The Yellow Bike
The second time I was intimate with a sex worker, I was 26 years old.
Lima, 2005
Massage parlors, spa lounges, Turkish baths. Every and all branches of this carnally transactional business world crowd Lima, Peru - my home. In these luring establishments, you find a diversified group of men. Older gentlemen, who notoriously sit inside the sauna for too long and pour water into the heating machine that very clearly states not to do so. Middle aged men with varying levels of insecurities. Boys in later school grades or university, thriving off their biological eagerness.
Growing up, two men from separate groups- my father and I - would occasionally wander into such places. My pre-adolescent brain would brace in hopes I could make it through the visit without a need to partake in what is known as “making your debut”. In tradition, a father (figure) is to take his son - especially a first born - to a place of this nature in order for him to certify himself, through this sexually inaugural rite of passage, as a man. An immature, underdeveloped, still learning algebra, can’t cook his own meals, man.
By September 2004 I had moved away to the US, and in the summer of 2005, I visited home for the first time since my departure. I was 12 years old.
Unbeknownst to me, seemingly a ripe "debuting" age. On an arbitrary night, but in deliberate fashion, my father took me to a spa lounge owned by an acquaintance of his, allowing us to show up after hours and enjoy the place to ourselves. It was us two, plus the owner plus another friend. Stepping foot inside the place, the dread of possible outcomes for a seemingly inescapable night gave me a headache.
The night evolved in habitual sequence - change into robes, sweat impurities in the sauna for a while, allow the steam room to cleanse you, wash off in the showers, and relax in the jacuzzi. Afterwards, as we all sat around a table in the main bar area, still in our towels, talking over loud music and sharing beers, a group of women arrived. I watched all four of them enter the room, and although my shyness kept my gaze down, I noticed distinctively that one of them was a lot younger looking than the rest. She said she was 19 when the fourth man in our group asked her. Highly alert and nervously achy, each kiss on the cheek I received from their hello’s sunk me more into my chair.
Up until that point, I had assumed my first close encounter with a woman to go so differently. I imagined stories for myself in the lines of: there’s a girl at school I had a crush on but was too shy to talk to her just like that. She also has a loser boyfriend who’s mean and that I hate. One day after class I bump directly into her, and attempting to pick up the books she’d dropped from our collision, we share a glance and start a conversation that goes nowhere but sends me butterfly catching. Time would pass, and one day I see her crying in the student parking lot after school. Come to find out her boyfriend had started seeing someone else (evidently because he’s awful). After a remedial visit to get ice cream, I confess my feelings and we end up kissing, timidly but repeatedly. And then we fall in love.
Or, it could be something like: this girl and I are on our respective sports teams for the school, and we’ve built up this flirtatious rapport through seeing each other before and after our practices. One night, as we’re the last ones waiting on our rides to pick us up, she goes to walk over to her parents’ car but I grab her hand reactively. Not having thought that far, naturally, I faithfully lean in and we do that juvenile kiss where your faces just frontally align, and you almost just squish into each other. Then we also fall in love.
Yet here I was, far away from my imagined ideals, but having managed to wiggle away from the party, watching tv in a room by myself hoping I would be forgotten about until it’s time to leave this purgatory. Before I had found something to watch, the younger lady made her way inside the room and walked right over to me.
Disassociated by the uneasiness, the fact she’s kissing me doesn’t register until I notice her chalky lipstick intruding my lips with a sense of ownership. Meanwhile, in an attempt to showcase my (inexistent) skills, I am moving my lips and teeth and tongue in a, retrospectively, desperate manner. She paused a couple of times and granted me a graceful smile, acknowledging my clear lack of expertise, and knowledge of any and all interpersonally corporal things. A deeply humbling moment for a 12 year old.
As we kissed, my eyes remained open throughout. Mostly from having no practice but also for awareness and protection. If the situation I found myself in had been sprung on me unexpectedly and involuntarily, anything else had the potential to catch me unsuspecting as well. Nothing seemed impossible. To add to my confusion I was experiencing my first scared erection. A true wonder of the body, and however neuro-signals work. The young lady’s hand then rises and moves discreetly but directly down my torso. My hand moves decisively and grabs onto my towel right at the part that tucks into itself in order to tie onto my waist. As she put her hand on top of my aggressively closed fist, although my natural masculine bodily reactions had reached heightened new levels, I did not open my hand in the slightest. I didn't trust anyone at that moment.
At the sight of my unwillingness to escalate our oral exchange, she paused kissing me, stood up straight, and made some small unmemorable talk which led into the most pivotal moment of the night - the question of “do you want a massage?”. My body had been in tense physical duress and strain for the whole few minutes, so surely an actual massage would have helped me. But surely she didn’t mean Shiatsu in this case. I said that I’d let her know, absent of eye contact, to avoid further embarrassment. She did not respond, and when I looked up, she had vanished. As if the whole exchange had been a dream.
My father and the rest of them came to keep me company. I don't remember much of what followed - but in the blink of an eye I was back in the passenger seat as we drove home. I was staring out the window, but mostly fixed on my translucent reflection in the glass. Thinking about if any of my friends had experienced this. Thinking of the young woman. Thinking of who I could even share this with. I didn't have answers to any of those predicaments.
For years I wondered how much of it was real. My brain fragmented the experience through the years so I could digest it but it never disappeared. Tied like an anchor to the vessel of my being.
Lima, 2018
I was visiting home for a couple of weeks that summer, and a few nights before I flew back, I met my father for dinner. Deciding on drinks after dinner, we headed to a particular new night club my father had heard of. A 20 minute drive gets us there, but it wasn’t until I walked inside that I realized this night club was nothing outside of an intermediary establishment set in place, to allow the real business to run. Unsurprisingly, a brothel. The downstairs, a lounge, where girls were readily available to meet and hangout with; with the opportunity of taking one of them to the conveniently adjacent, next-door hotel.
An hour into being there, surrounded by a handful of women, I felt like I was back at the spa lounge 14 years prior, only with an idea of how I would want the night to play out if given the chance. A striking woman of small stature in a blue miniskirt brought me the drink I had ordered, and taking the seat next to me on the couch, started speaking so close to me that the breeze in her breath brushed my earlobe in between sentences. By the time she asked me if I wanted to get a room, with hands unclenched and sans scared erection, my rationalization was confident.
Upstairs we headed. Outdated gray and black tile escorted us down the hallway into the only lit room. The rentable cube felt cold and stale. It had the frigidness of an empty apartment. Not a place love had ever stayed in. The soundness in my movements had withered by then and anxiousness now dizzied me. I probably would have backtracked had I not spent the entire walk there mentally rehearsing my incoming actions.
Soon after getting inside the room I I jumped into the bathroom hoping cold water could wash off my nerves the way holy water washes off sins. One big exhale on my side of the bathroom door, as soon as I stepped out, I acted as I had intended.
When it was over I met my father in the car. I remember before I had even walked out of the place, or let alone sat with myself long enough to let my feelings and thoughts get in order, I had an emotional lightness that I had no familiarity with. An intrinsic sense of peace that touched parts of me I had not tended to in a long time. Deep wounds, not healed, that time had covered. Wounds that would require dusting over to even notice, now suddenly exhibited. In the same breath I had exposed them, purified them and covered them again.
She was 23 years old. The Venezuelan economic crisis had forced her to emigrate like thousands others. In search of the financial stability to provide money back to her mother and son in Caracas, she had ended up doing the most easily accessible, lucrative thing a friend of hers had introduced her to. Her voice shook, her eyes squinted and the rest of her facial features puzzled when I mentioned I wanted to spend the 30 minutes I prepaid for, just talking. Realizing I was serious, we’re then lying on a twin bed that was not only made with horrendous vintage orange covers and hardened pillows, but that squeaked at the slightest of moves.
We’d started talking while sitting on the bed, across from each other, but as she started to speak more personally, she asked if we could lay down. I think being seen was easier for her when she wasn’t being looked at. So we laid and looked up. I can picture that peeling white stucco ceiling, with an antique bulb whose blinding white light occasionally flickered, so clearly to this day.
She had shoulder length hair, clear eyes, rosy cheeks that popped off her face and a soft smile that covered a weathered spirit and a heavy conscience. Shame, fear and defeat weighed on her tale about her current situation, but an uplifting tone warmed her delivery when she mentioned the money she’s able to send to her family, and what she presumed would be the expiration date of her current venture.
I asked her about the scar above her right eyebrow. You could tell she’d had it since childhood. It was about two inches wide and equally as long. On Christmas, when she was 11, she’d asked for a yellow bike - she told me. When she finally got it, her dad wanted her to avoid riding it right away as the wheels and seats had not been properly adjusted and tightened. The next morning, neglectful to the warning, she’d woken up earlier than the adults (but equally as early as other kids worldwide on christmas) to take it for its sidewalk debut. Not even half a block from her house, her front wheel snaps off its hinges and her face speedily greets the pavement.
The timer on her phone goes off in the middle of her describing what followed, marking the half an hour agreed time, and the room is cold again. As we walk back, I’m looking down as we approach the stairs, trying to think of a proper way to say goodbye. Before I made up my mind, she hugs, and holds, me longer than I expected. As if she wasn’t ready to get back. Red lipstick stamps my cheek and she whispers “all the best Juanito”. As I look up, she vanishes amongst the smoke and lights and music. As if the whole exchange had been a dream.
Glancing at my translucent reflection on the glass of the passenger window as we headed home, I think back on my younger self. That dread and confusion, now sympathy and warmth. It made me wonder if our past is our constant reality until we choose to relive it differently.
It was a funny thing to visit home and realize the only thing that had changed, was me. I thought of the 19 year old, and I wished to have gotten to know her just as equally; if she’d had a favorite gift as a child, and the types of scars she carried.