Mexico Page 8
That chain of logic made absolutely no sense to me. If they’re mothers they were working in the clubs because they had to, not because they wanted to. But I think it’s fair to say Gonzalo had a Mommy complex. He needed some kind of mother he maybe never got as a child, and he wanted me to share his fetish. Me, I wasn’t interested, but the guy wanted me to design a four-million-dollar home off one of the nearby golf courses, so I was willing to go along for the ride.
It was just like what you might expect for a cheapo porno bar. Up on stage, to the left as you came in, the lighting was red and dark, a single white spotlight on the woman at the pole. If she was a mother, she was a young mother, no older than twenty-five. Her nipples were big and brown, so she probably was a mother, and her ass was wide, just like Gonzalo wanted, but otherwise she was slim. She shimmied around the pole. She wore a pair of black-velvet high heels. She had on a red G-string. Otherwise, she was naked, cinnamon brown. Gonzalo walked straight over to her. He pulled out a five-hundred-peso note. The lady turned, with her ass in front of his face. She jiggled it up and down, back and forth, like she was playing the bongo drums, or like some Disney porno film version with her ass as some bongo drums. The standard rule with the pole dancers—as I’d learned earlier that evening, and with other clients closing deals—is that you don’t touch the dancer. You can push money in her G-string, but you don’t touch the merchandise. For that there are lap dances, and there are always plenty of women circling around the nightclubs to offer lap dances and to fill your drink. Gonzalo came about as close as you can to violating the rule. He put his hands up behind the dancer’s butt, he came within a millimeter of touching her, putting his hands around each cheek and pretending to squeeze in the air. This was the third time of the evening he’d done this, as if he thought it was hilarious each time. One of the advantages, from his point of view, seemed to be that for a moment his face and hands were caught in the spotlight, so everyone could see he was the big man, the guy putting in the five hundred pesos. After he stuck the money into the strap, he turned around to me and gave me this look like, Not bad, eh?
I gave him the look of approval he wanted.
To the right of the door, as you came in, there was a long bar-table with a view of the stage to the left. I took a seat at one of the stools and Gonzalo wended his way back to me. He chuckled as he sat down. His hair was combed straight back like some kind of Latin American dictator from the ’80s. He had on a pink button-down shirt, the collar wide open showing some black hairs mixed with gray. He had a number of gold teeth fillings that were more noticeable whenever he put his hand with his Rolex up by his mouth, while laughing. There was an old scar over his left eye. His face was smooth from eating a lot, full of fleshiness, and he had a constant slight sweat from eating and drinking. He seemed to feel a bit hot and sweaty wherever he was.
The whole evening he’d said normal things to me, talking about girls, asking me about my girlfriend, asking me about my father. There wasn’t much to say, he kept the conversation light, but now he leaned in close to me and put his heavy arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “You’re a pussy, but even though you’re a cunt they say you’re a good architect. I want a palace. You give me a palace and I’ll be happy and you’ll make some good money. You fuck up, you give me a house that other people don’t like, and I’ll make your life miserable.”
There was no mistaking his words. It was some kind of strange threat, from out of nowhere. How did I get this client? My brother Rodrigo had a friend who played golf in Acapulco. That friend had said he knew Gonzalo on the golf course. Three degrees of separation. In Mexico there’s usually a personal link, or nothing happens. Rodrigo’s friend was the link. I was going to kill him.
—
The whole time we were in the club it was pretty empty, other than the women working there, the bartender, and Gonzalo’s guard, but there were a few bunches of clients randomly scattered at the tables, some in pairs, chattering, some alone staring in wonderment or, like depressed junkies, up at the pole dancer. There were just enough that I didn’t notice two guys who slipped in after we had been in the club for an hour. When they came in, I didn’t know they were the reason, but Gonzalo excused himself and said he had to go to the bathroom. That left me alone for a while, sitting in the club without having to pretend to be interested in Gonzalo’s conversation. I had a chance to take in the soft Latin beat of the music. There were a few trumpets. It was supposed to be happy music, but in the sad red light falling on the pole dancer on stage the trumpets sounded forlorn, and I wondered what I was doing in this club, so far from my girlfriend, Julieta, in Mexico City. She was under the covers now, sleeping like a babe, with our dog, no doubt, on the floor by her side. We live in a loft I designed in the center of the city, with modern lines that were clean enough to get Wallpaper* magazine interested. They did a photo shoot of the loft—a mix of the modern within a traditional Colonial building, downtown. The truth is, I ripped off the style of another architect whom I admire who isn’t that well known. The loft looks beautiful, but it never would have gotten into Wallpaper* without the connections of a friend of my father. My father is one of those great architects of Mexico, who people in the outside world know. I got to thinking about my father, and I asked myself why I was in this dump with Gonzalo, trying to get him as a client, and I realized the only reason I was sucking up to Gonzalo, or tolerating him, was because I wanted to prove to my father I could make it without him, that I could get my own big clients by myself.
My father’s clients are serious. They’re famous writers, like Carlos Fuentes, or big industrialists who own steel and tuna factories, or telephone and TV companies. You know where their money comes from. They’re old, established families that have owned Mexico from the time of the haciendas or who came over from Spain to make their fortunes. I’m not saying they’re all nice, or all have good taste, but in as many deals as my father has told me about, I’ve never heard him say he went to three crappy strip joints, on the edge of town, to keep the customer satisfied.
While I was having these thoughts, Gonzalo’s driver came up to me and asked me to please follow him to a back room where Gonzalo had gone, earlier, following the two men. The back room had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the walls, and a mirror on the ceiling. There were cheap chandeliers, barely casting an orange tiger glow that perfectly imitated the clothing of the three women who were on the gold vinyl couches next to Gonzalo and by the two men who had come in. The women wore leopard-skin bodysuits. They had long nails and they put their arms around the three men. One stuck her hand on Gonzalo’s hairy chest and stroked him. There was a low coffee table in front of them—a rectangular cube made of mirrors—and on top of it the two other men had made a bunch of lines of white powder cocaine. A lady in a leopard suit grabbed my arm and made me sit in front of the cocaine. One of the two men slapped me on the back and said, “Take some. It’s good. It’s good quality.” I told him, politely, thanks but no thanks. That’s one rule I had for myself. No coke. Ever. I didn’t do that, and I didn’t need Gonzalo so badly that I was going to get trashed that way. It was one thing to drink shots of booze and to go from cheap club to club to get my 10 percent of a four-million-dollar home that many future clients would walk around along the beach of Acapulco. It was another to be told, like a dog, that I should snort coke with a fat client like Gonzalo.
“Hey boss,” one of the two guys said. His face was thick and his ears were missing some of their flesh, like a wrestler who’s had them pulled at too many times. “This guy—what’s his name?—he says he’s not interested.” He pointed at the coke. “What kind of faggot is he? Where did you find this guy?”
I couldn’t tell if Gonzalo had snorted some of the coke, or not. He seemed way too subdued to have taken any. He seemed the opposite, not up but down. He had his head leaning back on the couch, and his eyes half shut, and he was taking in the rubbing of the woman in the leopard suit assigned to him. He was staring up at the m
irror on the ceiling.
“I don’t really like him, either,” Gonzalo said in a fairly muted voice, like he was underwater. “He’s been a party pooper all night. He does look like a faggot. But he’s not. His girlfriend lives with him at Corregidora 38, in the Center. They have a dog and they live together in a loft. He’s an architect who’s going to design my next house for me. And if he screws up, if he makes any mistake on the house, his girlfriend is going to be in trouble.”
I had never given him my home address. I had never told him I had a dog. I had never told him I lived with my girlfriend.
“Hey faggot,” Gonzalo said. “You’ve been avoiding the lap dances all night. I’ve offered you women in each of the clubs and in each place you look at your Piaget watch like you have better things to do and like you don’t like my Rolex. I don’t care if you think I’m a cheap, fat guy with nouveau riche money. Every penny I have, I made it myself. I started my business myself. I don’t sell drugs. I didn’t make money the cheap, fast way. These guys are not drug dealers. They’re just snorting a little coke. Big deal. Every penny I made, I earned it myself. I didn’t come from some family where my father was sending me off to Harvard to go to architecture school. I would have liked that. Anyone would have liked that. But that’s not the way it was for me. So, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take off your pants right here, right now, in front of all of us, and then you’re going to get a lap dance from one of these women.”
I was more and more convinced he didn’t earn his money, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. If he’d made his money the honest way, people would have told me where his money had come from—but before we got together, no one knew. They said he just had it. I was more convinced than ever he was a small-time drug dealer, one of those mini-jefes down the totem pole who thinks he’s a big shot. This kind of scum was getting bigger and bigger in Acapulco. It was infecting the whole country like a cancer.
In Mexico, earthquakes are common. Every architect has to learn how to build around them. You put big buildings on springs that can move with the earth when it ruptures. You reinforce the beams with thick steel rods. You put on extra concrete so the elevated freeways don’t fall. If you do it right, the structure survives with only minor cracks.
The smart thing to do would be to listen to Gonzalo and just do what he said, to go with the flow, to bend. Who cares if it was humiliating? I could take off my pants. I could take off my underwear. I could let the women rub me until I got hard, with the other men watching like animals. I could be the circus animal and design his house, and take the money that I knew was from illegal sources, and get the house printed up in one of the big Mexican architecture magazines that would lead to other clients. It would be a small price of humiliation to keep climbing up the ladder. My father would see me doing better. He would have to admit I could make it on my own. I stood up with one hand on my belt, trying to decide what to do. Should I open my belt or not? If I opened my belt it would be capitulation.
I opened my belt, and I justified it to myself that it was better to live than to be a dead example of someone who had stood up for his principles against these thugs.
“That’s it,” Gonzalo said. “That’s it. Now dance, dance with one of these lovely ladies.” One of the older women with long, red nails opened my pants. I stood in front of the other men, and she felt me up while the men laughed at me like I was a circus monkey.
—
Sometimes, I think about my watch. There are a million things happening around the world at any second. There are an infinite number of split seconds in a minute. If Zeno’s paradox is right—that between any two points there are an infinite number of halfway points, so we should never be able to get anywhere—then the same must be true about choices in life. What if I hadn’t opened my belt? What if I hadn’t let myself stay in that room for a stupid lap dance that I feigned interest in? I didn’t care about the woman who was, supposedly, turning me on, and I cared even less about her twenty minutes later when Gonzalo finally came out of his stupor enough to say he wanted to leave. The two goons who’d been cutting up the coke on the mirror asked Gonzalo, suddenly, when they were going to get paid for some work they had done and for the delivery of a load. I couldn’t hear well, since by now I was standing fairly cold while the woman assigned to me gyrated around my body.
“Just shut up,” Gonzalo said. “You’ll get paid when I tell you.”
The goon with the ears partially missing said, “Nothing is free, jefe. You pay up soon or things could get nasty.”
Gonzalo’s driver came in, and he wasn’t having any of this discussion. He told the two goons to calm down. He was sober. He told Gonzalo he had to go to the car now, that it wasn’t safe to stay anymore. He said he would deliver me back to my hotel.
“We’re not going to his hotel, yet,” Gonzalo said. “He’s coming with me and these two women.” He grabbed ahold of the woman who had been dancing around me, who’d tried to give me a blowjob in front of the other men—she wasn’t fully successful because I willed myself not to get it up for her.
It seemed like the evening was falling apart, completely. Whether I would get the contract to build the house or not, suddenly seemed up in the air. In the morning, when everyone is recovering from their fiesta, there are times when people pretend whatever happened the night before never happened. And that could mean I would have a contract for the house or not, the next day. Oddly enough, though, and one of the reasons I had opened my pants—other than wanting to live—is that I knew these jefes lived according to their own, perverted code. If they said they wanted me to build the house, and even more so if they threatened me, it meant they had fixated on me for some reason, and they wanted it bad. And once they wanted it bad, they wouldn’t let go.
Gonzalo’s driver hurried me into the back of the Mercedes-Benz with the two women—one for Gonzalo and one, supposedly, for me. I had hopes the driver was just humoring his boss, that Gonzalo would finally calm down and let me end the “fun” of the evening and go home to my hotel.
“You’ll get your money next Monday,” Gonzalo said to the two goons, and this calmed them as we got into the car.
For a moment, sitting in the back of the car, I thought there would be a happy ending. I was sandwiched between the two women. Gonzalo was in front, telling his driver to go faster. The engine of the Mercedes accelerated hard and we swooped around a curve at what must have been ninety miles an hour. On the straightaways the driver was going a hundred. The precision of the machine, the precision of European engineering, was comforting, and I leaned back into the plush leather thinking this was it, a minor moment of humiliation survived, a day I could live with. My head was foggy from the late night, and the bad perfume of the women next to me pressed into my nose, but I began to think of the house I would design for Gonzalo on the beach. I would build it four stories high, one more than usual to give it the prominence he wanted. There would be circles and triangles throughout, primary shapes, just as Louis I. Kahn did in his Center for British Art at Yale, but I would come up with my own style for this house. I vowed I would never let myself rip off the work of any other architect again. This house would be a turning point in my work, a moment of maturation where I would go from cribbing others. And I would do it precisely because Gonzalo had humiliated me. I would give him a house that was better than he deserved, because it would be for me and not for him, and I would use his filthy money to do it.
The car slid sideways as the driver slammed on the brakes when the headlights pointed out a tree across the road. From a hundred to zero in six seconds. The women next to me came out of their soft leaning-in, tired from their work, ready for sleep, and screamed. I angled forward once the car came to a stop, with the bright lights against the green branches of the tree in front of us. It was a large tree, masking what was beyond. Gonzalo yelled at the driver, “Get back. Turn this around. It’s a trap.”
The driver punched the car in reverse, and I was
thrown forward and then back hard into the leather seat. Bullets came from the right as the wheels whirled against the pavement. TaTat! TaTat! Tattattattattat. When the projectiles hit the front, they didn’t break the glass. There must have been bulletproofing. But the bullets kept coming, the glass bending and molding inward, until there was no more resistance, Gonzalo yelling at his driver to go faster, the front window pocked with flying metal, the women grabbing at me and trying to get down, Gonzalo’s head flying back and then his body slumping forward, the driver’s foot coming off the accelerator as he slumped, too. I hid beneath the bodies of the women on the floor of the backseat. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard some men running up to the car and then away from it.
“They’re dead,” I heard one shout. “Come on, let’s go, they’re all finished. We got them.”
Then another opened up his machine gun against the side door, in the back. He unleashed a wave of bullets. They hit more and more into the door, just behind me. I felt a sting and a piece of metal go into my body somewhere. I heard someone open the door and look in.
“Yes, they’re all dead,” he said, and he left the door open and ran away.
How I’d become twisted, with my back against the floor, I’ll never know. My hand was splayed above me and I heard a faint tick, tick, tick, with the precision of a Swiss watch, and saw the time: 3:50. One second earlier, and I might have had a different outcome—I might never have been in that car.
—
A couple days ago, I went to a funeral. It was of the woman who gave me the lap dance. Before the funeral, my girlfriend asked why I had to go. I’d told her everything that had happened that night. I didn’t want any secrets between us before we got married. She came and saw me in the hospital, from Mexico City to Acapulco, and while it wasn’t clear, at first, whether I would live, I told her, through the breathing mask stuck to my face, what had happened. I didn’t want to leave any detail out, so I told her about the strange way I’d ended up in the back room with the mirrors and how Gonzalo had insisted I have a lap dance. I told her about the house I wanted to design for him.