Part Two: The Ugly One

by Mike Welch

Late into the night, Buck and I stayed up smoking his grass and laughing about the story. He said that after I’d broken away from them, he and Juan had been betting on when I’d be back. Buck said 15 minutes. Juan said 10. But I never did go back. After she left in her storm of spit and anger, I put a note on Buck’s cabina door across the hall: “Definitely come over when you get home!” And I sunk back into bed, laughing by myself.

The three of us had been walking to El Rancho when I broke from them to go follow her to a different bar, and buy her a beer. After that it was finally set up, sans ambiguity.

I knew that she could be 16 years-old, but she didn’t reveal her age, just that she was worth 6,000 colones. And though I’ve been told to never pay more than 5,000, I followed beside her down the quiet dead street of the village, trying to make her laugh the way I do with free girls.

My Tico friends who chase homely white girls call her “the ugly girl,” but in the E.U. and France, she’d be a runway model- thin breakable shoulders wrapped tight in soft brown skin, lush in a backless shirt. On top there is the full, maroon mouth and short, greasy hair. One of the most beautiful woman I’ve been close to; only $16.

We sat on my bed in my cabina drinking from our beer bottles. In case they stank, I removed my socks and threw them on the floor next to the bed. She didn’t speak English so I spoke Spanish when I asked her if she’d like to smoke pot. She said she only smoked cigarelos, and never pot, but that she wouldn’t mind smoking with me.

She immediately began to choke on the joint and stood up from the bed to go to the bathroom. She hacked, snapping her fingers in frustration, and leaned over the toilet as if about to vomit. She spit into the bowl a few times, sipped from the beer I’d brought her and calmed down. Then she came back and sat on the bed and we continued the joint. As we puffed, I asked her what she likes, how she likes to be touched, because the game is different here. The hookers won’t just go with anyone, and despite your having paid, you are, I’ve heard, still obligated to prove yourself. So she gave me some pointers and, as she extinguished the joint without asking me if I wanted any more, she inquired if I had condoms. I said yes, then leaned across the bed and extracted the condoms from between the mattress and boxspring, tossing them, along with the dead roach, onto the floor next to the beer bottle and my socks.

I rose to brush my teeth. As I scrubbed, she talked behind me, telling me I was to pay her first, beforehand, 10,000 colones. With a mouth full of foam further obscuring my Spanish, I came back into the room with her, still brushing, and told her no. She’d said 6,000.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I misunderstood you,” I told her with the toothbrush still in my mouth. “I can’t pay you that, You can go.”

I pointed at the door as I walked back into the bathroom, brushing.

This frustrated her, we squabbled a bit, but in the end she conceded to stay.

“But we won’t have sex,” she said.

“No, no, no; you can just go,” I reiterated, rinsing out my fresh mouth and motioning toward the door as I sat back on the bed.

She argued this for a minute before copping to our original deal and tucking the 6,000 colones in the tight front pocket of her white jeans. She stayed. Swinging her long, skinny legs over the edge of the bed, she asked me to remove her black, suede heels. On my knees in front of her, I slipped them off to reveal perfect young feet, long toes, and I realized it was really going to happen. I was smiling.

When I crawled back onto the bed, she stood up and slipped off her white jeans, asking me to help her unsnag the cuffs from her pretty ankles. When they were off, I leaned against the headboard and asked her to lay back on my chest, which she did, in her backless shirt and tiny black underwear, only two shades darker than her skin. She’d said she likes it soft, and so do I, so I tried to barely touch her while exploring all the soft dips and pointy bones in her neck and shoulders. My hands were gentle, and everywhere, but I wasn’t sure she noticed, so somewhere in there I asked her again, “What do you like to do?”

She sat up and spun around to me with that huge mouth, and then laid down on the bed, on her back with her knees up, eyes closed, and arms stretched high above her head, still. She said something like, “Do it.”

All the lights were off save the wisp of illumination from the half-shut bathroom door. In the dark, you would have thought she was asleep. I crawled to her and hovered over her closed eyes, studying and thinking. So much for $16. I kissed some bone in her neck and she didn’t stir. She was a beautiful corpse. I couldn’t stand it.

“Hey, you gotta move around,” I told her.

She said some things too fast for me to catch, but I knew they were argumentative. I sat up and leaned on the wall. “If you don’t work, I can’t pay you,” I said.

Her fast words died but her visage was stern as she came toward me on her hands and knees and grabbed between the legs of my shorts. She told me I was big; I heard the word “grande” between her other indiscernable words. But then she let go and said no. And lay again, on her back, in the dead position. “Do it.” Her eyes were closed again but she continued arguing quietly. She did not want to participate. She wanted me to do my business on her, and then stop and go away. When I didn’t comply, she argued herself into a sitting position, then a standing one. Soon she was walking hard across the small, white-tiled room with her white jeans folded over her arm, and locking herself in the bathroom.

Waiting outside for her, I heard her slipping on her jeans and I knew there was no way I’d get the money back. I thought of surprising her, reaching fast into the pocket of her jeans the second she came from the bathroom, back into the dark. But I knew then that she would scream, waking the other quiet sleepers in the hotel. I was gonna lose my money. I tried to just hope it would be a lesson to me, though I doubted I’d really learn.

She came back out fully clothed, beer bottle in one long, skinny hand, black suede shoes dangling in the other. “We didn’t do anything,” I reminded her, “so please give me my money back.”

“No,” she said, trying to pass me. I pressed two fingers to her skinny shoulder, holding her back, afraid that even that would set her off.

I blocked her four times on the way to the door, asking for my money back, telling her that I was poor, trying to coax her back into bed; O.K., O.K. I’ll settle for fucking your corpse…

“No,” she said, over and over, until she reached the door.

I held it shut, frantic, loud. She was still quiet, but hard with her no’s. After three frustrated minutes my Spanish cracked open and English flew out, “WHY are you trying to fuck me over? I am a good person.” My face was hot and red and I felt helpless. She was so beautiful through the whole thing, though her eyes were evasive.

As she stood with her back to the doorknob, unsuccessfully trying to find enough air space to bend down and slip on her heels, I felt another loud yell welling up inside me. I knew that if I tried to keep it in I would cry from frustration. Regardless, I tried to hold it in anyway, and the anxiety manifested itself as brilliance. Before I could cry out god knows what, I found myself ripping her shoes from her hands, hard and dramatic. She gasped. Her face wilted. She rubbed her hands together as if I’d hurt them. Her eyes were watery.

I was full of glee. I’d come out on top! I could see on her face that she was accepting defeat the way I had while she was in the bathroom, slipping her pants over those murderously sexy black underwear. The shoes surely cost her $20. I had wrenched them from her hands as if from the jaws of defeat! With a huge, sweaty, pissed-off smile on my face, I waved her out the door, swatting at the air, “Cool. Go. That’s fine. Keep the money. Go. I have your shoes, that’s enough. It’s cool. Go.”

She pouted, stared up at me through her top eyelashes, then dug into her front pocket for the money. When I reached for it, she pulled the money back.

“Mis zapatos,” she commanded.

I handed her one shoe. She wilted again. She was planning on dashing out with both shoes, and money for a new pair. She offered forth the money and I snatched it while giving her back the other zapato.

We were standing inches from each other, like lovers who’d failed, saying goodbye after a long time in the trenches. When I apologized and opened the door for her, she smiled her swollen mouth, cocked her head back, and spit a giant white clump of suds onto the shoulder of my shirt. When her face thrust forward to spit, there was an innate fear that maybe her spit was venom, acid, death, and when my hands went up reflexively to block the goober, I accidentally poked her in the eye with the tip of my ring finger.

She backed up against the wall and covered her face as if I’d slugged her. I felt it; I was fucked, and so I made the immediate mistake of apologizing profusely.

“Soy Tica, mae! Soy Tica!” she said. I am a Tica, man, you don’t fuck with a Tica.

“I’m sorry, it was an accident,” I said, then pointed to the dime-sized globule of white on my shoulder, like a jellyfish floating on the surface of the water.

She told me I’d had it. She was going to the police. She was 16 years-old, she said, and I was fucked. She also said a thousand other things that I didn’t understand, though I am sure they were threats. I thought to try and give her 1,000 of the money, just to keep her quiet. But somewhere in among all her confusing talk, I realized that I hadn’t done much wrong by Costa Rican standards. North Americans would frown on my hiring a girl, and the rest of the world would join in to denounce my disregard for her age. But aside from that, I had a clear conscience. I was in the right here; it was she who had tried to fuck me over. I held onto the feeling that I was innately right, and I decided that she wouldn’t tell anyone shit.

Still, I apologized seven more times as I walked her out the front gate. I couldn’t understand most of what she said, but, as we reached the front gate, her threats seemed to collapse into a fear that I would tell someone. Her last words to me were, “Tranquilo, mae, tranquilo.” And she put her index finger to her beautiful lips and made a long wooshing ˜shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” I locked the gate behind her.

Up in my cabina, I looked out the hot pink drapes and saw her sitting on the ground downstairs, out by the gate where I’d left her. I wondered if she really were waiting for the police to drive by as they often do, or if maybe she expected her older brother to walk up at any moment and avenge her. But before I could get too worried, I looked down beside my bed at the humorous still-life that had organically formed during the episode: two dirty socks next to three condoms, a beer bottle, half a joint, and 6,000 colones. Laughing giddily, I found my camera and took a picture of the still life, then wrote that note to Buck and stuck it on his door across the hall.

When he returned home, I told him the story with the urgency of a man who has been on safari and lived through an animal attack. He knew I was very excited to write about the episode, and we celebrated the story with many late-night joints. As we puffed, Buck told me the story of a guy who goes out into the woods and films himself fighting animals with his bare hands. “There was this one time I saw him wrestle a moose,” said Buck, “and the moose had him pinned on the ground, wailing on him, socking him in the face with its hooves, over and over and over, just beating the crap out of him. The guy’s wife is holding the camera and she’s screaming, hysterical. But the whole time the guy is yelling at her, ‘Don’t stop filming! Don’t stop filming!’”

I knew how the guy felt.

PART TWO…

The next day, my last day in the village, I didn’t run around the dirt streets saying goodbye to the locals I’d met during my two months in Costa Rica. I didn’t go down to the soccer field and watch the red parrots scream and fight each other, or walk the stinkwater mudflats one last time. Instead, I stayed in my cabina, hiding in case that 16 year-old hooker’s brother or father was out searching for the redheaded gringo who’d hit his sister or daughter.

Twenty-four hours later, her lie had not caught up with me, and I was alive and un-bruised climbing into John’s two-wheel drive AstroVan. The jungle roads of Central America had shaken the van’s brains loose on the way down so that nothing worked in the dashboard, but the machine miraculously made its slow way through the cows and rockslides on the rough roads to San Jose.

Daylight was almost gone by the time we got there, the darkness encouraging the city’s famous criminal insanity, so we checked into Hotel Asia as fast as possible before our bags could be ripped off. Between the three of us, we rented two rooms at $7-apiece; John took the bottom bunk, I took the top, and Buck got his own room, with the stipulation that he would be traded out and moved into the bunk below me if John rented a hooker. If they both got hookers, it was decided that they would use the bunks and I would sleep in the single by myself. There was no chance I would get a hooker. After my tumultuous run-in with the 16 year-old, I had begun telling myself, and Buck and John, that, though it remained unconsummated, my hooker-mania had run its course. I lay in my bunk, five inches from the dirty ceiling, telling John I was satisfied. No more silly hooker silliness for me.

As I spoke, Buck walked into our room, brushing his teeth in preparation for the night. When I finished my declaration, he stopped brushing. “Michael,” Buck said through a face full of rabid toothpaste foam, “I will let you lie to me, and I will even let you lie to John here. But I can’t stand by and let you lie to yourself.”

“No man,” I reiterated, “no more hooker adventures for me.”

He shrugged and went back to brushing, a redundant act considering prostitutes don’t let you kiss them anyway.

A half-hour later we sat in a quiet casino bar decorated with made-up older ladies that, despite their age, were still as visually perfect as the rest of the women in San Jose. They all sat by themselves, a sure indication that they were for rent. But they weren’t aggressive, mostly keeping to themselves, just waiting. When we didn’t make moves they initiated exciting, flirtatious Spanish small talk that had us soft white boys feeling dark and dangerous, as if we were truly creeping around in the margins with the questionable elements of Central America. But it wasn’t exciting enough to keep us seated for long and eventually we took off.

San Jose is as dangerous as pre-Giuliani Times Square. And though three poor, unwashed white guys with holes in their shirts are not the ideal target for muggers, we kept alert as we walked in the crazy city night.

“Where should we go?” John asked, looking over his shoulder.

“The hookers probably all hang out at Casinos, where the money’s at,” Buck opined, turning to me, “What do you think, ‘ol Michael?”

“Dude, I don’t care man,” I answered. “Seriously, I’m over it after the other night.”

Buck put his hand on my shoulder as we walked, repeating the three-line soliloquy about his inability to stomach my lying to myself.

When he finished I conceded, “Let’s go to another casino.”

We plowed down the street through a hundred shifty Ticos offering us things that would have had us arrested in the US, until rounding a corner and passing under a thicket of a million tiny yellow lights and through the doors of a madhouse. Inside the madhouse the slot machines were loud, the gringos were old and gray, and the beers, normally around a dollar anywhere else in Costa Rica, were four dollars. The women, so fucking many of them, were either hanging on wilted old men, or sitting alone at the bar. All of them were mind-bogglingly perfect; natural beauty rather than the garish cosmetics associated with the U.S. version of the profession. If a man was blindfolded, then loaded onto a plane, only to have the blindfold ripped off at the door of this casino madhouse, he might think he’d landed at a Calvin Klein modeling audition, rather than a hooker bar in Costa Rica.

John headed to the bathroom as Buck and I ordered drinks and sat staring around in befuddlement. Before our expensive beers had even arrived, two gorgeous black girls from Puerto Limon draped themselves over us from behind, smiling, rubbing our backs, conversing with us in Spanish. Unlike hookers in the states, who are most often sadly driven to prostitution as a last resort in a desperate situation, these hookers were proud, loud, happy, insanely charming and worst of all, funny. My body can’t help but respond to funny women. My heart, hidden under layers of skin and a dirty shirt and thus unable to see the reality of the situation, responded to the hookers’ jokes and laughs by beating fast, pumping blood to my cheeks and other extremities. The poor blind thing really expected true love.

The girls pressed their breasts against our backs, cooing and hugging us. Mine played with my hair in seemingly sincere wonderment, telling me in Spanish that she’d never met a redhead. The women weren’t pushy. They didn’t try to rush the money from our wallets. They seemed happy to just talk with us. We were the youngest guys in the place and I suppose they were relieved to have a crack at men their own age. So by all accounts I should have felt at ease and in control, but honestly I was a nervous fucking wreck. It was too much, like having a fistful of chocolate forcefully shoved into my mouth. However, Buck, whose Spanish is great, was as smooth and natural as the brown skin on the arms wrapped around me. He bluntly interviewed them in regards to their chosen profession, and they fielded all questions without hesitation.

“How much do you ladies make doing this,” he asked in perfect Spanish.

“$100 an hour, or $300 for the night,” his woman answered.

Buck’s face lit up into an exclamation point. “Jesus Christ! Buy us some drinks then,” he playfully ordered, slamming the end of his first beer. The women playfully obeyed.

Our new drinks landed in front of us as John came out of the bathroom and sat down, just in time to witness my woman reaching under the bar between my legs to make sure her magic was working. She was happy to find that it was. But like some talking toy doll that announces its hunger when its abdomen is pressed, the hooker squeezed my penis and I nervously blurted out, “I don’t have any money!”

Several of the other beautiful women around me laughed and my cheeks flushed deeper as my lady friend playfully slapped my red face with her free hand, told me to shut up, and continued doing what she was doing to me under the bar. For free. Though in all my nervousness, I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it.

Buck turned to his woman and pointed at some bald white guy sitting alone across the bar. “Only old ugly gringos like that have money,” he told her.

“That’s not true,” she answered, “I’ve been with many young gringos who have much money.”

“Well, we have very little,” he laughed.

“Then we’re gonna go over there,” she laughed back, “and talk to that old ugly guy.” She grabbed her friend’s hand off my penis and dragged her away to go talk to the bald guy Buck had pointed out. When the women were gone, I wondered if I were gay for feeling so relieved.

• •

The cab driver asked us where we wanted to go. We had no idea, so we just said, “A disco, with women.”

But before we’d made it through even one block of lawless San Jose traffic, the driver asked us if we liked whores.

“We don’t like $300 ones,” John laughed. And soon after, the driver was dumping us outside of a bar called Las Margaritas. When the $3 door price included one free beer, we knew we were closer to home.

Inside, Las Margaritas was not a disco at all, but a strip club. In the center of the dark room, wrapped around the ubiquitous pole, danced a dark, young, amazing Tica with long curly hair. I took my eyes off of her only long enough to notice that across the room, next to the stage was a door, and next to that, a service window where strippers brought men. The men handed money to the guy behind the window, and the guy behind the window handed the stripper a lump of something that was indiscernible to me in the darkness from so far away, before the couple disappeared through the door.

The dark Tica fucked the stage back and forth up and down as the men, all young Ticos, watched stoically. When she finished, she pulled on her clothes and walked straight to the only white guys in the room, and saddled up to the absolute whitest of them.

“Will you buy me a drink,” she asked me.

She ordered a shot of tequila. When it arrived she held it as we talked, and she still hadn’t drank it by the time she was asking me if I’d like to go into the mysterious back room.

“How much does it cost,” I asked her.

She told me it was 5,000 colones- roughly $15. Though I had no money left, before I knew it I had said yes. In front of the entire dark bar with its dozens of perfect women, John and Buck pulled wads of colones out of their pockets, flattened out the bills, and, laughing, handed them to their friend, who had told them a thousand times throughout the night, “I’m over it man, I’m over it.”

As the loan was pooled, a young Tico walked by with a basket of flowers. The beautiful Tica on my arm asked me if I would buy her one. Luckily I had the presence of mind to tell her no first, and feel stingy and guilty after he’d already walked away.

With her shot glass still full, she grabbed my hand and led me across the room to the service window. There I handed the man at the window my borrowed colones and he handed my Tica a lumpy towel, before she walked me through the mysterious door into a dim, silent hallway of doors.

She opened the first door, in search of a vacancy I assumed, but found instead a woman riding a young Tico. A breeze from the quickly-shut door landed across my face and my blood began pumping uncomfortably fast as my body, and the brain inside of it, wondered what the hell I was doing.

Behind the next door she checked was just an empty, single bed in a small room that was nicer than our cabina at Hotel Asia. She shut the door, and opened the towel on the bed, unveiling a tube of lubricant and a condom, as well as a roll of toilet paper, which reminded me that, despite the very real flesh of the woman holding my hand, I was still a hair’s breadth away from masturbation.

When she immediately began to unceremoniously remove her shirt, I blurted out, “No! Not yet!”

She told me in Spanish that she would leave on her bra, but that she needed to take off her shirt because she was hot. I had thought the heat inside my face was just nerves, or the burning hellfire in my soul, but she was right, the little room was super hot.

She asked me to take off my clothes and hang them on a hook, next to a ledge, where she set down her full shot of tequila. Sitting on the bed, I peeled my shirt over my head and then gazed down at myself. My fishbelly skin looked sick under the fluorescent lights. I hadn’t noticed the lights either, they were really bright. She hung my shirt up on the hook for me as I stared down at the lumpy white gut laying in my lap, its limp bellybutton encircled in red hair, staring up at me in a frown like some sad, bearded old man.

“Take off your shorts,” she commanded, unsmiling. I was too consumed by nerves, embarrassment and self-consciousness to do anything besides exactly what I was told, so I sucked in my gut, stood up, and slipped my gray shorts off onto the floor. She said “boxers” in English, and I removed those as well, hung them on the hook, and sat back down. Had I the courage to look down again, I would have noticed I was still wearing my white, knee-high socks, and I surely would have removed them, but instead I hung up my shorts, concentrating my eyes on her shot of tequila on the ledge.

I sat down, still sucking it in, and heard myself ask her, “So, what are we gonna do?”

“Sex,” she said, furrowing her brow, then ordered, “lay down.”

Naked except for my socks, my wristwatch, and bushes of red pubic hair, I laid back onto the bed as she commanded, with my head on a dirty pillow. Despite all my weird nervousness, it stuck straight into the air like an iron baton and she tore open the condom while staring at it.

Again I blurted, “No, not yet.”

But this time I heard confidence in my voice and my nervousness seemed to dissipate. I sat up and leaned against the wall, and asked her to lay back against my chest, which she did, while removing her bra–

CONTINUED