La Paz - 2009 June
“I mean, licking a girl’s asshole?”
Don is talking about how dirty the girls are on the barely legal porn videos he is fond of watching. The girls are 18 years old and fisting each other for a camera. Big dildos. Strap on dildos, vibrators, tongues, fingers, hands. Everything is thrown at these girls and they look good getting dirty Licking each other’s pussies and assholes. How, Don is wondering, did they learn to do that in the few years since puberty? How did they get so fucking dirty so fucking fast.
Don throws back his head in ecstasy and says, “God damn it - I love fucking sexy young bitches! When I was in Thailand about nine or eleven years ago I bought these four young whores for $50 and we…”
Don and I are eating shrimp and fish tacos and chips in La Paz, B.C.S. Both our watches are wrong by several hours. Don talks about time in terms of “Five to seven years ago I…” I am living in a van and gauge time by the full moons. The topic of the day is sex, the same topic as it has been with Don since he invited me to the local strip club. All facets of sex are on the table. It is his mission in life…a life now entering its 66th year, to fuck as many “young pretty girls” as he can. I, of course, am above ground, and male and thus can talk about sex as often as the subject is raised. When it comes to the subject of fucking young pretty bitches there is hardly a man alive who will cover his ears. As far as why these young actresses can act so dirty it is a question one should ask the girls, not the letch who watches them. My first guess is that someone like Don gave them $500 -$1000 to spend the night with them and the girls learned quickly. Of course there is also a director saying, “Now lick her asshole, don’t be shy. Put the vibrator in that pussy and…” which makes being dirty as easy as connecting the dots.
After Don is through telling me about the Thai whores of a decade ago and the weekend of pure carnal exploration we get back to how to make a living in this world and stay happy. I pop a corn tortilla filled with shrimp into my mouth and say, “You ought to be in porn. You ought to just pay young chicks to fuck you on camera.”
“Why?” asks Don as though he knows the answer.
“Because it solves both cash flow and sex problems at once,” I say as though I have thought this out.
“How?”
“Because you fuck and you have a product to sell.”
“You can’t sell porn unless you are a huge company.”
“Naw, you are giving these guys too much credit. The amateur stuff sells and it has no production costs.”
“But that becomes your whole life.”
I consider pointing out that since I have met him he has talked of nothing but fucking young pretty girls. It has already become his whole life. You can cut it any way you want and this pie still comes out in the shape of sex. My suggestion of producing amateur porn is just a gesture of practicality in our shapeless conversation. Instead of diverting the conversation into a philosophical debate of what defines Don’s life I say generically, “But you get fucked and that’s good.”
“Well, I like to get to know a girl, talk to her. I’m a letch but I don’t like to feel I’m a letch.”
This sarcastic humor of Don’s is what I like most about him. He is unlike most letches who are past the point of no return and can not identify themselves as such. They are oblivious to their zippers being down or the ASS MASTERS LOLITA EDITION magazine laying openly on their dashboard. Don wants to set himself apart from the crowd by admitting that he knows what he is. He knows that conventional society rejects his worldview but he isn’t exactly apologetic when he says, “I like a regular girl who likes to make some money on the side.” He repeats this phrase as often as Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” maxim.
“I like to fuck regular young girls with tight pussies,” he says as though he is defending his preference for Chopin over Satie. “I don’t care if they want my money. Everyone wants everyone else’s money. If they are nice to me then I’ll pay them for their time. I’ll pay them for being young and sucking my cock. Hey,” he says as he gestures at the tortilla chips, “You gotta eat some of these chips. I can’t eat them all.”
The ease with which Don says these lines is so casual that I’m slightly afraid I’ve become “one of those degenerates” with whom other degenerates confide because they radiate death and the black hole of infinity. It’s possible, but I’m completely sober, eating a taco and not even drinking soda pop because of its high sugar content. Am I a degenerate? Wait, don’t answer that question. The answer is that Don talks to every man like this. He has absolutely no tolerance for prudes…and he likes to talk about sex. So, my opinion or state of degeneration is irrelevant. I take a handful of chips, quietly ignoring their empty calorie content, and say, “Every girl has her price. Even the straight girls I have known, the Mormons, the real bible thumpers, have a price. I don’t care who you are. Hell, I’ve got a price.” I say as I squeeze lime juice onto a chip full of cheese and avocado. “It’s pretty high, but I’ve got a price at which I’ll do just about anything. Money is a drug. We’re trained to suck cock for money. You ever just offer a girl some money?” I eat the chip and look around at the tables for a reaction. I’m pretty sure a nearby couple understands every word we are saying.
“What do you think I’m talking about?” Don says.
This is a funny comment because it makes me realize I’m trying to imagine the scenario in which Don, a 66 year old man with white hair roots and a hunched back, is fucking four pretty 18 year old girls. The truth is that I have no idea how this would occur. As Don has pointed out a few times, “You’re too young to have to buy a whore.” Yes, I guess I am, but I’m not dumb enough to think I haven’t paid for sex in one way or another. It’s an age old exchange. While everyone wants to be that well adjusted couple who fucks “because they are in love” the other 98% of us are groping glory holes in the dark and throwing time and money at pussy.
Our pretty young waitress walks over and asks us, “Algo mas?”
Are we ready? She is probably asking this because one of the bilingual customers has complained that we are filthy gringos and should be evicted. Don is oblivious to everything but young women.
I say no, nothing more, and before she is out of reach Don says, “I like the way they shake their pussies. Hmmmm! You think she can fuck?” Before I can respond Don says, “It’s like Leaving Las Vegas, the movie, I bought fifty pairs of underwear when I came down here so I wouldn’t have to leave the bedroom. I could call the hookers and they would come to me and that’s it. Done! I die! You see, Marco, I like regular girls who like to make money on the side.”
I nod, as though I have heard this kind of talk all my life, which isn’t true. I think Don is the extreme example of a pleasure purpose we all share. We all want to be 65 years old and having the best sex of our lives with the most attractive, desirable partners we can imagine, sometimes four at once. Yes, it will come at a price, but that’s true of everyone…even rock stars so most of us realize this is a path of diminishing returns. Most of us see how quickly “paying pretty girls for sex” will turn into something demonic and destructive. Most of us realize that pouring money into young pussy is not sustainable. Most of us settle for cribbage and a yank mag by a muted television.
“A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but one.” Says Don with cigarette smoke coming out of his mouth. “You have to confront your fears. I was afraid of heights my whole life (on account of falling off a mountain when I was young) so ten or fifteen years ago I decided I was going to fly an airplane. So I hired a pilot and we went up in the plane and I was so scared my arms were shaking.”
You do have to confront your fears. I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately. To live in fear is the worst condition. You have to be fearless to live in this world, fearless to succeed, fearless to perform, fearless of all consequences because some of those consequences are terrific. You can’t select which consequences you get. The trouble is that so much of our childhood is spent with fear as a major motivating factor. Be afraid of that hill, that house, that side of town, that skin color, that family, that way of thinking, that bottle of chemicals, that food, that sport. Fear will keep you alive, is the rationality, but what really happens is we grow up afraid of myths and phantoms. That hill isn’t very steep, that house isn’t full of gypsies, that side of town is where the good music is, that skin color is just darker than mine, that family is just poor, that way of thinking is liberating, that bottle of chemicals is for cleaning cement, that food is better with beer. These fears must be overcome, one by one. But what if they aren’t overcome? What if the fears are so well implanted by our parents that we still avoid that hill or that house or that food 25 years after we were told to? That is when you are in a world more troubled than Don’s. Yes, Don is on a treadmill chasing young girls and paying them for sex. Yes, he’s an estranged degenerate and a letch and fucked up living in Mexico on social security. Yes, his main accomplishment for the last few months is throwing away his box of barely legal porn because, “If I’m not getting off then I don’t want to watch it.” He also kicked his speed habit and only drinks beer now and smokes a little bit of pot. That’s Don. He’s no candidate for the noble peace prize. But living in fear of some shadow menace that was implanted by some guy who knocked your mom up isn’t much better. I mean really, you fear the menace that never comes. Some people get over it. The fear wasn’t the same, but some families are so good at making you afraid that it becomes a complex. Then you are fucked, you may not know it but your fear directs all your actions. Bypass the fear and you will succeed, or at least die an adult, but obey the fear and it will keep you inside looking out at the world passing by. It does not take a genius to raise a child but it doesn’t take a monster to fuck one up either.
I could eat three more tacos but it is better to remain hungry. We leave the restaurant. I notice several customers giving us menacing looks. We walk into the La Paz heat. Don wants me to show him the sex shop. He wants to make sure he can buy sex there. And he wants to get a massage, a “real” massage, because his back is injured from the long drive from Ensenada. He almost hits a pedestrian on his way out of the parking lot. “I hate running over people with my car,” he says. “One time, about ten or fifteen years ago I got hit by a jeep. It threw me twenty feet and gave me this.”
Don shows me a jagged scar on his hip.
“It’s not the drugs and alcohol that fucked me up,” he says as we gain speed in the direction of the sex shop, “It’s the shit that happened while I was fucked up on drugs and alcohol. Look! Holy shit! You see that sexy girl?”
Don brakes hard at a busy intersection to look at a pretty senorita in skin tight jeans and we are nearly demolished by a speeding bus.
