The burning ember of his cigarette. These things I shall not forget. They were the bread and butter of my life in Tijuana.
The flight attendant insisted that I not wear a condom. “It’s totally safe,” she assured me. “My tubes are tied.”
They were OK enough, those two. Paola didn’t like it so much. “How do you know she’s clean?” she asked.
I didn’t always have all the answers. “She said she was clean,” I said. “I buy it.”
The husband paid upfront. No chit-chat or funny business. I don’t know how he cleaned his wife up after.
* * *
First time I saw Paola was on a cool September evening. Mexican wrestling on the TV. Beer and tacos on my table. I was the only customer at the Hotel Nelson restaurant. A group of men had gathered outside the window to watch the wrestling match on a large plasma TV behind me. It looked like the men were watching me. Paola noticed these men and went to see what they were looking at on the other side of the glass. I was mid-bite when this happened. There was a body slam on the tube and the men outside hooted and hollered.
Breasts blossomed from her chest and her hair was full and black and lustrous. It’s no stretch to use the feminine pronoun with Paola. I honestly thought she was a chick when I raised my hand and invited her inside to eat.
Life sure can be funny that way.
When she spoke, her voice was different: a man’s voice.
“Hold it,” I said. “Are you a he-she?”
“Yes,” Paola said.
I’d never seen one that close before; believe me, I’m from Texas.
She ran her foot up my leg.
“Cut that out,” I said. “Hey.”
The waitress looked at me.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said.
Paola curled her lip and stood.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “Don’t get upset. Have a seat,” I told her.
She sat down.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” I said. “Aren’t you freezing dressed like that?”
“Yes,” Paola said.
“You got someplace to go? Are you staying close by?”
“No,” she said. “I’m from Rosarito. I don’t have money for a cab.”
“Couldn’t you take the bus?”
“The last one left an hour ago,” she said.
I considered this as I sipped my beer.
An old lady entered the restaurant with a dozen roses wrapped in plastic. She shuffled toward us. She wanted me to buy some roses.
“No gracias,” I said.
I noticed the whiskers on her chin. “Buy a rose for your novia,” the old lady said.
“No.”
Paola found this amusing.
“Please,” she said, “mi novio,” she said. “Please?”
“I’m already paying for dinner.”
Wagged my finger at the old lady and also at Paola. But again, the old lady insisted I bought a rose and finally I caved and bought one. You’d have thought it was made of diamonds by the way Paola regarded it.
“Could I stay with you?” was the next thing she requested. “Just tonight,” she said.
I didn’t like the thought of her going back into the cold with those men. “All right,” I said. “One night; but no monkey business.”
“Me gusta monkeys,” she said.
Brushed my teeth at the bathroom sink while Paola fixed her eyebrows in the bedroom. Then she came into the bathroom and lifted her skirt to pee standing up like it was no big deal. I, being a tad gone on pills and booze, giggled at the sight. She swatted my shoulder playfully. I said, “Ouch.”
The night stretched into a week. Weeks grew to months. I liked having Paola around; (s)he was smart with money and kept our place neat. We shopped for groceries at the market and found the cheapest pharmacies in town. One afternoon, Paola and I climbed aboard a Zonkie and had our picture taken because we thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I uploaded this photo to Facebook for all my friends to scratch their heads over. I got a few comments from people wanting to know who the pretty girl was. Paola got the photo framed at Sears and kept it on the dresser.
At night, we lay on a queen-sized mattress with our pharmasuicidal buzzes, watching the ceiling fan spin.
They say you can choose your friends but not your family and sometimes I have to wonder.
I met you for breakfast at the Hotel Nelson restaurant and explained the new roommate situation.
“So she’s got a dick?” you said.
“Yep.”
“And breasts?”
“Estrogen hormones.”
You considered this while you carved your flapjacks.
“So she’s a he?”
“No,” I said. “He’s a she.”
“A hermaphrodite.”
“I wouldn’t call her that. She’s something else.”
“Cross-dresser.”
“I wouldn’t call her that either.”
You put your fork through the flapjacks. “Here’s the question,” you said. “Which restroom does she use when you’re in public?”
I thought about that. “Don’t know; never thought to look.”
Paola and I caught a cab to Zona Norte for a late supper with you and your pregnant girl, Belén, which is Spanish for Bethlehem.
Paola was drunk on Cuervo and Vicodin and talking about the differences between men and women. She’d lived for a time as both genders, so maybe that gave her the right.
Paola said, “A man can say ‘I love you’ to a woman and never telephone her again. But when a woman says it, she means it always.”
Belén nodded.
“I don’t know,” you said. “I’ve known women who could turn it on and off like a faucet.”
Paola said, “Men always think woman are crazy. And you know what? Women think men are selfish.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said.
Paola nudged me because she had to use the baño, so I slid out the booth to let her go.
Which restroom would she use?Damas or Caballeros? The three of us turned and watched.
“Ah,” you said. “Go figure.”
“She’s pretty,” Belén said. “Are you two . . . ?”
“No,” I said. “We are not what you think we are.”
A fistfight broke out in front of the café. Two drunks. A few jabs were exchanged and when the men were pulled apart, everybody ran in opposite directions. Minutes later a truck of heavily armed soldiers occupied the sidewalk. We watched the soldiers, two men and two women, stand with their fingers on the triggers. They looked like they wanted to shoot somebody. Slowly they climbed in the truck and drove away.
“The cops do that to scare us,” you said. “They only stand around long enough to make a point.”
Belén agreed.
Paola returned and I told her about the soldiers.
“Perros,” she said.
The nights got colder and fewer American dollars flowed into Tijuana. Needed more Vicodin; if I didn’t take enough, I got the headaches and cold sweats. In my mouth the pills were sweet as honey, but as soon as I’d swallowed, they became bitter in my belly.
You paid for the entire dinner and I threw up in the toilet.
The midnight fog cleared as we strolled home to the Hotel California. Paola was wrapped in my safari jacket.
“I’ll never understand women,” I said. I was thinking of my ex-girlfriend in San Diego. On her Facebook page, she listed her status as “widowed.”
“Do you really want to?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
“Mira,” Paola said. She pointed to the glow in the sky where the moon pierced the fog. “We change our minds as often as the moon changes her face. That’s why you must listen carefully to women.”
The moon was illuminating the sidewalk and reflecting in the puddles and I looked down and admired the moon shadow beneath her feet.
We climbed the narrow stairs. Paola removed her earrings, we got in
to bed.
I was having a bad dream and she shook me.
“What is it?” I said.
Paola said, “Wake up, Nachito, I have something to say to you.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh,” she said. “I love you, Nachito. Te amo.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
I rolled over.
She took my hand and held it and I paid her no attention.
I awoke to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing loudly on the jukebox downstairs. I love the eighties. I was born in that decade.
One evening in late January we stopped in at the Agua Caliente casino and put our last ten-peso coin in a slot machine. The streets were slick with rain and the cuffs of my pants were wet and cold. I watched the dials spin and spin and one by one they stopped on three watermelons.
Sirens and bells went off.
“Oh shit,” I said, thinking we’d done something illegal.
The equivalent of three hundred US dollars spilled into the receptacle. To us, it was a small fortune. We scooped everything into a plastic cup.
“Ay Dios mios,” Paola said. “Let’s celebrate! Let’s go dancing.”
“We should put this money in the bank.”
“The banks are closed, Nachito. Why don’t we dance?”
“I’m not in the mood,” I said.
“Oh, please,” she said. “Por favor, mi Nachito.”
The Rio Verde Club was hopping. I took some crisp bills into the baño and had some cocaine with the cartel boys. The waiter brought beer after beer and everything was fine. The norteño music was loud and spastic. Men and women whirled about the dance floor like socks in a dryer and everything popped.
Paola and I shimmied and stepped and I twirled her around like a weightless thing.
People were staring at us. They realized what she was and they didn’t like it. It was the rudest thing ever. I wanted to punch somebody in the face, which is the last thing you want to do at a place like the Rio Verde club, a known cartel soldier hangout where cocaine is sold in the bathrooms.
Waiting for us outside the club was a lady cop. The cop frisked Paola and found a little cocaine in her purse and then she frisked me and found nothing.
Paola looked at me for help. What was I supposed to do? Why the hell did she buy coke in the bathroom?
I offered a bribe to the lady cop and she said I could go to jail for doing that. Police cars arrived. I was frisked again, this time by a man, and all the money we had won disappeared.
They cuffed Paola and shoved her in the back seat. A crowd of onlookers gathered and pointed. “Mira,” they said. “The tranny is getting arrested! The tranny is going to jail!”
At the Hotel California I turned on the lights and got undressed. There, on the dresser, was the picture of us on the Zonkie. I looked at that photo for a good while.
The police were no help. They wanted a full name. I didn’t know her full name, his full name.
For weeks I approached strangers at the El Ranchero Bar and asked if they’d seen or heard anything about Paola. I always got the same response: “Oh, muchacho, she prolly went home. Happens a lot.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nobody stays in TJ forever,” they said. “People go home to their old lives,” they said.
I suspected Paola had simply quit dressing like a woman – you know, blended into acceptable Mexican society, maybe grown a beard. There’s no telling. She could have been any Chico walking down the street.
Something Twisted this Way Comes
Kyoko Church
It was a dark time for him. And titillating. Dark and titillating.
He hadn’t thought the two qualities could be so exquisitely combined. Or if he had, it was just an inkling, he’d only known somewhere in the recesses of his mind, on the edges of his fantasies. But it was there. The chocolate and peanut butter of sexual dysfunction.
He would always remember that time. Those three weeks when he couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Couldn’t do anything but think about her. Looking back he realized something. What made her, what gave her power, was what she knew. That in the human psyche there is no such thing as truth, only perspective. She understood that a person can have a secret, something he thinks is ugly. So he hides it from view, tucks it away, only visits it in secret, on weekends, and then only to torture himself, like picking at a scab. But she saw the glimmer of it. So she plucked it out, dusted it off. Turned it a hair to the left. And stood back for him to see. Waited for him to realize: the thing he most hated, he could actually love.
He met her innocently enough. No, that’s not true. Perhaps an outside observer could have thought it was innocent. But he was not innocent. He’d been looking at some, er, pictures, at his desk at work. So he was hard. He was hard in the elevator when she stepped on, on his way to take some pressure off, taking the elevator to a more secluded bathroom on the top floor of his office building.
She stepped on, all business, tailored suit but killer heels, auburn hair swept up in a surprisingly old-fashioned chignon in contrast to the rest of her look. She was not the kind of woman he was normally attracted to. He usually went for the more petite blonde type. She was all curves, very Marilyn Monroe, but with that hair the colour of fire. Embarrassingly the words, “va va va voom” ran through his head.
She looked at him. She assessed him. Sized him up. Her eyes scoured him up and down, everything from his average clothes, his average shoes, his slightly balding average hair. The wedding band on his finger. The bulge in the front of his pants.
He glanced again at those heels, open toed with her pretty red nails peeping out of the top. She caught him looking and he blushed. They exchanged not a single word. But then she smiled at him. A slow, sly smile. He saw a light go on in her eyes and in an instant he understood that she knew him. She saw what he was exactly.
“Email me,” she said, handing him a card. Then she stepped off the elevator, and was gone.
He emailed her the next day. Was he ever not going to? She told him to come up to her office on the 42nd floor.
When he got there she was stretched out on the leather sofa beneath the large picture window that looked out high over the city. Her feet were up, her heels, different ones today, black patent, were on the floor. She was wearing dress pants but her feet were bare. Again, those red toenails.
“Have a seat,” she said, indicating the sofa beside her.
He settled uncomfortably at the other end, not knowing where to look or how to position his body. She chuckled. “A little closer, silly,” she said, lifting her foot up, offering it to him as he moved closer. He blushed but took it, gently. Her foot was surprisingly small and slender, the skin pale so that the red toenails stood out sharply. He began to massage slowly.
“Wait a second.” He looked up. “Turn to me a little,” she said. “That’s right, now lift your knee up onto the couch.” He did so and jumped as she placed her other foot gently but firmly against his crotch. “Keep rubbing,” she commanded, gesturing at the foot in his hand. “I just want to make sure you’re not getting excited.” Fire exploded in his face. He looked away from her, at her foot, then looked away from that.
She laughed. “It’s OK,” she cooed. “I know you like my feet. And I do need a foot rub right now. So you rub them.” He hesitated. “Do it,” she said, not laughing now. “But I just need to make sure you’re not being a disgusting pervert and getting all excited about my pretty feet. This foot rub is supposed to be for me.”
He rubbed, obediently trying to clear his mind, trying to think of anything but her slim foot in his hands. But there was also the pressure of her other foot against him. And then she started making little noises. Little whimpers, groans of pleasure. “Mmm, that’s right,” she purred. “Ooo, right there, that feels so good.” He was helpless. He sat helplessly rubbing while his cock grew with a mind of its own.
“Oh my God, what
is going on?” She looked at him. “I can feel you, you know,” she said, wiggling her toes against his stiffness, and only worsening matters. “God, what horny little thoughts are going through your head right now? Was it the noises I was making?” she chided. “I was only enjoying the foot rub! You weren’t thinking that’s what I sound like when I fuck, were you?” He stared into his lap, unable to respond. “Well, if you are going to act like a horny little dog, then that’s how I’m going to have to treat you.”
This is how it was that he found himself, a grown man, a professional, an architect, on all fours on the floor in front of this goddess, humping her foot like some kind of human lap dog.
And even though she didn’t make it easy for him by doing things like swinging her foot away, complaining that he was going too fast, laughing, forcing him to keep all four limbs on the ground, to not use his hands, even still his little problem reared its ugly head.
He spurted, hips helplessly bucking, after two minutes.
He knelt in front of her and braced himself. He steeled himself against the familiar onslaught of feeling – frustration, anger, shame – that always raged through him like a firestorm, burning through everything in its path. But instead of the usual reactions of disappointment, pity, anger or worse, the yawning silence, pregnant with judgements and unspoken resentment, there was something different.
Giggling. Like tinsel. Like glasses chinking together, crystal laughter.
“My, my, my, we are the eager little beaver, aren’t we?”
Heat rose, he could hear the blood pump through the vessels in his head.
“That’s OK, sweetie,” she said and she leaned over, put her lips right next to his ear, so he could feel her breath on his skin. “Mistress has all sorts of ways to deal with a horny little boy like you,” she whispered.
Suddenly he realized he was hard again. Harder than he had been the first time.
There was shame. But no anger. There was humiliation. But no frustration.
Pure humiliation. Not blazing, like the white hot heat of the firestorm of his secret torment, but rolling in slowly, like molasses, covering him, turning his insides liquid, enveloping him in a mass of humility, shrinking him down, making him want to place his hard, needy little cock before her in an act of complete submission.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books) Page 55
