Mexico by Melissa Petro I’m thinking of Mexico. The smell of it. The smell of piss and burning garbage. Sweet bread glazed with egg. The mornings, when it smelled like it was going to be a warm day, the early sun was round and ripe–the color of warm cerveza. Then it would crack open mid-morning, yellow, and like runny yolk, spill over the city. I lived for four months in the city of Oaxaca, five hours by second-class bus south of Mexico City. Where sun meets dust. In the city, barefoot children with dirt-smudged faces, little black eyes and smiles–deep grins slashing their faces like happy masks–sell gum to taxis and other cars. They are tiny piñatas swaying in the breeze. In the city, eggs are frying, roosters are crooing, men in broad-rimmed hats are selling things from off their backs, women are weaving, music is playing, packs of wild dogs are hunting garbage for greasy scraps. Beyond the city, Mexico stretches before you like a great brown body. Not just brown, but many browns—cinnamon, cocoa, chili, red, clay, cockroach wing, pony-colored earth. People live this way, I remember thinking, captivated. This is what they know of life. So many browns. My first month in Mexico I lived with a host family. They were farmers–-securely middle class. My host brother was a soldier, and one of the first new words I learned was “gun.” That’s when I really realized how difficult it would be to communicate. I can say that I like or dislike guns, but to say that you dislike guns to a soldier is not enough; you want to be understood. Words become invaluable. Words were like beads— pretty glass beads, each one different from another. Big green ones. Little blue ones. Strung together into sentences. When you’re first learning a language, words never follow one another smoothly. Meaning never runs from the brain and off the tongue. Sometimes you are trying to say something but you just can’t talk it out, you try and you end up hog-tied, stuttering – repeating two, three words stuck like knots of the tongue. When I was first learning Spanish, I spoke in big primary words and I know that a lot of people thought I was stupid, because I communicated like an animal— like that gorilla that the scientists taught to sign. I was so clumsy, I was American, I was a woman. American woman. Stay away from me. American Woman, Mama let me be. I laugh when I hear that song, because that’s what people thought. Oh, dangerous Westerner- Idiot American. Sex pot. I don’t know what they thought. I know that people loved to talk to me, and I felt like a celebrity because I couldn’t sit by myself in a public park or at a café for ten minutes without someone I didn’t know coming up to me to start a conversation. In Mexico, women loved me. Men loved me. Chula, te amo. I love you, they’d say as I passed them on the street. Children loved me. So pretty. White lady, like Brittany Spears. Buy my bracelets. Dogs sniffed me. Bony cats peeked furtively from around corners to see me pass. Mules in the desert, hitched to dry outposts, lifted their heads, cocked their ears and silenced their chewing mouths, as I’d pass. The word for “lonely” and “alone” in Spanish is the same word: sola. I was rarely alone but always very lonely. I tried to explain myself to my new friends. Yo sentia sola--I feel alone. But you’re never alone. We are your friends. No, tu no mentiendes. You don’t understand. This feeling of being boxed-in, language-less. Of being desperately foreign, of being falsely idolized. I remember one day, I was washing my clothes by hand in a tub of rainwater in the courtyard of the hacienda where I lived. All the time I was being watched by the hacienda owner’s daughter, a little girl about five years old, with long brown waves, thick black eyelashes and pink jelly shoes. This little girl liked to watch me, and slapped her hand to her mouth and giggled whenever our eyes met. I was hanging wet clothes on the line to dry in the sun, a sun in a sky wide and empty as an ocean. I thought about the ocean, of continents and of feeling continents away from home. I thought about the meaning of this word ‘home’ and wondered, where is this place. I looked up just then to watch a jet plane break across the perfect sky. Suddenly I felt an irrational sense of panic, a clutching feeling in my heart of having been left behind, deserted, or cast off. You experience this feeling once and you know that you’ll never feel “at home” again. You will never feel safe. I remember the smell of the detergent, the way it burned my nose and hands, and the dirty brown water. The way I could never get blue jeans clean, washing them by hand, and they were always so stiff and shrunk, when they dried in the sun. * * * I became a sex worker while living in Mexico. Other women have described to me the experience of becoming a sex worker. It is a transformation, as if something takes over your body, like a possession. Suddenly you are something else. I met a Dutch woman named Anna that worked as a call girl in Berlin. She told me about her first time. The next day it was feeling great. I had enough money to go to the shop and I was buying everything I needed. My refrigerator was empty. She said It was great--butter and bread and milk and cheese. But then, after several weeks, I got a kind of shock. I thought, oh now you are a prostitute. You did it once and now you will be it forever. It doesn’t matter if you do it once or twice or three times -- a prostitute is a prostitute. I started working as a stripper in a club called La Trampa- translated; the tramp, or the trap or snare. I liked the idea of that. The club I worked at was pretty nice. People probably laugh when they hear that and think yeah, a strip club in some remote corner of Mexico, I’m sure it was real nice- but I’ve worked in over a dozen of clubs since, and trust me, La Trampa was a nice one. All the women that worked at La Trampa, besides myself, were not just strippers but prostitutes as well, but I didn’t know that at the time. The club was clean–-no drugs, no strange liquids, tons of security–-and as far as I knew the women were performers. I became a woman in a strip club in Mexico. As a woman and a sex worker, suddenly my body took on an entirely new function: to inspire desire, and to make money. But this function was not new. For me, it suddenly made sense, and it felt natural. I came to believe that all women are sex workers. I met a woman at La Trampa named Selma. Selma had named herself after the movie star, Selma Hayek. I don’t remember her real name but she was beautiful and she idolized me. Que Linda—how pretty, she’d say about me to others when she thought I couldn’t understand, but she was the pretty one. She made the most money at the club–more than me, and I made a lot by sheer virtue of my being white. Selma considered herself a real dancer, and would drive the men crazy by performing traditional dances right up there on stage in her string bikini. Not until the very end of her set did her top would come off to expose her perfect breasts for just one moment before she’d scoop them up with one arm and carry them off-stage. She had a great body and a wicked wit. I am in love with women. The idea of them. And maybe this is why I loved Mexico–-where, more than anywhere else I’ve ever traveled to or any other city where I’ve lived–-Mexico was, to me, a matriarchy. The Virgin de Guadalupe is the superstar in Mexico. Her image is everywhere. As sure as you can see some anonymous, angular woman looking ridiculous in her underwear plastered across billboards and buses all over the States, in Mexico you can buy a T-shirt of the Virgin, a painting or a statue of her likeness for every corner of your home. Young Mexican boys get the Virgin tattooed on their arms. It is a beautiful image. She is burning. Palms open, giving of her woman body. The Virgin Mother. The model Mexican woman. Virgin, yeah right. Before she was the so-called Virgin, she was a pagan goddess. Formed by hand from mud. Wide hipped, big lipped. Obscene. Black magical. Like all women. Then somehow over the course of history her magic was reverted. She was domesticated–turned from lover to mother–- like all modern women. Re-constructed, disempowered, dispossessed. When I think of Western women idols I think of those expressionless models with vacant circular eyes. Mouths hung open, dry-tongued. Or wired shut, a powerless species. Then I think of Mexico and I think of the Virgin. I think she is winking at me and I wink back. No wonder the locals think I’m loca. Now Mexican women want to be sexy too, just like us crazy Americans. Don’t tell a Mexican not to envy America; it’s like telling the Polish that communism can work. You’ll look like an arrogant American student and, well, I was one. Mexicans want McDonalds and Pepsi and suburbia and SUVs and color TVs for every room, just like we have. Americans are so fat, they laugh. Gorditas- you eat extra large pizzas! Yes. Will you send me American clothes? I will give you money just please, will you translate the words to this American song, I want to know what I’m singing. In the evening as dusk turns to dark, a million stars bob in an inky blue-black sky. The sky is so large and the earth looks round—yes, I know the earth is round, but in Mexico the earth looks round. You are parallel to the lowest stars in the sky and all the stars are so fat, each one appears within reach. Some nights I would go sit in a park and stare up into this sky. One particular night, I was walking home when I was attacked by wild dogs. Not attacked, but surrounded. First one, then two, three, soon half a dozen mangy beasts. Dogs in Mexico are monster versions of what you think of when you think dog. They are swollen titted, flea-bitten bags of bone and blood and shit. The wild ones especially, they are hungry. Starving. Looking at me like I was their next meal. What do you do when you’re about to be attacked, torn apart and eaten, by a pack of wild dogs? You’re a woman. What are women taught to do when they’re attacked? You scream. Not like a girl. Not a high-pitched choky little scream that’s all air and throat. You scream from your gut, from deep below your diaphragm. You let out a sound that even you are surprised you could create. Like you’ve had this scream in you, waiting to get out, for all your life. You wail. You keep wailing until the dogs with the smacking dog lips tuck their tails between their legs and scamper off. Maybe then you pick up a rock or two and lob ‘em at them, just to let them know you’re serious. You walk the rest of the way home under the black-blue, star poked sky, with a new sense of authority. You are not to be fucked with. But I was fucked with, of course I was. I was not so much afraid, or even angry, as I was tired, when the taxi driver would put his hand on my thigh and ask politely, cuantos? How much. Coming home from the club at 7am with a wad of damp bills tucked in my underwear, I felt exhausted and satisfied. The sun is coming up and the farmers are already in the fields, the women are walking to market and I am going to bed. This country–so alive, surviving, like the brightly-colored flowers that burst from the dust, thirsty and proud. I remember the markets were always full of smoke. A thick gray smoke that smelled like charred meat, like burning husks of corn and frying fat. Hotness, and the smell of human body, of sweat. Then, the heavy sweetness of cut flowers. Stall after stall of enormous blooms that always smelled to me like a funeral, a grave, or like church. The market smelled like the blood of the raw meat, like sour cheeses and spoiled vegetables–more death–like the corpses of vegetables and bruised fruits, rotting under swarms of tiny flies. In the markets, indigenous women sit cross-legged on the dirt floor wailing, Tlayudas! Tamales or tostados! Calling out Quieres un tlayuda mi vida? So many old women, crippled and knotted with age, in traditional dress with ribbons in their long grey-black braids selling tlayudas, tamales and tostados. You could think that there are two kinds of women. This old woman sitting cross-legged in the dust in the market, making tlayudas in the morning, selling tlayudas all day long, packing up in the evening and walking to her home outside the city to raise her children, feed her family, worship the Virgin, make more tlayudas. Versus a woman like Selma. Versus a woman like me. You may think that there are two kinds of women: the sex worker, and the woman that would never even consider doing that kind of work. And I think that’s bullshit. My story begins in Mexico. Melissa Petro is a 25 year old writer, currently living on Manhattan's Lower East Side. A graduate of Antioch College in 2002, she is now pursuing an MFA degree in Literary Nonfiction from The New School University. "Mexico" is excerpted from Selling Sex, a book-length memoir she is currently writing about her experiences in the sex industry, starting when she was nineteen years old and living as a student abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico. HOME