Jennifer Hewitson

My decision to move to Tijuana was an unfortunate one. a disaster really.

I was born a peasant in a remote rancho in Guerrero, one of Mexico's wildest states. My father, though he claimed political pretensions, was little more than an armed bandit, a highwayman Like so many fathers, he would have wished to see me follow him into his career... and in a way I did, a way that might have pleased him if he'd known of it. But s soon as I became a man at 14, I moved to Acapulco, where I came into my own and became very much a product of that city.

I have become a caricature to a certain extent — a pet Ricardo Montalban, a Latino David Niven.

Jennifer Hewitson

I worked for several years as a fisherman, but my eyes were always for the charms of the city, which, in the closing years of the World War, was becoming a "jet set" resort as well as a smuggling, seafaring town and Mexico's answer to Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Miami all in one place.

My patron had a beach-seine crew. We would loop a very long net out to sea with the launch, then haul it in on the beach to scoop up the fish. By my late teens I had developed a bronzed, powerful body with strong shoulders from pulling the nets, a deep chest from diving for oysters, and a glow of health from the outdoor life and simple diet.

I cooked cast-off fish over beach fires and slept under the boat at night so I could spend all of my earnings on flashy clothes and hair pomade to set off my build and good looks. I was a neon-dazzled, cut-rate boulevardier trying my fortune with the local girls, going mano a mano against puritanical Indian Catholicism and doing well enough to please myself. I was quite easily pleased with myself in those days. And with good reason.

But the more I saw American women, the less I enjoyed the favors of Mexicanas. And once I figured out what the taloneros were doing, I decided I was ripe for a change in careers and started spending my nights hanging around them, learning their tricks and slang and attitudes.

Taloneros are the young sharks you always see standing around outside Mexican nightclubs, especially those that cater to tourists. The whole institution of taloneros is poorly understood by foreigners. I suppose there are a few naive enough to think this pack of polished young hounds is there to be seating hosts. I was only naive enough to assume they were there to take advantage of the famously looser morals of drunken American women on vacation, though they were presumably picking up a little money somehow. Even at that age, struck blind, mute, and stupid by the visions of sexually permissive blonds, I was also interested in how the men made it pay.

When I’d adopted enough of their callous urban facade to overcome my hick manners (my first lesson in being able to change my style and personality like a suit of clothing ) to get a straight answer to my questions about talonero finances, I was amazed by the revelation, struck dumb by the bright, hard, incredible scope of it. Though it was common enough to them, with their gutter sophistication.

My status changed overnight after I rather decisively won a fight with another youth who had been tormenting me about my rough hands and back-country accent. They all acted very tough and carried knives, but in the final test, a life of lounging in nightclub doors smoking Faros and drinking tequila doesn’t really prepare a youngster for brawling with someone who spends his days cheating a living out of the open sea. He should also have given some thought to the fact that fishermen are as familiar with knives as alley cutthroats are.

After that I was still a bumpkin, but I was “their" bumpkin, inside that wary, brittle circle that we hoodlums and deceivers maintain. A very sleek talonero named Enrique, a man who became a sort of coach to my career, first answered all my questions. He said. “You think we’re here for the mondonga, don’t you?” That’s a local word for the female flower. He said. “Well, Country, I get more than any man you’ve ever met — nice, pale, clean, foreign stuff. But that’s just the pilon, the gravy. Here’s how it works..."

He explained that tourism is a very competitive business, so everybody pays commissions and kickbacks, concepts I’d already been exposed to in the fishing industry. But not to the extent that “hooking" and “landing" dominated the commerce of bars and cabarets. It turned out that there was a little mordida in every drink, meal, and cover charge in town. If you were a recognized member of the “guild,” you had running accounts everywhere that tourists could possibly spend money, from the cliff diving to the lowest level of prostitutes.

Enrique told me. “I don’t work for La Huerta; I'm just waiting for the right party. Then I attach myself to them, usually by getting them in without paying the cover charge." Cover charges are a joke in such clubs, and so are the velvet ropes used to build lines of apparently eager customers, if possible, but also to stop people long enough to size them up and set them up for hooking.

Once Enrique convinced the party (ideally a group of American women, who dote on being escorted around by handsome Latinos) that he was their best possible ticket to the pleasures of Acapulco, he would hail a taxi...there was always a taxi waiting for the hail with motor running...and take them for a ride. The cabbie would pay him something, of course (otherwise he would hail someone who would), but the real money came from hitting hot spots. Approaching a roped-off door where other taloneros waited. Enrique would explain that there was. say, a $6 cover charge but that due to his friendship with Pablo at the door, they would be admitted for only $3 apiece. Later he and Pablo would split the money, since the charge was imaginary. Those hooked would be waved in ceremoniously and Enrique would be noted as having landed them. Merely catching the eye of the right person would add a percentage to your account; everything they ate, drank, or bought would be fattening you up as well. Since such groups thought nothing of spending several hundred dollars a night, even a ten percent cut was substantial money. For comparison, I had been working like a slave all day for less than a dollar.

“From the lime you’ve set the hook," Enrique told me, “it’s just a matter of how long you can keep them running around spending money. The more they drink, the better.” He showed me signals that would let the bartenders know to send me drinks free of alcohol or to make stronger ones for those I'd hooked. Other signals could lead to other things than alcohol being put in drinks, everything from sleeping pills to laxatives to Indian herbs believed to be aphrodisiacs. Enrique cautioned me that such heavy-handed methods were to be used with caution, though much of the job consisted of being able to judge, monitor, and maintain the level of alcohol in a group of strangers.

Enrique taught me subtle as well as basic matters of hooking in tourists. “Most young guys,” he told me. “can’t wait to pour the gringas into bed by the end of the night. But is that always the best move?” There are many ways to play it, depending on how long they had been in town, when they were leaving, w here they were from. Using the end of the evening to suggest spending the next day at the beaches could lead to more money. It was always a fine decision whether it would be more lucrative to take one of the women to bed. It could lead to the opportunity to land her in every place in town for her entire stay and ravish her every night...or it might lead her single friends pressuring her to dump you so as not to break up the band. As a general rule, it is better to move in on older women but treat younger women as a tour group, being their local friend and saving any sexual conquests for the last night in town. But every situation is different and calls for judgment. Sometimes I have had those last nights extend to the enjoyment of an entire group of vacationing girls.

At first, as you might guess. I ran wild sexually, running up numbers of blond trophies at the expense of my income. Enrique smiled, applauding my success, but always reminded me that “the work comes before the poetry, my son." He also taught me something young bravos often ignore — that my relationships with the other taloneros, barkeeps, and waiters were as important as my conquests of the gringos. "Remember who is actually paying you, Tijera," he would say. He called me after a diving bird because of my fishing background, but it also means “scissors." a sexual pun referring to the spread legs and castrating qualities of a woman. “You should do well in that respect,” he said. “Those colleagues you can’t charm you can kick in the huevos like you did to Rogelio the night I decided it was worth trying to teach you anything." I was to remember what many of the other young men forgot: that a little competition between us was fun. but it was ultimately Us versus Them, and They had the money.

With Enrique’s advice, the money I was making, and my sexual success feeding the arrogant self-confidence that is so vital to a man who preys on the weakness of women, I excelled as a rake’s apprentice and had no regrets for my previous life. Some other husky hick could haul in the nets; I was after bigger, softer, and more fragrant fish. After three or four years in Acapulco, I felt ready to become a journeyman, to test my fortune in other areas. I had developed my own style by then, learning to do my initial hooking on the beaches in front of the hotels, where I could use my physique and dark bronze color to maximum advantage This seemed radical and impractical to Enrique when I told him, but when I explained that I could often attach myself to tourists right at their hotels before anyone else had a chance at them (learning to judge their time in town by the color of their skin), he nodded his head in appreciation and told me he had nothing more to teach me, that I was old beyond my years. ’Trust an ex-fisherman to be hand with the hook.” he said and drank my health with imported whiskey.

I had learned that the same network of commissions and escorting existed in most other Mexican resorts but that there were places where foreign women lived and could be exploited more fully than in places like Acapulco and Mazatlan. where they came and went on vacation packages. From what I could learn. the fishing would be best in the new resort of Puerto Vallarta, so I went there to see for myself. My only regret was that I hadn’t gone sooner.

It’s a much smaller town than Acapulco, of course. I might have been expected to miss the big-city advantages, but I was a country boy, you’ll remember, and found the smaller, more peaceful charms of Vallarta very much to my liking. My first night there, by the way, I spent with an American woman in her late 40s, an episode that led to five days of rather pleasurable employment on the beach and dance floor and my acquisition of a Norelco electric shaver, a silk kimono. and my very first case of gonorrhea. She was a strong and attractive woman and could easily have found less mercenary company in the bars, but she liked our arrangement, probably because she was in control. She was always on top in bed or initiating sex in the shower or sea.

She was the one who introduced me to the ladies’ bar at the Oro Verde Hotel. It’s a funny thing, but when I walked into that lounge with her on my arm, I instantly felt at home, as if I had known that room would be my office, living room, and performance stage for the next 15 years. I took enough money out of that place to live on, but I left my youth right there on that dance floor in the arms of women who had left their own youth somewhere else.

The Oro Verde was the central clearing house for gigolos in Vallarta. and it immediately felt very familiar and appropriate to me. It sits out from the main structure, with a commanding view of the sea and the sunset made so famous by Night of the Iguana. I liked the large dance floor, the rosewood tables and captain chairs, the marimba bands for dancing, even their house sangria. In a short time I knew everyone there and was a member of that society. It was new life that suited me perfectly. I was no longer steering tourists into commissions; I became a hot spot myself, one of the tropical delights of Paradise. I became a tourist attraction.

Though it seemed natural at the time, as I look back on the Oro Verde I can see it was a somewhat peculiar scenario. I remember a friend comparing it to a livestock show or cock tournament. Every night around eight, or whatever time it would take to eat, shower, and dress after leaving the beach for the day, the bar would start to fill up. The men would be mostly young and handsome, dressed casually flashy or in a white pants, Hawaiian mode. A few like me were older and maintained our territory through class and mannerisms. Most of the men over 25 wore loose guayabera shirts like I did. There would always be a musician or two on the small stage, arranging equipment and chattering with the beach boys, but the music would not start until around ten. The musicians, I decided, were to advertise that there would be music later and to keep things informal for drinking, conversing, and table-hopping in the meantime. The men would order their own drinks or wait for the invitations of the women.

The women were almost of a type — in their 50s and 60s. dressed in local tipica clothes and expensive jewelry, deeply tanned. Some would wear Hawaiian muu-muus, especially the fatter ones. There are a lot of Americans who have a Hawaii fetish. If they are at a beach with palm trees, they want to see those Hawaiian idols and decorations. Mexico is a sort of cut-rate Hawaii for them. I mentioned that idea to one of my colleagues. and he agreed, then said that Mexican gigolos are cut-rate Italians.

The women were, in some way, strong. Or I should say, powerful. They were gringas independent of men, “well married, well divorced, or well widowed," one of them once said. They were very much at home in Mexico and very accustomed to control and command. Many were long-term residents, like the famous circle that congregated at La Palapa. Painters, sailors, alcoholics, adventuresses. Others were only seasonal residents or short-term visitors who seemed to know about the Oro Verde and be very accustomed to the type of activity featured there.

My friend was right; it was a best-of-breed show. It was like a marketplace for gigolo customers to come shop around and where we could lay out.our wares. The women held auditions for companions, tried to tempt away consorts from other women, and showed off their latest finds to their friends. Friends who would never say anything about the difference in age and general attractiveness.

That was the one most important thing about the Oro Verde: bought company was the accepted norm, and nobody needed to be embarrassed about it. A woman once told me. “It’s like a sexual opium den. Everybody is in the same boat, and there’s no room for pretense or false pride.” An older woman dreamily dancing with her hands on the slender hips of a young stud who fetched her drinks and lit her cigarettes was accepted, normal behavior in the Oro Verde. One of my women called it a “gigolo ghetto"; it was, and perhaps still is, a sort of libido preserve. Anywhere else there would be those little looks that women dread. For that matter. I think the young guys dreaded them too. I myself had no sensitivity to looks or remarks. I was what I was and used to it. When I was at the Oro Verde, I was “at the shop" I wish I were silting there now, looking out the big windows at Playa de los Muertos, listening to tropical dance music, sipping a fruity sangria, and eyeing the dozens of couples in new clothes sliding around on that shiny hardwood floor.

My life in Vallarta was sweet and successful from the day I arrived. Sitting on the beach under the palapas. sipping rum from a coconut and listening to jumpy music on “Radio Paradise ,” I could look up at wealthy homes, flashy colored flowers and birds, slim beautiful natives. A paradise where even money was as available as the ripe mangos on the trees. I applied myself to learning how to harvest that particular fruit.

This matter of money is, obviously, a quite delicate part of such a business. Women have a need to nurture the illusion that there is a romance, that they are giving gifts rather than merely paying for services rendered. And cash is the least romantic of gifts. On the other hand, a man needs only so much of clothes, jewelry, and sexy curios; what is needed is rent, your own car, your own retirement fund. The real difference between a professional like me and the muscular beach boys that last only a few seasons is the ability to extract liquid assets. The odd thing is, the women don’t really object to this, are only too glad to part with their money. The problem is inventing a scenario that will allow their social upbringing and feminine ego to do what they want to do in the first place. But now that I mention it, isn't that always the problem with a woman? And those who solve the problem find that the same techniques work equally well with all women.

First I began to realize that clothes, especially the resort and nightclub wear they most like to give you, are pathetically worthless for resale. A $400 tuxedo or “smoking" might be worth $20 on the resale market. Of course, fine clothes and appointments have their uses, image being so vital in this line of endeavor, but there are limits. I quickly figured out that my tastes would be refined and only include clothing from certain posh stores...stores that would allow me liberal return policies in exchange for kickbacks. I was inventing my craft as I learned it.

My first important inspiration came when I was taking pictures of myself with a woman, an extremely distressed heiress from San Francisco who spent her winters in Mexico overexposing herself to the sun. alcohol, pills, and men. I was arranging for some little beach urchin to take pictures of the two of us sharing a drink from a coconut (at the old Daiquiri Dick’s on Playa de los Muertos, I believe) when it hit me. I became quite enthusiastic about taking her picture, for my own souvenirs as well as for artistic “studies.” My only regret was that I had to do it with her simple pocket snapshot camera. If only I still had my old Nikon, with its portrait lens that could have really done her justice. The next time she came south, she gave me a good-quality 35mm camera with three lenses — worth over $200 at the time, far more than my total worth or my expenses for five months.

Women love pictures, even though many are very camera shy and have to be shot candidly or with much persuasion — another mildly annoying example of women having to be tricked or badgered into being given what they want. They keep the shots as trophies or perhaps as amulets. They are always moved w hen I ask to keep their pictures for myself. I used to keep them in an old bronze frame from Tlaquepaque (frequently alleged to have once belonged to my sainted mother) that was hinged for easy changing of the current display.

When I sold the camera and felt the cash in my hand, more than I’d ever had at one time in my life, I knew I was onto something very good and big. Looking back on it, it was as though I had invented an industry. The camera charade became a standby, a hedge I never mentioned to my fellow gringa handlers. One of them would have bragged about it to belittle some woman who was quitting him, and word would have gotten around very quickly. The women who admire us are a tight little clique, really, bound by common interests. Like horse lovers or cat fanciers.

In addition to being my first real “cash crop,” the camera was my first practical lesson in value and liquidity. I started developing an eye for things that retained value, that could be quickly sold. I found out which cameras were more prized, which watches could be most easily disposed of. I was quite shocked to find out that there were watches priced in the thousands of dollars. The first time I recognized a Rolex on a man’s wrist, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It would have paid for a fine house in Acapulco, the price of the entire town of my birth. I was fascinated that such a little thing could be worth so much, so easily moved from one hand to the next.

Not that I was tempted to steal. I had long since gotten a true vocation, as the priests say; I had seen what could be done with women and that I had a talent in that direction, which practically obligated me to develop it.

I moved a long way off from cameras, didn’t I? This is the way to talk, a lazy afternoon above the sea, good food and drinks at hand, your tape recorder handling all the details and organization so I can slip effortlessly through my memories. Are you aware that your own profession is fairly therapeutic? Between you with your microphone and this young man with his tray and cigarette lighter, we will do well here, become better adjusted to our lives.

So. Once I had a portfolio of presentable pictures (including some thrown in by my friend in the lab). I was established as both artist and collector, and the women died to be photographed. To be included...do you see that? To be suitably commemorated. I can’t overemphasize the importance of those pictures...or really comprehend it completely. They seemed to be challenged, or possibly threatened, by the faces from my past. The images brought up the whole issue of my amours being something less than exclusive and enduring. Yet they were evidence of something — maybe just that I actually remembered women, that whatever was happening was not just of the moment. They gave a certain validity, the kind of secret, subtle permanence women so desire. I think they compared themselves to those other women (who I always referred to as “friends” or “models”) and, I think, found them easier competition than their own imaginations. Whatever it might be that women are always competing for.

But naturally I was always tragically without a decent camera and thus frequently received them as thoughtful gifts. I always accepted them gratefully and as if I were as much surprised as delighted. Since there was nowhere in Vallarta to buy a quality camera, the women always ended up inquiring of my friend ’Cisco at the processing shop (or at their hotel desk, with the same result) and ended up buying one in almost-new condition from a German wildlife photographer who just happened to be staying in the Hotel Oceano and selling off some of his gear before going back to Munich. It was a fairly nice Minolta, and I took pains to keep it in good condition through the dozens of times it was given to me.

The German (actually an American Army deserter from Wisconsin who enjoyed doing Teutonic accents) was getting about $25 every time it changed hands, a little surcharge I paid for having to do things that way so they’d think it was all their own idea. I had to pay for being “surprised.” I put away nearly $3000, thanks to that camera, and gradually acquired a nice leather bag, lenses, and accessories — all gifts from admirers, of course.

The savings were important to me, though day-to-day living costs were meaningless. I always lived and ate at some woman's expense, usually at the best hotels and restaurants. I’ve stayed in the Bougambillias penthouse, the Garza Blanca’s cabana at $400 a night, in the “presidential” suite at the Oro Verde. Not my favorite hotel for sleeping; too much like living over the shop.

I expanded the camera ploy to guitars. Like most Mexican Don Juans, I play passably and know ways to appear more proficient than I am. I even sing a bit, mostly relying on the impact of the melancholia, drama, and romance of old Mexican songs. Later I worked it with diving equipment, though that was trickier since there are places to rent it. An expedition to some remote cove like Los Ayala or Nadaderos for nude diving and beachcombing usually did the trick. The advent of the Walkman was wonderful — one of the most liquid medium-ticket items ever made. The perfect gift to a music lover like me (so frequently an aficionado of exactly the same type music as the giver) and instantly disposable, often for more than what it had cost new.

I developed a predilection for gold coin jewelry and was wise enough not to resell it but to save the coins themselves. I sold most of them when gold went to $600 an ounce in the mid-’70s. I cultivated a collection of clothes and accessories with seahorse motifs for a time, which led to gifts of others in precious metals — a common item in Vallarta. I became a master of the blessed gift of receiving. My dream gift was an automobile, one goal I never achieved. Sad. but there are great soccer players who never won the World Cup, no?

An even more delicate question than money is the matter of romance itself, and it is the major problem that any gigolo with staying power must be able to solve, if not actually understand. There is no problem for a muscle boy to attach himself to a woman for a quick stand, especially in a situation where she will not be seen with him. There are very few women who will flourish their young studs in public. The prominent Vallarta painter Martha Gilbert is a flagrant exception, something I always admired in her.

But as I say, our young stallion isn’t going to take anything away with him — just kickbacks, maybe some macho undershorts. He’s too young or too egotistical to understand how to play the long game. Perhaps if he were capable of moving somewhat beyond the business of "my penis is such a hot commodity, doesn't it just destroy you?” — if he were to seem vulnerable, cry a littie one night, appeal to her motherly instincts, make her feel like he needed an older, wiser mentor to shine him up, educate him. get him good clothes and attitudes, he might have something on the line. Women love to play Pygmalion, a fact to which I owe much of my own education. An education more valuable for having been channeled into areas pleasing to older, richer women.

I find it interesting that women are always most intrigued by the way I handled the financial side of things (as you have been in this interview), while men always lead around to the physical nature of it. Let me touch on a few things men seem curious about. In the first place. I am not some sort of sexual super-athlete. I assume I am fairly normal in that regard. Though I will say that total emotional detachment grants a certain advantage, which is to say power. Of the many jokes so intrinsic to sex (either God or the devil has a formidable sense of humor), the most ironic is that a man’s staying power is., what is the phrase?...reversely proportionate to his emotional involvement. The love-drunk Romeo faints into climax at a touch, while the cold pimp perseveres through brutal and devastating sex lashings. As I said, a joke on us all. But women are generally looking for certain companionship or presentation qualities, not marathon sex. Thank God.

My business was mainly one of attitude and posture. Is it not so often true when dealing with women? We develop poses to complement theirs. Very few women, almost none, will employ the straightforward “here is the money, where is the sex?” approach that men will accept. And they know better to buy the idea that some handsome, winsome, muscular young stud is in romantic love with a chubby, 50-year-old divorcee. You have to play it just right. What worked best for me, once I got the experience and ..how can I put this?...spiritual weight to put it across, was a sort of bittersweet irony. Like, "We're people of the world and we know what we’re doing, but even in that there is something of respect and affection.”

I would be like a stylized actor getting away with extravagant, flowery sentimentality by keeping an ironic edge behind it...and behind that just a gleam of the idea that there might be some sort of real true love hiding behind that charming, defensive crust. None of this was a question of their believing anything stated, but of being offered an attitude acceptable to their self-respect.

The French definitely have a gift for the ironic, worldly-wise mode, and American women have a distinct weakness for it. I would call a study of French cinema invaluable to any gigolo past his mid-’20s. I’ve seen every such film I could and don’t need to understand the dialogue to absorb the moves and attitudes. I was also indebted from an early age to the American films of Humphrey Bogart though, again, I didn’t always know exactly what was being said. In fact, I have reduced women to soft clay in my hands by “forgetting” my English in an emotional moment and flooding them with Spanish sounds accompanied with visuals inspired by Bogart and Belmondo.

It’s a subtle game, and I'm sure you understand I don’t do it consciously. It works best with the relatively intelligent, educated woman — which is the kind I prefer anyway, since I essentially live with them for the duration of our affairs. I don’t really care what they look like. Obviously. I sometimes pay attention to what their daughters look like, though.

If I had to summarize my own tastes in women for most of my mature life. I’d have to say, “Somebody’s 20-year-old daughter.” Their attitudes toward me are usually quite complex and by no means totally positive. They often resent my attentions to their mothers and treat me contemptuously, which can make things quite delicious when their curiosity and sense of competition gets the upper hand. As Enrique told me at the very start, it's not a bad life, and the mondonga is just gravy. My life in Paradise was good, rich and sweet. But I decided things could be a little better and ended up losing everything.

My decision to move to Tijuana was an unfortunate one. a disaster really, although it seemed a good idea when it was suggested by one of my colleagues. He remarked on my touch with American women and said that I should go up to the border, where I would be surrounded by them. I thought about that and Tijuana’s growing reputation as an economic boomtown. I was no longer young and no longer made much of a beach boy. My growing sophistication suggested larger cities, but in most Mexican cities my English skills and North American urbanity would have presented me little advantage. In fact even my sophistication was worldly, international, and American; most Mexican women would have considered me an effete, abstract poseur. I had several thousand dollars saved and thought of using it as a seed to make more, the way a fisherman slices his first fish into bait for more fish. At the border, in a land of automobiles, chromium, and green dollars. I could certainly do better. Maybe I could even marry a rich woman and secure my future, while I still had some vitality and promise. So I made the move to the north, the one worst move of my life.

Like many Mexicans, I considered Tijuana a world apart from Mexico itself, a strange mutant city far north of a wasteland. I got on the bus in much the same spirit that a man would step on a shuttle to the moon. 1 was hopeful but very apprehensive. The trip was boring and painful. But somewhere in Sonora something happened that I will never forget. I had a brief taste of a fairly ordinary young woman, an encounter that stands in my memory like a lighthouse above the sea of so many other women. It may have been the most wonderful sex of my life, it may have been the worst. But it was definitively the most memorable.

She got on with her family in Mochis or Guaymas but had to sit in the back away from them since the bus was very crowded. She was in her early 20s and looked like the typical downcast Mexican daughter, but with a little more knowing glance and unselfconscious movement. Perhaps she had been married and come back to the family roost. When the opportunity presented, I moved over to sit beside her.

We started a small talk that never pretended to be anything but flirtation. I felt that she had marked me when she first came down the aisle. I slumped in my seat and spoke to her without turning my head, since her parents occasionally looked around to check up on her. She maintained a practiced primness, but I could feel the increasing heat of her thigh by mine, sense the direction of her interest. Thank God for the never-ending desert night; in a few hours we were alone in the crowded bus. everyone else either asleep or in that strange trance that highway buses create. I draped a blanket over us and began to explore her under its cover.

She was not coy at all and seemed as interested an explorer as I was. We began a long, strange foreplay, a rising and falling excitement that went on for hours and miles. I was staring right into her eyes. Without saying a word. I felt something pass between us that I never understood, a greater communication than all the worthless words I have wasted on all the women in the world.

I can’t explain why I say this, but in the dark of that bus seat I lived a normal life for a few hours, just a man sharing pleasure with a willing woman. It was almost like I was a normal lover struggling for leverage and advantage with a normal woman. For a very short time in my life, money was meaningless, experience beside the point. She would never know she was in the hands of an expert. Not that it makes any difference. It seems to be a secret that sex is not a good arena for competition or even competence. I felt something that might have been love, or it might have been sadness. Or maybe a realization of what I was coming to, one of those sudden moments that start ambushing us when we get more than 40 years...awareness of spent youth and paths it is too late to travel.

I have remembered her often over the years, dreamed of having pursued her off the bus and claimed her, taking her off to...to what? What did I have that was worth as much as the simple beastly act any couple does every night without thinking anything of it? It is probably hindsight to say so, but I think that bus trip and the touch of that girl was the start of my decline. I was almost aware of it as I stepped down into the bus station. When I walked out into the centro of Tijuana, I was almost aware that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

For one thing, the city itself was as ugly and dirty as it is now, the climate as bad. Women, it turned out, are not as susceptible to my talents when at home, and most of those going to Tijuana were only shopping, not staying nor seeking affairs. Since I had avoided military conscription as a young man (and what young man in my position would have gone off to sleep in barracks full of men instead of the beds of tourist women?), I could not get a passport to cross into the United States. What little opportunity existed was short-term and of low financial quality. And there was a great deal of very experienced competition. In Tijuana sex is sold straight with no embellishments or pretty wrappings. “No chaser.” as the gabachos say. I realized how much of my former success was created by a vacation mentality, the allure of the beach and the special romantic magic of both Acapulco and Vallarta.

Tijuana had other disadvantages. The cold troubled me a great deal, and my first few winters I had severe grippe and influenza much of the time. The locals complain that immigrants from the south bring in diseases, and it’s true. As one of those immigrants, I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but my impression of the town was that of a pit of malevolent microbes. The cold affected me in a more subtle way as well. I retracted and restricted from the cold, became slow and sluggish like a frozen iguana. I started to become an indoors sort of person, losing the healthy outdoor look I'd always had. I had little appetite or sex drive during the winter months, became silent and sullen.

Naturally, this affected my work. I was becoming less attractive, less...involved. I was going through my savings very fast. As my health, appearance, and finances sank lower, I also started to lose the most vital asset of any man who needs success with women — my self-confidence. That indefinable aspect of male presentation accounts for more than just the way we talk. walk, and carry ourselves (though all are more important in the conquest of women than things like money and looks).

There is also...and I am quite positive of this, though there is no way for scientists to prove it...that there are also subtle emanations that women receive and react to without knowing it.

Perhaps there is an odor, like fear or musk. A satisfied, self-confident man has something women want. They see married men as more attractive than bachelors, men who have recently had sex as more attractive than those who have been without it for a long time, like prisoners or sailors. On the other hand, sexual deprivation, and more especially desperation, is like wearing an invisible halo that warns women away. This is something men in my profession learn as they age, though few would put it in words.

It may even be a principle that applies universally, not just to sex. While I have had almost no business with banks or lenders. I’m told that they like to give money to people who have money but are reluctant to share it with the poor. Again, a matter of confidence. For both parties, now that I think of it. One of my clients, an attractive financial executive in her late 50s, once told me that confidence is the secret coin of all money dealings, that nobody would even accept cash or gold if they didn’t have confidence that they could exchange it for something else in the future. Similarly, bad times come when people feel bad. good times when people feel good and confident in themselves and their prospects. The economy, she said (and I have no reason or qualifications to doubt her), is little more than a massive confidence game.

She also told me a line from a North American song that applies to what I’ve been talking about. "Those that have shall get, those that don’t shall lose.” I was certainly finding it to be the case.

Sorry to have slipped off into abstracts; perhaps it’s just to avoid discussing that very unhappy and terrifying period of my life. When I say terrifying. I’m not exaggerating. I was living day to day, squeezing out a very fragile income in the lobby bars of Caesar’s and the Nelson, perhaps picking up someone to “guide” at the bullring on Sundays or recommending myself as a betting counselor at the jai alai (where I often presented myself as an ex-player and sometime coach or manager).

The future of my trade appeared darker every day. My clothes were getting worn and used looking, my health and looks suffering, my attitude hardening into an unattractive mask. There was little, I realized, to separate me from the growing tide of ignorant, poverty-struck Juan Nadies coming into Tijuana and trying ridiculous schemes to part gringos from their dollars. A foreign woman would be offered sexual opportunities on every comer she passed and would become used to brushing off the advances of pushy salesmen in front of every junky little store. What did I have to offer, really? What would keep me from a career of washing windshields or urging young soldiers into the foul sex bars that used to line Avenida Revolucion?

Among my personal disadvantages in Tijuana was a lack of the net of friends, colleagues, and co-operators I had built in the south without thinking much about it. Nobody in Baja California owed me any favors, nobody paid for any services, nobody referred me to any clients, nor them to me. I had thought I would quickly establish connections in the new area as 1 had in Vallarta, but I never did. I was older, of course, and the real allies in our lives are made when we are young. Also Tijuana had (and still has) a more closed attitude, an infection, I suppose, from the famous “cold and calculating" temperament north of the border. I was merely a new competitor, one of thousands arriving every week.

There was no focal point for my talents, no Oro Verde, no beach, no “Golden Zone,” no hotels frequented by foreign tourists. The situation was impossible, but. I'm sorry to admit, out of ego and stupidity, I stayed until I was trapped, my hard-won savings spent, unable to afford even to leave. I was losing the game I had always won, the game I’d partially invented and made my own mark on, and I was getting addicted to losing.

If that sounds strange, notice compulsive gamblers in their activities. They can quit when winning, but when they lose, they can’t pull themselves away, will borrow or steal to keep playing. Men losing at love are the same way (and women even more so), milking each defeat, more committed when being abandoned than when in control. I was no different myself, it turns out.

It was nothing but possibilities that tempted and trapped me. possibilities that refused to become realities. I could see the incredible, careless Yanqui wealth at close range, watch the hypnotic northern television with its casual treatment of idle sexuality and feverish commercial announcements of vulnerability to spending money on almost anything. I saw gringas at their loosest and most sluttish, another full-color announcement of indiscriminate availability and screaming needs neither recognized nor understood. It all seemed so ready, so easy. I broke myself trying to get a hook into it.

Not that there was a complete lack of women coming to Tijuana those days, and not that they weren’t interested in some “world-level” experience. But they were more interested in colorful and “folkloric” Mexican men — bullfighters, mariachis. These things are taken in perspective in the south, but at the border, Mexican experiences, however ungenuine or out of place, are in greater demand. I became an ex-matador many times, complete with some ears, tails, banderillas, and other souvenirs. But it was a disguise that worked only in private, with women I had isolated from the herd. I would never be introduced to anyone as a matador nor be able to go to the corrida with anyone who believed me to be a torero. This, despite the fact that there were several fake matadors at the time, impressing gringas at the ranchos and hailed as such by accomplices in restaurants like Taurino and El Tablon. I myself was living on a very thin diet, and it was starting to wear me down.

Worse, I was starting to think of myself as inferior, as cheap. Though I had been too proud to ever think of myself as a whore, I started to see myself as morally dirty and compromised. I made bitter jokes over too many drinks in the Zona Roja. an area I increasingly frequented. I think I went there to look down on the prostitutes, to make myself feel like I was better than they were. If that was my intention, it failed. Notice the curious idea that as I lost respect for myself for failing to provide sex for money, I was starting to lose self-respect for providing it in the first place. The mind is disposed to draw wild conclusions...then leave us to suffer with them.

One afternoon, in a canyon up behind San Antonio de los Buenos, I saw a very thin old coyote nosing around same dry holes in the ground and had an extremely unsettling thought. What happens when a coyote or wolf or shark gets too weak from hunger to be able to kill another meal? Many times the cold weather here at the border has chilled me deep down to my bones, but that was the coldest I’ve ever felt in my life.

I’ll tell you the truth, even though you might not believe it. I went directly from there to a church. I didn’t really understand why. Was I going to pray for God to help me in finding women with whom to fornicate for money? I was never more aware of myself as a whore, and for the very first time I called myself that name in my mind. But I went into the church anyway, a small neighborhood chapel in San Antonio, and immediately felt calmer and less frightened, even though I had never been religious and had not been in a church since childhood. I sat and stared at their peeling painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, serene and pure in her cloak of sacred blue sky. I walked up and looked closely at her facial expression, knelt to examine her. This is the way God manifests to us Mexicans — as a pale-skinned woman whose virginity survives even childbirth, whose purity survives even the drip of blood from her wounded heart, who brings the sky down to the soiled and impure earth.

I felt no dramatic urgings, no hot tears or pangs; but when I walked out of that church, I had a feeling that the Virgin did not despise me, that God would not condemn me for being what I was, what he had made me to be. Looking back on that experience, I have no impulse to change or be saved; but I got respect for an institution I had once ridiculed...the confession. Now I firmly believe that confession is good for the soul and brings forgiveness. Even now, so aware of the nearness of the end of my life, I find forgiveness in me whenever I squarely face who I am and what 1 have done. If I end up in Hell, well. I’m sure there are tormented women there who need more than ever a taste of whatever it is they find in me.

Well. I’m not used to discussing matters like that with others. In fact, I have never mentioned that moment in the church to anyone else before. More of your therapy of microphone and printing press, I suppose. The modem confessional. You hadn't thought that the life of a man paid for his sex would have such theological implications, did you? Neither did I. But before I leave what is really an uncomfortable subject for me, I have to mention that three days after my audience with the coyote, Virgin, and Holy Spirit, a friend took me, for the first time, to Rosarito Beach, and my life turned around as if by magic. I don’t put too great a credence in such matters, but a man would be a fool to deny them. It seems possible to me that respect is more important than belief.

My friend, who I had known in Vallarta, was working in the Rosarito Beach Hotel. As soon as we walked through the lobby doors, I knew there was something there, a special quality...you could call it tropical romance. I looked at the murals of southern jungles with beautiful women holding birds and handsome men with machetes and fishing nets. I saw the Aztec artwork. I looked at the tile pool with its fountain and lounge chairs, saw the tables and bar out on the beach. It looked wonderful to me, like a memory come back to life. I had a definite feeling, like my first time in the Oro Verde. And in fact the hotel became another office for me; but maybe because of the changes I had experienced in Tijuana. I saw myself instead as a fixture of the hotel. I learned that the town was a vacation community and started patrolling the beach and hotels, liking everything I saw.

Mainly what I saw was my principal stock of trade, neurotic American divorcees desperate for reassurance, rebuilt esteem, and the quick oblivion of satiated flesh. And quite willing and able to pay the price of that desperation. If anything, I found such women in Rosarito to be even more insecure than my former clients in the south. The Rosarita gringas, whether divorced or still married, had also run away to Mexico but had not dared go so far, were still holding onto their world at an arm’s length, many going back and forth to gather new insults, disillusions, and damages to be repaired. I took a room in a house not far from the hotel and quickly found myself very much at home.

Though my basic approach was unchanged, in Rosarito I moved into a different focus and rhythm than what I’d been used to before. I started becoming less a vacation indulgence and more a sort of “boyfriend." This was partly because many of the women I came to know there were more or less permanent residents with their own homes but also because there was now less difference, if any, between my age and that of my clients. It was acceptable for them to be seen with me, for me to meet their friends and children. And especially, I noticed, their ex-husbands. I always rose to those occasions, completely the cultivated and mysterious man of the world, but personable and with a common touch. Much better than he thought she would do or, there was the hint, had done in the past.

This sort of thing helped remold me into a sort of mature period (I was quite taken at the time by the films of David Niven) and to restore my damaged self-confidence. Perhaps it’s the same thing everyone is now calling self-esteem. I had even read one of the many auto-estima books available in Spanish but was unimpressed by its recommendations. But even though my character had been restored and nurtured by the feverish, addictive need of wealthy, educated women as well as the envy of their ex-spouses and friends, I had taken some permanent damage during my years of scrambling and terror in Tijuana. My health never fully recovered and still troubles me. The lungs, the liver, the prostate...the usual. Though I heard it said that the slightly gaunt look became me very well. Made me look like I'd suffered, I recall hearing. Another used the word “poetic.” She probably had it confused with “tubercular” due to all the operas and novels about poets living in hovels and dying of consumption. When you have recovered your belief in yourself, it seems, even disease and poverty become fashionable.

So I became a boyfriend, living in nicely appointed beach homes with hot water, king-sized waterbeds. giant televisions with parabolic antennas, maid service. I have even been given the run of a house at times, staying there while the owner was off in Los Angeles or Phoenix doing whatever she did with her “real" life. The idea of leaving me alone in a house seemed so incredibly stupid that I was never even tempted to take advantage of it by selling everything off. My girlfriends knew that my affections were changeable and only temporary, so I did not have to deal with jealousies or worry about gossip. Everyone knew' what I was, and nobody made any move to hide it, so nobody had to name it.

When a live-in girlfriend was out of town, I immediately played the field. This was certainly not due to great carnal appetites on my part, but good business. For one thing, even with a roof over my head, I had to eat. So I earned my daily bread by the sweat, if not of my forehead, at least of my body. I often silently lamented all the drinks and meals that were bought for me in Rosarito without bringing me a single commission. The places would have paid me for new business but not for “landing" women who were already regular customers.

Besides, I found it good business to move around a little, not to let any one contract get too stable or stale. I had seen friends become boyfriends and hadn't liked what I saw. A pet-dog existence in the hands of a clinging or demanding woman; no control nor, ultimately, security. When they are too sure of you, they get tired of you. Otherwise they would have stayed with their husbands. I tried to keep my subtle, mysterious quality a proven factor.

My life and loves were well known but not greatly remarked in the rather small permanent American community. I was popular in expatriate bars like El Nido and Rene’s, where the local gringos gathered, and was seen by the men as a companionable source of local language and legend and by the women as a high-ticket but affordable sex appliance. One woman with a huge house on the cliffs by the Quinta Mar did much to further my education in art and English literature. Incredibly, I first read Don Quixote in English. I think of education as something contagious, contractible from one person to another, like disease. I have become a well-educated man largely through a sort of osmosis. When she mentioned a poem called “Paradise Regained," the phrase made a deep impression on me. I remember sitting in the luxury of her living room, looking out at the sea, with that phrase running around in my mind. Somehow I had left Paradise, somehow I had found it again. I don’t understand any of it but feel very grateful. It was a very full period of my life, and I still guard a deep affection for Rosarito. even what it has become in recent years.

Some of the local bartenders and beach types started calling me “El Pelicano.” The way they pronounced it was a pun on pelican but means a man with grey hair. Once again. I was a fishing bird. I mentioned that to a friend, an owner of rental horses who sometimes led his string by the hotel patio to let me know that one of the women on board might be worth meeting. He laughed and said that next I would be called gaviota. It’s another pun. meaning a seagull, but also a crude term used in the south to refer to a prostitute too old to do any business. Maybe it would be a good nickname to put on my gravestone.

I didn’t get rich here in the north, but I didn’t have to clean windshields either. Rosarito was better than I deserved, and I was happy enough to live in modest but gentle circumstances for my remaining useful years. More years than I care to count up, I can tell you. Please forgive me if I’ve been a little vague on numbers and dates. Not only is my memory losing interest in such matters, I don’t want to really fix my presence too closely in anybody’s mind. There are women who might read this and think thoughts. There are doubtless, for that matter, jealous husbands.

I can fix time in one way, though; I have a daughter of 13 years who I sired here in Rosarito. Her name is Xochil, and her mother was the daughter of one of my first clients at the hotel. She was an equestrienne, riding with the escarmuza, the Mexican cowgirls who compete in tournaments of pretty horsemanship. She was a fiery and egotistical girl but beautiful...and she could ride like a cloud, like a dream. I used to borrow her pony, telling her I was riding but actually using the animal to pose as an injured ex-polo player to impress some rather silly women that spent a few weeks each year at the hotel. When she discovered this, she confronted me angrily in the stables, striking me with her whip. It was a display that led to my peeling her tight riding breeches off and watching her gallop violently astride me in the hay. I was surprised by her decision to have the baby (the only child I ever fathered, to the best of my knowledge) and even more by the fact that she never told anyone I was the father. Except the girl, of course, when she was old enough to know.

I’m still older than my years, as I was as a boy, but it’s much less an advantage now. I’m sure you'd take me for much older than 64, and my body seems to be accelerating its collapse. If my lungs don’t hurry up and kill what's left of me, this prostate situation will beat them to it. I’ve entirely lost my manhood, and unlike trumpeters who lose their lip or boxers who lose their legs, I have no real way to compensate, no technique to atone for the failure of mere meal.

It’s embarrassing to realize that my personal style, my personality in fact, has been molded around what American women like and find amusing. I have become a caricature to a certain extent — a pet Ricardo Montalban, a Latino David Niven. I became a type. I suppose; a certain model of a certain commodity of a certain known value. Yet...I determined that price myself. And women paid that price gladly, even though the very knowledge that they are paying anything at all is the highest price most women could ever pay.

I find one thing ironic and extremely amusing these days: the woman I spend the most time with, a sort of lover, friend, companion, and (I lament to say it) a bit of a caretaker. She’s younger than I am (who isn’t anymore?), maybe around 50. She has a wonderful heart, very unsophisticated and genuine. She has no money at all — I met her through one of her small-time smuggling schemes. She’s also very fat and very plain. She’d fit right in at the Oro Verde in a tropical muu-muu and 20 pounds of rattling jewelry. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why I find my relationship with her so amusing.

She also hires my daughter Xochil to work part-time in her little travel agency. That’s funny, too.

My daughter, by the way, is a very beautiful girl. Like her mother was. Her attitudes toward me are not complicated at all. She loves me, adores me. When she leans over and kisses me. she’s so beautiful it almost stops my heart; I can see that love shining out of her face like the sun. and I can barely look at it. But I can! I can accept that undiluted adoration, look it right in the eye. That’s another thing my life has brought me to. If I could sum up right now what it all meant...and I'm sure this will sound strange...it’s that I have been loved. I have been desired and adored and enamored by women like few men have ever been. And even though I am a man of very little philosophy, I strongly feel that the universe does not run out of balance...and that somehow I have given as much as I have received.