From this day onward if I'm ever asked on a purity test or poll, “have you ever bribed the police”, I can finally say yes. Lukas needed to be at the airport for an early morning flight back via Mazatlan, so I left here at about 5:15 AM. It was still dark and the traffic was very sparse, so I was driving el buggi quickly, maybe 130 KPH or so, and wasn't really even slowing down for stop signs. A small SUV was gaining on me fairly quickly, and then tore past me in the oncoming traffic lane. Suddenly on top of both of us was a police truck with cherries and siren blaring, signaling us to the curb.
I wasn't sure if they were going to say anything to me at all, because the other guy had passed me rather psychotically — all I'd done was run a couple of stop signs, which is pretty normal in Mexico. One of the two cops went to talk to the guy in the SUV and the other one came over to me.
He greets me — “Hola” — followed by something in Spanish I didn't understand.
“Hola… en inglés?” I ask him.
“Un poquito inglés, si.”
“Un poquito español.”
“Poquito inglés, poquito espoñol… Were you racing?”
It was a reasonable assumption given what they'd seen — two cars barreling down the street side by side at well over the speed limit, ignoring stop signs. In a mix of English and broken Spanish, I tried to explain that I didn't know the guy, and was only driving into town to get a friend to drive to the airport… “Conduzco mi amigo al aeropureto…”
“Licencia?”
I gave him my Ontario license which he looked over, not really sure what to do with I think. He walked up to the front of the car, bent down to look at the plates, and then started checking the various stickers on the windshield. I passed him the car's registration and it was clear that's what he'd been looking for. He dropped them both on the street by accident.
“Chinga!”, he curses, picks it up, looks at me, smiles, and explains. “Lo siento, that means 'shit'.”
“No vio las ALTOs?” he asks, using his hands to mime a car running through a stop sign — “un, dos, alto” — and then slams his fists together, making a crashing noise. He says, “why? why did you do that?”, and only then (it was still quite dark) does he realize that he's talking to a guy with heavily stretched ears and a rather bloody face… “Oh… your ears! Why?“
I'm not sure if he's now shifted from asking for an explanation of my driving or wants to chat about the way I look. After a bit of a “I'm a stupid gringo, I don't understand” routine, I apologize and tell him I made a mistake at the stop sign. He tells me there will be a ticket, and says something about needing to have a coffee. “How much?”
“Cientos pesos… ten…”
I reach into my jacket pocket, hand him a hundred pesos, and he smiles, immediately hands me back my license and registration, thanks me, and sends me on my way. Maybe it worked out for the best — for the rest of the drive I stopped at and obeyed all the roadsigns, enjoying the sun rising over the mountains on the horizon, and he and his partner got a nice hot coffee on this cold Mexico morning.
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