Posted by Matiz on November 16, 2000 at 16:22:45:
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Pardon the slightly chastened, sad tone of this post, and it’s length. Perhaps I shouldn’t even write it. But if you persevere, I promise an upbeat ending. And maybe it will be a helpful reminder to some reader or serve as a practice pointer that, no matter your level of experience in TJ, there are an infinite number of ways to be had. Lots of metaphors have been used to describe TJ: an adult Disneyland, the Bizarro World, a real-life Dali painting, an acid trip. But one of the most enduring images for me has been a Hall of Mirrors. When I was young, the amusement park in our city had a Hall of Mirrors where you wandered through dimly-lit rooms lined with mirrors that distorted what you saw; some made you tall, some fat, some long-necked. But there was always one ordinary mirror that reflected things accurately. It was mixed in amongst the other mirrors, and the trick was that you got so used to seeing things distorted that you didn’t really realize that the ordinary mirror was accurate. Yours eyes simply didn’t believe what they were seeing. And so it is in the ZN. The ladies, often unintentionally and as a conditioned response, reflect an image of you they think you want to see. They also project an image of themselves they think is best for what they think you want. I always thought, perhaps naively, that you could penetrate through the many layers of illusion using just native common sense, a lifetime of experience, and keen observation, to eventually find the truth. I was wrong. Finding the “truth” is just sheer luck. I went to TJ this trip realizing I had to face my favorita and explain that I wanted, needed really, to see other ladies. Over the last two years we had moved from “The only thing I ask is that you not go upstairs with my best friends”, to “I get jealous when I see you with other chicas in Adelita’s, so please don’t go with any other ladies in the bar”, to “I get jealous just thinking of you with any other lady in TJ, so please only see me when you come here. Call me any time of day or night if you want sex. Just don’t see other women in TJ.” Trying to give our friendship a chance, I attempted, with varying degrees of success, to comply. What I discovered along the way was that familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least sexual boredom. Little by little, an inverse correlation developed between our emotional relation as friends and the sexual excitement I felt in la cama. As the friendship grew, the sexual dynamite slowly fizzled. Still, I knew I needed to confront this situation head on and resolve it quickly or abandon TJ. That’s why, being the brave soul that I am, I avoided Adelita’s entirely on my last trip. This trip I knew I had to take the bull by the horns at the first opportunity. So, immediately after arriving and showering, I walked right past Adelita’s and into CC. Don’t rush into anything. Like Caesar before a campaign, I thought, I needed to marshal my forces for the battle. At CC, I ran into a former AB girl, Flor, who plopped down and started talking about anything and everything that popped into her head. Then she asked why I wasn’t at AB. Not wanting to get into the dirty details, I began with a rambling preface, “Well, see, there is this amiga at AB.” Flor jumped in, saying “Oh, I know”, and named and accurately described my fave. This was the first bombshell. There was never any connection I knew between La Fave and Flor. But then, we all know how extensive the AB grapevine is. Then the second bombshell. “Oh, BTW, she’s not working this week. She’s in Cancun with her novio.” Since La Fave had vehemently sworn for two years she didn’t have a boyfriend, and that she would never subject her kids to some shiftless bum, or a series of shiftless bums as surrogate dads, I had taken it as an article of faith in our friendship that she was telling the truth. (Ironically, I could care less if she has a novio. The issue is trust and honesty among friends. I’m flexible and can get a lot of mileage out of the fantasy that some worthless jerk is sitting at home drinking Tecates and watching Sabado Gigante while I’m porking his beautiful girlfriend. That works for me. What doesn’t work is dishonesty and the distrust and suspicion it creates. Without trust, there’s no friendship.) Trying to act nonchalant, I asked if this was the novio that lived in her home town or the novio from Tijuana. From TJ, Flor blithely replied. Just sits around all day and doesn’t work. La Fave supports him totally. Well, I thought, having a TJ novio wouldn’t expose her kids to anything since the kids live in another city. It fits. What was worse, though, Flor’s offhand remarks, whether accurate information or not, revived my longstanding doubts about La Fave. She had moved in when my original favorita was on a three-month hiatus from TJ. To say La Fave is highly competitive is like saying Tiger Woods is highly competitive. Like Vince Lombardi, La Fave believes winning isn’t just the best thing, it’s the only thing. She doesn’t know what second place means. So she moved in, staked out the territory by using her considerable charms and wiles in a full-court Matiz press, and when La Original returned, La Fave made it clear that La Original was SOL and that yours truly couldn’t continue to have my cake and eat it too. It was her way or the highway. Oh, she was very diplomatic about it, very complimentary of La Original—what a beautiful girl, so sweet and kind. Still, you see, La Fave had these feelings of anger when she even thought of La Original and she couldn’t get over the image of La Original and me in bed. She cried. Olivier would have been proud. I buckled, of course. It was a difficult time that eventually resulted in an emotional crisis of a sort that claimed the life of former poster, Sgt. Pepper. The Sarge simply couldn’t handle losing La Original, of whom he thought the world. As Matiz, I felt I could learn from past mistakes and handle the new favorita, the Mystery Lady in Pepper's obituary, with more aplomb, style, and maturity than the good Sergeant. Foolish nonsense. To her undying credit, when she returned and found a poacher on her turf, La Original, being a woman of uncommon good nature, benevolence, and generous spirit, simply backed out of the picture and fondly wished me good luck. Later she admitted she was a bit sad, but wanted the best for me. The next two years, interspersed with great sex, conversation, and, what I believed at the time, was an evolving friendship, was a generally happy period with La Fave. But the perennial doubts about La Fave were never far from the surface. Many things she said just didn’t jive with what I knew to be the facts or contradicted other things she told me. But when the mirror is reflecting what you want to see, it’s easy to overlook the obvious and selectively pick the “facts” you want to look at. So it probably shouldn’t have come as any surprise that she had a novio, or so Flor insisted. I immediately went to AB to see if she was there. I knew she had just returned six days earlier from seeing her kids, so it was inconceivable she wouldn’t be at work. Equally inconceivable was that she would go back home again so soon after arriving. As you probably guessed, she was nowhere to be found. Several of her friends were very vague about her whereabouts, saying only she was not here, or they didn’t know where she was. Finally, one chica admitted she had left town on a trip the previous weekend, but didn’t know where she had gone. Of course, that’s not confirmation of Flor’s information. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, I told myself. Reasonable doubt exists. But as I sat and mulled this all over, I realized that I didn’t have the time, the energy, the interest, or, surprisingly, the commitment to find out the “truth”, assuming you can ever find out the “truth” in the Hall of Mirrors. She would just deny it. Her friends would support her story, and those that didn’t like La Fave would try to convince me otherwise. In the end, none of the chicas had credibility. They were all mirrors, each reflecting their own distorted images. Slowly, unexpectedly, I began to feel very tranquil, as if some momentous decision had been made. Two years of doubts and insecurity had been resolved. Regardless of the truth of the information, I simply wasn’t so committed to her as a friend that I was willing to put up with the uncertainty of the situation any longer. Even though I hadn’t even talked to her, I somehow felt relieved, as if a war had been won without firing a shot. Evidently, others could sense the sea change in my attitude. Two chicas, both good friends of La Fave and who for two years had carefully avoided coming on to me out of “respect” for her feelings, now all but threw themselves at me. One gave me an unsolicited lap dance and groin massage, the other collapsed in my arms and begged me to take her upstairs. I accepted both offers and had a great time. The next day I felt like a pilgrim in a brave new world instead of a stranger in a strange land. Doubts had been resolved, cobwebs swept away, the decks cleared and ready for action. My ego and pride had taken some lumps in the process certainly, but, as they say, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I roamed Adelita’s that evening hunting for carne fresca for the first time in, well, I can’t remember how long. I felt like one of those early explorers—Columbus, or De Gama, or Cook, sailing into uncharted waters with only the crudest map of where I am and where I’m going. Bring on the savages, the tropical islands, the forbidden fruits, the magical beasts, the sea serpents. I was ready. Listo was my middle name. But what I had forgotten about those early explorers is that if they sailed long enough and far enough, if they braved enough dangers and weathered enough storms, around Cape Horn and the Pacific isles, and past the Cape of Good Hope, they eventually arrived right back where they started. A little longer in the tooth, perhaps, a little wiser, certainly. But still at the very same place. Having spent three hours in Adelita without even feeling a puff of wind against my sails, I was beginning to experience a little drop off in my otherwise ebullient frame of mind. Suddenly, a stunning woman walked through the AB curtains and past me. Slender, incredible chest, long hair, Boticelli face, her gait full of grace and poise. A vision. Just as suddenly, I realized she was La Original, hair a shade lighter, but unquestionably her. Before I knew what I was doing, I was at her side, and then we were sitting together, having a drink. At first it was uncomfortable as the rust of several years of neglect, and one year without any contact at all, slowly began to work itself loose and fall away. Nervous, even awkward, for both of us. A ridiculous scenario for a prostitute and her customer in La Zona Norte of Gomorrah del Sur, verdad? But by the second drink, it was like “old times”. And I began to remember all over again why I think so highly of this woman. She is so centered, so self-contained, so poised and graceful. And so good-hearted. Every chica I’ve talked to gives the same account of her: she never says a bad word about anyone, never gossips, and is always prepared to help other chicas, even ones she doesn’t know well. She isn’t high volume, and doesn’t make a lot of money, preferring to spend long vacations with her kids rather than making the big bucks. Such a sweet personality alone would be enough. But she has the body too. Actually, IMO she has The Body. In that little secret fantasy drawer, deep in my subconscious, my image of the Perfect Woman looks exactly like La Original. It’s purely subjective, of course; most guys don’t respond to her that intensely. But for some inexplicable reason I always have. Just looking at her makes my knees weak and flashes of lust flicker through my body. Spending time in the room with her is being in a state of grace. Time stops and I forget about everything but her body. Even sex itself becomes superfluous. Just having that body and face all to myself, even if just for a few fleeting hours. Just to look, to touch, is enough to leave me totally satisfied. I don’t need to own a Boticelli to appreciate its beauty. If I can just hang one on my wall and admire it once in a while, I’m a happy guy. As Keats said, "Truth is beauty and beauty truth. That's all you know, and all you need to know." Anyway, I digress, and, worse, I’m beginning to slobber, as I always do when I talk about La Original. Sgt. Pepper used to shamelessly extol her virtues in post after post. I promise not to do that now. But how, you ask quite reasonably, could someone who thinks so highly of La Original ever dump her for La Fave? Two things. First, you can’t possibly appreciate how hard La Fave tried to win me over. She was an irresistible force, like a tidal wave or Hurricane Camille. Second, it’s always easy to Monday morning quarterback these things. The battle plan always looks better on the general’s drawing board back at HQ than it does to the grunts in the trenches looking for incoming fire. I did the best I could at the time and still screwed up. Live and learn. After the second drink, I didn’t know if I should ask her upstairs. And I didn’t know if she’d accept. La Fave can be a formidable foe and La Original doesn’t have a competitive bone in her beautiful body. She might not want to incur La Fave’s wrath, and wrath there was sure to be. I could limp back to LA and lick my wounds. But La Original had to earn a living right in the tiger’s cave. Well, I did ask, and she did accept. And the rest of the evening was a blur: old passions rekindled, new memories made. I felt the incredible lightness of being in TJ. One of the lessons I take from all of this is “don’t ask, don’t tell,” or, in less Clintonesque terms, “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” I had assumed one of the signs of friendship was the sharing of confidences: real names, phone numbers, the private parts of our lives. That was part of the bait that La Fave used so well to reel me in. La Original, on the other hand, always had definite limits to preserve her privacy. No all-nighters. No out-of-hotel dates. No kissing. No real names. She kept her feelings and her heart on a very short leash and in complete control. At first I thought she was just protecting herself. Later I realized she was also protecting me---from what I could easily come to feel about her in those naïve early days in TJ. She did eventually lower the curtain just a little. After a year or so, one night she wiped off her lipstick and started Frenching me without warning. Never mind that we had logged maybe 40 sessions without so much as a peck on the lips. Another time, after many months in the grubby AB half-hour rooms, she walked me to her own room in the hotel. Curtains, stereo, little throw rugs, pictures of her kids. All her outfits hanging in the closet. Afterward, she put on her nightie and I tucked her in bed and left. They sound like inconsequential intimacies for two people who are screwing on a regular basis. But in the desert, even a little puddle of water seems like an oasis. That she would share such private moments with me was special. But those moments were few and far between. Perhaps because of that we never lied to each other. We never had to. Well, I guess I’ve reached the end of my story. I know there is still work to be done, issues that have to be confronted. La Fave and I have to work out a peace with honor that we can both live with. La Original gave me her return date from vacation and said that when she gets back, her hotel room would be much more comfortable than the short-time rooms. She then kissed me on the lips as if to say, “Welcome home.” Yes, there’s work to be done. But I do feel like there is a certain wonderful symmetry to the way all of this has worked out. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to share it. Like I’ve traveled full circle. Like there’s some kind of closure after all to the odyssey of the last four years. A homecoming, if you will. Like one cycle has ended and a new one has begun. Like discovering, or re-discovering, that one special mirror in the Hall of Mirrors that reflects things truthfully. Like dejavu all over again. I love it. |
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