Where the Boys Go

Every weekend at the big U.S. naval base in San Diego, the cry goes up: "Let's go down below," or "Let's bug out to T.J." Soon battalions of fuzzy-faced young servicemen are headed across the Mexican border, where the horses run more often, the booze flows freer, and the ladies take off their clothes at the slightest pretext. Since World War II, when the

Government cleaned most of them out as a protection to servicemen, U.S. sin centers have been relatively tame. But vice has prospered in the Mexican border towns, and today it is flourishing as never before. Of the estimated $700 million that visitors spent last year in making tourism Mexico's top industry, all but a couple of million was expended in such sleazy border towns as Mexicali, Matamoros, Ciudad Juarez and--liveliest of them all--Tijuana.

For almost two miles on both sides of Avenida Revolucion, Tijuana's main drag, bright yellow, white, red, blue and green neon signs festoon the dirty fac,ades of grubby joints. In front of each stands a swarthy doorman, generally wearing baggy dark pants and a soiled red coat with heavily padded shoulders. To passing wolf packs of mufti-clad U.S. marines and sailors, he calls in an inviting voice: "Hey, Meester! Want to see nice French movies? Nice exhibition? You want nice girls?" "Take It off" The "good time" joints feature underlighted interiors, watered rum, tequila, gin and vodka of local manufacture, adulterated whisky, and tiny bottles of beer that cost 50-c- apiece.

Each place is liberally supplied with a dozen or more importuning B-girls; some are as young as 15, others are tired strumpets of 45. They sprawl at tables with pink-cheeked American youths who look as if they might be leaders of 4-H clubs back home. Cadging dollar drinks of "whisky" (tea served in a whisky glass), they fondle and proposition their escorts and watch the floor show with bored, vacant stares.

Invariably, the "show" lives up to the doorman's guarantee. A girl enters to the tune of an unlikely song such as Sweet Georgia Brown, clanked out by an instrumental trio. Slowly she sheds a shoddy evening gown while the audience yells, "Take it off, Baby, take it off!" When she has stripped down to pure buff, she bumps and grinds for a few minutes, then glides around the circle of ringside tables, stopping whenever a clean-cut, brush-topped young man reaches out to touch-test her salient features.

"We Try to Ignore It." This display, duplicated every night in a hundred or more nightspots in town, makes Gomorrah look like Racine, Wis., by comparison. Hundreds of thousands of Americans never venture farther south than Tijuana; they spend more than $120 million in this city alone, giving its citizens a per capita income of $900 a year (v. $280 for the rest of Mexico). Not all of it falls into the nightclubs. The 400 curio shops there actually rake in more dollars than the dives, but it is not the curios that draw the tourists. Explains one Tijuana businessman: "Americans come here for a good time. They spend their money in Tijuana, and we could not live without them, so we don't resent them. The vice here is awful. We try to ignore it. San Diego County deplores it. But there would be no vice here if it were not for the American customers."

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