Just Another Mexican Girl in Colonia BellaVista, Ciudad Juarez.

By ----

The Mexican girl’s long, dark brown hair - stiff from gel – lay strewn across the pillow and spilled onto the mattress. She was asleep. She had small, pink lips and a long, perfectly proportioned, Roman nose. Her eyebrows were dark and natural. She had a sharp, angular chin and jaw. High cheekbones and tan skin. Hardly noticeable pimples on her forehead revealed her youthfulness.

Her home had been Mexico City and her family was rich. She had been educated in American schools in Mexico City. Her mother was Mexican. Her father was Columbian and traced his ancestry to Spanish nobility. Both were Roman Catholic and strict, always telling her what to do. She hated being told what to do. Her father, the stricter of he and his wife, would often beat the girl. Tired and drunk, he would return from work, discover his juvenile delinquent daughter’s exploits of the day, and beat her senseless. He did not like to, but he had too, it was the only way she would learn.

The boys in Mexico City were not the only ones who noticed her breasts starting to grow and her body’s sharp angular lines replaced by sensuous curves. Her uncle did too. In fact, one night he raped her. She knew he would rape her again, and he did, often. She could not tell her father, he would certainly beat her.

So she decided she would run away, dreaming she might go to the United States and meet a rich, handsome, and nice American man. A man who would sweep her off her feet, love her, and provide all life’s necessities. She would leave and go to Ciudad Juarez, sneak across the border into El Paso, and find a job as a domestic. Then she would go dancing at night and meet her American man.

But her dream was also practical, at least she thought so. If she could not make it to the United States, she would stay in Juarez and work in the American factories, the maquiladoras. Then she would work all day and party all night. Besides, lots of Americans came to the Juarez nightclubs. Perhaps she would meet one there.

 Neither dream materialized. She made it to Juarez, but the border was harder crossing then she anticipated. The maquiladoras - actually nothing more than American sweat-shops - only paid five dollars a day. She could hardly see partying on five dollars a day. And the American men? Well, they only came to get drunk, do cocaine, and have sex with slutty girls. Disillusioned, she decided to give the American men what they wanted, only she quickly learned she could make money by making them pay. But because she was underage, when the nightclubs saw what she was doing they banned her, and so she started whoring on the street.

Whoring was easy. Gabachos - a derogative slang for white guys - came to Juarez with money. She had sex with them and they paid her. Easy. She made more in an hour then most Mexicans made in a week.

But even whoring wasn’t what she had expected. Juarez was off-limits to the soldiers in El Paso and so most Gabachos were truck drivers - unwashed, fat, drunk, and high on cocaine. Sex could sometimes be disgusting. She did not enjoy going down on a truck driver after he had spent a couple weeks on the road. But as long as the guy did not take Viagra, at least it was usually over quickly. She could make between ten and fifty dollars in five to ten minutes.

So although the sex was pretty gross, she had time to do drugs, party with friends, and live the good life. Counselors from the local drug rehabilitation clinic had tried to convince her to get off the street. Yeah, she was too young to work the brothels and had to work the streets. Yeah, she was hooked on drugs and spent her money as fast as she earned it. Yeah, she carried all life’s possessions in one black garbage bag. Yeah, she lived hand to mouth on the streets of Colonia BellaVista - called the Zona de Conflicta - in Juarez, Mexico. But what the hell did the counselors know? Every day was a party in Juarez and life was good. At least it had been up until tonight.

The American man was relieved, she was finally asleep. Asleep or comatose, he could not tell which. But she was peaceful. Before she had been anything but peaceful, moaning and convulsing, her eyes rolling into the back of her head. Her mouth agape. Surprisingly, she had not swallowed or bitten off her tongue. She had almost choked on her own vomit, though. She had also pissed on herself. Now, the vomit was drying and sticking to the side of her cheek as she slept.

She moaned softly and turned in the bed. The tattered, soil stained, dark red and blue patterned, burlap blanket slipped to the bed’s foot as she moved. She was naked. Her youthful breasts were small and tan with pink areolas. Her tan body, a little chubby, but still well proportioned. A slightly rounded stomach and a small, well-kept vagina. Bikini lines accentuated her privates. A thin layer of peach fuzz covered both armpits. It was quite sexy, he thought. Several small scars and burn marks on her thighs revealed past endured abuse.

He covered her with the blanket, careful not to disturb the IV in her arm. She moved her head and sleepily opened her eyes.

“Where am I?” she asked her American man.

“In a clinic.”

“Why?”

“You O.D.’d”

“O.D.’d?” She tried focusing on him, but could not. But she knew what he looked like. A tall, muscular man with his black hair slicked back from way too much gel. A day’s growth of stubble. Certainly, like always, he was wearing a T-shirt with tight blue-jeans, a scuffed leather jacket, and black boots. The quintessential American male. The individualist. Never mind that his eyes often darted around, looking for imaginary interlopers. Or that he was afraid of his own shadow. Never mind that he often lost his temper, berated her and sometimes bounced her off the walls of their apartment.

And there was that little thing they did not talk about - his job. She knew he drove cars loaded with drugs from Juarez to El Paso. But hey, he made good money, so what did she care. He was the closest thing she had to her American savior and she was not going to blow it - even if it did mean the occasional bruise or black eye.

She struggled keeping her eyelids open and coughed.

“You O.D.’d, but don’t worry now, sleep.”

She gazed at him briefly. “Was he her American savior?” she wondered. She turned her head and passed out.

He remembered how they first met. He had read about Juarez prostitutes on the internet. Massage parlors, bar girls, and street walkers - Juarez had them all. He had also read that cocaine flowed freely in Juarez, and more important, it flowed cheaply.

True, the cocaine was cheap, but the massage parlor women he had seen were all old and ugly. The brothel women were a little better, but not much. And the street girls, well, he felt like taking them home and nursing them back to health, not having sex with them. The Juarez prostitutes looked nothing like the beautiful Mexican singers Selina, Paulina, or Thalia. They looked nothing like the beautiful women on the Mexican American television station Telemundo. “Where were the girls from the Mexican Novellas, or the young girls that looked so hot in their bikinis on that Saturday afternoon dance show?” he wondered. They were not working in BellaVista.

Unimpressed with the women, he met up with other expatriates who ran drugs across the border. It was easy money and he couldn’t help but get hooked. It was such an easy job, in fact, that he had lots of spare time to wander Juarez’s streets. Day and night, he would walk. The streets were unmarked pavement with numerous potholes. The sidewalks were uneven concrete slabs. The houses were a heterogeneous mixture of blue, green, white, and tan cinder-block. Some were two stories, others one. Many of the two story houses had outside stairs leading to a second story balcony. On one such balcony, he had met her.

 “What you doing?” she asked, looking down at him. She was sitting on a chair on a white tile balcony. A set of stairs, covered with the same white tile, led from the sidewalk to the balcony. She was wearing a tight black skirt and a black tube top that exposed her stomach.

“Walking around,” he said, stopping and looking up. She could not have been any older than seventeen or eighteen. He could see up her skirt. She was wearing black panties.

She stood up. “What you looking for?”

“You,” he replied.

He tried concealing his hard-on. She noticed, smiled, and seductively licked her lips. She got up and bounded down the stairs to the street. When she reached him, she grabbed his arm and squeezed it. Her other hand grazed the front of his pants.

“How much?” he asked, hoping she would be cheap.

“Forty dollars,” she said.

“Too much.” He had read he could get a street girl for ten. He pulled his arm from her grasp and started moving away, pretending to leave.

“Too much?” She played with her hair. “How can I cost too much?” she asked.

“Well you are,” he said. Even though he wanted her desperately, he wanted to spend the least amount possible. He could use the extra money for cocaine.

“Twenty?” she asked, looking at him desperately and moving closer. She needed the extra money he was trying to save so she could buy her own cocaine.

“Twenty is still too much.”

“Fifteen?”

“Fifteen is good,” he said.

They went upstairs to her room.

A month later, he made her his girlfriend. He had quickly learned how to get a girl in BellaVista, and the girl he wanted was her. He was a Gabacho, and Gabachos had one thing a drug addict like her needed: money. As long as he provided her with money and drugs, she was his girlfriend. Having a Mexican drug addict for a girlfriend was easy, provided he overlooked her staying out all night, overlooked her jumping into strange cars with clients, overlooked her thievery, and overlooked her Mexican boyfriend.

The clinic’s smell jarred him from his memories - sweat, urine, and Lysol filled his nostrils, causing him to feel nauseous. He looked around, there were no respirators, EKGs, or any other modern medical equipment. The unwashed concrete walls were dingy blue and stained with brown streaks. The floors were off-white tile. No one had washed them in weeks. The waiting room’s chairs were plastic and the stuffing bulged from large cracks in the upholstery. The patient’s room was a small hall containing a row of beds. The beds, rusty metal frames with brown, stained mattresses. She lay on the furthest mattress from the door. Beside her, a dirty white plastic lawn chair that said Carta Blanca on the back. In the chair, he sat - the Gabacho - the American savior. His hands were shaking from using too much cocaine. He wondered if the doctor or nurse had noticed earlier.

The clinic’s doctor and nurse had long since gone to sleep. They had given her a shot that counteracted the heroin and then left her to sleep. They allowed the Gabacho to sit bedside. And so he sat there in the low lights of the clinic. He drifted in and out of a light sleep. A roach ran across the floor. He stepped on it.

Earlier that night they had shared three small bags of coke.

“I don’t want you working anymore,” he told her, opening the bags and preparing four white lines on the coffee table. She methodically removed the tobacco from two cigarettes and replaced it with the remaining cocaine. She rolled a dollar, placed it to her nostril, and snorted two lines.

“I don’t really like working, but I need the money. They’re just clients.”

He snorted the remaining two lines and lit one of the cigarettes. The smoke was acrid, the same smell as an appliance’s melting electrical cord.

“You’re my girl, and my girl don’t work,” he said. “You need something you ask me.”

“I don’t like asking all the time,” she said.

“Look, if I catch you screwing another guy, you’re out of here.”

“Never,” she lied.

“You need coke, pills, anything, come ask me,” he said. If he kept her supplied with whatever she needed, then she would be solely his. At least that is what Geraldo, the local pimp that ran the bar across the street told him to do if he really wanted to enslave her.

“What about money?” she asked.

“I’ll give you that too.”

“Okay, I guess I don’t have to work,” she said. As long as he was her boyfriend, she would have a vacation from the day-to-day street life. In time, he would probably leave – just like all the other Gabachos - but for now she would live the good life - partying all night, sleeping all day, and only having sex with one man for all her necessities. And besides, maybe, just maybe, he was her American savior.

She stood up and put the other cigarette in her jacket pocket. She was going out to meet her friends.

“When will you be back?” he asked, taking a long draw on the cigarette.

“Don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe two,” she replied.

“Lying bitch,” he thought. He knew damn well when she would be back – five or six in the morning. She was leaving to smoke crack and shoot heroin. He was jealous, he wished she would do the drugs in his apartment. He was horny.

He watched her do crack once. He was amazed watching her prepare it. First, she took an aluminum can and cut off the bottom. She placed cocaine and baking soda, with a little water in the small basin on the can’s bottom. Then she heated the can’s bottom using a lighter. Cooking the cocaine and baking soda mixture changed its chemical properties, making it more potent, and more addictive. After cooking it, she gathered the white crystalline mixture with her index finger and smeared it on the end of a section of T.V. antenna. A makeshift crack pipe. Then she smoked it.

He could not imagine why she liked crack. Unlike cocaine – where she got talkative and liked having sex and partying – when smoking crack, she sat trembling and silently staring at the floor or ceiling. He wondered what she thought about when she sat in her trance. He tried talking to her once when she was high on crack, but it was hopeless, she could not talk.

Sometimes she cried when doing crack, though. And sometimes she got a little out of hand. Insane, actually. Once, he had come home to find her standing next to the kitchen table, blood covering her arms, shirt, and the floor’s ceramic tiles. She was crying. When pouring a glass of water, her hands had shaken too much, causing her to drop it. One thing led to another, and she had taken one of the shards and repeatedly slashed her forearms. He came home just in time to see her standing there with the shard in her hand and blood dripping everywhere. He hoped nothing like that happened tonight.

 “I’ll be back,” she said. And just like that, she was gone. She was not gone long, though. About two hours later, she returned.

“She must need more money,” he laughed to himself. “What a worthless bitch. I should replace her with a new chick.” But then he remembered her young body, her small breasts, and perfectly shaped buttocks. He pushed any stupid ideas about dumping her out of his mind. “Who the hell would dump a hot, teenage piece of ass?” he reminded himself.

She was shaking and staring at the ground. She had smoked crack. “I want to go dancing with my friends and need money,” she said, staring at her feet.

“Right, dancing,” he said. He knew what dancing meant: drinking and pills. She would drink, excuse herself to the ladies room, down a few pills, and return to the dance floor.

“Okay, but don’t use this money to buy drugs for just you. Share with your friends,” he said. “I’ll kick your ass if you get too stoned.” He handed her 500 pesos, 50 dollars in American money. “I don’t want to kill you with this money. Share the drugs with your friends.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” she asked. “I am going dancing, not buying drugs.”

“Sure, have fun.” He knew she was lying. “Just promise not to be stupid, okay.”

“I promise,” she said, giving him a light kiss. Satisfied he believed her, she walked over to the refrigerator and took some ice from the freezer.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Never believe what happened, I reached under the bed at my friend’s house and a spider bit me,” she said.

“Where?”

She rolled her sleeve and showed him a swollen bump inside her elbow. Exactly where a junkie shoots heroin. He knew what the swelling meant - she had missed the vein when injecting.

“It bit you right where you shoot up?” he asked. “That’s incredible.”

“Yeah, it is,” she replied, not realizing he was mocking her.

 “Let’s get some ice on it. But, no more spider bites tonight, you hear?”

“Okay,” she said, wondering why he would say something that dumb. Of course there would be no more spider bites. She placed some ice on the swelling and started out the door.

“Bye,” she said, kissing him as she left.

He stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the dark street. She held the ice to her arm. She turned a corner and disappeared into the night. He sighed and closed the door.

He hoped she did not go with a client. He would have to kick her ass if she did. Because it was late, she would do it out of desperation for that last little bit of heroin. She would service a client because she was too embarrassed to come ask him for the money. Because she was desperate, she would charge a low price, taking any bum or junky on the street. Heroin was only three dollars, so for less than five dollars, she would do anything a client desired. Anything.

A rasping, gurgling sound, awoke him from his light slumber. It took a minute for him to regain his bearing - he was in a clinic sitting next to his girlfriend. She was struggling to breath. With each inhale, she made a rasping sound. With each exhale, a gurgling sound. Her lips had a bluish tint.

She stopped breathing. He slapped her, she breathed once. Nothing. He pinched her nose, she breathed once. Nothing. He slapped her again. Finally she started breathing.

 He ran over to the doctor’s little room across the hall. “Goddamn it,” he yelled, pounding on the door. “Ella no respirar,” he said, in his poor attempt at Spanish. The doctor opened the door and followed him into the other room. She had stopped breathing again.

After she had left the apartment for the second time, earlier that night, he had stopped waiting for her return and went to sleep. Later, at about 3 am, someone knocked. A Mexican girl – a prostitute with her Mexican boyfriend. The boyfriend stood ten paces behind her and stared aimlessly into space, a common practice when a Mexican prostitute and Gabacho client talked - the boyfriend did not want to interfere.

He looked at the Mexican girl. He wondered why he had never seen her around, he would like having sex with her sometime. As long as she did not tell his girl. She looked like a cholla, a latina gang-member - long, straight black hair with blonde tips, tan skin, and heavy makeup. Plucked and painted thin black lines for eyebrows. Heavy black eyeliner. Light blue eyeshadow. Bright red lipstick outlined by an even darker red shade.

“She really likes you, you need to go to the clinic and pay because she overdosed,” the Mexican girl said.

He knew what a Mexican prostitute knocking on a Gabacho’s door at three am in the morning meant: she needed to turn a trick to get money to buy cocaine to then make crack or she needed to pull a scam to get money to buy cocaine to then make crack. Or she just needed money to buy heroin. She was with her boyfriend, so he suspected a scam.

“You scamming me?” he asked.

The Mexican girl looked offended. “No, look, if you don’t pay they won’t help her.” She turned and started to leave.

“How much money you want?” he asked, unimpressed.

She turned around, “I don’t want your fucking money.”

He did not believe her, he continued his interrogation. “How do you speak such good English anyways?”

“I’m from East LA,” she said.

“East LA, what the hell you doing here?”

“Same thing you are,” she said.

“Drinking, smoking, snorting, and fucking?” he asked.

“Yeah, something like that,” she replied, her voice low with a tinge of sadness.

She was an American at least, he thought, so if she was scamming him, at least he would not be giving it to a Mexican. Never mind that she was Chicano.

“Okay, I’ll believe you, where is she?” he asked.

“The Sanatorium Moderno on 16 de Septembre,” she said. She gave him directions and described what happened. “She partied with me, left, and when she came back, she fell asleep on the floor and started not breathing. So I called a ambulance.”

“What do you think she did?”

The East LA girl shrugged her shoulders. “Heroin maybe. You know she shoots-up sometimes, no?”

“Of course,” he replied. He started to close the door. “Hey, come around sometime, you know what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said. “I’ve got everything you need right here.”

 What an asshole, she thought, his girl was dying in a clinic and he was making a date with her. But, hell she needed the money just as badly as his girlfriend. Never mind that she was her friend. “Sure, when?” she asked.

“Next week, Thursday, she always goes to her cousins house on Thursday.”

“How much,” she asked.

“About 40 dollars,” he lied. “Plus I have beer and all the white stuff you want.”

“What time?”

“Five, give or take an hour. I’ll be doing the same thing I’m always doing – a whole lot of nothing,” he said.

“OK, I’ll be there.”

Satisfied, he closed the door and went inside. She might or might not show up on Thursday, but at least he tried. He needed to keep his options open. His girlfriend could leave him at any time. Maybe she would steal and he would have to kick her out. Maybe she would die tonight. Maybe she would decide to go into drug rehabilitation. Maybe the Federales would arrest her. Who knew what could happen?

His thoughts turned back to his girlfriend. “Goddamn stupid little bitch. Coke, crack, pills, beer, and heroin – all in one night,” he thought aloud. Why he had ever fallen in love with her, he did not know. If she had just done those drugs at their apartment he could of at least had sex with her before she overdosed. He had always wanted to try sex with a girl comatose on pills and alcohol. He would be able to do whatever he wanted and she could not say a damn thing.

And now she was in a clinic drowning in her own fluids. After a minute of not breathing, she finally took a shallow, raspy breath.

“You need to pay for oxygen,” the doctor said.

“Okay, anything.”

“Its expensive, 200 pesos.”

“So maybe I just let her die instead?” he asked sarcastically. He pulled 800 pesos from his wallet. “Just fucking make sure she doesn’t die,” he said, handing the doctor the pesos.

The doctor folded the money, eyed the gringo for a moment, and got to work. The bribe caused a flurry of activity. He propped her body with pillows. A nurse wheeled in a large rusted oxygen cylinder. They put tubes in her nose and gave her oxygen. The nurse gave her an injection. 800 pesos and 5 minutes of work later, she breathed normally. Relieved, he sat down. The doctor left. The nurse dimmed the lights and left. The Gabacho drifted in and out of a light sleep. He sat on a white plastic lawn chair that said Carta Blanca on the back. A roach ran across the floor. He stepped on it. She lived.

She died a week later. A different crack house, different friends. Nobody noticed she was dying and not sleeping. Or maybe they did, but did not care. He never saw her body. He did not know she died until hearing the news from another street girl. He never heard from her family or friends. He never saw an obituary. He never went to a funeral. Nobody questioned him about her. Nobody asked him if he wanted to bury her. Nobody was surprised when he got a new drug addicted girlfriend a week later. A cholla from East LA. He had always wanted a girlfriend that looked like an East LA gang-member – now he had one. Nobody was surprised when he never talked about his old girlfriend. She had never lived.

-The End-