Veracruz, Mexico. 1974.
She didn’t ask me anything about me. None of the usual shit, where did I come from, where was I going. Why, what, where, when, who, all that shit. She didn’t care, I liked that.
Maybe it was because I was just another trick. I just liked that she talked freely and openly with me and told me of herself, her life, took me into the world of HER. Shit, any fucking world that I was welcome to was always better than the one that I came from….
I wondered if she felt that way too, if anyone else on earth really did but me.
Anyway, for her, who I was, where I came from and why I was sitting there now was all irrelivant and unimportant… and that was just fucking fine by me.
What fully mattered was this moment and the strange bond that attracted and repulsed me at the same time.
As she chattered in my ear, of course her story was a horror story of sorts… Like most people’s stories. But the way she told it, with that little lustful lively flashing madness and staccato little rhythmic voice, it sounded like a fairy tale. And I guessed it was a little of both. Like most people’s…
We were both old and jaded and young and innocent enough to see it that way too… and maybe she knew that I knew that. And maybe it gave her the freedom to just spill it… Or maybe I was just another anonymous ear like so many others coming and going in the ancient port. Coming and going before we were born and coming and going long after we’d be long gone, dead and buried…
She had that ancient, timeless quality of the port. And maybe for that reason more than any other she probably was just open and forthright and natural that way and it didn’t matter who was listening…
She probably didn’t fucking care, God bless her..
That’s what I liked. And I didn’t care that she didn’t care. Did she know that? Did she care that I didn’t care that she didn’t care?
I didn’t care, and maybe that made it all the better for us both.
She’d been around those bars all her life, she told me, from the time she was a baby in her mother’s drunken shadow. She’d grown up in these streets, these bars, they’d been her home and her school and her family, all that…
Her mother’d been a street vender and a hooker and had brought her up to be the same. Selling chiclettes and trinkets and flowers from table to table… and then one day when she was deemed old enough, her mom had turned her out to a traveling Mariachi who was flush and eager to bust a tropical cherry. From then on it had been into the whoring life for Lupe…
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2009.
Yo Ho Yo HO!
It’s a Whorin’ Life fer me!
Yeah, we’re not in kansas anymore.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT?
zactly.