"But they also spend more money," my friend observed.

That made sense. We hiked two hundred yards back into the American side and stuck out our thumbs at the cars approaching the border station. A VW bus that had been converted into a surf-woodie picked us up after a half-hour wait. We climbed into the back, pulled the curtains, and stiffened up among the surfboards. The driver and his passenger, healthy blond sun-god types, smiled at the American and Mexican guards as they drove past.

We piled out of the bus near the center of town, thanking the surfers and congratulating each other on our slyness. As we walked towards Tijuana's business district, we were joined by a young-looking American hitchhiker who had a pack and a bed-roll strapped to his back. He was a freshman at Stanford (prepped at Andover) who wanted to see as much of the coast as he could before school started. He stayed with us all day.

The day and night in Tijuana was a lot dingier than we had expected, even though we had been there before. It is really a grim city. American cars without mufflers from the early 50's roar in zig-zag patterns down the gray, blotched sidewalks. Pre-teen hookers and wiry heroin-pushers alternate street corners. A lack of curiosity and daring kept us moving past them towards tourist shops.

A frantic hawker stands in front of each shop, jerking passersby inside with either a friendly tug or a non-stop, 78 r. p. m. sales-pitch. The walls, laden with shining guitars, pinata dolls, and obscenely fluorescent paintings of nudes and bull-fights, flash down aggressively at the customer. Mexicans sit behind the counters, talking and laughing, while middle-aged, paunchy Americans solemnly try on yard-wide sombreroes in front of the mirrors.

We soon rediscovered how sadly identical each shop was. The excitement of the border incident and the brightness of the merchandise wore off quickly. We got down to the routine business of haggling-the merchant quotes you a price twice as high as he expects to get, you feign shock and make a counter-offer of two-thirds what you're willing to pay, and you whittle each other to the appropriate price. It can be a sport or a chore, depending on the wit and passion of the shopkeeper ("Ah! $5 for hand-made, fine hand-crafted, really real peasant blanket? The joke of my life!").

We enjoyed all that. One of us would pull a $5 bill out of our pocket (where there were plenty others), assure them that that was the end of our money, so $5 it would have to be. The energy we invested in arguments over $50c or a dollar verged on the unbelievable. But none of it was strange in the context of the game.

After a couple of hours of shopping, we went back to the border loaded with packages of belts, vests, wine-skins, and serapes that we were moderately happy with. The Mexican guard wouldn't even look at us as we walked by. The American guards asked us our citizenship, stared at our bags, concluded that we wouldn't dare, and let us pass.

III

WE LOADED the car with our spoils and drove north to San Diego. We stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a minor legend in Southern California. The Chuck Wagon is the last of the great all-you-can-eaters, with the juiciest everything in town. We hadn't eaten all day, and spent a solid, lusting, bestial two hours going back for more and more food. After sitting around the table for a while to tell each other how much money the restaurant lost on us, we waddled off to the car and headed for Los Angeles.

The car needed some gas before we got to the freeway. We pulled into a service station, and the three others slid out of the car to take care of things. Not feeling particularly mobile, I pushed back the reclining passenger seat (a standard feature on the 1970 Volvo), put my feet up on the dashboard, and turned to L. A.'s psychedelic station on the FM radio. I closed my eyes and listened to Al Kooper's guitar, clasping my hands on my well-packed gut and thinking about the bargain I'd won that day.

When I opened my eyes, the gas station attendant, who had been wiping the adjacent window, was staring at me. He must have been in his mid-fifties. His tight, chalky mouth made a sharp contrast with the shiny brown-black of the bags under his eyes. A faded blue Standard cap, the soda-jerk style, was pulled over his bristly gray hair. He was clearly the veteran of many, many thousands of night-shifts at that gas station.

We looked at each other, our heads two feet apart but on opposite sides of the glass, for no more than five or six seconds. Then, his body still motionless, he rotated his head to look at the packages in the back seat, to the hood of our gleaming red Volvo, to the blaring stereo cartridge/AM-FM radio system on the dashboard, up and down my reclining body, and, just for a split second, back at my face. Then he stepped away from the window to pull the gas nozzle out of the tank, leaving a thick streak on the area he was cleaning.

I stopped watching him as my friends were climbing back into the car. Our driver walked over to the attendant and handed him his father's gas credit card. The man slowly took it with a grease-smeared hand and wheeled around towards the credit-card press as my friend got back into the driver's seat. There was a little happy talk in the back seat about the utter foulness of the bathroom and nickels lost forever in the fucking gum machine. The gas station attendant came to the driver's window with the credit-card on a receipt-board.

My Harvard friend signed the slip, adding "son" parenthetically after his name. The attendant ripped off our copy, dropped it into the driver's lap with the credit card and a wad of trading stamps, and, saying nothing, moved to the car that had pulled up behind us.

"Thank you," grunted our driver as he started the car and pulled out into traffic.