Skin on Skin (11 page)

“L
ola, your dad’s on the phone!”

I groaned. I had just collapsed onto my futon, not even bothering to take off my mustard-stained uniform. My first day as a waitress was exhausting, my nurse-white sneakers in a constant, shuffled conga line as I trailed my cousin with a pitcher of burnt coffee. Verónica had been working at the mock drive-in diner for over a year and had gotten me the job for the summer, the summer before starting my
real
career, as my father no doubt wanted to remind me on the phone.

I stretched out my hand for the cordless, still facedown in my comforter. Verónica handed me the phone after saying a sugary good-bye to her
tío
.

“Hey, Papá.”

“How was your first day at work?”

“Good, I guess. Surprisingly tiring.” I left out the part about being so hungover that Verónica had to stand outside the bathroom door on the lookout for our manager, Louis, with his twitchy mustache, as I prayed with my head hung in the toilet bowl that the septic fumes would induce vomiting.
Give me
vomit or give me death.
But God granted me neither, and I had to suffer my own form of purgatory with the diner’s oldies on loop bebopping my splitting headache.

“That’s good, but remember, you’re young now. Imagine how hard it would be to waitress when you’re older or if you had your mother’s bad legs.” As if his constant peering over my shoulder as I studied all those years hadn’t made certain that his
hija
, the daughter of a car mechanic, would make it out of the
barrio.

“It’s just for the summer, Papá. I’ll be back in the fall to start my teaching job. Nothing is going to keep me from that.” I didn’t add that the job meant I could finally move out of my parents’ house into a place all of my own, although I imagined it would be close by so I could still help out my mom around the house when her diabetes got bad. Living here with Verónica was just a taste of things to come when I would have my own apartment in Tucson. For one, I could have boys spend the night.

“I know, Lolita. I just know how exciting your cousin’s lifestyle is to you, but just remember she—”

“Dad, hold on. I’ve got call waiting. One sec, okay? Don’t hang up.” I clicked over. “Hello?”

“Verónica?”

“Uh, no, this is her cousin Lola.”

“God, you two sound the same. I was calling for you, anyway.”

“
Nacho?
” I sat up, erect, in the bed.

“Nice, you recognized my voice…even though we didn’t get to talk much last night.” I felt myself blush in sudden heat, remembering Nacho on his knees sucking the sensitive flesh of my stomach.

“Um, how’d you get my number?” This was so unexpected. Our bathroom tryst in the dive bar I thought was just that, a bathroom tryst in a dive bar.

“Well, I figured you lived with your cousin, so I thought I’d call and see if you want to hang out sometime. Go for a ride in my car or something.”

“You got a nice ride?” I perked up. The daughter of a mechanic, an appreciation for cars was in
mi sangre.

“You bet. And I got more than that.” I laughed nervously and felt a hot surge between my legs. How fast that easy, cocky tone of his voice got me excited.

“So when are you going to take me for a ride?” I spoke through the breathy mask of my bedroom voice.

“How about I pick you up Thursday night. Around eight?” That was in three days. I needed him here now to lift the short hem of my polyester waitressing dress, flip me over, and yank down my cotton panties. I was about to ask him what he was wearing (imagining him in a wife-beater and no pants) when I remembered my father on the other line.

“Shit, Nacho. I gotta go. See you at eight. Thursday. You know where we live?”

“I do. See you at eight,
chica
.”

Flustered, I clicked back to the other line.

“Dad?” The dial tone admonished me with its nasal drone. I sighed and sank back into the billowy folds of my comforter. I knew I should call my dad back, but I closed my eyes instead. The fantasy of Nacho’s square hands rubbing me down after a long day on my feet relaxed me. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep.

I
saw Nacho before Thursday. It was Wednesday, the day before our supposed date, and Verónica and I had gotten off work just in time to make it to Tito’s for happy hour. Our pockets were crammed with small bills, hard-earned tips to blow on hard alcohol. When I saw Nacho, he was sitting in the same booth in the same bar with a girl (not me) who had lip liner permanently tattooed on her mouth. When she smiled, a closed-lipped smile, the lines of her mouth pulled taut like two red strings. She saw me staring at her and tossed a look of flying daggers. I meekly returned the look with a smattering of butter knives.

“Lola, that girl is
basura
.” Verónica had a way of hissing words in Spanish to hide the fact that she couldn’t speak it fluently. She quickly shuttled me to a stool at the bar, and we sat with our backs to Nacho and Tattoo Mouth. They were keeping company with a bunch of
cholos
whose precisely folded bandannas half-hooded their eyes and made them look sleepy.

Verónica ordered us two margaritas.

Chile pepper lights, like the ones my mom strung around our Christmas tree each year, blinked above a long mirror behind the bar. I checked it frequently like a rearview mirror and watched Nacho move into the fast lane. I felt as if I were being rear-ended.

“I think I’m going to go for a walk.” I stood up abruptly, upending my bar stool.

“But you haven’t even tried your margarita!” True, but it was already watery. I hated watery margaritas. I liked them blended thick like milk shakes.

“I just wanna get some air. I’ll be right back.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Verónica peered into the hurt expression that glazed my eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’ll be right back.”

I had no intention of returning.

I looked up and down the grey street for a pay phone. I felt lost in condensation. A thick fog had enveloped the city like a wartime gas. It infected my head and made it impossible to clear my thoughts.

I spotted the mock shelter of a pay phone two blocks away. As I approached, the bundle of wet newspapers next to the phone turned out to be a sodden, homeless man. He was passed out cold, and his arms were wrapped around the phone’s trunk like a thirsty man who has crawled through the desert only to die upon reaching a palm-treed oasis.

Carefully, I sidestepped the prostrate body and dug into my purse for the unused calling card my father had handed to me at the airport. Using a penny to scratch off the pewter strip, I debated whether or not I was actually going to place the call. My fingers, that most impulsive body part, made the decision for me and tapped across a complex code of buttons.

My ex-boyfriend’s voice mail picked up. I hung up without leaving a message. He would never know that I called.

Now what?

I looked around me. The streetlights flickered on and reflected themselves in the iridescent oil slicks of the street. Suddenly, it was Friday night all around me, swirling like a carnival ride. Crackheads pushed their shopping carts into oncoming traffic, maniacally assuming the right of way. Valets jumped to the curb at attention as tanklike SUVs pulled up in front of swank restaurants. Hipsters with dyed black hair that sat on their heads like helmets ducked behind the grimy windows of cafes and bars. A mariachi band paraded from taquería to taquería serenading first dates and immigrant families.

An old Mexican woman with an androgynous, wrinkled face stopped me. She was selling homemade tamales out of a teal-colored cooler. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.

“
¿Cuanto cuestan, abuelita?
”

Her smile was toothless and sweet, as if she had eaten too much candy over a lifetime. I bought two tamales and gave her an extra dollar. She patted my arm before rushing off to accost a pedestrian with tribal tattoos twisting like vines around his face.

I ate the tamales as I walked on, warmed by their company. Curiosity and the wanderlust of loneliness led me through quiet alleys that let out suddenly onto estuaries of populated street.

Pausing in front of a huge mural that covered a community center, I used my teeth to scrape the pasty remnants off the corn husk. The mural glowed with an eerie green light. The scene was of a field being sprayed with pesticides by a low-flying plane as Mexican migrant workers toiled below. One of the field hands was pregnant and her peacefully sleeping fetus was bathed in toxic green effulgence. I started in on the second tamale and noticed some gang graffiti bordering the edges of the mural. As I leaned in for a closer inspection of the cryptic lettering, which appeared to be a combination of roman numerals and chicken scratch, the loud backfire of an engine interrupted my thoughtful chewing. I jumped, but it didn’t scare me. I could long tell the difference between gunfire and backfire.

On the opposite side of the street, the rear end of an old pickup truck, rumbling with constipation, jutted out from an open garage. The warm fluorescence of the garage held a womblike pull for me. My earliest memories were of my father’s auto shop; the mechanical whirring could lull me to sleep better than any lullaby, and often my mother had to take me there to get me to sleep at night.

I approached the garage with the timid stealth of a deer. Love at first sight hit me with the voluptuous curve of the shiny, red hood of a ’51 Chevy pickup. It was the kind of hood that you wanted to get fucked against: the slick, hard metal slope matching up perfectly with the lumbar curve of your spine. And that impossibly red color! Like the perfect shade of nail polish or a hard cherry candy that it takes forever to suck into oblivion.

I must have been about eleven years old when I first laid eyes on this model Chevy. My second cousin Cristina’s boyfriend drove his ’51 pickup, an electric blue, into my dad’s garage to get its rattling muffler fixed. He let me sit in the passenger seat and even turned on the radio for me. The interior had the musty aroma of horse blankets. I remember thinking
this is what it feels like to be grown up
as I looked over at him adjusting the radio. His slender features—one might even have called them delicate, if not for the thuggish-looking man-boy fuzz above his upper lip—appealed to my girlishness. I imagined I was Cristina and he, my boyfriend, was driving me around town with the windows rolled down.

A leg in a navy-blue coverall dangled like a cigarette from the gaping mouth of the driver’s-side door. Whoever was sitting inside cut the engine. The night sputtered into stillness. I was afraid to move, to be discovered leering. I was standing dead center in front of the garage. The man got out of the truck with a sigh so heavy that I would never have expected him to be any younger than one of my
tíos
who worked at my dad’s shop.

Dark eyes, heavily fringed with black lashes, caught me like a pair of headlights. I could only brace myself against the impact.

He also froze in his tracks when he saw me. We looked at each other perplexed, like animals of two different species trying to recognize what the other was, unable to communicate, curious but apprehensive. His skin was as smooth as that of a teenage boy in an electric blue Chevy. And now I was old enough. Twenty-three. He looked only a couple years older.

He ended the staring contest with a blink. As he reached down to pick up a wrench from the grease-soiled floor, my eyes quickly frisked his body. The arms of his coveralls were rolled up past his elbows revealing a tapestry of tattoos like a second sleeve etched eternally onto his skin. He had the loose movements of an exceedingly tall person, yet without the awkwardness that usually accompanies such height. His shoulders were a bit narrow for his muscular arms.

I had seen him before. The first time I went to Tito’s. His drunken exit from the bar had unwittingly showed me its entry-way. The white boy with Mexican eyes and Elvis hair.

I couldn’t just keep standing there. When he looked back up, I was gone.

“Lola,
chica
, where have you been? We’ve been worried about you!” Verónica opened the gate to our apartment to let me in. I had forgotten my keys.

“
We?
” My gaze skipped past her shoulder and skimmed the bristly top of a shaved head in the kitchen behind.

“What’s Nacho doing here?” I pulled Verónica out onto the sidewalk. She was wearing a black miniskirt with leggings, no socks. My boozy cousin swayed on a purple pair of thrift-store pumps.

“Don’t worry, that
basura
was his ex-girlfriend. He dumped her in the trash, where she came from, months ago. She just showed up at Tito’s like some psycho-bitch.”

I was skeptical, but a big part of me didn’t even care. My teeth were chattering from an excitement I dared not name.

“When you left like that, he totally ditched her and kept bugging me about you, wondering where you went.” She shrugged as if reenacting her answer to his inquiries, and a loose strap of her tank top slipped off her shoulder. The hollow of her exposed collarbone was slightly blue, but she didn’t appear to be cold. Her breath formed warm tequila clouds.

My whole body was shivering, but I wasn’t cold, either. I was afraid my teeth would shake loose and leave my nerve endings exposed from my gums. I covertly pinched the flesh of my forearms in an effort to stop my incessant quaking. It was of no use. My thoughts would only backflip to the shiny, red pickup and those dark eyes that teased me of things I wanted to know, and my bones would set off rattling all over again. Just imagine all the places you could fuck on a truck like that! Not just on the engorged hood. Up against a sun-heated dashboard. Lying back on the creaky floorboards of the truck
bed!

“Lola.
Hey, Lola!
”

I had felt his eyes penetrate mine, but maybe I had just imagined that. Maybe my gawking had forced him to return the gaze.

“Lola, c’mon! He’s been waiting for you to get home.” Gypsy eyes implored me. I followed Verónica into the apartment like a sleepwalker led by a dream.

I didn’t want Nacho, but I could have him. I had a flame I needed him to feed, afraid if someone didn’t, it would extinguish and I would be at a loss how to light it, left holding just a flint and stone in my bare hands.

Verónica disappeared into her room. From the heavy rustling muffled behind her closed door, I judged she too had a male suitor.

I approached Nacho from behind. He sat patiently at the kitchen table like a schoolboy waiting for his lesson. The table was smoking with cigarette butts half-extinguished in empty beer bottles.

As if I was reading Braille, my fingers traced the prickly dots of hair that faded into the nape of his neck. He didn’t turn around. My nails sunk into his neck, almost in a choke hold. His head only turned when my fingers started to squeeze into the collapsing cartilage of his esophagus.

“Damn,
chica
.” But he liked it. I shimmied between him and the kitchen table. My crotch was at the dangerous level of his undressing eyes. He immediately pulled me onto his lap.

“Damn,
chica
.” Apparently, he didn’t have anything else to say. Fine with me. I slipped my tongue in his mouth and he pushed his hard-on, tenting in his pants, between my legs. That I wanted. I grabbed onto the bulge like the horn of saddle to ride the rhythm of his hips. The boy was pumping into me like he had a drill in his pants that could screw through the layers of our clothing. I had to put an end to this dry humping business. Fast.

“C’mon, Nacho. I want to show you my room.”

I switched on the only lamp in my small room and rotated its shade so that the tear in the muslin covering faced the wall. My room had the shameless appearance of a bachelor pad. In the dim light, Nacho tripped over empty take-out cartons and soda cans that surrounded the futon mattress barely raised off the floor by a low frame. My stereo was propped up on an overturned cardboard box, and I turned it on. The music was low and moody.

Nacho was already unbuttoning his shirt when I stumbled back to him. My suitcase, overflowing with unfolded clothes, lay directly in my path. I had yet to acquire a set of drawers.

“Here, let me help you with that.” My urgent fingers struggled with the tiny buttons. I wasn’t prepared for the sight that met me. The seductive eyes of multiple women stared at me unapologetically, laying claim to Nacho’s broad chest. I peeled off the rest of his shirt to get a better look at his tattooed harem.

Most of the faces were anonymous, wearing the vacant expression of strippers, but some dangled first names in looping cursive. The tattoos covered the entire region of his pecs, like the breastplate of a conquistador, and spared only his dusty rose nipples. A tattoo of the Virgin Mary guarded his not-so-virgin heart.

“Yolanda?” I poked an accusatory finger at the name in indelible black ink positioned under the exotic mouth of a long-haired beauty.

“My sister?” He shrugged sheepishly.

“Liar.” I shoved him fiercer than I had intended, and he fell back onto the futon. He grabbed ahold of my calf and pulled me down on top of him.

I fumed with a desire hatched from a convoluted jealousy. As I stripped off my shirt, I wondered what it would take to become one of those girls permanently engraved into his skin. Nacho quickly distracted me by squeezing my hard nipples, which poked through the black lace of my bra. He then tugged at them with his teeth.

“
Don’t tear my bra.
” He grinned, raising his devilish eyebrows. In one stroke, he pulled down the spindly material and cupped the naked fullness of my breasts.

His hands were large, large enough to completely cover my ample tits. His grip was crushing, and he just kept squeezing and squeezing until juice began to slip between my legs.

“
You like that, don’t you
?”

I responded affirmatively by unzipping his pants. I searched frantically until I found the ultrasmooth head of his cock. He moaned when I touched that precious bead of precum and rubbed it around the tip, slowing working down his stout, slightly ridged cock.