We’re mired in The Great Recession and most Americans still don’t budget.  You hear about it from time to time, those studies reporting that 60% or 70% or whatever percentage of households can’t understand their means, let alone live within them.  That’s what stimulus checks are for – and mortgage adjustments, Cash for Clunkers, and every other program that subsidizes our lifestyle of privilege.  Hardly a luxury limited to American consumers.   President Obama’s administration is running the biggest budget deficit ever, numbers with so many zeros they don’t even fit on my calculator.  Governor Schwarzenegger and the assclowns in Sacramento are solving the budget crisis of the world’s 6th-largest economy in the rhetorical sense only.  Corporations get billion-dollar handouts with numbing frequency.

I’m lucky, if you can call it that.  I grew up on a farm in Iowa.  800 acres of corn and soybeans sprawling flatly across Worth County, the living definition of drivethru country – blink when you’re driving through on I-35 and you’ll miss it.  On a farm you can’t separate life from economics.  The family is a business, the business is a family.  Mom and Dad were my bosses, although they never paid in love.  They exploited me like an illegal Mexican farmhand and taught me expenses can’t exceed income.  Call it my on-the-job training in microeconomics.

Maria is temporarily relocating to Dallas with $17,000 in her checking account, the flattered recipient of the Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez Dissertation Research Fellowship – and Javier’s leftover funding.  The funding that should’ve gone to me, if there was a bone of fairness in Hercules’ body.  Instead he keeps jawing about the cost-of-living difference between Mexico and the United States.  How I’m going there, and Maria is staying here.  His need to pump enough funding to her.

Except there’s no such thing as enough funding with Maria.  She’s that dying breed of Orange County Republican who was born on third and thinks she hit a triple in life.  She’ll just spend whatever she gets like it’s a birthright, then expect more.  Forget a year of fieldwork – I bet she’s back at UCLA by spring.  Might as well just take that money out in the parking lot and burn it.

I’m facing life in Mexico on $2,500 a year.  That’s $208 a month, with my paltry savings as mad money.  If I stick to my swinging bachelor lifestyle and allocate 30% to housing costs, that means I need to find someplace in Tijuana for $60 a month.  Someplace cheap but decent.  Problem is, most of Tijuana’s 1 million residents are looking for the same exact thing.  Worse, about 100,000 of those residents swarm across the border every day, commuting to jobs in San Diego – and earning more money than I do.  Competition is cutthroat for someplace cheap but decent.

Then there’s Gringo Only pricing.  The rule of thumb when dealing with Americans – double your prices.  Mexicans believe we can afford to pay more, and usually we open our wallets and purses and prove them right.  But this gringo knows better.  I’ll pay whatever a mexicano would, and not a peso more.

That’s why I’m touring this dusty neighborhood with one Mr. Sedesco, a stooped figure who reminds me of a defrocked Catholic priest.  He’s the kind of rental agent you wind up with when you keep saying “cheap” and “no, cheaper” in Tijuana.  A Mexican, but made for a Norman Rockwell portrait.  Hornrims and balding brylcreamed hair.  An unlit pipe is clutched in one liverspotted hand.  He keeps gnawing on the stem with perfect dentures.  “I got the patch,” he explains miserably, flashing a wattled bicep.

“There it is,” Sedesco says, pointing at a tiny cinderblock house with heavily-barred windows.  “Sorry I didn’t remember right away.  Getting old, memory’s not what it used to be.”  He shuffles across the tiny front lawn of patio pavers, producing a huge ring of keys from his pocket.  Then he begins trying them in the lock, a slow trembling process, one metallic fumble after another.

I’m looking over my shoulder at his old Crown Victoria, blotchy from years in the Mexican sun.  Sedesco paid a dirt-encrusted kid to watch it.  Not because his junker is at risk in this neighborhood, but because he does business here.  Got to grease the palms, keep the natives friendly.  The kid is sitting on the hood and throwing rocks at feral dogs in the gravel street.  He looks our direction and waves.

Inside is about what you’d expect from the residential equivalent of a postage stamp.  The walkthrough is brief, a few strides in this direction, a few strides in that direction.  Small empty living room, even smaller kitchen and single bedroom.  Cement floors.  Appliances sit there like dead things, light switches may or may not work – all the light bulbs are missing.  Then the only thing left is a closed door leading into the bathroom.  I try not to go there, just lean in and lean out.  Bathrooms in Mexico can be a horror show.

A plane thunders overhead on ascent from the nearby airport, stirring dust and making the walls shake.  Sedesco is trying to yell something but has to give up.  He gestures skyward and shrugs, as if there’s no explaining God.  When the house sinks back into silence, he says brightly, “The airport is only open during the day.”

“But the border does its business all night.”  I jerk a thumb in the direction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, a rusting sheaf of corrugated aluminum at the end of the block.  “I bet the Border Patrol helicopters and humvees are deafening.”

Sedesco isn’t paid to give up easily.  “The illegals are mostly crossing out in the desert now.  Even Arizona.”  He smiles hopefully.  “The noise probably isn’t that bad.”

I’m shaking my head.  “Seriously, what American wants to live in this neighborhood?  Colonia Libertad is in the news all the time.  The drug cartels are beheading people out here.”

“I don’t know about Americans, but plenty of Mexicans want to live here.  It’s halfway between the two border crossings.”  Sedesco’s trump card – location, location, location.  The San Ysidro crossing is a few miles to the west, the Otay Mesa crossing is a few miles to the east.  Commuting to a job in San Diego wouldn’t be cake, but it would be closer to cake than just about anywhere else.

“Forget the border crossings.  I haven’t seen a cop since we left downtown.  Are they afraid to patrol this neighborhood?”

“There’s a municipal police station a couple blocks over.  See the aerial?  Things don’t get lawless until Colonia Arenales, and that’s five kilometers away.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What can I tell you?  No cop in Tijuana likes to work a beat these days.  It’s like walking around with a target painted on your back.”  Sedesco gnaws on his pipe some more.  “So?  Are you interested?”

“Maybe.  But I’m not paying Gringo Only prices.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Then give me a Mexican price.”

“$300 a month.”                              

I laugh.  Just laugh, that’s all.

He raises his mottled hands in surrender.  “Okay, okay.  $150.”

I stop laughing.  “$60.”

“Sure.  For utilities.  Rent, that’s $150 a month.”

“Utilities aren’t included?”

“Only for those fancy rentals we looked at in Playas de Tijuana.  You know, the places you said you couldn’t afford?  On this side of town people sometimes go without power, even without water.”

Any hopes of living in Mexico on $208 a month are dying a slow painful death.  I’ll spend that much on housing, even in a dusty bottom-feeding neighborhood like Colonia Libertad.  The inevitable conclusions – I need to beg steal or borrow more funding, and I better close on the cheapest place I’ve seen all day.

“Make the rent $80 a month and you’ve got a deal.”

Sedesco relights his pipe.  “$140.”

“$100 is my final offer.”

 “Dios mio!  That’s nothing in my pocket, kid!”

I consider the elderly stooped man for a moment.  Trying to gauge whether his desperation is real or feigned.  He’s past the good paydays of his youth.  Probably living hand-to-mouth.  Shacked up with a woman out of economic necessity.  Working on whatever commission he can negotiate with the property owners.  His thick horn-rimmed glasses magnify every blink.

“$100 a month, and I’ll give you $100 as a thank-you.”  A bribe, basically.  I get a great deal, he gets my cash and a commission check, and the owner puts a tenant in the property.

“That makes the $100 a month my problem.  I got to negotiate with the owners for your price,” Sedesco grumbles, mulling it over.  I can hear his dentures clack on the pipestem.  “Give me $300 on the side.  I won’t even peg it at $500 and make you work down.”

We shake on it warily, both wondering if we got the best of the deal.  His hand is papery and brittle in mine.  Then the moment passes and it’s too late for regrets.  Mr. Sedesco is my new best friend, reaching up to clap my shoulder and congratulate me on my new home.  Or something like that.  Jet engines screaming overhead are the soundtrack to his lips moving.