The next day, my last day in the village, I didn't run around the dirt streets saying goodbye to the locals I'd met during my two months in Costa Rica. I didn't go down to the soccer field and watch the red parrots scream and fight each other, or walk the stinkwater mudflats one last time. Instead, I stayed in my cabina, hiding, in case that 16-year-old hooker's brother or father was out searching for the redheaded gringo who'd hit his sister or daughter.

Twenty-four hours later, her lie had not caught up with me, and I was alive and un-bruised climbing into John's two-wheel-drive AstroVan. The jungle roads of Central America had shaken the van's brains loose on the way down so that nothing worked in the dashboard, but the machine miraculously made its slow way through the cows and rockslides on the rough roads to San Jose.

Daylight was almost gone by the time we got there, the darkness encouraging the city's famous criminal insanity, so we checked into Hotel Asia as fast as possible before our bags could be ripped off. Between the three of us, we rented two rooms at $7-apiece; John took the bottom bunk, I took the top, and Buck got his own room, with the stipulation that he would be traded out and moved into the bunk below me if John rented a hooker. If they both got hookers, it was decided that they would use the bunks and I would sleep in the single by myself. There was no chance I would get a hooker; after my tumultuous run-in with the 16-year-old, I had begun telling myself, and Buck and John, that, though it remained unconsummated, my hooker-mania had run its course. I lay in my bunk, five inches from the dirty ceiling, telling John I was satisfied; no more silly hooker silliness for me.

As I spoke, Buck walked into our room, brushing his teeth in preparation for the night. When I finished my declaration, he stopped brushing. "Michael," Buck said through a face full of rabid toothpaste foam, "I will let you lie to me," he said, "And I will even let you lie to John here. But I can't stand by and let you lie to yourself."

"No man," I reiterated. "No more hooker adventures for me."

He shrugged and went back to brushing, a redundant act considering prostitutes don't let you kiss them anyway.

A half-an-hour later we sat in a quiet casino bar decorated with made-up older ladies that, despite their age, were still as visually perfect as the rest of the women in San Jose. They all sat by themselves, a sure indication that they were for rent. But they weren't aggressive, mostly keeping to themselves, just waiting. But when we didn't make moves they initiated exciting, flirtatious Spanish small talk that had us soft white boys feeling dark and dangerous; as if we were truly creeping around in the margins with the questionable elements of Central America. But it wasn't exciting enough to keep us seated for long and eventually we took off.

San Jose is as dangerous as pre-Giuliani Times Square. And though three poor, unwashed white guys with holes in their shirts are not the ideal target for muggers, we kept alert as we walked in the crazy city night.

"Where should we go?" John asked, looking over his shoulder.

"The hookers probably all hang out at Casinos, where the money's at." Buck opined, turning to me. "What do you think, 'ol Michael?"

"Dude, I don't care man." I answered. "Seriously, I'm over it after the other night."

Buck put his hand on my shoulder as we walked, repeating the three-line soliloquy about his inability to stomach my lying to myself.

When he finished I conceded, "Let's go to another casino."

We plowed down the street through a hundred shifty Ticos offering us things that would have had us arrested in the US, until rounding a corner and passing under a thicket of a million tiny yellow lights and through the doors of a madhouse. Inside the madhouse the slot machines were loud, the gringos were old and gray, and the beers, normally around a dollar anywhere else in Costa Rica, were four dollars. The women, so fucking many of them, were either hanging on wilted old men, or sitting alone at the bar. All of them were mind-boggling perfect: natural beauty rather than the garish cosmetics associated with the U.S. version of the profession. If a man were blindfolded, then loaded onto a plane, only to have the blindfold ripped off at the door of this casino madhouse, he might think he'd landed at a Calvin Klein modeling audition, rather than a hooker bar in Costa Rica.

John headed to the bathroom as Buck and I ordered drinks and sat staring around in befuddlement. Before our expensive beers had even arrived, two gorgeous black girls from Puerto Limon draped themselves over us from behind, smiling, rubbing our backs, conversing with us in Spanish. Unlike hookers in the states, who are most often sadly driven to prostitution as a last resort in a desperate situation, these hookers were proud, loud, happy, insanely charming and worst of all, funny. My body can't help but respond to funny woman. My heart, hidden under layers of skin and a dirty shirt and thus unable to see the reality of the situation, responded to the hooker's jokes and laughs by beating fast, pumping blood to my cheeks and other extremities; the poor blind thing really expected true love.

The girls pressed their breasts against our backs, cooing and hugging us. Mine played with my hair in seemingly sincere wonderment, telling me in Spanish that she'd never met a redhead. The women weren't pushy. They didn't try to rush the money from our wallets. They seemed happy to just talk with us. We were the youngest guys in the place and I suppose they were relieved to have a crack at men their own age. So by all accounts I should have felt at ease and in control, but honestly I was a nervous fucking wreck. It was too much; like having a fistful of chocolate forcefully shoved into my mouth. However, Buck, who's Spanish is great, was as smooth and natural as the brown skin on the arms wrapped around me. He bluntly interviewed them in regards to their chosen profession, and they fielded all questions without hesitation.

"How much do you ladies make doing this?" He asked in perfect Spanish.

"$100 an hour, or $300 for the night." His woman answered.

Buck's face lit up into an exclamation point. "Jesus Christ! Buy us some drinks then." He playfully ordered, slamming the end of his first beer. The women playfully obeyed.

Our new drinks landed in front of us as John came out of the bathroom and sat down, just in time to witness my woman reaching under the bar between my legs to make sure her magic was working. She was happy to find that it was. But like some talking toy doll that announces its hunger when its abdomen is pressed, the hooker squeezed my penis and I nervously blurted out, "I don't have any money!"

Several of the other beautiful women around me laughed and my cheeks flushed deeper as my lady friend playfully slapped my red face with her free hand, told me to shut up, and continued doing what she was doing to me under the bar. For free. Though in all my nervousness, I wasn't sure I was enjoying it.

Buck turned to his woman and pointed at some bald white guy sitting alone across the bar. "Only old ugly gringos like that have money." He told her.

"That's not true," she answered. "I've been with many young gringos who have much money."

"Well, we have very little." He laughed.

"Then we're gonna go over there," She laughed back, "And talk to this old ugly guy." She grabbed her friend's hand off my penis and dragging her away to go talk to the bald guy Buck had pointed to. When the women were gone, I wondered if I were gay, for feeling so relieved.

- - -

The cab driver asked us where we wanted to go. We just said, "A disco, with women." Before we'd made it through even one block of lawless San Jose traffic, the driver asked us if we liked whores.

"Not $300 ones." John laughed.

"No, the $300 ones are nice, we do like them," I disagreed. "We just can't afford them."

Soon after, the driver was dumping us outside of a bar called Las Margaritas. When the $3 door price included one free beer, we knew we were closer to home.

Inside, Las Margaritas was not a disco at all, but a strip club. In the center of the dark room, wrapped around the ubiquitous pole, danced a dark, young, amazing Tica with long, curly, black hair. I took my eyes off of her only long enough to notice, across the room, next to the stage, a door, and next to that, a service window where strippers brought men. The men handed money to the guy behind the window, and the guy behind the window gave to the stripper, a lump of something that was indiscernible to me in the darkness, and from so far away, before the couple disappeared through the door.

The dark Tica fucked the stage back and forth up and down as the men, all young Ticos, watched stoically. When she finished, she pulled on her clothes and walked straight to the only white guys in the room, and saddled up to the absolute whitest of them.

"Will you buy me a drink?" She asked me.

She ordered a shot of tequila. When it arrived she held it as we talked, and she still hadn't drank it by the time she was asking me if I'd like to go into the mysterious back room.

"How much does it cost?" I asked her.

She told me it was 5,000 colones: roughly $15. Though I had no money left, before I knew it I had said yes. In front of the entire dark bar with its dozens of perfect women, John and Buck pulled wads of colones out of their pockets, flattened out the bills, and, laughing, handed them to their friend, who had told them a thousand times throughout the night, "I'm over it man, I'm over it."

As the loan was pooled, a young Tico walked up with a basket of flowers. The beautiful Tica on my arm asked me if I would buy her one. Luckily I had the presence of mind to tell her no first, and feel stingy and guilty after he'd already walked away.

With her shot glass still full, she grabbed my hand and led me across the room to the service window. There, I handed the man at the window my borrowed colones and he handed my Tica a lumpy towel, before she walked me through the mysterious door into a dim, silent hallway of doors.

She opened the first door, in search of a vacancy I assumed, but found instead a woman riding a young Tico. A breeze from the quickly shut door landed across my face and my blood began pumping uncomfortably fast as my body, and the brain inside of it, wondered what the hell I was doing.

Behind the next door was just an empty, single bed in a small room that was nicer than our cabina at Hotel Asia. She shut the door, and opened the towel on the bed, unveiling a tube of lubricant and a condom, as well as a roll of toilet paper, which reminded me that, despite the very real flesh of the woman holding my hand, I was still a hair's breadth away from masturbation.

When she immediately began to unceremoniously remove her shirt, I blurted out, "No! Not yet!"

She told me in Spanish that she would leave on her bra, but that she needed to take off her shirt because she was hot. I had thought the heat inside my face was just nerves, or the burning hellfire in my soul, but she was right, the little room was super hot.

She asked me to take off my clothes and hang them on a hook, next to a ledge, where she set down her full shot of tequila. Sitting on the bed, I peeled my shirt over my head and then gazed down at myself. My fishbelly skin looked sick under the florescent lights. I hadn't noticed the lights either; they were really bright. She hung my shirt up on the hook for me as I stared down at the lumpy white gut laying in my lap, its limp bellybutton encircled in red hair, staring up at me in a frown like some sad, bearded old man.

"Take off your shorts." She commanded, unsmiling. I was too consumed by nerves, embarrassment and self-consciousness to do anything besides exactly what I was told, so I sucked in my gut, stood up, and slipped my gray shorts off onto the floor. She said, "boxers" in English, and I removed those as well, hung them on the hook, and sat back down. Had I the courage to look down again, I would have noticed I was still wearing my white, knee-high socks, and I surely would have removed them, but instead I hung up my shorts, concentrating my eyes on her shot of tequila on the ledge.

I sat down, still sucking it in, and heard myself ask her, "So, what are we gonna do?"

"Sex." She said, furrowing her brow, then ordered, "Lay down."

Naked except for my socks, my wristwatch, and bushes of red pubic hair, I laid back onto the bed as she commanded, with my head on a dirty pillow. Despite all my weird nervousness, it stuck straight into the air like an iron baton, and she tore open the condom while staring at it.

Again I blurted, "No, not yet." But this time I heard confidence in my voice and my nervousness seemed to dissipate. I sat up and leaned against the wall, and asked her to lay back against my chest, which she did, while removing her bra.

The indescreet florescence announced the flaws in her dark skin as well, but my freckled, white, hands looked even deader crawling timidly over her. She didn't respond. Didn't lean in to my touch. I told her to lie on her stomach.

As she'd negotiated the deal, outside in the main room, I'd noticed her rubbing the muscles in her shoulders. When she lay on her stomach on the dirty bed, I dug my thumbs around the outlines of shoulderblades, trying to compel her. She smiled at first, but quickly grew bored or impatient; she was at work.

So, before long I gave that up, though I had no idea what to do next. In my state of indescision she rose and told me to lay down. I obeyed. When I was like an autopsy patient, she brandished the condom again, eyeing my erection. I told her again, "Not yet."

"Con sus manos." I told her.

She switched the condom to her left hand and grabbed me with her right, and began pumping in a hard, fast, mechanical blur.

"Slow down." I told her.

She did slow down, and I watched her long, brown fingers wrapped around, going as smooth as the ocean in long slow dips, and despite the dreariness of the situation under the florescent lights; the complete motion of her petite fist was something so perfect that I exclaimed, accidentally in English, "Hang on. Stop. Wait." But since she didn't understand, she didn't stop the perfection, and in a second, without thinking of my $15, I let go, and it waterfalled down her pretty knuckles like the foamy white head of a beer down the side of a glass in a commercial during Monday Night Football.

With that out of the way, everything was ridiculous again. I really wanted to have my clothes back on. I sprang up, snatched my boxers off the hook and, as I used them to wipe my stomach off, my Tica said, "No!" When I turned to her, her brow was furrowed again as she pushed the towel and toilet paper at me. But I was already clean.

As soon as she was dressed she left me alone in the room without saying goodbye. On the ledge sat the full shot of tequila and the room felt haunted. I thought to drink the shot but my body was out the door before I had a chance.

Back out in the dark room, I watched my dark-skinned Tica bolt out the front door of the bar as another lighter skinned Tica danced to Eric Clapton's song about his dead son, "Tears in Heaven." Buck and John were nowhere. Their chairs were empty but I walked to where I'd left them. As I stood looking around, feeling tired and weird, a fat guy in a baseball cap came up to me. He looked like a Tico but he spoke English with a clear Canadian accent.

"So, how'd that bitch treat you?" He asked me.

"What bitch?" I asked back, not looking at him, scanning the room for John and Buck.

"That bitch you were just with…" He said.

My body and brain were still in some mild shock because of what I'd just done to them, so I didn't have the energy to argue with the guy over the word 'bitch';I was busy inside. So, I just said, "It was great, man." Still scanning the dark room for my friends.

"Well, see that bitch over there?" He asked, pointing a piggy digit at a beautiful woman laughing with another young Tico across the room. As the guy added, "Don't go with that bitch; she's fine, but she just lays there, eh." John and Buck emerged from the bathroom with the blessed question, "You wanna get the fuck outta here?"

I was quiet during the ride home and Buck and John let me be. Anyone like me would have conflicts about doing such a thing, so they understood without my explaining it to them. I just wanted to go home and smoke dope and think.

We left the lights off in John's and my hotel room and Buck rolled a joint. The third time it came around, they asked me to tell them what happened, and I was happy to. We laughed hard recalling the events of the evening until eventually we heard the hissing.

It was the same hissing heard throughout the streets of San Jose. It starts with an 'F' and ends with a 'T', and it's meant to get her attention on the street: "Fssssssst!" But now it was coming, wrapped in tiny giggles, from a small window close to the ceiling. I stood on my knees on my top bunk and peered out, over a skinny alley, to another small window, into a parallel room. Two woman, a black girl and a light-skinned Latina, were hissing and giggling and beckoning with, "Hey! Fsssssst! Hey!"

The girls were gorgeous. The light skinned one wore just a blue T-shirt and underwear. The black one wore a white bra and g-string panties. We all backed away from the window.

"What should we do?" Asked Buck.

No one answered.

"Dude, you guys should invite them to Buck's room and hang out." I suggested. "I'm definitely out of the game now."

John crawled back up to the window and asked the women to come over. "No," they said, through Spanish laughter, "You guys come over here."

My arms were at my sides, my high brain was silently going and going and my tape recorder lay on my chest in case any of it was worth anything. I spoke into the ceiling, inches in front of my face, "You guys should go over there." I said to John and Buck. "I'm just gonna hang out here." But the door closed behind them before I'd finished the last word.

I heard the girls giggling and running around in their room and when rose to my knees to peak over again they were adjusting their hair and lipstick when John and Buck knocked on their door. They entered the girls' room and laid with them on their beds; Buck with the black one, John with the Latina.

Their good Spanish was especially hard to discern in the quiet tone they all adopted once everyone was introduced. Breaking up the murmur, the girls would intermittently call over loudly, "Miguel? Venga, Miguel!"

But I didn't go over. I didn't even stir. I lay in the top bunk, stoned still, ignoring the girls' calls, because things had fit together perfect. If there was anything good about my minutes with the hooker, it had disarmed me for the night. Had I not spent myself already at Margaritas, I would have ran over to the girls' room with Buck and John, in hopes of getting laid, which would have disrupted the math and fucked it up for some one. But as it stood, or laid, I was happier playing the voyeur, watching John and Buck and the girls laying and talking through the small window near the ceiling. When it got boring I'd lie back down and think, until the giggling started again, then I'd climb back to my knees to check the progress out the window.

One of these times, when my eyes were peeping over the edge, my nose resting on the window sill, the Latina girl looked up and caught me. "Miguel!" She hollered again. "Venga!" The black girl yelled for me too. I thought this strange. Why would they want all THREE of us over there?

Before my stoned suspicion could rise to paranoia I swear I heard a scratching at our door, someone fiddling with the lock. They were still giggling across the alleyway. I thought maybe I was hallucinating. Regardless of doubt, I jumped down from the bunk and whipped open the door of our cabina.

This startled the owner, who was lingering out in the hallway. He immediately broke into a fit of Spanish, most of which I didn't understand, but the suddenness of his babble reeked of defense. He pointed at the window above my top bunk and squawked about the girls across the alley, shaking his head 'no' before running off down the hall like a rat.

My heart was racing as I jumped back up onto the top bunk: It's a set-up! I Knew it! Anonymous girls don't just invite you to their room! They're in cahoots with the owner of the hotel; the girls get the guys out, then he robs the room! No wonder the girls wanted me over there so badly!

Back at the window, I could no longer see Buck, and assumed he was lying down out of my line of sight. John and the light-skinned girl were kissing.

"Fsssssssssssst!" I hissed out the window, but the guys didn't answer, only the girls called back, "Miguel venga aqui! Venga!"

Within the minute, I was listening to a loud bang on their door, and watching as the hotel manager came in their room and told them there would be none of that in his hotel. John and Buck got up, erections visible under their shorts, and vacated the room. The manager sat down on the bed with the Latina girl.

"Dude! You guys were being set up!" I announced in a whisper, when John and Buck came back into our room.

I told them the story, my theory, which they refused merit.

"That girl let me touch her bush." John offered. "I think she liked me."

(click here to post your opinions on this s(h)ite. --- Ed.)