-S.M.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
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