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Chapter 12. Shit Attempt at Writer. Frenchmen World Travelers. Eating in Hong Kong.
I have a weird phantom pain on my right leg. I hope it’s not because of my horrible diet of tacos and hamburgers. That’s not a proper diet.
I have so much work this week. I didn’t do any last week and just let all the shit mount. Haven’t written dick. The one story I sent hasn’t been published and I have low hopes. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t very good. Pictures were great, the text wasn’t.
That’s what I’m into now. Taking pictures. And I have a bunch of those gigs this week. It should be fun.
Instead of working, I ended up partying for four nights in a row. It’s incredible how easy this city does that to you. I didn’t even plan to do any partying at all. Wednesday, the young freckled brunette that was mentioned earlier who thought I was the love of her life texted me. She is back in Tijuana. She wasn’t even living here.
She is now a blond. She’s also now 24.
Things happened. They shouldn’t have.
On Thursday, another girl contacted me for pictures. Things escalated quickly when they shouldn’t have.
Tititijuana.
Friday, buddies from San Diego came over and we went bar hopping and ended in a meh ska show.
Saturday, friends from Mexico City came over with tickets for the Xolos games. They were great palco tickets and included free drinks and food. Pizza and wings were shit, but they were free. There was only light beer available, but also bottles of Black Label.
From there, the partying continued until almost 3 a.m.
Titititijuana.
Two important things happened which turned me into a writer. Somewhat. Up to this day, I still have no idea what I’m doing.
Meeting Chad. He inspired me to become a writer and to try to get published for the magazine I currently work for.
Meeting Vincent, the Frenchman world traveler.
Besides announcing on Craigslist, I also had a Couchsurfer account. A lot of people stayed with me through there. I don’t use it anymore, but back then I used it to practice giving tours.
Vincent messaged me for a couch and to help him with a project called You Make My Trip. He was basically traveling the world asking the internet what he should do in the city he was staying in.
For Tijuana, the voting was between partying his ass off or investigating what the life of the migrants and deportees that lived on the river by the border was like.
The internet chose the deportees. I wanted the party for my own sake and to grow the tours.
This was the turning point in my life. Vincent stayed with me for almost a week. After a drunken tequila night, Vincent met and fell in love with my friend Shappu.
Their romance ended up in disaster years later, but that’s beside the fucking point.
The point is that with Vincent and Shappu, we explored the Bordo area and more of Zona Norte. Really gruesome stuff. People doing heroin or meth on broad daylight. The disgusting Tijuana.
The Tijuana that I got addicted for a while. Nueva Pachanga.
The lowest of the lowest of the fucking world.
It’s like staring at the face of death and walking away.
So much misery. So many drugs.
I knew I had to write about what we experienced.
This was my first failed attempt at writing for a magazine.
Pretty much like this is my first failed attempt at writing a book.
Can’t wait until I throw all this shit to the garbage. Or just post it online somewhere for free and make no money.
There goes all my pride.
My article got rejected.
Not only was it plagued with grammatical and spelling mistakes, but it was also just purely bad. “I this. I that. This happened.”
And wow!
Bad.
Horribly written bullshit.
The editor rejected it and told me to rewrite it. It took me a long time to write it… so I wasn’t happy. I thought it was good.
It wasn’t.
I rewrote the article. But I just fixed grammatical and spelling mistakes and cut down a lot of the fat.
It was still a horrible fucking article.
No details.
Nothing interesting.
It got rejected again.
My gamble didn’t pay off. I quit my job to spend more time doing Tijuana tours and attempting to be a freelance writer.
I was rejected and was left with little to no money. But not much money is needed to live in this city.
The editor ignored my following emails and my attempts to rewrite the story. I had destroyed his patience and the door was closed.
I did a couple of more free tours through Couchsurfing. Another Frenchman and world traveler named Alec. Also, guys from Montreal that I randomly met playing chess at what used to be the only craft brewery in Tijuana.
Tijuana has changed so much and will continue to do so.
And Tijuana changed me.
I like to say that I’m not a writer, Tijuana is just easy to write about. Tijuana transformed me for the better (maybe). Tijuana transforms people, not always for the better.
Random little tours kept me a bit afloat. One was with a guy named Jesse and a dude named Max who carried a banana suit wherever they went.
I’ve done way too many tours and have fucked with Tijuana too much to remember how things went down. We did the basic Tijuana tour to Playas and dive bars in downtown. Again, back then the craft beer or food scene was nothing to what it is now. Options were scarce.
All I remember that his time we didn’t do Hong Kong, we ended up in La Malquerida.
La Malquerida is a much cheaper strip club that’s mostly for locals. Beers are cheap and it has more of a wild cantina feel than that of a strip club.
The guys got plastic looking women sitting on their laps. The one I liked was cold and not into it, so it didn’t pan out well for me.
For them… I had to negotiate.
Mini-pimp translator.
That’s basically how I made some of my money.
After buying the girls plenty of drinks, the guys were tired of having them on their laps and wanted more.
I negotiated blowjobs for $20 + the private room.
They left immediately to the private rooms and came back a few minutes later to share the stories. One got a raw blowjob with no condom, the other was forced to use a condom. Both were very happy with the outcome.
That’s all I remember.
And that I got paid.
Paid to party and to be a mini-pimp.
After that tour, I had a tour with what I thought was a perverted old Canadian man. After giving the basic tour around the city, I learned sadly, that his wife had passed a couple years ago, but now he was free to do as he pleased.
He owned property in Jamaica and had his own business in Canada. His two sons were old enough and married. He decided to travel the world and ended up Tijuana.
The first time I ever had food in Hong Kong was with this fellow. He ordered the breaded shrimp on rice.
He stayed in the Hong Kong Hotel (Las Cascadas) and book the master suite (not the penthouse). It was a super nice room that looked like a porno set that I described before.
After the basic tour, we went back to Hong Kong. He picked a girl that he liked and kept buying her drinks.
Then he told me to choose a girl that I like.
I walked to a girl that I like but she gave me the cold shoulder, so I picked the one next to her.
As soon as we got back to the table, the girl jumped on me and said: “güerito, que bueno que me escogiste.” She said she had been checking me out and was so happy I picked her out.
The young girl with the older Canadian wasn’t happy, but I told her that the dude was willing to spend a lot of money.
The Canadian gave me $100 and told me to keep the girls with me while he goes to his room to shower. He told me to specifically not let go of the girl that he picked.
It took him almost 30 minutes to come back. The hotel is a crazy maze, so he had trouble finding his room and finding his way back to Hong Kong.
We stayed with the two girls for a couple of hours buying drinks, food, and tequila shots.
Then it was negotiating time for the Canadian.
My girl was all over me without the necessity of paying her. She was just happy we were buying her drinks (she makes money that way). And she was happy it was with me instead of some other pervert.
The tequila man with a whistle that comes around and forces tequila shots down your throat to ask for tips after swung by our table. Instead of getting tequila directly poured into my mouth, it was poured down the navel of the chick I was with down to her pussy and into my mouth.
Yuck. But drunk and having fun. Don’t judge.
Also, tequila should’ve killed bacteria, right?
Or so I told myself.
His girl…
She was not very happy.
The Canadian made his offer. $300 for a couple hours with her. Way more than the usual average pay. The girl was hesitant but she took it.
I am not sure what happened after. I went home. The Canadian stayed with the girl in his hotel room.
He paid me more than the rest. My tours started to have value. But I was just taking guys to strip clubs and translating for them.
Cupid translator mini-pimp.
Not a good thing on my resume.
Not a good thing to be writing about.
But that’s how I stayed afloat for a while.
