This is the corner of Bus and Truck. Streaming from the east is a line of buses packed with hapless worker drones. Their faces have the blank stares that announce CULTURE SHOCKED and BORED TO FUCKING DEATH. They used to scratch dirt for a living in the central highlands or the Yucatan. Now they inhabit a rapacious border city that eats them up and shits them out. Their existence is a treadmill between repetitive line jobs in the maquiladora zone and the cardboard-and-plywood shacks they call home. Soon the buses will return with another load of hapless worker drones. First shift is over, second shift is starting. After that comes third shift, and there’s a fourth shift too. The maquiladoras never stop producing, not on the weekend before Christmas, not even on Christmas Day.

Streaming from the south is a line of trucks carrying Mexican manufactured goods into America. It’s the year-end rush, as distributors move inventory across the border to evade the annual warehousing tax. Every December 31st the state of Baja California assesses a tax on finished goods awaiting export. The tradition dates back to 1900, when Tijuana was Mexico’s northern entrepot to the Pacific and the border was just a pile of whitewashed rocks on the coastal road. Every year the state legislature promises to abolish the tax, and every year it doesn’t. So the semis stream north, then stream south again. I watch their trailers pass with idle curiosity, wondering how many carry contraband — drugs, firearms, human beings.

Mixed in with the bus and truck traffic is an old Crown Victoria, blotchy from years in the Mexican sun. The car weaves through the intersection with admirable disrespect for traffic laws, provoking a chorus of horn-honking. It shudders to a halt against the curb and an elderly American emerges. He looks like a defrocked Catholic priest. Hornrims ride his beaky nose and his hair is brylcreamed into a creepy helmet. He pauses to tamp and light a brier pipe.

“Mr. Sedesco,” I say, extending a hand.

His grasp is brittle and papery. “Good to see you again, kid.”

Last time the leasing agent was only gnawing his pipe, not smoking it. I motion at his wattled bicep. “What happened to your patch? I thought you were trying to quit.”

“I gave it up already.” Sedesco waves at the diesel exhaust engulfing us. “This is Tijuana. Why the hell bother?”

The truth of it cracks me up. This is a cityscape of belching smokestacks, garbage piles burning, tailpipes with no catalytic converters. Slice open my lungs after a year here and you’ll probably discover twin lumps of coal.

We sit down at the corner “restaurant” — actually just a bunch of plastic chairs arrayed around a taco cart. It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so we pacify the street vendor by buying cans of Budweiser out of her ice chest. Then we kick back, resting our feet on a overturned wooden box. We’re worth a few curious glances. Gringos don’t visit this part of Tijuana if they can avoid it.

“How you like the house so far?” Sedesco asks, switching between his pipe and beer.

“I’d like it a helluva lot better if it had electricity.”

“I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Never move in during the holidays. Everybody checks out at the utility companies. You can’t even find somebody to bribe.”

“Are you telling me I’m screwed until 2008?”

The leasing agent flashes his dentures. “Of course not. You’re with me, kid. I put you in that house, right? I’ll get you electricity too.”

“You said you know people who know people. That sounds like you’re setting me up for an expensive solution.” I sip my Bud, watching him across the upturned can. “I’m just a starving grad student trying to stretch my pesos. Maybe it’s cheaper for me to wait.”

“Sure it’s cheaper. If you don’t mind living in the dark with no stove or refrigerator.” He pauses, enjoying the leverage. “Or you could pay me $300 and get juice tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is only two days before Christmas.”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m not kidding. I know people who know people. I make a call to start things rolling, you got a meterman at your house in an hour. He unlocks your meter and presto, you got juice. How’s that for a Christmas present?”

The beer is making my stomach ball up. I shift uncomfortably, knocking one of Sedesco’s orthopedic shoes with a hiking boot. “$300 is a lot of money. Especially since I’ll have to pay the meterman too. That could be another $50 right there.”

“Not for you, kid. You can negotiate him down to $20. Maybe even less.” He pauses to relight his pipe.

“Same as I can negotiate you down?”

Sedesco laughs. “Same as that.”

I pretend to consider his offer, scowling into a moving wall of semi-trailers. In reality I’m fitting together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. No electricity in the first place. The electric company’s unresponsiveness. Sedesco’s fortuitous call to check in. His offer to help while refusing to discuss specifics on the phone. Meeting on the busiest street corner in Tijuana. The fact I bribed him for cheaper rent on my house.

The skin across my shoulders is going tight. This is a shakedown. No fucking doubt about it.

Sedesco is conspiring with the local office of the Comision Federal de Electricidad — the national electric company. His accomplice is somebody who can sit on a customer service complaint during the holidays, when the office is mostly deserted. Together they’re preying on a fresh American transplant, assuming I’m just another gringo who doesn’t know how Tijuana works and can’t live without his electricity. What will I pay for light, a stove that works, cold beer in the fridge?

Sedesco isn’t stupid. The elderly dude senses my suspicion, all the untidy details, a payday receding fast. He drains his can of Bud and tosses it into the gutter. “I’m trying to help you, that’s all. A meterman might not make it out until second week in January. That’s three weeks from now. 21 days. You really want to wait that long?”

“We have a saying where I come from — ” I cut myself off with a shit-eating grin. “Do you even know where I come from?”

“What?” Sedesco’s blink is magnified by his thick lenses. “Where do you come from?”

“I come from Iowa. Rural Iowa, up by the Minnesota border. I’m straight off a family farm. And we have a saying that applies to this situation.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

But I don’t go for the big finish, verbally stabbing him with an old insult of my father’s. An insult I heard so many times growing up that I memorized it. An insult usually directed at me. Instead I put away my grin. I’m already having second thoughts, even third thoughts, about being an asshole toward the leasing agent. Sure, he’s trying to shake me down. But the dude doesn’t have much choice. He’s a retiree stretching his Social Security checks south of the border, condemned to straight commission, with a mexicana at home. The sunset of his life, and he’s forced to hustle harder than a corner drug dealer in East LA.

More importantly, he knows at least one more person in Tijuana than I do — that accomplice in the electric company. Before this year is over, I’ll need to know people who know people. Sedesco isn’t the most promising start to my network, but he’ll have to do.

“What are you thinking about?” He fumbles to relight his pipe, an awkward ballet of liver-spotted fingers. “Dammit, kid. Are you gonna say something or not?”

“I changed my mind, gramps.” The nickname sorta fits, if grandfathers were Sedesco creepy. “I’m keeping my mouth shut for now. Maybe I’ll call you if I get fed up waiting for electricity. Or maybe I’ll call you if something else comes up. You could probably teach me a thing or two about Tijuana, huh?”

“You know what they say about knowledge — it don’t come cheap.”

The elderly leasing agent struggles out of his plastic chair, feigning disinterest behind a gust of pipe smoke. He shambles past the taco cart lady, ignoring her attempts to sell him another Bud, and settles into his sun-bleached Crown Vic. The car roars off in increments, a slow motion departure into the honking forest of buses and trucks. I keep staring after Sedesco, letting him feel the weight of my gaze. My reward is a flaccid wave through a rolled-down window. Our negotiation for whatever comes next has already begun.