Cannelita folded the three bills neatly and tucked them inside her bra.
“So why you need this Chucho, this
joven?
What he know you need so bad to talk with heem?”
“That’s between Chucho and me.”
Cannelita smiled impishly, tossing the long hair of her golden wig off one shoulder.
“OK, you gorgeous gringo, I help you find Chucho.”
I spread the pages from my guidebook on the bar, and indicated the clubs I had yet to visit.
“Do you know if he works in any of these places?”
Cannelita ran her daggerlike red nail down the first page.
“Thees place no more.”
“Closed?”
“Closed,
sí. Cerrado.
”
She pushed the tip of her nose upward with one finger.
“They think they hot shit, you know? Dress code and attitude. Muy refinado. Fuck them! Is straight disco now, no more
maricones.
You no find Chucho there.”
I used my pen to run a line through the entry. Carmelita took the pen from me, bent over the pages in earnest.
“Thees one also no more. No pay so much money for the
policía,
so no do business no more.”
She crossed the club off the list, then rubbed her fingers together.
“In Mexico, you got to pay the
mordida
or the fucking police, they screw you up the ass.”
She pointed to the next listed club.
“Thees one, Chucho, he like thees place. But he only go there very late, maybe two, three hours from thees time. Nobody there now.”
She circled the club, moved down.
“Thees one have fire, burn down. No business no more.”
She crossed that one off.
“Thees one, maybe, but Carmelita no so sure. The
jovenes
there, they
muy macho,
you know?”
“Rough trade.”
“
Sí, escabroso.
Chucho, he no be that way. He ees more, you know,
femenino.
I tell him he should be like us, wear the dress, he so pretty.”
“What about these other places?”
“Thees one, no. Thees one, I no think so.”
Suddenly, she got excited.
“Thees one,
sí!
Thees where Chucho be now. Carmelita tell you about thees bar, Mi Amigo. It very small,
muy chico.
Mexican men, they go there after they work. Drink
cerveza,
shoot thee pool, mebbe have a boy if they have some money, before they go home to their
mujer,
their wife. No so many gringos. That why Chucho go there—he no like gringos no more.”
“Why is that?”
“He have some very bad problemas in
Estados Unidos. Muy malo.
He no even like to talk about thees. So Carmelita, she no talk about thees neither.”
I located Mi Amigo on the guidebook map.
“It’s in Zona Norte.”
“
Sí,
Zona Norte. No so good place. Sometimes, bad trouble there.”
“But you think Chucho might be there, at Mi Amigo.”
Carmelita called out to the bartender, asked him a question in Spanish I didn’t fully understand, mentioning the name of the bar. The bartender thought a moment, nodded, went back to his work.
Carmelita circled the entry, nodding.
“Thees bar, Chucho, he mebbe there. Is friendly place, is OK.”
I folded the pages up, pushed them into my shirt pocket, noticed that my pen had disappeared. Ignoring the petty theft, I thanked Carmelita for her help. She glanced sideways a moment, lowered her voice almost to its normal male register.
“I no see Chucho for many time. I hear maybe he be sick, you know, with SIDA.”
“I’ve heard the same.”
Sadness clouded her face.
“Poor Chucho. Is no good to get the AIDS in Mexico. They don’t do nothing for nobody with SIDA here, you know? You have good job, the insurance, money, then maybe they help you. You have no money in Mexico, they treat you more bad than a fucking dog.”
“You’re OK with that, a hustler with still working the streets and bars?”
She spit fire at me with her eyes.
“Leesen, meester, any time some old man, he pay a boy for sex, he better know the reesk, you know what I say? Some guy, he give this disease to Chucho. Chucho, now he got to survive. Thees old men, I think they know what a condom ees, you know?”
Just as quickly, she brightened.
“You come back tonight, you gorgeous gringo. Carmelita do song just for you. I do Streisand for you—‘peeples who needs peeples.’”
“Maybe I’ll do that, Carmelita.”
I felt her hand cupping my crotch, pressing firmly. “Mebbe later, we go someplace, eh? Carmelita, she show you good time. I give you special price, just for you, you gorgeous gringo.”
*
I was too worn out to walk the mile back down Avenida Revolución, so I caught a taxi and reached the north end a few minutes past ten.
Young men swarmed me as I stepped from the cab in front of the Hard Rock Cafe, haranguing me to come into their shops or basement clubs, offering me discount liquor, leather huaraches, cheap-looking jewelry, velvet Elvis paintings, and always girls, girls, girls. I crossed the street and cut along the sidewalk toward the old Hotel Nelson, the final point of demarcation along the boulevard before one turned the corner into Zona Norte, into another world.
Plaza Santa Cecilia was immediately on my left, a shadowy pedestrian street filled with vendors, outdoor restaurants, bars, dry fountains littered with trash, unshaven hustlers huddling silently beneath gnarled trees, watching for cops and calling out to gringos with their eyes. Two of the gay bars on my guidebook map were located here, including Mi Amigo, tucked in among several that were obviously straight, with heavily made-up young women at the windows or leaning against the dirty stucco outside the doors, each of them with one leg raised to lift her short skirt and show off her succulent thighs. I passed a group of strolling mariachis, older, slump-shouldered men blowing their horns and strumming their guitars as they sang, and stepped around a hungry-looking dog with pronounced ribs that lay listlessly on the cool pavement as if it hadn’t moved for hours.
The sign for Mi Amigo shone brightly in the night, blue and yellow letters against a white background with a red cocktail glass for an icon. I turned in that direction, past a short, dark-skinned Indian woman with a sad, beautiful face who trudged by with a tiny, sleeping baby slung in a shawl on her back. She never looked at me, but a bunch of raggedy children spotted me and came at me with outstretched hands. I emptied my pockets of coins and sent them scurrying back into the shadows. The mariachis ended their song and sat down heavily on a bench to take a break. As I stepped into the bar, I could hear pigeons cooing in the dusty trees.
The faces inside Mi Amigo were all brown, mostly older, showing cracks from age and sun. One or two of the men were in their twenties, another in his early thirties, vaguely handsome with working-class faces and bellies and fancy cowboy boots with pointed toes that marked them as probable hustlers, but the rest looked like uncles and grandfathers. Vicente Fernández was belting out a ranchero ballad on the jukebox, and behind the bar two fortyish women with short-cropped hair and sleeves rolled up their beefy biceps attended to business. In the rear, off to the side, two men in identical gray mechanic’s uniforms but different Spanish names over the pockets were shooting pool under a light that advertised Negra Modelo.
I didn’t see anyone close to Chucho’s age in the place, and wondered if Carmelita had sold me some bad information. I also wondered if I should hang around, waiting to see if Prettyboy came in. I’d have to order a drink, and a place like this wouldn’t have the option of coffee or mineral water. I didn’t like the idea of tempting myself like that. I’d already felt the old thirst coming back, seeing all the tequila being poured along Avenida Revolución, and the bottles lined up behind the bar at El Pequeño Palacio, and more of them facing me now behind the shorter bar at Mi Amigo. The selections here were mostly low-end Sauza and Cuervo brands, the younger whites or more common golds made from whites mixed with aged tequila that gave them that lovely golden hue. There were something like two hundred brands of tequila on the market, all distilled with varying degrees of purity from the blue agave plant in the Mexican state of Jalisco, and I’d sampled my share of them during lost weekends that had turned into lost years after Jacques died. Today, you could spend as much as a thousand bucks for a bottle of Cuervo’s 1800 Coleccion Añejo, or a quarter of that for the top Herradura, but there was none of that rare and pricey stuff in here. I did see varieties of one-hundred-percent-pure agave by Patron and Porfidio, premium bottles that looked a little dusty and were probably kept on hand for gringos like me who happened to wander in with plenty of money or trendy tequila tastes. I didn’t care if it was a fine Don Julio Silver or a simple Cuervo Traditional: Every time I sat in a bar with golden bottles of tequila beckoning, reminding me of their smoky citrus tastes, I felt the salivating in my mouth, the weakness in my guts, the terrible desire to crawl into a bottle and get lost again. They say that for a gringo like me, it’s not pronounced tequila but
to kill-ya,
especially when you’ve crossed the border with a pocketful of cash into
make-sicko.
I imagined that a shot of Cuervo went for a buck in a place like this, maybe less, which meant I could do some serious damage with the wad in my pocket. Waiting around for Chucho Pernales seemed less and less like a good idea.
I went straight up to the lady wiping down the bar and asked in Spanish if Chucho Pernales had been in yet that night, trying to make it sound like I’d known him since way back when. She studied my thinning blond hair a moment, then my blue eyes; then her own flinty brown eyes flickered in a way that told me she was smarter at this kind of thing than I was. Suddenly, her eyes shifted all at once, away from me and past my left shoulder, like she was sending someone an eyeball telegram.
I turned to see a slim young man coming out of the toilet, which was nothing but a shallow, tiled trough for pissing. He was slightly gaunt in the face but about as pretty a kid as you’d expect to run into outside the movies, where the Latin stars were always light-skinned, even south of the border. His complexion was bronze and his hair straight, which made him look like a young Indian brave without the headband. Dark fuzz covered his upper lip, almost a mustache but not quite, and he had big, expressive brown eyes that found me like radar as the toilet door swung closed behind him. He bolted half a second later, straight through the bar and out the entrance in his snakeskin boots, and I went after him, calling his name.
He dashed through the plaza toward Calle 1, swinging his sharp elbows hard and not looking back. I went after him in my old loafers, watching him cut left at the edge of the plaza, past a vendor pushing a cart filled with
helados,
quickly disappearing. I got there, I looked up the street into the heart of Zona Norte to see sidewalks crowded with all manner of people and the street jammed with vehicles, mostly beer trucks double-parked and taxis whose drivers tooted at me as I stood on the pavement, probably looking confused and lost. Then I spotted Chucho weaving through the pedestrians, no longer able to run with all the congestion. I stepped out into the street, sprinting between the lines of taxis, gaining ground.
Chucho looked back and saw me, dashed into traffic himself, cutting to the other side. I followed his lead until we were both on the sidewalk under a continuous awning of buckled wood, running down a long block past dozens of surprisingly pretty girls who leaned against the wall with one leg up and their short skirts hoisted, just like the girls in the plaza. I heard broken English as I raced past, urgent offers of sex, words of synthetic seduction blurted out and mixing with the horns of the taxis and the tinny music that came from the bars and the clatter of balls in the billiard rooms, where all the doors and windows were open for air.
Chucho reached the corner and rounded it to his right without stopping. When I got to the same spot and made the turn, I saw him hurtling down a slight hill into an unlit street where the pavement had crumbled to pieces years ago. He careened to his left and disappeared into a narrow alley, and I went after him, dodging potholes.
When I reached the alley, I pulled up. It was unpaved and barely wide enough to accommodate an automobile, with nothing ahead but tottering clapboard fences and rear doors to business basements that were locked and bolted. I listened keenly but all I could hear was my own desperate breathing. I figured Chucho was probably down the alley in the shadows, pressed up against one of the filthy buildings, listening to his own pounding heart. There was no sign of life that I could see, not even a stray dog or a drunk who had wandered off Calle 1 to pee or throw up. The ancient carcass of a kitten lay nearby on the oil-drenched earth, as flat and dry as a lizard run over by an eighteen-wheeler on a desert highway, and I realized it was the only cat I’d seen since crossing the border. This was not a place where I belonged, this Zona Norte.
When I turned around to face the sloping street again, I found several pairs of eyes watching me closely, men who had seen the commotion, seen the gringo running for his life, and come down after me, smelling opportunity. I stared straight back and through them, then walked up the middle of the street and past, looking them in the eye only if they were in the way. I kept walking that way until I was back in Plaza Santa Cecilia, crossing to the bar called Mi Amigo.