On arriving in Nuevo Laredo, I found the nearest hotel to the bus station, and took a look at the last remaining room on offer. It was less than 20 dollars, and had mould growing apparently unconstrained on the ceiling, and a ceiling fan, two single beds and a small television. I agreed to take the room with much shaking and nodding to the Spanish speaking owner. Michel Thomas, my Spanish tutor would be turning in his grave if he was dead. He might not be dead, but my memories of his lessons on tape were dead in my mind, dissolved in a solution of vodka and rum with the odd “no lo tengo” occasionally drifting to the surface. Michel Thomas, with your Spanish way of speaking English, you gave me the reciprocal talent of speaking Spanish in an English way, but now it has all gone.
I sat in my hovel, and wondered why people who own hotels insist on butchering the controls of all electrical appliances. The television could not have anything but channel 36 as the buttons had been destroyed. The light switch was curiously outside the room, and the ceiling fan was merely ornamental, as its controls had been disembowelled. I plugged in a floor standing fan, and noticed that it was impossible to control it either. Amusingly, as it stirred the hot air in the room, it caused the ceiling fan to rotate slowly. Perhaps this was generating electricity to power the television, which cut out at random, I mused. I decided to get some food, and as little poisoning as was possible.
I went for a wander, knowing nothing of Nuevo Laredo, except its reputation as a cess-pit border town. I wandered down dirty streets, past vacant looking vagrants, and across a railway line. All was dark and dusty. Battered cars would do their best to tear up the tarmac some more as they blatted past, mufflers long-gone. I walked for a few minutes along a high wall, and eventually had to pause to allow a car to exit from a road that emerged suddenly from the wall. As I stood on what I imagined a pavement might look like if the road had been the proud owner of such a nicety, I glanced past the break in the wall from which the car had come. Lights. Perhaps food. Faint strains of Mexican music. I ventured in.
Being obviously new in town, I adopted my not too hurried, but fast enough to avoid too much hassle gait as I approached some of the lights in this strange walled citadel. Slow enough to peer into each bar and cantina, but not slow enough to look like I was lost. It worked on the first few hawkers and foreign person baiters that I passed. But I was puzzled by the women I saw standing by doors between the bars. I imagined they worked as eye candy to stop people long enough to be persuaded to enter the adjoining bar. But they weren´t my idea of eye candy. Robust women. Sturdy girls. With low cut tops and gigantic bosoms thrust out, supported on solid foundations. With small rooms behind them with double beds in. And red lights around the place.
The penny dropped, and I was caught off guard. By this time my pace had quickened, but I still got caught in a hailstorm of “Hey baby!”s and “Wanna have sum fun?”s. I got woman-handled, accosted and had my beard tugged. It had been a while since any hookers have tugged my beard, and I had forgotten how vaguely exciting and forbidden it can seem. I pushed through the walls of cleavage, or rather around them, and regained some composure. I befriended a tout who was certain I wanted weed, despite my insistence I wasn´t. Once we´d sorted out the fact that I just wanted a quiet drink with no girls, drugs, polizia or trouble, not even cheap girls, no, not even attractive girls, he showed me a safe quiet bar. A bar where a man preparing himself to climb a mountain can not get drunk, arrested, into fights or locked up. I asked him what strange place I was in.
“Boys’ Town.” he replied.