These drug-bust videos are our modern pantomimes - recognisable human types caught in a morality-tale, which we prefer to be reassuringly repetitive, not disturbingly creative. But we also prefer not having to lip-read whole minutes of lost audio, or try to figure-out what's happening when
the film ends in mid-sentence, as in the version I watched.
The real Steve Peterson is certainly a recognisable human type, indeed a cliché - the ageing hippie, with a drug-lined face, full of regrets. He is played in this episode by a passable younger version of himself, tending to repeat "Guys", "Yeah, man" and "Kinda" a bit too often. At twenty-five, he's living the Californian life, with all the free love and marijuana he can cope with, when his friend Roger, apparently a weak, feckless type, suggests a little light drug-running. The nearby Mexican border is, of course, pre-wall, and the barbed-wire fence out in the wilds presents little hindrance to the team.
But as luck would have it, the cops happen to catch them transporting the stuff to the drop-off point, and suddenly Steve, Roger and his girl are getting their first taste of prison life, and having to work out who's who in the pecking order, which doesn't have too much to do with uniformed officials. Johnnie is the deceptively mild-mannered person who decides who qualifies for their own (tiny) private territory on the prison floor. Heladio is head of everything Class A, and therefore someone you don't cross. A baffled Steve calls it "Devil's Disneyland".
We can't really disclose more, except that Steve (obviously) lives long enough to tell the tale. Johnnie seems to be using the Italian 'Signor' instead of the Spanish 'Señor', though it could be a regional Tijuana dialect. And I'm not sure whether Mexicans really call Americans 'Gringo', as in the old strip-cartoons, rather than 'Yanqui', as we tend to hear in news reports.