Another Small Slice Of My Life And Not Surprisingly They All Seem The Same To Me

I was writing something that belong in a brochure for rats.  It was that good and then I started imagining Progresso and the French sisters.  I couldn’t tell them apart.  They constantly wore matching French flag tee-shirts with four identical nipples trying to pierce the cloth.  I’ve always been partial to sisters.  Yeah, I think it was a Sunday.  I’d left the German women with her kid in a rundown hotel on the beach.  Sure, her sucking and fucking were good and you could drown in her skin.  Okay. The problem though was the terrible, vile words that came out of her mouth.  The threats, the theft, the sickness.  Stuff like that.  No doubt she kept some dark secrets buried inside.  Something to do with abuse as a kid and teenager.  Maybe her father … I don’t know, she was always unclear about what it was, and even though I felt sorry for her, it didn’t make up for the shit she constantly gave me and the kid.  The kicker, of course, was she kept saying she loved us both. 

It was an overcast day and I walked down the beach thinking about what to do.  I wondered if I really had it in me to leave a mother and her kid in Progresso.  The place was dirty, with streets full of trash and sketchy looking Mexicans.  The pier was long, almost out of sight, and the big ships docked there, offloading different kinds of shit and taking on other kinds of shit, and the men worked for pennies a day and the bosses always seemed to get their way.  The only thing keeping me going was the predrilled pot cigarettes the little old night clerk sold me.  He was about four feet tall and I’d go into his bedroom at the back and he had them in the top drawer of a chest and he’d fish out four or five and I’d give him a US dollar for each one.

Leaving them.  Could I do it?  I bucked myself up by tapping into a selfish streak that I kept for just such occasions.  It was a bit like drinking 100 proof whisky straight from the bottle.  After a while, I pushed open the doors to the bus station.  I was going to buy a ticket to Playa del Carmen.  Not too far, but far enough for me.  I’d get over to the islands and then who knows, maybe Cuba.  Sitting on a bench was one of the French sisters.  I’d only said hi to her on the beach, looking down at her lying there on a giant parrot towel.  I don’t think there was a hair below her head, except between her legs, or so I thought, and all the others appeared to be gone, disappeared into the dictates of French Vogue. 

I made her to be fragile, sad, and there was something twisted going on in her 18 year old mind, or maybe 19, with dirty blonde hair and a thin body marked by cherry lips and blue eyes that could, no doubt, cry on cue or shoot down aircraft that made the mistake of flying too close to the ground.  With not much to lose, I sat beside her and asked, how’s tricks and she said, in broken English, what?  It’s hard to break a language with one word, but she did it.  So we switched to Spanish and then she opened up to me and said, she wanted to get out of town too and could she go with me?  Motherfucker.  This was all I needed.

Do you want to go to Playa del Carmen, I asked.  Sure, she replied.  Well, the bus doesn’t leave for another hour or two, so let’s go across the street and grab a beer.  So off we went and inside we sat and she told me her life story.  Her father had blown all her mother’s money and run off and left them fairly fucked in Paris.  Without options, the mother had brought them to Mexico about six months ago.  Since they didn’t have a lot of money, they’d settled in Progresso.  It’s so boring, she cried, but let me say one thing, my sister is the smart one, and I’m the pretty one, and I like it that way.  Why, I asked and she said, it made things a lot easier to screw people over.  I’m just being honest, she said, because if we’re going to go to Playa del Carmen together, I just want to make all that clear.  Okay, I said, I understand, but, you two are identical.  I can’t see much difference.  That was the wrong thing to say, because she starts describing all the imperfections of her sister, stuff that she didn’t have and couldn’t I see that?  And I said, well, I haven’t been looking at you two very closely, but I’m looking at you now, and I can believe that you are the most beautiful one, especially in this bar and then she smiled.  In a way she was precious, but I knew that smile.  It reminded me of the German woman’s smile and the one the kid was working on and I thought to myself that this sort of smile was defining my life right now and I couldn’t see anything better to do but tell the French girl I couldn’t take her to Playa del Carmen, because, I was sure her mother wouldn’t like it and anyway, I had a German lover back in a hotel and I really should return to her and she started saying stuff in French and cursing the Boche.    

About thirty minutes later, I was standing in front of the hotel door.  I knocked and she opened up.  I’ll never forget her look.  She said, I knew you’d come back.  Once again she seemed beautiful and sexy. The kid was sleeping and the air conditioner was blasting and she began to kiss me and before too long we were fucking in the bed next to the kid.  In the morning we returned to Merida and the day after that we caught a plane to  Oaxaca and ended up on Playa Azul and it went on like that until I left her for good about three months later in San Antonio.   

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