Boys Town: 200 Whores, 4 Classy Guys, and 1 Skinny Donkey

By Robin Postell

(Originally published in Razor Magazine and secondly served as the inspiration for a short story anthology edited by Violet Blue, “Best Sex 2005.”)

We’re dangling dangerously somewhere over San Antonio, Texas.

We’ll land in Laredo, cross the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and pay a visit to Boys Town, also known as La Zona, or Zona Rosa – a teeming village of bawdy prostitutes. According to Andy, it’s a thriving community where women walk around in their underwear hawking their wares for American dollars.  Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was a soothing getaway for Vietnam vets. Now it’s been renovated, and still has quite an allure for those looking to score some cheap, non-nonsense ass.

We are a motley crew. MC for the night is Andy, who owns a handful of strip clubs and nude tanning salons in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Andy had a memorable but brief stint in the infamous Ultimate Fighting Championship’s fifth installment, but got his big opponent’s thumb lodged in his eye, ending the match in a matter of seconds. Andy is rich, decadent, and from the wrong side of the tracks, which makes for a well-rounded character. Completely insane, Andy relishes spending big bucks amazing his friends and acquaintances. This makes him a popular guy wherever he goes.

Lance, Andy’s fulltime pilot, is probably the sanest of us, which is some comfort. He refuses to drink before he flies and always tries to get his rest instead of staying up all night with everyone else.  Up front with him is Doc, a Dallas physician with a penchant for the raunchy.  I’m in the middle seats, sitting next to Andy, who wears a simple expression of ribald complacency.

In the back seat there’s Tamale Joe, who invented a tamale-making machine. The bespectacled head resting on Tamale Joe’s shoulder is Dragon Lee’s, a Taekwondo grandmaster from Korea who barely reaches five feet but can kill you with one chop of his calloused hands or feet.

Andy’s telling me stories about Boys Town. He’d first told me about it at a UFC-spin-off fight in Kiev, Ukraine. I told him he was full of shit at a posh, mob-run after-fight banquet held on the top floor of a strip club and casino.

Once back stateside, I got a phone call from Andy’s pilot saying he was 30 minutes outside of Athens and to meet me at the airport.

Andy had a point to prove.

I packed up and headed to the tarmac.

+++

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say to Andy, forever naïve.

“Really,” he confirms. “Pussy for miles. Pussy as far as the eye can see.”

We’ve landed in Laredo. As soon as we cross the border into Nuevo Laredo I smell raw sewage and tacos.

The streets are grimy and sweaty, filth the norm. The heat makes you drunk, sticky, and slow. Cars and taxis ramble around with the windows rolled down, Latino beats blasting from cheap, busted speakers. Drunken tourists meander, glassy-eyed. We look for a restaurant but it’s too late. Andy hails a taxi and we pile in – a ten-dollar jaunt.

The taxi wings through Nuevo Laredo and passes a bullfighting arena filled with bloodthirsty fans. Then it’s upon us – the famed Boys Town, surrounded by a white concrete brick wall - one way in, one way out.

I study the garish, neon-embossed entrance with cars swarming in and out like worker bees to a hive. Everybody’s car windows are down. You hear Mexican pop jams, laughter, and drunken banter - a pumping fiesta, dusty as a spaghetti Western. Andy pays the cab driver as we peel our damp bodies off the vinyl car seats.

We stop off at a corner fajita stand just inside the entrance where short, perspiring Mexican men are cooking strips of flank steak on an outdoor grill thick with soot and grease.  Andy makes some remark about it not being beef, to be funny.

We sit at one of the outdoor tables.  I’m looking around for naked chicks.

“Cuatro Carta Blancas, por favor,” Andy says to the sweaty waitress. He is comfortable in the manner that Hefner must have been at the Playboy Mansion.

Andy points across the dusty street to a dark building. “That’s the clinic where all the girls get checked out,” he explains.

Prostitution is legal in Mexico, but confined to these red zones like Boys Town. Guarded by lethargic federales, whose presence is prominent (some even somberly wagging machine guns at the entrance), Boys Town is an attempt to keep at least some of the deadly sins corralled in designated areas.

Apparently, the women who hook here are required to get physical exams every week and carry a card resembling a passport with their photo and script stating that they are healthy enough to bang. They receive these from the Boys Town physician, who works on-site at the clinic. In addition to their weekly exams, they have blood work done twice yearly, testing for HIV and hepatitis. Free condoms are given out, or can be purchased for a buck when you choose your chick du jour, and while if you ask the women whether they use them they always say yes, plenty of horny guys have paid double to toss the latex.

“Show me something,” I say to my crew. They all nod at each other and smile smugly, scarfing down fajitas in salsa verde.

Doc and Tamale Joe are sprawled out in the wrought iron chairs at the Tamyko Club, smiles plastered on their mugs. They’re looking around at the women who walk around in their underwear and stiletto heels.

Tamale Joe wears a baseball cap with I LOVE TAMALES stenciled in red over the brim. We’re discussing the tamale-making machine, for which he says he’s getting a lot of orders for lately. He makes the machines by hand, so it takes him a while to get the orders out. Then he tells me that if I go stand by the jukebox that means I’m available. I see a few chicks standing by it. Immediately I note that none of them would turn me on if I were a man.

This disappoints me.

I wanted to be surrounded by hot horny babes, not hot horny whores. What did I expect?

We are sitting at a table that has a huge column in the center that blocks everyone’s view of everyone else except the person sitting directly to your left or right. This is an absurd bit of social engineering, so I choose to wander around instead of sit there craning my neck and straining my voice to make small talk with my posse. I excuse myself, Carta Blanca in hand, while the boys get doused.

On my way to the john I get a load of the place. When you exit the main lounge area there’s a center court filled with greenery – big leafy trees and short, rubbery-leafed shrubs. Flowers in concrete urns squat next to weathered wrought iron tables and chairs scattered about the place. The court is surrounded by a fort of rooms for rent by the half hour. When you choose a girl she pays the bartender five bucks for a key. Prices are negotiable behind closed doors but usually it’s between ten and a hundred dollars, averaging about forty-five. There are two levels, with black stairs jutting up them.

A heavy Mexican girl in a G-string teddy and high-heeled leather sandals leads a skinny, grinning American teenager up the stairs to the second floor. He takes shorts glances back to the ground level where his friends rib one another and giggle.

The ladies’ room is a crack in the wall near the bar, no frills, just the essentials; a mirror and a commode. I smack my rose-gunmetal colored Chanel lips and return to the masses. A guy approaches me and says, “Hey, I need a girlfriend.” He leans into me slightly and lays one hand on the truck of a tree.

“I’m not a hooker,” I say, trying to enunciate so he’ll catch my drift. “I’m here with friends.”

His English is not so good and I never make up my mind whether he gets what I’m telling him. It doesn’t matter, because I ain’t the one.

There is a group of Texas boys standing around in pinpoint oxfords and brown leather loafers. They all look 18 – which is Mexico’s legal drinking age. They say they come here every other weekend, smoke a joint, and freak out of chicks. But they say they never buy one.  There’s a cherub-faced girl sitting on one of their laps and I ask her what it is like, to hook here.

“It is work,” she says, in a thick accent. “It’s not love.”

I ask her how many times a week she has sex and she asks me, “How many times a week do you have sex?”

She goes onto say, in Spanish, which one of the teenagers translates, that she has only been working here for 30 days and she hates it. But she is saving up money to go to medical school to become a doctor. She says many of the women here are saving their money to start businesses, like hair salons or clothing boutiques. Many of the women live here inside the compound, some with children, in tiny rooms, she says. You see these rooms, doors opened, with their lonely, needy occupants standing sweat-slicked at the thresholds, hoping someone will come save them, maybe tote them across the border to greener pastures.

Andy’s looking for me, thinking I’m getting raped and knifed out back. He meets me at the door. We sit at one of the tables in the courtyard and he hails the waitress.

“Dos Cuartos  Blancas, por favor,” he says. Andy waves over a group of loitering musicians. One has a small guitar, the other a huge bass, and another an accordion. Andy knows everyone and they eye him lovingly. Word is that Andy’s penis is so enormous that one hooker gave him his money back. She’s here tonight. I fully intend on pulling her over to the side and asking her about this, to settle yet another one of Andy’s tall tales once and for all.

Soon the others have gotten wise to what’s going on and join us in the center of the courtyard. A couple of hookers sit down with us, wearing nothing but clingy see-through lingerie and high heels.

The vibe gets looser. Everybody’s milling about. The poor girls smell money. We’re gradually collecting an entourage. After everyone polishes off their swill, we cut out for the next place. There are so many, you must move through them quickly – scan the premises while you drink a beer. If it looks good, stick around. If not, move on. Since this is Andy’s way to prove he’s not a bullshit artist, he wants me to make sure I see as much as possible until his point is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I’m already convinced.

The next stop, and the most famous bar in Boys Town, is the Papagayo Club. Larger and more like a regular bar, with better looking women, it is a big room with tables and chairs, threaded down one side with a bar.

Chicks walk around in their panties and whatever other kind of foxy outfit they have fashioned out of little pieces of fabric. The guys are obviously familiar with the place because they recognize girls and talk about them as they pass. They’ve probably done them all. In fact, every now and then Doc will lean over and tell me if one swallows or not, or whether another likes it up the ass.

‘You’re a classy guy,” I tell him.

+++

There are 38 bars in Boys Town and we’ve hit about four. I’m getting the hang of it. I can’t help but wonder whether these girls are having a good time - because I’m a girl.

They look like they are.

But I know the ways of women. They can fake a lot of things – orgasms being only one.

We’ve got a big round table and the women are swarming around. Even though the women usually work one bar, many have travelled from other clubs because they have heard about the rich American strip club owner and his drunken pals. None of my crew has hooked up with any women yet. I was expecting them in and out of rooms with different hookers every half hour.

But I always overestimate the appetites of men.

Doc and Tamale Joe are being picky. This one is too fat; the other one’s nose is too big. Another has a pimple. I’m officially in charge of picking out women for them because I have declared I have better taste in women than they do.

Dragon Lee has never seen anything like this before, and it shows, but he is hanging in there. Earlier in the day he was doing a Taekwondo exhibition at a big tournament with kiddies wearing yellow belts in a Christian school gymnasium. I saw him chop three concrete blocks in two with one hand, then slice off cleanly the neck of a Jack Daniels bottle, barely spilling a drop.

Andy waves over a couple of damas and they sit down, one on either side of Dragon Lee. Fifty bucks is passed to the thinner one’s hand. Andy nods at Dragon Lee and whispers something in his ear. The young Mexican girl in the black thong bikini takes him by the hand and leads him away.

Then I see the girl of my dreams.

No other women in Boys Town compare. She is tall and thin for a Mexican, with warm, moist dark skin and long sultry legs. She’s wearing a black G-string and a black bra, her tits spilling over. If I were a guy, this is the one I’d do. I nudge Doc and nod at her.

“Go get her,” he says. “I’ll take her.”

I run off into the crowd after her, trailing her, listening to her stiletto heels click on the dirty stone floor. She senses me behind her and turns. Our eyes meet. I ask her to join us and she takes my hand.

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

We sit down at our table, our bare thighs brushing against each other. When she talks to me, she touches my knee for emphasis and her fingertips linger. I’m pissed that Doc’s going to take her and violate her, but she says she’s got a kid at home she’s got to feed.

“It’s necessary,” she says in broken English when I tell her she doesn’t have to go off with Doc is she doesn’t want to. Her name is Aurora and she is so beautiful and sad I give her my diamond bracelet.

This is how men get taken, I think.

Andy has ordered tequila shots for everyone and she’s getting drunk. She leans over and asks me if I want to do some cocaine. She wobbles off unsteadily to get her purse and then returns, guiding me into the bathroom. Off the end of her long red fingernail I snort a couple of bumps and she kisses me before we go back out.

Neither of us is drunk anymore and she’s got enough guts to go give Doc a $50 blowjob he’s been waiting for.

Something about this bothers me but I deal with it.

Mexican women here are poor. The unemployment rate is so high in Mexico that when jobs do become available only the men get lucky. At least she’s making money, buying shoes for the baby. I tell Andy I want to take her back to Texas and put her up in an apartment, take care of her.

“I will,” he says. “You know I will if you want me to.”

He would. He has so many whores put up in Texas apartments his accountant sweats himself to sleep nightly trying to finagle the books.

+++

We leave Papagayo with Andy fuming. I sidle up next to him to get the scoop. Dragon Lee took the girl Andy bought for him and then left her lying on the bed because she had an ugly C-section scar.

Doc’s going to catch up later – he’s off doing God-only-know-what to Aurora. Inwardly, I groan.

Tamale Joe is smacking his lips because he got lucky with a tiny hooker from Cozumel.

Andy’s being good, strangely, keeping me company, abstaining from the reindeer games. Every hooker in the joint lavishes attention on him, but he holds court stolidly.

We have still only been in a handful of bars and Andy is determined to show me the meat and bones of the place – saving the best for last.

We skip Monkey’s, which has a big fake gorilla standing out front. Andy tells me a guy is dressed up in a gorilla suit and has sex with a woman. The show’s not that great, Andy says, rolling his eyes. There are sex shows aplenty here, most of them themed.

Lesbians, heteros, monkeys.

And donkeys.

He saves the best for last. Marta’s. A donkey, a real one, is tied up suspiciously outside the entrance and a wiry Mexican man is screaming at passersby to come watch the show: The donkey doesn’t look happy; ribs protruding.

“Why feed him when he’s got all the pussy he can stand?” Andy laughs.

“Human pussy, at that,” cries a drunken Tamale Joe.

The ASPCA would have a field day ere.

Inside we grab a booth and Andy orders a round of Carta Blancas and shots of tequila. Women of all ages and descriptions mingle about the darkened, low-roofed space. Elaborate makeup and costumes abound. The walls are covered in red foil, which lends the décor a hellish flair.

Diamond-shaped smoked mirrors are hung haphazardly on the walls, with glowing jukebox in the rear. Wobbly tables and vinyl booths surround a central dance floor. A mariachi band of fat, wet men in dirty clothes grind out tunes. Perched on a wooden two-by-four shelf over our table is a huge black-eyed owl that drinks water from a half of a plastic milk jug. Free to do as it pleases, it occasionally takes flight for the other side of the bar.

About this time Doc saunters in, the snake. “She swallowed every drop,” he whispers into my ear proudly.

I want to punch him.

By this time we’ve accumulated quite a following of personable hookers who all know Andy, Doc, and Tamale Joe by name and penis size. One of the hookers, Christiana, tells me that 90 percent of the “women” in this bar are really hombres.

She says they work here to save up money for their operations. Most of the “girls” have ass and breast implants and take hormones as well. This sheds new light on the situation. I squint, searching for the tell-tale signs of manhood, but it is almost impossible to detect anything.

“Where are their dicks?” I ask Christiana. She tells me they tie a string around the head and pull it back between their ass cheeks, where they secure it with tape.

A dancer in a black G-string slithers over to our table and Doc says, “Can you believe that’s a man?” I can’t. Her name is Deana and she has braces. Her tits aren’t big but she does indeed have tits - and they don’t look fake, and damn sure don’t look manly.

She speaks no English and seems to be much more secure with her body than any of the females in the compound. In fact, all the tranny women here at Marta’s seem more at ease and happier than the women. Deana sits between Doc and me and downs a shot of tequila. I’m feeling her breasts, trying to detect a silicone bag, but it’s difficult. The skin is tight but not unnaturally so. More like the taut skin of a teenager. I try to look for an Adam’s apple but she keeps moving and I don’t want to be too obvious.

Deana gets up on our table and starts taking off her clothes and I’m sure any minute I’m going to see a penis and testicles drop between her smooth, solid thighs. She’s careful, though. Something in the way she moves makes me think she’s hiding something – something about the linear quality of her pelvis. Dragon Lee is looking for a penis, too, now that he’s been cued in. Neither one of us believes she’s a guy. After a few more shots of tequila, no one cares. They squeeze lime juice on her chest and tell me to lick it off, and I do.

The mariachi band takes a break and a Muzak version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” sets a new mood.

There’s a commotion at the entrance as the lights dim.  The small club is filling with patrons.

An overweight dancer makes her way out into the center of the dance floor, holding a banana. The woes of too many babies are clearly defined on her saggy abdomen.

Andy locks his eyes on mine and nods, in-the-know. In seconds, she’s peeled the banana and is on her back. To everyone’s surprise, demure Dragon Lee takes half of it and squats down beside the supine woman, sticking it in her holiest of holies.

Andy, meanwhile, won’t take his eyes off me and can’t stop laughing. There is something demonic about Andy, perhaps because his father is an infamous televangelist in Texas.

Two tired, old senors lead the equally tired, old donkey.

One man stands in front, the other in the rear, and with some shuffling dexterity they grab the poor burro’s legs and topple him over on his prickly back. This is disturbing and ridiculous to observe, but more so when the banana lady straddles him. I watch the woman grinding on the overturned beast and think about how my Mama would be shaking her head.

If they could see me, that little gang of mine…

A tranny with a wild Farrah Fawcett mane sits next to me. She’s sporting a long sequined gown, the neckline diving in between two smallish breasts. She’s up next.

Christinana is laughing, licking salt off Andy’s exposed neck and downing another shot of tequila. I get her attention.

“Did you really give Andy his money back because his dick’s so big?” I ask.

“Yes,” she smiles, nuzzling him. “I did.”

“What’d you think about the donkey show?” Andy asks me.

“I think you’re a classy guy,” I chuckle, down a shot of tequila, and watch the transvestites convince Doc it really doesn’t matter that they used to be guys.