Chapter 2

It was just turning completely dark when I walked up the street to the cantina. It was a better place than Hector's lukewarm recommendation had suggested. The food was very good, and, as always, the Mexican beer was superb.

Why a supposedly backward country like Mexico can turn out three or four different kinds of beer, all of them superior to anything brewed in the United States, has always been a mystery to me. I always thought the Mexican companies should advertise more on American radio and TV. If more people knew how tasty their beer was, our homegrown manufacturers would have to clean up their act.

So I had two beers at the cantina, on top of the one I'd had with Hector Martinez back in his office. I would certainly sleep tonight!

There were a couple of sexy young women working as barmaids in the cantina, and although it wasn't a typical border-town tourist trap, but more a local bar for mostly local people, I found the women attractive and desirable. I guess I was just super-horny from my three weeks of sexual deprivation. Anyway, after appreciating them quietly for the time necessary to drink two beers, I got up to go.

Just outside the cantina, a young boy — maybe twelve years old — tugged at my arm insistently. I pretty much knew what he was going to say before he said it, and he didn't disappoint me.

"Hey, meester, you wanna fock my seester? She's a virgin!"

From Matamoras to Tijuana, Mexican boys accost American tourists and servicemen, offering their "virgin" sisters to "fock." The virginity is only a distant family memory, and sometimes the "sister" isn't really a sister, but the boy's mother, or maybe just a neighbor woman using the boy as her customer service representative.

But the advertising spiel never changes, whether "Sis" is 12 or 42.

I am one of those guys who takes considerable pride in never having to "pay for it." The number of times I've visited a paid professional for sex is easy to remember: twice. Both times, I was 18 years old and serving in the Marine Corps, stationed in Southern California. Both times, it had been Mexican girls from Tijuana who had given me their "virginity."

Both times, I'd gotten my ashes hauled well enough, and, having the good sense to wear protection, I hadn't carried home any diseases. The girls, on each occasion, were young, reasonably attractive, and inexpensive.

Still, the transaction had not been pretty. I was inexperienced at the time (these two Mexican whores being my second and fourth coital partners), so the excitement was certainly there.

But you didn't have to be Mr. Sensitive to see how much squalor, how much victimization, was involved.

The girls I had been with were whores, plain and simple. Mexico didn't have a corner on the market for whores — there were plenty of them in our country, too. But the Mexican border-town whores were a sad lot. You knew they were going to be there, selling their ass cheap, for as many years as someone would be willing to buy it — at ever-decreasing prices. What you got for $20 this year would be worth, maybe, $10 a couple of years down the road.

It might have felt good, getting off with that young brown girl under you, but it didn't take long, afterward, before it felt more like what it really was: a selfish, one-sided transaction that provided you with minimal satisfaction and your "partner" with none at all.

So it had been fifteen years since I'd paid a whore — in Mexico or anywhere else — to help me get my rocks off. It just wasn't my thing.

So why did I talk to this kid?

Maybe he thought I was stupid, so he said it again. "You wanna fock my seester? She's a virgin!"

I asked the boy, in Spanish, how old his "sister" was. I think he was surprised.

"She has 16 years," he said, in English.

"Where is she?" Again, in Spanish.

This time he responded in his own language. "In a house, just up there," he said, pointing.

I knew it was dangerous, accompanying this kid up an unpaved, unlighted street and into a darkened shanty where his "sister" was waiting to give me her "virginity."

But, inexplicably, I was interested. I was horny, I had a rubber in my wallet, and I was stuck in Juarez, Mexico for the night. I could go back inside the gate at the warehouse, climb into my sack, and read until I fell asleep.

Or I could go and dip my wick in some (alleged) sixteen-year-old Mexican pussy.

A virgin. Yeah, right.

I knew I'd hate myself in the morning. Hell, I hated myself already. But I told the kid, in Spanish, to lead the way. If the woman turned out to be too awful-looking, maybe I'd just settle for a blowjob.

True to his word, the kid led me only a block and a half into the darkness and stopped at a tiny adobe house that looked barely big enough to contain two rooms.

"In there," he said.

There was no light on in the house, and from the looks of the neighborhood, no electricity in any of the houses. I told the kid to go in and turn on a light. I stood outside the door while he did so. He lit an oil lamp in the front room, and although there was very little light, I could tell at a glance that there was nobody waiting for me there in ambush. Nobody outside, either. The kid and I seemed to be the only people on the block.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"In there," the boy said, in Spanish, pointing to the other room, in the back of the tiny house. "Twenty dollar," he said.

I gave him the $20. "OK. You get lost, now," I said. The kid left the way we had come, closing the front door behind him.

I pushed aside a cloth covering that separated the two rooms and glanced into the completely dark, evidently windowless back room of the house. There was no light so I retreated into the front room, picked up the oil lamp the boy had lit, and took it with me.