Artesia—Roswell—Ciudad Juarez
—1957 to 1959
And the Band Played the Polka While
She Stripped
Probably because my father was a doctor and held a respected position in the community, it seemed as if my parents always had an innate desire as well as a driving need to be totally respectable in all aspects of their life, and they dutifully tried to instill this trait in their children. With my three sisters they succeeded admirably; with my younger brother and me, perhaps less so.
Like most young teenage males, at the age of fifteen I had a very strong and healthy interest in women and sex. This interest was fueled initially by the girlie magazines that occupied the higher shelves toward the back of Paul’s Newsstand. Paul was a crotchety old man with stuttering speech and a wooden leg, and it was somewhat difficult for him to get around, so he usually remained seated behind the high counter at the front of the store, ignoring what was going on in the back. This gave me the opportunity to thoroughly peruse all of the adult magazines.
My first true appreciation of the female anatomy came from the airbrushed nudes appearing in Playboy magazine and graduated to the titillating and rather risqué men’s magazines with names like Frolic, Escapade, Jem, Rogue, and Sir, which would certainly be considered pretty tame by today’s standards. I also got a big kick out of the raunchy sexual humor of the illustrated men’s joke books like Zippy, in which the girls were always drawn with big boobs and round, shapely butts and the lead character, Zippy, was always trying to bed them.
Toward the back pages of these magazines there was always a plethora of ads promising all kinds of delights, which could be ordered by mail, that one could enjoy in the privacy of one’s own home. Photographs of “totally nude” models, the little pocket-size eight-page comic books known as “Tijuana Bibles,” 8mm “stag movies” in which famous strippers such as Sally Rand and Tempest Storm “bared all,” photos hinted as being strongly pornographic and catering to virtually every spectrum of sexual desires, and even a supposedly aphrodisiac pill called the Spanish Fly.
Nearly all of these ads specified that the merchandise described was “the real thing” and it would be sent to you in a plain brown wrapper. Most of it was relatively inexpensive. Of course, these ads were all rip-offs. The 8mm movies of Sally Rand and Tempest Storm didn’t show much of anything; the important parts we really wanted to see were covered by bubbles and fans. However, I did enjoy having those short little films, especially the movie in which a beautiful young Tempest Storm performed an abridged version of one of her famous burlesque routines. I ran her film through the projector so many times that the sprockets became damaged and it eventually just wore out.
Back when I was ten years old and attending summer camp in Arkansas, one of my cabinmates used to constantly play a record by the Andrews Sisters called Strip Polka, which told the story of a stripper named Queenie, the principal attraction and cutie of the burlesque show. And how the band would play the polka while she stripped. This song always ran through my mind as I watched Tempest strip in the 8mm film that I had bought of her. Many years later, I would get to meet Tempest Storm in person and be able to tell her how much I enjoyed watching her perform.
There was only one little ad that delivered the real goods, and that was from a place in Mexico City called Exotic Art Studio. You can imagine my surprise one day when I opened a regular envelope with Mexican postage stamps to find a set of real, genuine hardcore postcard-size pornographic photos that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Of course, the people depicted on them weren’t particularly young or even attractive, but at least this mail order operator delivered the real thing, which was what he had advertised.
It was at the Eastern New Mexico State Fair in Roswell, New Mexico, where I first saw the intimate details of a grown woman’s vagina for the first time in my life.
The woman was rather ordinary-looking and somewhere in her middle or late twenties, with very pale skin and straight black hair that hung down well past her shoulders. One of the really nice things about her was her very shapely buttocks. I was close enough to notice the familiar smell of talcum powder emanating from her body.
As I carefully studied her, I could see that she was thin but not overly so, and she had medium-sized, slightly pendulous breasts with large, dark areolae and a slightly protruding belly with a small appendix scar and faint signs of stretch marks. The skillful way that she applied her eye makeup, however, made her look much more attractive than she actually was when seen up close.
On an impulse I had bought a ticket for the show in a tent that advertised a variety of sideshow freaks along with the main attraction, supposedly a beautiful hoochie-coochie dancer performing the exotic and forbidden legendary Death Dance of the Seven Veils. Sure sounded exciting. And I was certainly not really expecting to see what I eventually would see. Like everything else at a carnival, I had expected that part of the show to also be a rip-off.
As the final attraction, the dancer came on to the fanfare of recorded music and performed a lame and mostly uninspired version of the Dance of the Seven Veils to the beat of a scratchy record. She appropriately shed seven garish silk scarves, and by the end of the dance she was still in some kind of twisted silk bikini.
As the people started leaving the tent, the barker, who had been doing all the announcing, called out for all adult males over the age of twenty-one to stay. I was only fifteen, but I was curious, so I shuffled back behind a couple of tall young cowboys and stayed. No one seemed to mind, however, so I stood there waiting nervously to see what was going to happen.
When most of the other people had cleared out of the tent, the barker announced in a slightly lowered voice that for the paltry sum of five dollars per person the beautiful dancer had agreed to put on a “private show,” during which, he assured us, we would “see it all—the forbidden fruit in all of its glory, for educational purposes only!”
Some of the men left after this announcement, but I reached into my pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. The barker came around and collected the money and his gaze lingered on me a little longer than was comfortable, but he eventually moved on, intent on collecting more money.
I noticed that the dancer had wheeled a cloth-covered rectangular box, about four feet long and three feet wide and two feet high, onto the center of the stage. After he had collected all of the money, the barker put on the same scratchy record and the dancer proceeded into her “private show,” which involved teasingly removing the eighth veil—a much longer silk scarf that had been twisted around to form the bikini top covering her breasts.
All the men in the tent were looking on intently as she began tenderly and provocatively playing with her breasts until her overly long nipples stood out hard and erect. This went on for longer than I thought it should have when finally she reached down and began unknotting the ninth and final veil. Everyone looked on expectantly as she coyly toyed with us until she finally whipped it off, revealing a narrow, untrimmed crop of black public hair, which she bashfully played at covering with her hands. But much to my surprise, this was not the end of the show.
The stripper suddenly turned away from us and all eyes were riveted on her shapely butt as she walked over to the box in the center of the stage. She climbed onto the box on all fours as she continued swaying to the music. Then she brought her body around so she was sitting on the box, directly facing us.
A loud collective gasp could be heard throughout the tent as she smiled and spread her legs wide open and then quickly closed them before spreading them again. It seemed as if everyone had begun to inch closer to her as she shamelessly revealed the forbidden fruit in all of its glory. I couldn’t believe what I was actually seeing.
Then the stripper lifted her legs high in the air, straight up, and she smiled as she unashamedly spread them apart, allowing her dark vaginal lips to gape open so we could all gaze into that mysterious deep, dark hole. I’d never seen anything like that before in my life, and I became somewhat self-conscious and could feel the heat of the blood rushing to my face. I ventured a look around and saw that all the other men were staring slack-jawed at the very same thing.
Then the stripper swiveled her buttocks, planted her feet toward the end of the box, arched her back and began undulating her hips in time with the music. Everyone moved slowly around so as to get a better view. When the music ended, so did the show. I walked out of the tent somewhat stunned and immediately turned around and bought a ticket for the next show.
Naturally, I stayed once again for the “special show” and as I offered up my last five dollars I noticed that the barker no longer paid any special attention to me. This time I stayed toward the front, and during the show the dancer moved close to me and whispered in my ear, “You must like the show.”
I nodded and noted that her body smelled of talcum powder and her breath smelled not unpleasantly but unmistakably of onions. She must have eaten a hot dog between shows. Later as I was passing by the tent, I saw her standing around the side of it eating a big red apple. When she saw me, she winked at me, before returning her full attention to the apple.
Perhaps it was this early interest in what might be considered the “forbidden fruit” that would somehow lead to my career choice later in life. Now I was anxious to learn about this great mystery called sex.
My serious sexual education began a year or so later in the whorehouses on the back streets of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. It all began back home in Artesia one summer morning while I was having a serious conversation with my newly found friend Henry Rodriquez. Henry was a really nice guy, almost a year older than I was, but we were in the same class. While we were talking, the subject of girls happened to come up. Henry was a good-looking guy and I was sure there was no shortage of girls chasing after him, but I was going through a period of very low self-esteem. I was certain that there were no girls around who would find me attractive or want to go out with me.
I said, somewhat wistfully, “Man, you know something? For once I sure would like to get laid.”
“You’ve never been laid, man?” he said with amazement.
“Never,” I shook my head forlornly. “Have you?”
“Once, man,” he replied.
I stood in awe at the sexually experienced friend who stood before me. Here I was, a cool and sophisticated sixteen-year-old, and I was still a virgin. “Who’d you do it with?” I asked.
“Some whore down in Juarez,” Henry replied as if it were nothing special. “Cost me ten bucks.”
“Wow!” I knew that Juarez was a Mexican border town just across the bridge from El Paso.
“Yeah, later someone told me I could have got it for five.”
“That’s not what I meant, man. So it’s easy to get laid down in Juarez?” I asked.
“Easy! Shit, man, you go into one of those places and they’re all over you. Some of ’em are really chula, too, you know ese. We should go down there—you know, so you don’t have to be no virgin no more.”
The thought of breaking my cherry with some chula whore down in Juarez was sounding pretty good to me. Just the very idea of the new experience of stepping onto foreign soil seemed exciting. “When can we go?” I asked.
“I’ll see if Alex wants to go,” Henry said, warming to the idea. Alex Torres was a friend of Henry’s who had a car. He called Alex. “Alex says he wants to go but we’re all going to have to chip in for the gas. If we leave in the next couple hours we can be there by late afternoon, spend the night there, and drive back tomorrow.”
I went home to change my clothes and pick up some money. I told my dad that I was going on a fishing trip with some friends. I really didn’t like lying to him, but I sincerely felt that getting my cherry busted was something of great importance, something that I just had to do. I felt even guiltier when he told me to be careful and have fun.
An hour or so later, Alex pulled up in an old clunker that sounded like it was on its last legs. “What a piece of shit car that is,” I commented. “You sure it can make it?”
“It may not look like much,” Alex replied defensively, “but this old car has made hundreds of trips down there. Besides, the radio works great!”
Henry and I piled into Alex’s old Chevy, and as we left Artesia, “Yakety Yak,” the Coasters’ big hit from the previous year, was blasting away on the car radio’s speakers. We headed down the highway south through Carlsbad toward the Mexican border town of Juarez. Alex turned to me and said, “I hear you’re going to get your cherry busted.”
“You heard right,” I said to him. I could hardly wait. “That’s the plan, if this old junker is able to make it all the way down there.”
“Well cross your fingers,” Alex held up his right hand showing two crossed fingers.
“I thought you said that making it down there wouldn’t be a problem,” I reminded him.
“Just keep on crossing your fingers,” he said, and we all laughed.
By the time we finally arrived in El Paso, Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” was rocking the airwaves and we were eagerly rocking along with it. The car did make it to the border, but just barely, and we parked it in a dirt lot on the El Paso side near the crossing bridge. Then we got out and walked across the long bridge spanning the Rio Grande, which separated the United States of America from Mexico, on over to the border town of Juarez. Although it’s called a border town, Juarez is actually more like a border city, with a teeming population, at that time, of well over a million people. It was and still is a much larger city than El Paso, its American counterpart.
Stepping off the bridge into Mexico seemed like stepping into a whole new world. It seemed so strange that one could simply walk across a bridge and suddenly be in a foreign country. Even the air seemed to smell different. The buildings and the signs were in a different language, and the hustle and bustle in the streets created an almost exotic, unfamiliar, and uniquely foreign atmosphere.
As the sky darkened into evening, the lights began to come on. Bright, gaudy neon signs on Avenida Juarez spoke of the bawdy and exciting nightlife. We walked around for a while, and ate a big but relatively inexpensive meal of steak and the local Juarez Cruz Blanca cerveza at the Dominguez Café to fuel us up for our wild night on the town.
The three of us each invested a nickel and bought a pack of the Mexican-made Faro cigarettes. The heady aroma of strong, black Mexican tobacco and sweet cigarette paper seemed to go with the ambiance that we found ourselves in.
As we walked farther down Avenida Juarez, smoking our Faros, several of the more enterprising shopkeepers beckoned to us from the entrances of their shops, trying to pull us into their smal, one-man stores with enticements ranging from gaudily decorated sombreros, suede jackets, piñatas, pottery, blankets, handmade hunting knives, and other cheaper souvenirs.
A few of them whispered promises of dirty books and playing cards, and even little plastic vials of Spanish Fly.
On a whim, we ended up going into one of the most promising of the shops, where Alex bought a white push-button stiletto knife, bargaining the man down from five dollars to three.
As we continued to walk down the street, Alex kept flipping it open. “Might need it for protection down here, you know,” Alex said. “Never can tell what’s going to happen.”
“Hey that sounds like a good idea—I think I’ll get one myself,” I said and we went back to the shop.
With the thought of protection implanted in my mind, I bought a smaller switchblade, with a somewhat elaborately embossed golden dragon against a deep red background, for the sum of three dollars. The happy merchant was now anxious to make further sales, but we said we’d be back to see more later and left.
It seemed like we had been walking forever so I asked, “When are we going to go to the whorehouse?”
Henry answered, “We’re almost there.”
Alex said, “Take it easy, man. You’re so anxious you’re going to shoot your load before you even get it in her.”
The Waikiki #2 Club on Avenida Mariscal seemed to be an appropriate enough place for my first sexual experience.
I saw that instead of a nightclub, the place looked more like a bar with a kind of living room inside of it. Where the pool table would have been, three long sofas were arranged in a horseshoe fashion with coffee tables in front of each of them. On the sofas sat five bored Mexican women of varying ages, appearances, and sizes. Their eyes looked up to follow us, like predators honing in on their prey, as we headed to the bar.
Apparently it was still a little early for business because there was no one sitting at the bar. Although it boasted a wide variety of hard liquor, we sat down on the stools and ordered three Cruz Blancas, the local Chihuahua brand of beer and also the cheapest beer served everywhere.
In Mexico we could drink even though we were underage without being hassled. When the bartender brought our beers over to us, three of the women lazily got up from the nearby sofas and walked over to us.
The one that stood next to me appeared to be the youngest. She wasn’t particularly pretty but she was pleasant-looking, short and a little stocky but pretty well-endowed. The first four words she spoke to me were,“Buy me a drink?”
I looked at Henry and he shrugged his shoulders and asked me, “Well, do you like her?”
I didn’t really know what to say, so I said, “Sure.”
Henry asked the bartender how much her drink was and he held up two fingers indicating what I assumed was two dollars. I nodded to the bartender and he brought her a glass with some kind of colored liquid in it.
In the meantime, the two other women had been pestering Henry and Alex to buy them a drink but they shook their heads and told them in Spanish, “We’re just here for him.” Then he said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand to the girl sitting next to me and she nodded her head.
My girl took my arm and led me over to one of the sofas. The woman sitting there got up and left to make a place for me. I nervously chugged my beer and the girl sitting beside me sipped on the brightly colored drink that I had bought for her. It kind of looked like strawberry soda, and I wondered if it had any alcohol in it at all.
From time to time, I looked over at Henry and Alex, who were still sitting at the bar quietly nursing their beers. The two women were still sitting next to them but they all seemed to be ignoring each other.
“You Chino?” the prostitute asked. I knew the Spanish word for “Chinese person,” so I nodded in the affirmative. She looked at my face carefully. “What color you eyes?” she asked. I had been asked that before. My eyes are a sort of hazel but sometimes the lighting in a place makes them look almost green.
“What color do you think they are?”
She moved closer and looked deeply into my eyes, then shrugged her shoulders and downed her drink in a single gulp and I immediately realized that the time for small talk was now over. “Come,” she said, taking a firm hold of my hand as she stood up. I followed her to a narrow hallway with a number of small rooms leading off of it.
The whore led me into one of the rooms, which was furnished simply with a bed, a small wooden nightstand, a single wooden chair, and a battered old painted wooden dresser upon which a cracked mirror was attached.
She motioned for me to sit on the bed, and then she looked at herself in the cracked mirror and straightened out her hair before she sat next to me and began gently rubbing her hand over my crotch.
She asked me, quite casually, “You wan’ sucky, or you wan’ fucky, or you wan’ sucky-fucky?”
I was such a novice at this that the sucky part of the equation hadn’t really occurred to me, so I answered “How much for the fucky?”
“Fifteen,” she replied.
“Dollars?” I asked, trying to appear startled.
“Sí dollars, Chinito, no pesos, only dollars!”
The first thing that came into my mind was what Henry had said to me back in Artesia, so I countered with, “How about five?”
She gave me an exasperated look and sighed. “This you first time, no?”
“Yes,” I replied in all honesty.
“Then for you I going to do it for only ten.”
I hesitated but she seemed to be more than prepared to wait me out, so I finally gave in and told her, “All right—ten.”
She smiled and reached out her right hand, and I realized that I had to pay her now and not afterward. I hoped that I wasn’t being scammed as I reluctantly reached into my jeans pocket, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She put it in her left hand and held out her right hand again.
“One dollar more for the propho,” she said.
I had no idea what a propho was but I handed her a single anyway.
She got up and said, “You wait for me—I be back,” and she left the room. I looked at the well-worn bedspread that I was sitting on and hoped that it was at least somewhat sanitary, although I definitely had my doubts.
After what seemed like an eternity, the door finally opened and a small, shriveled-up old lady came in carrying a roll of toilet paper. She was so old that even her wrinkles had wrinkles. My jaw suddenly dropped and the first thing that raced into my mind was: oh no—what is this—some kind of bait and switch? I grew even more uneasy when she moved in close to me and indicated for me to take down my pants.
“Wait a minute,” I said, growing somewhat uneasy, but she simply smiled a toothless smile and proceeded to unzip and take down my pants. She unrolled some of the toilet paper, pulled down my underwear, and carefully examined my penis. Then she nodded her head and smiled, put the roll of toilet paper on the nightstand, and walked out of the room, leaving me with my underwear down and my pants around my legs.
Almost immediately, my prostitute returned to the room carrying a small white enamel basin containing warm water and a white face cloth, which she also put on the nightstand. Then she undressed—quite normally and matter-of-factly and not at all like a stripper. She placed each piece of her apparel carefully over the dresser and when she was totally naked I noticed that she was a little chunkier than she had appeared with her clothes on.
She came over and sat on the bed. “Well, Chinito,” she said, stroking my hair. “You going to take off your clothes?”
I had always been reluctant about undressing in front of other people, even in the locker room for gym class at school. I’d survived that and I’d even survived the communal shower experiences at boy’s camp in Arkansas. But I’d never undressed in front of a woman before. I suppose it was finally time to overcome this phobia. I shyly took off my pants and underwear and shirt and put them on the wooden chair. I already had an erection from watching her undress.
She beckoned me over to the bed, and as I stood before her she reached over and stroked my erection, making it even harder. Then she retrieved a foil packet, which she tore open before removing a condom. Of course! The propho I’d paid an additional dollar for was nothing more than a simple “fucking rubber.” She carefully unrolled the rubber onto my anxious penis.
Then she laid herself down on the bed and spread her legs as I moved myself over her. She reached down and inserted me with her hand and as I pushed in to the hilt I experienced a feeling of soft and pleasurable warmth down there such as I had never felt before. So this is what it was all about, I thought, as I plowed into her the way I thought I should be doing it. She was making little gasps, and as I drove into her as hard as I could, a low moan seemed to escape from her lips and all of a sudden I felt myself ejaculating. I had lasted all of about thirty seconds before it was all over, almost as quickly as it had begun. I felt somewhat embarrassed at this unexpected turn of events.
“Ay, Chinito,” she said breathlessly, “you come too quick.”
I could feel my face turning red not only because of this but also because the propho had come off when I pulled myself out of her, quite messily splattering my collected sperm all over her. She reached down and retrieved the rubber, which was full of my spending, and said, “So much, you,” before wrapping it in a handful of toilet paper and tossing it on the floor. Then she cleaned herself off with more toilet paper before dipping the face towel into the warm water and gently cleaning me off.
After she finished cleaning me, she cleaned herself before walking over to the dresser where she quickly slipped on her panties and began reaching for her dress.
“Wait a minute,” I said, not wanting to go back out and face my friends so quickly. I knew that if I did so I’d surely never be able to live it down. So I asked her, “Can we—do it again?”
She was still holding her dress as she looked over at me. “You think you ready to do again?” she asked suspiciously.
I looked down at my still erect penis and told her, “I’m ready.”
She sighed and put her dress back down on top of the dresser and slipped out of her underwear. “Going to cost you double,” she said.
I had the money but I decided to bargain her down again. I walked over to where my pants were, reached into my pocket, and pulled out a five. “How about a five this time?”
She hesitated a moment, then sighed and took the five-dollar bill before saying, “But going to cost you one dollar more for new propho!” I gladly forked over the additional dollar. The girl was beginning to look more and more attractive in spite of the fact that she was built like a little football player. She had nice eyes—that’s what it was. The second time lasted much longer, and I enjoyed it much more. Even she seemed to be enjoying it somewhat, although in retrospect I think she was probably just faking it to get me off faster.
When I got back to the bar, Henry and Alex were still there sitting in the same place, but the whores that had been sitting next to them were now sitting with some other customers.
“What took you so long?” Henry asked.
“I did it twice,” I proudly answered.
“Wow, did she charge you double?”
“Nah,” I lied. “She gave it to me for free. I think she liked me. It’s the color of my eyes, you know. For some reason the girls seem to like it.”
“You’re so full of bullshit,” Alex said, and we all laughed.
When we headed out in search of further adventure, I left that place a man. We walked boldly down the late-night streets of Juarez. I found the very smell of the place exhilarating.
We had to take a taxi to our next stop, which was a place called Irma’s, at the far edge of the city. Neither Henry nor Alex had ever been there, although they had heard about the place. “They got the finest girls there,” Alex said. “Not like those dogs at the last place we were at. Hell,” he continued, looking at me, “you got the best one.”
“So that’s why you guys didn’t do anything there. You were saving it up for this place.”
“Yeah,” they said in unison, and I wondered why we just didn’t come here in the first place—but I supposed that they must have had their reasons, so I decided not to say anything.
Irma’s certainly turned out to be a much fancier place. The bar was much larger and more elaborate, and the large front room sported luxurious curved sectionals. The girls here appeared to be younger, much more attractive, and stylishly dressed. It seemed as if we had definitely come to the right place. We went up to the bar and ordered Cruz Blancas.
“No Cruz Blanca. We have Carta Blanca,” the bartender informed us, as if by making this statement we should now realize that we were in a higher-class place.
These Carta Blanca beers turned out to be more expensive than the Cruz Blancas, and we were beginning to wonder if we could actually afford to be in this fancy place.
Three attractive young Irma’s whores walked up to us, and Henry asked one of them something in Spanish. The girl replied and Henry whispered to me, “She said twenty-five dollars for a straight fuck.”
The girl that had moved in next to me was not only pretty but had huge tits, which were amply displayed by her low-cut dress. In fact, I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of them and I felt myself becoming urgently aroused again. “What do you think?” I asked.
Henry looked at Alex and Alex nodded. “We can go for it, how about you?”
I replied, “Why not?”
One of the girls asked us if we wanted to get another round of drinks. Henry said, “The drinks here cost almost twice as much as at that other place. Let’s skip the preliminaries and head directly to the rooms.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I responded.
Henry said something more to the girls in Spanish and they looked a little put out but agreed, so we all headed on over to the back rooms. This time the room appeared to be a little cleaner, if not more luxurious. The same inspection routine that had happened at the other place also happened here.
The only different thing this time around, aside from the pleasant fact that the girl was prettier and had much larger boobs, was that instead of lasting only thirty seconds I lasted a good thirty minutes or so. I was sort of proud of myself. Maybe I was finally starting to get the hang of this sex thing after all.
By the time we headed back to the car to head on home, Henry and I were pretty drunk and Alex, who would be driving us back, was not so much. After we crossed the border back into El Paso, we stumbled into a small, dingy side-street tattoo parlor that still happened to be open.
The owner, an old bald-headed guy, who looked as if he had a metal plate embedded in the top of his head, eyed us suspiciously.
“I’m gonna get another tattoo,” Henry said. He already had one so this would be his second.
“You sure you guys can pay for it?” the cynical tattoo artist asked.
“Sure I can,” Henry replied, pulling out his money.
“I’m gonna get one, too,” I said decisively as I pulled out my money. While Henry got his tattoo, I tried to focus my eyes on all the designs on the wall to pick one out. Alex simply looked bored as he curled up on one of the chairs and dropped off to sleep.
After he finished tattooing Henry, the tattoo artist turned to me and asked, “You picked one out yet?”
“Yeah,” I answered even though I hadn’t. I tried to focus my bleary eyes as I pointed at one of the designs.
“All right,” the tattoo artist said. “Sit down in this here chair. Where do you want it?”
“What?” I asked, still standing there before him.
The tattoo artist sighed and looked at me as if I were some kind of idiot child before bringing his hairy finger up and lengthily picking his nose, eventually flicking the offending booger unceremoniously onto the floor in front of me. “The tattoo,” he continued, “where do you want it?”
“Same place where he got his,” I muttered, nodding my head toward Henry who had taken the seat next to Alex and was beginning to nod off himself. “But you’re going to wash your hands first, aren’t you?”
The tattoo artist glared at me before reaching for a bottle of alcohol and pouring it into his palm and over his fingers before making a show of cleaning his hands off with a paper towel. I sat down in that there chair where he indicated and before I knew it, the buzzing electronic tattoo needle was penetrating the soft flesh of my upper right arm. It didn’t hurt all that much, or at least as much as I had expected, probably because I was so drunk at that point. And from that point on everything about the rest of that night and the trip back to Artesia is a little hazy. I think that I slept a good deal of the way home.
What I remember clearly is that when I woke up the next morning in my bed at home I was suffering from a terrible hangover. I suddenly realized that my head and my upper right arm were sore, and then what I had done the previous night came back to me. When I removed the taped-on gauze bandage on my arm, I saw perhaps the ugliest tattoo of a skull with a knife going through it that I had ever seen.
I groaned and silently asked myself, “What have I done?” But I soon came to the realization that what was done was done and I would have to live with it. But then a smile came across my face. Now I was no longer a virgin. Hell, I had been laid and gotten a tattoo all in the same night! Surely I was really a man now. But in spite of this, I would also have to spend the next few months keeping the tattoo on my arm hidden from my parents.
When I told my friend Gary Welch about my Juarez adventure, his eyes widened and he began getting ideas about getting his own cherry broken as well.
One weekend, while Gary’s parents had gone out of town and he had the house all to himself, he invited Henry and me to come over. We were sitting in his living room enjoying drinks from his father’s well-stocked bar when the subject of going down to Juarez came up. We all agreed that it seemed like a good idea, but Henry said that we needed a car.
Gary told us that we could use his parent’s Oldsmobile to take us down south, but we had to disconnect the spedometer to hide the fact that we had made the trip. This was accomplished easily enough.
While Gary carefully poured water into the liquor bottles we had drunk from to approximate their previous levels, I called my parents and told them that I was having a weekend sleepover at Gary’s house. Then the three of us headed for Juarez in search of further fun and erotic adventure.
This experience in Juarez proved even more fun for me than the previous one, perhaps because I now had reached the point where I knew the ropes.
We arrived during the late afternoon, had a quick meal at a café, then had some drinks at a bizarre but popular basement bar called the Cavern of Music in order to bolster our courage before going over to the infamous Waikiki #2 Club where Gary would lose his virginity and I would continue my education in intercultural relations.
In the next couple of years, after Gary and I started attending the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, we and some of our other friends from the boarding school would continue our sacred pilgrimages to that wide-open town south of the border whenever the opportunity arose. In those days, promiscuous sex was much safer than it is now, as were the seedy bordellos of Juarez, and even the border city itself.
Nowadays, with the extreme violence of the drug cartels and the lucrative underground market for organ transplants, it’s a totally different story. But back in the old days it was a fascinating place for adventurous young men teetering on the brink of adulthood. Fortunately, one of our mutual friends at the Institute, Marty Tovar, lived in El Paso, and he provided an excuse for spending a couple of days there. Our parents were none the wiser. Perhaps the lessons I learned in the wild nightclubs and bawdy whorehouses of Juarez would, in the future, help me enormously in the course of both my personal and professional life.