Matar dos pájaros de un tiro. (10 Feb)

¡Ay carumba!

What a last 24 hours.  Actually it was the end of yesterday/the early hours of this morning that made it worth talking about.  It’s my last day here in Mexicali.  Tomorrow I leave in the early hours of the morn; I’m ready.  I did a practice pack and my bags will take it, but they bulge.  I need to do a little bit of juggling, I think.

Anyway, last night my housemate failed to follow through on his “I’ll cook you traditional Hermosillo food” pledge.  I got home at 1730 and sat reading until 1845.  I had told myself – If he  isn’t here by 1900, I’m going out to get dinner; I was hungry.

True to form, he turned up with 15 minutes to spare and told me that he had talked to his friend and they decided that we should go out for dinner.  Fine.  I asked if we could leave right now, as I was hungry.  We went to a place called Kilos & Beer.  Their deal is they serve meals in half kilo and kilo serves and they have beer.

We arrived without my housemate’s friend.  I decided I’d wait for him to arrive before we ordered, that being the polite thing to do.  We drank Indio beer and talked until 2100 when I got fed up and asked where the fuck the friend was.  I ordered my meal – a fajita de rez con chipotle. The meat was, as always, perfectly cooked, but the presence of chipotle was seriously lacking, and the whole point was the chipotle.  I was displeased.

I had a few good conversations with some of the people working there and then, while having a good chat with some guy in the bathroom, my housemate told me that we were going.  His friend had been outside were they wanted him to pay 50 pesos to park and then pay 50 pesos to enter.  He had only turned up to tell us to go somewhere else, so he decided to go to the place and call us, telling us to go there too.  I skulled the rest of my beer and hopped in the car.  It was then my housemate told me where we were going; a strip club.

I’ve never been to a strip club before and, from what I had seen in movies and television shows, I didn’t really want to go either.  Two things lured me in though, one being that there had been so much talk about strip clubs while I had been here, it seemed a shame to leave without seeing what they were talking about.  The second force dragging me inside was the desire not to drag the evening down by making a big old scene.  I would go.  It would be fine.

The first club (you heard me) we went to was called Pido and they charged us a lot of money, by Mexican standards, for our beers.  80 pesos for two brews; assholes.  We met the friend who was sitting at a table right next to the dance floor, that was about 3 metres by 10 metres and had a gold pole at each end.

Some lady was dancing and she’d taken her top off to reveal her implants.  Her dancing was unenthusiastic, but she was getting money thrown on the dance floor anyway.  Men and women (there was a table of three men with girlfriends, all in their early 40′s and having a great time) were reaching out and groping the woman.  This was the first weird thing for me – I had heard that touching was strictly forbidden in strip-clubs.  I was waiting for some angry bouncer to crack skulls, but it never happened.  She was pushing their faces into her chest and kissing men on the cheek when they gave her money.  All the bills being thrown were US bills.  My housemate’s friend explained that they were all one dollar bills.

At the back of the club was a table of men that had a bunch of girls sitting with them and talking and drinking.  I don’t know what their deal was (rich businessmen, drug dealers, government officials, buck’s night) but they seemed to have the monopoly on the dancers.

There were big delays between the dancers.  Periods of quiet in a club where no-one would go for the ambience.  There were TV’s suspended from the roof everywhere showing the soccer – just in case you were bored of the showcase of flesh.

The table with the women on it were rowdy as hell.  The women were enjoying giving the girls dollars probably more than the men.  They’d give some money and then tell the girl to motorboat their man.  At one point the dancer decided that the woman should receive the special treatment, and idea that was meant with roars of laughter and discomfort by the woman.

When there was no-one on stage the men would jokingly push their girlfriends onto the stage, and they’d laugh and scramble back to their seat.  At one stage, during a break, a guy from across the dance floor leaned across and tried to pull one of the girls onto the floor.  She was not an oil painting, friends.  I was relieved it didn’t lead to anything more.

I actually started to wonder whether the table of men and ladies was a plant.  The women would chastise other tables when they weren’t throwing money at the dancer.  They were laughing and drinking a lot.  It seemed possible that the business would put a table like that there to show people how to enjoy themselves and that women could enjoy a show as well (which I don’t disagree with).

We saw three dancers while we were there, only the last one didn’t have implants.  All the dancing was dull and I couldn’t see any point to being there.  My housemate’s friend explained to me:

“In a strip club, all you look at is ass and tits.  If you start looking for a nice face, you’re in trouble.  Ass and tits, that is all.  Ass and tits.”

This mantra was problematic for me.  While I am a huge fan of every part of the female figure, the first thing I look at is the face.  That’s were I go to for the majority of information.  These girls were not attractive to me; they had plucked their eyebrows to within an inch of their life, they had plastic breasts and they lacked any sense of sensuality that I imagined might be required to make a place like that worth visiting.  My associates felt somewhat the same; they were annoyed that the men up the back were hogging all the best dancers.  The second dancer that came out had received little to no dollars from the crowd for her performance.  She looked like she was coming to the end of her dancing career, but you could only tell this by looking at her face, which I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

My table had decided we’d check out the other club and we’d leave as soon as I’d finished my beer.  This plan was delayed however because, during the third dance, in came what I hoped were heavily armed police officers.

Moving around the perimeter were men in tactical fatigues with black masks over their nose and mouth; they carried, what I think were, assault rifles with scopes.  My initial reaction was hey! The cops are here, but this changes to Christ, I hope they’re cops, otherwise we’re fucked. They divided the room into the men and the women.  The women, they didn’t bother searching.  They just sat on the other side of the room chatting while the men had to show ID and empty their pockets.

This was fucked I thought; I don’t need anything to go wrong here.  I put my wallet on the table, my camera, my phone and keys and looked at them wondering what the odds were that they would be “confiscated”.  I kept all my other things (credit card, booklet with US $380 dollars, keys to luggage locks) in my tourist belt.

The cops then proceeded to frisk us.  The first thing they found was the packet of tissues in my jacket pocket.  The cop stopped frisking me and said – what’s in there.  I pulled out my tissues and he recommenced the frisking.  Then he felt the strap to my tourist belt.  He said – what’s that.  I replied ahh, mi cinturon de turista. He told me to empty it completely.  So I did.  Everything was actually progressing very calmly.  My housemate was shitting himself.  He later told me he thought we were very close to dying.

My housemate’s friend told me the next day that there was a lot that was not good about the way they did their search: they didn’t introduce themselves, didn’t explain what they were doing there, were being unnecessarily intimidating.  Outside – their cars were not marked as police vehicles.  I joked lated that nothing was ever going to happen, the cops were on their best behaviour, because they had an international guest.  The guys laughed, but they were seriously shaken by the event.

A lot of Mexicans hate the police.  They tell me there are two types of cops in Mexico – the ones that are all menacing and the ones who just shoot everything.  All cops are fucking dumb, they tell me.  My housemate told me that he used to feel bad when he heard cops had been shot, and nowadays, when he hears about it, he thinks they deserve it.  Cops, to my housemate, are just another one of the “only thing”s he hates.

The cops left eventually and everyone rushed to the toilet.  It was unreasonable to keep us that long – we’d been drinking beer and it was cold.  Our bladders couldn’t take it.  They left with two people arrested; one customer and one of the staff – the guy whose job it was to collect the money thrown onto the dance floor at the end of the song.  My housemate’s friend chastised me – “it’s all your fault”, he said, “we were only still here because we were waiting for you to finish your beer.  We should be in the other club”.  The other club was the building next door, the fabled La Mosca.  I told my housemate’s friend that he shouldn’t worry; the cops were probably going to raid La Mosca too.  We sat down and watched as the girls filed back out and swarmed around the table up the back.  I don’t think anyone came out to dance while I finished my beer.

When we left Pido to go to La Mosca the cops cars were still there.  I had been right – they raided La Mosca.  My friends told me to hang back a moment and wait for the cops to leave the club before we entered.  As we approached, I noticed that the cover charge was 40 pesos.  The people at the door were being jovial and telling us everything was alright and to come on in.  They reduced the cover charge on account of the recent nasty business of police with big guns; no one wants the cops involved in their enjoyment of naked women.  They charged 50 pesos for all of us.

La Mosca had a different layout.  There was a dance floor in the middle with one gold pole and a ring suspended from the ceiling.  There were U-shaped tables with a depression filling the centre of the U – lower than the U-shape, which was to be our bench for drinks, but higher than the floor.  It turned out that this was so you could have a dancer in the centre of the U that you could watch while you drank.

We were given a dancer in a red devil outfit.  She was cute in the face, probably because she didn’t look like she’d tried to change it with surgery.  In reality, she probably wasn’t that pretty, but she smiled and laughed a lot and when she did so, her eyes lit up.  She seemed genuine, and that went a long way.

My housemate’s behaviour had changed.  Later, his friend observed, that he’d turned a bit pale since the police encounter and he was more sexually aggressive with the girls.  The devil at our table had only just arrived and was facing my housemate’s friend and me when my housemate pushed her top down to reveal her breasts.  It seemed grotesque to me at the time, but she laughed and shook her chest for a second and then pulled her top back up.  I assumed that this was all acceptable behaviour for a Mexican strip-club.

My housemate’s friend also comment that my housemate was slapping the dancer’s asses a lot.  I guess my housemate’s friend didn’t know that my housemate really loved to do that to women.  He certainly tells me all the time. The devil hung around for a while at our table and another skinny, petite girl in a Catholic schoolgirl’s outfit turned up.  After a few minutes, my housemate’s friend disappeared with her.  I had been told that he frequently has sex with strippers, so I assumed that that was what that was about.

After a while our devil disappeared and came back in the shortest denim hotpants I’d ever seen.  I’d emphasize how short they were by saying that they were stripper short… but that seems a bit redundant here.  The outfit was topped off with a tight white top that covered only her chest.

She was the first girl we saw dance at La Mosca, by this time my housemate’s friend had returned.  I’d also been to the bathroom – a detail I’d have left out if, while I was standing at the urinal, a dancer hadn’t entered (the men’s) and walked right behind me and slapped my arse while I was peeing.  The urinals had a door at each end and seemed to double as a short-cut.  I couldn’t help but feel that it was all orchestrated (he’s in the toilet now, go and sexually harass him – he might pay you more), but I laughed and shook my head.  Shyness be damned – I’m not afraid to use urinals so do what you will, strippers.

The ex-devil girl was a truly good pole dancer.  She used the ring thing to do some very fast pivots and she also turned herself upside down, slipping her leg through the ring and then hanging momentarily.  I have no idea how she got her leg through the loop so effortlessly; it must have been a magician’s sleight of hand deal.  While we were looking at other things, she got her leg into the loop.

She worked the pole (ahem) well too.  Another upside down trick with one leg holding her in the air, she let the pressure off slightly and slid down to the floor.  Truly a talented move.  I wondered if she’d considered Cirque du soleil… perhaps she can only do her thing topless.  I don’t know.

She also danced to great to OK songs.  The White Stripes’ 7 Nation Army, Marylin Manson’s cover of Sweet Dreams and something else grungey.  She was such a cut above what we’d seen at the other club, I thought we’d just been at a bad club.

My housemate’s friend got a US $20 change for 20 US$1 and gave us one each for the next dancer.  I, apparently judging by the shame on my housemate’s friend’s face, wasted my dollar by simply putting it in the dancer’s pants… or whatever.  I’d seen TV shows, that was what I was supposed to do – right?  Wrong.  both my housemate and my friend showed my how I was meant to do it.  They faced away from the stage and then limboed their heads onto the bench surrounding the dance floor.  The dancer then lowered their crotch towards my friend’s faces.  I wondered how they’d be able to deposit the bill with their mouth but, when she was 10cm from their mouths, she took the money and instantly moved on.

I politely declined the next dollar I was offered.  I didn’t want to use the dollar in the right or the wrong way.

At some point my housemate’s friend disappeared with another dancer.  And then later, he walked off to a table away from us to chat with a dancer all alone.

It was about 0130 and my housemate was talking about getting tacos or hotdogs. . He’d let me choose – I chose hotdogs, then he went to a place that sold good tacos anyway.  He drove, after he said he wouldn’t and I berated him for it.  It wasn’t that far though.  When he finished his tacos and we went back to the car, he asked me if I wanted to drive.

I was not drunk; I’d been pacing my drinks.  His car had no license plates, so I figured that my lack of an international license was not the biggest issue here and my sobriety made it a much more attractive option.  I took the keys and proceeded to learn about changing gears with my right hand.

It was a short drive home and, once we’d gotten past the horrific business of finding reverse in the complete opposite direction of an Australian car, I drove very smoothly to our apartment.  I even indicated, which was probably excessive for Mexico.

That’ll do for now.  I’d meant to include what happened today (11 Feb), but I guess I’ll wait.  It’s getting really long.  I went to bed at 0200 and at 0650.  I’m tired now, but this is the first time today I’ve felt ragged.

I hope I’ll sleep well tonight, but Edgar has offered to take me to some tequila bar, and I can’t refuse tequila.

Shit it’s hard being me.

Paz.

P.S: My wife is fine and so is my little unborn child.  I’m calm and look forward to seeing my whole family in less than a week.