Hooked.

If you live and work and shower and cavort and fight and eat and travel and kibbitz with enough people for a long enough period of time under a good amount of the stresses and strains that come from trying to earn enough to rub two pesos together, or maybe more, sooner or later someone is going to crack. 

I saw it in high school, losing friends to the ravages of drugs. I saw it in college, losing friends to drink and drugs and depression. And I certainly saw it in any number of the big and small agencies I've worked at over the last 42 years. 

At one agency, in fact, a copywriter's husband sat in his Chevy Malibu, closed the garage door and asphyxiated himself the slow way. She got the call in her office and I can still, all these decades later hear her screams reverberating off the dirty carpet tiles and the dropped ceiling that never dropped enough.

Back when I played ball, almost exactly half-a-century ago for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA), we had a utility man, Jorge Ibarra. One day during a stretch of games against the Diablos Rojos del Mexico, Ibarra cracked through like a hot wine glass shoved into cold water. 

Brittle. With shards.

Though I lived near Ibarra for hundreds of days and nights and countless hours of bus rides up and down the crags of Mexico, he was one of those guys I hardly ever spoke to. There was no animus between us, it was nothing like that. We'd nod and say "hey" when we saw each other, but neither of us had a set of well-lubricated gab muscles and we never had the occasion to do any jawboning.

One scorching hot week we were scheduled to play the team that was perennially the best in the Mexican Baseball League, the Diablos Rojos del Mexico. This was never easy for the Seraperos. Playing Pandilla Escarlata (the Scarlet Gang) was easy for no one, and during this stretch of away games, because of rain earlier in the season, I think we were slated to play something like six games in four nights, including two double-headers.

Our souls were tired. Our bones were tired. We were tired of being tired. My teeth overslept.

We were staying a high-rise hotel of the modest sort. It was called, without irony, El Conquistador, which indicated that it catered primarily to those from el Norte. I'd say the hotel didn't much cotton to a horde of two or three-dozen un-shaven obreros hunkering down in their rarefied surroundings and we could feel the scowls every time we congregated within an axe-length of an Americano.

Maybe it's because it was scorching hot and therefore the low season. Maybe someone from the Diablos lost a bet to someone in management at the Seraperos. Regardless, we had de-camped in the classiest digs we had, by far, ever stayed in. 

Ice machines and everything.

I don't recall the exact days and scores of the half-a-dozen games we played against the Scarlet Gang. I do recall that as the stretch of games unfolded, we got more and more bedraggled by the pressure and the loses and the strangeness of our surroundings. 

It was then Jorge Ibarra cracked.

He missed the bus to the ball park. A cardinal sin. Then he went missing altogether. After two days of being missing, not even his roomie, Refugio Cervantes had heard a peep from Ibarra.

One evening I was in Hector's room with Batista and Sisto talking about the things dumb men talk about. It was about twenty or thirty minutes before we would head downstairs to bus to the ballpark for the last of our six games. There was a knock on Hector's thick wooden door.

Two cops were standing in the hall. Hector waved them in. Decorously in their immaculate uniforms with white leather belts like military police. They took off their peaked caps and spoke to Hector.

"You have a player," the shorter cop asked, "called Ibabba."

"Ibarra," Hector corrected.

"We had him in down at the station. We have had to arrest him, but we will release him to you with no charges as long as you keep him under your care."

Hector had heard this song before. 

The taller cop left the room and in a moment he brought in Ibarra and un-handcuffed his mitts which had been chained in front of him.

"What did you do, Jorge?" Hector asked.

Jorge sat in his dusty pants on Hector's bedspread. He left an imprint of ass like the chalk outline at rear-end's murder scene.

"There were so many people. There were just so many people. And I am so alone. I decided to catch one," Jorge explained.

The shorter cop broke in. "He was people-ing," he said. "He had lowered a fishing line from his window with a fifty peso bill on it. He lowered the bill on his hook to about eye-level to the people on the street."

"By and by," Jorge said, "I caught someone's eye. They would reach for the dinero. They wanted the money. Then I would try to hook him and reel him in. There were so many people. So many people. And I am so alone."

Hector walked the cops to the door of the room. "I will take care of the boy," he assured them. He laughed, "Maybe his sliding pads have been on too tight."

The cops laughed at that and they each shook Hector's calloused right hand. Hector shut firmly the door and bolted it.

He sat in his bedspread next to Ibarra. He held the young man's hand.

"People-ing," was all Hector said.

"I caught no one," Ibarra admitted. "I used the right bait, of that I am sure. The people-ing is not good here in the city."

"Maybe it will be better in Puebla or Veracruz.

"You are not mad at me with the policia?"

"Next time, I will people with you," Hector said. "Together our luck will maybe better."

Ibarra got up to leave. The rest of us grabbed our things to go to the stadium. 

Where there were so many people.

And we were so all alone.