Intro to Sex Tourism (Part 3)

Previously: Part 1, Part 2

While we ate Rocky began to talk about the Jews, Hitler and the Holocaust. The Jews were clearly a favorite topic and I was trying not to listen to it. He got Sofia to look up from her texting and asked her if she knew who Hitler was. She didn’t. She had never heard of the Holocaust or the Nazis. Rocky began to explain the second World War to her. In his version the Jews had brought it upon themselves.

Then he asked Sofia what she wanted to do with her life. She smiled at him playfully. Rocky told her she was beautiful and 19 and not working and all the guys were chasing her--but what did she want?

She wanted to be a model, she said, and I realized then that she believed she was gorgeous. Had I cared at all and actually been annoyed by her texting, I might have said something nasty about her having no chance and pointing out all that was wrong with her, but I was thinking about how I needed a ride back to the hostel. I didn’t want to walk back with this hangover.

Rocky switched topics to another favorite, bee pollen. He claimed bee pollen was more powerful than steroids or human growth hormone and insisted that after taking it a few times a young person could grow an extra few inches and have his mind improved. Bee pollen was a secret supplement used by all the top athletes and he tried to convince Sofia that it was what she needed to improve herself. She could become a model or maybe a telenovela actress with it. Sofia listened to him carefully and seemed to consider it. Then she went back to her texting.

I turned to Rocky and told him I was going and stood up.

“Okay, bro, but Sofia’s really into you, y’know?”

I looked at his pock-marked pathetic face and smirked. “Yeah. I know.”

The girls got up too and we all walked to the car and left Chipichape. On the ride back nobody said anything and Sofia sat in front texting on her cell phone. Rocky and I got out and said goodbye to the girls and I went back to my room and fell asleep.

A few days later I was reading in bed when Rocky came to my door and announced we were neighbors. He had moved into the privado next to mine. Then he walked into my room in his bare feet and scratching at his genitals proceeded to tell me about some black girl who had given him her number.

I was horrified that he was standing in the middle of my room in his bare feet. I don’t like them real black, he said, but he was going to give this one a try. I was giving him the subtle signals to leave. A doorman at a hotel had gotten the number for him, he said. You should see the body on her though. I turned over in my bed and looked away. And she has a sister. Maybe you’re interested, bro. And Sofia’s been asking about you too, man. I closed my eyes.

But Rocky did not leave in time and my room would have his odor for the next few hours, part sickness and part decay. I had to keep my door shut after that. When I left for Argentina a few days later he was in the common area on his laptop and I said goodbye to him. He winked knowingly at me and I winked back at him. We did not have to say anything more. It was an exchange of winks that no doubt confirmed for him the special bond that existed between us.

Intro to Sex Tourism (Part 2)

Previously: Part 1

I was hungover from the night before and figured I would say hi and get a look at Sofia and take her number if I liked her. Rocky and I walked down to a beat-up sedan parked at the bottom of the hill. The windows were tinted and the girls did not open them and I opened the door to look in. Rocky pushed me inside next to a smiling pretty girl with braces in the backseat. An older fat girl was driving and had a little hairless boy standing on her lap staring at me and sucking his thumb.

“Sofia’s in the passenger seat,” Rocky said. But Sofia did not turn around. Rocky pushed in next to me so that I was wedged between him and the girl called Luna, and then the car started and we were driving somewhere.

“Where we going, Rocky?”

“Chipichape,” he winked. Chipichape was the big shopping mall.

My head hurt and this was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I tried to get a better look at Sofia but she was wearing big sunglasses and texting on her phone and didn't look back at me. Nobody said much as we drove the 20 blocks to Chipichape, but Rocky kept grinning at me and winking. It was disgusting to be pushed up against him in the little car. I could feel the heat of his sweaty body against me.

We parked and walked inside the mall and Sofia still had not said a word to me. We ordered lunch at a parilla with Rocky and it was expected we pay for the girls and the little boy. My head hurt and I was finding it hard to believe what I had gotten myself into. I gave Rocky 25 pesos.

After we sat down it became clear that Rocky wanted to use me to impress this girl Luna and to build his rep with her--that he was friends with a young, cool guy-- and maybe also for me to occupy the 19 year old and the older one so he could get Luna alone. But our table only seated 4 and Rocky had seated himself at the next table leaving me with the 3 girls, with Luna sitting next to me. I had expected Rocky to do most of the talking since he had taken these girls out before, but by choosing to sit at the other table it was up to me to make conversation if there was to be any.

The older girl spoke mostly to the one year old Juan-Jose and Sofia sat across from me still wearing her big glasses and texting. Luna, the girl Rocky wanted, was the only one who spoke and she would make little jokes to me and touch my shoulder. But since it was the girl Rocky was after I smiled at her and didn’t say much.

By the standards of Colombian women Sofia was not a beauty. She was not well-dressed and was already top heavy with a badly done breast job and I could see a few dark hairs poking through the poorly applied mascara on her cheeks. She was not at all the great beauty Rocky had made her out to be.

“Sofia’s like that, man. With the texting. Take her out a few more times and she won’t do it as much.”

“A few more times?” I said. “I should break that fucking phone right now.”

Rocky smiled. The man had no game and this was the shit he not only tolerated but paid for to get laid.

For awhile nobody said anything at the table. Rocky stared at the girls and smiled and winked at me. Sometimes he said something in English about how cute Sofia was. I tried to enjoy the awkwardness of it all. I studied the other tables of Colombians and wondered if they recognized what was going on and had picked Rocky and me as sex tourists. I made faces at little Juan-Jose and made him laugh.

Under the table Sofia’s foot would touch mine and she would hold it there. She still had not looked up from her texting and I would make a slight movement to see if she would take her foot away but she did not. She did this throughout the meal and I supposed this was her way of telling me she was interested.

Intro to Sex Tourism (Part 1)

There was a older American staying at the hostel. He was 6 ft 5 with graying black hair, beady dark eyes and a pock-marked and badly ravaged complexion. His nose was strangely pushed off to one side as if it had been broken and left un-repaired.

On some days he had a smell about him. It seemed to come from his whole body, as if something was rotting. The German girls complained to me that he had one night stunk up all three rooms of the upstairs with his odor.

The American man arrived 2 weeks before I did and planned to stay another 2. He sat all day in front of his laptop in the common area and did not seem interested in the events of the feria or even to be aware it was going on. He rarely spoke to the young people at the hostel. There was something sick about him, debauched, and I did not want to know more about it.

From my room one afternoon I overhead him telling the Israeli girl that Jerry Seinfeld was the least popular comedian in the United States; that his humor was Jew humor and incomprehensible to most Americans; that his show had continued only because of the manipulations of Jews in the entertainment business and that now Seinfeld was broke and unable to find work. He told the Israeli girl that Seinfeld’s humor would work in Israel and that he should go there. The Jews of Israel would find all his jokes funny.

A few days later I was going out for dinner and needed him to lock the door behind me and he asked me where I was going. I told him. “I’m hungry too, bro,” he smiled. I paused at the door and thought about it. Then I invited him to accompany me. I was wrong to do it and I knew it.

The American and I sat down at a restaurant a few blocks from the hostel. His name was Rocky and he lived in Los Angeles. He had been coming to Colombia every year since 2004 and he told me he had Colombianas in all the big cities. He met them online after paying a website for their pictures and personal information. He paid $12 per girl.

Rocky told me sex stories throughout the meal and I had a hard time eating. Bogota was the best he said and he spent $200 a girl at The Castle and La Piscina. Those were clubs right next to each other and nobody knew about them and all the best looking girls in the country went there to work. I shouldn’t miss Bogota and Rocky encouraged me to go.

The other girls he saw lived with their families and he had to spend money on the entire family to have an opportunity with them. In Pereira he stayed with a 20 year old girl in her room, with her brother and parents in the same apartment, and Rocky took them all on a one week vacation to a finca in the mountains where the father at last let him have his young daughter.

The stories did not stop and I tried to change the subject to football. But Rocky then began to tell me about the mental inferiority of black quarterbacks and how they were unable to read defenses and audible at the line of scrimmage. He presented this as common knowledge and instead of disagreeing with him I quickly finished eating and asked for the bill.

The following day, after having the almuerzo at the panaderia down the street, I returned to the hostel and Rocky told me Sofia was asking about me. Who was that, I asked him. It was the 18 year old sister of Luna, the girl he was after. He had told Sofia about me saying I was a 25 year old American friend of his. “She wants to meet you, man,” he grinned. Oh, I said. I didn’t think much of it and went to my room and took a nap.

When I woke up Rocky was waiting around my door. I could see he was excited. “They’re coming, bro. They’ll be here soon. You should see the tits on Sofia. She really wants to talk to you, man. They’re driving here right now.” An hour later Rocky told me they were out front of the hostel.