Wasted Youth
By Rodrigo Garza
Jul 9, 2024
Fasten your seatbelts for a harrowing trip down memory lane, in Monterrey’s Y2K teen car culture, where every joyride was a gamble with death.
The faded roses on Carlos’ roadside memorial were a middle finger to time. “Descanse en paz, 1988–2006,” the weathered sign read. It was the relic of an era when Monterrey’s teens treated the streets like their personal demolition derby, fueled by cheap beer and cheaper bravado.
Rewind to the early 2000s. Monterrey, Mexico, was a monster of industry with a raging thirst, a ginormous metropolis where five million people baked under a skin hating sun. The historic brewery, now owned by Heineken, pumped out rivers of beer like water didn’t exist.
Plastilina Mosh, local prophets of alt-rock excess, nailed our ethos with their anthem: “45 Grados y un chingo de cerveza.” It wasn’t just a song; it was a goddamn manifesto. (“113ºF and a shit-ton of beer” units converted for our imperialist readers) While Mexico City’s Metro cars packed more riders than swifties in a stadium, Monterrey spread its concrete tentacles into the desert, a middle-class wet dream of suburban expansion but with tinacos (water tanks on the roofs, water runs out here, it’s the desert). The result? A car-centric shitshow where your ride wasn’t just transport — it was your ticket to not being a social leper.
For us acne-filled, hormone-overdosing teens, the math was simple: No wheels? No life. Also, designated drivers were for pussies, and taxi money was better spent on another round of Jägermeister in Barrio Antiguo (where the bars and clubs were).
I EVEN TOOK A BEER CAN FOR THE ROAD THAT TIME.
Sure, some buzz-kill adult tried to tell us it takes an hour to process each drink, that our teenage brains were basically marinating in poison and wouldn’t fully develop. But when you’re 16 you already know everything and are pretty much invincible, so those warnings have all the impact of a fart in a sand storm.
My Chevrolet Cavalier was a rolling heap of near-misses and fun times. Like that night I accidentally played bumper cars with a friend’s ride and then just casually drove home and crawled into bed? Just another checkmark in a long list of “holy shit, how am I alive” moments, I even took a beer can for the road that time.
But not everyone got to laugh about it on Sunday morning. By 18, I had heard about so many accidents close to my social circle. Many of these dudes never even graduated from highschool. I’m so thankful all my close friends escaped their many close calls.
Now, in our “Uber-for-everything” present, it’s easy to look back and wonder what the fuck we were thinking. But in the moment, caught between Monterrey’s smelting nights and the omnipotence of youth, every drive was a coin toss with death.
These days, the streets are tamer. Rideshare apps and breathalyzer checkpoints have taken some of the edge off, but there’s still no safe public transportation, and if you’re a woman, you’re better off driving drunk than riding Ubers alone at night.
And let’s not kid ourselves — a few days before I wrote this nostalgia trip, some kid ran his ford fiesta into a very hard wall on Carlos’s old street. The story is the same, except now with timothee chalamet wannabes as the protagonists.For those of us who cut our teeth (and sometimes more) in that lawless coming of age era, the memories are seared into our psyche like that shitty minimalist tattoo on your left arm. We were the lost children simply cruising the cityscape that promised endless freedom in one hand and a reality check with the other.
Many of us stumbled through to tell the story, now shaking our heads at our younger selves while secretly daydreaming about the good old days. But our joyrides left more than just skid marks on Monterrey’s streets. They etched trauma into the city. Drive around any of the main roads and you can relive the story by paying attention to dusty makeshift memorials, on sharp curves, bridge columns, and intersections. If they have fresh flowers don’t forget to wish them a happy birthday.
KIDS WILL BE KIDS
Along the way we might have birthed a generation of helicopter parents, and spawned an army of breathalyzer-equipped cops. The powers that be can’t think of anything better only crank up the fines every now and then. Short term vision from short term leaders.But kids will be kids, and In Monterrey, we took that truism and drove it off a cliff, laughing all the way down.
