by Obed Silva
“To wherever the fuck you’re going.”
“But you don’t even know where I’m going.”
“I know where you’re going. Don’t try to pretend like you’re not going where we both know you’re going.”
He laughed. Under the illumination of the streetlight he boomed with laughter. When he was done laughing, he stood silent for a moment while staring at me, contemplating whether to bring me along or not.
“You really want to go?” he asked.
The way I saw it, I was already in hell.
“Yes.”
Cokis came out of the house and asked where we were going. We both ignored her.
* * *
We took off in my mother’s Jeep, in which I’d come to Chihuahua. He drove. It was close to midnight and people were still out. We passed groups of men drinking from the hoods of their cars and tailgates of their trucks and women chatting on concrete steps while their teenage sons and daughters hung out on the street corners talking about sex, drugs, alcohol, love, death, and other adult themes. For the first hour all we did was cruise familiar territory—we went up and down the dirt and asphalt streets of El Cerro de la Cruz. Then my father asked me again, “Do you really want to go?”
“¡Chingado! Aren’t you my father, mi papá, el pinchi papá?”
“Pues sí.”
“Then let’s fucking go! ¡Vamos pues!” He was beginning to piss me off.
We drove out of El Cerro de la Cruz and onto the main highway in the direction of the airport, which was about fifteen minutes away this time of night. A couple of miles before reaching it, we turned onto a dirt road that led into a dark neighborhood. It was so dark that I could barely make out the houses on either side of us. We drove slowly to prevent stirring up too much dust or hitting a large rock or sticking one of our tires into a large pothole.
“It’s around here?” I asked my father, looking ahead and to the sides of us.
“Yes,” he replied, pointing forward with his right index finger. “It’s right there where the car with its lights on is parked.”
All I could see were brake lights; I couldn’t see the car. It was not until we pulled up right behind it that I was able to see its shape and that there were two persons inside. For a few seconds, as I analyzed the car and our surroundings, I was at a loss as to what was going on. I had no clue about where my father had brought me. Everywhere around us was dark and dusty, and silent. I rolled down my window and aside from the motor of our Jeep, I didn’t hear anything—no voices, crickets, cars, nothing. It was quiet all over—scary quiet, the type of quiet that makes you nervous; the type of quiet that always leads to a crime; the someone’s-going-to-be-murdered-tonight type of quiet. Finally, a hand came out through the chain-link fence that the car in front of us was parked next to and handed something to the hand sticking out from its passenger side. Cocaine.
When we drove up to the fence after the car in front of us slowly drove off, I noticed there was a young man on the other side of it sitting still on something, and I could barely make him out in the darkness. “What’s it gonna be?” he asked me as he brought his face forward. I turned to my father for the answer; and leaning into my side and projecting his voice out the window to the dark figure on the other side of the fence, my father said, “Dos tostones.” Toston is slang for fifty pesos, so what my father had just asked for was a hundred pesos’ (about ten U.S. dollars’) worth of coke. The figure heard the order, pulled two small rectangular envelope-looking folds, no bigger than the top end of my index finger, and held them up close to the fence to show us that he had them ready to go.
“Well, pay the man,” my father ordered me. Motherfucker!
“Right. Hold on,” I said to my father, and then to the figure. I’d been buying drugs from dealers ever since I was thirteen and all of a sudden I was forgetting how it all worked. I should’ve had the money in my hand ready to go way before turning into the fucking street. So after fidgeting through my pockets, I finally pulled out a crumbled-up hundred-peso bill and handed it to the figure through the baseball-size hole in the fence, just like the person in the passenger seat of the car that had been in front of us had done only moments earlier. Once the figure had the money secure in his hands and had checked it to make sure it was the correct amount, he pushed his hand through the same hole and dropped the two small envelopes in my hand.
“There you go,” the figure quietly and calmly said. “Enjoy.”
“Gracias,” I courteously replied, clutching tightly to the two envelopes.
Again I turned to look at my father. This is it, I thought, staring deeply into his glossy eyes, there’s only one way to go from here. My father released his foot from the brake, softly stepped on the gas, and off we went into the night.
Once on the main road, we headed back toward El Cerro. I didn’t say anything. Just thought about what the moment when we opened up the envelopes was going to be like. My father, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be having the same thoughts as me. In fact, he’d become more talkative. He began to talk so much you would’ve thought he’d already done a line. As soon as we drove away from the hole, he began to go on about how it all worked. “This is all one big mafia,” he said. “There’s a shitload of places like this one all over Chihuahua. Day or night, it doesn’t matter. Estos cabrones are always selling. But they only sell tostones, that’s it—nothing under and nothing over fifty pesos. No, here it isn’t like in the U.S., where you can buy a gram or an eight ball or whatever you want. No, here only tostones, and no discounts. And a toston isn’t a lot, maybe like a little under a twenty in the U.S. And don’t think it’s a lot for less than what you’d pay in the U.S. It’s just that over here people are poor, so the dealers adjust their prices to what they know people can pay. Imagine if we had to pay twenty dollars for a toston, we wouldn’t be able to support our habit. Fifty pesos ain’t bad, about ten American dollars. But tostones is all there is. So if you want to buy more, then you have to buy more tostones, which sucks because after you finish one toston you quickly want another one and then you have to come back, and everybody usually always comes back, which is what they want. They want you to keep coming back, como en el Micdonas [McDonald’s]. It’s good soda though. It gets you going right away. As soon as you sniff it, you can feel it all over your body and face. Esta a toda madre. We should be able to get at least four good lines out of each toston, you’ll see. Do you have them?” He stops talking and turns to me with a serious look.
“Yes, they’re in my pocket.”
I’d been holding the two envelopes in my clenched fist inside my pocket. I kept thinking about them and about how fucked-up the place we were headed was going to be. We were headed nowhere good; but just like my father, I, too, was itching to get there fast. I wanted a line just as much as he did. I wanted the high, the fuck-everything feeling. I didn’t care anymore. Didn’t care that it was my father sitting next to me, that we’d just scored coke together and that we were now going to do it together, too. Fuck it! I quickly changed my reality to where I’m cruising with one of my homeboys back in California after having just scored and we’re on our way to get loaded. There’s no remorse, nothing to be ashamed of. This is the journey of the wounded heart. Cocaine is nothing new to me, I’m thinking. Just do it.
“Pues saca uno,” my father says. “What are you waiting for?”
As I reached into my pocket for the tostones, my father pulled to the side of the road and there, on this warm summer night in Chihuahua, as most of the city slept, my father and I committed ourselves to a part of hell from whence we could never return. He took one of the envelopes from my unfurled fist and eagerly opened it. On a blank CD case he let a small pile of white powder fall and quickly cut it up with a pocket knife he’d been carrying.
“You have a bill?” he said.
I dug into my pockets and pulled out the first three bills I felt: two American five-dollar bills and a ten. I handed him one of the fives and shoved the ot
her two bills back into my pocket, along with the other envelope. My father rolled up the five, put it to his nose, brought his head down to the CD case, which he was holding up in front of him close to the steering wheel, and inhaled. Then it was my turn.
There is nothing like a cocaine high. The world looks and feels prettier, and there’s no reason to cry. The euphoria takes over and the first thing you want to do is open your mouth and say how good it feels, or how good it feels to not feel. You’re numb, alive, and cold all over. You’re something excited. You want to talk and you want to love. You want to tell someone that you love them. All is good. All couldn’t be better.
“Is it good?” my father asks.
“Yes, real good,” I tell him, tilting my head back against the headrest, allowing the powder to make its way down my throat—this is what we call the drips.
My father looks at me, laughs, and says, “That’s it, hijo, that’s the way you do it.”
* * *
We ended up at a strip-club-slash-whorehouse close to where we’d scored the coke. There we salivated over the naked putas and drank more beers—all paid for from my pocket. We also smoked a shitload of cigarettes and talked about a whole lot of nothing—a common side effect of cocaine. Besides, what could a son possibly talk to his father about at a whorehouse? The whores, I suppose. The music was too loud and the whores too fucking beautiful. I wanted to escape with one. I wanted to leave the side of this man and plunge my happiness into pussy. I wanted to share my high with a woman, especially the one who’d brought us the beers. She was special gorgeous: tall and big breasted with the face of a telenovela actress. I told her this as she popped open our beers and she smiled. She told me that I was handsome, too, muy guapo, and I believed her. I tipped her a five-dollar bill, and she kissed me on the cheek. She also whispered into my ear that if I needed anything to just ask her. “Lo que sea,” she said seductively, and again I believed her. She seemed like a woman I could trust. “Claro,” I told her, grinding my teeth like a crackhead. “Come back in a few minutes and I’ll have a list for you.” She smiled, turned, and walked away, dripping sex all over.
Noticing that I couldn’t take my eyes off the telenovela whore’s ass, my father placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You like that? You could have her, you know, for as little as fifty dollars.” I thought for a second: Fifty dollars? I have fifty dollars. There was a motel next door, a place meant only for fucking putas, rented only by the hour. That’s where we went.
We hopped into the truck and my father drove the puta and me a few yards to the motel. I suppose we could’ve just walked there, but the dirt ground was too much for me, and the cold too much for the puta, who was only wearing a bright pink bikini top and a matching thong. She was also wearing cheap stiletto heels.
The motel was as shady as they get. We drove into a U-shape structure of small rooms that each had their own carport. A figure came out of a small kiosk to the left of the entrance and walked up to the driver-side window. “What will it be?” he asked. “My son and this bella mujer need a room,” my father replied. He had said “my son” with emphasis, as if with pride, as if we were in a coming-of-age story where the father takes the son to have his first sexual experience with a prostitute. “One hundred pesos,” the man said. I couldn’t see his face clearly. He was short and barely reached the window. All I could see were his eyes and the top of his head, which didn’t reveal much. “There it is, hijo, cien pesos,” my father said as he dropped his arm across the puta’s lap, who was sitting snuggly between us, and waved his open palm in front of me. I didn’t say anything, just reached into my pocket, took out a roll of bills, peeled off a ten, and dropped it in my father’s palm. The puta watched it go from my hand to his and then to the attendant’s. I couldn’t stop staring at her legs, pussy, and tits. She in her thong and me loaded as fuck, and we were about to go fuck. She loved my American dollars and I loved her Mexican everything.
But something strange happened, something unexpectedly magical. Something quick. My telenovela actress morphed into something amazingly other than a prostitute. In the light of the motel room she became just another simple woman with stretch marks on her big breasts and stomach and a face with way too much makeup: a lie, nothing more than a damsel in distress, a poor soul in need of a muchacho with gringo bills. That was me, the horny American-wannabe with coke up his nose and the crazy father pushing the issue.
And I had lost the desire to fuck. I was too drunk and high, and in the light of that motel room, the puta just didn’t seem so pretty anymore. All her defects had come to light, and I became disappointed. I just couldn’t get past all of the stretch marks on her breasts and stomach and all the makeup on her face. She was a grown woman after all, and I, still relatively young and shallow. This was a good thing, though, because what happened in that motel room after I’d done away with the “fucking” option turned out to be all the more wonderful. We talked. She fondled my penis and we talked. But what could a young man with a college degree talk to a prostitute about? “Do you know who Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is?” I asked her as she gently stroked my penis. We were both on the bed. I was lying on my back with my shirt off, my pants and underwear pulled down to my knees, and she was on her knees next to my legs. “No, who’s that?” she replied, looking at me, her hand still moving slowly up and down.
“He was a famous painter from France, a great one.”
“Oh yeah? And what did he paint?”
“Prostitutes. Well, he painted other things, too, but mostly prostitutes. Lots and lots of prostitutes. He loved to paint them.”
“Is that all he did?”
“Well, no. I told you, he painted other things, too.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, did he do other things with the prostitutes besides paint them, like, would he fuck them?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that that’s what you were talking about. But yes, he did. He fucked them often, probably more than he painted them.”
* * *
This is where I first buried my father, in this shitty motel room where this wicked conversation took place. I buried him here, where I found solace in a conversation with a prostitute. Here is where the funeral took place; here is where I laid him to rest—yo y mi puta lo enterramos.
And I loved it. All of it. Loved the scene: something dirty and immoral, something you could never turn back from. I’d landed on Mars and loved it more than earth. My puta was like a lonely cactus in the desert, existing only as a form of resistance against the elements that every day worked to destroy her, and I was like the happiest boy ever, slowly coming apart inside. I stared at her thick thighs and the cellulite that marked their thickest areas, looked like moon craters, like dimpled white cheese, and I stared at the stretch marks on her belly, marks left after having given life. I was beginning to appreciate something ugly, something often disguised. She was nice, kind to me, didn’t care that my dick remained limp like a dead fish. She played with it regardless, smacking it against my leg like a whip, and I smiled and she smiled back. We were both broken, and we understood each other’s pain.
“So this Toulouse,” I continued, “he loved prostitutes—las amaba! To him they were the most beautiful type of women to paint, and the saddest. Are you sad?”
But whether she was sad or not, I would never know because she never answered that question. She just continued to love me, to do her job. She rubbed my chest and her hands felt good, soft and firm, like a heavy breeze on a hot summer night—all was good, all felt good. And I wanted to touch her breasts, too, but I kept talking. “María Magdalena was a prostitute, too, you know, and Jesus loved her.” And I wanted more cocaine, but it was too far at the other end of the room on the table, next to my wallet and my green card.
After I stopped talking about prostitutes and of the historical men who came to appreciate them, this woman began to tell me about her children, and of how if she didn’t do what she did, they’d probably go h
ungry and not have a roof over their heads. She had two young sons and a daughter, all not yet teenagers. She spoke endearingly about them, telling me that she hoped they would never find out about what she did because it would kill her. I asked her about their father, and right when she was about to tell me there was a knock on the door. “¡Hijo! ¡Hijo!” It was my father. “Open the door!”
“This motherfucker,” I said aloud to myself. I couldn’t believe that he was already at the door. It hadn’t even been fifteen minutes, and I’d told him to return in half an hour. “Espera,” I said to the woman. “Let me go see what he wants.” I pulled up my underwear and pants, quickly zipped up, and jumped on my chair.
“¡Hijo!” my father yelled again before I got to the door.
“Hold on!” I yelled back. When I unlocked the door, he quickly turned the knob and pushed his way in. “¿Qué paso?” I said, but he ignored me and walked right into the room, looked at the woman on the bed, and said to her, “Are you done? Did he perform well?”
“Yeah, we’re done,” I said before the woman could say anything.
“All right then,” he said, turning to me, “where’s the coke?”
That’s why he’d come so soon. He wanted more coke. He couldn’t wait, as junkies never can.
“It’s right there, on the counter,” I said, pointing at the paper next to my wallet in which it was folded. He quickly walked over to it, unfolded it, and let some of the white powder fall onto the counter.
“¿Quieres?” he said to me.
“Sí.”
Then he looked at the woman, who was now standing up next to the bed with her little purse in her hand, and asked her if she, too, wanted a line, but she quietly said no. As I counted off fifty dollars, my father cut up a couple of lines. I rolled over to the woman and handed her the money. I heard my father snort behind me. I thanked her for everything and told her that she was a beautiful mujer. My father called me and I went to snort my line.
