One Story
Hombre de burro
There was something about the spandex. Of course the other parts were nice too: the lavender lace patches covering her breasts like translucent mosquito nets, or the silky triangle beginning at her belly button and going down to her pussy, occluding her navel, begging him to rub his cock against the delicate fabric until it was about to explode. Those parts were nice, right, but the thing that drove him crazy was the constricting grip of lycra across the various curvatures of her body. Nothing was better than turning her over, sliding a taut g-string to the side and fucking her like that, the spandex band rubbing against his cock as he went in and out of her in ecstasy. Even the pain of it, the rawness caused by friction against the fabric, held a kind of eroticism. Days later, rubbing vaseline on his dry and rashed cock, he would become aroused by the stinging sensation and rub one out like that, wincing at the pain as he orgasmed.
There was a piece she wore once in a while that was exclusively spandex: a web of inch-wide black bands covering her entire body like she was tangled in some type of trap. That piece got him going. He had a picture of her wearing it on his phone. When he traveled for work he would masturbate to it. This piece, the one she was wearing at this moment, was nice of course, but the other one was the best.
He was not sure if she’d brought the spandex web piece along with her for the trip. So far it had been all new pieces she had picked up for the special occasion––using his card, of course. He had been promoted. And so he hired her out for the weekend and brought her to Mexico City, where they had been doing not much more than fucking and drinking. She probably wouldn’t prefer the term “hired out” come to think of it. For one, it was inaccurate. He was the only one of her followers that ever met her in person and fucked her. Everyone else was restricted to purely online. So it wasn’t like she was a woman that could be hired out really. But he couldn’t think of a better term to describe it because he was, you know, paying her.
He pulled his cock out of her now and turned her over. He slapped his hand on her asscheek once, wasn’t satisfied with the sound, then did it again. He slid his cock into her and started fucking fast. She moaned and screamed; they were both drunk and being quite dramatic about the whole thing. He grabbed hold of her hair, bunched it up in his fist and focused on shoving his cock as deep into her as possible.
He had been married before this. Before her. Three years of marriage that just went kaput like everything else did. Which had been its own kind of devastation: the fact that even marriage wasn’t safe from the destructive forces of time. He wasn’t stupid. He knew time eroded all things. But he’d also always heard that marriages, if they were good ones, which he thought his was, would erode to reveal new things so you wouldn’t be too bothered about the whole eroding business. Not him. Not his marriage. His just eroded and then, one morning, before either of them got out of bed they just called it off. Like they were yawning through a simple weekend plan:
I think we should divorce.
Yeah. Well… yeah.
He told her he was about to cum. She instructed him to do so into her mouth. He pulled out of her and she quickly turned around and got to her knees. She spit on her hand and grabbed hold of his cock and stroked it until he orgasmed. It got all over her face. This was the happiest he’d been in five years probably. Maybe six.
“You know how they say divorce in Spanish?” she said.
“How?”
“Divorcio.”
“I like that.”
“It’s nice, right? Kind of fun and sparky. Divorcio.”
“It feels like a word an American would make up when explaining what happened to a Spanish speaking friend. It feels like something I would have said to you when we first met.”
“I’m sure that’s what happened. I’m sure that’s where it comes from.”
“Just some guy.”
“Si, um, hola. No yeah, my wife no here no mas. We have divorcio.”
“Mucho bad divorcio. My wife no like me nada. We no habla.”
“Hablamos.”
“Right. Hablamos. We no hablamos because we divorcio.”
They were sitting in Parque Mexico eating ice cream. They had spent the morning strolling Roma Norte. He had bought her an expensive necklace which she, out of some previously unseen principal, had initially refused. But he had talked her down. Convinced her to conceptualize it as an expression of friendship and not an expression of love, which, truthfully, it was, which both of them knew it was. But now she wore it proudly around her neck, which looked a little odd because she was wearing running shorts and a t-shirt and it was a somewhat large, ornate thing that would only probably look best if she was done up a bit more and in a dress. He knew she didn’t love him, but he also knew she enjoyed the attention of someone that was in love with her. And he didn’t mind having the rug pulled out from under him. So he would go about loving her on this trip and when it ended and she inevitably told him she didn’t love or couldn’t love him or was not in a place to love him, he would just take it on the chin. He would go back to New York, start up at his new position, and have this little moment to think of when things got difficult and arduous. He would have his little fling in Mexico. His little moment of love or whatever you wanted to call it.
“It’s getting hot,” she said.
“It’s Mexico. It’s always been hot.”
“Fuck off.”
“Let’s go to the pool.”
That evening, at a pulque bar off of Insurgentes, they befriended two lesbians named Laura and Phoebe. They were also from New York but clearly it was a different New York than he was from. There were many New Yorks, as everyone knew, within New York. The one that he came from could be replicated basically anywhere. You could pull his piece of New York out and put it in Phoenix or Seoul and no one would notice. The one Laura and Phoebe were from was also not that unique or interesting, though in their minds it was because it was in Brooklyn and they were gay and they were originally from the midwest. The only person who came from an interesting New York was her, and that was because she was born in the Dominican Republic and then moved to Washington Heights when she was young and so both the place she was from and the place she ended up in were unique and interesting and would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Laura said, “This is the second time we’ve been here. Last time we only stayed around the Roma area. But this time we want to get out a little more. To the other neighborhoods.”
“We went to Coyoacan yesterday,” Phoebe said. “To the market and to the Frida House. But even that was like super white.”
She said, “Do you guys speak Spanish?”
“I do a little,” Phoebe said. “I took it in college but I’m rusty. I’m getting better the longer I’m here though.”
“You should go to Tepito,” he said. “I hear people still get robbed there.”
“Or go south,” she said. “Wild dogs killed four people in Iztapalapa last year.”
“That could be nice,” he said. “You guys might like that. Wild dogs, eh? Sounds pretty good, right?”
“I know how it sounds,” Phoebe said. “I just, I don’t know, aren’t you curious at what’s authentic and what’s not here?”
“What is this shit?” he said, gesturing to his mug of pulque. “I mean what even is this shit?”
“It’s an agave distillate,” she said.
“Okay?”
“It’s like, when they cook and smash up the agave hearts to make mezcal it makes a juice that you ferment, right? Typically you run that through a still a couple times to turn it into mezcal. This is just the stuff you get if you don’t do that part.”
“It tastes like cum,” he said.
“It’s just a strange texture. It’s an important drink here. They’ve been drinking it for a long time. Don’t call it cum.”
“I didn’t call it cum. I said it tasted like cum.”
“You don’t even know what cum tastes like.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do.”
“For example,” Laura said, unprompted, “when we went to Thailand a few months ago we ended up making friends with these guys that were actually from there. And they took us to this, like, secret beach they knew about that you had to trek through the woods to get to. Or even when we were in Austin these guys took us to this after party metal show at someone’s house. You know, stuff like that. We’re always looking to get into stuff like that.”
“Do you think,” he said, “in those two cases, those guys understood you were both gay?”
“I mean,” Laura said.
“Because you know what it sounds like?”
“What,” Laura said.
“You know what it sounds like. I don’t have to say it.”
“Say it,” Phoebe said.
“They were trying to fuck you.”
“You don’t think we read as gay?” Laura said.
“Maybe in New York,” she now said. “But probably not here. I’ve never been to Thailand to be fair.”
He nodded. “Maybe in New York,” he repeated.
Everyone sipped their pulque. It was a nice night as most nights there were. The days in Mexico City had an overbearing feeling to them. Something about the sun and how it felt midday. And it wasn’t the heat he was thinking about. It was something else. It felt like you were being watched by the sun. Like it was looking at you and judging. Other places in the world, the sun was watching you from afar and sometimes not at all. But in Mexico it had a front row seat. And it was staring at you with interest. But the night ended all that. The night was a release from the judgement.
“How do you guys know each other?” Laura now asked. “I mean how did you guys meet?”
“I used to pay her to send me naked pictures and videos through an app on my phone,” he said. “And then one day I actually just ran into her on the street. On East 58th of all places. And somehow I had the balls to ask her to have a drink with me. I got a divorce somewhere in there as well. There was very minimal overlap.”
Phoebe and Laura didn’t say anything. They looked to her for confirmation.
“It’s true,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t have said it like that.”
In San Pablo de Tepetlapa the four walked about looking for something to fill their afternoon with. They had spent the morning at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum. The number of sculptures and pieces had been baffling. How did one man obtain all that? Surely he must have just been the only person in the market. What incredible foresight he had to collect all those little Aztec and Mayan figurines. And the building itself. How does one even come up with such a thing? And how were people still allowed to walk around it? In the United States it would have been closed off to the public years ago, deemed too large a liability to have people walking around such a cavernous and sharply edged building, not to mention the cultural risk of having so many rare artifacts on display to the public, who always mess things like that up. At least in America they did.
They stopped off at a little drug store and bought bottled water and mangos. They ate these seated on a nearby stoop, him peeling and cutting up the fruit with a little plastic knife and distributing to the rest of the party. He tossed the skin on the ground in front of the stoop which caught the eyes of two older women walking by. He got up, grabbed the peels, and went looking for a trashcan.
In a nearby alleyway, where three men were seated on milk crates and smoking, he found a trash can and tossed the peels into it. Taped to its side was a flyer. It said: Hombre de Burro – El Vidente. There was an arrow at the bottom of the flyer pointing to the right of the can. He followed this to a door where the same flyer was posted, this one with additional information: $20. He stood there thinking.
Soon the door opened and a young man, perhaps sixteen, stood before him. “¿Quieres ver?” he said. He held out his hand, “Veinte.”
He put his hands in front of him, as if to say, Oh no, just looking. “Lo siento,” he said.
The young man smiled and shook his head. “Esta bien. Uhhh, Quince?” He cleared his throat. “Five-teen?” He held out his hand again.
“Quince?” he asked. “Fifteen?” The young man nodded.
“To see donkey man?”
“Si, Hombre de Burro. Muy famoso.”
He pulled out his wallet and found a twenty peso bill and handed it over. “No cambio. Gracias.”
The young man nodded and stuffed the bill into this pocket. “Gracias, gracias.” He turned and began walking down a hallway. He followed.
They arrived at a door. The young man put his ear to it for a moment then knocked. A voice came from the other side. “Entre.” The young man nodded, opened the door, and stood to the side. “Por favor,” he said. “Entre.”
He entered the room and soon the door shut behind him. It was dark and the only light was coming through a nearby window that was boarded up with wooden slats. There was nothing in the dusty room besides a small plastic folding table with two chairs. In one chair sat Hombre de Burro. He said, “Siéntate por favor. Please sit.”
He stood by the doorway for a moment longer, taking everything in. Hombre de Burro, from the looks of it, was a slightly pudgy shirtless man with some kind of donkey mask on his head. He sat at his table with a deck of cards that he continued to shuffle.
“Please,” Hombre de Burro said. “Come over here. Come sit.”
He did as he was told.
When he sat down he got a better view of the mask. From what he could tell it was a real taxidermied donkey head that had been hollowed out to fit around a human head. There were two eye holes to see through, but it was too dark to be able to see his eyes. Around the base of the head, at the man’s neck, were the scars of what used to be stitching. The donkey head had been sewn on, seemingly a long time ago.
“Is that… is the head attached to your skin?” he asked.
“Yes,” Hombre de Burro said.
He nodded.
“When I was young I was in a very bad car accident,” Hombre de Burro said. “This is the story. My whole family was t-boned at an intersection near the university. My whole family, my father, my mother, and my sister, were killed instantly. But not me. Though I should have been. I recall the feeling of being trapped in the mangled car. There was sharp metal touching each of my body parts. I could feel blood flowing from all over and I could smell gas. My face received the worst of it. The roof above me had collapsed and a jagged piece of metal had been driven down through the middle of my face. When people arrived to begin helping, and as they attempted to save me from the wreckage, they realized that I had become wedged in that fashion. That it was not possible to remove me from the vehicle without first removing the entire roof of the car and taking the metal shard out of my face. Otherwise the metal would mutilate me. They tried to move me about but with each maneuver I cried out in pain.
“There was not enough time, though. That was the thing. Everyone was scared that the car would soon set on fire so there was no time to be delicate. So they did what they had to. A fireman, I still remember the look of him and his hairy arms, yanked me from the car and half of my face was torn off. I can recall the feeling of peeling. Of feeling my face peel off of my head. I can still hear it. I can remember the sound of it. Of the peeling.
“I nearly died from this. I lost a lot of blood. I do not understand how I survived. Even many of the doctors had taken me for dead. But, somehow, I made it.
“Of course it was not without its consequences. For the rest of my life I would be marked with a disturbing disfigurement. There was only so much the doctors could do and this was many years ago at a hospital that was not so good. Perhaps nowadays I would have fared better. But this isn’t the point. The disfigurement was terrible and remains terrible. It is one that is simply repulsive for the people to see. People will do their best to accept disfigured people into their lives, as you know, but mine is simply too difficult to look at. So, when I felt healthy enough, I left the city and went to the country. My plan was to kill myself. I had stolen a bottle of sleeping pills from a pharmacy and intended to kill myself in the countryside near Puebla. I was thirteen years old.”
“But you didn’t,” he said.
“I didn’t. No. Though I did try. If I had been left alone I would have done it. It was the interference of others that prevented my death. Someone saved me. I had taken the pills, laid down, closed my eyes, and went off to sleep. But I woke up. I woke up in someone’s home. I had been saved. They had reversed the effects of the pills using an injection.”
“Who?”
“Exactly. Who? I don’t know. When I woke up, no one was there. I was left in a home with no one. I waited for two days, eating the food that had been left for me, but no one ever came to the house. The only sign that someone had been there was, of course, that I was alive, and second, the mask, this mask, had been left out on the table for me. There was a note. “Para tu rostro,” is all it said. “For your face.”
“And so you sewed it on?”
“That happened much later. I would wear it for years before I decided to make my body one with the mask. But what happened when I put the mask on is important. Suddenly I could see differently. Different from how I had seen in the past. As I walked about that house in it, I became aware of the presence of the future and the past as well. They began to exist for me in the same fashion as the present. I could see the past and the present just as material and real as I could see the here and now. The home, once vacant, was now buzzing with people and activity. Everything that had ever been in that home and would ever come to that home, I could see.”
“And you can see my future and past as well?”
“Of course.”
He nodded.
“It is imperfect. I will tell you that much. What I am capable of seeing are the versions of you that decide to walk through the doors and sit here. There are many versions that do, I have counted twenty different ones, but there are many more who do not. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Well, the ones that did not enter, they don’t exist right?”
“Of course they exist. I just told you they exist.”
“But I decided to walk through the door. So the possibility of me not walking through the door no longer remains, correct?”
“Not correct. The possibility of you not walking through the door remains real even if you decided against it. It is real because you thought about it and considered it. The thought made it real. And so now the possibilities are out in the world. They do not go away. Do you understand this? You can walk out of here and think of what might have happened had you not walked through these doors, and just like that the ghost of the other choice comes back to you. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“So then if that’s the case, why bother telling fortunes? If I might just walk out this door and slide back into the path I was on previously?”
“Are you not curious? You are not curious of the paths I can see? You paid twenty pesos to come in here and tell me not to tell you about the paths?”
“Of course I am. I just… Of course I’m curious.”
“Of the twenty paths I see in this room there are three that seem most prominent. There are three that are shining brightest to me.”
“What are they?”
“Answer this question for me: when you love someone, do you find yourself able to put your full heart into it? Do you find yourself able to abandon your preconceived notions of how your life should be and adjust to what you have been given, or do you feel you must keep hold of the life you have been imagining for yourself.”
“It’s difficult to say.”
“Of course it is.”
“Well there have been times in the past I have given myself up to people like that.”
“And what happened?”
“They ended.”
“I see. Here’s what I’ll tell you: of the three most prominent paths I see, only one of them appears to have taken the love of another fully into his heart. The other two have remained most in love with themselves. I will also say this: only one path seems to be happy more often than he is sad.”
“Fuck.”
“Those are not bad numbers actually. Typically people come in here and have no chance at that sort of thing. You at least have a shot.”
“Which one is the happy one?”
“The one with the love. Obviously.”
“Can you prove that you’re not just making this shit up as you go?”
“I am, in a way, making this shit up as I go. That’s what I do.”
“Well can you prove that you’re actually fortune telling and not just spitballing some wacky shit?”
“Your mother’s name is Carrol. Your father died when you were eight. His name was Gabe. You had a divorce three years ago and have not dealt with it well. You have gained a good deal of weight. Perhaps around forty pounds.”
“Okay enough.”
“You understand it is risky to let someone into your heart in the way I am suggesting. So you typically don’t do it.”
“I said enough. I believe you.”
Hombre de Burro stopped for a moment and looked over to the covered window. He nodded.
“What are you seeing?” he asked. “Your death.”
“Christ, nevermind.”
“You will die old, most likely. There are few versions of you that encounter enough daily risk for something bad like that to happen. You will more than likely live a quiet and simple life and die old. Cancer more than likely.”
“What kind?”
“Prostate. The same as your father. But not until you are old.”
“Incredible.”
“There is risk of suicide as well. A very prominent risk.”
“I won’t kill myself.”
“You don’t know. You never know.”
“I realize that.”
“Is there anything else you’re curious about?”
He thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “That about sums it up for me.”
“Do your best not to think too much of the paths that lay before you. Trust me. Just try to act natural.”
“Right.”
“Have a nice day. Return whenever you’d like.”
“Gracias.”
“Of course.”
That night he and her sat up late in the courtyard of their hotel drinking beer. They shared a couch and she lay with her legs dangling off the end and her head propped up against his lap. They would return to New York the following day and he was beginning to dread it. He didn’t know what she felt.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said. “We could stay.”
“And do what? How would we live?”
“We would drain our bank accounts on cocaine and good times first.”
“Of course.”
“And then we would be forced to figure it out.”
“Foolproof.”
The two sat in silence for some time. He had not told her about Hombre de Burro. He explained his absence by saying that he had an upset stomach and had to find a bathroom. He was not sure why he lied to everyone. He was not sure why he did anything, other than it was what felt correct to do in the moment that he was doing it. But there was so much he did that did not feel correct in the moment but which he understood to be necessary to his wellbeing, and, in most cases, was. If he compared the things he did between what felt right and what did not feel right but was necessary, he assumed the chart would read 80/20 in favor of the latter. And this made him sad in some way he couldn’t quite articulate.
“My father died of prostate cancer when I was twelve,” he said.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not sure. I just thought you should know. It seemed significant.”
“Oh.”
“I just thought you should know.”
∩
Jake Hargrove is from North Carolina and lives in New York. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Cult Magazine. All his writing can be found at ceramic-horses.com.