60 miles from Tucson, Arizona).

The last time I made the trip to Nogales, one of my ex-Phi Psi friends, Paul, invited me to motor-scooter down there with him at night. Earlier that evening he’d told me that he had fallen in love with a prostitute and that he was planning to travel with her to Guadalajara and meet her family later that month, to ask for her hand in marriage. Wow! That seemed so gutsy and brave. I was impressed that he had been able to see beyond the obvious fact that his future wife had been with hundreds of men for however many months and years before they’d met. I should add here that Paul (not his real name) was one of the nicest young men I met at the U., quite shy, not loud or boisterous, not at all like most of the fraternity guys we were surrounded by, a person who gave a vibe I understood to be a very moral and straight-shooter, someone anyone would be lucky to call “friend.”

Anyway, he said he had to get to Canal street, see her, and make their plans. I looked at his sensitive face and hoped that he knew what he was doing. I wondered if he was just being suckered for money, or worse. He was one of the few kids at college that I could relate to on an emotional basis, and I worried for him. I wondered if what he described could really work out. But I didn’t press him with my own doubts. Just before we pushed off from Tucson he mentioned that her name was “Tia.”

That name! Could it be the same nice woman I had been with a few months previously? This coincidence was just too unreal! At any rate, the thought that it could be my Tia made the crazed night ride almost bearable. I guessed if it was Tia, what she had said about helping her family with earnings and all, she could have been someone my friend had related to. The quiet/shy and admirable aspects of both these two souls could actually be a good match. Of course, she (was it actually her?) came from a totally different culture. Could Paul even imagine how her family lived? And how could he support her? Questions, questions, questions!

We took off around 8:00 PM on his Vespa motor scooter, and even though we were seated one behind the other, taking turns driving, it was unbearably cold. The wind-chill factor from our fifty-mile-per-hour drive turned our hands numb, our faces red, and our eyes bloodshot. As the desert sped by us, pitch dark except for our headlight’s illumination, my mind began to play tricks on me. I thought I saw animals in the darkness, strange red-eye reflections just beyond the edge of the brush (certainly possible in the Sonora desert at night). At any rate we kept on, in spite of being inadequately dressed, with hardly any money between us. Only when we stopped the scooter once to pee did I get a true sense of the expanse of desert that lay to each side of the road. As my eyes adjusted to the night I saw that we were definitely in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, we reached the border checkpoint and were waved across without any problem. Proceeding ahead at a slower speed, the air felt almost warm. Within minutes we had covered a half-mile or so, and made our turn down the dirt-covered Canal Street. The colored lights glowing in the distance, along with music pounding away in the clubs, signaled that our road odyssey was at least over for the time being. Arriving by scooter rather than car gave the place a completely different feel. It was all more real that night – the bumpy road, the air, the people. We weren’t arriving in a metal bubble. We were completely visible, right there, right out in the open, like all the beckoning prostitutes.

We parked outside one of the clubs and Paul went inside to locate his future wife. He soon emerged with...Tia. MY Tia! Oh my God! It WAS the Tia I knew... And she seemed so down to earth and straightforward again, just like I’d remembered her. She was introduced to me as her future husband’s friend, gracefully without a flicker of recognition regarding our past liaison. Whew! And ultimately, I felt a surprising confidence in this strange alliance my friend was making. If she could survive all the insensitivity of Canal Street, anything was possible. Maybe they would beat the odds after all. I hope they did.

A final recollection from that trip is of waking up on a sidewalk, my friend next to me, his motor scooter parked on its side nearby. We had been too tired to drive back and just camped out on the cement as soon as we crossed to the American side of the border. When the sun finally rose over some low-lying buildings and illuminated our section of the sidewalk, I remember feeling overcome with relief that the demanding and chilly night was soon to be finally over.

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