It’s nice not knowing anything about a place and turning up with no preconceptions. The only preconception I had about Boys’ Town was that there was a bar with few women that wasn’t a brothel that sold cheap booze. I had been there the night before. And getting there would involve avoiding eye contact with a few dozen ladies of the night. A typical lady of the night looked like she had a big snatch and could clean and jerk all day, by which I mean she might have the physique of a powerlifter.
I remembered the bar’s existence correctly, and dodged and weaved around a few touts. I hadn’t noticed the big policia station by the entrance to the citadel, or the large numbers of shifty looking armed officials roaming about. I only later found out that this was a ‘zona‘ – a controlled area in which prostitution is legal, with compulsory STD tests and identity cards for workers, and policing to keep trouble to a minimum. If you trust the police. I was offered, “Cocaine?” and then “Poouussseeee?” , and then “Donkey?” I was puzzled by the suggestion that I might need a donkey – the place was maybe five minutes walk from one side to the next, and the donkey I was shown didn’t look big enough to carry a load. The tout explained that the donkey was part of a show.
Ah. Right. I eventually found my cheap ass bar, and went inside for its relative safety. Mexicans dressed like fat cowboys perched on bar stools. I drank my way through the tequila menu that was daubed on the wall, trying to avoid getting between the cowboys and their television. I decided to eschew the lime and salt offered by the barman for each shot to prove how macho I was. That was a bad idea. I ended up reaching behind the bar and grabbing a lime on shot number three, which dashed my macho pretensions.
A squat Mexican gent came in with a squat Mexican lady. The sturdy type. They selected some music from that ever-present Mexican bar ornament – the sparkling jukebox. As the music started, the man dragged his lady to the middle of the floor, and started to kiss her savagely. She was sturdy enough to avoid suffocation from his advances, and she must have had a neck like a rhino to keep the violently passionate kissing going for as long as they did. Perhaps the strenuous necking is the reason for all of the powerlifting training. When the song ended, the couple sat down and continued to wrestle tongues as if they were drunken teenagers at a prom, and had only five minutes of face-sucking left before their parents arrived to escort them to their homes. They kept it up for some time, and I was conscious that I was staring in disbelief at how they were going at it. I had a few more ‘El Presidente’ brandies because I thought the name sounded macho, and then headed outside to weave my way through the treacherous streets to my motel.
A broad shouldered woman just a few inches shorter than me blocked my way as I walked past a bar. I looked at her dress. I looked at her co-worker’s dress. These ladies seemed rather more slender, lithe and sparkly than the other girls I had seen. With my progress arrested, I struggled to focus in the dark, as my captor suggested subtley indecent things to me, before pulling aside her dress to show me her g-string. It was about that time that I noticed the stubble on her co-worker’s chin, and again the penny dropped. I politely made my excuses as I headed off leaving the two gents of the night to their business. The next indeterminate-gendered-worker of the night to grab me cut to the chase and said, “Sucky sucky ten dollar,” and made graphic demonstrations with his/her closed fist and his/her mouth.
“No thanks, I’m fine.”
He/She then changed her marketting and said, “Sucky fucky twenny dollar?”
Again, I shrugged off the grabbing limbs, and made my way into a burger bar. I had eaten some grim food already, and thought that my intestines might as well be hanged for a raw sheep as for a lamb. While I waited for the frozen burger’s outsides to be cremated, a Mexican with a bike started talking to me.
The man was clearly disillusioned. He thought that by endlessly repeating himself in Spanish at my baffled expression, that I would eventually understand. Of course, everybody knows that the technique of repeating yourself to people who don’t speak your language only results in recognition in the following circumstances:
- You’re English
- You speak very slowly
- You speak very loudly
My attention was distracted by the languorous way in which his eyelids would pulse open and closed. At first I thought he was drunk, but then I figured that his eyelids were more like bellows, trying to pump in pictures to a brain addled with opiates. He lifted up his arm – freshly broken and swollen – and then nodded at his scratched bike. He was totally spaced out after an accident it seemed.
My raw on the inside, burnt on the outside burger arrived, and I made my excuses and moved quickly into the night, away from the donkeys and rhinos and bearded ladymen of Boys’ Town. My only regret was that I didn’t make it back to see the masked wrestling on the television.