Sarah Weinman - Sex, Thugs, Roll, and Rock & Roll

Dammit, I got off track again. Any time you catch me talking about dick instead of telling the story, just remind me. Occupational hazard and all.

So I drove until I got about halfway there, which took about a week. I would have been quicker, but the Percocet I was popping to combat the anxiety and the homesickness made it hard to drive. In between the puffs of sluggish thought, I remembered something about switching cars, because of something…It came to me almost a day too late that Dad was planning on reporting his car stolen. Fuck. So I switched the car and used the money Dad gave me for the purpose of buying another. But, fucked if I am, I spent a little of that money on good drugs, so the car I could afford was a little shittier than the one Dad probably intended.

So me and my vintage-fuck you, it’s not just another word for old-VW Bug made it across the border in one piece. The first thing I noticed? Mexico is fucking hot, and ugly, and seriously? The square whores I could do without. Anyhow, I ain’t writing a travelogue or review and if this is whetting your appetite to come here? All I can say is, leave your scruples, sense of personal hygiene in your other pair of pants and get your shots.

I found my way into a bar, got a beer, and sat down. Now what the fuck was I gonna do?

“Those’re great veins, mang. ”

“Thanks, mang . And Eduardo? Don’t talk like a stupid Mexican, okay?”

I was sitting at my desk working on a panel for yet another comic book- Los Vaqueros con Los Chorizos Largos , or something like that. What it amounted to was drawing another big cock in a long line of big cocks. The difference here was that it was the only thing in the panel. I had to pay close attention to what it looked like, so I was shading in the veins.

Eduardo was a colorist. He was responsible for the lovely flesh tone with purple tints that would soon fully define my cock. The one I was drawing, that is. Eduardo went to a good university here, and while he is a Mexican coloring pictures of dicks, he’s certainly not dumb.

“Okay, carnal . Damn ese ’ pardong thee fock outta me ang sheet.”

I sighed and went back to shading veins.

That first day I got here, I was drinking in the bar, which happens to be around the corner. I still go there. Anyhow, I was drinking. After the third beer, I was a little drunk (painkillers-fuck you, I’m not a lightweight) and doodling on the napkin in front of me.

I’d almost completed the drawing. In this case, a likeness of this pretty Mexican girl I’d seen in the street, walking to the bar with these incredibly bouncy unconfined tits. Unreal, miniskirted ass. Unbelievable. So I was sitting there putting the shading around the tits to give them some erect nipples…well, you know I can’t resist improving on reality. They call it artistic license.

But a voice woke me up out of the place where I go when I’m drawing. It’s that place where I can see the hands on the clock just spinning by in fast-forward and my insides get quiet and painful. Like I’m bleeding directly onto the page. Doesn’t matter if I’m putting together my portfolio for art school or drawing a picture of a chick with huge knockers, it’s there.

I looked up and saw this guy sitting next to me, ogling the drawing.

He started asking me questions about the drawing, asking me if I could always draw shit like this. What, tits? Yeah, I can almost always draw tits. In between the broken bits of language overlap between us, I figured out that his cousin worked at this place where they needed artists to draw shit like this. He called them las historias , told me he was gonna bring his primo by the bar tomorrow. He was gonna give me some trabajo -drawing titties.

I got up to leave and put some American dinero on the bar in front of me (See? My Spanish is gettin’ better already) and walked out the door. I left the napkin with the naked chick on it on the bar. By the time my conversation with the guy was over, she was sporting a sombrero and leading a burro on a rope. Just your everyday naked vaquera . Big ten-gallon titties and sombrero.

By la semana proxima I was working in this little office, making pesos.

The first letter I received was directly after I had this huge argument with my boss. That beaner’s got no sense of humor whatsoever, or imagination. How the fuck’s he expect me not to go crazy without a little variety? He checks over all the finished art boards for the books before they go to the writers, who, incidentally, have gotta be even more bored than me… I mean, Christ, how many times can you write “ devora me otra vez ,” really?

So I happened to draw a few of the girls in my drawings with smaller tits than normal. I just wanted to inject a little variety, a little realism in with everything else. Shit, maybe some of the guys buying these things don’t like enormous titties? Right? Maybe? No. They all like enormous titties…and for some reason every guy in the audience likes to see a huge cock too. Someday someone is going to, how you say, ’splain this to me. Why the fuck does it matter to a bunch of straight, male porn freaks how big the guys’ cocks are?

So I got hauled into my boss’s office where he spent the better part of a half hour ripping me a new asshole about how he wanted huge tits and huge cocks-no kidding-he actually said the people want huge cocks… Mi gente quiere culo grande y la carne aun mas grande .

Oye, Jefe? Tu gente, maricon son. Serio …Buncha faggots.

I was at my desk afterwards, fuming about the exchange and redrawing the art boards so that they could get to the writers and then to the press because they were due today. I was giving every girl a rack so big that you could nickname her cleavage Silicon Valley and every man a schlong large enough that they’s gonna have to register it with the local police department, when this envelope landed on my desk and Eduardo’s words drifted over the divide between the desks like some kind of ugly-voiced whorish siren.

“ Oye , Buddy-Love, there’s some mail for you.”

I don’t know why he calls me that.

It was addressed to the name I use down here, for bills, payroll, rent, yadda, etc. What’s that? No, I’m not gonna fucking tell you. Anyway, there was this, I guess, fan letter in there, it was all in Spanish, and there were these awful drawings all over the letter, in the margins and along the top, breaking the text up. It was these stick figures with these huge circles, which I guess were supposed to be tits…somewhere underneath the little lines that were supposed to be arms. All I could think of was Juan at the local bar, telling me when “I find the pendejos who draw all that shit on the bathroom walls, I’m gonna matalo, cut off their huevos and whatnot.”

Hey, Juan, I think I found their art teacher.

So the text was a little hard to read, looked like a third grader did it. It was so badly misspelled and there were these creepy little misshapen hearts all over the place, dotting the I s and replacing some of the O s. Like some kind of perverted, malevolent and prepubescent lesbian-retard wrote me a letter. I checked the front for the return address and saw it was from La Penitenciaria de la Ciudad de Mexico. What the fuck?

I managed to pass the next several weeks without pissing off El Gusano Grande , my boss. Eduardo and I passed the time talking about art in these oddly hushed tones…we might have been the only actual educated people in the place. Discussing actual art in here was like discussing multiplication tables at a George Bush address.

While we sat there, I got the next letter. So far, it had been six weeks since the first, and six letters. One a week. Each had gotten weirder. I asked Eduardo to look at them and tell me what this person could possibly be talking about. I found out the following things.