The Table of Truth - Chapter Two, Part 1a

CHAPTER TWO

Part 1

Counting Down

It’s easy to fuck for money. Especially when you don’t think about it. You bend over. Put your mind on something else. And wait for him to finish. It helps when you've had a lot to drink. It loosens you up. Numbs the senses. You don’t want to seem uninterested, so you move around a lot. Make some noises like you’re loving every thrust. I try to always have a little Red Bull. It picks me up. And it's free. The boys are always paying. They don't notice their money going when they have tits to look at. Almost. I leave just enough mystery to make them take me upstairs. They'll have to pay for heaven.
I try to ignore the fact that I don’t want to be there. Failing that, I try to remember why I’m there. I think of my children. How much food I can buy with the thirty dollars I’m making. I keep going for them.
I try to avoid giving head. I hate the smell. The hair. Sometimes the choking, especially when they grab my hair. I try to please them and get them on the bed as soon as possible. The sooner it’s over, the sooner I can get another client and another thirty dollars.
If a man is rough, or strange, like he wants hot wax poured on his penis, I try to avoid him when I see him in the club again.
I don't orgasm anymore. I haven't had an orgasm since I started. A couple times I came close. When I liked a guy. A nice guy. Well, nice at first. They were the nicest gentlemen in the world while we sat and had drinks. But after we fucked, they didn't want to have anything more to do with me. They wouldn't even look at me. Pretty soon I stopped romanticizing about anyone. And all the sex I had was just fucking for dollars. And I soon forgot the feeling of a sexual climax.
I prefer doggy style. So do most of my customers. They like to fuck like animals. I like looking away from them. Sometimes they forget they're human. Sometimes, especially when they're drunk, they act like they have something to prove inside me. And it hurts like hell. I always use lube. But sometimes even a whole bottle isn't enough, so I count down the minutes until we're done. I begin when we enter the room. Thirty minutes left. The clothes are off. Twenty-five minutes left. On the bed, twenty minutes left. By the time it gets rough there are usually only ten minutes left, and I count them down by the individual minutes. I look at my watch and I concentrate on that.
There's a mirror at the head of the bed. I don’t know why they put it there, but I often watch myself in it and remind myself how I came to this point in my life.
The first time I had sex, the first time I had real sex, was when I was 14. My boyfriend Diego told me I had to do it if I really loved him. I did love him. I wanted to prove that to him. I didn’t know much about sex, but I knew I wanted to try it.
The first few times hurt a lot. I don’t remember if I screamed or cried, but I remember that I felt like I was being ripped apart. When it was over I always told him that I liked it, while I hoped it would get better.
And it did. We sneaked away every chance we got and found some private place where we could make love. Sometimes we sneaked away from school. Other times from church. We mostly told our parents we were going to someone else's home and found some place where no one could see us. There are a lot of empty houses lying behind broken down fences in the hills of Rosarito where we lived. I learned to relax into the enjoyment of it. Soon I was the one pulling him aside. There wasn’t much else to do anyway, and most girls I knew were having sex long before they were 15.
But then the price of it came. I had started menstruating when I was 13, and suddenly it stopped. I asked my mother what was wrong. She told my father. He was so furious I thought he might attack me.
He didn't. It was worse. He just told me how disappointed he was with me. It was a quiet sadness in his eyes. I would rather he have lashed out at me. Hit me. Spank me like I deserved. Make me a child again and take away this enormous responsibility I was about to have. At least yell at me. But he didn’t. He just shook his head at me pitifully, telling me with his face that I had let him down. “You have ruined your life,” he said. “You could have achieved many great things, but this child will keep you from them.”
I began crying. I cried for several days. Not because of what was happening to my life. But because Father made me realize how much me and my sisters must have ruined his life by being born.
He and my mother were in their teens when they began having children. He could have been a great musician. He could have traveled the world, seen many things, and maybe even been famous, but he had stayed with my mother and taken care of us children. The shame I suddenly felt realizing that we had probably ruined his life, as now mine would be ruined with my stupidity!
He found me crying and he comforted me. I never told him I was crying for him.
Diego and I moved into an apartment together. We no longer had to sneak away. But as my belly got bigger, I began to wonder if he was sneaking away from me. He claimed to always be looking for work. But it didn't seem right that he would be searching after 7:00 at night.
I spent much of my time reading about babies. Preparing myself to be the best mother Mexico has ever seen. I also read about giving birth. Every health tip I could find to make sure it came out of me healthy and safe. One of the books suggested I get injections of multivitamins. So every day I gave myself a shot into the butt. I had trouble sitting straight some days, leaning over in the chair while Diego looked at me strangely. Thinking on how the baby would come out, I knew that it was all worth it.
I was not the only pregnant girl in school. As I walked down the halls, I noticed many other girls my age with their bellies getting bigger. They sometimes stopped and smiled and showed off to each other. I have always been more reserved, so I didn’t join them. But I would often watch them and listen to the tips and suggestions they were giving each other.
Pregnancy was so common among the girls in my school that I began to wonder what my father had meant by saying I had ruined my life. It wasn’t like girls in my neighborhood had much else to look forward to. We were expected to grow up and be taking care of children by the time we were twenty. A few girls studied hard, and were hated for it. One girl got straight tens, and the girls beat her mercilessly. They said she thought she was better than everyone else.
I knew I was on the right track when Barbara, the most popular girl in school, showed up with a big belly. Her friends squealed with delight that she would soon be a mother. She was a beautiful girl with long, flowing black hair and large eyes. And her boyfriend was strong. Muscular. He was handsome and he worked on cars. Her baby would certainly be gorgeous.
The most painful thing I ever felt was giving birth. It is one of the hardest things for a woman to do. Harder still for a 15-year-old girl. I held tight to my sister's hand on one side, and Diego on the other. I fell back almost unconscious when it came out.
I was in a daze. Looking up at the white ceiling. I could faintly hear everyone swooning happily. I heard a faint cry. A little voice.
Then he was held above me. A cherub. An angel. I thought I had died and he was welcoming me to heaven. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Never in my life have I been so in love with any being than this person lowering down to me. I didn't know it was possible to love anything so much.
He was placed in my arms. I looked into the eyes of the most amazing creature on earth. Diego had already named him… Diego Jr.
I stayed at home taking care of Diego Jr. for several months. Diego said he had found work, but it was at strange hours. Some days he would sleep in and leave in the middle of the day. Other times he would leave in the middle of the night. He told me not to ask him about his work, and so I didn’t. He paid the bills and brought home food. All I cared about was the baby.
But the bills were not always paid on time. When the electricity went out for the second time, I decided that wherever Diego got his money, it wasn’t reliable. Spring was coming, so I asked my mother to watch over Diego Jr. and I took a job at a restaurant on the main thoroughfare of town where tourists regularly passed on their way to or from the night clubs.
One week every spring our little neighborhood became the most popular spot on earth for rich college students who came in from the United States waving their dollars around. It seemed like everyone on earth was crowding in our area. We were the gateway to their enjoyment. They left chaos, garbage, and lots of money in their wake.
The worst job was cleaning the bathrooms, which I managed to avoid most of the time. I wore tight shirts that always caught the boys’ attention. Girls didn’t like it, but they weren’t the ones paying. Even boys who were there with their girlfriends found a hidden moment to slap me on the butt while the girls weren’t looking. If the boys were caught by their girlfriends, they simply said they were drunk and the girls excused them for it. In any case, I got away with a bigger tip.
We tried to stay open and work as many hours as we could during this time. Everyone in the town tried to harvest as much money out of these party goers as they could to hold them over the rest of the year, much like a farmer brings in the crops to last his family over a winter. Prices were higher for the out-of-towners than they were for locals. If we charged each other the same amount, we would all starve. But those who came into town had lots of money that were given to them by their parents. And whatever they lost they would recover when they returned.
I don’t know what makes their green paper more valuable than our coins, but their value makes them powerful. I kept my mouth shut and made the money. Because money equaled food for my child.
One morning we came in to work and found the place vandalized. Someone had broken the lock, opened up the doors, and gotten inside. They had stolen all the money, which wasn’t a lot. But the worst part was that they had smashed the TVs, stolen the liquor, and broken some chairs. Those were worth more money than what we had in the register. They even vomited all over the floors.
The police were no help. They had seen what happened, but someone paid them to not arrest the vandals, and they let them go. The owners couldn’t complain. They had to start over and keep going as if nothing had happened. This sort of thing occurred every year. The owners of restaurants had to take this into account when taking stock of their profits.
The crowds of the spring are both a blessing and a curse to those of us who live in Rosarito.
I spent every moment I could spare with my boy. He was the reason I did everything. Whenever life was hard, I always thought of him. I pampered him beyond reason. I would do anything to keep him safe. To make him happy. It kept me going.
The first time it got cold I bundled him up so tightly in so many clothes and blankets I almost smothered him. My mother yelled at me when she saw this and threw the blankets off. He was coughing for air. “You have to let him breathe!” she scolded. I began taking Diego to her a lot so my mother could observe. I never told her this was why I wanted her to see him, of course. I didn't want her to know that I needed any help.
My oldest sister Berta had a daughter a couple years older than Diego. She gave me a lot of clothes and baby things that she wasn't using any more. They had mostly been handed down to her from our mother after our youngest sister was through with them. We had another sister also, between Berta and I, who had no children. But after she saw the excitement and joy Berta and I had, she began talking to her boyfriend about marriage. I don't think he liked us very much.