Dating Advice From . . . Glassblowers by Ariana Green Q: How does your job affect your skill set in the bedroom? A: I work with beads, so I don't do much blowing. Working as a glassblower makes you immune to double entendres, by the way.
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DISPATCHES
posted 12/14/2004
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The water went early Saturday morning, and all day long the sixteen people in Biri's house languished in our sweat. The temperature was in the nineties; unable to bathe or even wash our faces, we lay on the bed and watched dubbed Patrick Swayze movies. "When is the water going to come back?" I asked Biri as Patrick steered his eighteen-wheeler head-on into another truck. "Maybe Monday," she said, and laughed. Then she left to make an appointment to lose her virginity.
A few hours later, the water came back — as it always did, apparently — and we filled our buckets, bathed, and put on our disco clothes. Biri wore a flouncy pink skirt, a button-down shirt, a mesh cap embroidered with "Los Angeles," and heeled sandals. When she modeled this outfit for her sister, who was shaping tamales on a concrete table, eight months pregnant, the sister laughed and shook her head. Too many things had rendered Biri helpless in questions of femininity — the shaved head, the soccer games, the breakdancing team. Biri is only missing a penis, the sister once said.
We got on a bus and rode downtown, past miles of shanties and half-built houses, past the oil refinery, past the roads leading to the industrial parks. Reynosa has the usual border town commerce — drug trafficking, immigrant smuggling and English-speaking dentists — but otherwise there isn't much beyond oil and factories. The maquiladoras, more than 170 in all, belong to companies like Black & Decker, Maytag and Nokia. Many of their employees left their families in poorer regions and traveled north seeking work. For the past twenty years, they have been building shacks wherever they can find space, and the slums now extend for miles outside the city proper. Neighborhoods like Biri's, which was until recently a squatter colony, are now the norm.
People are freer here. Biri entered her first lesbian bar at fourteen.
I first came to Reynosa four years ago, when I received a grant to work with maquiladora workers. I ended up living with Biri's older sister, next door to where Biri slept with her mother and a rotation of other relatives. Biri was thirteen then, and out of school. She spent most of her time working on her basketball shot. A year ago, Biri got a job working for the Florida-based Jabil Circuit, where she repaired computer hard drives for Dell and other companies until two months ago, when the company illegally terminated her contract.
We disboarded downtown and picked up Adán, who lives in a house made of thin plywood with his mother, a stout, smiling migrant from the southern state of Veracruz, and his aunt, who is on the border waiting for her husband to be released from a county jail in New York. "My dears!" exclaimed Adán, who was wearing flared white pants, high-heeled boots, a black shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest and a gold chain. He stowed the mascara he had been applying, kissed his mother, and led us through the gate, which was made of tacked-together wooden crates. The two women smiled; they were washing beef stomach under an outdoor faucet in preparation for the Sunday rush at their taco stand. "Have fun!" they yelled after us.
On the way to the 1040, Biri told us about her appointment. The boy was the fifteen-year-old squirt from down the street. "He's going to call me at 10:30, and I'm going to meet him outside. I want him to take me to the Hotel San Carlos." A few nights before, Biri and Adán had sat in the plaza outside the San Carlos, smoking cigarettes and contemplating what it would take to get invited up to one of its rooms. The answer was virginity, it seemed. "I'll be back here by 1:00," she added.
Adán and I looked at each other. "I think you'll be back before then," I said.
Adán laughed. "He'll come like that," he said, swiping his hand through the air. "In a second."
When I lived in Reynosa four years ago, the workers in a General Motors subcontractor factory ousted the corrupt leader of their shop committee and voted in a new delegate who promised to devote himself to them. In the week following the election, the factory's workers talked excitedly about the future. The outcomes of shop committee elections almost never reflected the workers' votes, and this was an amazing opportunity to effect real change. I heard no one mention the fact that the new leader was a male-identified female. It didn't seem to matter.
A month earlier in another border city, I had sat in on a meeting between the AFL-CIO and a Mexican labor organization. After lunch had been served, slums toured, and a joint strategy plotted, the Mexican organization's secretary, who was born Pablo but known to everyone as Paola, emerged in a tight Lycra dress and gave a rank-and-file American trucker a lap dance. The trucker didn't seem excited. The Mexican workers, who far outnumbered his colleagues, clapped and hooted.
Workers frequently arrive on the border single and without families, and those who grow up here do so without grandparents, without repressive small-town gossip, without, more often than not, the influence of the Catholic church. People are freer here, in Mexico's San Francisco, than they would be elsewhere. Biri entered her first lesbian bar at fourteen.
Now she is a veteran of the scene. As we descended the stairs into the 1040, Biri quickly spotted her friend Eva, a short, stocky butch woman in her thirties, and led us over to where Eva was sitting with her cousin Tomy, a pimpled, overweight man who had arrived from Veracruz to look for factory work just the day before. The cousins gave up their stools and gestured for Biri and me to sit down. A gaudy mural unfurled before us: the Mexican and American flags, crossed at their tips, and under them, in English, "WELCOME."
Biri used to work with Eva at Jabil. The night before, I had met another butch Jabil employee, a woman named Laura. I wondered if it was one of the predominantly lesbian factories that people talked about.
Drinks were free for women, and Biri quickly downed five tequila sunrises. I suspect that Eva, who had just broken up with her girlfriend the week before, encouraged her. By the time Biri got up to dance with Eva, she was falling over. Eva caught her deftly each time she swayed and even managed to coax her into a low grinding position. That was something, because Eva's head reached only to Biri's chest; low for her was very low.
Biri's cell phone rang its bluesy ring four or five times, but she ignored it.
Adán, whose boyfriend was working that night, was eager to get some on the side, and he turned his attentions to
Adán and Biri, preparing for the night out
the waiter, batting his eyelashes and lightly biting the tip of his index finger every time he passed by. The waiter did not seem up for anything except recovering our used glasses. At about 1:00, Adán turned to me and asked, "You're bored, aren't you?" I had been dancing continuously for the past three hours. "Let's go to the Alaskan. I need to figure out who I'm going to cheat on Rodolfo with."
Despite the glowing waterfall pouring down the outside of Alaskan, the interior was spare. There was a pool table, a dance floor surrounded by clusters of tables, and, at the far end of the club, behind the bar, a deep blue wall studded with triangular pieces of mirror, the sole decorative indulgence. The music was discofied cheesy – techno versions of already questionable songs ("Oops!…I Did It Again," "I Will Survive," "California Dreaming"). As we made our way through the crowd, the beat gave way to the deejay, who announced that in a few weeks there would be a thousand-dollar prize for the winner of the Miss Alaskan contest. "In other words, me," Adán quipped. He had been preparing for such an event for months. When I visited Reynosa in May, he had asked me to bring him back a pair of full-length black diamond-studded gloves from New York.
Some of the boys at the Alaskan were slim, beautiful and fashionable. Some had the height and bulk of Texans. Others were pure rancho – cowboy boots and hats, round belt buckles, mustaches. One of the cowboys dancing on a platform here last week had taken off his shirt to reveal two nipple rings. Adán cruised like a professional, but his advances never went beyond putting himself in a man's line of sight and performingthe bat-and-bite routine that had failed to entice the waiter. Like Biri, he is seventeen and a little shy in some matters. He still has braces.
Biri and Eva disappeared — to the bathroom, Biri told me when we found them again. I wondered whether they had been making out. There was a nice leather divan against one wall of the ladies' room, and it was fairly private. No one lingered there except a few transvestites who seemed to be continually reapplying their makeup.
We went outside for some air. An old woman was at the gate, performing the sign of the cross, praying for our souls. "Ay, pobrecita," Adán cried facetiously. Biri led us — somehow, despite her stumbling, she was still very capable of leading — across the street to D'Animal, a dumpy little bar that hosted a few couples sitting at tables, a guy toying with ajukebox that seemed to offer only accordion-heavy música norteña, and groups of hookers strutting back and forth. It could have been any bar in northern Mexico, except that several of the hookers were about six feet tall and the women at the tables – who were also prostitutes, only employed ones — had squarer jaws and thicker waists than usual. I thought back to Wednesday, when Rodolfo, Adán's twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend, had been driving me around the red-light district of Reynosa in his pickup truck and we had passed a group of prostitutes, one of whom was wearing a white thong beneath a sheer white dress. She was unbelievably curvy. "That butt is so injected," I had said. "They all are," he'd answered kindly. "They're men." Rodolfo had just taken me to see a subtitled White Chicks.
"There's not much going on here, is there?" Biri said, her speech slurred. She led us back to the Alaskan, where the crowd soon cleared the dance floor for the strippers. Biri took my hand and pulled me to the edge of the floor. Eva wasn't interested, and by this time Adán, who was getting desperate, had turned his attentions to her homely cousin.
A man who was soon wearing nothing but a visor, a fluorescent blue G-string, and knee socks took the floor. He swung a bat around, flexing theatrically, as the DJ introduced him to us as C-Ball. When he came near us Biri snapped his thong. The realstar was the cowboy, though — Dominique, who came to us "all the way from San Antonio." He circled the floor in boots, a hat, and a G-string, dancing for a chubby woman sitting on a skinny man's lap and then for an acned boy wearing aviator glasses. Biri had her arm around me, and as Dominique neared us, I felt her apply pressure to my back. Before she could push me into the stripper's path, however, a man waving a measly dollar butted in front of us. Dominique fell to his knees, and the man jumped on him and started sucking his chest.
"I would like to go to Veracruz," I told Eva when we joined them again.
"You should come with me," she said. "Believe me, if we go to Veracruz, everything will be cool." Eva talked a little like a Los Angeles gang member. "My mother is there. My brothers and sisters — you won't have to pay for food at all." Tomy, who had been mostly silent until now, chimed in. There were orange trees, and clean rivers. It wasn't gray like Reynosa. His words sounded painfully earnest next to Eva's, which were just nostalgic. She couldn't go back — not for good. That seemed clear.
The next time Biri, Adán, and I ventured outside, at about four a.m., we left Eva and Tomy inside. "Eva knows how to wait," Biri said cryptically. "She is a patient woman. A very patient woman."
For a few minutes, the street resembled traditional Mexico. Biri ordered a hot dog smothered in salsa from one street vendor, and I ordered tacos filled with either beef tongue or cheek — I couldn't figure out which — from another, and a man boasted to me about the size of his testicles. We could have been in Durango. Then a minibus screeched to a halt
Adán knelt down for a second. "Grab your rocks."
half a block away, and a plump transvestite jumped off, yelling, "I don't like it! I don't like it!" We watched her make her way down the street, right through a pack of guys engaged in a quaint fistfight, staggering in clear plastic platform shoes.
We left the Alaskan a few hours later, Biri barefoot and carrying her heels and Adán complaining that he had to wake up in two hours to go to work. Biri was still a virgin — as far as I knew — and Adán had not messed around with anyone (although he would later claim he had had a "divine" time with Tomy). It was just another night at the disco.
As we approached Adán's house and the asphalt gave way to dirt, Adán knelt down for a second. "Grab your rocks." Then, more shrilly: "You don't have rocks!" As we turned onto his street, three mangy dogs trotted toward us, barking. "This way," he said. Staying close to one edge of the street, we inched our way toward his house. The street, which was wet now, smelled like raw sewage. I remembered Adán's mother telling me the outhouse had leaked, spilling its contents onto the street. As we crossed the street, venturing into the dogs' territory, Adán threw a rock. One yelped and lunged forward. At the prompting of a second rock, it retreated. Adán's mother met us at the gate. "How did it go?" she asked. "Did you dance all night?" n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mara Hvistendahl has been published in the Village Voice, the Philadelphia Independent and the Arizona Republic. She lives in Shanghai.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
