Reina

I had met a young stripper in Mexico where Latin music played so loud to bruise the bananas and cantaloupes. She had led a painfully difficult existence. Thrown from her family at the tender age of thirteen to hustle on the streets of Mexico City where she pulled wallets like toll passes surviving from the riches of her tricks. Prostituting her unripe body to old horny men of the night. She had experienced life at a rapidly accelerated pace. When I first made her acquaintance she was no more than sixteen. I had been robbed of all but a few mere pesos in the hard luck city, which situated me in a desolate bar drinking my last cerveza. Reina that was her name, which in Spanish meant “queen”, carried no pretence to steal from me as she could clearly make out I had nothing but bad luck. She bought a few beers for us as she told me of her existence. The day fell into darkness as she lured me into her realm. I followed her to a dingy closet of an apartment to where we dined on one another for what felt like eternity. She had stolen something from me, my inhibition. She had thrown it out the one small open window through the iron bars that held us in. We performed unprotected sex for months on end until finally she became ill in the mornings. She told me she found a doctor who would gladly exchange a blowjob for an abortion. Which was about the same time as she aborted me from her life. I’ll never forget those days and nights in that dark apartment making love and drinking cheep red wine.