by Diana Dinerman

Diana Dinerman, *Untitled,* digital photograph, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

Calexico, 1993

Diana DinermaN | AUG 2026 | Issue 54

FLASH

Deep in the Cuyamaca mountains sits an old mining town called Julian, known for its apple pie. How we got there, I don’t remember, but we took my father’s gold Toyota. We drove South toward Calexico on the Mexicali border. Sixty-two miles from Yuma and one hundred and twenty miles from San Diego—no place for two suburban kids.

I’d never seen that kind of heat. It shimmered like a cartoon mirage, like a fun house mirror, warping objects. I wore jean shorts. I was always in jean shorts. You wore a purple t-shirt. You were always in a t-shirt. We both wore Converse All Stars. Mine green, yours white. Yours high top, mine low. We stopped at a Carl’s Jr. and when you asked me if I wanted anything, I said No. At 16, I said No to my hunger. You shrugged and went in. I stayed in the car, like a good dog.

When you came out with your hamburger, a drifter walked up and asked for change. Leopard print crop top, bolo tie, black cowboy boots, brown hair bleached mustard. Desert people have a catcher’s mitt complexion. He tipped his hat at me, a cheap silver emblem on the front catching the sun so sharply it cracked a glass bottle on the ground. He asked for $1.29. You gave him your change, like you knew him, like this is how you be grown-up, you give a man change when his boots are dusty.

We got back in the car and looked at the Carl’s Jr. receipt. Your change had been $1.29. We left the drifter in the lot, and I think I saw you wink. The Carl’s Jr. sign became a shrinking red balloon in the rearview mirror, the drifter another warped object in the heat.

Calexico is a dream bubble I pop in my mouth, sweet then bland from chewing. Did we even go to Julian? What happened to the pie?

We didn't cross the Mexican border. We drove parallel, at the edge of the state line, close enough to see the other side. Then we turned north and hit a hundred miles per hour on the highway—the fastest I had ever gone. Being with you is the fastest I have ever gone.

Diana Dinerman is a writer, performer, and humanities scholar with work in the Los Angeles Times, The Sun, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and others. She holds an MFA from Antioch University.