Mexico - 8. Chapter 8 of 16

Despite our middle school Spanish, Mark and I managed to find a hotel. We sort of tag-teamed it. One of us would grin stupidly at whoever we were trying to talk with, to show we were harmless, while the other would flip desperately through the dictionary of my Spanish textbook, looking for useful phrases.
“Hotel” wasn’t that hard. It was almost universal. “Sleep” was okay. Dormir. “Night.” Noche. “Cheap.” Barato. “Clean.” No cucurachas. You could probably dance that part. But the directions were hard. Two or three times, we thought we had just what we wanted, only to get lost in unmarked turns.
“I could get rich in this place by selling street signs,” Mark decided.
“First, you’d have to convince people to use them.”
Everyone seemed to use landmarks instead. La bodega. La escuela. Or norte. Sur.
“Lucky they don’t guide us by the sun,” I mentioned.
It was going down.
But just as buildings were starting to turn on their lights, we found a nice enough place to spend the night. It had a pretty little courtyard with lots of plants. A small, pleasant lobby with a pretty girl behind the desk. And up a twisting stairway, a tiny room.
“What do you expect for thirty bucks?” Mark said, as he tested what I guessed he’d chosen as his bed. Mine was a narrow aisle away, against the opposite wall. There were no mirrors, no pictures, no curtains, and only basic shutters on the one window which opened on the courtyard below. There was no phone, no TV, no clock, not even a Bible. There was a undersized, dark wooden table between the beds, squatting under the window, but it didn’t even have a drawer. On the wall opposite it, past our plain iron footboards, Christ was being killed in the most agonizing way. Fortunately, he was only the size of a cheap teddy bear. To his right, through an open archway near the hallway door, was a shrunken bathroom, barely containing a toilet, a sink, and a shower.
Mark looked around, grinning. “Clean,” he said.
We smiled at the boy who was carting my knapsack. He’d been summoned by the girl behind the desk and could have been her ten-year-old brother. I wondered how much you had to tip child labor and gave him a buck. It was just then that I realized there were no electric lights. There was a single candle in a stand on the table and another one clinging to the cracked top of the toilet. On the ceiling in the main room, there was an empty fixture, and there was another one over the bathroom sink, besides the space that should have been a mirror. But there were no bulbs or switches. I pointed this out to Mark, in case he hadn’t noticed.
He was lying on his bed, eyes closed.
“You mind?” he asked, when I told him about the lights. “Just give me an hour.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll go down and get some bulbs. I’ll bet they go on as soon as you screw them in.”
I could easily do that. The room’s ceiling was high, but it was accessible if I stood on the bed.
Mark was already asleep when I left. I closed the heavy door quietly and went down to the lobby. The pretty girl was apologetic, but she didn’t have any extra bulbs. I understood that in the same way she got “bulbs” and “extra” from me. I started with something about flowers -- bulbos -- which my textbook helped me correct to bombillas -- “light bulbs.” That sounded more menacing, but it was correct. The desk girl looked for some bombillas. I helped her look. I even politely suggested borrowing one of the six hearty bulbs in the chandelier above her desk. I mimed how I could stretch to the nearest one by carefully balancing on the desk. She was amused but didn’t seem very encouraging. So I continued to smile and said I’d go out and buy some. She smiled, too, but didn’t even offer us a discount. Though she did give me a book of matches.
I had no luck buying light bulbs, but I was kind of working against myself. Asking for bombillas almost scared me, so I was mainly hunting through stores on my own. And most of the shops sold clothes. Still, the section of town I was wandering through seemed very nice. I found a couple of restaurants, but they didn’t seem to have bars. I found a couple of bars, but they didn’t seem to serve the kind of food I wanted for dinner. “Seem” was important, because I was never really sure what I was seeing. Or hearing. Or sometimes even asking. As before, I could pose simple questions and state them clearly and well. Then the answers came back in quick, unrecognizable Spanish, almost always accompanied by a grin. The same grin I got when I sometimes broke down and finally asked, “¿Habla Inglés?” Only those grins were accompanied by sad shakes of people’s heads.
When it seemed around eight o’clock, I went back to the hotel. The pretty girl was still at the desk, and she smiled but seemed to have forgotten why I’d gone out. I mimed “empty-handed,” but she didn’t get it, so I headed upstairs. The steps got increasingly darker as I moved further from the lobby. On the upper landing, there was another table as small as the one in our room. It held a lit, flickering candle. With its quivering help, I found our unnumbered room and glanced down the dark corridor to another, distant candle. Earlier, the hallways were lit by skylights.
In our room, I lit the candle then almost didn’t wake Mark. He seemed pretty far gone, and since we’d been snacking all day, it’s not like he really needed to eat. . But he’d mentioned getting drunk, and I didn’t want to deprive him of that. Besides, it sounded good.
Drinking wasn’t something I did a lot, and it wasn’t something I would have thought of on my own. I wasn’t a solitary drinker. During the first week I was traveling, when I was sleeping in my car, I mostly stayed out till it was time for bed. I’d purposely have a late dinner or go to a movie. A couple of times, I turned in early and tried to read by flashlight. But the position was uncomfortable, and my light attracted bugs. I didn’t read all that much anyway.
The thing I really missed was my computer. I considered bringing my laptop, and I could always have kept it locked in my car. But once I got to the dig, I wasn’t going to spend the summer in my Chevy. Also, everyone I spoke to said laptops in Mexico were even hotter than American cars. It was the new version of Montezuma’s revenge. The water was safe, but people would steal your drinking glass. That’s probably why there were no light bulbs in our room.
While Mark slept, I headed to the bathroom, surprised by how much light a single candle gave off. The main time I used candles was while making love with Chris. But those were smaller, in frosted glass bowls. This one was white, eight inches tall, and shining like a torch.
I carried it with me, to light the smaller candle on the toilet. This was mostly to save matches -- the book the girl gave me only had a few. I was trying to be quiet, but when I flushed the toilet, it roared and rumbled, and when I ran water in the sink, the pipes clanked like next year’s Christmas ghosts. Still, there was plenty of pressure, even when I tested the shower.
In the room, Mark was sitting up on his bed. “What time is it?” he asked. “I can’t read my watch.”
I handed him the candle.
“After eight,” he discovered. “We should get going.”
I took the candle back, set it on the table, then told him about the restaurants “I couldn’t find one with a bar.”
“That’s okay,” he said, grinning. “We can make several stops.”
As quickly as he stood, he pulled his still half-buttoned shirt over his head, then yanked off his pants. “Let me take a shower,” he said. “Sounds like it works.”
And he was past me so quickly, I mainly saw his dim receding butt. He was five feet away, then totally lost as he disappeared into the john. Still, that was okay. He had to come back.
So I lay on my bed, the only place to sit beside his. I propped the thin pillow against the wall behind my head, to give me the best casual view of Mark getting dressed. I wasn’t worried about him noticing me. In a room that small, my bed was the logical place for me to be. And a guy who pisses openly in a field isn’t going to turn shyly away to slip into his shorts. Especially in near darkness.
He was back in maybe five minutes, wrapped in one skimpy towel and using our other one to dry his hair. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t going to shower till morning, and both towels would be dry by then. I didn’t think of asking downstairs for extras. I was sure they were stored with the bulbs.
“That feels better,” Mark said. “And the nap really helped. I’ve almost forgotten why I’m depressed.”
He didn’t seem to be. But he also seemed good at covering things.
He finished drying his hair, then sat down on his bed and started using the same towel on his feet. As he brought his first foot up to his knee, the towel around his waist loosened, and when that foot when back to the floor and his other foot came up, the towel opened and sat loosely under him. Not that I could see a lot, except that he had a nice chest, with the dark hair I’d glimpsed earlier thickening as it continued downward. And he had good arms. You could tell he worked out. Then he stood to pick up his shorts, and for a moment, he was fully naked in front of me.
Then he pulled on his pants and shirt, and turned automatically to the bathroom, running his fingers through his hair. I knew what he was going for so wasn’t surprised when he was back in seconds.
“Forgot there’s no mirror,” he said.
Your hair looks fine, I wanted to tell him. But that was something else I wasn’t supposed to notice.
“It’s usually okay,” he went on, as I lay there, grinning at the memory of his body. “I’m lucky that way. But I always like to check.”
“There’s a mirror in the lobby,” I reminded him. “And better light.”
“Great.”
He put on his socks and shoes, tucked in his shirt, then pulled it out again. “No more lawyer,” he said, laughing, then added, “Let’s go.”
I let him get to the hallway before I blew out the candle. Passing the john, I pinched out that candle and followed Mark down the steps.
In the lobby, the girl was looking at a trash American magazine, though she couldn’t have been reading it any more than I read the Mexican newspapers. She was slouched in what could have been a two- hundred-year-old chair with her feet up on what might have been an ancient burial chest. A radio I hadn’t noticed before was playing Mexican pop, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else around. But she didn’t seem to be expecting anyone, either.
“Buenas noches,” she said.
“Buenas noches,” we replied, Mark already at the mirror, finger-combing his hair. The girl watched him happily.
Out past the courtyard, the street was fairly busy, well lit by overhead lights. Mark and I walked a few blocks while I showed him the restaurants and bars. He picked a restaurant, and said I could choose the first bar. “Then I’ll pick the second.”
It had been years since I’d gone to more than one bar in a single night. I mainly had an undergrad bar I liked in Ohio, then a favorite in grad school. In Iowa, Chris and I drank in restaurants, at dinner.
And dinner with Mark was fine. The food wasn’t exactly Mexican, but it wasn’t totally American, either. It was interesting how quickly the two mixed. The waitress spoke more English than we did Spanish, and Mark flirted with her throughout the meal. But so did I.
I always liked flirting with women. It was safe because I wasn’t going to ask them for anything afterwards. Most of them seemed to like that. They got all the attention with none of the stress.
“But what if we want to be asked?” one of my would-be college girlfriends had mentioned. “What if I want you every bit as much as you want me?”
“More,” I could have told her, because I didn’t really want her at all. But she was great fun to be around.
And maybe I flirted with the waitress because I couldn’t flirt with Mark. And maybe he was flirting with her because he could, openly, for the first time in several years. I’d have bet he wouldn’t risk that around Anne. There’d been no sign of it the night before.
When the waitress wasn’t there, and Mark and I weren’t eating, we mostly talked about things we’d seen that day. He didn’t seem interested in going back to anything personal, and that was fine with me. I was increasingly discovering something possibly really shallow about myself: That as much as I was still completely in love with Chris, and as much as I really wanted him back, I could almost entirely forget him when faced with a good-looking naked guy.
And maybe that’s all Chris had been trying to tell me. Maybe he really did love me and wanted to spend his life with me as much as I wanted to spend mine with him. Maybe he just needed to convince himself of that by passing some time with some suddenly available guys.
“How much have you done this before?” I yelled at him after the naked guy on the steps grabbed his jeans and went scrambling out of our house.
“I’d be lying if I said this was even close to the first time,” Chris tried to answer honestly. But it’s not what I wanted to hear.
“How could you?” I demanded.
“You could, too,” he shouted.
And now I was. Well, not doing it, but thinking about it. And that wasn’t how I planned to spend my time in Mexico. I intended to forget for three months. About math. About teaching. About Chris. He was still living in the house we’d rented, and I thought, if I went away for the summer, we might both be able to see things better. After all, we knew each other so well. There was so little reason for us to break up.
“You want coffee?” Mark asked as I was remembering Chris in a hammock. It had been Indian summer, two months after we’d moved to Iowa.
“Sure,” I told Mark, not really back with him yet.
“We don’t have to,” he went on. “We can go straight to drinking.”
We were already drinking. We’d split a bottle of red wine the restaurant was able to serve and were feeling happily loose.
“Then bring on the tequila,” I told Mark, laughing. As I focused on him, Chris began to dim. I tried to hold on, but staring into Mark’s eyes, across the small table, didn’t help. And he just stared back.
“You already buzzed?” he asked. He’d never looked at me that directly for so long.
In answer, I grinned.
“Will I have to carry you back to the hotel? Are you one of those drunks?”
Being carried might be fun, I thought. But I couldn’t picture it. Of course, I said nothing.
The first bar was noisy and jammed. There was a band, and everyone was about our age. Guys were dancing in ways my body would never let me, and I just wanted to watch. The girls were hot, too, but I wouldn’t ever move the way they did. I wanted to be one of those guys.
We got hit on pretty fast. There were four girls staring at us, giggling and talking among themselves. Mark and I smiled back. Maybe the girls were after free drinks. Or maybe they wanted to have fun with the Norte Americanos. It didn’t matter. We were up for it. I tried to get a couple of the girls to teach me to dance the way their guys did. I didn’t want to feel out of place. But even after several tries, I was still doing tight, math teacher steps.
Mark was no better, the couple of times I noticed him. I didn’t see him a lot. There were always other bodies and not a lot of room. The few times we were all sitting down, there was a lot to drink.
The girls took us to a second bar, stopping in an alley to pass a joint. There were still four of them and two of us, though a younger Mexican guy was trailing one of the girls. She pretended not to notice.
“Be nice,” I wanted to tell her. “It doesn’t happen all the time.” But I couldn’t be subtle in Spanish.
The second bar was larger. Two floors. A series of small, connected rooms. Bright colors. Old paint. A balcony. Mark and I kept buying everyone drinks. We were still using American money, and a little of it seemed to last a long time. “You’re sure that’s enough?” I kept asking the girls. But the waiters kept bringing us bottles.
We’d do shots of tequila, then tumblers of beer. They were only small glasses, but it was still a challenge. And we danced. Hot dances. Slow dances. Then we went back to drinking. As much as I drank, I seemed to burn it off, never forgetting who I was or where. I was all set to have sex -- there as no denying that. But not with anyone in that country.
At one point, I wondered what would happen if Mark brought one of the girls back to our room. Even drunk, I couldn’t ignore that. Couldn’t ignore something happening two feet away, especially if I wasn’t distracted by doing the same thing. And what were those chances? If I couldn’t piss openly in a field or dance wildly in public, I wasn’t about to have sex with a girl I didn’t want when a guy I could want was that close by.
I also wondered how old the girls were. I was guessing a little younger than we were, but not by much. I tried to ask. I did, indirectly. But got teasing answers.
“Why do you want to know?” they said. “Do all the girls in America tell their ages? I don’t think so.”
They spoke better English than the girl in our hotel, but maybe there was more reason. From what I understood, one of them was in college, and one worked in a much larger tourist hotel. A third one worked for a company that did a lot of business with America. These weren’t high school kids.
And soon, there were only two. In the second bar, the girl with the Mexican boy after her found a guy she was more interested in. That made the boy disappear. Then the fourth girl vanished, maybe by earlier arrangement. It was getting late, and I knew what was happening. And I decided to let it go. I was dancing looser now. I’d had more to drink than probably in the whole previous year. And Mark was always laughing.
If he was drinking to block Anne, it was working. If he was drunk to celebrate being free, that was working, too. He was happy in a way that was terrific to watch.
The girls saw it as well. His girl was named Tiana. Mine was Adelina.
“When does this place close?” I asked her.
“Not till everyone leaves,” she said. So we kept dancing.
Finally, Mark had one shot too many. He was giggling. It went way beyond laughter. His shirt was open, half the time he was most way out of it, and his once-rolled sleeves were flopping around his wrists. He kept running his hands through his hair, the way I’d seen that afternoon. But now he was saying, “Oh, man.” “Oh, wow.” “Oh, more.”
The girls loved this. They giggled right along. But I kept thinking I’d better get him back to the hotel.
I said something to Adelina. She whispered to Tiana, and it seemed they were also ready to go. I wondered how Mark would handle this.
The girls walked us back to the first bar. That was fine because I had no idea where we really were. Then there was some hot kissing that started as fun but quickly got wild. We were back in the alley, alongside the bar. There was light, but not too much of it. Adelina was standing against the wall, and I leaned against her. But I think the building was keeping Mark up. Though just when I thought the next stop was our hotel, Adelina began to pull away.
Was I doing something was wrong? Was I not good enough? I was certainly having fun.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. “¿Está bien?”
“Oh, sí,” she answered. “Yes. Sí. Grande. But I have to work in the morning.”
It seemed there was only so far you could take these Norte Americanos. Still, it took a while to separate Mark from Tiana.
“He’s so cute,” she went on. “Atractivo. Mas atractivo. Guapo. ”
He was cute, I wanted to agree. But we were all very drunk.
When the girls finally left, after several false endings, Mark was still leaning against the wall. You okay? I wanted to ask him. But he was grinning.
I steered him back to our hotel. I was surprisingly clear-headed for someone who couldn’t walk a straight line. Mark was steadier on his feet, but worse at directions.
“Are you sure we didn’t pass this?” he kept asking. “Are you sure this is right?”
“You keep turning around,” I told him. “You’re dancing to something only you can hear. You only think we’ve been here before.”
“All right,” he allowed, dancing on.
When we found the hotel, unfortunately, the gate was locked. I didn’t even know it closed. I pushed it a few times, then shook it, trying to make sure it wasn’t just stuck. Then I noticed Mark’s watch and saw it was almost three AM. No wonder the girls had to leave. No wonder the courtyard was locked.
It wasn’t a very tall gate, and the open wrought iron offered plenty of places to stick my toes. But the gate was topped with twisted black spikes that I probably couldn’t have negotiated sober. And it was set in a thick stucco wall.
We didn’t have a key. We didn’t even have a room key. When we asked for one, the girl at the desk just smiled. Later, I noticed there weren’t working locks on any of the doors. There was a knocker on the gate, also wrought iron, and I tried banging on that. Gently at first, then louder. I wondered if we’d get attention, and if we did, the wrong kind. The hotel wasn’t exactly isolated. But I hadn’t seen the policía all night.
When banging brought nothing -- the knocker really wasn’t efficient -- I began to call. Again, quietly, at first.
“Abra!” “Abra la puerta!” “Abra la puerta, por favor!”
It really wasn’t a door, and I knew that’s what puerta meant. But there wasn’t much need for “gate” in my high school Spanish.
Mark soon joined me, calling. And he took over the knocker, hammering. He did it much more forcefully than I had.
“Abro!” he called. “Abro el gato!” “Abro el gato, por favor!”
That cracked me up. “That’s cat,” I had to tell him. “You’re shouting Open the cat!”
“What?” he said.
“Gato. It’s cat. Not gate.”
“How do you say gate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then it doesn’t matter. No one’s gonna to hear us, anyway.”
That’s what I’d been thinking
“We’re gonna be here all night,” he went on.
I was already thinking about sleeping in my car. It was just on the street. I was working out the logistics.
The mattress was wide enough for two. If the two people knew each other well. I didn’t want to risk that with Mark. Not with me drunk. Not with him that way. There was a chance he’d fall immediately asleep. But there was a bigger chance he’d roll against me. And that would make me nuts.
I could sleep in the front seat. But with the back seat down, you really couldn’t really tilt the front ones. I’d have to sleep sitting up.
I had my sleeping bag. I used it on top of the mattress so I didn’t have to bother with sheets. I could put it on the ground, next to the car, and sleep there. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but I might not notice.
While I was working this out, Mark kept hammering and shouting.
“Abro!” “Abro el gato!” “Abro el gato, por favor!”
“La puerta!” I corrected. “Abra la puerta! Please!.”
“Gato!” Mark yelled.
“Puerta!”
“Por favor!” we hollered together.
Finally, someone came. Though not who I expected. Though who did I expect? Not the girl at the desk. She probably would have long gone home. Unless this was her home. If this was a family business.
A young guy let us in. He wasn’t the ten-year-old we’d seen before. But he was less than twenty. And he was completely naked. We’d obviously woken him up. He modestly covered his dick with one hand while unlocking the gate with the other.
And he looked exactly like Chris. Well, Chris at eighteen. Chris when I met him. Without his beard. And with dark hair, like when Chris came out of the shower.
Chris! I wanted to say. What the hell are you doing here?
Mark, of course, didn’t see this. He’d never even seen Chris’ picture.
The kid barely talked to us. You could tell he was pissed off. We’d gotten him out of bed, and he just wanted to go back. He didn’t speak English. He grunted and pointed and herded us in. Then he locked the gate behind us. We followed him inside.
Mark didn’t seem to notice the kid. I’ll bet he was just thinking of sleep. But I kept wanting to say, Chris. Chris. Say something. Smile at me. Do anything. This is too weird.
In the lobby, there was a half dressed girl sleeping on the floor behind the desk. It wasn’t the girl we’d seen before, and it seemed we’d done more than interrupt the night guy’s dreams.
I was still stunned when we got to our room. When the guy who wasn’t Chris simply left. It was like breaking up all over again. The kid lit a candle and guided us upstairs. Mark went straight to the john, pissed, then was out of his clothes and onto the bed. He didn’t even pull back the sheets. Just hit the blanket, turned to the wall, and was out, as fast as that afternoon.
I sat on the edge of my bed. Chris. Mark. The kid downstairs. The girl. The girls at the bar. Tiana. Adelina. The dancing. Kissing. Tequila. The beer. It was all too much, and I couldn’t think about sleeping.
I propped my head against the wall, against the same thin pillow I’d used while waiting for Mark to shower. Eventually, I fell asleep. I know I did. At some point, I even got out of my clothes. I just don’t remember how.