Los Baños de Vapour would open at eight that evening. They had a central tub and rooms to rent; massage boys could be rented, too. I would be welcome.
The papier-mâché Pan was at least seven feet tall and was indeed the only bright thing in the lobby. Passing through the courtyard, an overgrown jumble of vines pushing through cracked tiles, a slight smell of sulfur, a stagnant fountain, we were shown up a flight of concrete stairs to our room by Carlos, a solid, round-faced man in his mid-twenties, wrapped in a frayed white towel. The room was small and completely tiled, grout black from a losing fight with the wet tropical air. At one end was a shower and at the other a bench, a low, vinyl-covered bed and a massage table. There was a switch that, when flipped, filled the room with steam. Boyfriend flipped it and we shucked our clothes; as the pipes hissed and clanked, Carlos gestured to the massage table and then to me.
Boyfriend answered for me, in Spanish, that I’d love to. I got on the table and Carlos set to work. Boyfriend danced around the table gleefully, sometimes stroking me, sometimes Carlos’s butt. “Hey, man, I’m working!” Carlos protested, not very insistently, and Boyfriend went for his cock, stroking it hard, then urged him up onto the table, and Carlos’s hands, still slick from the massage oil and warm from the friction of my skin, covered my breasts as Boyfriend rolled a condom onto Carlos’s cock and rubbed it up and down my labia a few times and finally let go, letting it sink in. He rode me slow and then hard while the table rocked dangerously and Boyfriend stood at my head, letting me tongue his cock while he played with Carlos’s tits. When Boyfriend was sure that we were having a good time, he put on a towel and slipped out the door. Carlos looked surprised. I had to figure out how to say, in Spanish “He’s going hunting,” and get him to go back to fucking me, solid body slick from oil and steam; if he kept it up, he would make me come, clutching his slippery back, legs in the air.
That was just happening when Boyfriend came back with David. He was pulling him in the door by his already stiff penis, and I suspected Boyfriend had wasted as little time getting him by the dick as he usually did. He had found David in the tub room, he announced, and he had a beautiful, long uncut cock. (Boyfriend always enunciated clearly when he said “uncut”.) David did have a beautiful cock, and he spoke English and was long and slim with startling blue eyes. It turned out he was Chicano, second generation, a senior Riverside High who spent school breaks with his grandmother in Mérida and worked at Los Baños de Vapour as a secret summer job. We found out all this about him as I was showering the sweat and oil off from my fuck with Carlos, and by the time I heard that he’d been working at the Baños since he turned sixteen, I was ready to start fucking again. David was the most quintessentially eighteen-year-old fuck I ever had, except Boyfriend’s presence made it unusual; he held David’s cock and balls and controlled the speed of the thrusting, until his mouth got preoccupied with Carlos’s dick. David told me, ardently, that I was beautiful, though at that point I didn’t care if I was beautiful or not, since I was finally in a bathhouse doing what I’d always wanted to do and I felt more like a faggot than a beautiful gringa. But David was saying he wished he had a girlfriend like me, even though I was thirty, shockingly old – this actually was what almost all of Boyfriend’s conquests said to me, though I suspected not every man could keep up with a girlfriend who was really a faggot, or a boyfriend who was really a woman, or whatever kind of fabulous anomaly I was.
Then someone knocked on the door and we untangled for a minute to answer it, and there were José and Gaspar, laughing and saying we were the most popular room in the Baños at the moment and would we like some more company? At least that’s how David translated the torrent of Spanish, for they were both speaking at once. Naturally we invited them in, and lo and behold, Gaspar was actually gay, and so while I lay sideways on the massage table with my head off the edge and my legs in the air so I could suck David while José fucked me, I could watch Boyfriend finally getting his cock sucked by Gaspar, whose black, glittering Mayan eyes closed in concentration, and I howled with not simply orgasm but the excitement, the splendid excitement of being in Mexico in a bathhouse with four uncut men and a maniac, a place no woman I knew had gone before. Steam swirled in the saturated air like superheated fog, beading like pearls in the web of a huge Yucatán spider in the corner; David’s cock, or was it José’s or Carlos’s again, I didn’t care, pounded my fully opened cunt rhythmically and I wished I had her view.
You know if you have ever been to a bathhouse that time stands still in the steamy, throbbing air, and so I had no idea how long it went on, only that sometimes I was on my back and sometimes on my knees, and once for a minute I was standing facing the wall, and when Boyfriend wasn’t sucking them or fucking me, he was taking snapshots of us, just like a tourist. The floor of the room was completely littered with condoms, which made us all laugh hysterically. Rubber-kneed, Gaspar and David held me up with Carlos and José flanking them so Boyfriend could snap one last picture. Then he divided all the rest of the condoms among them – we had more at the hotel, I think that week we went through ten dozen – and got out his brochures. He was trying to explain in Spanish the little condoms he used for giving head – how great they were to use with uncut guys ’cause they disappeared under the foreskin – and I was asking David what it was like to live a double life, Riverside High to Los Baños, and who else came there – “Oh, everybody does,” he said – and did they ever want to fuck him – of course they wanted to – and did he ever fuck them – well, sure – and how was that? He shrugged and said, as if there were only one possible response to my question, “It’s fucking.”
When we left, the moon was high, the Baños deserted, the warm night air almost cool after the steamy room. The place looked like a courtyard motel, the kind I used to stay in with my parents when we traveled in the early sixties, but overgrown and haunted. The Pan figure glittered in the low lobby light, and the man at the desk charged us $35 – seven for each massage boy, four each to get in, and six for the room. Hundreds of thousands of pesos – he looked anxious, as though he feared we’d think it was too much. We paid him, laughing. I wondered if this was how a Japanese businessman in Thailand felt. Was I contributing to the imperialist decline of the third world? Boyfriend didn’t give a shit about things like that, so I didn’t mention it. In my hand was a crumpled note from David: “Can I come visit you in your hotel room? No money.”
Tarot
Florence Dugas
Noon was gently moving towards two o’clock. As it was already summertime, no one could telclass="underline" somewhere in the world it’s always noon. It was as if the sun had given her a sign, and she didn’t return to work.
The sound of her heels against the stone of the road and the sidewalk is like a clamour of victory. She supplies a rhythm to the city, and her long, thin legs move, map, and order its topography, like a defiant army marching ahead under the newfound sun, celebrating the coming of spring. It is good to feel the heat spread across her skin, caressing her knees like two warm hands, even moving up between her thighs now no longer under the protection of nylon. The sun almost draws a crown of gold around her head, as if she were a chosen being. From time to time she even swings her head from side to side, like a racehorse in heat. Saying yes and no to her invisible mount while her heavy stream of hair undulates across her back. She straightens her back, holding her stomach in, and the flow of her hair swims gloriously in motion.