“Gomez,” I said, “you think we can get that stuff here by four o’clock?”
“What’d you call me, you little bitch?” he said in his slow drawl.
“Gomez, we—” He interrupted me.
“What?” He grinned.
“Mi Padrino, do you think we can get that stuff?”
“No worries,” he said. “You little bitch.”
No worries. This was Gomez’s defining philosophy on life. It was his mantra, his guiding principle. And he never deviated.
I tried to adopt this philosophy as my own, but it was slow going. When the company that shipped my car from New Jersey took close to a month to deliver it instead of the week they’d promised, I said No worries to myself. But it didn’t stop me from being furious. When the car arrived and was strangely coated in a thick layer of rock-salt residue, I again told myself No worries. I still wanted to punch the truck driver in the face. No worries was easy to say, but the mind-set was hard to adopt. You can take the nebishy, neurotic, hyperbolically angry kid out of the Northeast, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be anything other than nebishy, neurotic, and hyperbolically angry somewhere else, I guess.
When Gomez strolled into my office one Wednesday afternoon while Jose blocked the doorway, I knew something was about to happen, and that it was most definitely trouble. No worries , I tried to tell myself. No worries.
“Little bitch,” Gomez said, a slight smirk on his face.
“What’s up, Padrino? I’m kind of busy,” I replied in the shitty tone that is my trademark when I’m stressed.
“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked.
“Nothing, I don’t know, why?” I snorted.
“Don’t make plans.” He grinned. “We’re taking you to TJ.”
TJ. Tijuana. Before I could protest, he walked off. Muerto followed behind, his trademark cackle at full volume.
Tijuana would have intimidated me even if I weren’t being led around by a former drug mule who thought of me as his bitch. As someone who had just stopped drinking eighteen months earlier and who was finally feeling good about himself, I was scared shitless at the prospect of heading to a debaucherous party city of terrifying proportions. And yet I didn’t protest. I didn’t bitch or moan. It turns out I wanted to go. I figured if I was going to leave New Jersey for California, I might as well extend the adventure and check out Mexico. Besides, I had to push myself. A big part of my motivation to move had been to try something new, something beyond the familiarity in which I had lived for so many years. Coming to Los Angeles had been a good first step that I had taken on my own—but in my quest to relax, it was the Mexicans who set the bar for me. Maybe going to Mexico would show me how they managed to pull it off.
Besides, for all their crazy behavior, Gomez and Jose were my friends. If they wanted to show me where and how they grew up, I was not going to say no. No worries, I told myself.
We left after work on Friday and the trip quickly developed an uneasy air about it. Jose picked me up in an old, broken-down white van, undoubtedly part of his underground car-sale empire. “Get in, pussy,” he said as he screeched to a halt. He was driving with one hand and rolling a joint with the other.
I climbed inside. We stopped for gas just a few blocks from work. Since the car’s gas gauge was broken, the automatic cutoff didn’t work and Jose sprayed about four gallons of gasoline all over the ground. He climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“Dude,” I said, “we gotta tell someone. They’ve gotta clean that up.”
“No worries,” he replied.
“But Jose, someone could light a cigarette and torch this place,” I protested.
“No worries, you little bitch,” he said. We drove away.
Jose lit his joint five minutes after we got onto the highway. A slight contact high set in as we headed deeper into Southern California than I’d ever been. The desert rolled into the distance on either side of the highway and I realized that I’d never seen anything like it in my entire life. I rolled down the window and put my feet up on the dashboard. By the time we cruised past the San Diego skyline, I was as relaxed as I’d been in about half a decade. Finally, Southern California was having an effect on me. Jose smoked nonstop until we came to the border, and not even the manic bustle of the crossing managed to stress me out.
We pulled up in front of Gomez’s house and my Padrino jumped in the car.
“We gotta show you the town, little bitch,” Gomez said. “Let’s go to the bar.”
“I don’t drink,” I told them.
“No worries,” they said in unison. We parked downtown and entered a bar called Adelita’s. It looked nice, almost like a club. As we entered, I realized that its niceness was a moot point, and that the major difference between this bar and others was actually the prostitutes. The hundreds of prostitutes. Women in bikinis, women in lingerie, women in street clothes. They wandered all around Adelita’s. Big ones, little ones, light ones, dark ones, ugly ones, and yes, beautiful ones.
“Yo, you little bitch,” Gomez said to me. “You can fuck any of these women for forty dollars. Which one you want?”
“I don’t want to sleep with a hooker,” I said, very seriously. “Get me out of here.”
Jose started to protest.
“No,” I said. “Get me out of here. Right now.”
Gomez was irritated. “All right, no worries!” he said, bristling at my anger.
We shuffled outside, not talking. Jose grabbed the van and pulled up in front of the bar. We jumped in, and Muerto dropped us off at Gomez’s house shortly after. He soon left, presumably to go sell that piece of shit van.
Gomez and I got food before heading to his family’s home. The streets surrounding it were narrow and busy, filled with people and honking cars. But when he lifted the large metal garage door that marked the border of his property, I was shocked to see a beautiful estate. I stepped onto a large stone patio, vegetables growing around its border, and Gomez’s lovely mother ran out to meet us and hugged me immediately. We sat outside on lounge chairs, looking out over the city. I met Panchi, Gomez’s Chihuahua, who, Gomez informed me, had a huge dick. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and he’s running around, dragging it on the ground behind him,” he told me. “Whenever that happens and you catch him, he looks at you, and he always looks real ashamed.”
I laughed. After our showdown at the bar, I feared that Gomez and I would be at odds. But a meal and some bizarre stories had gotten us back to business as usual. I looked at the tiny (but huge) dog and laughed again. Gomez grinned at me.
“Now, look,” he said, “do you want to go back and get a hooker or what?”
“Dude, no!” I exploded. I was amazed he brought it back up after our earlier blowout. “And I’m really not sure why you won’t just drop this.”
Disappointed, I opted to head to bed rather than hang out with my Padrino any longer. I woke up at three in the morning to Gomez shaking me.
“Little bitch,” he said. “Little bitch, wake up.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I imagined nightmarish scenarios where the drug runners who forced Gomez into mule-itude had returned and were now after me.
“Nothing. But look, let’s go back to Adelita’s,” he said. “You can fuck a whore. I won’t tell anyone, not even Muerto.”
I looked up at Gomez, my friend. In the short time I’d known him he’d already shown me a lot and I appreciated him for it. Still, enough was enough. I felt the familiar sensation of anger snapping to life inside me. Since moving to California I’d come to enjoy a sunny rage-free few months, but now, with Gomez’s late-night prostitution prodding, it returned. I sat up, and though I was still half asleep, I lost my cool. I pounded my fist into the bed and gave Gomez a wild-eyed stare.
“Gomez,” I said. “Look at me. I’m gonna tell you one more fucking time, and then we’re going to have a serious fucking problem. I don’t want to fuck a whore.”
“Why not, man?” he sai
d. His voice melted from insistence to desperation. “It’s clean. They even give you a towel afterward.”
“What do you think my problem with this is?” I shouted. “And why do you think a towel will fix it?”
“Damn you, little bitch,” he yelled. “You gotta get it over with sometime.”
I rolled over. He stayed in the room. I ignored him—if I hadn’t, we would have wound up in a full-on shouting match or, worse yet, a fistfight. Lying on my bed in furious silence I kept hearing one phrase, rolling over and over in my head—“Get it over with sometime.”
Get what over with sometime? I asked myself. I’d never seen Gomez this insistent about anything, nor this upset. Get it over with sometime? I repeated it in my head. It?
Then it hit me. I sat straight up in bed and turned to my friend.
“Gomez, do you think I’m a virgin?”
He blinked. “You’re not?”
For the first time, I saw myself as my new friends did.
When high-strung Americans see laid-back Mexicans, they tend to unfairly label them as lazy. It occurred to me that when Mexicans see someone as high-strung as me, someone always in a rush, someone always irritated, they must make assumptions, too. In this case, the only logical explanation for a person who behaved like me was that he must have never gotten laid in his entire life.
I breathed heavily, unsure of what to think. Okay, I told myself, you’re twenty-four years old and they think you’re a virgin. That’s humiliating.
But I was also touched. For much of my life I’d felt like I’d had to fight every battle on my own. Now an immense sense of gratitude overtook me as I realized that Gomez wasn’t mocking me. He was looking out for me. Misguided and embarrassing, yes, but the important thing was I had a friend who had the heart to treat me to a Tijuana whore.
I looked at Gomez, his sleepy eyes waiting for an answer. I wanted to express myself, but couldn’t find the words. How did I explain that I was angry, but also touched? And that I wasn’t what he thought I was? Finally, I said the one thing I knew would get across everything I was feeling. For the first time, it made sense.
“Padrino,” I said, grinning at him. “No worries.”
“My boy!” Gomez yelled, probably waking up his big-dicked dog. “For real?”
I nodded. Without saying anything else, he understood.
Since that trip, Gomez has stopped calling me “little bitch.” Now, he calls me “Padrinito”—the little godfather.
A few short months later, Crossballs wrapped. I didn’t have another job lined up and debated whether to stay or to head home to the Northeast. On the one hand, there was Los Angeles, a place I had just begun scratching the surface of, a place that had afforded a necessary reboot of my personality, but one that also, I sensed, was overall too gilded and superficial for my liking.
On the other hand, there were New Jersey and New York. Places I had deep connections to and very fond memories of, but places that I had some long-standing and still painful negative associations with.
Early in the summer of 2004, I made up my mind and drove cross-country back home. I owed the East Coast another shot. I’d never known it while I was happy. I’d never experienced it with No worries.
Six Red Bumps
“I thought you had my back!” I shouted into Allison’s face as we stood next to an Italian sausage stand. “It’s my mistake for making such a stupid assumption.”
“Will you calm down?” she pleaded. “I didn’t realize this was a whole-day thing!”
“I didn’t realize,” I said, “I was dating someone who cared so little about me.”
Being angry with someone you love is terrible. But converting the passion of that anger into sexual acts is a euphoric experience that I can’t recommend enough. Makeup sex is absolutely the best sex you can have.
A few Labor Day weekends ago, my girlfriend Allison and I went to the Jersey Shore. The Shore’s perfect for us; Allison loves the beach and I love deep-fried Oreos. And both of us love looking at mulleted weirdos in airbrushed tank tops who get drunk in the afternoon.
We relaxed, swam, and shared as terrific a meal as one can find on a boardwalk. We rode through a cheesy haunted house and laughed when a fat man smoking a cigarette jumped out from the darkness.
Although we had been dating only a few months, I realized that we were experiencing our first perfect day together, and as we walked among the lights and sounds and games, I began to suspect I really loved the girl.
Then Allison’s phone rang.
“Hey, Clair,” she said, turning her back to me. “Maybe eight or nine? No, put me on the list,” she said. Allison placed her hand over the receiver. “What time do you think we’re getting back tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Then, I walked away. She caught up to me in front of a store that sold T-shirts with phrases about Italian people on them. My fists were balled.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why did you ask what time we’re getting back?” I snapped at her.
“There’s a party,” she said. “I thought maybe we could get back in time for it.”
“I can’t believe this fucking bullshit,” I said. Anger, my old friend, had returned.
I felt stupid, ashamed I had spent the past few hours thinking this was “our first perfect day” while, in the meantime, Allison obviously couldn’t wait to leave and was already planning her night out without me. I took it to mean that all of my cheesy romantic thoughts weren’t being reciprocated, and being a boneheaded male unable to handle emotions I reverted to what was most familiar to me: I began to yell and curse.
“This is a big misunderstanding,” she said. “I’m not trying to be mean.”
“There’s no misunderstanding,” I said. “I’ll just drive you home so you can hang out with the people you’d rather be with!”
“I want to be with you,” Allison answered.
“You have a funny way of showing it,” I snapped.
Our fight continued all the way back to the car and it didn’t stop there. We yelled at each other on the Garden State Parkway, continued the yelling as we merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and waiting to get through the Holland Tunnel we killed some time with more yelling. Though we were far from the first people to scream in frustration while sitting in Tunnel traffic, I can guarantee we were some of the most committed. We kept at it as we pulled up in front of Allison’s dorm. And then for good measure we yelled for another hour in my car, blocking traffic on Fourteenth Street.
“I didn’t mean to insult you!” Allison said for the fiftieth time that night.
“Well, I’m having a tough time figuring that out,” I continued. “Because when all you can think about is getting away from me, I find it pretty insulting.”
“Chris, I’m sorry,” Allison said. “I love you and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I love you too,” I said. “If I didn’t, there’s no way I could possibly get this mad.”
And then, suddenly, after so many hours of arguing, it was gone. Exhausted, we finally began to calm down and really listen to each other.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” I asked.
“Yes,” Allison said. “Yes, I do.”
I’ve never driven through Manhattan that fast, nor have I weaved my way through the traffic on the Queensboro Bridge as skillfully. We were back at my apartment in no time flat, and when we got there we attacked each other.
I won’t be crass. Suffice it to say that all that dark, brooding aggression fell by the bedside. And at one point a pineapple-flavored Marino’s Italian Ice was involved. That part was cool.
The next morning I woke up first and for a moment watched Allison as she slept. Sunlight was streaming through the blinds and hitting her face. Allison is a petite girl, but when she’s in a bed by herself, she spreads all of her limbs out to take up the entire mattress. It’s adorable. I realized that I had been a moron the day before at the Shore. I had
been hurt, but my reaction to that pain had led to a horrible day that risked our relationship. It was inexcusable. The amount of jealousy I felt at being snubbed for Allison’s friends was nothing compared to the hurt I created in response.
Allison rolled over and mumbled. I smiled. It was a perfect start to the morning.
A perfect start that immediately came to an end when I went into the bathroom and peed. That’s when I sensed a strange, pulsating feeling emanate from the tip of my penis. It wasn’t a burning sensation, and it didn’t quite hurt. It felt like someone had applied just a slight pressure between finger and thumb on the head of my dick. The initial shock was like driving a car you’re familiar with and realizing that something is wrong with the transmission—the car was still running, but something was off.
I looked down and was horrified to see six red bumps forming a ring around my urethra. I sprinted back into my room and collided with my desk chair. Allison shot out of bed.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said. I motioned wildly toward my penis.
The beginning of my morning had been idyllic. Allison’s was off to a much rockier start. She leaned in close to examine the ring of raised red blotches on my junk.
“What the hell is that?” she said, eyes wide with fear.
“I don’t fucking know,” I said.
“Was that there when we—”
I interrupted her.
“Fuck no it wasn’t there,” I said. “There’s no way I wouldn’t have felt it. It feels like my dick is trapped underneath a dictionary.”
I grabbed the camera case hanging from the doorknob of my closet.
“I’m going to take pictures of the bumps,” I told her.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” she shouted at me.
“What if they go away? I need to show a doctor,” I said.
I didn’t know what else to do. I had never been in this situation before. The only thing remotely close was the time my first girlfriend had a pregnancy scare after the second time we had sex. But I’d since discovered that everyone’s first girlfriend has a pregnancy scare after the second time they have sex. This was something else entirely. There was only one thing I knew for sure—I had to see a doctor.
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 17
