“I’ll have to think about it Armando,” I said meekly.

“Don’t waste any time though,” he added and raised his glass in a last toast. “Salute! To the gay caballeros! I’m so happy we met amigo. It’s a load off my chest.”

I left the apartment and went out of the Asombra through a back door. When the bus showed up I got in and twenty minutes later we were lined up at the border in a massive traffic jam on the bridge across the Rio Grande. Border guards moved between the vehicles with submachine guns at the ready. An endless stream of people walked over the bridge. The guards, to give immigration officers a chance to examine the crowds, stopped them from time to time. Some were turned away and had to walk back to Mexico against the flow.

It took the best part of two hours before our bus reached the checkpoint. Two immigration inspectors came aboard and asked everyone to produce some ID and declare their purchases. The bus was half full of tourists with bags of souvenirs, medications and bottles of alcohol. They offered driver’s licenses, credit cards and other documents as IDs and argued with the inspectors. I was the only passenger with a passport but without any goods to declare.

“What was the purpose of your visit?” one officer asked me. He only glanced at my passport from a distance without any attempt to examine it.

I did not expect that question. Ideas like confession, detention and federal protection flashed through my mind. I thought I better come clean right away so as not to complicate my life in the future and take care of Armando.

“Met with some Zapatistas to discuss their nuclear weapons program,” I replied in a quiet and bored manner.

The inspector either did not hear or decided to ignore my answer. He spotted some bottles of liquor on a seat of a passenger behind me.

“You have more than two bottles here,” he said. “You’ll have to pay excess import duty to the Texas Liquor Commission.”

When the IDs of all the passengers were checked, one inspector got off while the other directed the bus driver to pull up to a side bay with an office. He accompanied the man with four bottles off the bus into the building while we waited. It was not long before the man reemerged with his bottles.

“All this fuss for a total of fifty cents excess import tax, “ he commented.

A few minutes later we reached the Cielo Vista area in El Paso where I parked my car. Soon after I joined the traffic on Interstate 10 on my way to Houston and points east. I was still under the shock of Armando’s revelations and could not decide what to do about it. I glanced into the rear-view mirror often and wondered whether I was followed but did not see any signs of that.

I have driven about a hundred miles or so when the highway gently climbed the crest of a hill. As I reached the top I saw that the road was barricaded and all traffic shunted to several booths operated by armed guards of the border patrol.

“This is it,” I thought. “How clever. They ignored me at the border to avoid any incidents in that massive traffic jam. Here we can discuss the issues at leisure without undue pressure or interference.”

The vehicles ahead of me were stopped and searched. Customs and immigration inspectors questioned the drivers. They even used angled mirrors attached to long poles to look under the cars. I waited patiently for my turn and tried to figure out how to tell them what they needed to know. Finally an officer waved me on. I slowly rolled up to the booth and leaned out of the window.

“OK, OK, keep going,” he said and kept waving me on. “Keep going, Florida,” he repeated when I hesitated. Then he turned to the car behind me and shouted: “Next!”