The Table of Truth - Chapter Two, Part 2

Part 2

I am on Nobody’s Side


I had to let the children go outside to get exercise and play. I'm sure they went out while I was at work. I worried every minute they were away. Every minute I was away. I worried that they would be picked up by the police. That they would be kidnapped. That they would get lost. That they would find something better and not want to come home. That someone would hurt them. That they would hurt themselves. I worried that they would find me at work. I forbade them to make friends. I told them this was temporary. But I couldn't tell them for how long. My sisters had told me I could come home soon. But when?
I tried to keep the children inside as much as possible. The best way to do this was to show them movies. They saw a lot of them. Everything from adventures to documentaries. I stayed up fascinated by stories about hunters, like sharks, lions, and anacondas.
I found a group of DVDs called 'The Lord of the Rings' that lasted twelve hours. The many times they would watch it and re-watch it bought me a lot of time. We all sat in the bed together staying up late enthralled by this other world. A place where people were not hidden away in a small room. A world where there was no upstairs business I had to hide from my kids.
I enjoyed Golem. I could understand his addiction to the ring. I was drinking enough now that I felt the same pull to alcohol. But Treebeard was my favorite. The walking tree. His slow speech and wise eyes drew me in. But then he said something that I felt deep in my heart. When one of the little men asked him what side he was on, he said, “Side? I am on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side.” That was it! That was how I felt! Nobody is on my side. So why should I be on anyone else’s side?
It helped me cope with my job. When I was angry with a customer, or the bar, I protected myself from the pain by reminding myself that I am not on their side because they are not on my side. Suddenly everything felt better. I was emotionally distant from anything that could hurt me. I was in it for myself. And for my children. And that was all that was important in the world. Counting down now was replaced by my mantra, “I am on nobody’s side because they are not on my side.”
Whenever I walked to work my nose reminded me why I was doing it. The tasty smells of carne asada were like clouds I walked through. And I knew that it was waiting for me and my family when I came out.
One day, on my way in, I noticed how many men were working outside the clubs for pennies as shoe shiners, magazine sellers, and many were beggars. I was suddenly very glad that I was young and pretty enough to be a prostitute, working inside and easily making enough to survive on. That was when I became okay with what I was doing.
That same day I stood near the back of the club doing what I often did, watching people. Men are easy creatures to understand, but it still fascinated me. The different ways in which they went about doing basically the same things. Each one thought they were the first. Each thought they were unique. But they were all the same.
Sometimes in the room I would go through the man’s stuff. Not to steal it. I was fascinated with what they carried. Gum. Cigarettes. Business cards from every profession. Photos of their loved ones. Their family. Some had fake IDs. A trucker kept key chains from every state. I remember one from a place called Nebraska that had a cow with a skirt on it. Any time they had souvenirs I tried to look at them and imagine what those places must be like. Many of the men brought condoms. They probably thought they would have to supply them.
On this particular day I couldn’t get the man beside me to be interested in getting me a drink. Or fucking. So I wasn’t bothering him. He walked away. I glanced over to see who was next. He looked over at me at the same time. We both did a double take. It was my father! My hands raised to my mouth in surprise. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or angry.
He was less torn. “What are YOU doing here!” he asked furiously. He grasped my arm. “Your mother and I didn’t raise you to be a whore!” He tightened his grip and started toward the door.
I yanked back. “What about you? You shouldn’t be here either! You’re supposed to fuck Mom, not these chicas!”
He stopped, still grasping my arm. He knew that he had been caught every bit as much as I had. He knew that if I told Mother he would be in more trouble than I. He could lose everything. “I won't tell her if you don't,” he said. He let go and took another long swig of his beer.
We both leaned against the wall trying to think about what to say next. “Have you seen the movie about that pilot?” he asked. “It stars the guy from that boat movie you really love.”
“Leonardo Di Caprio.”
“Yeah. Yeah. He’s a really good actor.”
My eyebrows furrowed. How could he be thinking about something like that right now? Thousands of questions raced through my mind. But I couldn’t get any of them out. I had never wanted to think of him and mom and sex. But I knew that that’s where it was supposed to happen. Would he tell my mother about this place? Would he tell everyone in the family? If so, would I tell about him being here? How else would he know that I’m here? If they did find that out, what would happen to the family?
We both stood against the wall in fear, each one waiting for the other to move first. As if that would make the one still standing less guilty.
Then someone else decided for us. A boy with a buzz cut and a letter on his jacket strutted up to me. He took my hand and said, “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
I followed him. Didn't look back until I was half way through the room. At last I did. Daddy wasn't looking at me. He was finishing a swig of his beer. He handed it to a waiter in one hand and grabbed a girl with the other just before the crowd of bodies got between us.
We saw each other a few more times after that. He bought us both a drink and we talked. It wasn't the place I had imagined connecting with my father. But it was the first place where we got to know one another as adults. I asked him several questions for the first time. Where had he met my mother?
In school.
What attracted him to her?
Her beauty. And her strength. She had approached him first.
What did he enjoy in life?
His music and his girls.
What were his dreams, and where did he steer away from them?
He was living that dream. He didn't like to think of what else could have been. He was fine with who he was and where he was in life.
He asked me why I was in that place. I made the one rule we both lived by. We wouldn't talk about the club. Neither of us would ask why we were there. And neither would talk about this with Mother.
I could see in his eyes two emotions. A respect for me as an adult. An equal. Someone he had never truly known before. And also a disappointment that I had not lived up to being more.
The visit became a weekly event. Every Tuesday he came in and checked in on me. I made sure I wasn't with a customer at that hour. I didn't want him to see me doing what I did there.
I at last broke my own rule. I had to know why he had come to this club. Did he not love Mother anymore?
“Oh. I love her more than ever,” he said. “I would give anything just to spend my life with her.”
“Then why...” I started.
He lifted a hand. “People think that men who seek out other women are evil at heart. That they don't love their spouses. That's not true. I'm not going to excuse anyone who cheats, least of all myself. But it's not that a man falls out of love. For us, love and sex are two separate things.”
I had noticed this from other men who made their excuses before sex. They usually talked about their wives or girlfriends. They said they still loved them. They just needed to feel a little variety. Have a little fun outside the relationship. It didn’t change the way they felt about the woman they loved. After sex, though, they rarely spoke at all. They usually put their clothes on as quickly as possible without looking at me and hurried from the room.
These small conversations I had with my father during that week drew us closer than we had ever been. They reminded me of the good times. When I was much younger. I had been too young to really appreciate him. Now we spoke to one another as equals. As friends. I found that I really did love this man. I saw why Mother built her life with him. There was a nobility in him. A unique way of looking at the world. But it was buried inside him, sometimes unable to come out and show itself. We drank together. Sometimes I stopped him before he drank too much.
After work one day I took him to the hotel to see the kids. They screamed with excitement to see their grandfather. They jumped all over him. He took us all to a restaurant downstairs where we feasted on tacos and took some home with us.
The following Tuesday he didn't arrive at the club. I was confused. And a little worried. I thought perhaps my mother had discovered what was happening and was keeping him at home. Yelling at him. I would have hoped it wasn't anything worse. But I couldn't imagine anything that would be worse than that.
I left the club and went to a pay phone at the corner. I called Claudia, uncertain what to say. I didn't want to tell her Father had come to the club. So I tried to ask around that. See if perhaps something had happened around home.
She told me that Father was in the hospital. He had been sick for some time. But he was hiding it from the rest of us. I had noticed no signs in all of the visits.
Claudia took me to see him in a Tijuana hospital. He was hooked up to a bunch of machines, including a respirator over his mouth. Berta was already there. She was staying by his bed even more than my mother, who was working overtime to pay for everything. When she looked up at me entering the room, I saw that her eyes were red. Bloodshot from hours of staying up late. Or stress. Or crying. Or all of it.
They told me that he was doing better. That he would be ready to go home soon. But I could hardly believe it. He didn't look like himself. His skin had changed color. More pale. He had deep circles under his eyes, which rested on me. And that was the hardest part. Though he was weak and suffering, he didn't seem concerned about his condition. He instead just looked at me... disappointed.
I didn't say much to him. What could I say? He just looked at me with those knowing eyes. After Claudia told him various things about her own life, she and I left Berta and he alone and walked into the hallway.
“The doctors say he drank too much,” she told me. “His liver is almost destroyed. We're taking him home, but we're going to need to watch over him and make sure...”
“Can I come home, too?” I asked quickly.
Claudia hesitated a moment. “You can never go home to live with Mom and Dad again,” she said. “They have Elsa to take care of. You'll give them five more kids to raise.”
“Five? I have four.”
“And you. You need to grow up, Marisela. Find your own place. Make your own way. Do you have a job?”
“I... Yes.”
“That place?”
“Yeah.”
She looked away. Sucked in a deep breath. She nodded, then looked back at me. “I saw a few places for rent. I'll see what I can do.”
After Claudia went home I walked alone. It was late and many of the halls were empty. The rooms were quiet. This was very different from the hallways I was used to. Soon I came upon a small chapel with a statue of Jesus on the cross at the front. I walked in and stared at it a moment. On the way to the hospital, Claudia had told me that Mother had turned to religion once things got bad for Dad. I didn't know if that was right. To turn to this only when things went wrong. But I had found myself doing it before. And now I was doing it again.
I got on my knees. The way I had seen others do it. I felt a little stupid. But no one else was around. I folded my hands and looked up at the statue. I saw the shape of the cross and remembered that you're supposed to do something with your hands. Make a shape or something. So I moved my hand in the air like I was drawing a cross and then looked up at Jesus. I prayed for Daddy. For my family to be like normal again. Then I begged him to please bring me someone who is on my side. Anyone.
Two days later a man was in the room with me. He stopped fucking me and started asking questions. He wanted to know about me. My feelings. My opinions. No one had ever asked my opinion before. No one had ever challenged my mind. Made me think of things. When he asked what I would like to do for a job, I told him I was interested in psychology because I liked watching people. Studying them. Trying to understand them. I understood this man the least. Men always just wanted to get naked and start fucking as quick as possible. But not him. When he looked into my eyes I felt like I could melt. I was afraid because he made me feel things I hadn't felt for anyone before.
After he left I thought I'd never see him again, but he had changed my life. I began thinking about my own future, what I would do after things were cleared up with the police in Rosarito. I would get my children's lives on track. But perhaps I should get my own life on track, too. Perhaps I should find some other line of work. I couldn't do this forever. Sometimes I saw an older prostitute in the brothel. It was a sad sight. Anyone over 30 needed to start looking to retire. And over 40 it was just plain pathetic.
The man returned, and I jumped into his arms. No man had ever returned. Not for me. Not for anyone else I knew. He wanted to know more about me. So we sat at a table he called the table of truth where we had to tell each other our real feelings. Our real thoughts. We shared ourselves with each other. The way he talked, the things he asked me... I knew myself better when I was around him. I felt better about who I was.
Claudia talked with social services and found that the case Diego was involved in was closed. The police were no longer looking for me. As long as I stayed out of trouble, I could come home.
It was a relief to move back into the hills of Rosarito with my family. They all lived within a few blocks of one another. Their little community. And now I would be part of it again. The children were happy also to be close to my younger sisters, nieces and nephews. We gathered at the house of my mother on every occasion we could.
My children started school again. They quickly became entrenched in a group of friends. Everyone in my neighborhood walks, or shares taxis together, so everyone knows each other. The restaurants in my neighborhood are open to the sidewalk so people are social even when passing by. It was good to be reconnected like this again.
The man returned to Chicas a third time. He had taken me seriously about wanting to be a psychologist. Most of the time people laughed when I told them I had dreams. He brought me a book. I read from it every opportunity I got. Now that I was taking a taxi or bus all the way from Rosarito I had the time. Sometimes I had to write down a word and ask someone who understood English better than I did what it meant.
Sometimes that person was my father, who I visited after work. He was the first to teach me to speak the language. If he had not pushed me, I probably would not have learned, and I would not have the hope this book was bringing.
Men sometimes bought flowers for me at work, and I gathered them in the back into a bouquet. Then took them with me to the dark hospital late at night. Visiting hours were over, but no one seemed to care. When I asked him random questions about obscure words in the book, he answered, but he asked me why. I usually told him I was just curious. But at last I told him I was interested in studying psychology. I showed him the book, and he smiled. Proud at last.
When I got home late that night I took the book mark out. It was a photograph of me with the American. I sighed his name, “Oh Jake.” Things had gotten better ever since he appeared in my life. Was he an angel? Had he been sent to turn my life around? Or was he just a gay man who didn't notice other women that he passed by to see me? Was there something wrong with him that he cared so much about my opinions? I didn't care. For whatever reason, things were better. Even things he had nothing to do with. For the first time since I was a child, I had hope. I taped the photograph of him and I to the wall next to the pictures of my family... In the middle, in fact. In front of all the other photos.
I looked at my four sleeping little angels. They deserved better. They deserved a better mother. One with a real job. One they could look up to. I swore to them, though none of them heard it, that I would give them that.
Every night I fell asleep looking at this photograph, and it gave me hope. Every morning I woke up to it, and it gave me strength.
I looked into school. How much it would cost to study psychology officially. It was cheap enough that I could pay for it through my work. I began to save a little more every day.
Then Father's health took a turn for the worse. He had to be put on a dialysis machine. It cost $500 a day, more than anyone in my family had. I used every penny I had saved and it just paid for a day. I didn't know how long Daddy would need this. But we had to pay to keep him alive for as long as it took. I began working overtime every day. I didn't discriminate. If it had a penis, I walked up to it and convinced it to take me upstairs. I tore through that brothel like a hurricane. As soon as I was done with one, I was searching for another. I wouldn't leave until I had all the money I needed to pay for his machine.
I continued to gather the flowers that men bought me to create bouquets for my father. I placed them on the shelf near him and sat by his side. He didn't recognize me, but I stayed with him nonetheless. Berta was usually there and gave me reports on his deteriorating health. When she left the room I would talk to him about the conversations we used to have in the club. He didn't remember. He just stared at me.
One night Mom was there instead. It was the first time we got a chance to talk with each other. “Too many drinks,” she said. “I'm never having another drink again.”
I remembered all the drinks we had together and suddenly felt horribly guilty. I might have killed him. But I didn't dare tell Mother. Instead I asked her if she knew how long he would need the machine.
“I don't know,” she said. “He might not be able to come off of it.”
Inside I panicked. What would we do if that was true? I slept only a few hours a night as it was. And mother would learn that a babysitter was raising my children. And she'd learn where I was and what I was doing, and-
“I think your father was having an affair,” she said suddenly.
“How could you think that?” I asked ashamedly.
“Before he went into the hospital, he spent a couple extra hours in Tijuana every Tuesday before coming home. I don't know what he was doing, but I know that he wasn't at work anymore.”
I swallowed hard. I looked over at Father and saw he was asleep. There would be no saving me from this. I either had to let her continue to fear, or tell her where I was. Or...
“He was with me,” I told her. She looked at me surprised. “We met for lunch. I work as a stripper, Mama. I'm sorry, but it's the only way I can pay for all of this.”
She looked away, clearly upset and disappointed in me. I was glad that I hadn't told her what I really did. She would have probably needed a machine and a place right next to Daddy.
“Is that where you get enough money to buy a bouquet like this?” she asked.
“I get those for free. Men throw them at me.”
“I thought men threw underwear at strippers.”
“They throw those, too.” I laughed. She didn't seem amused, but I kept laughing, and soon she smirked, then broke a smile, then laughed. We shared in the laughter together.
“So he knew?” she asked.
“Yeah. He saw me go into work one day. I asked him not to tell you, so we met and talked every Tuesday during my lunch break.”
She just nodded. A moment later I could tell she was thinking about something hard, like she was discovering something in her mind. “Do you feel powerful? Standing there in front of all those men?”
I thought about it a moment. I had not considered this, but it was true. The first time I had to go up on stage to dance I was more afraid than when I went to a room with a man. This was dancing without any clothes on in front of a hoard of men. One of my friends at the club had shown me how to grasp the pole when I spun around it. She showed me how to climb. How to slide upside down while spreading my legs. It was like a gymnastics event. “They give me a 10.0 score then, right?” I had said, laughing in her face. Freya was her name. The one with the Egyptian hair. And we laughed together a lot until one day she just disappeared. I never knew what happened to her.
But it was true. When I marched in front of those men, when I strutted on that stage above them, regarding or disregarding their vacant stares at my leisure, I knew power I had never felt. In my neighborhood, the boys were always in charge. As a girl you never questioned their authority. But here... I was the master, and they the slaves. I took their money and strolled away without ever looking back.
“Yes,” I said, and suddenly I realized why she was asking. She had grown up in this culture that said a woman's place was to support the man. Women weren't asked their opinions because men didn't believe they had any. She had never known what it was to be admired and desired by crowds of onlookers.
But then, as I looked at the way she stared at her husband there in that room where he could do nothing in return for her, I knew that she had what I didn't have. What I perhaps would never have. She had love. True, unconditional love.

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